TRANSCRIPT:
- Hi, I'm Sage. Welcome back to the Addictive Wellness channel. Today we have a special guest joining us, Tracy Komlos. She is a serial entrepreneur, a marketing and branding expert, community builder. She's the CEO and founder of Pangea Dreams and the co-founder of the Multiverse, which is the first ever mushroom marketplace. Thank you so much for joining us today.
- Thank you for having me Sage.
- Absolutely.
- I'm so excited.
- Wonderful, so we are going to have some amazing mushroom conversations, but before we sit down and talk. we need to make a mushroom elixir.
- Yes.
- So we are gonna make here something pretty special. Wanna tell us a little more about what's coming up?
- Yeah, we are going to be making a super herb mushroom elixir with cacao, lion's mane, tremella, cordyceps, and reishi.
- Yep, so this is gonna be for beauty, energy, brains, immunity, and whenever there's cacao in the equation, it means we're gonna be having a good time. So I'm glad you guys have joined us. Maybe make this drink along with us and then join us for this amazing conversation we're gonna be having. So let's get started. We're going to have the base of this, it's gonna be some warmed up almond milk. Set in our blender here and you can of course make this in a regular VitaMix, but we are using a metal blender jug so that we don't have the hot liquids mixing in the plastic. So we're always trying to do everything a little bit better.
- Smart, yep smart. Should I toss these in?
- Yeah, what would you like to do first?
- Okay, so let's put, this is the tremella. So we're gonna put some tremella in here.
- Okay, actually, that was a... You kind of mixed up, that was lion's mane. I think we switched around the bags there, but so we start with lion's mane,
- The mushroom for the brain. This is improving the myelination of the nerves, which is the sheath that coats the nerves and when they have more of this, the signals can travel faster and the nerves are more protected. So lion's mane is incredible for gut health as well. It does more than just brain stuff.
- Oh, cool. I love taking lion's mane in the morning. Like before I know I have a big day of work and it just really helps me focus.
- A lot.
- Okay, next one is tremella.
- There we go, it's always like super like white and fluffy. It's delicious, you just wanna dive right in there.
- Tremella, and tremella a fun fact about it is it can hold up to 500 times its weight in water. So it's incredible for beauty, like you said, in water absorption.
- Right, so it basically mimics hyaluronic acid, but actually overperforms and does the job even better. So you can consume it internally, but also a lot of topical products you'll see using tremella and then more and more these days, which is fun and exciting.
- Okay, then this one is the cordyceps.
- Cordyceps, so cordyceps fun fact, it's not actually a mushroom. It is a synergistic family of fungi and you can't grow it on hardwood or in the ground like you would other mushrooms. It has a specific way of growing, that's very unique to it. And it's more than one strain of fungi that actually grows together. So it's amazing for energy, for endurance, for immunity, for lung support, for supporting the adrenals and the HPA axis. It's spectacular, very powerful herbs to incorporate.
- That's also another favorite of mine, when I know I have a big day. Just to give me that extra boost of energy, 'cause I don't really drink coffee either. So yeah, cordyceps is definitely a go to.
- Yeah, cordyceps improves your oxygen utilization. So from the air, you breathe you get more oxygen actually making it to your brain, to your muscles, through your blood. And so everything is gonna work better.
- Okay, and last mushroom today is reishi.
- Reishi has gotta be my favorite. And this is known traditionally as the mushroom of immortality and spiritual potency in good fortune. It's, for thousands of years has been an incredibly sought after substance, by Taoist monks and hermits because of the spiritual effects that it has. It just, it gets you out of your head and your heart and makes you feel more peaceful. And then on the side, it's also an absolutely incredible immune supportive herb with, actually more research done on it than any other herb in the world. So that's reishi is number one in so many ways.
- Oh, that's really cool. I mean, they're so versatile, it's incredible.
- So many ways you can use these, obviously this is like the most obvious and basic way to put them in like this. But you can prepare, like we have so many different recipe videos. You can obviously put them into chocolate as we love to do, but you can put them into ice creams. You can put them into cakes and breads. Like there's so many ways to incorporate these. And that's the idea is. it's not about having a mega dose necessarily for a special occasion, but these herbs have the effect of having a cumulative building beneficial effect over time. That's how they would traditionally be taken. Small amounts on a regular basis. And over time they shift the course of your life in a pretty powerful way. So now--
- Consistency, consistency is key.
- Consistency, that's, it's exactly. Now we are going to get this to be a little more flavorful. So these herbs are all very interesting as it is, but we're a chocolate company, we're gonna make hot chocolate today.
- Yummy.
- And so we have tablespoons here of our cacao powder, which is mycotoxin free. It's heirloom cacao and it is not grown on a farm. It doesn't grow on a plantation. These are trees that actually grow wild in the jungle and people that have access to this land go up in there, pick the cacao when it's ripe and then carry it down. And we have this network of people that provide the cacao in this way. And so this has a genetic robustness to it that you don't get from something that has, it's grown on a farm, it's growing protected. It's kinda like if somebody grows up with like helicopter parent and not, they don't have to deal with like some of the challenges of the world. Well then you put them out there and like--
- They don't know what to do.
- Yeee.
- Yeah.
- Whereas if somebody grew up on the streets, like this cacao grew up on the streets of the--
- It is street smart. You know it's gonna get around, it will be okay.
- So it has more genetic robustness. It can survive and has evolved to survive without protection from man. It doesn't have to have fences put around it. It doesn't have to have herbicides sprayed. It doesn't have to be, have all other competing plants kept away from it. 'Cause it doesn't know how to extract resources very efficiently from the earth. So this is amazing and it grows in volcanic soil. So super mineral rich.
- Wow, actually I was recently told that a lot of chocolates do have a lot of toxic chemicals in them.
- Sure absolutely.
- And so I love you guys because I know like you just said where it was grown and how it was grown. Like I can trust all of your ingredients. 'Cause the integrity that you guys put into your products is amazing.
- I really appreciate that.
- It's incredible, I'm so inspired by it.
- And it's fun to share with somebody like you who is equally passionate about all this stuff as we are.
- Definitely.
- Now we're almost done.
- We gotta sweeten it up a little bit. We have some stevia drops that we're gonna put in here. And that is gonna be ready to blend. Perfect. Okay, so of course you could add other things to this as well if you wanna take it another step. You could add some MCT oil. You could add ghee, you could add collagen and there's various different directions you could go in, but we're just making a fairly simple, but pretty still amazing and spectacular drink that we're both gonna enjoy and let's blend it up and get to some fun mushroom conversation.
- Perfect, let's do it. I'm excited to try it.
- All right.
- Well, these drinks look amazing--
- Thank you.
- Cheers to mushrooms and cacao and everything that comes with it.
- Yes.
- Let's see if it tastes as good as it looks. All right, it's powerful.
- I feel like I've trained my palette over the last few years, but to actually enjoy bitterness--
- Mh, it's important.
- And 'cause I find it a little bit bitter, but I actually like that now. And I think that the problem with so much of our food is that they add so much sugar and sweeteners and artificial flavoring that you lose that like appreciation for natural foods bitterness.
- Absolutely, and to connect back to what we were talking about earlier with the cacao being wild grown, as opposed to domesticated, what you see so much with domesticated plant foods is that they've had the bitter compounds bred out of them to be mainstream friendly.
- Exactly.
- You go to some more fringe greens like the dandelion, whoa.
- Yes
- That's like seriously bitter. They're not gonna sell that at Von's or Safeway.
- It's not a mass crowd pleaser.
- Or even something like radicchio, which can taste so great, AnnaBlanca makes it just like magical radicchio dish. But it's got a bitter flavor that we've learned to enjoy. And these bitter compounds are the medicinal compounds. So it's quite something when you think that the world we live in has bred the medicine out of the food and then sold it back to you in the form of a drug.
- Yeah, that stuff
- It's quite backwards. And I think we're changing that like--
- We are doing our best.
- The way that yeah. Everything that you guys are doing with Addictive Wellness, the stuff that I'm working on, it's educating people so that they can make smarter decisions and actually use food as preventative medicine. And like, that's what I'm so passionate about.
