 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Might Pop! With your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. Hey boys, you want to have a mushroom party? You want to have a party with me? That's such a weirdo. You trying to do the accent or whatever? No, it's like the touch my monkey. Would you like some mushrooms? I'm giving him that for mushrooms. Dude, so the president of Four Sigmatic, Tero, I'm going to fuck up his last name. Yeah, you are. I don't know if I said that. Love this guy. Anyway, fucking love the guy. He's so cool. He's super cool. And we partied with him the next day at Dosis. Yeah, he's a super cool guy. Very, very smart. He's one of those people that you meet where they're so smart that you're like, dang, that's a little too smart. You know what I mean? Well, especially with... I think it's important to let people know that if you are not interested in mushrooms, this is not the episode for you. But if you are at all interested in the science and in mushrooms, I think... The medicinal application. Yeah. Lots of information. I mean, it's an information overload. It makes you interested in mushrooms, even if you aren't. I'll be honest. No, it won't. I mean, because I wasn't that interested before. You guys know that I'm probably the least fan of all the mushrooms, but I'm not going to lie after listening to him for this episode. I'm on the mushroom train. Yeah, and I was drinking it last night. So because of that, I think that it's important that you listen to this if you're at all interested in the science behind it, because I think sound him dive really deep and drop some really good knowledge in here. I remember meeting him for the first time. It was at PaleoFX a couple of years ago, and we're walking around and I see Four Sigmatic. And I told the boys that I really wanted to work with Four Sigmatic because I had dived deep into the science of mushrooms and their application and how they've been used for thousands of years in many, many cultures. And they're unique properties. I mean, they have some unique effects in the body. And I say unique because fungi is a whole different class of organisms, different than plants, is different than animals or whatever. And most of us don't get enough fungi in our diet. And I know the oldest living organism on earth is a mushroom. We talk about this in this episode. But I was very fascinated with it. But also, you can buy mushroom supplements, how they're grown, where they're grown, how the ingredients are extracted, how they're stored. All these things are important things to know. And I knew that Four Sigmatic understood all this and basically catered to it. So when I saw Four Sigmatic, the booth I ran over there, the little that I know, the president, it was Tarot. He was the one running the booth. I thought he was just some dude running the booth. So I shake his hand. I'm like, hey, what's going on, man? Love your product. I really know. I host mine pump, blah, blah, blah. And then that's how we got kind of hooked up. And so to my surprise, when we sat down to do an interview with Tarot, I had no idea what he looked like. He walks in the room and I'm like, you're the fucking dude that I talked to. You know, when we first got this whole thing set up. So he dives deep into mushrooms and their effects in the body of work. And of course, Four Sigmatic is one of our sponsors. It's one of my favorite sponsors, one of my favorite products. If you go to Four, spell it out, F-O-U-R, Sigmatic, S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot com forward slash mine pump and enter the code mine pump. You get a discount. You can find Tarot on Instagram at I am tarot. So you can see more information on him, but Tarot is T-E-R-O. T-E-R-O. But I mean, he's also, he's also a cool guy. I would hang out with. Oh, we're going to go foraging with him at some point. That's right. I can't wait for that. That's right. He said he'd take us foraging. What do you say? Up in big basin areas, like one of the best places to go? Yes. Yes. So that's like our backyard. Hope we don't find those. We have a mushroom party. All of us. Those scary ones. Yeah. But anyway, yeah, that's it. So without any further ado, here we are. Oh, wait a second, dude. One of the things I definitely want to do before we get into this interview is a huge thank you to Tom and Lisa, Bill, you for opening their home to us, Matt. I mean, amazing that they did that for us. Right. It's, you know, a testament to how important it is to build, to build relationships in business, especially because here's someone who is, you know, we met two, about two and a half years ago. And since then, you know, him and I have maintained a really good relationship and communication with each other. And it was something I didn't ask for. He totally offered it up to us. We were coming on the health theory show anyways. And we normally, when we come down to LA, we do multiple shows. While we're down here, it makes sense if we're going to fly the whole crew. And for Tom to open up his home and say, dude, you guys can record here all day. And I mean, it was so dope. We're here and he's got, you know, a whole table full of, you know, quest bars and snacks and water and drinks. Letting us use his equipment. Oh, yeah. I mean, and he's got his team that is setting us all up. There's super generous people. I fucking love Tom and Lisa. Yeah. Good people. Thank you guys. Thank you very, very much for letting us use your home. So without further ado, here we are interviewing Tarot, the president of FourSigmatic. I think we should start from the, from the beginning, Tarot, what got you into this? Did you found FourSigmatic? Are you the founder of that company? What's your background? What made you get into mushrooms? I'm a 13th generation family farmer and forager out of Finland. So the answer is lineage and plus I'm dumb enough to do that. So a combination of those and just went, you know, foraging for mushrooms growing up with my mom. And then my great grandfather started this environmental school, which is like a mix of Steiner school, I don't know if you're familiar, but the guy who invented basically organic food, organic agriculture and biodynamic farming. And then like a Waldorf style schooling, something like basically like a hippie school with an actual curriculum. And this is in Finland? Yeah. This is in Finland. And then studied chemistry and nutrition and randomly discovered a rare mushroom about 13 years ago. That was only thought to grow in one island in Japan and I found it in Finland and won this innovation award and it's kind of like, like with anything, like there's not just one tipping point, but there's like multiple steps that you take. Now, when you were, when you were doing this with you, when you were foraging, when you were kid with your mom and stuff, were you really into it then? Or is this? I was more into berries because they were sweet and they tasted better. Wild strawberries, raspberries. I don't know if the guys ever had wild raspberries, but they're like the bomb. Some shoot leaves, nettles, stuff like that. But I did like mushrooms and sauces, you know, I was in mushroom soups. I like, but it was like mushrooms to me were like a mystical group. You know, it was not something that as a kid, I was like as excited as I was to find wild strawberries in the forest. Now, you said 13 generations. Was this just your growing them or forging for them for use in culinary purposes? Or was this medicinal? What, how did you guys farm all the, because you said there's 13 generations? Yeah, 13 at least that we know of. Finland has only been independent 100 years. So we were like part of Russia and Sweden for a long time. And a lot of the records were burned. So we don't actually really know at least 13 on both of my parents' side. And, you know, it's for survival. Like the time when you're in the 17th century, life is very different than on the 20th century. The farm has gone through civil wars, multiple under Russian ruling. And so like things have changed multiple times, but survival, dude. It's just like that's, that's the core of it. You could sell stuff, you know, that's also, but there is also a psychedelic mushroom that is less known. A lot of people here are focused on a stilocybin psychedelic mushroom. But there's another even more well known, but nobody really knows what it is and how to use it is the mushroom on your phone. Like the Moji, the red mushroom with white dots. It's called Amanita Muscaria. And the whole story of basically like Santa Claus and Christmas is based around that mushroom. And it's from Finland, from my indigenous people, like Sami people that inherited that land for over 5,000 years, at least so much longer than Vikings, which is also my heritage. But Vikings came after the Sami people. So you get away. So you got to tell me how. Yeah, tell me that story. Tell me how a mushroom in Santa Claus. I know they just make things up, but I want to know where. Origin comes from. It's a long ass story, but I'll try to like the cliff notes. OK, so Santa Claus is the world's most famous person, arguably. You know, it's like crosses beyond religions and countries. We know about Santa Claus, but rarely think how did Santa Claus story come? You know, the same way as like Easter and a lot of these other traditions that actually originally pagan. So the story of Santa Claus, how we look at it today is obviously like a very Coca-Cola story that was brought to the US by the Dutch. The Dutch stole