Keep Going Podcast

Dive into the latest Keep Going Podcast featuring Tracey Tee, the founder and steward of Moms on Mushrooms, as she shares her revolutionary approach to microdosing psilocybin for better mental health and healing ​. In this thrilling recap, discover:

• How a 2020 camping trip led Tee to test microdosing and completely transform her life amid pandemic losses.

• The core mission of Moms on Mushrooms: a digital community and educational platform empowering mothers to explore psychedelic-assisted therapy safely.

• Why intuitive microdosing, instead of rigid protocols, can help busy moms regain presence, patience, and creativity without weekend retreats.

• Real-life success stories: from moms reducing nightly wine to rediscovering laughter with their children.

• Expert insights on breaking the stigma with fact-based education and understanding psilocybin’s low toxicity compared to alcohol.

• A peek into the future: Tee’s vision for mindful, sacred use of psychedelics that could reshape mental health care for generations.

Whether you’re a curious first-timer or a seasoned psychonaut, this episode is your gateway to understanding how microdosing can become a game-changer for stressed-out parents.

LISTEN HERE

Read Transcript

[00:00:00] Keep Going Podcast: Welcome to Keep Going, a podcast about failure and success hosted by John Biggs. Every week we talk to an amazing person about a time they failed and what they learned. And remember when you are going through hell, keep going.

[00:00:24] John Biggs: Welcome back to going a podcast about success and failure. I'm John Bigs.

[00:00:28] John Biggs: Today on the show we. Tracey Tee from Moms on Mushrooms. This is a this is an interesting episode for us because this is a I guess this is a practical way for a lot of women, mothers older women to begin psychedelics and and change their lives. Welcome, Tracey.

[00:00:44] Tracey Tee: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

[00:00:46] John Biggs: Yeah. So tell me a little bit about moms and mushrooms real quick.

[00:00:49] Tracey Tee: Yeah, sure. Moms On Mushrooms is an online educational platform and digital community that aims to bring mothers together around the safe and intentional use of. Working with psychedelic medicine for better mental health and healing. So we really do base our whole core mission is education.

[00:01:05] Tracey Tee: Coupled with community so that mothers can feel like they have a safe place to understand what psychedelics are, especially microdosing, psilocybin, microdosing magic mushrooms to. Feel like they can get information that's relevant to them in a way that they can understand it. And then work with it in community of not only experienced mothers, but mothers who share the same experiences as them.

[00:01:29] Tracey Tee: So that you can create an intentional, hopefully, lifelong relationship with this medicine that you can apply to many areas of your life.

[00:01:38] John Biggs: Okay. And then I'm gonna do a, I'm gonna do the conclusion. So where can people find out more about this?

[00:01:44] Tracey Tee: Moms on mushrooms.com should have everything you need to know.

[00:01:47] Tracey Tee: We have a great freebie, PDF, that is, I'm a mom, is microdosing right for me. That guides you through some critical questions to ask yourself. Again, everything we write is through the lens of motherhood. So whether you're a new mom. You're coming up to be a mom, or you're a mom who's got grown and flown kiddos and you're working with grandkids.

[00:02:05] Tracey Tee: We, we all moms welcome and we've got plenty of resources for you. So just visit moms on mushrooms.com.

[00:02:11] John Biggs: I'm a little bit hurt that there's no dads on mushrooms.

[00:02:13] Tracey Tee: Oh, I'm working on it. Okay, perfect. All right. Yeah.

[00:02:16] John Biggs: All right. If you need any help, if you need any help on that,

[00:02:18] Tracey Tee: we're an online educational platform and community that aims to bring mothers together around safe, intentional use of microdosing, safe and intentional use of psychedelics.

[00:02:31] Tracey Tee: In this season, we're focusing highly on microdosing psilocybin because I feel like that's a really beautiful foundation to understand psychedelics. And I believe that I believe that in the west where we have a culture that has not been. Raised or grown up around with any context on understanding entheogenic medicine.

[00:02:54] Tracey Tee: And then women and mothers especially. I believe microdosing is a beautiful way to create an intentional relationship with the medicine and understand it before you go into a large dose. Scenario, which as we're seeing more and more people leap in with both feet unprepared, uneducated, un contextualized, and then can become very destabilized.

[00:03:14] Tracey Tee: So for me, I think microdosing really fits, is really good for, especially mothers and mothers who are busy doing a thousand things. It's a way to work with this medicine without having to set aside a weekend or two weeks in Bali.

