🎙️ Episode 2 – Africa’s Untold Fungal Story
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In this conversation, ethnomycologist Cullen Taylor Clark shares his journey of uncovering the rich traditions of mushroom use among tribes in South Africa. He reflects on the transformative power of psychedelics, the wisdom of traditional healers, and the urgent need to document indigenous knowledge.

His research project, The Lost Muti, explores the indigenous use of fungi as medicines, foods, and entheogens among South Africa’s diverse tribal communities. It documents current uses, recipes, names, myths, and more, tracing these practices back to ancient hunter-gatherer societies. Ultimately, Cullen’s work reveals that reverence for fungi as sacred allies has been woven into Southern Africa’s cultural fabric since the dawn of time.

🔗 Learn more about Cullen’s work:

Patreon: patreon.com/cullentaylorclark

Aether Apothecary

Lost Muti

Instagram: @cullentaylorclark

TRANSCRIPT

Jasper (00:00.815)
What’s up everybody? We’re here joined by Colin Taylor Clark, an ethnomicologist from South Africa working to revitalize kind of the sacred mushroom traditions of which specific tribe in South Africa do you work with?

Cullen Taylor Clark (00:17.43)
All of them.

Jasper (00:19.233)
All of them. Okay. So there’s many different tribes. That’s incredible. And we’re going to be talking about Colin’s work. We’re going to be talking about ethnomycology in general, psychedelics in Africa, just general connection to mushrooms from indigenous people that are not necessarily related to psychedelics and so much more. So I’m really excited to be diving in with Colin. And before we dive into

the thing you’re going to be sharing on the first time for the first time here on the podcast. I’m curious like what led you to ethno mycology specifically. saw you also do like mushroom for a walks. Were you first like a mushroom fan and then rolled into ethno mycology or were you more on the anthropology side and you’re like my god like this is incredible I need to learn more about mushrooms.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:06.616)
Man, I’m keen to share with you. Well, firstly, yes, but thanks for having me on, man. Like I said before we pressed record, I’ve been such a fan of what you’ve been doing, you and the team out that side. So yeah, thanks for having me, dude. I’m so stoked to be here, excited to be talking to you guys. Hopefully you’ll find some of it interesting. think people usually get a surprise when I say like, all of the tribes, there’s so much knowledge locked in South Africa that is waiting to tell its story to the world. There’s this resurgence or this like…

this coming of Africa as this great land ready to share its biodiversity and its knowledge with the world and hopefully help right some of the wrongs or lead us on a better course. So let me maybe start my story because it’s one of the stories that is helping to piece this together. So my name, Cullen Taylor Clark. I…

I do do many different things, but I think the best place to start, the easiest way that I explain it to people is I do two major categories. I’m a researcher, an ethnomicological researcher, and I’m also a bio-suitable entrepreneur. And that second one is basically the best place to start. So when I was 21, like many of us in this industry, I was in the corporate grind.

And I absolutely despised it. I did not enjoy it. I mean, it was good because I learned a lot and I had my fingers in many different pies and I was learning sales and marketing, different strategies and all of that would come in handy for this later course in my life, which I’ll touch on in a second. But the main thing is I didn’t have purpose, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I just felt like I had more life to give. I wanted to be a force for good.

At my core, I try and be a kind person and I know that I want to do something that helps humanity and I wasn’t going to do it selling cleaning products. It wasn’t going to happen. I had a mushroom trip when I was 21 and it rattled me. It just shook my life and it shook me to the core in the most beautiful way. That was on the weekend on the Saturday. I think if I remember correctly, I went to work on the Monday.

Jasper (03:09.804)
haha

Cullen Taylor Clark (03:26.606)
And I said to my boss, I’m out of here. Like I’m not going to do this. And I left and I have not looked back since, man. So I tried to find many different things to do and I got into like websites and graphic design and I started a company with that. And I also started another company looking at art and app development. And I loved that. And then had this third endeavor, which was our biosecure company called Ether Apothecary.

Like I looked at this, these three endeavors, and I saw that the one couldn’t be scaled. I couldn’t scale graphic and web design, because I’m only me, and I can only do X amount of websites a month. And the app development, I needed a bigger team, and it wasn’t going to happen. But the natural medicine one stood out to me, because I’ve always had an affinity for nature. I love nature, and I love being a part of it. And I know that I always feel my best when I’m

in nature. I thought let’s head down that avenue and let’s see what happens. And it’s nine years later and we have the most extraordinary company. We are fairly well known in Southern Africa. We supply to hundreds and hundreds of stores all around the country and we export overseas and we contract manufacture for some of the leading brands here. So if you are drinking a kombucha or you have a cosmetic product or food product,

and it has a natural medicine inside of it. Chances are our company made it for you. So that’s what we do there. It’s wildly interesting. I love what I do. But along that journey, I stumbled onto something absolutely fascinating. So have you ever been to South Africa? Are you familiar with the landscape here?

Jasper (05:11.051)
No, I have not yet. really, I really want to go and, first of all, congrats of like listening to that message from the mushrooms to jump out of the matrix as, as they say in certain circles, because like, I think a lot of people have that inclination, that deep gut feeling like, this is not my path, but then they are not, they don’t have the courage to step.

out of that and try something new and try going for yourself. you know, I was able to do that because I didn’t have any other choice in my mind. I was like, I wasn’t able to continue in that sense. yeah, congrats on like listening to the mushrooms. And it seems to have put some wind in your back and making that decision and like having this well-known mushroom brand in South Africa. But

I am quite familiar with just like what the terrain looks like, but like I’ve never been. I would love to

Cullen Taylor Clark (06:05.837)
Okay, so firstly, thank you for that, man. I think the hardest thing is not following your purpose. I think that’s what people get mistaken by. It’s much harder to stay put where you are. It’s harder for your soul and for your body in terms of like…

Jasper (06:21.411)
I think it’s worse for you, but I think we are creatures of comfort, right? And we’re like, I think the older we get, less open we are to risks and changing your life, changing the stability you have from like a stable job and working for somebody else and like all that comes with, that’s very comfortable and it’s really hard to leave that behind. But then…

I see it totally from your point of view as well, right? It’s that like, it is more challenging for the soul and it’s gonna create more internal conflict on a consistent basis and that’s on the long term worse for you. But making that leap of faith, that’s not an easy thing to do.

Cullen Taylor Clark (06:50.285)
Yeah.

Cullen Taylor Clark (07:00.832)
Mm-mm.

Yeah, I think hard is maybe the wrong choice of words here. I think I’m also biased because I was 21 when I did it and I had no responsibilities, no family to take care of. And I can only go off of my journey so far. So I really do feel for the people that are at that crossroad and they’re struggling to make that choice. And it is a difficult one. But I found that when you follow your purpose, it does piece together.

Jasper (07:11.001)
Same. know. Same. For me it was easy.

Cullen Taylor Clark (07:32.629)
also beautifully. It might take a bit of time and it might be difficult at first, but if you are following that journey and you’re true to who you are at your core, it will come together. think, yeah, I’ve seen, I mean, not to get into it too quickly, but I’ve seen it with my own life. I had quite a challenging upbringing and I know that I have privileges that many other people don’t have, but it…

The biggest thing for me was staying put, sitting in that traffic day in and day out and realizing that I was going to wither away doing that. That’s just myself. Other people might have a journey that is deeply tied into corporate world and they can do a lot of amazing things then. They can help a lot of people. So I’ve got no issue with corporate. Corporate can be really awesome and it can do a lot of wonderful things for the planet if done correctly, you know. So it just wasn’t for me.

And I’m hearing, Jasper, that it also wasn’t for you as well, correct?

Jasper (08:35.081)
No, that also wasn’t for me. I was in sales and I had everything my life. What my life told me that was good for me. I had like a well-paying job for my age. was having like, I was going to tons of parties. I had good friends and I just, it felt empty. And I needed something more. Yeah. More fulfilling. And what, one thing that like has been put to my attention is

Cullen Taylor Clark (08:38.72)
Yeah.

Jasper (09:02.935)
It could be a sign of neurodivergence to not like be in the system. And because like I have some neuro-regular friends, I guess, I don’t even know if anybody in our generation is neuro-regular at this point anymore. But they are more easy for them just to like accept a part of their life as not their highest excitement. And they can get so much fulfillment out of all the other things that they’re doing. That’s just like a thing that I can’t to play with because for me and like how I work, it’s just so…

Cullen Taylor Clark (09:05.133)
Mm-hmm.