it from Germans. And you might have heard Saint Nick, Saint Nicholas, but it's actually not from Germany, even though it's like label as German. It's actually from Turkey. So the Germans took it from the Italians. The Italians literally stole the grave of this guy in Turkey, who was Saint Nicholas. So shout out to my people. Yeah, so a lot of going on that. And then at that point, the church really used this ancient story as a way of incorporating into their own values. And that's a whole not a rabbit hole there. But they originally the Turkish combined the story of Saint Nick, who actually existed and with an even older story of this old man, Frost, who was a it was a Russian Santa Claus, basically, still today. If you go to Russia, you don't celebrate Santa Claus. You celebrate this old man, Frost, Des Moores. And they took it from these indigenous people saw me. And so as a whole, like how it transferred. But what originally was that rain where reindeer's originally grow is in this area of like Lapland, which is partly Norway, Sweden, Finland, parts of like Russia. And there are these indigenous people live and they, you know, take care of reindeers. And what they also do is they use plant medicine or in this case mushrooms ceremonially a few times a year, like almost every indigenous. This is how they fly. I see us all coming together. We're going to die. It's a long intro, but I'm going to tie a couple loops. So few times and the two big celebrations, almost every indigenous culture is winter solstice, summer solstice. So in where in Lapland in the summer, there's 24 hours of sunlight. There's really no night. Winter, there's very there's like an hour or two of sunlight. So really when the days that it's long as that's when you would do magic and how they would do it is they would use this mushroom, Amanida muscaria, that the shaman had collected during the summer and it grows under the pinealio family of trees, which proves the Christmas tree that you see at Rockefeller Center. It can grow under it, where Christmas presents are sometimes kept under the tree. And the shaman would put it on the trees because you have to dehydrate it to remove a toxin. It's also a poisonous mushroom. It's psychedelic and poisonous. So we would put it on tree branches and to dry it, sun dried because especially sunlight removes this toxin, this one type of acid in it that gets removed or reduced if it's sun dried. So when the salmon would at one point collect these mushrooms, it would be a tree full of red mushrooms. And if you used to go back to even the German time story of this, you can see photos with trees with not red ornaments and balls, but actually Amanida muscaria hanging from the tree. And the star at the top is Polaris. That was very important for the Sami people. The chimney comes from the fact that the Sami people live in these quotas, which is a huge teepee that you enter from a kind of narrow entrance. But sometimes during the night, it snows in and the entrance is covered with snow and there's a fire inside to keep you warm. But in order to fire to go away, the teepee kind of obviously has hole at the top. And if it snows in, you exit and enter to the chimney or the roof. Hang comes Santa Claus here. reindeer is flying. That's a whole nother story, obviously, on how they fly. And there's a couple. Then we snuck Jesus in there. Yeah, totally. And not to spoil the full story, but there's urine involved drinking urine, which is supposed to dark turn. Yeah, very dark turn. But that's how one of the ways I remove the poison and out of it. But also my uncle's soul. There's muskimool. There's an compound there that gets emphasized if you rotate urine and you drink urine. And that's how they say that the the term get pissed was originally. Oh, wow. My childhood is alive. So glad you shared that. Anyway, there's a lot of tensions around that. But I think we just spoiled someone's day. You guys have had such bangers lately. You've had been green. So you needed an intermission here. That's a great story, man. That's a great story. So what's this mushroom that you discovered that you won an award for? You said like a few minutes ago. So mushrooms are a kingdom or fungi or fungi. There's no right or way to say it. So there's like a lot of people say, I don't like mushrooms because like I don't like portobello mushrooms or I have they have Candida and they their gut health is not aligned. But actually, the kingdom of fungi is in immensely like wide and there's so many different types. There's about six times more fungi types than there are plans estimated to be on the world. So for every avocado and bell pepper, there's six of each on different mushrooms type and but very kind of like before it gets overwhelming. There's two kinds of mushrooms for humans. Really like from a from a functional point of view, there's culinary mushrooms and then there's this functional mushrooms. So for Sigmatic, my company is really focused on functional mushrooms that help support performance or reduce stress or sleep quality or sex drive or cocking function, whatever. But then there's the whole suite of culinary mushrooms like more else, for example, people hunt them for for their flavor. And if you go to a lot of fancy Michelin star restaurants, they're like specialized that Shenzuel is more like a commonly known morel. But there's also like the truffles of the world, right? And the Japanese have this one mushroom called Machutaki. And it's like the truffle for the Japanese. It's they're like really prestigious mushroom and Taki, by the way, T-A-K-E means mushroom in Japanese. So she Taki, my Taki just means she mushroom tie my mushroom, which all means something else like a tree or something. And and they just love this mushroom, but it's really hard to get and and basically discovered that it grows also in Finland because the climate in this one island in Hokkaido is similar to where I grew up in one specific part of Finland. And as almost as a joke with my friend, we just entered this innovation contest that is like, wouldn't it be funny if we would sell this to the Japanese for like five thousand bucks a kilo or something like that? But he actually became a legit thing. And the university, I think, still runs it. So we donated it to a university for because we didn't want to run it. But I think they still still sell mushrooms to the Japanese. Well, fascinating. So let's talk about the the functional side of mushrooms, because I know in in Chinese medicine or Vedic medicine, Eastern European medicine, mushrooms have been used for thousands of years. Western medicine just now starting to learn about some of the effects of mushrooms years ago. I had a family member who had cancer and I was doing lots of research and I stumbled upon Chaga, which in Eastern Europe has been used for a while to combat certain types of cancer. Let's talk about some of these functional mushrooms and what they do and why they're so special and how people use them around the world. Yeah. So one of the big bummers is that because I have a company and I sell products, I'm like not really in a position where I can give direct like comments about certain functionality. I have to like tiptoe along the lines of FDA, FTC. So why does that explain that? So basically, it's to protect consumers. Because they want the FDA wants to sell their drugs. I don't want you to sell. Yeah. So so and this is actually the US is the Wild Wild West. So what FDA and FTC allows is much more than what you allow in Canada. Really? They are Europe. They're more strict. But so basically to protect consumers, companies are not allowed or who sell pharmaceuticals or sell supplements or sell food. They have to be careful on what they claim that is possible, which is in high level, a good thing. You know, you don't want to just come out and say, this will make your penis bigger. Right. Right. You know, like, because it would sell. Like, let's be honest. And and so you just have to be careful about and there's more kinds of clients and stuff when we talk about the studies that have been, yeah, so I can still a little bit about the studies. But I think what is probably more useful, you know, I think your audience is pretty smart and they can, you know, Google and go to PubMed and do a lot of their own research. But I understand what fungi do in biology is also a good way to look at what they can also possibly do in life. Right. So fungi is one of these five or six kingdoms with animals, bacteria, you know, plants. And what they do is they have this intelligence to help other kingdoms to operate. So fungi was the first kingdom to come from the sea to the dry land about 2.4 billion years ago. OK. And they were here well, like estimated about 1.7 billion years before anything else grew on dry land. So they had to eat rocks to survive. And what's similar about fungi and animals is that they cannot produce their own food and they breed oxygen and expel CO2. So actually animals and fungi used to be part of the same super kingdom. So we share up to 50 percent of our DNA with fungi, which makes fungi very potentially bio available for humans, but also very potentially very toxic. So molds and buildings or things that can really we've been really sensitive to fungal badness and we can really be receptive to fungal goodness. And to the goodness point is like about 40 percent of all pharmaceuticals are derived from fungi, which is insane. Penicillin is the one that everybody knows, but a lot of immunosuppressants on the