Once Upon A Shroom

Hey, True Weirdos, we just wanted to take a minute and thank you so much for your support. True Weird Stuff has won the Best History Podcast and the Women in Podcasting Awards and we've also won a Signal Award in the Paranormal category and that's only happened because of you, our fellow strange people. Thanks. Stick around if you want after the episode for a little bonus content and conversation.

A banker, a pediatrician, and a shaman walk into a forest. There I was, poised in space, a disembodied eye, seeing but not seen. The effect is to bring about a fission of the spirit, a split in the person, a kind of schizophrenia, with the rational side continuing to reason and to observe the sensations that the other side is enjoying.

The banker made promises he didn't keep. The shaman was punished, first with fire and then with murder. It was as though the walls of our house dissolved and I was suspended in mid-air, viewing landscapes of mountains with camel caravans advancing slowly across the slopes, the mountains rising tier above tier to the very heavens.

A banker and a shaman, and before you know it, the CIA. Throw in a Russian pediatrician and an undercover chemist and what you've got is the story of how shrooms turned America psychedelic. True weird stuff. Valentina Pavlovna Guercken was born in Moscow but emigrated to the United States with her family during the Russian Revolution.

There she met and married an up-and-coming finance bro named Gordon Wasson. The year was 1927 and the couple was honeymooning in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. For Gordon, this meant long romantic rambles in the forest, hand-in-hand with his beautiful and brilliant new bride. For Valentina, freshly graduated from medical school, it was a chance to introduce her new husband to something she loved as a child in Russia, foraging for wild mushrooms.

In the afternoon of the first day in the Catskills, we went strolling. Suddenly my bride spied wild mushrooms in the forest and racing over the carpet of dried leaves in the woods, she knelt in poses of adoration before first one cluster and then another of these growths. She was overcome with joy at seeing the same kinds of mushrooms in the United States that she had seen in Russia.

That night, Valentina prepared an elaborate meal using every mushroom she'd collected. Gordon wouldn't touch a bite. He pleaded with her not to eat any of it, declaring that if she did, he would surely wake up a widower. He insisted that she couldn't possibly know which mushrooms were a deadly poison and which were safe to eat.

But Valentina did know what mushrooms were safe to eat, and that led to the kind of spirited discussion that goes down between this kind of brainiac newlyweds. Instead of rolling her eyes at her charming but narrow-minded husband, and instead of him sighing at the peasant superstitions of his otherwise rational wife, the pair arrived at the conclusion that their very different attitudes came down to simple cultural bias.

Valentina hailed from the Slavic world, where wild mushrooms were an everyday thing. Gordon's roots were firmly planted in the Anglo-Saxon world, where wild mushrooms were suspect and dangerous. Which got the young lovers wondering, what if all the warnings about the dangers of wild mushrooms were really just propaganda, a smokescreen hiding the larger truth?

The ancients had used mushrooms in sacred religious ceremonies. Why was this mystical knowledge locked away from the modern world? What secrets were being kept? Valentina went to work every day at the hospital. She was a pediatrician who went on to publish her research into possible immunizations for rheumatic fever, and then later for the treatment of sinusitis in kids.

That's just for starters. Gordon clocked in every day at the Guarantee Trust Company. Like his wife, Gordon was beyond accomplished. Before getting into banking, he'd served in the U.S. Army. He studied at Columbia University and then at the London School of Economics. This was a power couple for sure. But a part of their life they didn't much share with coworkers was their growing obsession with mushrooms.

Mycology is the study of fungi. Ethnology is the study of people. Valentina and Gordon Wasson called themselves ethnomycologists. In their spare time, they began hunting for the places in the world where mushrooms were used as medicine and or in sacred rituals. They wrote letter after letter to anthropologists and missionaries and experts in languages.

This was a no-passing hobby. The couple invested years. Years that turned into decades. Now, one of those letters Valentina sent was to a British author named Robert Graves. He'd written a best-selling biography in 1934 called I, Claudius. In it, he described how the Roman emperor, Claudius, had died by poison. The leading theory at the time was that his own royal physician betrayed him by pouring the poison into a dish of mushrooms destined for the emperor's table.

