Welcome to Roon Soup, a weekly podcast about magic, culture and the paranormal.

My name is Gordon and I shall be your host.

This week we are speaking to Dr. Beatrice Labate.

Bia is an anthropologist and author or editor of dozens of books and academic papers on psychedelics.

She is one of the world's leading experts on

Iowa's culture and indiguity. I have been trying to get our calendars to line up

for most of this year, so I was and am very much looking forward to this conversation enjoy

Dr. Labate thank you very much for your time yeah thanks for having me here. Lovely, lovely.

We have a traditional first question, Bia, which is, were you a weird kid?

Oh, I don't know how to define weird but I think I'm not weird but I have heard often that I'm weird so I guess so.

As a child were you always interested in this kind of thing?

Were you running off into the woods?

You know, that kind of stuff, playing by yourself, interested in

I've been interested in things that are different from my culture. I think I've always had some kind of like anthropological twist to life so you know if I was in the club and I would

see somebody that looked from another culture was foreigner I would try to go

there and hang out I've also was raised in a pretty bourgeois family and I always like to hang out with the people in the kitchen, the people of color, and go check out what the, you know, the guards were doing and just hang out in the street and you

know see for example the police in action I remember I was small once and I saw

murder around the corner of my house and I stayed with like 12 men that were the police and all this technical people and just men that wander around the neighborhood at night and me a small

young girl watching out and checking it out and trying to see what was happening and of course when I told my parents they were pretty upset but I always I guess I've always been curious towards

authority as we would say in anthropology.

So was it something you always wanted to do or was there a period there maybe after you saw the

policeman that you wanted to be a policeman or anything or did you think actually you know I might want to study

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