The Wonder of Mushroom Coffee with Jody Hall

[00:00:03] I've got to speak quietly because everyone is asleep. Today's episode of the Mush Love Podcast is sponsored by our friends at Wonder Ground. Wonder Ground roasts gorgeous coffee beans and then they load them up with powerful adaptogenic mushrooms to help you feel better. And for me, every morning I grind up some brainchild beans, add a spoon of brainwash to make my oat latte, and I am ready to roll.

[00:00:30] If you haven't tried it, man, go to wondergroundcoffee.com. You will definitely thank me. All right, I gotta get to work.

[00:00:39] Enter code MUSHLOVE30. That's M-U-S-H-L-O-V-E-3-0 and get 30% off at wondergroundcoffee.com.

[00:01:03] Hello and welcome to the Mush Love Podcast. I'm your host Tim Keck.

[00:01:07] The Mush Love Podcast is a podcast where we talk about the crazy, interesting world of mushrooms and the people who are obsessed with them.

[00:01:15] Today's Mush Love Podcast is about adaptogens. Adaptogens are organic substances that help the body adapt to stress. And while found elsewhere in the natural world, many of the most powerful adaptogens are found in mushrooms.

[00:01:29] In this episode about adaptogens, I'm speaking with Jody Hall, who is an entrepreneur that's harnessing the power of adaptogens.

[00:01:37] Full disclosure before we get started, Jody is a sponsor of this podcast, basically came up with the idea of this podcast, is a close friend, and is my neighbor.

[00:01:47] In fact, just this morning, I saw Jody's wife, Kelly, while I was drinking a cup of Jody's coffee on my front porch.

[00:01:54] But even in taking consideration all of our entanglements, I still wanted to talk to Jody, because as you will see, she's doing some very interesting things with adaptogens.

[00:02:04] Jody has started more cool businesses than pretty much anybody, from Cupcake Royale to The Good Ship and now Wonderground.

[00:02:11] She's always making amazing stuff, always does tons of good for the community, and is, as you will see, so smart and fun to talk with.

[00:02:20] Wonderground, her new venture, adds mushroom extracts to coffee, making a cup of coffee with a one-two punch.

[00:02:26] So without further ado, Jody Hall.

[00:02:37] You and I have known each other for a zillion years, and your first business, or one of your first businesses, was making delicious cupcakes.

[00:02:44] And then you also started making delicious THC-infused confections.

[00:02:50] And now you're doing mushroom-infused coffee that's also delicious.

[00:02:55] And I'd like to just kind of get, you know, I know it seems natural to you, but I want to understand that arc and how you got there and how it all happened.

[00:03:03] I really started my career in coffee for a place that everybody knows, and was there at the early, early days, and loved the idea of connection.

[00:03:11] And coffee is connection.

[00:03:13] And there's this beautiful heritage of coffee that goes back five, six hundred years.

[00:03:18] People gathered in Coffeehouse, Penny University.

[00:03:21] For a penny, you get your cup of coffee, and you would be exposed to what was going on in culture, in commerce, people talking about ideas to build a better society, an art, et cetera.

[00:03:34] And that was why they called it Penny University, because you were exposed to be educated about what's going on in the world.

[00:03:40] The soapbox, all that stuff.

[00:03:41] So coffee has been, and connection, you know.

[00:03:44] That's cool.

[00:03:44] I never knew that's where that expression came from.

[00:03:47] Really?

[00:03:47] Yeah.

[00:03:47] I mean, I studied that a lot in my time at this company that everybody knows.

[00:03:53] But to me, at its core is connection, right?

[00:03:56] Connection's important.

[00:03:57] We're starving for connection as a society.

[00:03:59] I mean, right?

[00:04:00] The phone is taking us away.

[00:04:02] The more social we are, the less social we are, you know?

[00:04:05] And I think that things that connect are really inspiring to me.

[00:04:08] So I think about Cupcakes when I left that company and started one of the first cupcake bakeries in the United States outside of Magnolia Bakery in New York.

[00:04:16] It was about joy.

[00:04:18] It was about celebration.

[00:04:19] It was about connecting over a birthday, a wedding, an office promotion, just to say I love you, you know?

[00:04:26] And to me, connection's profound.

[00:04:28] Cupcake brought me out to all these interesting places, meeting President Obama.

[00:04:32] Like, what?

