Meet The Disruptors: Christian Rasmussen Of Minnesota Nice Ethnobotanicals On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

Providing value that one can’t find elsewhere is really the most effective way out there. There are obvious ways to do this, like provide a better quality product or provide better pricing, but then there are things such as providing content, educational material, and community. Building a culture and a community is a great way to really solidify one’s space in an industry, and it can also be very disruptive to the industry if it’s not something that’s already being done in that particular niche. We certainly try to do this at MN Nice, and are working consistently to build our a bigger community base and provide more and more value to our customers and prospective customers.

As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Christian Rasmussen.

Rasmussen is the founder and owner of Minnesota Nice Ethnobotanicals (MN Nice), the country’s leading vertically integrated ethnobotanical company. In just a few short years, MN Nice has become renowned for its premium Amanita muscaria offerings, thanks to Rasmussen’s ability to craft a niche for enthusiasts of the iconic red and white-spotted mushroom. Following his philosophy of people over profit, Rasmussen is proving that conventional business practices do not always heed success, but rather leading with heart and ingenuity that truly shake up an industry.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

Honestly, it really just sort of fell into my lap. I initially went to school for physics, with the hopes of becoming a theoretical physicist. The ’08 housing crisis happened in the middle of my first year, and I decided to drop out of college and pursue a career in Real Estate. I’ve always been very business minded, and it sounded a bit more exciting than 8 years of schooling. After some years as a successful Real Estate Investor, I decided I wanted a change of pace and opened up MN Nice Botanicals as a cannabis company. I had struggled with addiction my entire life, and during this transition, I also decided it was time to clean up my act. I got off of benzodiazepines on September 16th, 2019, and had no idea what I was in store for. The withdrawal was absolutely brutal. I would say frequently that I’d rather be strapped to a chair and physically tortured than to go through what I was having to deal with.

A year later, it felt like I had healed maybe 5–10%. I was looking at dealing with this for years, and I was about to check out. I was ready to give up. On a hike, I found these beautiful Amanita muscaria mushrooms growing. There was this unbelievably strong heart pull, something I couldn’t ignore, so I picked them and went back to the house to do some research. There wasn’t much online about them at the time, aside from horror stories of people taking obscenely large doses without proper preparation and having bad experiences. But there was one woman, Amanita Dreamer, who had just started her youtube channel. She claimed it healed her brain after getting off of benzodiazepines.

I did some further research and found out that Amanita muscaria hits the same receptor sites that benzodiazepines damage — the gaba and the glutamate system. I figured I had nothing to lose, so I began microdosing.

Within 2–3 weeks of microdosing it felt as if I was 80% healed. It was truly miraculous. It quite literally saved my life.

Eight months later, I turned the cannabis company into an ethnobotanical company, and we started selling Amanita and other plant medicines that hold a dear place in my heart. We were the first to really start selling Amanita in the states to scale.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

I think in a sense really everything we are doing is disruptive. Amanita is such a powerful healing tool. We’ve seen people heal so many different issues, whether it’s mental or emotional issues like depression, anxiety and insomnia, or more complex physical issues such as Parkinsons and Lyme diseases. It’s likely that big pharma wouldn’t be too thrilled about this mushroom getting out to more people.

It’s not only the physical or emotional stuff, there’s a really large spiritual aspect to using this particular mushroom. Many people find themselves more connected to energy, to the universe, to their fellow humans. Intuition seems to skyrocket and hearts seem to open. Many people have also been able to not only give up, but transmute their addictions with Amanita, which is very disruptive in and of itself.

If providing a product that seems to help people heal themselves is disruptive, then we can definitely be put into that category!

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Looking back on everything, it certainly wasn’t a mistake, however, I opened MN Nice 2 months after I got off benzos. I wanted something to keep me occupied while I was going through everything. It was a bit overambitious of me!

Getting everything up and moving was extremely difficult. My mental state was so frazzled that I would have to do everything in 5–10 minute chunks. I would be working on designing the website, for instance, and within 10 minutes be in such a state of terror and agitation that I’d have to take a 30 minute break to calm my nerves down. It was a pretty awful thing to have to go through, but in retrospect I am really grateful I decided to do things that way.

I certainly learned a lot about how to regulate the nervous system, even if my attempts at the time seemed feeble. I also learned a lot about my own determination and will. I felt like I was on a mission, and nothing was going to hold me back from the frontlines.

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

Amanita Dreamer certainly helped me a lot in the beginning. She actually asked me to start selling Amanita here in the states. I haven’t really had any physical mentors for this particular work. We’re really doing something that’s never been done before. That said, I read a lot, and have learned a lot about business from the books I’ve read.