[00:03:27] John Biggs: Just to get it outta the way, what's the, what's like the. The Rick recommended recommended regimen.

[00:03:32] John Biggs: Is it the whatchamacallit, the, like the, I read the Alet Wads book she was doing LSD. What would you recommend for somebody, I guess maybe even a little bit older, who's thinking about it

[00:03:42] Tracey Tee: in terms of,

[00:03:43] John Biggs: yeah. And just just to if, so first off they need to go to the website, right?

[00:03:46] John Biggs: They gotta hit the website and get the information, but what's like the rule of thumb that you offer people if they're, if you're just chatting about it yeah,

[00:03:52] Tracey Tee: We love, I think we're really focused on, I. Magic mushrooms right now, psilocybin. And in terms of regimen, it's funny, we tend to actually make a lot of people mad because I don't really think that this medicine needs a protocol.

[00:04:05] Tracey Tee: I'm not sure we need another dude in a lab coat telling us exactly what to take and when to take it. I think we can intuitively understand what's best for us. That's what comes with intentional microdosing. And so what we really try to do in our courses and our smaller group cohorts is to create a container where women can, again, create a relationship with the medicine, understand how it feels in their body, understand what they're putting in their body, and then say, oh, actually I think.

[00:04:36] Tracey Tee: This is how I wanna take it and this is what works best for me, rather than it being so like western allopathic medicine. So I would say our protocol is intuitive microdosing, but it takes a while to get your brain around that. 'cause it's not how we're. It's not how we're trained.

[00:04:53] John Biggs: Okay. So it's not it's not take 0.2 grams every day at six in the morning.

[00:04:58] John Biggs: It's no take, take a little piece and see what happens.

[00:05:01] Tracey Tee: Yeah. And the adages apply. Start low, go slow. Listen to your body. And more than anything, again, know your why. Know why you're doing this. Ask yourself why you wanna take this medicine. What's your intention? What do you want out of it?

[00:05:15] Tracey Tee: And do you understand that this isn't actually a magic pill? It's not gonna, you're not gonna lose 30 pounds. Fix your marriage, write the book. It doesn't work that way. So a lot of what we offer is an opportunity to unlearn what we think about medicine and understand that this is like a co-created experience where you're required to do work.

[00:05:33] Tracey Tee: It's not passive like

[00:05:35] Tracey Tee: Advil, you have a headache, you take Advil, you sit back and wait for it to go away. The same is true even for SSRIs, where psilocybin doesn't really do that. Psilocybin asks you to. Meet it in the middle

[00:05:48] John Biggs: if you're at the, if you're at the birthday party or at the bar or whatever, what do you say to a mother who's been trying or woman who's been thinking about this and is unsure where to start, or even why to start?

[00:06:00] Tracey Tee: Yeah. I would say, first I would say what's calling you to this? Why do you think that this might be something that. Would be a good fit for you. And those answers are varied. It can start with, I just wanna get off my medications, I wanna get off my SSRIs, I wanna stop feeling so overwhelmed.

[00:06:16] Tracey Tee: Mothers specifically, we hear I, I just, I. I wanna be more present with my kids. I wanna have fun with my kids. I don't remember how to have fun. Older demographics. A lot of mothers in their 60, 70 eighties come to us who are grandmothers now and are realizing that they don't wanna spend their third act of life.

[00:06:37] Tracey Tee: In the same mindset that they've spent the first two. I've had women tell me, I, I wanna laugh again. I'm actually not sure if I've ever laughed. I don't remember. Just laughing. I actually want to cry. I don't remember the last time I've cried. So identifying those wants and then understanding if microdosing could help that I think is probably the first step.

[00:06:58] Tracey Tee: And then I always just say. Educate yourself, take some time to really understand what this is, to understand the medicine, to understand your brain. Again, we're taking, we're given medicine so quickly in the Western medical model, and we don't have, we don't, there's no opportunity to ask questions. There's not a lot of encouragement to do research.

[00:07:19] Tracey Tee: What you read is usually sponsored by the people that are making it. It's not objective. And, I think it's really important to know what we put in our body, and you've made it this far without shrooms, so you can wait a few more weeks or a month while you read. There's so many podcast books, all these things or in communities and then decide.

