Business Innovators Radio - David “Grant” Conner – Founder – Mark Stephen Pooler

Episode Date: April 23, 2026

David “Grant” Conner is the founder and CEO of Mushroomtek, a fast-growing mushroom wellness company redefining how people approach health, performance, and consciousness.After building over $30 million in sales in the gold industry, Grant experienced a devastating collapse in business and personal life in 2023 that forced him to rebuild from the ground up. That moment became the catalyst for Mushroomtek—a company focused on clean, lab-tested, functional mushroom products designed for real-world results, not hype.Since launching, Mushroomtek has generated over $250,000 in early product sales, sold out multiple product lines, and won awards for precision dosing and product accuracy at leading psychedelic competitions.Today, Grant is a father of four, a faith-driven entrepreneur, and on a mission to build a globally recognized brand at the intersection of health, science, and spirituality.https://www.mushroomtek.love/bloghttps://www.instagram.com/grantconner87igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qrSource: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/

Welcome to Business Innovators Radio, featuring industry influencers and trendsetters, sharing proven strategies to help you build a better life right now. Welcome to Brilliant Business TV, conversations with leading experts in business. I am your host, Mark Stephen Pula. We have a wonderful guest on the show today, and I'm really looking forward to an interesting conversation. We're streaming live on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube. We're on the E-360 TV network. We're on Business Innovators Radio Network, MSPNewsGlobal.com. And I think I may have said it, but I'm going to say it once more.

Business Innovators Radio Network, let's bring in our incredible guest, David, Grant, Connor. Grant, welcome to Brilliant Business TV. Thank you for having me, Mark. I'm excited. I'm looking forward to a conversation with you and a really, really interesting topic of mushrooms, which I'm sure the audience is really interested in. So let's get started with the show grant. What was a failure that forced you to rethink everything? Often failures do do that to us.

And how did that shape M-Tech? Yeah, so in 2020, I hit some of my record highs in the gold industry. I have Nuggets by Grant. It was been around for 13 years now and, you know, COVID was going on and people were afraid of the world ending. So obviously they're buying gold. And I had a call from a pretty famous island called Kauai, not Hawaii, but Kauai, the oldest island out there. And some younger men who were, you know, they were in talks with Mark Cuban's original business

partner, Chris Jabs. and they were doing transactions with him and wanting to do a gold deal with me and him. And we were talking about blockchain and gold and how we wanted to create a physical gold object that was attached to the blockchain. And that just sent me down a huge rabbit hole. I had gone through a divorce.

I was in the middle of finishing my dream home at the time and thinking I was going to have a family and children and settle down. And the world had changed. A lot of people during 2020, it changed. for a lot of other people as well. And so I decided to, you know, my ceiling for Nuggets by Grant was only so high and I wanted a higher ceiling.

And so we had millions and millions in cells. And that turned into me understanding, you know, who to partner with and who not to partner with. And some of the partners ended up taking some of the money in embezzling it in a jewelry company, embezzling it in a house in Portugal. And I was left at the end of it with my retirement, my cars I sold, my gold I sold, everything. I put into this with nothing.

And I had ended up just bootstrapping the talent around me. They had one website of the year in 2021, crypto of the year, and stuff like that. So there was some success. A lot of success was built on hype. And they would do these Zoom calls with investors in these luxurious houses. You know, they spend like $30,000 on a rental at a home. And I realized hype is great. But if I could do it all over again, I want a physical product.

I want a product that I can stand by and that isn't going to go away. I love that. I love how sometimes these challenges, they send us in the right direction of where we're meant to be going. And I used to do a lot of gold, like crypto. I used to do a lot of crypto and bullion. I made quite a bit of money with that, but I sold up too. So yeah, really interesting. Now tell us, Grant, what belief about health or performance do you think most people are getting completely wrong right now?

I think we're living in a day and age of a lot of clickbait. There's a lot of social media going on and everybody's a biohacker nowadays. And, you know, at the end of the day, my foundational core beliefs. One is that health is wealth. And it doesn't matter how much money you make. It doesn't matter how many important people you've met on this earth. If you don't have your health, you really don't have much wealth.

And I believe those two foundations of health are going to be whole foods and movement. Those two are my foundations that I always preach. And getting into that, someone would be like, hey, well, Grant, you were a personal trainer out of college. You've tried all these supplements. You've tried all these peptides, all these different biohacking protocols. Well, I didn't want to create a supplement company that wasn't based on that idea of whole food. So I chose mushrooms because mushrooms had a lot of natural benefits. It was really the only thing on earth that you could see that takes death to life. You know, you decompose, it uses decomposed.