market, for example, a lot of immune. Focus things you talked about cancer and there's immunosuppressants, but that's where a lot of the fungal studies are. And the reason for that is that that's what they do in nature as well. They actually help plants in like trees, for example, tell where there's nutrition. They tell that here's water. Here's when they exchange nutrients between trees. So the roots of the trees have this rooting system mushrooms and they, for example, swap nutrients. Like this tree has this nutrient, this tree has this nutrient, and they swap things together and they tell if there's danger somewhere. So if there's a hostile species or thing on the other side of the forest, they communicate underground called like the woodwipe web. And the fungal matter is underground everywhere in this planet. So about 25 percent of the earth's biomass or quarter of the earth's biomass is fun is the fungal material. How do they communicate? Yeah, I've heard that even when you walk like in the forest, like it's it's already like mapping all these. Yeah, you will know that you stepped on it. Basically, how do they communicate? Is it just through chemical signals? Yeah, it's actually like one of the things that we don't fully understand. But there's interesting studies how even a slime mold can figure out the Tokyo metro system smarter than humans can and how they can get themselves out of a maze. You drop them and they'll find a route out of that maze with some sort of intelligence. So we don't really know. We obviously know out of these functional mushrooms, some compounds that are incredibly well studied for certain functions. But the intelligence that the fungal kingdom have is still massively not understood in even to the point of like psychedelic mushrooms or whatever. Like we don't we don't really know. But a lot of people can probably justify that they do something. But what did how do they do it? There's some evidence. There's some studies and we can obviously talk about them. But like in a in an in an abstract, we're just figuring shit out. You know, I curse, by the way. Yeah, of course, it's encouraged. They say the thing that fascinates me about mushrooms is their their symbiotic relationship that they tend to have with their hosts. Yeah, where where if you get other types of infections or parasites or whatever, many times they'll, you know, kill you. Or take you over, whereas in many cases, certain species of plants almost require that symbiotic relationship from the mushrooms. Which is very fascinating. 90 percent of plants require mushrooms to grow. And you could actually argue that every human being requires mushrooms to grow, you know, be ourselves because and here's my guess for the future is that we'll discover in my lifetime, discover a new kingdom that is something between bacteria and fungi. And so they have this relationship even in our gut, but also anywhere else. It's like they have these yeasts, especially like beer and wine and bread and kombucha and all these things require the collaboration between fungi and bacteria. Otherwise, you cannot produce certain cheeses. So there is something how they collaborate that we don't fully understand, but they definitely do goodness and including in our gut and in our body and in our immune system. One thing I learned a while ago that it's obvious when you think about it, but it never occurred to me was that mushrooms are not plants in the sense that like when people say you should eat vegetables every single day, you should have some proteins and some fats every single day. Nobody says you should eat mushrooms every day because they think if they eat vegetables that they're getting in, you know, that that's part of that, but it's not. It's totally different. And I know in a lot of cultures and a lot of like alternative medicines, mushrooms are considered a staple. Like it's something you should also consume on a regular basis. An essential nutrient almost. Yeah. And that's that's very fascinating to me. How do they operate within the body when we ingest them? How or do they operate differently than other things? Yeah. So a lot of the culinary mushrooms that you'd find in a grocery store, they have things like fibers there. They can be prebiotics. So if if you're into the gut health world, you probably tune into the importance of prebiotics that it's hard to change your gut biome by having more probiotics unless you just went through like an antibiotic or something. But using prebiotics is often a way to improve gut biome. And mushrooms are one of those sources. They can contain proteins. Some of them actually have a pretty good protein profile. I think she talkie. I'm not saying that that would be your single source of protein or that. But like you could probably replace a meal a day or a few meals a week by using a different form of a protein source. They have B vitamins pretty widely, depending on the mushroom. But there's a some have more B three, six, you know, but they are a great source of B vitamins and vitamin D, one of the only plant based sources of vitamin D. So for example, where the Sami people live, they get a very limited amount of sunlight. So they would use mushrooms as a way of getting vitamin D throughout the winter for like seasonal depression and stuff. So that's kind of like the macro and micronutrient profile of mushrooms can offer a very like clean source of carbohydrates. And but then we get to the intelligence part. And one of the most studied compounds is a form of polysaccharide. So, you know, many sugars. But as you know, that sugars come in many forms. And these polysaccharides are the ones that release the slowest and especially this type of pay to declugans that you can get in small amounts from, let's say, oats. But they were one of the most studied compounds in human health period. And they're incredibly abundant in these type of mushrooms. And and what they're studied for is certain type of immunomodulation, the ability to modulate your immune system too directionally. So when your immune system is low, you normally tend to take immunostimulants like, let's say, garlic or a quinea or something like that. But if you overly stimulate your immune system and your immune system is hyperactive, then you get into troubles like allergic reactions and the autoimmune stuff where your body is attacking your even healthy cells because they're confused. So then you take immunosuppressants to do that. But what mushrooms and these beta-declugans seem to be able to do is this modulation of two directionally. They're like a bootcamp for the immune system. So that's what these beta-declugans do. There's a lot of studies, obviously, just because purely out of funding for for blood sugar type of things and and like heart health and things like antioxidants. There's certain very good antioxidants in mushrooms from anything from clotheion to melanin to. So there's like a lot of antioxidant focus studies out there, just because those are where the funding is available. And not to say that those are the only ways where you can use mushrooms for. But now I read that mushrooms probably want to find organic ones as often as possible because they tend to absorb pesticides or herbicides. They're kind of they're kind of gnarly in a way that to do your symbiotic point, actually, fungi are parasites. And the word parasite is a really bad word in our society. Some human being, he's such a parasite, right? But what basically means in nature is that they will use another form of living being for their benefit. And that's what basically we all do. We eat food for our benefit. Right. And just like how it helps the overall society whole ecosystem is like how much are they like symbiotic? For example, so there's a scale in what mushrooms do is that they are the cleaners of the forest and cleaners of the nature. So they have this ability that seems to be that almost nothing else has the ability in nature to break out both organic and inorganic matter. So let's talk about that organic matter is like if you die and they put you in the graveyard, mushrooms will come and decompose your body. OK, but they can also break down inorganic matter that doesn't really necessarily belong in nature in that form. So something that was organic was shape shifted into something that was inorganic. And now it's in nature. Case example, oil like diesel and oyster mushroom that is commonly available in grocery stores could potentially help clean oil from nature. And there is they found a mushroom three, four years ago in the Amazon that eats plastic. Whoa. Wow. Yeah. And then you can eat it, actually. So you eat the plastic and you can eat it and you're all good. Yeah. And then there's like certain chemical warfare weapons like the exansoma that are potentially the most gnarly things human race has ever created. And they can just go out and munch it. They munch checks and balance for sure. And they love like eat radiation. You can find them in like a real real. That's how a superhero gets born or something. Yeah. But those cases, if they've cleaned the nature, you don't want to consume those ones. Sure. So they are they accumulate and hyper accumulate toxins from the forest. So that's why you kind of have to know where your mushrooms come from. And it's the same thing with like when we talk about plants, a lot of plants, you don't have to always worry if they're organic or not, right? Because they're lower in the food chain. Same with small fish versus big fish. If you eat small fish, there's