Valentina pondered this. And then in 1949, she reached out to Graves, suggesting that perhaps the treachery that killed Claudius didn't come from his doctor's apothecary, but from the kitchen. Perhaps, she said, Claudius had first been served amanita caesarea, which is a delicious and wholesome mushroom. And then an assassin hired by the emperor's wife, who was also his niece, slipped the poisonous amanita phalloids into the dish.

The symptoms that Claudius suffered before dying were very similar to those caused by eating the deadly amanita. This is not the only reason why you shouldn't be marrying your own kinfolk, but it's a good one. Now, this delightful exchange sparked an enthusiastic new friendship between the Wassons and Graves, and soon letters were zipping back and forth across the Atlantic.

Graves was famous and famously eccentric. He lived in Majorca, was broke as a joke, completely indifferent to money and social norms. But, weirdly, the very free spirit at Graves found a brother in Wasson, the New York banker. In one letter, Graves wrote to Gordon Wasson that, Graves followed what the Wassons were doing very closely.

He was fascinated by their research into the connection between the ancient religions and mushrooms. Graves told them of the myth of the Corinthians, claiming that they were born from mushrooms. This is a highly controversial myth today, since it seems to suggest that not only had early Christians were gobbling mushrooms in an attempt to commune directly with God.

This sort of thing does not go well in Sunday school, trust me. Wasson's mind was pretty well blown by what he was learning from Graves. I'm a little frightened by your capacity for detecting inner meanings. What astonishes me is how you managed to think so clearly about these things in the banking district of New York.

Who doesn't love a good bromance? Am I right? Then, in September 1952, the letter arrived. Graves shared an article written by a Dr. Richard Alan Schultz. Schultz had discovered in 1938 that an ancient Aztec practice had survived the centuries and was still in use by certain indigenous peoples in Mexico. Schultz described the ingestion of what appeared to be narcotic mushrooms, what the Aztecs had called Tiananacetl, which translates as the flesh of the gods.

Gordon Wasson raced to the phone and called Dr. Schultz at Harvard. He had a thousand questions. And so Schultz advised him to turn his attention to Mexico, where he could see it for himself. And that's what led Valentina and Gordon Wasson to pack their bags and head to southern Mexico, accompanied by a society photographer named Alan Richardson.

Making their way from one remote village to the next, the Wassons soon found themselves participating in all night long sacred rituals involving hallucinogenic mushrooms. This was the first of many trips spent tripping for the Wassons. Graves was super jealous. He'd only read about such things. And here's his new bestie, Gordon Wasson, describing his experience of the divine in the company of what he called backwards Indians.

Please allow me to point out that here is a random white dude crashing an ancient religious practice with the nerve to call the people who've welcomed him backward. Ain't that just the way? From that fungal epiphany on their honeymoon, the Wassons had been compiling their findings. They kept coming back to the repeated references to mushrooms in religion.

It seemed to them that our human ancestors had gone so far as to worship a mushroom. How else could you explain the reverence shown the fungi dating all the way back to the beginning of civilization? There was something downright supernatural about the way mushrooms were presented across cultures throughout human history.

What did it all mean? In 1957, the couple published a massive two-volume book called Mushrooms, Russia and History. Massive, not just in size, but in scope. Volume one covered everything from mushroom culture in Valentina's native Russia, to infamous murders by poison, to how early European Christianity painted the mushroom as a tool of Satan.

Volume two brought the reader to Mexico and tribal ceremonies using mushrooms to commune with the gods. This book is addressed to all who love mushrooms, who love the whole rich world of wild mushrooms. In the same way many love the flowers of the fields and birds of the air, Our subject takes us into history and folklore and mythology at a daunting 579 pages.

It most definitely does. But if you're expecting some sort of dry textbook, think again. We Russians love whole mushroom world. And what a world it is. Almost endless in variety. Every species expressing its individuality by its size and shape and stance. The evil kinds, how they flaunt their wicked grace like the harlots that they are.

But we are fond of them too. In a way, the book is fascinating and it's packed with beautiful illustrations and paintings. It's also out of print and used copies sell for as much as $4,500. If you had to boil it down to one major premise or thesis statement, as we all heard a million times in school, it might be this.

