The Mush Room | Episode 8: Serendipity, Mycelium, and the Magic of Community with Omar Dasco-Uribe

Some connections are just meant to happen. Johnny met Omar at the Telluride Mushroom Festival and knew immediately this was a conversation worth recording. Omar Dasco-Uribe is an Ojai-based community builder, educator, entrepreneur, and lifelong student of the relationship between people, nature, and fungi. A chef for 14 years, a microdosing coach, and the founder of OHMS Collective, Omar has spent years exploring the intersections of food, mycology, personal growth, wellness, and community. His work is rooted in one simple belief: meaningful change begins with relationship to ourselves, to each other, and to the living world around us. In 2026, Omar founded and is producing the Ojai Mushroom Summit, bringing together scientists, cultivators, farmers, chefs, artists, educators, healers, and the fungi curious for an eight-day event built around learning, connection, and cross-pollination. At the heart of everything he does is a desire to create spaces where people can learn something, meet someone, get a little weird, and leave feeling more connected than when they arrived. This episode covers everything: food, grief, psychedelics, discipline, community activism, and what it actually takes to build something meaningful from the ground up. They open by tracing Omar’s path from growing up in Ohio with a close-knit neighborhood feel, to culinary school in Santa Barbara, to discovering Lion’s Mane forty feet up in a tree and hauling it down with a hundred-foot rope and a lot of determination. His culinary background gave him a deep appreciation for the versatility of mushrooms and eventually led him straight into the medicinal side of things when his girlfriend was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and Lion’s Mane showed real promise in supporting myelin regeneration. Omar opens up about losing his father to stage four esophageal cancer at fifteen and how that loss set him adrift for years, until a group of friends invited him to take mushrooms on the day the world was supposed to end in 2012. What followed were hours of realizations stacked on realizations, a profound shift in how he understood life, death, and his place in it. He and Johnny go deep on how grief and loss can actually open a person more fully to what mushrooms have to offer, and why the medicine seems to come in hardest when you need it most. The conversation moves into microdosing and both Omar and Johnny share how finding a devoted daily practice changed everything. Omar talks about building his microdosing routine into his life as a chef, first experimenting in a high-pressure hotel kitchen and discovering a kind of clarity and flow he hadn’t felt before. He also co-authored a book called The Trip Tracker with therapist Gwen Pelofini of Rooted Ethos, a straightforward intention-setting and somatic journaling guide designed to help people actually get something out of their microdosing practice instead of just taking something and wondering why nothing’s happening. Johnny shares how his Micro Discipline program approaches this from the same angle: preparing the vessel before the medicine, building the habits and the vessel first so that when the window opens, you’re actually ready to walk through it. They both land on the same idea: the mushrooms aren’t the power, they’re showing you your power. They talk about the current state of the mushroom supplement market, why so many products have nothing real in them, and why education is the most important tool for helping everyday people navigate that noise. They also discuss the legal landscape in California, how decriminalization is slowly spreading from Santa Cruz outward, and what’s happening in Illinois with the new psychedelic-assisted therapy bill for veterans and the formation of the Illinois psilocybin committee board. Johnny shares that he and Devin have partnered with Decrim Nature to launch the Chicago chapter and begin working with city council on bringing real change to the state. They close with a full breakdown of the Ojai Mushroom Summit, how it grew from a two-day symposium to an eight-day event, what to expect if you show up, and the honest lessons Omar learned about event production, sponsor outreach, and the importance of prepping like a chef. **About Omar Dasco-Uribe:** Omar Dasco-Uribe is an Ojai-based community builder, educator, and founder of OHMS Collective. A chef for 14 years and a microdosing coach, he co-authored The Trip Tracker with therapist Gwen Pelofini and produces the Ojai Mushroom Summit. His work lives at the intersection of food, fungi, wellness, and community activation. **Connect with Omar:** Instagram**:** https://www.instagram.com/ojai.mushroom.summit/ Website: ohmscollective.com Tickets for the Ojai Mushroom Summit: https://events.humanitix.com/ojai-mushroom-summit **Mentioned in this episode:** The Trip Tracker by Omar Dasco-Uribe and Gwen Pelofini, available at ohmscollective.com. Forgotten.life is live now with Lion’s Mane tinctures, Cordyceps, Reishi, gummies, and elixirs.