Cullen Taylor Clark (09:13.261)
Good.

Jasper (09:32.943)
hard to realize like having a soul training job. Like in the end I ended up before doing Fungi Academy I was a cook and a chef for a while and that was giving me so much fun because I was doing stuff with my hands and I although it was still you know kind of the grinds of like nine to five years I was obviously different hours I was at least enjoying what I was doing while working for corporate I could see why it was

Cullen Taylor Clark (09:37.249)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper (10:01.871)
and enthralling because there’s obviously the allure of status and financial security. But like I can’t, I just can’t force myself to do stuff I do not like doing. And for me, I also had the psychedelics with that that could show me that there’s another way out. And for me, it was, yeah, psychedelic journey as well that told me to go travel. And I quit my job as well as you did, which I don’t recommend people do it, but like maybe take a week.

Cullen Taylor Clark (10:13.079)
Beep.

Cullen Taylor Clark (10:26.999)
with

Jasper (10:30.435)
maybe take two weeks when you think about it this hug don’t do it the next day which i did today now here

Cullen Taylor Clark (10:32.525)
Talk to your spouse, maybe talk to the family before you do that, before you have been leaving. That was actually going to be my question before we spoke about other stuff. So it was a psychedelic journey for you as well that maybe rewrote your story a bit? Which one, can I ask?

Jasper (10:51.503)
Well, all of them, I think. So I was definitely quite the psychonauts. was trying everything in the luxury in the Netherlands. Everything is accessible for really affordable. So I was experimenting with what now people would call research chemicals. So actually my first journeys were specifically with mushrooms really showed me that I could live a happy life because I was also having challenging challenging time during my teenage years. But then the

Cullen Taylor Clark (11:05.773)
Mm.

Jasper (11:19.865)
The psychedelic that actually pushed me to leave my comfortable life in the city, in what people refer to as the matrix, was 2CB, which Shashar Shogan calls the teacher as well.

Cullen Taylor Clark (11:31.927)
Yeah. Okay.

Well, I’m glad that 2CV crossed your path and that you are on the journey that you’re on because you’ve been fundamental to a lot of people’s mushroom journeys. think a lot of people have been watching what you guys have done. I don’t think, maybe you do realize it, but the Funga Academy is really pivotal here in South Africa in terms of a lot of people’s stories if they’re in the mushroom space. It’s made a… of course, man.

Jasper (12:01.628)
Well, I didn’t know that’s incredible.

Cullen Taylor Clark (12:04.908)
I have my fingers in many different communities here and a lot of them around entrepreneurship and fungi and bioremediation and cultivation. When I told them that I was going to be chatting to you, everyone was like, no way, I love Fungi Academy. It’s a testament to you guys and what you guys are doing and your character and just the work that you guys are doing. Thank you so much, man.

Jasper (12:32.943)
Wow, thank you. That’s making me blush a little bit. I appreciate the kind words. I hope to come to South Africa. I meet all these people. I all these people. I didn’t know.

Cullen Taylor Clark (12:33.782)
Yeah.

It’s my pleasure. me tell you about the… Yeah, that room over there is an extra room. You’ve got an extra room in my house if you need it, down in Cape Town. Yeah, so I… I would love to have you down the side, man. Cape Town’s beautiful. Cape Town’s an awesome place. And the people, which I’m hoping to tell you about in this talk, the people of South Africa are extraordinary human beings. It’s so much wisdom. So…

Jasper (12:52.537)
Too easy. We’ll make it happen.

Cullen Taylor Clark (13:07.658)
Like just to get us back on track here for a second. So I found myself in the Eastern Cape, which is this beautiful stretch of land. It’s a very wild coast. And our company was doing really well at this point in time. So the company had relocated to the Eastern Cape. We set up a farm and a laboratory and extraction facility. And we started to do things a little bit differently.

We decided that we were only going to employ from the local surrounding villages. The socioeconomically deprived individuals that came from these villages were illiterates, and none of them could use a computer. And we decided, let’s upskill the people here. So we trained them. And these people that didn’t have any jobs became laboratory technicians. And they learned how to make medicine and supply that to people all around the world and do business and send emails with like,

Western corporate CEOs and stuff. So it’s really, it’s been extraordinary. The company’s just been wonderful to see it grow and morph and change over the years. But while I was in the Eastern Cape, I fell in love with fungi. I had taken these mushrooms when I was 21 and then built this company around natural medicine, but didn’t actually sit with the fungi.

and form a tight relationship with them until I went to the Eastern Cape. And I proceeded to take the next four years and spend every single week in the forest hunting for mushrooms. And I got deep, man. I got like super deep, like crawling on my belly, understanding the smells and which ones waft on the wind, which ones are closer to the ground. And I knew everything about my environment because I spent…

every single week in these forests around my home. And I formed a deep connection to the reishi mushrooms that grow here. We have endemic Ganoderma species. There’s, I think, eight or nine that are endemic here. One in particular called Ganoderma astraafricanum, which is a phenomenally powerful medicinal mushroom with high amounts of Ganodyrac and lucidinic acids. It’s a really, really cool mushroom. Looks like every other reishi, but it’s endemic here to South Africa.

Jasper (15:06.159)
incredible.

Cullen Taylor Clark (15:31.008)
I was spending time in the Eastern Cape and with our company, we were also working very closely with the traditional healers because we were trying to uplift these communities and teach them about foraging of various different fungal species. And while talking to them, I realized, okay, there is actually deep seated knowledge around fungi already existing inside of these villages. So I turned to the academia, to the literature.

And I wanted to try and see if there was anything else in South Africa, because I was curious to learn. And lo and behold, there is pretty much nothing in our academia. There’s no accounts of traditional use cases, therapeutic or medicinal use, very little on culinary use, absolutely nothing on psychedelic use of fungi in Southern African tribal people. And I thought this is the most peculiar thing, because we have use cases all around the world.

why would we not have use here in Southern Africa where we have ample amounts of fungi? So I thought, okay, is this an isolated case or is this just that no one has taken the time to look and talk to our people? And you’ll be pleasantly surprised to hear that it’s actually the latter. It’s that no one has taken the time to go and travel and talk to the people. So I set out on this project to go and talk to as many

traditional healers. So like a shaman in our culture would be a Sangoma or an Etkicha is their name. That’s like a diviner. And then we have like a herbalist called an Nyanga or a Sahole. There’s various different names for them. So I was talking to hundreds and hundreds of traditional healers and diviners all around the country documenting the craziest stuff that you’ll ever hear.

Basically, along this journey, I’ve managed to find accounts of indigenous names, recipes, uses, culture, spirituality, all revolving around fungi that no one knows about. And what this turned into is a project to shine a light on a knowledge that is deep-seated in the culture, but has been lost to the Western audiences. No one has been interested enough to look at it.

Cullen Taylor Clark (17:53.58)
So that’s where I find myself at the moment. And I’d love to tell you about some of the stories because there’s some crazy ones.

Jasper (18:01.955)
Yeah, please. I just want to say like, first of all, this is just why mycology and also ethnomicology is so incredible because, you know, here you are just an enthusiast, not affiliated, like affiliated with a university or have been sent there on a PhD program against your will because that’s like the field of study that was open. You were just like driven out of curiosity and

your findings have just been incredible and have just kind of opened this whole book on like southern African ethnomycology, which, you know, I think it’s just because of our culture of mycophobia that for so long we haven’t looked like if it wasn’t for Gaston Guzman and his colleagues, we would have also had very little knowledge of what was happening in Central America and Latin America. And it’s just because of one individual that

Right now, I’d say we’re in ethno-mycology. have probably most literature in like Mexica, Mayan traditions, because it just kind of kick-started this whole field of study. And it’s just incredible to see how much applications and how our indigenous brothers and sisters are working with the mushrooms, because of course, like they…

If you live in a culture that’s still closely related to a hunter-forger ideology, you need to be able to understand everything in your ecosystem and you need to be able to understand how to apply everything in your ecosystem. And fungi are just such a diverse and incredible resource in these ecosystems. So there’s like no way that any culture that is aware and like in balance with their ecosystem isn’t aware of

Cullen Taylor Clark (19:50.197)
Mm-mm.

Jasper (19:52.537)
this treasure of fungi and be that medicinal for food purposes or for spiritual work as well. yeah, I just find it incredible that you just out of curiosity stumbled upon this treasure chest of ethnomycological knowledge. And I’m really, really keen to learn more.