- That's awesome. So I wanna know how you got to there. Because I imagine everyone's mushroom journey. They usually start out from a place of considering mushrooms as a food, something you might have on a pizza or in a pasta dish, something like that. And don't think of it as anything medicinal or with therapeutic value or anything extra special. And you've certainly transcended that level many times over, but most people never go past it. It's like the mushroom is just like a thing as a food. But you've obviously gone further. You've gone to the point where you start to understand that they have something more to them. And then you've gone to the point where you actually wanna build a company in the world of mushrooms and make mushrooms your life.
- So tell me about how you, the story of how you proceed through these chapters. 'Cause you've gone, not just further than most people in mushrooms, but like you're in the elite 0.01% of how far people will go on the mushroom journey to actually have a business.
- We're working on changing that.
- So that's part of the plan. But yeah, no, that's a great question. For me, my health journey and also my first interactions with mushrooms, where, like you said, whether it was on a pasta dish or pizza, just eating regular everyday foods and not really appreciating the mushrooms, just being like, "Oh, that's another vegetable in my dish." So that was I guess my first interaction with mushrooms as a child growing up and it went into my teens. But about five years ago I developed terrible eczema all over my arms, my neck, my forehead, my eyelids, like it was so debilitating and bad. Sometimes I wouldn't leave my apartment for days because I was so physically uncomfortable in my skin 'cause it was so itchy. And that's when I was like, you know what? I've been trying all of these cortisone creams and stuff that dermatologists were prescribing, nothing was working. I was reading and doing my own research and I was realizing like kind of everything that's in Western medicine is quite backwards and it's more of a band-aid to the problem rather than going to the root cause. And that's when I learned more about Ayurvedic medicine and Chinese medicine and all these alternative medicines that actually have been around for way more time than Western medicine. And so I dove deep into that and sort of being a citizen scientist of my own for myself, and wanting to cure my own health issues. And that's when I really started diving deeper into listening to podcasts and hearing these functional medicine doctors talk about using food as medicine and a food that continuously was brought up was the power, the healing powers of mushrooms. And I was just so fascinated by that. And I mean, five years later I've healed and cured myself of absolutely of everything. I've stopped, I haven't taken a prescription drug in three years. I got off of birth control. I had like completely cleaned and cleansed my body and I truly do look at food as medicine. And so it's just so powerful and mushrooms, like I said, played a really big role in my healing journey and my whole education in this space.
- So what was the first mushroom that you came across in your research that you said, "Wow, this sounds really interesting. "Never heard of it before, but I gotta try it."
- Yeah, chaga. Chaga was definitely the first one and reishi as well, but they were both like anti-inflammatory, antioxidant. They had all these incredible health benefits and I was like, "Okay, like, I'm gonna give this a try." And so, you don't just go and like buy chaga at a grocery store or reishi. And so the way that I was ingesting them and incorporating them into my diet was through powders and through capsules. And I felt amazing. And I mean every single day since, I've taken mushroom supplements. They've truly changed my life. Not only like physical health, I honestly feel like they've made a difference. I mean, for sure in my skin, but physically I feel incredible. Mentally, I feel so clear. And I just, I don't, I cannot picture my diet or my daily routine without mushrooms in some way. So that's why I'm so passionate about it 'cause it truly has changed my life in so many ways that we just need to continue educating 'cause education is the basis of change.
- Absolutely, yeah. Chaga was the first one for me that I got into using regularly. At the time I just got the chunks of raw chaga.
- I started just brewing it up into this really, really strong, concentrated tea. And it's actually a very affordable way to do it and just drinking every day. And it has such a nice flavor to it on its own, but also it has vanillic acid in it. So it combines very well, the vanilla flavor. So if you add a little vanilla, a little bit of sweetener to it, it's like just a magical drink, on its--
- I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna add a little vanilla--
- A little vanilla flavored stevia. I was like, wow.
- That's a great idea.
- Definitely something to try.
- We'll make that next time.
- Absolutely, that'll be our next drink.
- This time, it's like a chocolate one next time will be more vanilla.
- There you go, a good combination.
- I love that.
- And so then as you kind of went along through your mushroom journey there, At what point do you decide, "Okay, this is not just gonna be my, "something I do for my health, "but this is something I wanna share with the world. "That's something I wanna make into a business." 'Cause this wasn't your business all along, you have a whole 'nother very successful and exciting career. Why don't you tell a little bit about that and then how the transition has happened for you into becoming, the messenger of mushrooms?
- Yes, definitely yeah. So my background is completely different. My company Pangea Dreams started about five and a half years ago as a production company. And what we did was we would work with five to 10, small to midsize brands. We would choose a beautiful destination somewhere in the world. And we would split the production cost amongst the brands and shoot all of their marketing materials. And after a year of doing that and sharing on social media women from around the world that were following me and finding me on Instagram were like, "What are you doing? "How are you living this life? "What does it mean to collaborate with a brand "or to work with the tourism board? "And how are you traveling so much?" Like, "What are you doing? "What's your job? "How are you making money?" And during that year as a solo female entrepreneur, I kind of felt lonely. Like there was no support. There was nobody else that was doing what I was doing. Anytime I would reach out for help, nobody was forthcoming. And it was very much like you're my competition. And so I don't really want it. I'm not gonna help you.
- I can't share.
- No, and that's never been my energy. That's never been how I was. It's like, if I have something that can help someone else, please take it. Like we're stronger together. Truly like I really to my core believe that all ships rise together. And so, having this community online that was asking me all these questions, I decided I was like, "You know what, "I'm gonna take this community online "and bring it offline and everything "that I've learned over the last year or two years, "as a digital content creator, "photographer, social media manager, all of these things, "I'm gonna turn it into a curriculum "and educate the women who joined me on this retreat "to how to start and launch a digital based business." So Pangea Dreams pivoted for four and a half years ago into the first ever educational retreat for women specifically focusing on digital based businesses, which was amazing. And then COVID hit.
- Yeah. COVID will change things.
- COVID will change things. And basically we had to cancel 12 of our upcoming retreat experiences this year. Then they were taking place in Bali, Morocco, Peru, India, Mexico, like all over, refund everyone. And I had to let go of my team, but that actually allowed me to have so much more free time on my hands to really dive deeper into what I wanted to do next. If this was gonna be a really long trend, which I mean, we're seeing that it's going to be travel, international travel. It's gonna take a while to get back started again.
- If only you could give your business immune mushrooms.
- I know, I know.
- I think like we have such a great immunological solutions for us individual humans, but everywhere there was like, there's gotta be some metaphorical thing that you can give to a business like boost immunity. But anyways, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. It something that popped into my head.
- No, that would be really funny. If I can just like inject Pangea Dreams with some chaga, and we'll be good to go. But, yeah, no, because of that and because of the all the free time that I had, I really dove deeper into other things I was really passionate about and that being mushrooms. And my best friend and business partner, Ali and I decided like now is our time. Both of our businesses were kind of put on hold because of the current situation. Let's dive deeper into all of this mushroom stuff because it's changed both of our lives in our own unique ways. And we want to be part of this, renaissance and movement of really using food as medicine and being huge proponents and advocates for mushrooms in that. So that's where we are now with the Multiverse. It's the first ever mushroom marketplace, which we're really excited about. And we'll also be launching our own CPG product as well, which will be a sublingual mouth spray.
- Cool. It's very exciting what you guys are doing. And so you obviously are someone in the position that creates lots of opportunities for those around you as well. And we'll be obviously employing lots of people in your Multiverse. And do you feel like, I have my own thoughts and experiences on this as well, but when you bring people into a business, no matter what their role is, but something, a business that's health-related or that's mushroom related in this little microcosm of businesses of ours, how do you feel that affects somebody as an employee compared to going to work at a tech company or going to work at like, something that, a company say making paper, and something more generic.
- I mean, I think that if health and wellness and education is what we're selling, then that needs to run true for how we run our business and operate our business and how we empower our employees or the people that may work with us. So, if let's say one day we decide to have an office. I mean, you best believe we'll have mushrooms on tap.