And then there are the spiritual mentors. I’ve studied various spiritual practices my entire life, and everything I do is tied into my spirituality. I am very connected with the ‘other side’, and have been guided throughout everything I’ve done by my team over there. I’m not sure if I’m ready to share those stories publicly yet, but I’ve been shown the steps I’m meant to take many times along the way, and have been guided to the inner healing necessary to take those steps.

In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?

I really think we need to look at the fruit, right? If something is having a net positive effect on people’s lives, it’s obviously a net positive. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s hard to gauge that without gathering anecdotes from individuals that are tied into that particular industry or community. There is confusion whether kratom, for instance — another plant medicine — has a net positive impact or a net negative. On the one hand, it’s helped a ton of people get off of opiates, that’s a massive positive and has likely saved many people’s lives. On the other hand, it’s addicting and has really harmed a lot of people that unknowingly became addicted to it. I think in that situation it’s going to be really hard to quantify whether it’s a net positive or not. I personally believe it is, but others might think differently.

For something like Amanita, we really have only seen a net positive. We really haven’t heard any horror stories, or negative stories. The worst we’ll get is ‘I didn’t feel anything’. The amount of good we’ve done and seen from this mushroom is really astounding.

That said, there is disruption going on in the Amanita space. About a year and a half ago, the synthetic cannabinoid space started perking their ears up to Amanita. They thought it would be the ‘next legal high’ and something that they could profit greatly off of. We were really the only people doing what we were doing in the states, so pretty much everyone in that space got in touch with me. I told everyone that they were looking at Amanita wrong, and it was more for healing and connection than recreation. A few months went by and all these Amanita products were coming out and being placed in smoke shops. When smoke shop customers see gummies in psychedelic packaging, they’re going to expect to ‘trip’ from the product. Amanita really doesn’t have a ‘trip’ associated with it until much higher doses, and even then it’s very different from traditional psychedelics, and only a small amount of people really enjoy it (although most everyone enjoys the lower doses). When these products weren’t producing the effects these companies were hoping for, they decided to start putting research chemicals in their ‘Amanita’ products. Now we see fake Amanita products in stores all around the country that are really research chemical tryptamines, or other even more problematic compounds. We’ve even seen people hospitalized from these, and recently 2 people died from the DIamond Shruumz bars. It’s really tragic and absolutely has been a huge net negative for many, many reasons.

So, yeah, that was very disruptive as well, but definitely not in a positive way.

Can you please share 5 ideas one needs to shake up their industry? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.

1 . Providing value that one can’t find elsewhere is really the most effective way out there. There are obvious ways to do this, like provide a better quality product or provide better pricing, but then there are things such as providing content, educational material, and community. Building a culture and a community is a great way to really solidify one’s space in an industry, and it can also be very disruptive to the industry if it’s not something that’s already being done in that particular niche. We certainly try to do this at MN Nice, and are working consistently to build our a bigger community base and provide more and more value to our customers and prospective customers.

2 . Leading with one’s heart can also be very disruptive, particularly in an industry like this. I am of the belief that business shouldn’t be about making money. Sure, making money is a great byproduct of business, however, business should always first and foremost be about providing value and benefit to the world. It can be a bit tricky to navigate the business world when one is leading with their heart or their ethos, but with strong boundaries and business sense, it’s not only doable, but seems to provide an edge on everyone else out there. Since it’s not done frequently, it can be very disruptive to those in the space that aren’t doing things this way. People will naturally gravitate to individuals leading with their heart, and we see that time and time again with our business and in our space.

3 . Another thing that really sets us apart from the rest of the industry is that we aren’t some faceless entity selling products to people. I am the face of the company, and that was as much a strategic move as anything. When people are purchasing products, they’re not purchasing from MN Nice as much as they’re purchasing from me. We label all of our product bags with ‘Christian’s MN Nice’. Our customers know who I am, and my intention has always been to provide each customer with an opportunity to build a relationship with not only the products or the company, but with me as a person. This is also very disruptive in the sense that not very many companies do this. Some of the greatest companies in the world do things this way, though. With social media it makes it a lot easier to implement.

4 . Challenging an existing industry will also inevitably be disruptive. Any of the points I outlined above do this, but then there are other industries that might be in direct competition with the industry one is involved in. Initially I think of the pharmaceutical and alcohol industry for what we are doing. We’ve seen thousands of people get off of benzodiazepines and alcohol from using Amanita, and that is very disruptive in the fact that it is directly competing and taking business from these other industries. Not to mention it’s such a net positive.