[00:04:32] You're the leader of the free world, and I make cupcakes.

[00:04:35] How are we even standing next to each other?

[00:04:37] But I was featured with him as part of a press conference where the White House released a report that women founders had better success rates.

[00:04:45] And I was one of two people to stand next to him and hang out for half an hour or something.

[00:04:50] Amazing.

[00:04:51] So, yeah, so Good Ship came along.

[00:04:54] And to me, the theory there was, you know, Washington and Colorado were legalizing.

[00:04:58] And Good Ship is the THC company.

[00:05:02] Exactly.

[00:05:02] Good Ship came along with the legalization of cannabis in 2014, passed in ballot in Colorado and Washington.

[00:05:10] So a bunch of people reached out and said, hey, you're so good at building brands.

[00:05:15] We'll invest in you.

[00:05:16] You should build a brand in cannabis and help define the narrative.

[00:05:20] Don't let the big, big guys come in, the Philip Morris or what have you, define the narrative.

[00:05:24] It should be the small business, the entrepreneurs.

[00:05:26] And I was like, wow, that seems crazy.

[00:05:29] But, you know, the thesis to me when I thought about it was connection.

[00:05:33] Do we connect more profoundly over the lens of cannabis than, say, alcohol or other things that we use to imbibe?

[00:05:40] So as you've grown on this, as you've done this, what makes you think that mushrooms are so valuable?

[00:05:49] You know, like we talk about adaptogens and putting those kind of things in mushrooms.

[00:05:53] How do you know it's such a good thing for you?

[00:05:55] How do you know that it brings connection?

[00:05:56] How do you know that this is so much so that you're putting your whole life into doing this?

[00:06:01] Right. I think discovering that in 2017, that's when Paul did the Good Ship Higher Education.

[00:06:09] September 2017, that was what, more than six years ago?

[00:06:13] There was maybe 20,000 views on his TED Talk.

[00:06:16] Now there's probably 20 million views or more.

[00:06:19] He launched Fantastic Fungi, et cetera.

[00:06:21] I started studying that and realized that there was a lot of benefit, that these were used for thousands of years.

[00:06:29] And especially in Eastern cultures, China, et cetera, part of medicine, part of diet.

[00:06:37] And then realizing later cancer rates are different because we're ingesting these things that have such boost to our immunity.

[00:06:45] And realizing that it can help mitigate stress and anxiety.

[00:06:51] Wow, that's pretty compelling.

[00:06:53] And, you know, I think the West were like, oh, yay, 240 characters and microwave popcorn.

[00:07:00] Let's do it.

[00:07:01] You know, we kind of ignore all this kind of stuff that has been around for a long time.

[00:07:06] And, you know, mushrooms were the first form of life on terrestrial planet Earth.

[00:07:11] Some people say dating back a billion years, maybe 600 million years ago.

[00:07:16] Plants have been here 200 million years.

[00:07:19] So the fungi is this underground network that occasionally creates a fruit or a mushroom, as we would think of it, and has eroded rocks and minerals to create soil, to create plants, to create mammals, to create humans who have been around less than 2 million years.

[00:07:38] So you think about what we use currently in our pharmaceutical life.

[00:07:44] I mean, penicillin, and you think about fermentation and gut health and all these kinds of things.

[00:07:50] Just the more I studied it, the more it felt like this is something that's been around a long time.

[00:07:57] It's been a part of diets.

[00:07:59] Some of these mushrooms are approved to stop cancer cell growth in other countries.

[00:08:05] Why wouldn't you do this?

[00:08:06] What if, you know, what if you could do this in a way?

[00:08:09] I mean, 75% of us drink coffee every single day in the United States.

[00:08:13] And, you know, a fifth of us are diagnosed with anxiety disorder.

[00:08:19] Caffeine's a trigger for anxiety.

[00:08:20] What if you could mitigate, you could put something in your body or through your coffee and have it still taste good, but help us navigate stress, cortisol.

[00:08:30] Help us mitigate anxiety.

[00:08:32] I mean, that's probably the most common thing that I hear.

[00:08:35] People who have anxiety can't drink coffee or they can drink a half cup.

[00:08:38] Now they drink two or three cups.

[00:08:39] They sleep well.

[00:08:40] It's wild.

[00:08:41] So it helps us balance our bodies.

