Healing Power of MUSHROOMS with Amentara CEO Christian Rasmussen | Hn 260

**Haman Nature** (0:07)
Christian Rasmussen, welcome to Haman Nature. What is the deal with mushrooms?

**Christian Rasmussen** (0:15)
I mean, I don't know, we're seeing such a big renaissance, I guess, in the mushroom realm. I think people are, you know, where the potential scope and efficacy is starting to get, you know, looked at and maybe expanded upon even. Well, I'm not like necessarily, you know, a mushroom guy. I guess in some sense I am, but like I deal with a very, very specific mushroom. I guess in more senses, I'm like a consciousness guy, right?

**Haman Nature** (0:46)
Yeah.

**Christian Rasmussen** (0:47)
And that particular mushroom that I work with the most just happens to be a really powerful tool in the development of one's consciousness.

**Haman Nature** (0:58)
So folks, I've got a very special guest on here.
A former Minnesota boy. So kind of like myself here, we got that kinship, but I've got got on with us Christian who founded a company called Amentara. And they sell some very interesting medicinal type products based on mushrooms. So, Christian, tell us a little bit about your company Amentara, how that came into being.

**Christian Rasmussen** (1:26)
Yeah, so we're the largest retailers of Amanita Mascaria in the world. And Amanita Mascaria is the traditional toadstool mushroom. So you see it in Alice in Wonderland, you see it in Mario Brothers, the Smurfs live under a mushroom emoji on your iPhone. It's arguably one of the most iconic symbols in the world, is that red mushroom with white dots.
And then we sell basically any legal psychoactive plant medicine that has a good safety profile. We're not going to sell things that are really dangerous. There are a handful of legal psychoactive plants that are very hard on the body or very hard to experience. But basically, any legal safe psychoactive substance we're selling.
I was a poly drug addict in my 20s. I was very successful also, but I was in real estate. I was chasing the dopamine hit with my life, and I was addicted to opioids and benzodiazepines among other things.
I was really good at it. I put on a face, like nobody really knew what I was doing, and I was like, I mentioned I was good at what I did until I wasn't. It was maybe 27, 28 that are all started to fall apart, and I wasn't able to...
I've always had really, really ambitious goals. I felt since I was a kid, I was here to do something really important, right? And that's been a driving force in a lot of my life.
It's led me to study physics like I did in college, and it led me to study consciousness like I've done my whole life. I've always been really into plant medicines and meditation and various other spiritual practices. But life started to unravel, and I realized I was either going to die or at the very least, I wasn't going to be able to do what I came here to do or what I've felt like. I have the impact in the world that I felt like I've been meant to have. So I decided to get off of opioids first, which I had done before. Very difficult, not easy, don't recommend it, but it was manageable, it was doable. I had heard that Benzos were like, and Benzos for anybody that doesn't know, are typical anti-anxiety medications like Xanax, or Klonopin, or Ativan, or Valium. They're extremely widely prescribed. It's something like eight million Americans are actively addicted to them, insane numbers.
Well, A, in the pharmaceutical community is the worst pharmaceutical to get off, but then also in the drug realm, the recreational drug realm, as the worst substance to get off of. And I can attest to that. It's infinitely harder. It was infinitely harder for me to get off of these than it was heroin. And it is such because it's really... There's the withdrawal period, which is brutal and difficult, and then they call it post-acute withdrawal syndrome, but really what one is dealing with is brain damage. Benzo has damaged the GABA system, which is our inhibitory system, and the glutamate system, which is our excitatory system.
And that can take years for people to heal fully. I know people that have been off of Benzo's for 10 plus years and they're still like sick, you know, their brain still hasn't balanced out. And so for me, you know, I got off of them and it was a year of living in terror, basically, like it was like panic attack, fight or flight times 10, you know, like to a level that I hadn't experienced before constantly. And so like zero sleep. You can imagine if you're in a panic attack, like how do you sleep, you know? It's like barely any sleep and then a whole host of physiological symptoms. It felt like everybody was out to get me. And you know, it was, it was a really, really brutal time. And I was a year, it was actually a year to the day. I got off of Benzo's September 16th, 2019 And on September 16th, 2020, I was on a hike and I was like ready to end it. You know, I was done. And I was, you know, like contemplating what that would look like and, you know, getting kind of a plan together in my head.