Our mistrust of mushrooms is the product of ancient, ancient religious taboos against eating them. We mere mortals are unworthy to consume the food of the gods, to partake in their visions, to share in their knowledge of the mysteries of existence. They wrote of the old beliefs that mushrooms were born of lightning. There is some actual science to that.

Lightning does boost the growth of certain species of mushrooms. They wrote about Tlaloc, worshipped as both the god of lightning and of mushrooms in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, which might expect to have been just one more big academic book about a subject that only a handful of people cared about, instead helped kick off the psychedelic age in America.

And all it took was a little help from one of the most popular and influential magazines in the history of the United States. That magazine was called Life. At its peak, one in four Americans was a devoted reader. So, in May 1957, a 15-page article complete with photographs describing Gordon Wasson's hallucinatory adventures with a Mexican shaman named María Sabina caught a lot of attention.

María Sabina was a curandera, a traditional healer or shaman, who could enter into an altered state of consciousness to interact with the spirit world. We chewed and swallowed these acrid mushrooms, saw visions, and emerged from the experience awestruck. We had come from afar to attend a mushroom rite, but had expected nothing so staggering as the virtuosity of the performing curanderas and the astonishing effects of the mushrooms.

Richardson and I were the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms, which for centuries had been a secret of certain Indian peoples living far from the great world in southern Mexico. Valentina and the couple's daughter were scheduled to arrive the very next day, but Gordon and Alan Richardson were deep into the experience already.

In an attempt to protect the shaman, Sabina, Wasson withheld the name of her village and called her by the name Eva Mendez. He described a gathering of 20 people watching as Eva cleaned the mushrooms, praying over them as she passed them through a cloud of resin incense smoke. She sat on a mat before a simple altar adorned with Christian images, the child Jesus, and the baptism in Jordan.

The shaman and her community were Mazatecs, an indigenous people in the Mexican highlands. So the Mazatecs blended Roman Catholicism with their own older spiritual beliefs and practices. They venerated the brown-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe, a figure some anthropologists theorize is a manifestation of a traditional goddess.

The mushroom ritual was meant to elevate the worshippers to a higher plane of consciousness. Then Eva apportioned the mushrooms among the adults. She reserved 13 pair for herself and 13 pair for her daughter. The mushrooms were always counted in pairs. I was on a tiptoe of expectancy. She turned and gave me six pair in a cup.

I could not have been happier. This was the culmination of years of pursuit. She gave Alan six pair too. His emotions were mixed. His wife Mary had consented to his coming only after she had drawn from him a promise not to let those nasty toadstools touch his lips. Alan broke that promise. Shortly after midnight, the room in darkness, Eva had snuffed out the candles using a blossom from her altar.

Alan whispered to Gordon that he was seeing things. The visions had started. They reached a plateau of intensity deep in the night and they continued at that level until about four o'clock. We were never more wide awake and the visions came whether our eyes were open or closed in vivid color, always harmonious. Later, it was as though the walls of the house dissolved and my spirit had flown forth.

The visions were not blurred or uncertain. They were sharply focused. The lines and colors being so sharp that they seemed more real to me than I've ever seen with my own eyes. I felt I was now seeing plain. Ordinary vision gives us an imperfect view. I was seeing the archetypes, the platonic ideals that underlie the imperfect images of everyday life.

The two men slept for a couple of hours, waking clearheaded and refreshed. Wasson was convinced that the ritual, at least for Eva's community, was as necessary as the mushrooms themselves, but... This doesn't mean that the mushrooms lose their potency if not eaten communally. My wife and our daughter, Masha, aged 18, joined us a day after this ceremony and in their sleeping bags ate the mushrooms while alone with us.

They, too, saw the same brilliant colors. My wife saw a ball in the Palace of Versailles with figures in period costumes dancing to a Mozart minuet. Now there's a family vacation to remember. The Wassons returned home to New York with a stash of mushrooms. Six weeks after his first trip, Gordon wolfed down another handful in his bedroom in the city and discovered to his delight that...

