Incense Explorer: A Deep Dive into Incense History, Culture, Ritual and Lore · Alyssa Severeid

The World Makes Scents with Dave and Smey Schultz

·59 min·3 clips

They say jasmine and orange pushed them to consider essential oils after years of whole-plant making.

1. Incense Explorer: The World Makes Scents with Dave and Smai Schultz centers on incense as history, ritual, and product development. 2. Alyssa Severide hosts Dave Schultz and Rack Smai Schultz, and Smai matters because she learned incense making in Cambodia while Dave handles the business side. 3. The episode asks what it takes to move from family incense knowledge to a small U.S. incense company. 4. Smai says she grew up in a small village in Cambodia near a mountain and pagoda where older people made incense. 5. She remembers running around the makers, helping a little, and then trying incense herself and learning it quickly. 6. Smai says the village commonly made rolled stick incense from herbs gathered locally or bought from farmers. 7. She describes people sitting in a group, rolling sticks by hand, and chatting while they worked. 8. Smai says lemongrass was common in her home because it was used in food, lemongrass tea, and lemongrass incense. 9. She says the incense was burned for fragrance, prayer, and mosquito control. 10. Dave says village incense makers used the ingredients that were most readily available and inexpensive. 11. He adds that ceremonial pagoda incense was less about scent than about the ritual act itself. 12. Dave says some villages used leaves, bark, or roots whose English names were hard to identify. 13. He describes trying to photograph plants, upload them, and ask others to identify them, with mixed results. 14. Smai says she started making incense again during the pandemic because the kitchen and apartment called for cone incense rather than long sticks. 15. She says cone making fit a small space, while sticks required more rolling, more bamboo splints, and more room. 16. Dave says the business now evaluates ingredients through cost, reliability, and whether customers will pay more than mass-market prices. 17. He says they work at night in the kitchen, burn samples on charcoal, and adjust blends until something emerges. 18. Dave says ideas can come from ordinary moments, like thinking about a Dreamsicle while waiting at an ice cream parlor. 19. The tone is conversational and practical, with long back-and-forth explanations, jokes about smoke in the face, and repeated references to testing and revising blends. 20. Listeners who like plant-based craft, incense making, and Cambodia stories will get the most from it, while people wanting fast answers or no product-development detail may skip it.

As heard by us

A patient, scent-rich conversation that turns incense into place, memory, and craft.

Alyssa Severide treats incense as more than fragrance, tracing it through land, memory, ritual, and the hands that make it. The discussion stays close to the material world, moving from wild harvesting and city foraging to tree resin, and to the habit of noticing plants and bark…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

For when you want an incense episode about plants, smoke, and lore, with a guide to how a walk can turn into research.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Incense Explorer: A Deep Dive into Incense History, Culture, Ritual and Lore