Cullen Taylor Clark (20:11.631)
Brilliant. I think you’ve put it perfectly. think that it really is this like treasure chest of knowledge waiting to be told to the world. And that is an important part because our traditional healers here are so free and willing to share with the knowledge. None of it is held tightly to the chest. As long as there’s reverence and respect within the community.

it’s freely given because the belief is that this knowledge is for the people, not the people of the tribe, not the Zulu or the Ndebele, it’s for the people of the world that this knowledge needs to disseminate out and bring people together again. So yeah, we’ll get to that in a second, but the main takeaway is that there is ubiquitous use throughout this country of dozens of different species.

used as therapeutics, is culture revolving around fungi, there is ritualistic practices. And I saw all of this and I thought to myself, okay, well, if all of this is here, potentially there could also be psychedelic use as well. you know, we have various different psychedelic fungi that grow here in our land, various different Paniolus mushrooms and psilocybe species that grow here.

And we have a culture, the Bantu people, so the people that migrated here from central and West Africa that became our Zulu and Kosa and Basutu and various other tribes all came in the early 1100s. When they came here, they brought with them an agricultural tradition of…

planting crops and also cattle rearing as well. So cattle were largely important to the cultures here and everyone that like knows anything about mycology, you know that with cattle you also you get copper felus mushrooms, mushrooms that they grow undone and some of them are psychoactive. So I thought okay, this is a good place to start and I started to put some felus out and you know I

Cullen Taylor Clark (22:33.897)
I didn’t take it as seriously at first until I found myself on a trip in Lesotho, which is this incredible piece of land within southern Africa. It’s a landlocked nation within southern Africa. And I found myself in Lesotho on New Year’s Eve with some friends traveling. We had gone for various different reasons, know, one to just break away and go and do a pilgrimage through the land.

walked for like 80 kilometers through the mountains. But I was there to research the indigenous use, the ethno-mycological use of various different fungi. And I got a bunch of really cool stuff that we haven’t told people about yet because we’re busy writing papers on different lycoproton species, puffballs, and various different boletus species. But the one in particular that stood out is on New Year’s Eve, I stumbled into a patch, a grove of…

a new psilocybe species called psilocybe malutii that would subsequently be described in free states, the Suthu and KZN as well. And what stood out about this species, why it was so interesting, is that it is obviously this new species to science, but it’s not new to the people that live there. And through my work, I went and chatted with one of my translators, and we spoke to various different diviners, and we found out that the species

was actually used and is still used in divination ceremonies. It’s used to define maladies and problems, to talk to ancestors. But it’s done in a ceremonial setting where only one or two people are present. The diviner, usually by themselves or the diviner with the patient. And this was fascinating. We wrote a paper about this. I’ve spoken to many people about it it was really, really cool.

really wonderful to observe and to document. But one thing stood out to me, I didn’t get to participate in the ceremony and it always like grated me because I was like, man, it would have been really cool to participate. So I found myself in March of this year at a crossroad and I wanted to go back to Lesotho to go and sit with the traditional healers and I reached out to

Cullen Taylor Clark (24:51.87)
various different translators that I was speaking to and trying to figure out how can I make this happen? It’s past the period where these mushrooms are growing. Maybe they’ve got some samples left over. It just didn’t come together, man. So it didn’t come together and I was so bummed. And I decided, like I did when I quit my job and many times after that, I decided to just go with it, like just roll with it. I like to plan things, but I also understand how the universe works.

if you push too hard and you try and control, it’s not gonna happen. So I usually just float on the wind and things will piece together. So I decided to float a little bit. And I went to a region that I’ve never been to before called the Trans Sky. And I got to the Trans Sky. Also just by the way, this is completely new information. This has not been told on any media platform yet. I got to the Trans Sky and I…

We’re going to keep the location a secret for now, probably indefinitely, because we don’t want a resurgence of what happened with Maria Sabina unless things are put in place to try and counteract any negative effects from sharing this information. Basically, I was in the Eastern Cape in the Trans Guy and I found these two traditional healers, these diviners, one named Mamanoleven.

and another named Dada Makosi. And I proceeded to spend a couple days with these two individuals learning everything I could about the traditional medicines that they were associated with, traditional fungal medicines that they were associated with. And I got the coolest stuff, man. We documented so much. And during this journey, I asked them, because I knew that there was a species that grew along that area.

And this is a new species to science called Psilocybe ochreciocentrata. And what’s fascinating, just a little side track here, what’s fascinating about this species, ochreciocentrata, it’s the closest, thus far that we can see, it’s the closest relative that we know of on this planet to Psilocybe cubensis, which grows on the other side of the world. And it only grows here along our stretch of land, ochreciocentrata.

Cullen Taylor Clark (27:14.89)
And I knew this one was growing there, so I asked them about it. And I asked, and I was maman 11 first, because I was sitting with her first, and I got a giggle. And she proceeded to share with me that she knows exactly about this fungus. And she gave me a traditional name for it. They call it Incocoane is the name for this mushroom, the psychoactive mushroom. And she prepares it into a tonic, a decoction with various different herbs for

for everyday maladies to help in smaller amounts, almost like a micro dosing to help with cognitive function and figure and energy, a bunch of different stuff. But she also told me about the use of this mushroom in a ceremony. And when she tells me this, she got up and she started to walk off and she willed me to follow her. And we met up with Dada Makosi and he told me the exact same stuff. And we went into detail on how this mushroom is used.

in order to convene with the ancestors, in order to divine, in order to acquire knowledge about the world that we live in and how to walk through it. And we unpacked this for quite a while. And then Dada Makosi said to me that the ancestors have told him he cannot tell me about this mushroom anymore. And my heart fell through my chest. I was like, God, have I like overstepped here? Have I maybe…

not done this in the correct manner, maybe I’m pushing too hard. And I was just terrified that I had lost my opportunity to talk about this more. So I left it for like the briefest of moments and he turned to me and he said, the ancestors said, can’t talk to you about this anymore. I have to show you. And what happened was my team and I prepared and we set the space with them for what would be

the first video documented evidence of a psychedelic mushroom ceremony on the African continent. My team and I recorded a five hour journey with six traditional healers. They had rounded up traditional healers from the entire village to bring them to this one abode. And the congregation consisted of about 25 to 35 people, all coming and going at different periods of time, different villages.

Cullen Taylor Clark (29:40.18)
But the culmination of it, the whole point of it was that we were invited to participate, to sit in and record a psychedelic mushroom ceremony that involved psilocybe, ocrasia, and trata. So I didn’t make it happen with Lesotho, but we found this whole other tribe. So Lesotho is the Basotho people and the trans guy consists of the… So it’s the Klosar people. you’d to click on the site, Klosar people.

And these people are also Bantu tribal people, but completely different people. And they have their own use case of a traditional psychedelic fungus that is used in a ceremony. So I wonder if you do want to unpack that, we can. But basically, it’s the coolest thing because the ceremony, which we’re currently writing a paper about, runs parallel with ceremonies.

Halfway across the world, like the Mazatec, there are such close similarities that will blow your mind. And our people here, for the most part that we know of, have never interacted with those people. But there’s use case that rivals that. And yeah, so that’s what we’re doing at the moment. I’m actually busy the moment with four academic papers at the exact same time. They’re all in peer review.

Jasper (30:58.659)
Well that’s…

Cullen Taylor Clark (31:04.169)
on various different fungal species, therapeutics, psychedelics, all of these things. yeah, hopefully those will come out soon and the world will hear about the brilliance of Southern African tribal people.

Jasper (31:15.513)
That’s incredible. It’s like incredible that you followed that path and like you followed your gut intuition to that led you in that right place. But also it’s incredible that it kind of feels like a second chance of, the story of Gordon Watson and Maria Sabina to an extent that’s and it’s tragically and it’s still kind of a dark page in.

like the textbook of ethnomicology and just the reference and respect that you’re approaching this with and the openness of the people that you’re working with to me is just incredible. what I like the first thing when you said about like these diviners and working with one or two patients, like that came up to me at first is like, that sounds like the Mazatec divination ceremony as well, right? Where, and like it could hint, like there’s lots of similar like

interesting similarities in in cultures all over the world, but it could perhaps hint to a very very ancient traditional lineage of working with these mushrooms which I am I’m sure you’re familiar with McKenna’s idea, but recently I think last year They dr. David nut was also part of a study that showcased that the stimulation of the 5h to a receptor was core connected to The growth of our brain size and that was kind of the first

perhaps like scientific hints that the stone-dape theory might have some foundation. And I do think that these links of these similar practices that have maintained, right, because we know everybody, all people originally came from Africa. Also, psilocybe species came all from Africa, including pretty sure Kubensis as well. I just named that for Cuba because it was first described there, but

Cullen Taylor Clark (32:52.585)
wonderful.