If anything, they'd gained in their hallucinogenic potency. So what the Wassons didn't know was that they weren't at all alone in their pursuit of the magical mushroom. The CIA was interested, too. And the dot that connected Valentina and Gordon Wasson to the CIA's top-secret MKUltra program was none other than that long-dead emperor of Rome, the mushroom-poisoned Claudius.

Back in the early 1950s, as the Wassons' correspondent with the writer Robert Graves was picking up speed, an officer in the CIA technical services division was daydreaming about how assassinations were pulled off in the ancient world. Look at how Agrippina killed her uncle-husband Claudius, for example, he said. She used mushrooms as a poison, didn't she?

From a declassified memo discovered through a Freedom of Information Act request... Let's get to the technology of assassinations. Figure out the most effective ways to kill, like Empress Agrippina. The CIA, under the leadership of director Sidney Gottlieb, didn't need to be asked twice. The secretive MKUltra program was all about mind control.

The agency had been cheerfully conducting secret experiments with LSD for decades, often on subjects who had no idea they were being dosed with acid. The CIA had people tripping balls for days, weeks, even months at a time, with predictably dire results in many cases. You know, insanity and death. With LSD proving to be such a good time, Gottlieb became curious about mushrooms and enthusiastic about adding them to the CIA's arsenal of psychotropic weaponry.

At the same time that the Wassons were packing for Mexico, a CIA field officer was already there. He was roaming from one remote town to the next on the hunt for both poisonous and hallucinatory mushrooms. He'd heard the stories of secret mushroom rituals, and he learned that there were shamans practicing the ancient ceremonies.

Shamans who used mushrooms to access the divine. All of this went into a report sent back to Washington. That field officer superior at the CIA, a man named Morse Allen, liked what he read. Not just the part where toxic mushrooms might be used to assassinate an inconvenient rival. Morse Allen thought that hallucinogenic mushrooms might be as good, or maybe even better, a tool for use in interrogations than LSD.

Very early accounts of the ceremonies of some tribes of Mexican Indians show that mushrooms are used to produce hallucinations. In addition, this literature shows that the witch doctors or divinators use some type of mushrooms to produce confessions or locate stolen objects. Essential that the peculiar qualities of the mushrooms be explored.

So the CIA did what the CIA did best back then. It created a new secret program inside the already secret MKUltra. It found a civilian recruit to do the dirty work, and it appropriated the money to pay for it. In this case, an amount equal to about $20,000 today. The mushroom hunt was assigned the very bland name Subproject 58.

It is hereby certified that this invoice 1, applying to MKUltra, Subproject 58, their performance is satisfactory. That the services are being accomplished in accordance with mutual agreements. That a detailed agenda of the payments and receipts is on file. That this bill is just and correct, and that payment thereof has not yet been made.

Acting Chief T-85 Chemical Division is hereby certified that this invoice applies to Subproject 58. Which has duly approved and that the project is being carried out in accordance with the memorandum dated 13 April 1953. All very government-y and official. And no worries, taxpayers. Expenses were itemized. Camera, recording equipment, luggage, etc.

The civilian recruit was a young chemist named James Moore. As a grad student, Moore had worked alongside some of the scientists on the Manhattan Project. And then moved into a career at a private pharmaceutical firm. That's where the CIA found him. Offering to pay his salary in exchange for his research into certain substances.

That arrangement worked out great for Moore's bosses. Who were more than happy to let the feds pay their employees full salary. Worked out for Moore and really paid off for the CIA. Who cheerfully followed their pet chemist right to his new gig at the University of Delaware. One of 44 colleges and universities already engaged in secret research for the MKUltra program.

Under the direction of the CIA handlers, Moore was on the hunt for a mushroom called the flesh of the gods. Sound familiar? The very same mushroom the Aztecs called Tiananacetal. Multiple trips to the Mexican highlands had turned up nothing. And then, James Moore heard a crazy story. It was about a banker in New York.

An amateur mushroom fanatic who had somehow found the mysterious flesh of the gods and had sampled it. What? A banker? Moore reached out to Gordon Wasson. He told the banker that he was very keen to visit the mountainous region of Mexico that Wasson was already familiar with. A scientific expedition. And in an incredible stroke of luck, Moore happened to have just received a grant from the Geschichter Fund for Medical Research.