[00:07:37] Tracey Tee: And then the last I would say is I would suggest to work with this medicine initially in community because you learn as much about your experience. By sharing it with others as you do, by hearing their experiences as well. And when you have shared experiences like motherhood, it just adds a layer of trust and understanding between people.

[00:07:58] Tracey Tee: And typically our issues tend to be in the same vein and the same tone. And so it's just really nice to have people to walk through this because it's just uniquely different. Again, it's not passive medicine.

[00:08:12] John Biggs: What do you do to break the stigma? Some of the folks that I talked to are basically saying, oh I remember some guy jumped off a roof or whatever.

[00:08:19] John Biggs: And that's like apocryphal, right? So the they're gonna, they're gonna tell that story over and over again. How do you break that stigma? How do you break that fear?

[00:08:26] Tracey Tee: Education? I think the stigma and the fear that exists right now is completely. Directly correlated to decades of misinformation.

[00:08:35] Tracey Tee: And that's the truth. So the idea that someone's gonna jump off a building that is patently untrue. And so for me, the stigma. Is very easily broken when you start to get to the facts and it's your choice, of course, if you wanna believe the facts, but the facts exist. We actually have no recorded known cause of death directly from psilocybin anywhere.

[00:08:55] Tracey Tee: And the person who jumped off the building, I think there was actually three people who jumped off buildings. A, they were taking other substances, and that's the number one thing. And B, jumping off the building like. Is what killed them. It's not, it's horrible and you can absolutely like. Take too many mushrooms and get in a car and cause a lot of damage.

[00:09:14] Tracey Tee: But that's a, that's the case with any substance, including alcohol, which is abundantly available on every street corner in America. And we have 420 deaths directly correlated to alcohol every single day of the year in America. So for me, the stigma just. Goes back to facts. And really understanding that even on the toxicity level, psilocybin is the lowest toxic substance of anything.

[00:09:37] Tracey Tee: And actually alcohol is the highest. So again, it comes back to unlearning everything we thought we knew about medicine, about drugs and. Asking ourselves, am I willing to actually believe the facts? Am I willing to drop this narrative that I've been told? And that's an individual choice.

[00:09:56] John Biggs: What about legalization?

[00:09:57] John Biggs: What, what do folks do if they're in places where, presumably you should be able to get 'em. You can start growing anywhere unless you're in Florida apparently. But but what should people do to get started and like even just obtaining them aside from doing sketchy stuff.

[00:10:13] Tracey Tee: Yeah. I'm probably not gonna comment on that. Okay.

[00:10:16] John Biggs: Just find a group that's, find a friendly group nearby, something like that.

[00:10:19] Tracey Tee: I think if you start with education you'll be guided to the right places. And always. They are easy to grow and I do think they're a democratic medicine.

[00:10:27] Tracey Tee: Mushrooms grow psilocybin, banus or psilocybe banus, the genus of psychedelic mushrooms. That's the most popular, grows on every single continent in the world, except Antarctica. It is the most democratic medicine. If you feel like taking a chance, growing your own is probably the safest.

[00:10:41] Tracey Tee: And the rest I have, I'm not gonna comment on

[00:10:43] John Biggs: Yeah. I'm growing 10 strains for the book oh

[00:10:45] Tracey Tee: my

[00:10:45] John Biggs: gosh. So I have I have I have a lot of good friends right now. We're very excited.

[00:10:50] Tracey Tee: Mushrooms in a truck. It's all you need to have friends. Yeah.

[00:10:53] John Biggs: Yeah. I got, I gave a buddy of mine, a whole box, like blue meanies.

[00:10:57] John Biggs: Oh my gosh. And he wasn't aware of their potency. And all of a sudden he he realized he was in a sushi restaurant, like the fish was talking to him and stuff. And that got messy, so it didn't work out so well. But he learned yeah. Cool. That's why I'm here. So the.

[00:11:16] John Biggs: From a women's point of view, what are the benefits do you think of this medicine? We already discussed that a little bit, but I think there might be some, we can dig down a little more specifics.

[00:11:26] Tracey Tee: Yeah, there's a lot of really promising research happening right now on psychedelics and premenstrual dysphoric disorder, PMS perimenopause, menopause postpartum disorder.

[00:11:38] Tracey Tee: I think what we're seeing is that there is some correlation between, psilocybin affecting our serotonin and female hormones, and I think we're getting closer and closer. I don't know that everyone's quite figured it out, but what we're finding is that women especially just really benefit from the.