less likelihood of toxins accumulated versus you go to tuna, you kind of have to know where your tuna comes from as salmon, right? Because they've eaten so much during that food chain. So mushrooms, even though they're small and seemingly should be lower in the food chain like vegetables, we talked about the similarity with them and animals. They actually are kind of further in the food chain. So you have to be more quality conscious with fungal things than you have to be with vegetables. That's interesting. I've never heard anyone say that before. I've never heard anyone say that before. Yeah. Yeah. No, I was reading about how you want to get organic mushrooms for sure because they tend to absorb whatever's around them and they can accumulate those things. No, just as far as the hierarchy of how you should be more cautious about it. Oh, for sure. Yeah, for sure. It's a bigger animal. Yeah, like sardines versus like swordfish. You're going to have way more mercury in swordfish. Correct. And also how often you consume it, obviously. If you have a staple food that you eat every day, you want to be more mindful of that. But as a rule of thumb, I think when you look at purity in your diet in general, you want to really focus on stuff that you consume a lot or stuff that is further in the food chain or things that are concentrated goodness or badness. I think nothing is more true than fat. Animal fat is like you really want to know where your animal fat comes from because it's concentrated or amazingness or concentrated of not amazing. That's right. Like you really this. So but just in the case of mushrooms, they're further in the food chain, even though they seem small and tiny and little things, you know, but they have consumed something else because they had to eat to live versus plants use photosynthesis to generate energy and to grow animals and fungi need something to munch on. If I'm not mistaken, wasn't the largest living organism on earth, a mushroom? Yeah, it's in Oregon. It's like underground. It's underground. There's a natural forest growing on top of it. So this is kind of a crazy thing. Nobody ever believes it. It's the humongous fungus, but it's between two to 4,000 years old. So it's the oldest living organism on the planet earth right now as we know it. And it's about size of 20,000 basketball courts. Holy shit. Of one mushroom. And this is the crazy part. If you think of your skin, depending how you classify your skin, but like you have three or seven layers, I think, at least three, right? It has one, has one layer. And he has survived two to 4,000 years and he's been attacked by all kinds of species and whatever and he has survived. So think of the immune system of this living being. Incredible. To have to live to two. So the longevity and the immune system and the protection mechanism that this massive mushroom, one cell level thick in the honey mushroom family can survive that long. And it eats the National Park a few times. I can't remember the exact time period, but it eats all through. It's just eat trees. It keeps eating trees. So now it's all underground though. So right now I'm in this massive mushroom Yeah, it becomes so big. It will pop fruiting body. So maybe that's also a good thing to talk about. Mushrooms, we've talked now that they're underground, right? That is like the rooting system of mushrooms. Sometimes mycelium or hyphae, it's basically there's this rooting system and that's most of mushrooms out there. But then what we actually eat is called the fruiting body. So that's the classic mushroom shape. That's the, even if you go to grocery store, you never get mycelium. You get the cap. The cap is part of the fruiting body. There's a stem cap, but then there's so many different types of mushrooms that don't have a stem and a cap. So, but generally speaking, the classic mushroom shape, and that's what mammals consume. So the reindeers consume this poisonous psychedelic mushroom and they trip around, which just happens. You can Google BBC reindeers, I'm Anita and you're going to see a video. And anyway, animals love to trip on that. That's a cool fact. All animals like to trip. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. Or we don't know what's the experience of the reindeer, I have to just have to disclaim that. It seems like they're having a fun time, but we don't really, it's hard to be the reindeer and know what they're actually experiencing, but they're drawn to it when they come back for it. So it's something that they must enjoy. And so that is the fruiting body. And then there's spores and they're in the air. So as we're speaking, we're breathing in mushroom spores, spores everywhere they're in the air. And they're kind of a dormant for a while. And then 20, 30 years later, they will create more mycelium that will create a fruiting body that will create spores. So that's kind of the cycle of life in the eyes of a fungi or fungi. And yeah, and the most of it's underground and it's invisible, but you sometimes find these fruiting bodies also in this humongous fungus can create fruiting bodies. But most of the mass is underground. Do we know like a recommended dose of each type of mushroom that probably we should consume? Do you have any idea of like, do you have a regimen yourself? Like I make sure I have this much chagra ratio. I mean, how do you? Yeah, that's a great question. Cause like as you guys know in health and wellness, it's not just how much you know or how much you've consumed. It's more like what can you boot in practice and what can you have compliance with, right? The problem when we talk about a kingdom, there's such a diversity of things. Like it's like, is the amount of avocado you should consume every day the same amount as how much sweet potato can you consume versus or we can go even stronger, how much pot you can consume. They're all plants, right? The amount of marijuana that you can consume versus the amount of potatoes you can consume is not the same thing. Way more pot than potatoes. Yeah. Easier. Potatoes have set my stomach a big tolerance. Okay. So basically it's so dependable. And the crazy part is that because they're these extremfields that can grow anywhere, they built this mechanism to protect themselves and they especially have this chitin structure and chitin is very hard, almost impossible for humans to break down. Chitin you would find in the shovel lobster for example. So you can't eat the shovel lobster same way you can't eat mushrooms raw. So you have to cook them. So to prepare mushrooms you need fats and heat. Most commonly mushrooms are sauteed in butter or they put in a soup and that's how you unlock their nutritional powers. You can also cook them in like bone broth that's called a decoction. That's probably the most potent way of consuming mushrooms. So there's like preparation. When the same way as you do bone broth you can cook it for a couple hours or you can cook it for days, right? So like how strong is the bone broth or how strong is anything that you extract coffee. You extract coffee or tea. Like do steep the tea for 15 seconds or multiple minutes. So that's a difference. So mushrooms are the same. Most products on the market when you talk about functional mushrooms are extracts. I wouldn't even recommend buying if you're listening to this I wouldn't even recommend buying nothing but extracts if you're not familiar with the extraction process required. And in those extracts there's a huge scale of quality. What I would say is first get stuff that is organic stuff that is actual fruiting body. So grown in its natural it's using the right part of the mushroom. And then I recommend taking any from 500 to 1500 milligrams a day. But again, I'm talking very general. Of course it depends. And how big you are, how sensitive you are. Some people can handle less, some can have more. Is it common in the mushroom space for people and supplement companies to pixie dust it or like they do with other supplements? Hell yeah, hell yeah. I mean, dude, it's happens with anything, right? So the money's in the right. This is why I like your company. I met you at Paleo FX a couple of years ago and I saw your stand and I'm like, I gotta talk to these guys cause you know, the first time I ever heard of or using mushrooms for athletic performance or for health. Well, I'd heard about it before. I have an uncle who does Chinese medicine but I forgot what year it was but the Chinese swim team in the Olympics was killing everybody. And then they attributed their success to using cordyceps which is a very interesting mushroom by the way, it grows in caterpillars like it kills them and grows out of their body. So I had studied the cordyceps and I had bought some products and the difference and I don't remember what the brands were but some of them did nothing and others I could clearly feel like, oh, this is actually giving me some stamina when I'm doing at the time I was training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And then you learn about like, okay, you need to be able to extract the, what's gonna work in your body? You can't just take it and then expect your body to unlock the nutrients or the compounds in it, they're gonna have an effect. And I know with FourSigmatic, you guys have this dual extraction process which is trying to maximize the effects of whatever's in there. How does that work? Yeah, so, I mean, like let's take first the step back in general and any supplement food product, whatever market there's definitely like