Umbo co-founder Jake Plummer recently joined the guys at The Dan Le Batard Show, where he was asked to talk about being "one of the nation's foremost mushroom advocates." The whole episode is great — they go deep on mushrooms of all kinds, and Jake wears a silly hat too.

Here are handful of great quotes from the interview:  

From cannabis to functional mushrooms

"My journey has taken me a lot of different ways but one that was really profound was through the use of nature and, and natural ways of healing first with, you know, cannabis — differentiating between CBD and marijuana, advocating and educating on that. I now have another opportunity here with functional mushrooms, through some close friends that are in the know, and they sent me some mushroom tinctures, got me out in the woods looking for obviously for fungi out in the trees."

"This has become really an amazing journey, just to try to help people feel better, whatever that means for them. We're not gonna talk about curing anything or eliminating any of your ailments or diseases, because we can't. There are no studies being done yet. But man, it's sure it's sure nice to feel better each day and have more focus, more energy, sleep better at night. And that's what these wonderful fungi have have provided me."

Doing the hard work to heal

"So I have to get out there and share this because I know there's a lot of people out there struggling with their health. And I have a whole lot of buddies that are, that are going down that route, post career, physical dysfunction, cognitive decline. And I want to get serious about it. So as we grow with, we're gonna be able to go do some of this serious work and get some of these clinical studies done and figure out if there's a way to reverse some of these trends that really don't give much hope for these guys in the long run."

Playing and living through pain

"I love to do it. I love playing ball. I mean, recess in grade school we were playing tackle football. I also played a lot of other sports. I play even still today, dabble in a lot of different sports yet. I don't put the pads on because I think if I got hit and I had to land on my back, I jsut don't think I'd get up from the pain, you know? Just that my body... I'm not in daily pain, but just my body doesn't move like that anymore. And I'm okay with that."

"I've come to accept being 49. At what stage I'm in. I still get around really well."

"I played a lot of games. I played 14 years straight from ASU then into the league, starting halfway through my rookie year, played in a lot of games and I played through a lot of pain. I played through injuries. I probably should have taken a break and sat down and, like, let it heal. Instead, I pushed through it. I pushed the pain down."

"I'm kidding myself if I'm saying I'm just gonna be fine, because there are days that pain wears on me, wears on my nerves. It makes me a little less patient, makes me short, kind of a mudge, and grumpy sometimes. And I don't like that."

The opportunity and potential of functional mushrooms

"So through my post career, you know, dealing with those kind of things settling in,  as I'm not getting the treatment and, you know, working out all the time and doing the things that we did as, as athletes. I started to feel my body and that's when, you know, nature came in. First, Charlotte's Web and CBD. And then, the opportunity to start using functional mushrooms. We differentiate between gourmet mushrooms that you can cook and you can eat. Then functional mushrooms. And then medicinal mushrooms, which I like to say are the ones that we talk about for psychedelics or hallucinogens. There's some true healing power there also. And there are studies being done in a lot of leading universities around the country to find out what these mushrooms can provide for us in, in our society that has a lot of mental health issues.

"But for physical health, I felt like these things [functional mushrooms] really help clear my body of the lingering inflammation. The give me that hope of a longer, more vital life — with more vitality, more longevity to carry on down the path as I age. Because we all are gonna age. It's just whether you do it gracefully or not.

"So I want to age well and be active long into my eighties, nineties, even hopefully into my hundreds. And these [functional mushrooms] have given me the hope for that."