[00:08:44] Similar to stress, adaptogens help our bodies adapt to stress and adapt to the stressors going on in our lives.

[00:08:53] And I think that's pretty cool.

[00:08:54] And it goes back to connection, right?

[00:08:57] Mycelium is a web underneath us that connects all living things.

[00:09:02] So, yeah, I think I was a believer.

[00:09:05] And I was really inspired by Paul's talk.

[00:09:09] And obviously I did tons of research on that and just thought, you know, coffee is the original performance enhancing drug.

[00:09:15] It's the second traded commodity in the world.

[00:09:19] Wow.

[00:09:19] Let's figure out a way to make it taste as good as your favorite cup of Stumptown or whatever and have you feel better.

[00:09:26] Wouldn't that be great?

[00:09:27] Yeah.

[00:09:27] And so it keeps all the good aspects of coffee, you know, which also have antioxidants in themselves and takes care of some of the negative ones, including adding really valuable things to your body as a whole.

[00:09:39] Exactly.

[00:09:39] So that I feel like one of my weird things, and maybe this is an entrepreneur saying, is that you really see things way before.

[00:09:46] I saw this little coffee company.

[00:09:48] I was like, I'm going to just leave it all behind and start working here.

[00:09:51] I think they're going places.

[00:09:53] I was like, I'm going to leave it all behind and start cupcakes.

[00:09:56] What?

[00:09:57] Everybody was like, you're crazy.

[00:09:59] Why would you leave the best job in the world?

[00:10:01] I'm like, it's going to be great.

[00:10:02] Just you wait.

[00:10:02] And sure enough, I mean, we were just right at the crest of that wave starting to go.

[00:10:07] Same with Good Ship.

[00:10:08] And I think we're on the same kind of early crest of wave with Wonderground.

[00:10:14] And our will is really good.

[00:10:15] We want to make delicious coffee and use all of our expertise to roast it properly and source it properly, but then add these mushrooms in a way that you want to drink it all the time.

[00:10:25] So how did you do it?

[00:10:27] So, okay, so I buy that.

[00:10:28] But like, how do you go from not having mushroom coffee to having mushroom infused coffee?

[00:10:34] Like, how did you kind of, you know, beyond the marketing aspect, just the physically putting it together.

[00:10:40] Give me a little bit of a snapshot of how that process went.

[00:10:43] Well, yeah.

[00:10:44] I mean, that's a really good question.

[00:10:46] So it started.

[00:10:48] I mean, really the spark of that idea was that night when we sat down with Paul.

[00:10:51] That was in 2015.

[00:10:53] I'd already sold my cannabis company to one of the global titans and I was still working there and I was like, this is my next thing.

[00:11:01] And, you know, we didn't start till 2021.

[00:11:03] And so I worked quite a bit on this business plan and was just kind of like, ah, should I do this?

[00:11:09] This is interesting.

[00:11:10] Studying market size, et cetera.

[00:11:12] But I really, as a third company and just kind of formative time at, you know, Starbucks and kind of brought back a lot of interesting people from my old days at Starbucks to my time at Cupcake to time at Good Ship.

[00:11:27] And really, you know, brought back the band of all the people to build like a magnum opus company, a company that really does good in the product.

[00:11:37] It does good for the world.

[00:11:39] It's a good company to work for, all those things.

[00:11:42] And so as part of that, one of the people I knew I wanted to work with was head of like food science and product and development at the Green Dot.

[00:11:52] And she had left and spent two years studying adaptogenic mushrooms and where they're grown, what substrate they're grown on, the efficacy.

[00:12:01] Is it fruiting body, which is the fruit, the mushroom cap that's above the soil?

[00:12:06] Or is it the mycelium that you might grind up and put into a capsule?

[00:12:09] And had done two years of research from a chemical scientist, food scientist, chemical engineer, food scientist perspective.

[00:12:17] And this is somebody that you worked at this giant coffee company that you sometimes name and sometimes you don't.

[00:12:21] Yeah.

[00:12:22] And so she had left and she had been doing some research.

[00:12:26] So she came in and helped formulate.

[00:12:29] So she had already picked out the best supplier for all those things, for clean, green, USDA organic, double tested here in the States.

[00:12:39] All this is coming from China.

[00:12:41] Why?

[00:12:41] Because they've been using this for 2,000 years.