- And we will wanna empower our team and really teach them how to not only speak about our product, but how to incorporate health and wellness into their lives, whatever that may mean, whether it's through movement, whether it's through food, there's so many ways that we can help empower people to take control back. And I just feel like so many people feel helpless when it comes to their health. And we really do have the answers within us. We just don't know how, I guess we just don't know how to see them 'cause we've been so blinded and disconnected with our bodies by just like, "Oh, you have a headache, take a pill." Rather than like, "Why do I have this headache? "What does my body really need right now?" And so I think having conversations like that and workshops and a lot of community building, will be surrounded around our businesses for sure.
- Great, yeah, I'm excited to see how you bring, your skillset from previous businesses--
- Oh, absolutely.
- With community building and inspiring and educating people into what you're gonna be doing now.
- Yes.
- When you first come into conversation with someone something comes up and you decide, "Okay, I'm gonna share mushroom world with this person." 'Cause it can be a bizarre world, open people up to 'cause it's so foreign. It's not, these are not plants. These are not animals. As is famously said, some will kill you. Some will heal you and some will show you,
- The great spirit. And how do you open this up for people? How do you gently introduce them without exploding their mind too much?
- That's hard for me because I'm so passionate. And I'm just like, I just wanna tell you all the things. But what's so cool about mushrooms, is they're not, they're actually closer to humans than they are to plants. Like, so just in that self, it's fascinating. Like what does that even mean? Like, we are more similar to mushrooms than plants. And so that's just like really cool. And something else that's interesting is like mushrooms, it's an entire kingdom, it's a whole ecosystem. And mushrooms are the digestive system of our planet. Like when an animal dies on the ground of a forest, mushrooms come and eat it and decay it. Same thing with plants and with leaves or whatever it may be. And so the power of fungi is so much further beyond just their health benefits. And I mean, of course when people are like, "Oh yeah, tell me about mushrooms." I'll share all of the health benefits. We spoke briefly about, the health benefits of tremella, reishi, cordyceps, and lion's mane. But there's so many incredible benefits that are unique to maybe like whatever problems you might be having, like Turkey tail, they've done studies with cancer. And so it's just so incredible and so vast. And what I tell people is like, whatever you're doing, let's say you have a coffee every morning. Can you somehow add, mushrooms to that coffee. Like what are small things that you can do to incorporate into your daily habits that you're already doing? And then that way you get those health benefits, but you're not necessarily changing something where you drastically have to--
- People are so used to hearing that, "Oh, if you wanna get healthy, you gotta cut out this, "cut out this, cut out this, cut out gluten, cut out dairy, "cut out..." And they feel like you're assaulting them. People are, people with their diets. It's kind of like a religion for them a lot of times, especially in certain dietary communities. And if you tell people they have to change and there's, I mean, there's evolutionary reason to this. When through evolutionary history, you ate what your tribe ate or what people in your geographic region ate.
- Survival.
- Changing your diet historically was not an option. No true person in a traditional culture said, "You know what, I'm gonna change my diet. "What?"
- If somebody had different diets? This is where it gets complicated. We have to fight or evolutionary biology a little bit because evolutionarily if somebody had a different diet from you, it meant they were probably from somewhere else.
- For sure.
- And maybe not to be trusted. So we have to really like pause and embrace people doing different diets I think. Because people are at different stages of health. People have biological uniqueness. People have different genetics. There's so many different factors.
- Absolutely, absolutely. That's such a great point though. Because traditionally, biologically, if you didn't eat what you were served, you would die. Like you don't really have that choice. But all of our needs are met and beyond. So we do have the luxury of choice. And I think that again, it's like, great. Now I have all this choice. I can make all these decisions, But I don't even know where to begin. And then that's where education comes into play.
- Giving people some ideas, things that they can add in. So they don't have to cut out and feel like their diets being attacked.
- Exactly, exactly. It's like, "Oh, you have a coffee. "Maybe toss him some chaga in the morning "and like, add that to your coffee." It's like, yeah instead of subtracting, let's add in some of the good stuff.
- And as we were talking earlier about the bitter and sweet flavors, I think a lot of the craving for the sweet flavors comes from the parasites, from the bacterial imbalances, from these things that feed on sugar, tap into your nervous system and then can make you crave sugar.
- Absolutely.
- As you start to get onto healthier things, whether it's from a dietary shift or started to incorporate some herbs and your biology shifts, your inner terrain shifts, your taste shifts. Like I can tell you when I was a kid, I had zero interest in broccoli. And now I think broccoli is amazing.
- Me too.
- It's one of my favorites. And just even like with other herbs, you try something in the beginning. If you, somebody was coming just right off the mainstream and they tried like straight reishi mushroom, and it might be a little bit intense. You could prepare it in a way that makes it delicious. But over time you learn to embrace these flavors as a learning, and becoming accustomed to it. But also I think your inner terrain is changing and with your body calls for changes,
- For sure, for sure. And I mean, that's what's so messed up about like the food industry and the government and just like how they look at food and this mass production of corn and soy and sugars and gluten and everything, it's really destroying our biological taste buds of what our body truly needs. So then we don't know how to feed ourselves and give ourselves the nutrients that we need, because we're like, "Oh, I'm craving something sweet right now. "I need, like a soda." And no, like maybe that's not what your body needs. And so, I mean, for me everything always comes down to knowledge is power. And like you asked how are we gonna incorporate that into the business? A huge part of what we wanna do with the Multiverse and Supermush is truly like content and is sharing real experiences and people's stories and also just knowledge and education on everything. And I think that you guys do that so well as well with your lives and these videos. That's how we create that change in the movement. And so it's really empowering. I'm empowered to help empower people, to make smarter decisions that are gonna make them feel amazing. 'Cause at the end of the day, I always say this, I feel like people now are always that people are surviving. We gotta get people to thrive.
- Absolutely.
- And that's the mission.
- Yeah, you can go further than just eking out a meager daily existence--
- And just coasting.
- And reishi really helps in that department.
- Real deal, yeah, yeah.
- But reishi for me is just so incredible because of the way it changes you spiritually over time. When you take reishi on a regular basis, real strong, what they call, shen reishi. Shen is the Taoist term for like your spirit or your higher self. It's something that reishi is able to affect. Certain nerves can affect your shen like albizia or pearl powder. Reishi is one of them. And one of the most powerful. And the traditional wisdom on it is that it guides you around the obstacles in between you and enlightenment. So it's kinda like enlightenment GPS or Waze guiding you around where there's like the traffic jams and the road closures or things like that.
- I've never heard anyone explain it that way. That is beautiful.
- Yeah, so I can't take credit for that, it's traditional. It's pretty amazing. And it, there's been, I'll tell a quick story. When I was many years ago, working at the original Erewhon Tonic Bar, one of the new owners would come by for a drink. And I would make her this smoothie and the heroin tonic was different back in the day. It was like, all herbalists working there and you come up and you would get like a little five minute mini consultation and have a custom creation made for you based on what was going on. And you put your health and in your life, there are different vibe from what is today--
- Shout out to Erewhon. You guys gotta bring that back.
- That's amazing. I love that.
- It was incredible. So one of the new owners of Erewhon would come up and ask for this drink and I would put various different things in there to make it like a really delicious chlorophyll smoothie, kind of milkshake, vanilla kind of thing. But I was putting reishi in there every day to kind of, 'cause I just was like, "Okay, I'm gonna, "you're gonna come to me for the nutrition "and for something that tastes good, "I'm gonna sneak in something in there "that is going to assist you "on the path of a evolving consciousness."
- And sure enough, like I can tell you, I can at least say my friendly relationship with her became a lot friendlier during that time. And we, I think we came to have a much better connection. Whereas in the beginning, I didn't think they really, the owners understood me or what I was doing there.
- And this has happened sometimes, but a reishi is a magical thing to share with those around you. It makes people friendlier, I think in a big picture.
- We all need a little bit more reishi in our lives.
- Especially now.
- For the friendliness and for the immunity side of it. I mean, it's the herb for modern times, for sure.
- I love that, the herb for modern times.
- So how are you taking mushrooms these days, which I know you traditionally took them as extract powders. Is that kind of still your go to.
- Definitely, I have a mushroom elixir every morning. It's how I start my day. And usually I'll end my day with a reishi one and then also cooking. I cook a lot with mushrooms. I love, you sauteing, shiitake, oyster but about like all of the mushrooms. I'll do like a big medley and I'll throw that into a salad. So actual mushrooms and also a lot of powder.