Cullen Taylor Clark (33:13.427)
Yeah.

Jasper (33:13.805)
I found it in Asia, I’ve known people who found it in parts of Africa as well. And then of course like a species that’s directly linked to that like cow culture is then used in this ritual. But then did you find that there’s also different use cases for these different species of mushrooms? Because that’s what we see here in Central America, which is often overlooked where people often just put everything as Teotonalicato, which is…

Cullen Taylor Clark (33:40.583)
Mm. Yeah.

Jasper (33:40.813)
roughly translates to flesh the gods, the fine flesh. But that was a specific group of mushrooms that Mesoamerican people work with in specific use cases. Well, some people go out and they say, I’m consuming teotona necato, I’m consuming psilocybin gubenzes. But psilocybin gubenzes actually wasn’t present in Mesoamerica until the white man appeared because you need large pack animals to like have the droppings. And in certain parts of

Mesoamerica is also called the white man’s mushroom and that’s why the common name is also sunny cedro and not a Bajaritos or whatever it is that we see with these other species. And what I know from my Mayan neighbors here that we kind of are under Renaissance of it. It sounds like the cultures you’re working with, they have never lost this, this practice of divination and all these other ceremonies that I’m really excited to hear about and

Here they had to keep it secret for so long because any relationship to the mushroom, you know, can end you up on the burnt pile, which is still, you know, people still burned alive by religious fanatics in Mesoamerica, which is just insane to comprehend in the 21st century. So yeah, I’m curious the question, I know it’s a long winded question, but how do you see different species of

mushrooms having different use cases or is that something you’re just slowly starting to uncover or is that species that you first described I forget the name but it looks Maluti, it has a very unique look is that used in a similar divination ritual or does it have a different application?

Cullen Taylor Clark (35:17.095)
Maluti, philosophy Maluti.

Cullen Taylor Clark (35:27.081)
completely different. that’s the brilliance is exactly like I think the people in Mesoamerica is that different mushrooms are used for different things. So the ceremony in the Lesotho Highlands is a very individualistic ceremony where you would travel inward within yourself to access parts of yourself that maybe are locked away or to divine with insights in order to find

what may be causing a malady. the ceremony that takes place, sorry, the Lesotho one, Pseulosobium malutia is called Keo ala quaba. And then in the Tronskai, that species is a communal ceremony, very different ceremony. And that species is called Inco Coane. And that is Pseulosobium ocrasiocentrata.

that basically means the golden mushroom. So that species is used more in like a communal ceremonial setting where people are brought together to induce trance dance. So altered states of consciousness that involves trance dance, it also involves, which I’ve heard stories of people also doing in Mesoamerica, it involves

maize beer. We call it un tromboti is the name and it’s a maize beer that is ritualistically drunk in small quantities, not high quantities, because this alcohol you would think, okay, like if alcohol is present that could be a deterrent, but it’s drunk in relatively small quantities and a lot of it is actually poured out. We do this process here where like a sip is taken for yourself and a sip is given to the ancestors. You pour portion out for the ancestors. And

It’s basically three hours of nonstop dance, singing, and divination. And this happens in a cycle, a cyclical process. I recently wrote a blog about it, and we’re hoping to release the video that we recorded in a short form documentary so people can see this. What’s wonderful is that the process follows set structure where

Cullen Taylor Clark (37:57.321)
singing and dancing will take place divination will take place or channeling and speeches and then it will start again there’s a period right at the beginning where you set the ceremony candles are involved application of another species a fungal species ground into a paste applied to the body I had these mushrooms applied to my body there’s the cooking process

Jasper (38:25.615)
What kind of species? Are we talking like a more chitinized mushroom? Like a genoderma?

Cullen Taylor Clark (38:29.192)
The species, do have the name for it. And now it’s evading me. It’s part of the bluewood family. think that it’s part of the family. I just can’t remember what the name, the Latin name of it was. I will find it. I will send it to you. The elopista. Yes, yes, yes. Exactly. Thank you for that, So we suspect it to be elopista.

Jasper (38:42.306)
Okay.

Jasper (38:47.17)
It’s a lapista.

Cullen Taylor Clark (38:56.028)
We unfortunately didn’t get any samples of it for testing. So my intention is to go back now in the coming season to go and chat with them again and find out some of the missing pieces. Within the ceremony, I could only ask so much before I was upsetting the structure of the ceremony. so that entailed me being as cautious as possible. I was invited to participate.

Jasper (39:19.843)
Mm-hmm.

Cullen Taylor Clark (39:25.84)
and do the process with them. But I was also on their terms and on their ground, and I wanted to make sure that we didn’t take too much in terms of information that wasn’t bestowed on us willingly. It takes time. So yeah.

Jasper (39:41.187)
Yeah, which device? I just want to share some reflections as well on like other similarities with the…

Cullen Taylor Clark (39:44.072)
Go for it, Yeah, please.

Jasper (39:46.913)
at least Mayan fire ceremonies, also like the fire central and some practitioners have been working with certain sacred mushrooms in that as well. But it’s never the core of the ceremony, right? This is also when people talk about cacao ceremony is like, there’s a Mayan tradition, but the core has always been the fire. But in that it’s a very cyclical nature because they count the 13 nahuas, which are kind of the entities that rule the base.

And then also you have like moments of collective prayer, have moments of collective dancing, have contemplation, meditation. also like, it sounds like there’s just this core principle of any kind of ceremony that seems to be the foundation of all of these practices all over the world. So I love to see the similarities and…

You know, it’s like also the making the paste and smearing stuff over your bodies. Like, of course, this is happening with cacao over here, but it’s also happening with tobacco and many other. So there’s even a use case of older L’Ete Potosovre, the chicken of the woods, that is fermented in ash and then ground into a pulp and then also smeared over your stomach for cleansing purposes, which is it’s…

Cullen Taylor Clark (40:54.278)
Mm-hmm.

Cullen Taylor Clark (41:04.84)
We have that with Ganoderma varieties. So the Ganodermas are called Ispindi. And the Ispindi are also ground down and made into a paste. some cases, ash applied to it as well in order to purify the body. There’s also a ritualistic process involved in the initiation ceremony of young boys going into adulthood. After circumcision, these Ispindi mushrooms, these Reishi varieties,

Jasper (41:12.399)
Mmm.

Cullen Taylor Clark (41:33.904)
are ground down and applied to the body after circumcision to anoint the boy as he goes into manhood. So I see a lot of cross-cultural, and maybe just to come back a second, we can’t obviously pinpoint a time when maybe these people were connected or they separated and they carried this information with them, but what I maybe lean more towards is knowledge. We all are connected. I remember

I remember hearing about a study at one point in time, think it was mice that were solving a puzzle. when one group stopped, yes, of course. So perhaps something is going on there where humans see similarities and we’re utilizing these mushrooms and we get downloads. don’t know. I mean, we can get very esoteric with this. And because of academia, have to really toe the line very carefully on

Jasper (42:09.871)
I… Rupert Sheldrake. Morphogenic field theory. Amorphic resonance. Yeah. Very good.

Cullen Taylor Clark (42:30.226)
being too esoteric, I know that there is a spiritual side to life. I live it. I am here in it. I’ve touched it and I felt it. But a lot of academia doesn’t want to that portion. So we try and I’m trying to push the boundaries ever so slightly with these papers by bringing in the spiritual side.

Jasper (42:47.605)
If you’re interested in that, should look into Rupert Sheldrake, which is Merlin Sheldrake’s father, is, that’s his whole career of, I think he’s a biologist by nature and he’s really pushing the boundary of what’s science and spirituality and there’s some, his whole claim is too much dogma in science that we just accept. And he talks about behavior.

Cullen Taylor Clark (42:53.512)
Okay.

Cullen Taylor Clark (43:07.048)
I’m going to definitely go and read that.