[00:12:44] The company we're working with mostly sells to Pharma and has been around over 100 years.

[00:12:50] It's a really great company.

[00:12:52] And most people don't know this company, which is great.

[00:12:55] That's part of our trade secret maybe.

[00:12:56] But so we started and we honestly pulled together the four mushrooms that we thought were most relevant.

[00:13:04] Lion's mane, reishi, cordyceps, chaga.

[00:13:07] And we cupped them.

[00:13:09] So we're standing around.

[00:13:10] Imagine a roastery place.

[00:13:13] The people that we work to source our coffee have a roaster.

[00:13:18] One of our team members has roasted coffee for 20 years.

[00:13:22] So we did sample roasting.

[00:13:25] First, we cupped the mushrooms.

[00:13:27] We're like, let's taste chaga.

[00:13:28] Let's taste lion's mane, cordyceps.

[00:13:30] Let's think about what coffees, what roast level, what varietals.

[00:13:34] And we just kind of sat around and cupped with some of the best palates in coffee.

[00:13:39] And when you say cupped, you're saying just drinking cups of coffee.

[00:13:43] Right.

[00:13:43] Cupping is just a word that's used to taste and sample and flavor.

[00:13:49] So you add water to the extracts.

[00:13:52] You use a spoon.

[00:13:53] You rinse it in hot water so you're not contaminating.

[00:13:56] And you slurp.

[00:13:57] And so you're tasting chaga.

[00:14:00] Chaga is super bitter.

[00:14:01] It's dark.

[00:14:03] It has a kind of coffee-esque flavor.

[00:14:06] In fact, they used it as a substitute during World Wars as a replacement for coffee.

[00:14:12] We tasted lion's mane, which is much more brothy.

[00:14:15] And it was, you know, it had that fungi flavor.

[00:14:19] And we're like, oh, man, this is going to be really hard.

[00:14:21] Like, we're using high potent mushrooms because we want it to taste good.

[00:14:25] But we also want you to feel good.

[00:14:26] So we're not dumbing it down and just sprinkling a little mushroom and calling it that.

[00:14:30] Because we don't win if people don't feel good.

[00:14:33] So we cup that.

[00:14:35] And then we're like, okay, what kind of coffees?

[00:14:38] Would a Guatemala make sense?

[00:14:40] Would a Sumatra make sense?

[00:14:41] You know, there's a terroir of coffee.

[00:14:45] What regions have different tastes that have different kind of earthy notes or acidity or brightness?

[00:14:51] Or so we kind of thought about that.

[00:14:54] We did a bunch of sample roasts in a little roaster that you might roast a, I don't know, quarter pound of coffee just to do some sample roasting.

[00:15:02] Grind that up, taste it, add the mushrooms.

[00:15:04] So we went through probably 30 different roasts and cupping events to go through this over quite a period of time.

[00:15:14] And finally figured it out.

[00:15:16] That sounds kind of exhausting, but also cool.

[00:15:18] Right?

[00:15:19] And when you roast coffee, it's not like you just turn on the heat to high and then it's over.

[00:15:24] Like you're boiling your water for your pasta.

[00:15:26] You turn it on.

[00:15:28] Then you might go up at a certain point to kind of grab and bend the roast curve to maybe caramelize a note that you get in that varietal.

[00:15:36] And then you bring it back down and bring it, you know, there's a lot of art and science to roasting.

[00:15:42] So using the chops of some of our investors and advisors who are world-class roasters, it was amazing.

[00:15:48] So we finally landed on it.

[00:15:50] We're like blown away.

[00:15:51] We're like, okay, we totally nailed it.

[00:15:53] We can start this company.

[00:15:54] So it kind of started there.

[00:15:56] That's awesome.

[00:15:57] And it seems to work, you know, like, so do you have different types?

[00:16:01] So it's just kind of a different mix of those mushrooms that you mentioned are in all of your beans though, right?

[00:16:07] We, you know, we're just rolling up.

[00:16:09] There's not a whole lot out there in the market, right?

[00:16:12] So we're like, well, we want one of our coffees to focus on brain health.

[00:16:19] So lion's mane is getting a lot of great press from clinical trials and studies that you're reading about.

[00:16:26] Recently, one out of, I believe, Australia said that they're studying lion's mane and seeing results to help slow down dementia, help remyelinate neural pathways.