How about it, Mr. Wasson? What do you say? In 1956, Gordon Wasson and James Moore traveled together to the village of Huautla, Mexico. Wasson thought he was in the company of a fellow fungi enthusiast who happened to be a scientist. He had no clue that there was no such thing as the Geschichter Fund for Medical Research.

No idea that the CIA was funding the entire trip and watching his every move. And as for Moore, it was his first time playing CIA agent outside of a clean, climate-controlled laboratory. I had a terribly bad cold. We damn near starved to death and I itched all over. I did feel the hallucinogenic effect, although disorientation would be a better word to describe my reaction.

You know, all this chanting in the dialect. Wasson, mushroom fanatic and true believer, was disappointed at how his travel companion responded to the sacred ritual. He had no empathy for what was going on. He was like a landlubber at sea. But in the end, it was all worth it. James Moore brought a big bag full of the Tianana kettle mushrooms home to his lab in Newark, Delaware, and informed his CIA bosses that he was confident that he could isolate the chemical compounds that made the mushroom magical.

He set to work. One of many chemists on the CIA payroll supplying the agency with the hallucinogenic compounds that were being fed to unsuspecting guests at federal holiday parties and to certain men who were customers of a brothel in San Francisco. Check out our episode on that wild experiment. That one's called Tripping Johns.

Anyway, many years later, James Moore reflected on his time as a secret chemist for the CIA. Did I ever consider what would have happened if this stuff were given to unwitting people? No, particularly no. Had I been given that information, I think I would have been prepared to accept that. It was all investigative. Moore claimed to be unaware that the CIA, under Sidney Gottlieb, was doing some unorthodox things in some very unorthodox ways.

If I had thought I was participating in a scheme run by a small band of mad individuals, I would have demurred. Ultimately, Moore was a patriot who believed that when it came to the Cold War against the Soviet Union, the ends more than justified the means. As for Wasson, he stretched those CIA dollars as far as he could, making several more trips to the village of Huautla de Jiménez on the government's dime.

And then Life magazine came calling. And psilocybin, magic mushrooms, were introduced to the whole world. It sure would be nice if the story ended right here. Gordon Wasson, everybody! The great granddaddy of shrooms. That legendary scientist of the psychedelic, Albert Hoffman, isolating the two compounds that gave the mushrooms their magic, psilocybin and psilocin.

With that surprising and fun CIA plot twist making it all seem like a cool movie. Except, there is always a price to be paid when mortals covet the powers and privileges of the gods. A steep price to be paid when grubby and greedy hands snatch the sacred and make it profane. In 1958, just one year after the Life magazine story hit the stands, Valentina Wasson died of cancer.

Her part in this story was overshadowed by her husband's. That's how the world was for women back then. Even though Valentina was a physician and a scientist, the world looked at her mostly as a wife. Even though, just six days after the Life article was published, Valentina's account of the same mushroom ritual was printed in the magazine this week.

That article was called, I Ate the Sacred Mushroom. If the active agent can be isolated and supply assured, it will become vital tool in study of psychic processes. As the drug becomes better known, uses will be found for it. Perhaps in handling alcoholics and narcotics addicts, in treating terminal illnesses accompanied by acute pain, and in mental diseases.

Valentina was a visionary who died more than half a century before the National Institute of Health released this. Preliminary research indicates that psilocybin may be helpful in treating substance use disorders, including tobacco use disorder. There is evidence that psilocybin may be an effective treatment for depression and anxiety disorders.

Research suggests that some psychedelics can reduce anxiety and depression in people with cancer, and can promote well-being, quality of life, and acceptance of their illness and related issues. Research is underway right now, like at Johns Hopkins. The molecular structure of psilocybin, a naturally occurring psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms, allows it to penetrate the central nervous system, and the scientific and medical experts are just beginning to understand its effects on the brain and mind, and its potential as therapeutics for mental illnesses.

Backed by $55 million in funding, researchers working to develop new treatments for a wider variety of psychiatric and behavioral disorders, and to expand research and healthy volunteers with the ultimate aspiration of opening new ways to support human thriving. Human thriving? Who isn't up for more of that? Valentina's death did not appease the gods, though.