[00:12:02] Tracey Tee: The increased mindfulness, the increased patience the decreased reactivity that psilocybin specifically tends to bring. I really think that's amplified in a microdosing setting began because you're taking small amounts and you're rewiring in neural pathways in real time. It's not just like one big day on the floor crying all day long or one large concert.

[00:12:24] Tracey Tee: It's little by little and if you apply it with mindfulness practices, whether that's, journaling or meditation or church or even going for a walk, if you just apply it with something that's a little bit more mindful and intentional, we are. Just beautiful expansion in that space. And for women and for mothers specifically.

[00:12:46] Tracey Tee: It's such a crazy, overwhelming world. And the number one thing that mothers come to us with is, I'm just overwhelmed and unhappy. There's too much stimuli, there's too much to do. Everything is everywhere, all at once. Kids are, it's hard to be a mom in the first place and presence and patience is something that is really.

[00:13:07] Tracey Tee: Desired right now in the modern mother, and I think that microdosing can really help that. So I think there's, and then, from the brain standpoint, focus, clarity, creativity my prayer is that we're gonna see great strides happen even with dementia and Alzheimer's. So there's just a lot of real great benefits for that focus piece where we can start.

[00:13:28] Tracey Tee: Titrating off or dropping some of the peripheral medications that are over prescribed right now and really get dial into what's bothering us and really what we need to focus on rather than just piling pills on top of each other.

[00:13:43] John Biggs: Can you tell me like a success story? Do you remember anybody specifically who would like, who came in?

[00:13:49] John Biggs: He came in upset or maybe even skeptical and then went away a changed person?

[00:13:54] Tracey Tee: Yeah. We see that every day. I would say there's so many. Some of the common success stories that we see at moms on mushrooms are while a. I'm just having more fun with my kids. I'm getting down on the floor and playing with my kids or I, I'm actually okay to tell my kids that they can go play by myself and I don't feel guilty.

[00:14:16] Tracey Tee: Like I have to be with my kids all the time, which is actually just as liberating. A lot of moms find that they come to moms on mushrooms because they're finding that they're deeply relying on that one to two or three glasses of wine every night, and they just. Don't like it. It doesn't feel good.

[00:14:32] Tracey Tee: They don't wanna do that, and they find that psilocybin because of its anti addictive properties. They don't drink as much as they used to. A lot of moms find that they're able to work through a period of grief, whether that is birth trauma or womb trauma or a divorce. And, we get a ton of moms that are just saying, I just, I feel more creative.

[00:14:53] Tracey Tee: I'm painting again, I'm writing again, I'm playing my instruments again. Not because I feel like I have to or that I wanna start a business, but 'cause it's fun. And we have a lot of moms that just start having a lot more fun. And, I think when there's happy, healthy moms, that's when we raise happy, healthy kids.

[00:15:11] Tracey Tee: So I'm all for it.

[00:15:13] John Biggs: And how did you come into this

[00:15:15] Tracey Tee: Covid? I lost a business and it was devastating. I'm a third generation entrepreneur. I had a really successful, actually comedy show, live touring comedy show that I had created, co-created with my best friend and business partner. And when the lockdowns happened, of course, every live entertainment business just basically tanked overnight and we watched a nearly 10-year-old business just slip through our fingers like sand and the grief was palpable. That plus navigating online school and having a third grader and trying to explain this insane thing that was happening I just found myself at a crossroads and I'd been on a spiritual path for.

[00:15:54] Tracey Tee: Several years prior to that, and mushrooms would always come up in my research or my readings. And I just was always like I just can't do that. I'm a mom. There's no way. And I was raised in the Reagan era in a very conservative Christian home. So I never did drugs, and I just thought, there's no way.

[00:16:10] Tracey Tee: And then my same best friend and business partner invited me to a like a camping trip with a bunch of moms in the summer of 2020. And we, and she's and you're gonna put your brick, gold pants on and you're gonna eat some damn mushrooms. And it changed my life in every way, and I just knew that there was something there.

[00:16:29] Tracey Tee: I'd also had a hysterectomy at 41. A full hysterectomy that launched me into surgical menopause. The next day. And so my functional medicine doctor wisely put me on Wellbutrin to handle that swing of just walk. I literally walked into the hospital with, hormones and I walked out with hot sweats in 24 hours.