multiple factors, points of differentiation, points of quality. So first of all, obviously like, what genus are you taking? Like, are you taking? So, genus is like the, what exact type of like, let's say, there's many types of tomatoes or there's many types of potato, like, or even in many breeds of dogs or something like that. So, not all of them are the same. So if you think of, okay, actually dogs, that's a horrible example. Because they all have the same Latin name but let's forget what I just said. But let's assume that you look at a dog that is like a husky versus a chihuahua, they're like, they're different, right? They're built differently. So same can be applied to mushrooms. Some varieties are stronger than others. Then how it's grown? Is it grown in wild in Siberia or in a laboratory in East side of LA or something? I don't know, that's a difference. And then how it was harvested and collected. Was it harvested at peak period? Or was it harvested when it was too young or too old? How it was dried and processed? The extraction is what really is the mushroom in the case of with mushrooms, a huge differentiator because that's where you unlock its bioavailability. Because you could have a great starting point but you can eff it up totally by not extracting it or extracting incorrectly. And mushrooms, I mentioned that they love heat and fats or lipids. They have two kinds of really groups of active compounds, water soluble and non-water soluble. Water soluble compounds are the things that help with your immune system and gut health. So almost all top mushrooms are good for your gut health and for your immunity. And they are anti-viral, anti-bacterial, yada, yada, yada. But then the other part is these non-water soluble, often fat soluble compounds that are more adaptogenic which is very buzzy word right now, but. Helps your body deal with stress. Correct, in different ways. So in case of quarter-seps, there is like very specific compounds that can help with, for example, ATP production in a cellular level or VO2 max was improved in the case of like the Chinese endurance athletes, their ability to take oxidant in your lungs improved. And these are very quantifiable things. Other things could happen in your body but VO2 max we can measure pretty easily. And it works. I mean, I always can tell a difference when I take quarter-seps before, now if I'm doing a heavy strength training, you know, one to three reps, long rest, I don't know, it's a huge difference but when my workout speed up and I need more stamina or longer, for sure I notice a difference. And I noticed a difference when I did jiu-jitsu, in fact, half the class I used to take would take quarter-seps because they would notice a difference. Well, yeah, definitely if you have any Arabic exercise, I would take quarter-seps is probably the best of the functional mushrooms because it really helps with the ability to, you know, move oxygen in your body and that's huge. For if you are more in the anaerobic type of exercise, I would really look into a mushroom called lion's mane that protects, it's usually used as a new tropic, like a smart drug. I was just gonna say, I didn't know that. Okay, so tell me about this. But you have to understand is like a lot of anaerobic exercise, actually the nervous system recovery is huge. So let's take a sample of runners. Like if you're not a sprinter and you go at the track and you do high-intensity exercises or something like that, and you do let's say, like people think like 100 meter dash or 60 meter dash is like an easy workout. Like you go and if you're not used to it and you don't know what you're doing, you could be for two, three weeks, you're sore because you over-stimulate your nervous system. And nervous system recovery takes a lot more longer than recovery or for example, muscle tissue. We talk about this all the time. Like Dom's like, that's not really your problem. Like that's not your problem. So like how in one single exercise in one of those, if you really push your nervous system, you can achieve a lot of damage. Well, most people don't realize like if you wanna be really, really strong, you get strong muscles but have a powerful CNS. That's gonna give you, this is why Olympic lifters, 150 pound Olympic lifters can lift more than a 230 pound bodybuilders or CNS that's able to generate tremendous amounts of force. And for people listening right now, you've experienced this if you've ever drank coffee or had caffeine before a workout. That extra strength you get from the caffeine isn't because your muscles got bigger, it's because your CNS was able to fire more effectively. Totally. And then in generally what mushrooms I mentioned that they're good for immune system which is one of the least sexy topics in health. I think it's probably the third least, the third most underrated part about health. I think number one is eye health. Totally, total tension by the way, apologies. But like how much we stare computers and phones like nobody's really focused on eye health. I think it's just gonna blow up in the next 20, 30 years of different antioxidants and color pigments that protect your eyes of the damage that we're putting in. It's a total new frontier that we'd have no clue what's gonna happen. When you grow up as a kid staring at iPads and how will that impact your... So you're gonna think of that? Second, I think that is beyond underrated, I think is basically like your sleep quality which sounds so fundamental but like most people react to poor sleep with more energy products. And we see that all the time whenever we make a, at Four Sigma Day if we make a product that like tries to lower stress or sleep deeper like people don't like get that. If you make something for the brain and energy people want that usually. But the immune system is so related to like our skin quality and our ability to recover and our gut health. And when you've finished a workout your immune system is actually kind of fucked. It's like temporarily you could get sick really easily. If you ever run a marathon and you do like a big CrossFit tournament whatever you do and you push you to the next level it's very easy to get sick. Like very easy. So I think a lot of like really smart post-workout stuff recovery stuff would include something that helps the immune system to rebuild. You can achieve that in easy ways like with really nutrient and berries but you'd also use things like these functional mushrooms and a small amount in your post-workout shake to kind of rebuild your immune system and speed up the recovery there as well. It is part of the immune system's job along with the central nervous system. In fact, I just read an article that the central nervous system and parts of your body fat even react to inflammation to help manage it. And inflammation is necessary. If it goes out of control of course we know what that's like and if it's too low then you can start to deteriorate and cause problems. You just literally described how the immune system works basically to inflammation. Yeah, you need that. And so having a healthy immune system for athletes it's not just about not getting sick. It's also about how well you recover and how well your body adapts which is what you want. You wanna build muscle, you wanna burn body fat, you wanna get faster, strong or whatever. The immune system plays a major role in that. But back to Lion's Mane. So Lion's Mane helps strengthen the central nervous system or does it stimulate the central nervous system? Well, there's a specific part of the nervous system or actually part is the nerve growth factors. Are you guys from have your- Like BDNF? No, it's actually NGF. But basically one of the compounds in Lion's Mane has the ability to penetrate the blood-brain barrier which is kind of rare only like usually like glycos and certain like essential nutrients can penetrate basically your body from your brain. And- We need to talk about that for a second just for the listeners. So the blood-brain barrier exists to protect your brain from potential toxins and pathogens. Correct. And one of the problems with, and that's great, but then getting things to the brain if you wanna take a medication very, very challenging. Very hard. Very hard. I mean, this is the handful of things that can do that. It's literally- I do not know- And it's a good thing again because it's a way to protect our body even if we're super, super, super sick. Like that's another way of like how we can maintain the brain to the final hour in a way. But what Lion's Mane does have the ability is to penetrate that. And there's another compound there that can help rejuvenate these nerve growth factors. And nerve growth factors kind of became big by this Italian female scientist. And she was actually, I think, the oldest person to ever win the Nobel Prize on science. And she served in the Italian government until the day she died, which was like 103 years old. Wow. But basically the synapses that fire in our brain, so like how the nervous systems basically connect with each other. Those nerve growth factors are a central part of how well that nervous, central nervous system is firing. And this Lion's Mane seems to have ability to help with that. So obviously more research is needed. So I do Lion's Mane with caffeine and now it makes perfect sense as to why that would, because when I take Lion's Mane with caffeine, I'm fire. Yeah. I'm literally on fire. And sometimes I'll do it before podcast and these guys can't get me to shut up. But no, it's an excellent