- Yeah, that's great. It's fun to incorporate them into different dishes and diversify. You have a little extra feeling of awesomeness when eating whatever dish you would normally eat, but you know there's some magic stuff in there.
- Oh yeah, it's amazing. You get to eat magic every day and then you feel magical.
- Do you feel like magic right now?
- I feel pretty special.
- So outside of medicinal mushrooms, what about other mushrooms and their role in the world and for humans and the planet. What are your thoughts in this sphere?
- So, all of the mushrooms that we've been speaking about are functional medicinal mushrooms. That's the category when we talk about them, people are like, "What does that mean?" So it's the ones that don't have the psychoactive ingredient of psilocybin in them. But then you have magic mushrooms or shrooms or psilocybin, and that's a whole other category of mushroom. And that truly is a, it's like a gatekeeper into entering another dimension of reality. And the research that they're doing with psilocybin for PTSD, for depression, for anxiety, for addiction is so fascinating. And it's incredible because you have people that are on SSRIs and antidepressants, their whole lives go to anywhere between one to six treatments and they're cured. And it's just like, that is how we affect positive change in the world. That is truly, working on our side. It's not trying to get someone addicted to a drug for the rest of their life. That's gonna cause so many other health problems.
- It's fixing people.
- It's fixing people. And that I think is going to, I mean, as psilocybin becomes decriminalized and it is happening, which is very exciting. That is how I truly think like mushrooms are gonna change the world. Not only in terms of our health, but also mental health.
- And I should correct when I said fixing people, I should probably more accurately say getting people out of the way of being able to fix themselves.
- Absolutely.
- Rather their own way.
- Absolutely, I mean, psilocybin is so fascinating because it allows for different parts of your brain to actually start communicating, that don't normally communicate with each other. So you actually create new neural pathways, new ways of thinking. And you can go back into your mind and rewrite a memory or heal a traumatic event, in your life that happened and see it in a different way. And that is, again, it's the difference is, okay, you have a problem, put this band-aid on it or now you have this problem, let's get to the root cause. And I find that food and psilocybin and all of these substances actually get to the root cause of the issue and then can generate a true cure. And that's amazing.
- It's gonna be very exciting to see how the research and the public availability develops. Of course it's being fast tracked by the FDA, is the most promising treatment for depression. For treatment resistant depression.
- Yeah, yeah.
- I think it's exciting
- Actually in Canada, they just announced that they were allowing four cancer patients that are terminally ill to go through a psilocybin assisted therapy, to help them with their anxiety about death and overcome that. And I mean, even that, like how beautiful is that.
- Absolutely.
- We have a tool and it's not even a tool that we made it's from mother earth, it's from nature that can help us ease the anxiety of dying. And I think death, even that just in itself is something that in nature in our society, we've turned and made it such a negative and terrible thing. And then you take psilocybin and you have this experience and you realize like what we see here in this realm of reality, there's more to it. There's more. And so, energy never dies. Energy can't be destroyed. And so, we're just in this kind of physical body, but what happens to the energy that's within us, our soul. And you realize like this isn't it. And so the anxiety, I think of dying kind of subsides.
- Yeah, and how interesting that you mentioned earlier, when an animal dies, it gets eaten up by mushrooms.
- So we are destined to also be eaten by mushrooms.
- Yes.
- How fitting that one of that mushroom family, would be the one to prepare us for that journey to join the mushrooms.
- That's beautiful.
- You're gonna become a mushroom sooner or later as well. Might as well ally with yourself, with them now.
- Exactly, that's so true. That's so true, I love that.
- It just came to me in the moment. It's inspired by this drink.
- It's great, we've got to have another little sip here.
- So are you more into macro or micro dosing?
- Psilocybin?
- Yeah
- Definitely micro-dosing. I have loved my macro experiences and I think that they've given me profound insight and also have changed the way that I show up in the world. And I live my life. Like the dualities of life are so present I find. That when you're having that kind of experience, is that like one of the biggest ones for me was, firstly they don't take everything so seriously, it's all a game. And the one thing, like nothing truly matters. But the one thing that matters is that you have fun. And so we're here for such a short period of time. How could we optimize for joy? How could we optimize for human connection? How do we make sure that we're being our best selves and truly listening to that. And I think that comes into tapping into your intuition. And all of these things sound so kind of like, woo, woo. but going through a psilocybin experience, it gives you a deeper understanding of what all of these. Of what all these like buzz words truly mean. Like cliches are cliches for a reason and they're a cliche until you actually understand them. And so I think that going on these kinds of experiences and journeys, and it allows you to understand. Understand in a deeper way all of these cliches or words or what people are saying, whereas before maybe you can't grasp it as much.
- And I think our language comes up short very often.
- It does.
- Describing what you experienced in that realm, because look, you have to be a human for like three years straight before you can like, just kind of start to talk about anything as a child, Really you have to be like in your teens before you can really communicate about, this universe you spend 100% of your time in. How much time relative to that, do you spend in mushroomland to talk about what's going on there? So of course it, can you come back and it's like, it's a little hard to put into words 'cause we don't spend enough time there to develop the vocabulary for that.
- No, it's so true. And 'cause I think that also the experiences are so profound, we just don't have the words, like you said, like to really articulate the experience and something that I've also learned and through my experiences is inviting this childlike, curiosity and playfulness that you have when you're on a psilocybin journey into everyday life and life just becomes so much more enjoyable and exciting when you can look at life through that lens. It's beautiful.
- That's amazing. And then I guess the last realm of mushrooms to ask about is what about mushrooms outside of human consumption? What about mushrooms for planetary wellbeing?
- Yeah, I mean, we touched on it earlier, how they basically decompose matter, like they're digesting matter. And so we can use mushrooms in incredible ways through for the environment. They, Paul Stamets actually patented this incredible new product, I guess. I don't know how exactly you would explain it, but he did a test where he inoculated and drenched an entire wood chip pile with oil and toxic chemicals and left it there to sit. And then another one with the same thing. And he inoculated it with spores, mushroom spores and then went back to check it. And the one that he put the spores on, it cleaned all of these toxic chemicals off of the wood chips. And so it's like, we can use that in cleaning up all the messes that we're making. And I saw recently they are with, when you die, you can like be also doused in spores. And so it speeds up the process of your decaying and the mushrooms digesting you. In packaging, where you actually, like it's made out of mushrooms and you put it in water and it dissolves. So it's biodegradable, I've seen shoes like leather like shoes that are made out of mushrooms.
- That's amazing.
- It's crazy. Like you literally can do everything with them. It's amazing.
- That's just the potential here. When anybody starts to dig into it gives you so much hope.
- So much hope.
- And just kind of makes you think like, "Wow, "there's a lot more that can be done "if we have just scratched the surface up "and it's all coming."
- Absolutely, absolutely. So much to look forward to.
- Yeah, so if people wanna continue their mushroom education. what would be maybe like a movie or a documentary or book that you would recommend as the next step?
- Okay, so definitely book recommendation is Michael Pollan's book "How to Change Your Mind." It's incredible. That is just like you read that and your mind is literally blown and you finish the book and you're like, "Yeah, my mind is definitely changed." So highly recommend that one by Michael Pollan and then a documentary that recently came out maybe about a year ago. It's called "Fantastic Fungi." And that's all about the magical kingdom of fungi, both functional in nature and also psychedelic. So that, that would be like a great starter kit to start getting educated in the space. Those two things I would highly recommend.
- Fantastic, and then where do people find and follow you?
- Yeah, you guys can find me on Instagram. It's my name, Tracy Komlos. And also you can check out the Multiverse, you can check out Supermush once it's launched.
- What's the website for the Multiverse. It's yourmultiverse.com. Supermush is iamsupermush.com. Pangea Dreams is pangeadreams.com and yeah. But I think best ways is Instagram. You can reach out directly.
- Excellent, start there and go on the mushroom journey. All right. Thank you everybody for joining us. Thank you Tracy, for coming over and being here today.
- Thanks for having me.
- It's been a pleasure. And may we have many more amazing mushroom adventures together.