[00:16:46] And so we chose one for brain and one for more like better mood and immunity.

[00:16:52] So we kind of did that.

[00:16:54] And then later we created a product that has all four of the mushrooms that we just like the combo of all four and we mix them up.

[00:17:03] They're not equal parts.

[00:17:05] And we did that for a reason because we're trying to, you know, lean into certain benefits and things like that.

[00:17:11] And it's, you know, it's an open book.

[00:17:13] Maybe we want to go back and try something with other things, but we do think mushrooms, we really believe in the potential and power.

[00:17:21] I mean, they've been here for a long, long time, a lot longer than us.

[00:17:25] And we'll continue likely to be here a long, long time, a lot longer than us.

[00:17:30] And we have something to learn from them.

[00:17:31] So I kind of want to switch now to the consumer side.

[00:17:35] So when you first started, you know, obviously this is a ton of discovery by your customers right now.

[00:17:41] You're getting new customers all the time.

[00:17:42] You know, I thought it was really cool when you guys set up the tasting spot at the airport.

[00:17:48] So there's just all of these people who can taste it.

[00:17:51] And you talk to your customers a lot.

[00:17:53] I know how connected you are to them.

[00:17:54] When they first hear mushrooms infused coffee, what are some of their first responses?

[00:18:01] I mean, they think that we're crazy, right?

[00:18:04] What are you doing?

[00:18:05] And, you know, I think there's a lot of confusion.

[00:18:08] First of all, they're like most people haven't heard of this.

[00:18:12] You know, certain people have.

[00:18:14] There's definitely a whole wellness crew, a fungi crew that are early stage understanding this.

[00:18:20] Paul Stamets, probably one of the earliest, right?

[00:18:23] In the United States, I should say.

[00:18:25] And so, yeah, people were, what?

[00:18:29] No, that's what are you talking about?

[00:18:32] That sounds awful.

[00:18:33] There's mushrooms, I think, are very divisive.

[00:18:35] People love them or they hate them.

[00:18:38] And I think that's why we opened a cafe.

[00:18:41] That's why we did the airport at SeaTac.

[00:18:44] And we're able to sample hundreds and hundreds of cups of coffee every day because we were like,

[00:18:49] just try it.

[00:18:50] And people would try it and be like, oh, wow, this tastes better than the coffee I make at home.

[00:18:55] And I'm like, awesome.

[00:18:56] That's our goal.

[00:18:57] And then they buy it and they come back and they're like, wow, thank you.

[00:19:02] I feel the benefits of this.

[00:19:03] I really appreciate it, especially.

[00:19:05] So your goal is to just get somebody to just try it, just like get a taste of it, right?

[00:19:10] So that's why we opened a retail cafe.

[00:19:13] It's as much to have people come in and look somebody in the eye and say, what are you talking

[00:19:19] about?

[00:19:19] Can I try this?

[00:19:20] And of course, that's our whole goal is to like, hey, give it a try.

[00:19:24] See what you think.

[00:19:25] These are the beans we use for this coffee.

[00:19:27] These are the beans that we use for this.

[00:19:29] We chose these beans for these reasons.

[00:19:31] These are, you know, let me educate you about the mushrooms.

[00:19:34] And we're using extracts.

[00:19:36] A lot of people think mushroom coffee and they think it's ground mushrooms that are like gross

[00:19:40] and floating on top of your water or your liquid.

[00:19:45] That's not fun.

[00:19:47] Nobody wants to drink that.

[00:19:48] So the extracts are super soluble and they melt into the coffee when it's brewed.

[00:19:53] It's not impacted by that high temperature.

[00:19:55] So yeah, it's funny.

[00:19:57] Definitely into this day, of course.

[00:20:00] I mean, people are just kind of getting wind of this.

[00:20:04] And people who they can check online and see your marketing and your marketing kind of speaks

[00:20:09] to that.

[00:20:10] Like it's definitely mushroom forward, but it's very bright.

[00:20:13] You know, it has like kind of a Japanese anime kind of ish feel.

[00:20:16] And tell me a little bit about how you're when you're thinking about marketing, how you just

[00:20:21] market the concept of mushrooms in general.

[00:20:23] Right.

[00:20:24] I mean, I've been in coffee my whole life and coffee is pretty, you know, not a lot

[00:20:30] of innovation in coffee.