Jasper (43:11.883)
it’s good. You have a fun rabbit hole with reading what he has written. yeah, I do think that there’s things that we have held on like this. know, humans have been around for 300,000 plus years as we know now. And if things are working, things are working and we are creatures of habit. And I see that with, yeah, lots of cultural phenomenon, like all over the world. So I wouldn’t see why

Cullen Taylor Clark (43:16.999)
that I’m

Jasper (43:41.775)
this technology of ritual wouldn’t also have just been passed on and so hey, it’s working, so why change these foundations of gathering around the fire and making offerings in a cyclical way and dancing together and invoking the ancestors is what I’m hearing, right? So all of these things seem to have tremendous importance to us as humans if we at least look at the peoples that are still connected to our

Cullen Taylor Clark (44:00.304)
Right.

Cullen Taylor Clark (44:06.354)
course.

Jasper (44:10.691)
traditional ways, so why wouldn’t it be passed down? Like it just makes sense to me. But maybe it’s also morphic resonance. It can totally be both.

Cullen Taylor Clark (44:11.942)
Yeah, true. Exactly.

I think maybe it’s a mix of all of these things. think the human species is a tapestry. It’s an interwoven tapestry of so many different lineages and stories and cultures. to remove one of those threads, you unbind the whole thing. We’re made together. We are one people. And that was one of the significant takeaways from this experience. One of the lead diviners at one point in time throughout the

in the evening got up and gave a speech to us, is something we all know, we all can feel, but in him saying this during the ceremony, it really solidified in me the importance of it. He said the very simple words of, our skin may be different, but if we bleed, we bleed the same blood. It’s the same thing. No way.

Jasper (45:11.395)
They say the same thing here, man. They say the same thing here. Yeah, like 100%. The Mayan people always say it’s like, we’re all people of red bloods.

Cullen Taylor Clark (45:19.463)
god, that’s so funny man, I love that. I’m gonna do one more tie in here, I wanted to ask you, what are the songs that are sung, what are they called again? There’s a name for the songs that are sung during these like ritualistic ceremonies.

Jasper (45:36.793)
So in South America they call them Icaros. But like here, there’s not really like a name for them. It’s just a thing that does happen and it’s not as prevalent as in other cultures. It’s only in very specific situations. It’s often more of a communal chanting, almost like.

Cullen Taylor Clark (45:38.788)
Okay.

Cullen Taylor Clark (45:43.567)
Okay.

Cullen Taylor Clark (45:51.655)
Okay.

Jasper (46:04.249)
with the thing that comes up, it sounds musical, but it’s more like freestyle rap where they just like all together in traditional tongue, like honor the Nuales and do that in a, it sounds beautiful and like it’s often accompanied by drum, but music is, least here in the Mayan Highlands of Guatemala and all the ceremonies I’ve been a part of, music is generally instrumental.

Cullen Taylor Clark (46:08.805)
Okay.

Cullen Taylor Clark (46:32.295)
Okay, we had here in South Africa, music is of big cultural significance. It’s very important to the various different tribal people here. Drums being a big factor there as well, or major factor there. And another thing of importance within the ceremony were songs for the community.

Jasper (46:33.795)
more so than vocal.

Cullen Taylor Clark (47:00.909)
sung together as a community, but then also individualistic songs sung to the mushrooms as they sat cooling, as they sat in front of the fire, as they were brewing. Different songs were sung at different points in time in order to elicit some form of resonance that was taking place. The people knew the songs and they sang them in unison with each other, which was just incredible to see that this culture is

You know, it’s deep seated. It’s a long, whole tradition that potentially goes back hundreds of years. I don’t have the exact finding on that right now, but I’d love to figure out more. But I stepped away from that ceremony after five hours with this incredible feeling of unity. My people, I love my country, man. This place is awesome. I love my country. I know that there are beautiful, magical places all around the world. I don’t discount that for a second, but.

South Africa is an incredibly beautiful, incredibly magical, incredibly rich place. And I felt it when I was sitting in that ceremony. We couldn’t we couldn’t speak to each other. I didn’t know the dialect, but we spoke to each other through our eyes and through our emotions and through hugging and through chanting. When I stomped my feet on the ground in unison with the elders, there was

this feeling of just one tribe, that we’re all the same people at the end of the day and we segregate ourselves and we try and say, my people and your people, but if you boil it back, we all come from the same people at one point in time. And it was really beautiful to hear these words from someone with a life lived completely differently to my own, someone with different skin color that has lived different trials and tribulations.

seeing what we all feel, which is that we are of the same blood. We’re one tribe. And that was really magical to hear. So I love what I do. I love telling the story. I love going and researching the stuff because there’s still so much more to find in South Africa. Yeah. What do you think? You think it’s pretty interesting. I mean, the stuff coming out at the moment is pretty wild.

Jasper (49:17.807)
This is incredible, you know? like, what I also heard that like, I don’t remember if it was with your conversation with Hamilton Morris or somewhere else, but like that the elders are so keen to share this information with you and your team because their youth is kind of being enamored by the gaslighting of the American dream of like, yeah, we need to go to the city and like, I want to have

all of this bling and they’re losing track of their traditional ways because everybody everywhere has phones now and are being shown this other life that they think they should be living. it’s the same here, you know, it’s like, there’s in the mind, the highlights of Grimano is like, it’s a weird divide where there’s a group that is more disconnecting and more wanting to like go to the United States or like

dress like rappers and have that hip-hop culture be their dama and thing or there’s also people that have been Christian for their lives and are kind of missing something and are reconnecting with their indigenous ways through some of these elders that have never lost that tradition and those teachings. So, and that is strangely also interconnected with the with the the extranjeros, the foreigners that live here because

Cullen Taylor Clark (50:43.224)
Yes.

Jasper (50:44.173)
We foreigners are obviously super interested in these cultures and in these traditions and want to learn more. And that’s actually enabling a whole group of people to dedicate their lives to going deeper in these Mayan teachings and sharing that and sharing the ancient tradition of midwifery even. it’s a beautiful balance when I see, you know, some

like an indigenous brother that works with us, who’s like had struggled with alcoholism in the past and is now working with gumbo to deal with that. And that’s a tradition from somewhere else. And it’s like, and it’s doing a traditional Tim O’Scales and other healing modalities while he’s still like mainly Christian and goes to church. Right. So I’m really interested in, in this revival because I’ve, you know, we often talk about,

people to often talk about mushrooms are going to save the world and if all the world leaders take psychedelics we were going to be fine and I I don’t think that’s the case I don’t think that’s for everybody but what I do think is these traditions that make us feel more connected like you’re saying is like you sit in the ceremony and fire ceremonies here in Guatemala are often without psychedelics maybe even without cacao and I feel the same way and I think it’s just such a deep need

Cullen Taylor Clark (52:03.396)
Mm.

Jasper (52:06.465)
in our soul to have these prayers, these ceremonies as a collective, as a group to go through personal stuff, to make offerings to entities that are larger than us and I think those can have a huge, huge impact. Is that also going to be for everybody? No. Is it maybe a combination? Maybe. And in the end, the main core that I’m seeing is what we need more is that exact

sensation that you just described, Colin, of, I felt part of something bigger. I felt part of one tribe. We want to belong. And so many of us in this 21st century have no sense of where we’re belonging to. And how do we create more of that in the world? And if we can use these modalities that you’re encountering or that we’re encountering, or even inventing our own, that make us feel like we belong to a place. That’s, that’s I think a greater.

Cullen Taylor Clark (52:59.023)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper (53:05.305)
good in the world and for me my nerdy side is just super excited that there’s so much new ways to commune with these amazing organisms that we love so much, the mushrooms. And now I’m like, I want to be part of this African divination ceremony and see what happens over there, you know?

Cullen Taylor Clark (53:24.678)
And I think that’s maybe the brilliance of the world that we live in is that there are cultures all around the world that are doing their part in order to reconnect people back to something far greater. And I don’t know what that greater thing is. everyone has a different account of what that is. And just to pull back a little bit on people leaving the villages, I want to be very careful to paint everyone with the same brush because

You know, some young people are forced to move to the cities in order to support their families and to help bring money in or food in. it’s a very difficult thing when they have to choose to do that and leave their communities. A lot of young people are moving for the wrong reasons as well. there’s crime and drugs that come into play. What I’m seeing across the board, is that the elders,

regardless of who you are or where you come from or your skin color or your ethnicity, they want to share. There’s this deep seated feeling within Southern Africa of us being like an amalgamation of many different people, of being one people. And because of that, if you have the calling, you can undertake the twasa, the initiation.