And it's like, man, that, I just, something intrigued me about that. Being a believer in Jesus, I'm like, wow, something that could take death to life on earth and something that is mycelium that's in all the dust of the ground. So I just fully believed in what I was doing, although the legalities probably weren't up to up to date with what I was doing. As an entrepreneur, you kind of have to be ahead or else you're behind. And so I moved to Boulder, Colorado, and I went after mushroom tech. So I lived in a basement. Actually, my first harvester was a homeless person named Arthur. And I had bootstrapped a bunch of people in the house to be the harvesters. And I learned how to grow. And I learned the difference

between this species and that species by taking what I call mini doses. And many doses are the least researched. Everybody has researched a ton of microdosing and a ton of macro dosing. But these little mini doses is what I'm kind of very intrigued about. I've heard so many good things about the benefits of mushrooms. I mean, I never used to take much care of my health when I was younger. in fact, I used to do a lot of magic mushrooms when I was younger, so I know that they've got a very, very powerful thing to the mushrooms. But I know when you get to my age, like I'm coming up to 45 now, it's really, really important that we look after health.

And mushrooms really have so many amazing health benefits, don't they grant? Yes, they do. And that's why a big reason why I, you know, learned from the first thing. I learned how to produce this, like, really complex three-ounce coin that a lot of people couldn't cast. It would cast with the imperfection. So I stayed down here in San Diego for two and a half months straight and lived out of a hotel and I produced this coin and I figured out I'm a really good producer. And so I started from the growth of the mushroom all the way to the end product. You see me like we have our gummies. This would be the end product. And I went after a

specific type, which is called, I went after trying to stabilize psilocybin with the Bay Accystin in it, the Norpolestine, the Andesine, and all these other natural compounds, I tried to stabilize it and not wash them out. So what God created it on Earth, I tried to keep just like he made it. And by producing it myself from start to finish, oh my gosh, Mark, It was not easy. There was a ton of failures along that way. Well, there's something to be very proud of being able to pick up that physical product now. What an achievement.

And to know that you're benefiting people's health and well-being as well. That's something that will build a great legacy. What do you believe, why do you believe what you're doing is right versus waiting for legalities and big companies of Gov to handle mushrooms and distribute? That's a great question. I think that goes back to what I kind of discussed before we started the show is I went through the ringer with Big Pharma. I was a survivor of the opioid crisis that was happening here in America. I had a ton of different doctors giving me prescriptions for norcos. I was eating, you know, over 50 a day.

And my liver was shutting down. And everything was a total wreck. and I had also a hip, a very bad hip, which I'm getting a replacement on finally. And I had gone through stem cells and different protocols to try to save my hip, but microfractor surgeries and all those different things. And I really learned that what better person to do to handle mushrooms than an entrepreneur? Entrepreneurs are very detailed people. They are, you know, they don't give up and they don't, and I don't have a bias going into it.

I just wanted to make something that's a lot like a whole food, like something that is nature's protocol. And after two years of developing it and failures of our concentrate getting burned out and nothing being in the gummy after a couple of weeks and it degrading and all these different losses, there's a doctor named James Fateman. He's a very well-known doctor, Stanford, Harvard, and he's done a lot of microdosing research, and he talks about it in one of his latest books.

There was a study that came out of Israel, which Israel is the most advanced in the medical system when it comes to cannabis and mushrooms. And they had pointed towards my production as the only way that you get the healing in the body. So keeping these basestinin, the endocene and nopelicidine, and all these different natures protocols

that are synchronistic with the psilocybin, they said, well, this is the only way to create dendrites and neuroplasticity and neurogenesis in the body. But the synthetics just don't do it. And so right now, if you look at the landscape of America, you can see gumies in almost every gas station in different corners in different places. And originally I was wanting to work on an app that kind of helps people scan products and understand what's in it and what's not.

And to most of the stuff that's out there, you know, is so far ahead of the legal system. They're chemical research drugs that are coming from China, like 4ACO, DMT. And these do convert into silicin. So you do get, silicin is that magic feeling that you get psilocybin converts into silicin. And they said, well, this chemical research drug converts into silicin, the job's done. We're good. but the truth is that there's no healing happening underneath the hood of the car. You're just getting a feeling.

So if someone wants to have a feeling of a mushroom, that's cool. But if you want the healing, you would need a product like mine. Well, that's very, very powerful. That's a good way to put it definitely grand. What's the real difference between someone who gets results with MTech and someone who doesn't? I think doing our consultation, and doing the coaching and getting the advice, these are very powerful compounds.

And so, you know, we have different protocols on the website. You know, Paul Stamett's stack. We have the Fateman Protocol. We have, you know, different recommendations. But it's also not everybody's super intuitive. So you could always go, add an extra gummy if you're not feeling something,

but you can't take away a half of a gummy or old gummy. So I think the dosages are very important because people are so sensitive, you would think like, oh, there's a 250-pound man, he should be able to take more mushrooms

than this 90-year-old lady. And you could give them the same species, the same dosage, and you could send them into a grocery store and the old lady will be talking to people and be totally aware and happy and she'll check out and she'll be able to calculate her pennies at the end. And the big 250-pound man might be down on the ground, weeping and crying and having an emotional breakthroughs, you know. So mushrooms aren't like alcohol or anything like that where, you know, size matters. They don't, it doesn't

work that way. Interesting. I'm definitely going to take a look at your website. What do you want for the future of your life to look like and the future of the health in America? I think, you know, I have my newborn baby. He's, well, he's a month, a little over a month old right here in this hotel room. And I think we need to think about the children and, you know, the next generation to come. I'm so, so, so happy to see this new Robert Kennedy come in and the new FDA to come in. And I think we're in a, little window of the veils kind of being torn and you know it was so cool. I didn't get pressured when he came in the hospital to get vaccines for the first time. I feel like I had my baby almost

a perfect timing where I had no friends three years ago or five years ago where they were just totally pressured to take this vaccine and and we don't know. You know, I think medicine is great. I think Western medicine is great for certain specific things like saving your life. If you get a limb chopped off, if you're deathly sick, you have an infection. However, they don't really handle the whole human body very well. And so I would like to see us really take this next two or three years under this administration and go after the health of our own children, take the responsibility of ourselves.