- Yes and many more mushroom elixir.
- Mushroom elixir, yeah. Next time chocolate vanilla.
- Yes, cheers guys.
- Cheers everybody.
- Thank you for having me Sage.
- Absolutely.
- I'm so excited.
- Wonderful, so we are going to have some amazing mushroom conversations, but before we sit down and talk. we need to make a mushroom elixir.
- Yes.
- So we are gonna make here something pretty special. Wanna tell us a little more about what's coming up?
- Yeah, we are going to be making a super herb mushroom elixir with cacao, lion's mane, tremella, cordyceps, and reishi.
- Yep, so this is gonna be for beauty, energy, brains, immunity, and whenever there's cacao in the equation, it means we're gonna be having a good time. So I'm glad you guys have joined us. Maybe make this drink along with us and then join us for this amazing conversation we're gonna be having. So let's get started. We're going to have the base of this, it's gonna be some warmed up almond milk. Set in our blender here and you can of course make this in a regular VitaMix, but we are using a metal blender jug so that we don't have the hot liquids mixing in the plastic. So we're always trying to do everything a little bit better.
- Smart, yep smart. Should I toss these in?
- Yeah, what would you like to do first?
- Okay, so let's put, this is the tremella. So we're gonna put some tremella in here.
- Okay, actually, that was a... You kind of mixed up, that was lion's mane. I think we switched around the bags there, but so we start with lion's mane,
- The mushroom for the brain. This is improving the myelination of the nerves, which is the sheath that coats the nerves and when they have more of this, the signals can travel faster and the nerves are more protected. So lion's mane is incredible for gut health as well. It does more than just brain stuff.
- Oh, cool. I love taking lion's mane in the morning. Like before I know I have a big day of work and it just really helps me focus.
- A lot.
- Okay, next one is tremella.
- There we go, it's always like super like white and fluffy. It's delicious, you just wanna dive right in there.
- Tremella, and tremella a fun fact about it is it can hold up to 500 times its weight in water. So it's incredible for beauty, like you said, in water absorption.
- Right, so it basically mimics hyaluronic acid, but actually overperforms and does the job even better. So you can consume it internally, but also a lot of topical products you'll see using tremella and then more and more these days, which is fun and exciting.
- Okay, then this one is the cordyceps.
- Cordyceps, so cordyceps fun fact, it's not actually a mushroom. It is a synergistic family of fungi and you can't grow it on hardwood or in the ground like you would other mushrooms. It has a specific way of growing, that's very unique to it. And it's more than one strain of fungi that actually grows together. So it's amazing for energy, for endurance, for immunity, for lung support, for supporting the adrenals and the HPA axis. It's spectacular, very powerful herbs to incorporate.
- That's also another favorite of mine, when I know I have a big day. Just to give me that extra boost of energy, 'cause I don't really drink coffee either. So yeah, cordyceps is definitely a go to.
- Yeah, cordyceps improves your oxygen utilization. So from the air, you breathe you get more oxygen actually making it to your brain, to your muscles, through your blood. And so everything is gonna work better.
- Okay, and last mushroom today is reishi.
- Reishi has gotta be my favorite. And this is known traditionally as the mushroom of immortality and spiritual potency in good fortune. It's, for thousands of years has been an incredibly sought after substance, by Taoist monks and hermits because of the spiritual effects that it has. It just, it gets you out of your head and your heart and makes you feel more peaceful. And then on the side, it's also an absolutely incredible immune supportive herb with, actually more research done on it than any other herb in the world. So that's reishi is number one in so many ways.
- Oh, that's really cool. I mean, they're so versatile, it's incredible.
- So many ways you can use these, obviously this is like the most obvious and basic way to put them in like this. But you can prepare, like we have so many different recipe videos. You can obviously put them into chocolate as we love to do, but you can put them into ice creams. You can put them into cakes and breads. Like there's so many ways to incorporate these. And that's the idea is. it's not about having a mega dose necessarily for a special occasion, but these herbs have the effect of having a cumulative building beneficial effect over time. That's how they would traditionally be taken. Small amounts on a regular basis. And over time they shift the course of your life in a pretty powerful way. So now--
- Consistency, consistency is key.
- Consistency, that's, it's exactly. Now we are going to get this to be a little more flavorful. So these herbs are all very interesting as it is, but we're a chocolate company, we're gonna make hot chocolate today.
- Yummy.
- And so we have tablespoons here of our cacao powder, which is mycotoxin free. It's heirloom cacao and it is not grown on a farm. It doesn't grow on a plantation. These are trees that actually grow wild in the jungle and people that have access to this land go up in there, pick the cacao when it's ripe and then carry it down. And we have this network of people that provide the cacao in this way. And so this has a genetic robustness to it that you don't get from something that has, it's grown on a farm, it's growing protected. It's kinda like if somebody grows up with like helicopter parent and not, they don't have to deal with like some of the challenges of the world. Well then you put them out there and like--
- They don't know what to do.
- Yeee.
- Yeah.
- Whereas if somebody grew up on the streets, like this cacao grew up on the streets of the--
- It is street smart. You know it's gonna get around, it will be okay.
- So it has more genetic robustness. It can survive and has evolved to survive without protection from man. It doesn't have to have fences put around it. It doesn't have to have herbicides sprayed. It doesn't have to be, have all other competing plants kept away from it. 'Cause it doesn't know how to extract resources very efficiently from the earth. So this is amazing and it grows in volcanic soil. So super mineral rich.
- Wow, actually I was recently told that a lot of chocolates do have a lot of toxic chemicals in them.
- Sure absolutely.
- And so I love you guys because I know like you just said where it was grown and how it was grown. Like I can trust all of your ingredients. 'Cause the integrity that you guys put into your products is amazing.
- I really appreciate that.
- It's incredible, I'm so inspired by it.
- And it's fun to share with somebody like you who is equally passionate about all this stuff as we are.
- Definitely.
- Now we're almost done.
- We gotta sweeten it up a little bit. We have some stevia drops that we're gonna put in here. And that is gonna be ready to blend. Perfect. Okay, so of course you could add other things to this as well if you wanna take it another step. You could add some MCT oil. You could add ghee, you could add collagen and there's various different directions you could go in, but we're just making a fairly simple, but pretty still amazing and spectacular drink that we're both gonna enjoy and let's blend it up and get to some fun mushroom conversation.
- Perfect, let's do it. I'm excited to try it.
- All right.
- Well, these drinks look amazing--
- Thank you.
- Cheers to mushrooms and cacao and everything that comes with it.
- Yes.
- Let's see if it tastes as good as it looks. All right, it's powerful.
- I feel like I've trained my palette over the last few years, but to actually enjoy bitterness--
- Mh, it's important.
- And 'cause I find it a little bit bitter, but I actually like that now. And I think that the problem with so much of our food is that they add so much sugar and sweeteners and artificial flavoring that you lose that like appreciation for natural foods bitterness.
- Absolutely, and to connect back to what we were talking about earlier with the cacao being wild grown, as opposed to domesticated, what you see so much with domesticated plant foods is that they've had the bitter compounds bred out of them to be mainstream friendly.
- Exactly.
- You go to some more fringe greens like the dandelion, whoa.
- Yes
- That's like seriously bitter. They're not gonna sell that at Von's or Safeway.
- It's not a mass crowd pleaser.
- Or even something like radicchio, which can taste so great, AnnaBlanca makes it just like magical radicchio dish. But it's got a bitter flavor that we've learned to enjoy. And these bitter compounds are the medicinal compounds. So it's quite something when you think that the world we live in has bred the medicine out of the food and then sold it back to you in the form of a drug.
- Yeah, that stuff
- It's quite backwards. And I think we're changing that like--
- We are doing our best.
- The way that yeah. Everything that you guys are doing with Addictive Wellness, the stuff that I'm working on, it's educating people so that they can make smarter decisions and actually use food as preventative medicine. And like, that's what I'm so passionate about.