5 . I’m also a big fan of collaboration with other existing businesses. It’s disruptive in the sense that not many people are doing it, and it’s challenging the status quo, but it’s really a constructive creative way to build your customer base and provide more value to your current customers. We’re working on a few fun things that I haven’t seen implemented anywhere else that will utilize creative collaboration to foster community, provide more value for the consumer, and allow businesses to share in their ecosystems.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

There’s a lot of fun things in the pipeline! Unfortunately I’m not able to publicly discuss them as of now, but we should be rolling out some new things in the next 6 months that are really exciting. Things that I haven’t seen any other businesses doing. We’re also focusing heavily on education and PR, so I’ll be doing more and more interviews like this and getting out into the public eye more as things progress.

Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?

I share this story in the bio on our website. The book that completely changed the trajectory of my life was ‘The Holographic Universe’ by Michael Talbot. I was always interested in physics and spirituality, but this book really put me on a path to understanding more of the inner workings of this universe, my role in it and what I might be able to accomplish here. I highly recommend it to anyone interested.

When I was 19, I moved to Portland OR for a bit with a friend. We met this guy named Bobby, and started playing music with him regularly. Bobby’s Dad was a paranoid schizophrenic, and was in and out of the house constantly, oftentimes gone for weeks at a time. One day, about 6 months into our move, Bobby’s Dad came home unexpectedly. We were downstairs playing music, and he came down the stairs and walked right up to me. His hair was in an unkempt frenzy, and his eyes were intensely passionate, yet he wasn’t fully there. He handed me this book, really emphatically, and as his eyes widened, and somewhat aggressively he said, ‘they told me you needed to have this!’. He then walked upstairs and left the house and I never saw him again.

A week or so later, I had just climbed a mountain, and was in the middle of a cloud, staring directly at the sun (which I could do because of the light refraction from being inside a cloud). It was a really powerful experience to be able to gaze at the sun without my eyes hurting. In the middle of this meditative dance I was performing with the sun, I got hit with the really profound knowing that it was time to go home back to MN.

A week later, we had broken our lease and had a new apartment back in MN. It wasn’t until 6 months later that I read the book and realized that’s what I went to Portland to get (that and my cat, Spazz). That book completely changed my life and sent me down a deep rabbit hole of quantum mechanics and spirituality.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

My favorite quote is one that I was told by one of my guides on the other side. It’s a long story that I won’t get into here, but what they told me was ‘The seed doesn’t germinate in the light.’ This was during my benzodiazepine withdrawal. It was a really powerful reminder that, yes, I was going through some very difficult times, but it was all necessary for me to germinate — to evolve. I imagine it’s not very comfortable for a seed to crack open and begin growing through the dark, cold soil, out of its protective shell. But how worth it when it pops out of the soil, can embrace the light and warmth of the sun, while being rooted in the Earth.

I like to think I’ve broken out of the soil now and am now ever growing, reaching out towards the sun, while simultaneously grounding myself in the womb of Mother Earth.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I’m certainly doing the best I can here. I really just want to do my part to help heal and change the world.

I think we’re in the process of creating that movement. It’s certainly something that I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time. Sometimes I wish it would happen quicker! But I’m learning to take a step back and watch things unfold in divine timing.

The movement is really already a thing, but I think we’re hitting it from a different perspective. The goal is healing and evolution. Amanita doesn’t just have a profound healing effect on people, it also seems to help connect them to their inner selves, and help orient them to a more fulfilling, spiritual existence. It’s not only helping them heal, but helping them grow and evolve. That’s what I’m all about. I want to heal and grow and evolve, and if I can do anything to help others do the same, I want to do it.

If there is a movement being created, it’s not me that’s doing it, it’s the mushroom and the collective intention of humanity to grow, heal and evolve. I’m just a conduit to help facilitate. There is some other stuff regarding this, some other plans, that I’d love to talk about, but not yet! As I mentioned earlier, I think if the reader follows us and follows our story over the next 6 months to a year, they’ll start seeing what I’m eluding to come to fruition. It’s a really exciting time for us over here, and for everyone that’s a part of our community. I’m very grateful and humbled to be able to be in the position I’m in. I’m not sure where things will go from here. I have my ideas and my goals and ambitions, but the universe generally always has something bigger and better in store than what I could have imagined. Let’s see what happens next!

How can our readers follow you online?

Our website is MNNiceEthno.com. We, unfortunately, were just banned from Instagram for Amanita (such a shame!), but I have a new account which is @minnesotaniceethno. We are on X @MNNiceEthno. And are Minnesota Nice Ethnobotanicals on Facebook. I’ve also done a lot of podcasts which can be found directly on our website under the ‘podcasts with Christian’ tab.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!