[00:20:31] Maybe a K-cup or instant coffee in the 60s.

[00:20:36] But it's very dark.

[00:20:37] It's very brown, black.

[00:20:40] You know, it's kind of the same old, same old, same old.

[00:20:43] If you look at go to your grocery store and look at the wall of coffee, it's always going

[00:20:47] to have brown tones, maybe a little orange, a little green.

[00:20:50] And it's kind of boring.

[00:20:51] And my thing was, if you are present and you're just in your body and looking around, engaging

[00:21:01] with people, noticing your environment, to me, that's this moment of where you can wonder,

[00:21:07] right?

[00:21:07] Like you can speculate, you can have ideas, you can solve kind of problems in your head when

[00:21:13] you're present in the moment, right?

[00:21:15] And wonder is part of Wonderground.

[00:21:17] And so the underground, I think, represents mycelium.

[00:21:21] The underground of what's underneath every footstep, Paul Stamets would say, every step

[00:21:26] in grass or nature is 300 miles, a single wall mycelium beneath our foot.

[00:21:33] That's insane, right?

[00:21:34] There's a massive network underneath the ground.

[00:21:37] And so wonder, to me, is something we're starving for.

[00:21:41] We're so busy.

[00:21:42] We're off the rails.

[00:21:43] We can barely read a book.

[00:21:44] We can barely finish an email in our scroll.

[00:21:48] And when we are present, we can engage.

[00:21:51] We can read.

[00:21:52] We can learn.

[00:21:53] We can think.

[00:21:53] We can solve.

[00:21:54] We can connect.

[00:21:56] All those things.

[00:21:56] So the brand was really meant to have you think about wondering, like, oh, this is random.

[00:22:02] Why is there an octopus on a yellow bag of coffee?

[00:22:05] And to me, like, you know, there is a moment if you brew coffee, one of the 75% of us, you

[00:22:12] have a moment.

[00:22:13] You grind your beans.

[00:22:14] You put them in your brewer.

[00:22:16] It takes about four or five minutes for it to brew.

[00:22:19] It's kind of a little moment of zen that you have every morning.

[00:22:22] It could be a moment to wonder.

[00:22:24] So elbowing out a few moments to wonder every day to help us better connect and balance

[00:22:29] our bodies.

[00:22:29] Like, that's kind of the thesis of why we're so wonky with our brand.

[00:22:34] So I also want to, I kind of want to talk, you're talking a little bit about the wave

[00:22:37] of coffee and the interest in coffee and how people are starting to understand all these

[00:22:40] benefits that coffee has.

[00:22:42] Would it be possible to do this brand 10 years ago before Fantastic Fungi, before all of these

[00:22:48] things?

[00:22:48] Do you think that if you just had your same business plan, your same experience, all those

[00:22:53] kinds of things, that you could have done this a decade ago?

[00:22:56] It's hard to say.

[00:22:57] I mean, I think that there's...

[00:23:00] Well, Jodi, you can do anything.

[00:23:01] Let's say a mortal.

[00:23:03] Sure.

[00:23:03] For sure.

[00:23:04] We could do this 10 years ago.

[00:23:06] But I do think the things that are on our side now are New York Times in 2022 named fungi

[00:23:14] the ingredient of the year.

[00:23:15] You're reading more and more about the benefits of these adaptogenic mushrooms.

[00:23:20] Your studies are coming into your newsfeed around lion's mane, around chaga, cordyceps,

[00:23:26] turkey tail, et cetera.

[00:23:27] And you're seeing congressional support on both sides of the aisle for some of the medicinal

[00:23:35] benefits of psilocybin, which is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms that are showing

[00:23:43] incredible promise for mental health, for trauma, for PTSD, and helping us heal.

[00:23:51] And obviously, that's in a very heavy dose and things like that.

[00:23:55] But I think you're going to see this move to rescheduled into a way that will be part of

[00:24:03] healing and wellness in American medicine.

[00:24:06] Yeah.

[00:24:07] And wherever you are politically, the people's distrust in pharmaceutical companies, very

[00:24:15] reasonable distrust in pharmaceutical companies.

[00:24:17] People are looking for other ways, not just for adaptogens and cancer and these different

[00:24:22] health things, but also mental health.