Don't put it off on a doctor. When you go into a doctor's meeting, you'll see them typing a bunch, and they don't even pay attention to you. They're not even understanding what you're saying half the time. And so I think more and more people need to find, you know, I always would say is I think personal trainers in America should be paid more than doctors,

because I think people need movement more than they need to go and take another prescription. And if we look at what, medicine does is it goes after a symptom where, you know, we're just trying to use a food source or something that the body can absorb to, you know, bring it back to homeostasis, bring it back to a balance is what I call it. I think that's really powerful as well because so many people are on medications when they don't need them. I do a lot of breathwork, meditation. And I know,

adding like a nutritional benefit to the diet as well can be really good. So I think what you're doing to change health of America is really, really good, Grant. What are you building with M-Tech that people won't fully understand until a few years from now? Yeah, so our branding is really the difference. If you go look at our website, like I told you, we won that award in 2021. Shout out to Jordan Alexander out there. the Ozarks. He has been the one of my good friends

and colleagues along the way of this. We've traveled the world filming a gold documentary. We've been arrested in customs together. Crossing borders. And we've really, you know, he is

hands on on the design part of this website. He is a guru when it comes to videography. If you watch the newest YouTube that's out, of mushroom tech and showing us grow the mushrooms in the caves. And basically, you know, I believe it's my, me, me getting partners out of the way and me taking the steering wheel of CEO, you know, I had a deal to sign with three other people and I would have instantly got $3 million for, you know, 20 percent. And I would have lived on a huge ranch,

275 acre ranch and Emerald Pines down in Colorado by Pikes Peak Racecourse. And I backed down that deal and I took the steering wheel of this brand myself because I realized that the branding needs to be something out there that is more like the Nike of mushrooms. It needs to be not just super cool looking, but it needs to speak to someone. Let's say you're a war vet. I work with war vets all the time. There's one that's been to Somalia, Iraq, and all these different wars. He's sent in Marines that have died, and he's got a ton of different meds he was on when he first started with me.

Well, when he walks into a room and he sees my product, it looks super clinical and clean. There's no hippie-dippy-trippiness to it. It's not scary. So I think that's what people will kind of look at us for when it comes to mushrooms, is our branding is so uniquely different than the rest of the psychedelic community. I love it. I would encourage everyone to connect with Grant GoTo. Let me just wait for that to come around again.

At Grant Conner at 87. That's at Grant Connor 87. That's if you want to follow on Instagram, send him a DM. You can go to the website. at mushroomtech. That's mushroom tech. Dot love. And the tech is with a T-E-K.

That's mushroom-tech. Dot Love. I've really enjoyed having a conversation with you today. Grante's of anything you would like to say to finish up the conversation. Yeah, I think this is something that needs to be talked about. When I traveled, you know, traveling is probably one of my core values.

You know, I have family up there. I have my relationship with God, and I have traveling is one of my favorite educations. And when I traveled and I took eight months out of the country, lived in the Middle East and lived in Europe, lived in the Caribbean. I had came up with this concept of creating what you call like a Narcan for psychedelics. And that ended up being a product called brake pads. And there is no mushrooms in here at all. It's all natural. And there is, I took it to a champ show in Vegas.

and people on MDMA, LSD, and psilocybin mushrooms were totally clearing themselves out and getting, basically clearing out and getting sober from this product I had created with just plants with the formulas out of Boulder. And little did I know. I came to find out that this product was even better suited for just the anxiety-ridden housewife or someone who was on Xanax or Valium at home or someone that has anger issues or anxiety attacks. It works so, so well. I use it because my busy brain can't go to sleep at night. I'll take two drops at night. But a lot of these women are coming to me saying that they're getting off their prescriptions and they're just taking break pads and it's super easy. It's just a drop you do right under the

tongue. And you could feel this within five minutes. So we're not just a much, mushroom company, we also have tech or different supplements that go along and with mushrooms as a safety net. So you could you could try that at home and not feel so pressured that if you go too far, you can't come back. Excellent. Grant, please stay on the line. After this call, I've got a few questions to ask you. Thank you so much for being my guest today. I've fully enjoyed having a conversation with you. I encourage everyone to go to mushroom tech. That's mushroom tech. Dot. Love.

Thank you for being my guest today, Grant. Thank you, Mark. I appreciate you. The pleasure's being all ours. Thank you, everyone for joining us for Brilliant Business TV. Thanks for listening to Business Innovators Radio. To hear all episodes featuring leading industry influencers and trendsetters, visit us online at businessinnovators.com.

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