- That's awesome. So I wanna know how you got to there. Because I imagine everyone's mushroom journey. They usually start out from a place of considering mushrooms as a food, something you might have on a pizza or in a pasta dish, something like that. And don't think of it as anything medicinal or with therapeutic value or anything extra special. And you've certainly transcended that level many times over, but most people never go past it. It's like the mushroom is just like a thing as a food. But you've obviously gone further. You've gone to the point where you start to understand that they have something more to them. And then you've gone to the point where you actually wanna build a company in the world of mushrooms and make mushrooms your life.
- So tell me about how you, the story of how you proceed through these chapters. 'Cause you've gone, not just further than most people in mushrooms, but like you're in the elite 0.01% of how far people will go on the mushroom journey to actually have a business.
- We're working on changing that.
- So that's part of the plan. But yeah, no, that's a great question. For me, my health journey and also my first interactions with mushrooms, where, like you said, whether it was on a pasta dish or pizza, just eating regular everyday foods and not really appreciating the mushrooms, just being like, "Oh, that's another vegetable in my dish." So that was I guess my first interaction with mushrooms as a child growing up and it went into my teens. But about five years ago I developed terrible eczema all over my arms, my neck, my forehead, my eyelids, like it was so debilitating and bad. Sometimes I wouldn't leave my apartment for days because I was so physically uncomfortable in my skin 'cause it was so itchy. And that's when I was like, you know what? I've been trying all of these cortisone creams and stuff that dermatologists were prescribing, nothing was working. I was reading and doing my own research and I was realizing like kind of everything that's in Western medicine is quite backwards and it's more of a band-aid to the problem rather than going to the root cause. And that's when I learned more about Ayurvedic medicine and Chinese medicine and all these alternative medicines that actually have been around for way more time than Western medicine. And so I dove deep into that and sort of being a citizen scientist of my own for myself, and wanting to cure my own health issues. And that's when I really started diving deeper into listening to podcasts and hearing these functional medicine doctors talk about using food as medicine and a food that continuously was brought up was the power, the healing powers of mushrooms. And I was just so fascinated by that. And I mean, five years later I've healed and cured myself of absolutely of everything. I've stopped, I haven't taken a prescription drug in three years. I got off of birth control. I had like completely cleaned and cleansed my body and I truly do look at food as medicine. And so it's just so powerful and mushrooms, like I said, played a really big role in my healing journey and my whole education in this space.
- So what was the first mushroom that you came across in your research that you said, "Wow, this sounds really interesting. "Never heard of it before, but I gotta try it."
- Yeah, chaga. Chaga was definitely the first one and reishi as well, but they were both like anti-inflammatory, antioxidant. They had all these incredible health benefits and I was like, "Okay, like, I'm gonna give this a try." And so, you don't just go and like buy chaga at a grocery store or reishi. And so the way that I was ingesting them and incorporating them into my diet was through powders and through capsules. And I felt amazing. And I mean every single day since, I've taken mushroom supplements. They've truly changed my life. Not only like physical health, I honestly feel like they've made a difference. I mean, for sure in my skin, but physically I feel incredible. Mentally, I feel so clear. And I just, I don't, I cannot picture my diet or my daily routine without mushrooms in some way. So that's why I'm so passionate about it 'cause it truly has changed my life in so many ways that we just need to continue educating 'cause education is the basis of change.
- Absolutely, yeah. Chaga was the first one for me that I got into using regularly. At the time I just got the chunks of raw chaga.
- I started just brewing it up into this really, really strong, concentrated tea. And it's actually a very affordable way to do it and just drinking every day. And it has such a nice flavor to it on its own, but also it has vanillic acid in it. So it combines very well, the vanilla flavor. So if you add a little vanilla, a little bit of sweetener to it, it's like just a magical drink, on its--
- I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna add a little vanilla--
- A little vanilla flavored stevia. I was like, wow.
- That's a great idea.
- Definitely something to try.
- We'll make that next time.
- Absolutely, that'll be our next drink.
- This time, it's like a chocolate one next time will be more vanilla.
- There you go, a good combination.
- I love that.
- And so then as you kind of went along through your mushroom journey there, At what point do you decide, "Okay, this is not just gonna be my, "something I do for my health, "but this is something I wanna share with the world. "That's something I wanna make into a business." 'Cause this wasn't your business all along, you have a whole 'nother very successful and exciting career. Why don't you tell a little bit about that and then how the transition has happened for you into becoming, the messenger of mushrooms?
- Yes, definitely yeah. So my background is completely different. My company Pangea Dreams started about five and a half years ago as a production company. And what we did was we would work with five to 10, small to midsize brands. We would choose a beautiful destination somewhere in the world. And we would split the production cost amongst the brands and shoot all of their marketing materials. And after a year of doing that and sharing on social media women from around the world that were following me and finding me on Instagram were like, "What are you doing? "How are you living this life? "What does it mean to collaborate with a brand "or to work with the tourism board? "And how are you traveling so much?" Like, "What are you doing? "What's your job? "How are you making money?" And during that year as a solo female entrepreneur, I kind of felt lonely. Like there was no support. There was nobody else that was doing what I was doing. Anytime I would reach out for help, nobody was forthcoming. And it was very much like you're my competition. And so I don't really want it. I'm not gonna help you.
- I can't share.
- No, and that's never been my energy. That's never been how I was. It's like, if I have something that can help someone else, please take it. Like we're stronger together. Truly like I really to my core believe that all ships rise together. And so, having this community online that was asking me all these questions, I decided I was like, "You know what, "I'm gonna take this community online "and bring it offline and everything "that I've learned over the last year or two years, "as a digital content creator, "photographer, social media manager, all of these things, "I'm gonna turn it into a curriculum "and educate the women who joined me on this retreat "to how to start and launch a digital based business." So Pangea Dreams pivoted for four and a half years ago into the first ever educational retreat for women specifically focusing on digital based businesses, which was amazing. And then COVID hit.
- Yeah. COVID will change things.
- COVID will change things. And basically we had to cancel 12 of our upcoming retreat experiences this year. Then they were taking place in Bali, Morocco, Peru, India, Mexico, like all over, refund everyone. And I had to let go of my team, but that actually allowed me to have so much more free time on my hands to really dive deeper into what I wanted to do next. If this was gonna be a really long trend, which I mean, we're seeing that it's going to be travel, international travel. It's gonna take a while to get back started again.
- If only you could give your business immune mushrooms.
- I know, I know.
- I think like we have such a great immunological solutions for us individual humans, but everywhere there was like, there's gotta be some metaphorical thing that you can give to a business like boost immunity. But anyways, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. It something that popped into my head.
- No, that would be really funny. If I can just like inject Pangea Dreams with some chaga, and we'll be good to go. But, yeah, no, because of that and because of the all the free time that I had, I really dove deeper into other things I was really passionate about and that being mushrooms. And my best friend and business partner, Ali and I decided like now is our time. Both of our businesses were kind of put on hold because of the current situation. Let's dive deeper into all of this mushroom stuff because it's changed both of our lives in our own unique ways. And we want to be part of this, renaissance and movement of really using food as medicine and being huge proponents and advocates for mushrooms in that. So that's where we are now with the Multiverse. It's the first ever mushroom marketplace, which we're really excited about. And we'll also be launching our own CPG product as well, which will be a sublingual mouth spray.
- Cool. It's very exciting what you guys are doing. And so you obviously are someone in the position that creates lots of opportunities for those around you as well. And we'll be obviously employing lots of people in your Multiverse. And do you feel like, I have my own thoughts and experiences on this as well, but when you bring people into a business, no matter what their role is, but something, a business that's health-related or that's mushroom related in this little microcosm of businesses of ours, how do you feel that affects somebody as an employee compared to going to work at a tech company or going to work at like, something that, a company say making paper, and something more generic.
- I mean, I think that if health and wellness and education is what we're selling, then that needs to run true for how we run our business and operate our business and how we empower our employees or the people that may work with us. So, if let's say one day we decide to have an office. I mean, you best believe we'll have mushrooms on tap.
- And we will wanna empower our team and really teach them how to not only speak about our product, but how to incorporate health and wellness into their lives, whatever that may mean, whether it's through movement, whether it's through food, there's so many ways that we can help empower people to take control back. And I just feel like so many people feel helpless when it comes to their health. And we really do have the answers within us. We just don't know how, I guess we just don't know how to see them 'cause we've been so blinded and disconnected with our bodies by just like, "Oh, you have a headache, take a pill." Rather than like, "Why do I have this headache? "What does my body really need right now?" And so I think having conversations like that and workshops and a lot of community building, will be surrounded around our businesses for sure.