There are countless white Sangomas in South Africa. There’s so many of them. It’s not a rare thing anymore. So the elders are willing to teach. They’re wanting to teach. So much so that at the end of my ceremony, Dada Makosi came to me and he put his arm underneath mine and pulled me close and put his cheek onto my cheek and whispered in my ear. And he told me that I…

I must start, have to do my Tuasa, which is your initiation to become a traditional healer. They want to share the information so that it doesn’t die out, so that it stays alive and well. Yeah, we, I think we have an exciting next couple of years in store for the human race as we try and figure out how to best live on this planet, because there’s many different

Cullen Taylor Clark (55:51.846)
solutions presented to us. Maybe 2CB is one of them. Maybe mushrooms are one of them. Maybe it’s Ayahuasca. Maybe it’s the Western world coming up with something really interesting and us going down that avenue. But the thing that I take away is that human beings are inherently good. We have goodness and kindness inside of us. We just get a little bit of stray. And I think if more people can feel that and tap into that, I think we’ll have a better place.

So I’m excited, man. I’m super stoked. I think, yeah, this is groovy, dude. I’m enjoying myself. I love what I do and I love telling people about it. So I’m excited for the future.

Jasper (56:31.701)
It shows, and it’s infectious. And that must be such an honor to be invited to take that path. I’m actually like really, really impressed with the elders that are so keen to share because, you know, here the indigenous peoples have obviously had a horrific past with people from European heritage or northern, the global north heritage. And it’s the same all over Africa. And here they can be

reluctant to share certain information. Like, so for example, there’s this whole thing about Ganoderma Aplanatum, which looks like a Mayan god’s ear and they call them the ears of the forest. They call them the ears of the forest, but they don’t want to tell me what they do with it. and I’m like, well, what’s, like my curiosity is deep with that, but I also respect that I’m going to push it. But there’s a sadness in me that was like, but

Cullen Taylor Clark (57:08.238)
Mm.

Jasper (57:28.717)
maybe we can all have more reference for these mushrooms by sharing it. like what I am hearing from the peoples that you’re working with is that somehow they have been able to forgive the past and look forward in the desire to preserve this wisdom and this knowledge. And we can all learn from that, especially in a time where it seems that old conflicts seem…

we seem to hold on to them in a global scale and forgiveness is the best medicine and that has the hardest medicine as well. And I’m personally also very excited about the future and like, I love to see how psychedelics and having our own rise of passage, because I think that might be actually more important that especially as young men are missing that we had to kind of make our own, right? Like you had to.

Cullen Taylor Clark (58:15.929)
Hmm.

Jasper (58:22.767)
quit your job, I had to go and like book a one way ticket to Thailand and figure out life with three years on the other side of the world. But like, I feel if we have a tradition that we can go into a rite of passage and our fathers and our uncles, and I’m speaking specifically for the masculine right now, because the feminine to an extent has that physically, right? That they go through the bleeding, which is

Cullen Taylor Clark (58:25.861)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper (58:51.245)
like it’s not held in the right way, but that we can look in like our elders eyes and that they acknowledge us as an adult. Because I think so much of what we’re seeing in the world are just men that didn’t have boys that haven’t gone through initiation and are just boys in 70 plus year old bodies making boyish decisions and not decisions for the good of the collective. And part of that is we also need each other, right? Like we raised with this idea that like

Cullen Taylor Clark (59:14.639)
Yeah.

Jasper (59:19.609)
We are individualistic and that’s why I don’t always connect with this psychedelic psychotherapy approach because we are made to have these experiences like you described with the whole collective. And so we feel like we’re part of something bigger, but we also have people to hold us accountable for the change we want to make. Like I’m big into man’s work that I do with a group. come together every week and that has been more impactful in me growing as a person.

Cullen Taylor Clark (59:41.146)
Yeah.

Cullen Taylor Clark (59:45.391)
Yeah.

Jasper (59:47.907)
than having some revolutionary vision on mushrooms or as the ayahuasca or aboga or whatever and then not knowing how to implement that and it’s actually a kind of having that network of support and that’s why we love the archetype of fungi, right? And of course I’m always reminded by my teachers like Juliana Fursi that fungi are not only good in the natural world and that there’s also bad behaving fungi and that this parasite since

But I do think that they represent an archetype of connection and that’s the whole ecosystem is also like we, are all people of the red blood, but also we are all beings of earth, right? Our ecosystem is also interconnected and how more we can take care of the trees, the trees will take care of us by producing shade and fruits and stable soil and you name it. I think

That’s really the realization that we have to make. I think indigenous practices and ceremonies and having curiosity towards people that are different than us and openness towards people that are different to us is crucial for us to evolve into this next step.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:01:01.253)
I will echo the sentiments of coming of age for young men. It’s been something that has been prevalent in my life. For a long time, I like I have one foot in boyhood and one foot in manhood. I run a company that has 12 employees and we feed families. There’s things that I do that are adults and that have masculine tendencies that I’m taking care of.

structure and responsibility with my research as well. But then I also have this one foot still in boyhood, and it’s so difficult to pull it out of that. And I think that had we undergone these ceremonies that our ancestors undergo, it would be a lot easier. There’s this amazing book called Iron John. I don’t know if you’ve ever read it before. Iron John. Iron like metal. Iron John?

Jasper (01:01:54.413)
No, I am John.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:01:59.977)
I R O N. And this book is an amazing story that pieces together mythology and literature and belief systems from all around the world. tells the story of initiation for men, but from various different vantage points. And the main point of it is that men, you cannot become a man until you undergo certain heroic journeys.

Jasper (01:02:00.941)
Hmm

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:02:29.022)
And that was really important for me to hear that like pulling away from the feminine, from the mother and undergoing an initiation and having responsibility and all of these things that we don’t, for the most part, a lot of young boys don’t do in the Western world. There’s this clear framework that cultures all around the world follow. Here in Southern Africa with the initiation ceremonies, here young boys are removed from the tribe for four weeks.

and left to fend for themselves and build a boma or like a house and they stripped of all of their clothing and it’s like a whole practice that is undertaken. So I think it would be wonderful for us to try and find something like that, know, not just for initiation for young boys, but also for women or for people that are needing help with transition into the afterlife. We need to create new structures and ceremonies and maybe draw on

practices and insights from other cultures and formulate something because I God knows we need a little bit of help and a little bit of guidance It’s it’s wonderful to hear that You know there is that happening on your side of the world with these men circles and these men’s gatherings that are happening I’m gonna Say one other thing if you would let me you know that Ganoderma aplanartum that you spoke about earlier so we have a very interesting use case here in the Neisner forest, which is this

Jasper (01:03:43.535)
Yeah, of course.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:03:53.164)
Afromontane, it’s our oldest forest in the country. It’s this massive swatch of land that is ancient and beautiful. It also has endemic elephants that roam it. And this is an account that I had found of the elephants, these dwarf Neisner elephants consuming Ganoderma aplenatum, excreting them.

And then local traditional healers taking the semi-processed fruiting body, the basidocarp of the Ganoderma aplenatum, taking it, grinding it up and making a tea out of it. And they believe that the elephant partially breaks down the chitin, like obviously I’m coming from a scientific standpoint, but it breaks down the mushroom and it allows them to make this medicine. So they make a decoction out of this elephant excrement with

Ganoderma aplanartum inside of it, as well as brownie. There’s another species that looks similar as well. And they make a tea and they drink this tea for longevity, which is quite an interesting one. We don’t call it the ears or the deities ears, it does have some interesting use cases here.

Jasper (01:05:11.225)
That is super interesting. It kind of reminds me of the luwak. The coffee in Indonesia where they have like this civets that they eat the coffee and then they wait until it excretes the coffee beans and then they brew, they roast, they ferment it more and then they make the coffee from that and that’s the whole thing and they also think it will help with…

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:05:15.0)
What’s the Luaq?

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:05:26.99)
Yeah.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:05:31.769)
Yeah.

Jasper (01:05:37.069)
like digestion and the beneficial properties of the coffee. But that’s also like a use case. Like how much did our ancestors do that? And again, we’ve known that all primates have gone through the droppings of animals looking for food. And we just think, maybe direct nutrients, like calories, but perhaps also like…

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:05:41.73)
Okay.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:05:50.819)
Yeah.