combination. What about some of the other products? Like we talked a little bit about Cordyceps, Chaga. Chaga from my experience, Immunomodulator, it's an adaptogen. I know it's got some anti-cancer properties. What are some of the traditional uses of Chaga in medicine? Well, the traditional uses the name Chaga comes from Russian language. And that's who made it popular. It grows anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. So it grows in the US, Canada, coal climates and birch trees, but it became famous to Alexander Solchinichkin, which is a noble winning law author. Talked a lot about like Coologs and the concentration cancer in Russia. Yeah. Didn't you write the, was it the Coolog archipelago or the something like that? Yeah, I have his book actually. I'm about to read it. Yeah. And, but he wrote a book called Cancer Ward and talks about in that book using Chaga and that kind of gave it popularity in the West a little bit as well. But Chaga, traditional uses for gut health and cancer that I cannot say our product helps with those things. But that's the traditional use. That's what they use it for? Yeah. Well, we know about it. Yeah, that what we know about it is incredibly high amounts of antioxidants. And I mean, God, the internet loves to debate, which is the number one source of antioxidants. But Chaga is definitely somewhere out there. Like a cup of dual extracted wild Chaga would equal to like 30 pounds of carrots in antioxidants. Not all antioxidants do the same thing though. But one of the things that is very hot, two things that are very high in Chaga is the super oxase dismutase, the SOD. And that's for an athlete, something definitely. If you are an athlete, you want to work out due to a days or be more active. I really look into the research of SOD. The other one is melanin. And we know how that kind of creates the color pigment on our skin. Melanin is an antioxidant. So if you want to protect your skin, if you're a lot exposed to a lot of sun or something skin related, I would look into maybe supplementing your lifestyle and diet with Chaga or it's a natural source of melanin. Yeah, one thing I also found fascinating about some of these mushrooms is in because again, I'm in the fitness industry, which tends to be geared around fat loss and muscle building was some of the, I've seen studies that show that some of these mushrooms will raise testosterone levels in men who have depressed testosterone levels. Doesn't seem to do that with normal testosterone. So people who are healthy, but when people tend to have depressed or hormones that seem to be out of balance, some literature shows that it may be one of those things that helps balance it out. And I think that's kind of a hallmark of an adaptogen. Yes, so technically in order to, now adaptogens, everything is in adaptogen, right? But in theory, the original research on adaptogens, kind of you need three things to qualify as a real adaptogen. One is that it's first of all, safe and non-hapid forming. So if it, if you can form you an addiction or a habit or if it has toxic capabilities, technically you cannot be, I mean, anything is toxic at a bigger amount, but you should have to be safe and non-hapid forming. The second is that it needs to be non-specific, which is always hard to research and study because it's non-specific. But basically means that it has multiple functions or this modulation ability to modulate something. So it's two directional, but it can work multiple body parts. So you could maybe, maybe the work effects are on the endocrine system and maybe they're in the central nervous system. Maybe they're in the blood circulation or their ability to produce like ATP production. Like there's multiple touch points where adaptogens could land. And that's obviously like heart from a scientific point of view to really narrow down, but that's kind of how they work. And in this case, for example, I think it's really important to not fully buy into the hype of adaptogens but acknowledge that they are and there are things that can do that and you can use them in a certain way. And we don't fully know how they work, but if you use the right quality, I think you believe that you should feel the effects. So I feel like you should just trust that. The feeling? The feeling more than the fact of like, we're still, for example, in the case of testosterone is obviously that's a marker you can measure, but I feel like sometimes hormones get misunderstood. Like we think that like, oh, our testosterone is low and the problem is testosterone but like maybe testosterone is low in the body because the body's trying to buffer something else. Right, you're stressed out and sleep very well. Correct. So it's like, it's a safe buffer and it's actually there to protect you and you should figure out why has it been pushed down. Sure, you can elevate it, and but if you use something synthetic, but it seems to be that these mushrooms have this intelligence of modulating but not stimulating or suppressing, but like they modulate. So because this is your field of expertise, do you study like all mushrooms? You know, like even the psychedelic ones? I mean psychedelics, yeah, but like, no, it's impossible. Like unfortunately, like even if you are a mycologist, like you would choose few types of mushroom families they'd focus on and probably even there you would focus on a specific, like for example, enzymes that are, you know, in the protein family, but a lot of them are derived from certain like fungi and you would just focus on few types of enzymes that can be used in a laundry detergent and your life, whole life is dedicated on this family of certain lipase that can remove oil stains from your shirt when you wash it, because like stuff like that, right? And so now washing machines are more energy efficient so they use different types of new enzymes and you could dedicate your whole life on it. I can't do that. Like I'm just really focused on... What made you do for Sigmatic? What made you start a company like that? I mean, there's... I just, I struggle answering that question because it's a lifestyle, you know what I mean? It's like, it's not like one day I woke up and an apple fell in my head and I was like, it's like something that is within me, you know? It's like trying to explain God to someone if you just feel it kind of like it's kind of hard. I mean, did you see the writing on the wall? I mean, you've already a couple of times said some things about what you think is going to happen in the future and I... That was like my passion for mushrooms, adaptogens, optimal for human performance is just within me. For me to put my focus on building a company, I had to see that something was about to change and that was basically what we're doing now is like information sharing with blogs initially and then social media and now podcast enable information that was unpopular or odd to spread easily without use of external funding. So like my company is not run on VC money, right? So you have to figure out like, how do you get your message out in a cost efficient way or ideally for free just by sharing what you do and doing good stuff, right? That was not possible, for example, when I discovered the firm mushroom 13 years ago, there was no way you needed tons of dough or you need to have like a small tweak to an existing belief. So now you have protein, but you have more protein, 13% more protein or you had potato chips with 12% less fat or something like that. So you couldn't build like, if you come out and say, it's like, hey, I want to wake the whole world drink mushrooms, which basically I'm trying to do. Get the whole world drinking mushrooms. It's so out there, it's so insane. Is that like people are not going to bind that lens. There's a way of how you can tell the story at long form like we're doing now, right? So that block two point, the web 2.0 whole that world was like, okay, that's that stuff there. Me believing in their ability to lower stress is more relevant now than ever. The adaptogens help with like stress. We have more stress than ever. The ability to help with your concurrent function. We have more need for brain power than we've ever had or natural beauty industries just blowing up and people are consuming these BS stuff all the time to look themselves pretty. And actually it's just hurting their skin quality when there's like natural ways of actually making it. So I saw that happening, but it really like, how can you do it without pouring millions of some banker's money into it? And you guys, I mean, early on, because podcasting now is getting popular. It's getting mainstream, but even three years ago when we started our show, it wasn't. I would go up to people and ask them, if they listen to podcasts and they say, well, what's a podcast? And that was just three years ago. But you guys have been on podcasts or sponsoring or advertising on podcasts like pretty early on. Was it, what made you decide to go that route? Was it that you saw that, okay, new media is the way to go or? We just love education. Like my mother is a teacher. She taught physiology and anatomy. I just love education, you know? And I think podcast is like a revolutionary way of educating people. So you listened to them way before you even. Yeah, and it's, I think the magic of podcast is the fact that you can do it in a car. I think especially for America, that is the jam. I would use them to audio books before that. And audio books are good, but I feel like podcasts are better. Oh yeah, way