[00:24:23] And I think that there's these things that have been around for so long and are so powerful

[00:24:28] and benign in a lot of other ways, non-addictive, those kinds of things are going to be things

[00:24:33] that people are really interested in taking.

[00:24:36] And they just don't trust the pharmaceutical companies to solve their problems.

[00:24:39] And I think mushrooms are in a great spot for that.

[00:24:42] Well, you think about the word adaptogen.

[00:24:45] And that's kind of a confusing word, right?

[00:24:48] What does that mean?

[00:24:49] And an adaptogen is something that's made in nature, a plant or fungi.

[00:24:54] Those are different.

[00:24:55] There's a plant kingdom and a fungi kingdom that have benefit to help our bodies adapt to

[00:25:01] stress.

[00:25:01] And those things grow in the ground, right?

[00:25:04] Whether it's ashwagandha, a root, or if it's mushrooms, if it's CBD, et cetera, it's something

[00:25:14] that is in nature.

[00:25:16] And it'll be interesting, right?

[00:25:19] Like how it unfolds.

[00:25:22] Are we going to want to find that natural thing?

[00:25:25] Or do we want a big pharma company to come in and control aspects of that?

[00:25:29] And that's the only place you can get that.

[00:25:31] How much you want to regulate that?

[00:25:33] Obviously, you want to regulate it to some extent.

[00:25:35] And, you know, but how far do you go there?

[00:25:37] And there's going to be a market.

[00:25:39] This grows underneath our feet.

[00:25:40] So it's going to be interesting.

[00:25:42] And yeah, distrust is definitely part of it.

[00:25:46] This is my last question.

[00:25:47] What kind of advice would you have?

[00:25:50] There's lots of entrepreneurs who are doing everything from caskets made out of mycelium

[00:25:56] or mushroom materials to coffee in your case.

[00:25:59] There's all of these different things that are happening now with mushrooms.

[00:26:02] And there's all these interesting entrepreneurs who are doing this.

[00:26:06] And as you mentioned, you know, pharma companies and a lot of these bigger companies are noticing

[00:26:11] and probably wanting to gobble up some of that market.

[00:26:13] So there's going to be a competition from small businesses like yourself to competing

[00:26:18] with these giant organizations.

[00:26:20] What advice would you have for people who in general who are making a business out of mushrooms

[00:26:24] and how they should be thinking about it and how they should consider mushrooms as a business?

[00:26:29] I mean, there's a lot.

[00:26:31] Mushrooms are super sustainable and renewable.

[00:26:34] You see companies exploring fungi and mycelium for packaging instead of plastic or things like that

[00:26:43] or things that are completely biodegradable that you can put in your garden.

[00:26:47] I think there's a whole bunch of promise with replacing things that are damaging to our environment

[00:26:53] to things that don't damage our environment.

[00:26:56] I mean, I think there's a lot of possibility.

[00:26:58] There's a lot of possibility in health and wellness, planet health, you know, psilocybin, etc.

[00:27:05] And, you know, obviously this has been around a long, long, long, long, long time.

[00:27:10] And, you know, what's the market for that?

[00:27:13] It's hard to say.

[00:27:14] It's like saying what business should I start?

[00:27:16] But I do think there's a lot of promise in mycelium, I think,

[00:27:22] and mushrooms, fungi for many businesses.

[00:27:25] And yeah, I mean, I think you look at the market opportunity, what problem you're solving.

[00:27:30] I think that innovation is going to be wild to watch in a good way.

[00:27:35] Well, Jodi, thank you so much.

[00:27:37] It's been so great watching you, all of your iterations.

[00:27:40] And this last one is just amazing.

[00:27:43] And I just really appreciate talking to you.

[00:27:45] And congratulations.

[00:27:46] Congratulations and keep on going, making it happen.

[00:27:49] Tim Keck, you're the best.

[00:27:51] I really appreciate this opportunity to chat with you.

[00:27:54] So about fungi.

[00:27:56] And here we are again, doing some shenanigans together.

[00:27:59] So appreciate that.

[00:28:01] Thanks, Jodi.

[00:28:05] Thanks again to my pal, Jodi Hall.

[00:28:07] If you'd like to learn more about Jodi and what she's up to,

[00:28:10] check out information about our guests at themushlovepodcast.com.

[00:28:14] Subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts.

[00:28:16] Thanks for listening.

[00:28:17] See you next time.