- Great, yeah, I'm excited to see how you bring, your skillset from previous businesses--
- Oh, absolutely.
- With community building and inspiring and educating people into what you're gonna be doing now.
- Yes.
- When you first come into conversation with someone something comes up and you decide, "Okay, I'm gonna share mushroom world with this person." 'Cause it can be a bizarre world, open people up to 'cause it's so foreign. It's not, these are not plants. These are not animals. As is famously said, some will kill you. Some will heal you and some will show you,
- The great spirit. And how do you open this up for people? How do you gently introduce them without exploding their mind too much?
- That's hard for me because I'm so passionate. And I'm just like, I just wanna tell you all the things. But what's so cool about mushrooms, is they're not, they're actually closer to humans than they are to plants. Like, so just in that self, it's fascinating. Like what does that even mean? Like, we are more similar to mushrooms than plants. And so that's just like really cool. And something else that's interesting is like mushrooms, it's an entire kingdom, it's a whole ecosystem. And mushrooms are the digestive system of our planet. Like when an animal dies on the ground of a forest, mushrooms come and eat it and decay it. Same thing with plants and with leaves or whatever it may be. And so the power of fungi is so much further beyond just their health benefits. And I mean, of course when people are like, "Oh yeah, tell me about mushrooms." I'll share all of the health benefits. We spoke briefly about, the health benefits of tremella, reishi, cordyceps, and lion's mane. But there's so many incredible benefits that are unique to maybe like whatever problems you might be having, like Turkey tail, they've done studies with cancer. And so it's just so incredible and so vast. And what I tell people is like, whatever you're doing, let's say you have a coffee every morning. Can you somehow add, mushrooms to that coffee. Like what are small things that you can do to incorporate into your daily habits that you're already doing? And then that way you get those health benefits, but you're not necessarily changing something where you drastically have to--
- People are so used to hearing that, "Oh, if you wanna get healthy, you gotta cut out this, "cut out this, cut out this, cut out gluten, cut out dairy, "cut out..." And they feel like you're assaulting them. People are, people with their diets. It's kind of like a religion for them a lot of times, especially in certain dietary communities. And if you tell people they have to change and there's, I mean, there's evolutionary reason to this. When through evolutionary history, you ate what your tribe ate or what people in your geographic region ate.
- Survival.
- Changing your diet historically was not an option. No true person in a traditional culture said, "You know what, I'm gonna change my diet. "What?"
- If somebody had different diets? This is where it gets complicated. We have to fight or evolutionary biology a little bit because evolutionarily if somebody had a different diet from you, it meant they were probably from somewhere else.
- For sure.
- And maybe not to be trusted. So we have to really like pause and embrace people doing different diets I think. Because people are at different stages of health. People have biological uniqueness. People have different genetics. There's so many different factors.
- Absolutely, absolutely. That's such a great point though. Because traditionally, biologically, if you didn't eat what you were served, you would die. Like you don't really have that choice. But all of our needs are met and beyond. So we do have the luxury of choice. And I think that again, it's like, great. Now I have all this choice. I can make all these decisions, But I don't even know where to begin. And then that's where education comes into play.
- Giving people some ideas, things that they can add in. So they don't have to cut out and feel like their diets being attacked.
- Exactly, exactly. It's like, "Oh, you have a coffee. "Maybe toss him some chaga in the morning "and like, add that to your coffee." It's like, yeah instead of subtracting, let's add in some of the good stuff.
- And as we were talking earlier about the bitter and sweet flavors, I think a lot of the craving for the sweet flavors comes from the parasites, from the bacterial imbalances, from these things that feed on sugar, tap into your nervous system and then can make you crave sugar.
- Absolutely.
- As you start to get onto healthier things, whether it's from a dietary shift or started to incorporate some herbs and your biology shifts, your inner terrain shifts, your taste shifts. Like I can tell you when I was a kid, I had zero interest in broccoli. And now I think broccoli is amazing.
- Me too.
- It's one of my favorites. And just even like with other herbs, you try something in the beginning. If you, somebody was coming just right off the mainstream and they tried like straight reishi mushroom, and it might be a little bit intense. You could prepare it in a way that makes it delicious. But over time you learn to embrace these flavors as a learning, and becoming accustomed to it. But also I think your inner terrain is changing and with your body calls for changes,
- For sure, for sure. And I mean, that's what's so messed up about like the food industry and the government and just like how they look at food and this mass production of corn and soy and sugars and gluten and everything, it's really destroying our biological taste buds of what our body truly needs. So then we don't know how to feed ourselves and give ourselves the nutrients that we need, because we're like, "Oh, I'm craving something sweet right now. "I need, like a soda." And no, like maybe that's not what your body needs. And so, I mean, for me everything always comes down to knowledge is power. And like you asked how are we gonna incorporate that into the business? A huge part of what we wanna do with the Multiverse and Supermush is truly like content and is sharing real experiences and people's stories and also just knowledge and education on everything. And I think that you guys do that so well as well with your lives and these videos. That's how we create that change in the movement. And so it's really empowering. I'm empowered to help empower people, to make smarter decisions that are gonna make them feel amazing. 'Cause at the end of the day, I always say this, I feel like people now are always that people are surviving. We gotta get people to thrive.
- Absolutely.
- And that's the mission.
- Yeah, you can go further than just eking out a meager daily existence--
- And just coasting.
- And reishi really helps in that department.
- Real deal, yeah, yeah.
- But reishi for me is just so incredible because of the way it changes you spiritually over time. When you take reishi on a regular basis, real strong, what they call, shen reishi. Shen is the Taoist term for like your spirit or your higher self. It's something that reishi is able to affect. Certain nerves can affect your shen like albizia or pearl powder. Reishi is one of them. And one of the most powerful. And the traditional wisdom on it is that it guides you around the obstacles in between you and enlightenment. So it's kinda like enlightenment GPS or Waze guiding you around where there's like the traffic jams and the road closures or things like that.
- I've never heard anyone explain it that way. That is beautiful.
- Yeah, so I can't take credit for that, it's traditional. It's pretty amazing. And it, there's been, I'll tell a quick story. When I was many years ago, working at the original Erewhon Tonic Bar, one of the new owners would come by for a drink. And I would make her this smoothie and the heroin tonic was different back in the day. It was like, all herbalists working there and you come up and you would get like a little five minute mini consultation and have a custom creation made for you based on what was going on. And you put your health and in your life, there are different vibe from what is today--
- Shout out to Erewhon. You guys gotta bring that back.
- That's amazing. I love that.
- It was incredible. So one of the new owners of Erewhon would come up and ask for this drink and I would put various different things in there to make it like a really delicious chlorophyll smoothie, kind of milkshake, vanilla kind of thing. But I was putting reishi in there every day to kind of, 'cause I just was like, "Okay, I'm gonna, "you're gonna come to me for the nutrition "and for something that tastes good, "I'm gonna sneak in something in there "that is going to assist you "on the path of a evolving consciousness."
- And sure enough, like I can tell you, I can at least say my friendly relationship with her became a lot friendlier during that time. And we, I think we came to have a much better connection. Whereas in the beginning, I didn't think they really, the owners understood me or what I was doing there.
- And this has happened sometimes, but a reishi is a magical thing to share with those around you. It makes people friendlier, I think in a big picture.
- We all need a little bit more reishi in our lives.
- Especially now.
- For the friendliness and for the immunity side of it. I mean, it's the herb for modern times, for sure.
- I love that, the herb for modern times.
- So how are you taking mushrooms these days, which I know you traditionally took them as extract powders. Is that kind of still your go to.
- Definitely, I have a mushroom elixir every morning. It's how I start my day. And usually I'll end my day with a reishi one and then also cooking. I cook a lot with mushrooms. I love, you sauteing, shiitake, oyster but about like all of the mushrooms. I'll do like a big medley and I'll throw that into a salad. So actual mushrooms and also a lot of powder.