Jasper (01:06:00.313)
processed mushroom bodies to turn into a tea, which I’m always surprised like who started that and how did that person convince everybody else that that’s a good idea.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:06:10.821)
Trust me, it’s a great idea, just trust me guys, I swear. Yeah, it’s an interesting one. think what is fascinating again, like I’m gonna double down on this, is that there’s some cool undocumented use cases here and what I hope the listeners listening in on this can take away is that there’s still more to be found and I am just but one of the mouthpieces of this. This is not my research, it’s just.

Jasper (01:06:14.115)
You

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:06:37.282)
I’m hoping to tell the story. It’s going to take a lot more people in order to find out all of these wacky, wacky things. Like someone needs to go and test that Ganodermaplenartin before and afterwards and see if there’s any post-processing that takes place that maybe makes it more active or something. There should be researchers on South Africa because it’s this awesome hot spot and it’s going to take a lot of people. So I would encourage whoever’s listening to this. If you guys find it interesting and you are looking to find something to research, South Africa could be a good place.

Jasper (01:07:08.661)
incredible. like, it’s also so fantastic that it becomes, it’s like technology made it so much easier to like do these analysis, right? Just with, we have a mini PCR here, which like, it’s, it’s great. Like you didn’t use half that now you have like these micropore things and you can do full DNA sequencing on your own laptop. It’s just like, my God, this is making it so much more accessible for people with smaller budgets.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:07:27.918)
Yeah.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:07:37.806)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper (01:07:38.031)
but either just enthusiast or just starting out and they, know, scientists with a passion that don’t know how to do the whole scientific game of just finding funding, which is increasingly harder and just go out there and make these discoveries. And now I know you have a Patreon as well where people can like support you and your research, right? Like we can crowdfund citizen science in which never been possible before because of these financial barriers in the past. And that’s just.

like absolutely like incredible and sometimes I’m also at the use cases of like maybe maybe this kind of derma up and out them elephant poop situation is one of them but I always use this as like an example in my ethnomicology classes wherein in Poland I’m pretty sure Fomis fomentarius or it was the I’m pretty sure it’s Fomis fomentarius was used for like curing vaginal cancers on

dog on dogs and I’m like how how did that ever get in the literature that you have so many dogs that they they start getting cancer in their vagina and that you then try so many things that you found a cure and like if you go through some of these ethnomycological papers you find like 70 different use cases for certain mushrooms and they they go like wait this is a cure for everything that’s that that’s interesting and I’m wondering how much that is of

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:08:45.337)
Yeah.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:08:57.762)
No. Sorry.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:09:03.672)
and

Jasper (01:09:04.259)
people kind of haven’t lost that information and just kind of, you know, when you get to a place in Southeast Asia and you’d ask for directions and they don’t know, but they don’t want to tell you they don’t know. So they just make up directions. and that’s, that’s also a part of doing this, this research because sometimes they’ll just make stuff up on the spot to entertain themselves.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:09:24.9)
The only way to counteract that is to ask more questions. And if you see parallel across uses in various different villages, then there must be something to that. So we do see that happening. So like this isolated case, the reason why we haven’t written about it with the elephants is because like, okay, is there a possibility this is just like a once off and someone was like, I got a great idea, this is going to be great. then

tried it and he was like, this is shocking, I’m not going to give this to anyone. Or is that this maybe is something that needs to be studied further, in which case someone needs to do the research. I’m going to try. But what we write about at the moment, so we have a couple papers that are in peer review, which I mentioned earlier. One of them is called Ethnomycology, a treasure trove of indigenous fungal knowledge, and it references eight different species.

on the recipes, the use cases, which tribes use them. And we only put them in when there’s crossover of two or more tribes using a species for a certain use case. And then that made its way into the paper, because we know, OK, there’s something of substance there. We’ve got a couple others on some Ganoderma species, which, again, has this cross-cultural use in various different tribes. So I’m not an academic.

Jasper (01:10:33.071)
Mmm.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:10:50.819)
I don’t have any degree. I’m pretty much trying to wing it at the moment. And luckily, I’ve, I’ve garnered assistance from people far smarter than myself. So I am now affiliated as an independent contractor or independent researcher to Free Stage University. And I write with Stellenbosch University. And there’s some international journals that are participating in co authoring papers with us. And

You know, getting multiple different people involved to look at the stuff and vet it and verify it is so important. One of the things which you touched on earlier, which was my Patreon, it does make it very difficult to do the research because I’m entirely self-funding it myself for the last five years. And that’s why I have opened up this Patreon where people can read about the research. can follow along. They can read the papers prior to…

release and see the videos and give insight and suggestions on how we word things and how I put it together. And the whole point is to just try and garner some funding. it’s the equivalent of a cup of coffee every single month. It’s really not a lot of money, but that goes towards the traditional healers and helping to pay for their time.

It goes towards publishing costs and travel costs. It’s all for one reason alone, which is to document the information, not to just put it out to the world, but primarily to put it into the literature because we have…

an amazing piece of legislation in our country. know, traditional medicine is very important to our people here. And it even got baked into our legislation. The bi-prospecting and, what’s it, bi-prospecting and access and benefit sharing, bi-prospecting, access and benefit sharing legislation says that if a,

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:13:12.789)
a traditional medicine is documented in the country and it’s associated with a tribal culture, then any subsequent pharmaceutical research or product development or anything like that, there has to be fair trade agreements and share going back to that culture so that we can uplift that culture out of abject poverty. We can’t do that unless it’s documented. with like, like,

with regards to this ocreous serocentrata species by showcasing that there’s now a ceremony attached to this. If any pharmaceutical company in the world wants to supply this mushroom as a medicine, there has to be dialogue and communication with the traditional culture here in South Africa so that we can try and see, there some form of benefit share that we can put in place here.

The reason being is that we’ve had this with other traditional medicines like Robos. Are you familiar with Robos tea by any chance? Have you heard of Robos tea? Okay. Robos tea, billions and billions of rands were siphoned out of the country that didn’t go back to the San people that needed it most. And only recently was that legislation put in place to help funnel money back to pick these people out of the poverty that they’re currently in.

Jasper (01:14:17.807)
Yeah, of course.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:14:37.827)
due to colonization that happened. So, yeah, I would encourage everyone, if you guys are interested, I don’t keep any of the profits of this research. The funding that gets put in place through the Patreon goes to help document the research. That’s it.

Jasper (01:14:59.791)
Incredible. Yeah. And like, I find it so like admirable. I, I’m curious to, cause like what I could see as well, right? If, if these elders want to keep the knowledge engaged and there’s, bet so many people like me that want to experience a ceremony like that. What’s the legal status in South Africa right now? Um, especially to the use of indigenous shoes, because like, I think there’s some countries, uh, Mexico has an exception.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:15:29.101)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper (01:15:29.433)
that like a lot of these natural earth medicines, these natural earth psychedelics are illegal, but not if it’s practiced by indigenous peoples. And I wonder if something like that is in place in South Africa, or if people are moving towards that now, you’re seeing this like occur. And that could be even just the sharing of this information, if they’re open to people willing to go through that initiation or having that experience, I think could be a great way to…

If done in the correct way and not in the ways that what happened in Oaxaca in the 60s and 70s could help uplift a lot of these peoples out of these financially restraining situations.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:16:01.303)
Yeah. Yeah.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:16:11.969)
Yeah, so maybe the first question, I’ll get to that one first on the current legality surrounding psilocybin species or psilocybin and psilocin in general. Still scheduled substance here in the country, on par with heroin and cocaine and the rest of them. But I have been in communication with some amazing people that are currently fighting with the high court lawyers that

that were involved in the decriminalization of cannabis within the country. They’re now tackling psilocybin. And what we’re discussing at the moment is that if we can show traditional use case, that it becomes a lot easier to get these things decriminalized because of this legislation within our constitution that takes traditional medicine so seriously. It’s ridiculous. Like 70 % of our population still rely on traditional medicine.

And if you now outlaw like one whole category of that, it can cause irrefutable damage to the cultures that are here and cultures are so important to us here. So there is work going at the moment. It is a bit hush-hush. We’re not gonna talk too much into it at this moment in time. And there’s also like, yeah, way better people at explaining the laws around it. But what’s happening is that the high court is being challenged as we speak.