[00:16:47] Tracey Tee: That's how fast the change is in your body. So the Wellbutrin, she suggested would be really good to help mitigate some of these intense side effects of having a full hysterectomy. And I'm grateful for it, but I didn't wanna be on Wellbutrin forever, so I was curious if Microdosing would help.

[00:17:02] Tracey Tee: And so it all roads just led to that and I taught myself.

[00:17:08] John Biggs: Interesting. And how many how many groups or how many meetings do you guys have per year or whatever?

[00:17:12] Tracey Tee: So we have a online community. It's a private community called the Grow. It's like Facebook for moms on shrooms.

[00:17:18] Tracey Tee: And there's about 2000 paying members of that community right now. We've put about. 4,000 women through either a group course, a self-paced course, or through our community in the last two and a half years. So we're growing. We have like instant courses where people can just download and read.

[00:17:40] Tracey Tee: We have small group cohorts that last three months and we have specialty offerings in between integration circles, all sorts of stuff. We're just trying to meet moms where they're at and give them the resources that they need because I think, again, education is the foundation of all of it. If you don't know and understand what this medicine is it's probably not gonna work for you.

[00:17:58] Tracey Tee: So our job is really to educate mothers in the way that best suits them, and then give them the presentation of choice of is this something that you think is going to work for you and your life, and are you willing to commit to it?

[00:18:10] John Biggs: From a business standpoint, do you think this is gonna get, be as big as, I don't know, tobacco alcohol, that sort of recreational stuff?

[00:18:17] John Biggs: What do you think the, what do you think the future of psilocybin or psychedelic based businesses are?

[00:18:21] Tracey Tee: I think the future's very bright. I really don't see it going. The recreational route as intensely as tobacco or alcohol or even cannabis. I think because of the first psychedelic revolution in the sixties, there's a lot of bad tastes, rightfully in people's mouths of how not to do this.

[00:18:40] Tracey Tee: I don't def, I don't think we should be dropping acid tablets from airplanes onto groups of evil. It's like never a good idea. And I think a lot of people in this space really want to keep it mindful and keep it sacred and safe. I think the future is very bright. I see in the, within the next 20 years, our children understanding that if they're struggling, that psychedelics are an option.

[00:19:04] Tracey Tee: I'm seeing a lot of addictions being healed through multiple psychedelics, and I'm hoping that. There will be a priority on education and understanding of how they work, rather than just compounding it into another pharmaceutical drug that people take without understanding. And I think that's where we're at right now.

[00:19:23] Tracey Tee: We're at this like in this liminal space of really saying, can we usher this into this new time in a new way. Or are we just gonna repeat the same thing we've been doing? And I'm really hopeful that we're not gonna repeat the same thing we've been doing.

[00:19:37] John Biggs: Okay. Very cool. So I think this was such a good interview.

[00:19:39] John Biggs: I have another, I have my podcast, which is Keep going, which has right now it has, it used to have 130,000, but Sub Stacks messed me up, so I'm trying to figure out how to grow it back up again. But I'm gonna put this in as a podcast episode, if that's okay. Oh. Of course. Yeah, because that'll get you all kinds of eyeballs.

[00:19:53] John Biggs: Great. No, I love that. Thank you. The book is not coming out until I don't know, next year anyway, so I'm gonna, who's the publisher? It's Skyhorse Press, who also is also publishing Melania's book. Oh. Okay. And Danesh DEA and RFK Junior. Okay. And and I'm not the happiest puppy about that, but the way I figure those people are buying more books than young people are.

[00:20:15] John Biggs: There was this book called Trippy that just came out about Ayahuasca, and I think it just, I think it just bombed. Yeah, because nobody the people who should be reading it aren't reading it, and they're afraid to read it 'cause it's not. So I figure if I'm next to freaking Melania in the airport, then maybe that'll be better, I hope.

[00:20:30] John Biggs: Yeah. But I also hope I don't become like a, I don't become a grifter, but I think that's a, I think that just requires some, I think that just requires an amount of will willpower. I think this has been Keep going. Podcast about success and failure. I'm John Biggs. We'll see you. Thank you for listening to Keep Going, a podcast about success and failure.

[00:20:50] John Biggs: Remember, keep Going, is entirely listener supported. If you're listening to this, please head over to Keep Going pod.com, where you can subscribe to the podcast for as little as $5 a month. This is a labor of love and every little bit helps. Thanks for listening.