- Yeah, that's great. It's fun to incorporate them into different dishes and diversify. You have a little extra feeling of awesomeness when eating whatever dish you would normally eat, but you know there's some magic stuff in there.
- Oh yeah, it's amazing. You get to eat magic every day and then you feel magical.
- Do you feel like magic right now?
- I feel pretty special.
- So outside of medicinal mushrooms, what about other mushrooms and their role in the world and for humans and the planet. What are your thoughts in this sphere?
- So, all of the mushrooms that we've been speaking about are functional medicinal mushrooms. That's the category when we talk about them, people are like, "What does that mean?" So it's the ones that don't have the psychoactive ingredient of psilocybin in them. But then you have magic mushrooms or shrooms or psilocybin, and that's a whole other category of mushroom. And that truly is a, it's like a gatekeeper into entering another dimension of reality. And the research that they're doing with psilocybin for PTSD, for depression, for anxiety, for addiction is so fascinating. And it's incredible because you have people that are on SSRIs and antidepressants, their whole lives go to anywhere between one to six treatments and they're cured. And it's just like, that is how we affect positive change in the world. That is truly, working on our side. It's not trying to get someone addicted to a drug for the rest of their life. That's gonna cause so many other health problems.
- It's fixing people.
- It's fixing people. And that I think is going to, I mean, as psilocybin becomes decriminalized and it is happening, which is very exciting. That is how I truly think like mushrooms are gonna change the world. Not only in terms of our health, but also mental health.
- And I should correct when I said fixing people, I should probably more accurately say getting people out of the way of being able to fix themselves.
- Absolutely.
- Rather their own way.
- Absolutely, I mean, psilocybin is so fascinating because it allows for different parts of your brain to actually start communicating, that don't normally communicate with each other. So you actually create new neural pathways, new ways of thinking. And you can go back into your mind and rewrite a memory or heal a traumatic event, in your life that happened and see it in a different way. And that is, again, it's the difference is, okay, you have a problem, put this band-aid on it or now you have this problem, let's get to the root cause. And I find that food and psilocybin and all of these substances actually get to the root cause of the issue and then can generate a true cure. And that's amazing.
- It's gonna be very exciting to see how the research and the public availability develops. Of course it's being fast tracked by the FDA, is the most promising treatment for depression. For treatment resistant depression.
- Yeah, yeah.
- I think it's exciting
- Actually in Canada, they just announced that they were allowing four cancer patients that are terminally ill to go through a psilocybin assisted therapy, to help them with their anxiety about death and overcome that. And I mean, even that, like how beautiful is that.
- Absolutely.
- We have a tool and it's not even a tool that we made it's from mother earth, it's from nature that can help us ease the anxiety of dying. And I think death, even that just in itself is something that in nature in our society, we've turned and made it such a negative and terrible thing. And then you take psilocybin and you have this experience and you realize like what we see here in this realm of reality, there's more to it. There's more. And so, energy never dies. Energy can't be destroyed. And so, we're just in this kind of physical body, but what happens to the energy that's within us, our soul. And you realize like this isn't it. And so the anxiety, I think of dying kind of subsides.
- Yeah, and how interesting that you mentioned earlier, when an animal dies, it gets eaten up by mushrooms.
- So we are destined to also be eaten by mushrooms.
- Yes.
- How fitting that one of that mushroom family, would be the one to prepare us for that journey to join the mushrooms.
- That's beautiful.
- You're gonna become a mushroom sooner or later as well. Might as well ally with yourself, with them now.
- Exactly, that's so true. That's so true, I love that.
- It just came to me in the moment. It's inspired by this drink.
- It's great, we've got to have another little sip here.
- So are you more into macro or micro dosing?
- Psilocybin?
- Yeah
- Definitely micro-dosing. I have loved my macro experiences and I think that they've given me profound insight and also have changed the way that I show up in the world. And I live my life. Like the dualities of life are so present I find. That when you're having that kind of experience, is that like one of the biggest ones for me was, firstly they don't take everything so seriously, it's all a game. And the one thing, like nothing truly matters. But the one thing that matters is that you have fun. And so we're here for such a short period of time. How could we optimize for joy? How could we optimize for human connection? How do we make sure that we're being our best selves and truly listening to that. And I think that comes into tapping into your intuition. And all of these things sound so kind of like, woo, woo. but going through a psilocybin experience, it gives you a deeper understanding of what all of these. Of what all these like buzz words truly mean. Like cliches are cliches for a reason and they're a cliche until you actually understand them. And so I think that going on these kinds of experiences and journeys, and it allows you to understand. Understand in a deeper way all of these cliches or words or what people are saying, whereas before maybe you can't grasp it as much.
- And I think our language comes up short very often.
- It does.
- Describing what you experienced in that realm, because look, you have to be a human for like three years straight before you can like, just kind of start to talk about anything as a child, Really you have to be like in your teens before you can really communicate about, this universe you spend 100% of your time in. How much time relative to that, do you spend in mushroomland to talk about what's going on there? So of course it, can you come back and it's like, it's a little hard to put into words 'cause we don't spend enough time there to develop the vocabulary for that.
- No, it's so true. And 'cause I think that also the experiences are so profound, we just don't have the words, like you said, like to really articulate the experience and something that I've also learned and through my experiences is inviting this childlike, curiosity and playfulness that you have when you're on a psilocybin journey into everyday life and life just becomes so much more enjoyable and exciting when you can look at life through that lens. It's beautiful.
- That's amazing. And then I guess the last realm of mushrooms to ask about is what about mushrooms outside of human consumption? What about mushrooms for planetary wellbeing?
- Yeah, I mean, we touched on it earlier, how they basically decompose matter, like they're digesting matter. And so we can use mushrooms in incredible ways through for the environment. They, Paul Stamets actually patented this incredible new product, I guess. I don't know how exactly you would explain it, but he did a test where he inoculated and drenched an entire wood chip pile with oil and toxic chemicals and left it there to sit. And then another one with the same thing. And he inoculated it with spores, mushroom spores and then went back to check it. And the one that he put the spores on, it cleaned all of these toxic chemicals off of the wood chips. And so it's like, we can use that in cleaning up all the messes that we're making. And I saw recently they are with, when you die, you can like be also doused in spores. And so it speeds up the process of your decaying and the mushrooms digesting you. In packaging, where you actually, like it's made out of mushrooms and you put it in water and it dissolves. So it's biodegradable, I've seen shoes like leather like shoes that are made out of mushrooms.
- That's amazing.
- It's crazy. Like you literally can do everything with them. It's amazing.
- That's just the potential here. When anybody starts to dig into it gives you so much hope.
- So much hope.
- And just kind of makes you think like, "Wow, "there's a lot more that can be done "if we have just scratched the surface up "and it's all coming."
- Absolutely, absolutely. So much to look forward to.
- Yeah, so if people wanna continue their mushroom education. what would be maybe like a movie or a documentary or book that you would recommend as the next step?
- Okay, so definitely book recommendation is Michael Pollan's book "How to Change Your Mind." It's incredible. That is just like you read that and your mind is literally blown and you finish the book and you're like, "Yeah, my mind is definitely changed." So highly recommend that one by Michael Pollan and then a documentary that recently came out maybe about a year ago. It's called "Fantastic Fungi." And that's all about the magical kingdom of fungi, both functional in nature and also psychedelic. So that, that would be like a great starter kit to start getting educated in the space. Those two things I would highly recommend.
- Fantastic, and then where do people find and follow you?
- Yeah, you guys can find me on Instagram. It's my name, Tracy Komlos. And also you can check out the Multiverse, you can check out Supermush once it's launched.
- What's the website for the Multiverse. It's yourmultiverse.com. Supermush is iamsupermush.com. Pangea Dreams is pangeadreams.com and yeah. But I think best ways is Instagram. You can reach out directly.
- Excellent, start there and go on the mushroom journey. All right. Thank you everybody for joining us. Thank you Tracy, for coming over and being here today.
- Thanks for having me.
- It's been a pleasure. And may we have many more amazing mushroom adventures together.
- Yes and many more mushroom elixir.
- Mushroom elixir, yeah. Next time chocolate vanilla.
- Yes, cheers guys.
- Cheers everybody.