more interactive and if you can learn at the same time. But both of them have this magic of the stuff that if you go for a walk, if you're in a car, if you're whatever, you can do it as a background. And so that's why I love them. And the second thing is that, the curation process is completely different than let's say radio or TV or like, there's a editor in a magazine telling what is allowed to be told. And now there's a platform that like anybody can boot out any content. And if it's good content, somebody will consume it, right? So, you know, just super supportive of like odd people and different thinkers putting their word out. But as you guys know, is like in theory making a podcast is free, right? In theory, right? You just need your phone or whatever, but it actually takes a lot of time and money to boot out there. So supporting that is actually like, it's almost better than supporting a charity is like supporting education for free. And in Finland, I was happy enough to brought up for free educational system. So all universities and colleges and everything is free and you actually get almost like a salary or allowance to go to school, but here that's not the case. So podcast is one of the answers for a lot of, I think for a lot of people, for anybody wherever you live, you have access to free education. How long ago did you guys start? How long did form-sigmatic start? Six years ago and three years now in the U.S. Was it, where did you start then? Was it in Finland? I was living in Switzerland and it was launched in Hong Kong and then I moved to the Philippines. So it's like the craziest life story. It's all over the place, all over the place. Why did you go there? Philippines or? No, Hong Kong and then Philippines, yeah. I mean, I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. There was no really little taxes there. Hong Kong is very business friendly. There was other downsides to it, but like when you had no money, I couldn't pay myself a salary for the first two years. Yeah, tell the business story. I would love to hear, starting in with your own money like that. I find that fascinating and where are you at now? Whatever you can share. And it's easier now guys, it's getting easier. It's still, in certain ways it's harder because everybody's flocking on Instagram ads and Facebook and stuff, but still like in today's world, it's certain infrastructural parts of running a business gets easier, like accounting and fulfillment for physical products and all that stuff gets easier and easier. But yeah, I mean, starting a business with limited capital or no capital requires really that you have something else of value, right? Cause like you are not gonna win anybody by outbidding them on ads or sponsorships or hiring the top talent who can get you into GNC, Whole Foods, Walmart, Target, whatever. Like in my case, it was just like my knowledge and passion for whatever I do. So ability to source better than anyone else, but ability to formulate better than anyone else. Like so another way to say, which is not true, but like that marketing is a tax you pay for a bad product. And if you just like believe, especially in today's world that you have the best product, not just believe, but it actually is true, that is a way of entry. So if you're listening to this and you wanna do something, is it a service business, a product business, whatever? Because of internet, it's hard to be the full best product on the market in your category. It's really, really hard because why would anybody buy your product? You don't have to be- That's a good point. The best is a white definition. If someone personally might be best means the cheapest. If you are always the cheapest product in your category, there's a market for you, right? Then you have the best product, like who has the best product? Yeah, quality. And then there's like the best customer experience. So like you offer something else that others can't offer. So you're fucked if you're the fourth company. You, I think you, that's probably some, I'm not a super business mind, so maybe some of these guys, they're like waving their fingers, like that is not how Tracy and Versaum minted in 1997 when they drew the Valley Disciplines. Fuck that. I think if I'm a consumer and I want headphones, I want headphones, like why would I buy your headphones? Do you want, like I want the amazing headphones. I want the best overall experience. And overall experience can mean branding and design and all that kind of others. The customer service, like sabos with shoes and stuff, like can mean a lot of stuff, but why would I buy your product? I think that a lot of that's dying. I think we're in this, I mean, I noticed in my time of shopping for something online has completely evolved and changed in the last 10 years. In the past, we would search for a brand that we recognize, but now you search and you look for what's got the five-star reviews, five-star reviews and so on. Let's take like age old question, like which protein to use? Why would you use an average way protein? Like why, like who would use that? Cause you kind of give a shit. Yeah. Just a little bit? Yeah. So either you choose a product that is like, especially in today's world, you choose the product you think is like actual cleanest, best, whatever. Sure. Or the flavor is on point. So you're not gonna throw up. It's gonna be best in one category. You have to like somehow, yeah, I think a lot of like Me Too products is just gonna die out because of internet. Cause they just can't. I can see that. Like cause even if you find them and they're sold, you're gonna Google them and you say like, oh, actually this product is better. Like this has better reviews. So this one, these guys are not as nearly as good as these guys, right? That's a good point. So you start in Hong Kong and you launch your product online? No, actually we launched it in Europe and Europe, the language difference is different. So we started making basically mushroom tea in Europe and sold it in retail and education and all that stuff, community was done online. But the sales channel was still like conventional at that point. Also because of language barriers were easier to sell to stores. And then like a few years in we started getting requests from the US and I came here before we moved the business just to kind of like talk and I interviewed like hundreds of people and it's just like if you would do this and ask them questions before making the decision and the decision was pretty clear is that if you come here, you're all in. You don't come here to half-ass. So if this is the NHL, the NBA and you come from the Euro league, like you gotta be all in, like this is not, this is like, there's so much competition here and the best of the best from around the world are here you gotta be full on. So move the business here and quickly realized a couple things. One was the fact that like buyers of whole foods or whatever, I don't wanna pick on whole foods but like whatever store they were like nobody drinks mushrooms here, first of all. So like, I'm not gonna buy this as like our first product cost it like 38 bucks. Like why would anybody buy this product? Plus we came from Europe so we didn't make any health claims or our competitors would say is like, you know, this does make you a penis bigger. No, I'm kidding. But like it was easier for them to sell with basically telling you like, so we tried to like actually deep educate like how does mushrooms think or whatever. And yeah, it was like quite a barrier of entry. Then second thing we realized that was like, people here don't drink tea. If they drink tea, they don't know what's the difference between good tea and bad tea. You can have airplane tea and you think, oh, it's tea, you know, it's a little eclipton but every person, even if you're not quality conscious at all and you're Jim or Susan in, you know, Kentucky, you've had a bad cup of coffee, right? We're coffee people over here. That's a great point. Everyone has had a bad cup of coffee. Even if you think Folgers is the bomb, you have had a bad cup of coffee. So you know that there is an importance and value to upgrade your coffee. Like you've had hard burn, you've had jitters. You know that if somebody can offer you a coffee without the jitters or the coffee without the heartburn, a lot of people would be like, got it. Secondly, the problem with anything health when introducing a new thing is compliance. So you can have this great workout program but then people quit after a week or something. It doesn't really help you, right? So mushrooms are no different. Like if you don't consume them, they don't help you, right? So ritual, like how do you repeat the habit is really hard. One of the built-in repeat mechanisms is coffee. Like people rarely forget to have their coffee. So if you can make a healthy coffee that suddenly also has these immune and gut-supporting mushrooms but doesn't give you the jitters or whatever, people are like, I'll have that every day. So we had to like move from making mushroom tea into mushroom coffee. And instead of selling the mushroom thought, we're just like, hey, do you want coffee without the jitters? People are like, yeah. Fuck yeah, I'll just sign me up. I'll try anything. And then second is like, because no buyers will want our product. We're like, okay, if there's, we're just gonna sell it online. And both of those ended up being like, I can't take credit for that, but like brilliant. Like they were ahead of the curve and then