Let's get on to the show.

Yeah, that's a really interesting question.

I think you have to try and understand what attitudes were towards the fungi before the advent of mycology.

And mycology is quite a late discipline.

It only really starts getting going in the end of the 19th century.

And then often in an amateur way, this is not to decry the people who were doing it, but they weren't professional scientists.

A lot of them were clergy, British clergymen out in the countryside who had time on their hands, who got excited about fungi and started classifying mushrooms.

Are mushrooms filling some need for the meaning or enchantment in this highly rationalized world?

But could you put that in some sort of context of, of what that means, paganism? And again, um, obviously that's evolving with, with your relationship to it, but, but just some framework that, that people could maybe begin to have some idea of, at least for you or in a, in a bigger context, what that's referring to.

Sure.

Um, so the term itself is, is Roman in origin, but came, came to be used, um, to sort of lump together anything that, that wasn't Christian.

That's the way in, I think in, in popular parlance, that's how it's used.

And so, you know, I mean, even in Britain, we have what? Ten thousand years of...

Is it that long? Whenever the, the last ice age ended.

I'm sorry, I can't remember what it was.

So within that context, do you-- uh, and again, I know this is a huge question, but, but do you have some, some sense, whether it's from historical records, your own experience, your own, uh, delving into this, this curiosity, the, the seeking that you had of, of, of like what that worldview would've, would've somehow resembled?

So to begin, I'd love to ask you if you're happy to share about your origin story of meeting iboga and kind of how you gravitated towards having an interest in it and where that falls in relation to your research

well first of all thanks thanks for inviting me and it's great to be here having this conversation I was trying to remember where I first heard about Iboga.

And I think it was probably Daniel Pinchbeck's book, Breaking Open the Head.

Or it was Bruce Parry's BBC tribe program where he lived amongst the Bobongo and went through the Iboga initiation program.

So I certainly knew about it and obviously I already had an interest in psychedelics.

And so I was aware of both its fearsome reputation within the psychedelic community and this repeated story that Perhaps what it did was it enabled you to review your kind of life and particularly your misdemeanors from the perspective of those people affected by your decisions.

So I knew that.

How do you feel when it comes into contact with academia, when you bring it into academia or when you are collaborating with other people who do? What ways do you feel like academia, is able to kind of welcome and appropriately hold space for things that you participate in sacredly and what kinds of hygiene do you hope people will keep around when traditions come into academia and what can academics do to create a welcoming place that is safe and not harmful for traditions to come into?