There was more punishment yet to come. Gordon Wasson had sort of tried to protect the curandera María Sabina, who had welcomed him into her community's sacred mushroom ritual. He changed her name in the Life article to Eva Mendez, but he lied to her about his motives. He didn't tell her that he was a man obsessed with mushrooms.

He told her instead that he was frantic to find his missing son, and had heard that she knew a ritual that might help locate the man. That was, of course, pure fiction. Then, Sabina refused to be photographed, but relented once Wasson swore to keep the picture private. Instead, he released the photo to Life magazine, along with the name of Sabina's village.

Wasson distorted the truth in service of his story. Sabina, like the members of her community, didn't eat mushrooms to commune with God. They were good practicing Catholics. They went to Mass to commune with God. The mushrooms were used by them for healing and for locating lost people and objects. The publicity and attention that Gordon Wasson rained down on this tiny remote village brought nothing but sorrow to Sabina.

Thousands of people turned up at her door, including famous people like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, and John Lennon. Beatniks and hippies swarmed the place. Sabina's neighbors were bitter and angry, and they blamed her for all of it. She was ostracized. She was even jailed for a while. Her home was burned to the ground. Her son was murdered.

At the end of her life, she had nothing but regret and remorse for allowing Gordon Wasson in. She died alone, impoverished and heartbroken. Gordon Wasson went on to absolutely shine in his chosen career of ethnomycologist. He teamed up with a French botanist and mushroom expert named Roger Heim. The pair traveled throughout Mexico collecting specimens, which Heim was later able to cultivate in his laboratory.

Those were the specimens scientists Albert Hoffman used to isolate the psychoactive compounds in the mushrooms. Both Wasson and Heim even had a species of hallucinogenic mushroom named for them, which in science is a kind of immortality. Wasson went on to study other ancient intoxicants and rituals, and self-published a handful of beautifully illustrated books, most of which have never been reprinted.

When he died at age 88 on December 26, 1986, he was lauded for his work. One obituary declared that Gordon, along with his wife Valentina, had illuminated the sanctity of psychotropic mushrooms, not only in Russia and Siberia, but also in the most ancient of Hindu scriptures, in the mystery cults of ancient Greece, and among the native peoples of Mexico and Guatemala, both ancient and modern.

Another described him as respected by both Manhattan's merchant banking community and by the prophets of the narcotics and LSD cults of the 1960s. They called him the reluctant American father of hallucinogenic psychedelia. So it's only fitting that we end on a very trippy note. Remember how Gordon and Valentina began their shared obsession?

It was with a question. In the far mists of time, in the earliest days of humanity, was it the mushroom that people worshipped? Was it the mushroom who showed them a vision of God? The mushroom that shaped our entire understanding of ourselves and our place in the cosmos? Did our fundamental meanings derive from fungi?

That's blasphemy for some. But here's a thing you might not know. A thing to give you the willies. Did you know that the largest organism on Earth is a fungi? It lives in the Blue Mountains of Oregon and takes up more than 1,665 football fields. That's just one. There's somewhere between 2 and 5 million different species of fungi on Earth.

But over 90% of those are unknown to science. Though we do know that without that fungi, known and unknown, we wouldn't even be here. For two reasons. First, the whole world would be buried under dead animals and fallen trees and every other once-living thing that relies on fungi for decomposition. Reason number two. Fungi is a distant cousin to humanity.

We split off a billion years or so ago. Our bodies are home to fungi right now. They call it the mycobiome. It keeps us healthy and sometimes it makes us sick. What do you think causes jock itch or a yeast infection or pneumocystis pneumonia? Fungi. Every single one of us is harboring anywhere from 9 to 23 strains of fungi.

And if that's not trippy enough, humans also share more than 50% of our DNA with fungi. Mushrooms, it turns out, are far more closely related to people than they are to plants. We depend on fungi for our very survival. We just have to hope we keep the upper hand. Because it will be the very end of the world as we know it if the fungi that colonizes our bodies suddenly took control.

That would be a nightmare. A nightmare like the novel The Girl with All the Gifts. A nightmare like the video game turned TV series The Last of Us. But that's not real. At least, not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Next time on True Weird Stuff. The ancients may not have had antibiotics or flush toilets or Taco Bell, but they had something even better.