like podcast and like being online and you know, and we sell pretty well. For example, on Amazon and like when we're there, like nobody really did that stuff on Amazon. So like you have like first mover advantage and stuff. How long did it take for the business to really start to take off? It's a classic like overnight story that takes five years. You know, it's like, yeah, I think four or five years. But like we were a big shit within a certain community. Sort of like certain. Big shit, small bowl. Yeah, very small bowl. But like, we had, we were on Vogue before we launched here or something like, or we had like celebrities using the products. I don't know, even they, how they found it because it was not sold anywhere. So like that's what I mean. Like with the marketing, the marketing is a tax for bad product. Like if you have, if you do something amazing, people will find it, people will look for it and they'll talk about it. And you don't have to make a viral video with an ad agency. Like if you just make good shit. You don't have to say yourself on fire and jump rope. Yeah, no, it can help though. Very strategically. No, we just spoke at a mastermind group and then we were talking. Everyone was so surprised that we didn't have this huge marketing budget and we hadn't spent a lot of money on that. And it was like, no, we, you know, we believed we had a good message and there was a need for it in our space. And 100% of the business has grown organic up until just now. I mean, we just hired a marketing team three, four months ago. Yeah, I mean, like I said, I'm the intermission after putting like Ben and Paul and like put stuff like that, like it will spread. Like people will share those episodes five years from now. Yeah. Like people are like, hey, have you heard this? Cause it's going to live there and it's accessible at any time. So are you, so you're headquartered now here in Southern California? Yeah, in LA or based in, but we have a fully distributed team. So at the same time, like when we did this, we had to figure out like how to reinvent everything because we wouldn't have access to the resources. So one of the things we decided is like, why do we need, why do we need an office? Like what's the point? Technically we have an office in LA, New York and Helsinki but nobody ever goes to them. So a team can be anywhere and there's clear benefits to it. And it's not always easy, but like there are benefits of like you can choose the time when you're most effective. Like are you a morning person or evening person? Right? You can also, I take a nap every day. Like that's important for me. And then some people want to like we can hire better talent because we don't have to relocate them. Or as a company, because people can live in a cheaper place. Like the first few years, because I couldn't pay myself, I would live in low cost countries around the world because like I could have a good solid quality of life, you know, drinking coconut by the beach, but still only spend a few hundred bucks a month. You know? So was that the Philippines right there, right? Yeah, the Philippines is one of those destinations, but... Are you married or are you single? I'm single, right? I'm single. He's like, hey, what's your favorite country so far? Because you've operated business in Europe, Hong Kong, Philippines here. Yeah, they're vastly different markets. Yeah, this is my 10th country I'm living in. Oh, really? Oh, name the other ones. US, Canada, France, Italy, UK, Switzerland, Australia. I think that's it. Finland, Finland. Good deal. Yeah, I stopped picking favorites when I was like a teenager, but no, they're all good in different ways. I think actually that's kind of you set yourself up for failure is expectations. Like somebody said that happiness is like when reality meets expectations and you have two controls, two levers. You can control the reality and you can control the expectations. And with those two levers, you can control your happiness, right? So if I go to the Philippines and I expect the infrastructure to work and people to be on time, it could be pretty unhappy. If I live in Switzerland and I'm there, like I paid $8 for a bottle of water, you know, I'm pretty bummed right now. But then you can look at it as like, hey, the most incredible nature is available for me for free at any time. Within an hour, I'll be in Zermatt or Saus Faire or I'll be here climbing or like I, and it's free, like or close to free. And then I have to overpay here or in the Philippines, like I had other things that you could access. Like a massage was three bucks, so you could have a massage every day. You know, it's like it's not really break the bank. So like the same with living in LA or in California, you're literally exposed to some of the greatest nature on the planet Earth, like California and national parks, state parks, like. Gorgeous. Insane. Like people just don't appreciate them. But then you have traffic and cost of living. And like what we're doing now, like the community and the people who are here, like right after this, I'm going to get lunch with my friend Max, who apparently you know as well. Oh, look at here. So like if you live in Finland, there's great people, but it's harder there than it is here. Or you know, it's like, so obviously technology is bridging a lot of those gaps, but at the same time, like every place has its pros and cons. Now what's the store for the future of a four-sigmatic? It seems to be growing. Can we talk about these chocolates? Pretty, yeah, what did you give us here, dude? That's still on the wrap. Mushroom chocolate. And one of the things when you do what you want to do is we give that out for free. So we donate free mushroom chocolates to people so we don't sell those. Except for Valentine's Day, we sell them. And these are different than the mushroom chocolates that I had in Hawaii with my girlfriend where I started seeing funny things. Yeah. That one is everyday magic. What you had there was one's a year magic. Or something like that. It's a magic. Exactly. So yeah, so the future, like what are you guys, what are you gonna be doing in the future? What's ahead? Well, I just hate the question like people ask like, where are you gonna grow? I often give this anecdote of like a push-up. As a trainer, you're like, okay, let's do 10 reps. Why the fuck nobody ever says nine reps? Or 11. It's kind of even. I don't know. It's like 10, 12, 15, okay? So now you're a trainer and you're looking at the person you're training and they're doing, let's do 10 reps. After four rep, the form gets all shitty. Now you have a risk of injury or that you're working the wrong muscle or whatever. But you're like 10, it's gotta be fucking 10. Or what if you can do 52, right? The muscle doesn't know the weight you're pushing and knows the resistance, right? And then there's, so same with business. Like why do they all these numbers like you have to do this, you have to do that? So I consider like the form being a much bigger thing. It's like, what can you do with good form? Like what is the level? And but you still have to challenge yourself beyond your capabilities. So to give that hormesis, that hormetic stressor, like so you grow. If you don't push yourself, you don't grow, but you can push yourself too much, right? What's that sweet spot? The other thing I like to say is everybody fucking says is like wanna be, like where us, not them. But like I really try to live that. So every year I try to do something outlandish. Like I just, we just bought a school bus and that we named Mori and we're gonna convert it into a mushroom mobile that will travel around the country giving people free mushrooms. We opened a shroom room on Apakini, which is one of the trendiest streets in America. It's in Venice Beach with all these gentrified, like all these crazy fashion stores coming up. We opened a little shroom room on the corner that gives free mushrooms to people. And- And we just, we are a mushroom academy that like every online marketer would have said we should have charged people to do that. It's for free online. So you can go to free mushroom academy e-learning course and just making like dope products. Like trying to figure out in different ways how you can sneak people like mushrooms adaptogens and other like top superfoods to their diet without them really noticing. Like that's the kind of the ultimate ninja move is when you can like incorporate to your like, your mom and dad's life a mushroom coffee or something else that we're working on right now that like you can just put it into your body and you're not gonna, you're like, oh, that was good. That's a dope attitude, bro. Are you living your dream? Yeah. Sounds like it. Yeah, I mean that's also like a funny is like, are you living your dream? Like what does that actually like, I actually mean that's why I always like meditate on that. What the fuck is that, man? I'm having fun most of the time. Yeah, most of the time. That's cool, man. Oh shit, excellent, man. You definitely live your brand. I mean, I'm glad we were. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, we work with you guys. Yeah. Excellent, excellent. Thanks for coming on the show, brother. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at mindpumpmedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps anabolic, maps performance, and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs. With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. 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