And I have been asked to help out as a, I can’t remember the term, but it’s a friend of the court. You basically write in on behalf of academia saying that there is traditional use and that should help swing the tide in our favor. So fingers crossed, hopefully soon. With regards to uplifting communities and sitting in on these ceremonies. Sure, man, this is such a difficult one because I don’t want to.

I don’t want to go down for all of history as the person that did exactly the same as what happened with Maria Sabina. And I really am trying to take this as seriously as possible, but I do mess up, man. Like I’m human and I do make mistakes and I’m taking counsel from a lot of really wonderful people that are hoping to guide this. But I’m going to actually step back and say, I think that decision requires

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:18:38.708)
a round table of not just government and not just academia, but also the people with their feet on the ground, the traditional healers that are doing the ceremonies, let them make the decision if they want to. That’s why I’m keeping it silent of where this happened. We give a general area, but let them make the decision. And I am not going to be involved in that because I am biased and I would love the whole world to try mushrooms.

you know, all of those things, but maybe they have a different journey for what they’re wanting to share. Maybe they want to share it with the whole world, but they will come to that conclusion. And I think that’s a better approach.

Jasper (01:19:21.239)
No, think I’m with you fully. I’m not saying that that needs to happen, but I do see what it, what impact it can have and when it happens in a good way. And it just comes to mind of the, practitioners that come from the Amazon and travel the world and bring abundance of just sharing their traditional medicines of hape, but also of course, uni or ayahuasca or whatever you want to call it. And like the amount of,

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:19:23.584)
Yeah. Yeah.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:19:42.208)
No.

Jasper (01:19:52.003)
potential for increase of quality of life and also the potential to protect their native lands because of those financial resources. also some of these are rock stars, man. Some of these Huni Queen people are like, they’re just full on rock stars on the internet. And that can also help them protect their habitats and their villages from illegal log in and you name it. So

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:20:03.66)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Jasper (01:20:19.095)
I see it’s a very sensitive topic and you have to approach it very sensitively, but I do see that there’s a huge potential benefit for these people as long as they’re willing to share and maybe even not in their villages, but like creating centers because I do know that people hunger for a traditional mushroom ceremony like they find with the cacti ceremonies, with eboga, with…

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:20:29.783)
Definitely.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:20:40.545)
and

Jasper (01:20:47.663)
ayahuasca and all of these different technologies that we have on this planet. And here it’s like in Mesoamerica, it’s a lot reinvented, right? Like it’s, and that’s what people feel. And that’s why it’s less popular. Like I’ve been to temaz, like a sweat lodges with mushrooms and I’ve been to fire ceremonies with mushrooms and it’s sometimes feels like an, an add on. And, but like if there’s a traditional way that like it’s purely

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:20:56.13)
you

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:21:07.074)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper (01:21:17.217)
made for that, that’s not tainted. I think people want to learn, that’s it. People want to learn and like right now it’s like what is like the psychedelic industry to be prospected like a couple billion dollar industry really soon and it would be amazing if that can help these people if it’s done in the right way and that’s always incredibly hard right and that’s not

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:21:40.694)
Definitely.

Jasper (01:21:42.315)
anybody making a decision for them but it’s the people making the decisions themselves.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:21:46.836)
Exactly, Yeah, educated and clear decision making where they know all prior like information. Can I give you my hope for the future? I maybe because I, I I do agree with

Jasper (01:21:59.553)
Of yeah, please. You seem like a very optimistic guy, which I think we need more of in the world, so…

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:22:04.162)
So I agree with you, man. I think that it could do so much good by bringing this information out to the world and it could really help to funnel back. And if done properly, there could be trusts initiated that can help to rebuild these communities and lift them up. How I see it happening, which would be really awesome, is we see these clinical

studies going on with psychedelic mushrooms, people being, or people using them for psychological disorders or distress or end of life depression, all of these things. And they’re done in a Western academic clinical setting or approach. My hope for the future is that South Africa is part of the story, but we utilize our species that are endemic to our land.

that our local people utilize. And we tie in academia with these traditional ceremonies. And we do them the way the people of the land have been doing them. And we see what benefit that takes. Because if we just copy paste what’s happening in America and we say we’re to do this in Europe and we’re going to do this in Australia and it’s going to be the same psychedelic mushroom thing that takes place within this research center, we’re not going to

we’re not going to see any deviation from the norm. But if we now introduce an actual ceremony where community is involved and we use endemic species here, maybe we can garner some slight different benefits. And that could be instrumental to elicit change in our people. So I see South Africa being part of the story, being one of the head players, but doing it in our

Jasper (01:23:56.895)
I fully agree and that’s also what I was hoping to relay of like, we have one modality, but like that doesn’t mean that that’s the one modality or the best modality and having more options. What’s coming to mind right now is I was in a Lakota ceremony that’s normally done with peyote, but with mushrooms and

everybody got invited to speak kind of at the peak and it was a pretty strong dose. And it was just like, was getting me out of my comfort zone, but the healing that came from it to speak out loud and to pray out loud. Well, normally you just lay in there and just like, let it over, like you just let it happen to you, but you have to participate. And the participation was, it was really profound. And like, hope like that’s what I’d like to see more of in the, in

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:24:38.497)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jasper (01:24:50.639)
the evolution of our understanding of working with these technologies is that there’s a benefit for just receiving, right? And getting the traditional treatment and there’s the benefit of doing something similar in a group setting where you can hear other people go through their processes and then there’s a benefit of having a participatory event, that helps us

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:24:54.849)
Mm.

Jasper (01:25:19.523)
go through this together, you know, and that’s, that’s, we end up in a cliche always because they’re true is like what Ram Dass said, right? We’re all walking each other home and it’s so powerful to, to, go through these experiences together and to, to see our, everybody’s vulnerabilities and strengths come out to play. And it doesn’t have to be in a psychedelic induced ceremony at all. And I just hope to see more of these

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:25:40.417)
Yes.

Jasper (01:25:48.835)
practices these like you see like you’re saying it’s their own variety their own ways of doing this come to light because we can learn so we can learn more from each other than from our own culture I think so I’d love to I’d love to see more of that and I want to thank you for helping these traditions come to light so they may benefit the peoples that have safe kept these traditions and these this wisdom this knowledge but also

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:26:02.281)
Thank you.

Jasper (01:26:18.083)
potentially help so many other people all over the world and maybe can just be helping that there’s an excitement that the this is has a seems to have a very very very long tradition of practice perhaps even to the beginning of our species and that really excites me and that gives me a lot of hope and I want to thank you for your work and keep doing it I hope to have many more of these conversations and ways to collaborate I love to come to South Africa

Let’s make it happen. I also would love for you to come over here. And I always love when the peoples meets, right? So I would love for the indigenous peoples in Africa to meet the Mayans and see that how much similarity they have in their traditions. That just brings me a lot of like, stoked.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:26:47.914)
Definitely.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:26:58.335)
Cullen Taylor Clark (01:27:05.685)
That would be magical. I would love that. That would be crazy, man. That would be awesome.

Jasper (01:27:14.051)
So, your Patreon, what’s your Patreon? Where can people find you? Goosebumps!

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:27:17.035)
So if anyone wants to, Matt, I was gonna say now I’m getting a little bit teary-eyed, because I think it would just be so wonderful. But yeah, thank you so much for having me on. If anyone wants to find out what I’m doing, my full name is Cullen Taylor Clark. Find me on Instagram under that. You can find me on Patreon under that, Cullen Taylor Clark. And you can find me on YouTube under that, Cullen Taylor Clark. But my research, if you’re looking to follow along and like actually see the website and see what I’m doing there,

the researchers called the lost Mootie, L-O-S-T as in I’ve lost my keys and then Mootie, M-U-T-I. For anyone wondering Mootie means medicine, but medicine has various different meanings here. Medicine can be spiritual medicine, it can be psychedelic medicine, it can also just be a headache medicine. So Mootie is all encompassing.

Jasper (01:27:54.415)
Yeah, we’ll put the links down there as well.

Jasper (01:28:12.719)
beautiful. Well thanks again for all you do. I’m really stoked to be connecting and seeing more of what you’ve been cooking up and uncovering and learning and it’s incredible. Thank you so much. Thank you all for listening. If you’re listening and we’re gonna wrap it up right now. Let’s see you all on the flip side.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:28:13.247)
Go man.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:28:25.505)
Thanks.

Cullen Taylor Clark (01:28:33.377)
Peace out, man. Thank you so much,