They had curses. Tell me you haven't wanted to lay a mighty curse upon someone's head at least once. Don't miss the next episode of True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents in this episode. Don Morgan, Wendy Tonetti, Stuart Watson, Kary "Doc" Bowser, and Sam Moore. Sherry, may I make a confession? Please.

I don't eat mushrooms. Not on pizza, not in soup, not on steak. I don't like the taste. I don't know if it's because it's a really earthy taste in a lot of them or it's the slimy texture or what it is, but I've tried and I don't like mushrooms. I just don't. Kevin won't eat a cooked mushroom. He'll only eat a raw mushroom.

I love mushrooms. I have a confession to make. I have always wanted to do shrooms, but I'm too scared because I live inside my brain. I'm familiar with it. It is a low-rank Carney Fun House up in there. I'm afraid. I'm a product. I mean, I grew up on ABC Afterschool Specials. I'm afraid of looking down and spiders are coming out of my hand.

I'm afraid of clawing my own eyeballs out. I really have always been so, so, so curious about that. As a teenager, I read. Do you know Carlos Castaneda? Yeah, yeah. I read all the Carlos Castaneda books, and all I wanted to do was have astral projection and chew on some peyote and have visions. I'm such a boring, tiresome, tedious Capricorn.

I was always too scared to do it. I'm so scared. Back in the day, I never did any hallucinogens. It's interesting because LSD, in particular, back in the 1950s, before it became a popular recreational drug, it was being used for a lot of things. You talked a little bit about that with the alcoholism and narcotics addiction.

The reason that hallucinogens were used was because the feeling is that when the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous started, he said, you must have some sort of a spiritual experience of some kind in order to overcome this. He was obsessed with being able to find that. In the 1950s, before this became a recreational drug, there was a Canadian doctor.

His name was Dr. Albert Hoffer. He was involved with this, and he distributed these to one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous in the idea that it would be able to bring about this sort of spiritual reaction that would help you overcome it. In a documentary that I watched, there is a man who is Canadian who swears that, yes, it helped him overcome his alcoholism.

However, Bill W., the guy who was one of the founders, determined that this was not a useful tool for this. What's interesting about hallucinogens is, recently, it's gained more popularity again as a possible treatment for depression. I'll take it a handful of shrooms on the weekend. No, it's a clinical dose and you're monitored.

You can't find it everywhere. You've got to go looking for it. There are some microdosing treatments. I actually have a family member that lives in a place where this is legal and legitimate. She did a microdosing protocol that was really a game changer in terms of depression and it's a very interesting field of study.

Again, those Puritans, we have them to account for why we're so hesitant to investigate this. I remember years ago, before COVID, probably around maybe 2018, somewhere like that, I read a fascinating article about a research project that was underway with actual patients who were diagnosed with a terminal illness. They knew they were going to die and they were terrified.

I mean, we all know we're going to die, but we kind of don't know we're going to die, right? Right. There's a difference between, boy, I guess I'm going to die someday and, well, I'm probably not going to be here for next 4th of July. These are people that were scared, depressed, anxious. What time they had left had been stolen from them by the specter of annihilation, right?

Right. These people were recruited into this program and I think this ran under the Johns Hopkins as part of the Johns Hopkins study. They were treated with clinically managed doses of LSD and all of them were better because they had had, I'll never forget this one woman, she was really struggling. She had a husband and kids.

I don't care how preachy you are, live, love, laugh, but that's a hell of a thing to be confronted with. So, she said that her experience with this treatment had shown her that this life was of the smallest significance in the grander scheme of things, that there was a God and that there was so much more for us and to us than this one brief existence and it allowed her to let go.

It allowed her to let go of her fear that she was just going to cease to exist and instead embrace a different kind of idea of her own immortality. And she was able to die peacefully and without fear when her time came. That's good medicine, you know? When you can take someone's fear and hopelessness away and replace it with joy and hope and excitement over all of the things that the creator has endowed us with, that's pretty good medicine.

And that's as good as any painkiller that you're going to give. So, there's been a lot of really encouraging work that's been done around mental health, terminal illness, substance use. There are clinics, I don't think they're here in the US, but there are clinics that you can go to. It's expensive. Once again, this is for people with resources, right?

But there are clinics that you can go to where you'll undergo this treatment protocol where you get clinically monitored dosing and trained professionals who are your trip guides, your trip masters, and your experience while tripping is a guided. Think of it like as a guided tour because you're there to work on the things that you're struggling with.

You're there to work on your grief or your depression or your anxiety or your fear. And so, you're tripping and you're also doing therapy at the same time. And if you're going to ask, well, does it work? It works like anything works. It depends on the person. What did you bring to it? Right? It's not a panacea for... Everybody's looking for, oh, we finally found it.

I mean, it works with certain things in certain situations with certain people. And you have to really show up for it, right? You have to... One of the things that was kind of clear in that early Johns Hopkins study with people who had terminal illnesses, I'm pretty sure it was Johns Hopkins. I'm going to have to start keeping a notebook or something.

It's crap that I read. But anyway, one of the things that was really obvious was you got out of it what you brought into it, which is also true of therapy. Mm-hmm. You know? Like, if I'm sick and you give me an antibiotic and I'm telling you, this is a bunch of bullshit. I don't believe in any of this. That antibiotic is still going to work, right?

Right. But therapy requires that you engage in the process. And I guess at some level, this did too. It's just amazing to think about. It is amazing to think about how much suffering we could alleviate potentially, right? Yeah. I think there's still a lot of unknowns with it. But I think it's interesting how hallucinogens have gone through cycles and then we kind of forget about them.

And then all of a sudden, we sort of bring them back again every once in a while. It's interesting that you talked about you had a guide for it. Is that what it was? Because that's what a therapist told me one time. She said, look, I am not your director. I'm trying to remember how she said it exactly. But she ended up saying, I'm your guide.

I'm not telling you what to do. I'm just your guide into you. And I think that's what a lot of people feel when they take hallucinogens. But the problem is that not everybody reacts to it the same way. So I, like you, would be concerned that I would be jumping off a building or gouging my eyes out or something. So scared.

Just so freaking scared. Just so scared of, I don't even know what I'm scared of. I'm just scared of everything, right? I never did. I never did the really fun party drugs. Part of it was having a parent that was a raving addict. That'll put you off your shrooms. But yeah, that's like in social work. We don't lead you and we don't walk behind you and push you.

We walk alongside. And that's really what that guide kind of relationship is. There are so many. And who would have ever thought, Max, that we would spend as much time crisscrossing and overlapping the CIA as we have on this podcast? That wasn't our plan, I don't think. No, it certainly wasn't. But when you went MK Ultra and I went Tripping Johns, it's the episode Tripping Johns, which you must listen to.

You will be shocked at what the CIA was doing if you haven't listened to that episode. It's unbelievable to me. So I look at them. I dive into these declassified CIA documents. And if you didn't know what you were looking for, you wouldn't understand what you were seeing. Because they have like on subproject 58, which is the shrooms project, they've got like this much for film and this much for incidentals at the drugstore.

And this is what Gordon Watson spent at the hotel bar. But there's not a big headline that says shroom budget, right? Right. You had to know what you were looking for to see it. And once you ask the document the right question, you're like, oh, my God, the CIA. Y'all were a bunch of scoundrels in the day. Like the Cold War CIA was the ultimate mystery machine.

It really was. Well, how the CIA went and recruited some of these people for these special projects is kind of fascinating all in and of itself. Because the things that the CIA needed for you to do, there was no major for that in school. You know, I mean, like, well, in the Tripping Johns episode, that guy who they. Oh, that guy.

That guy was a drunken pervert. He was a drunken pervert watching people watching hookers have sex with men who they'd Mickey'd with LSD. That's what was really going on. I mean. Thank you. Like it gets exhausting for me how we have to tiptoe around. He's a drunken pervert. He was what that was. That's what that was. So the so the interesting there were a couple of things in this episode that were just like delightful.

One of them was that Valentina Wasson connected with Robert Graves over the murdered Emperor Claudius and the CIA connected with Wasson over the murdered Emperor Claudius. Didn't you find that that really is an interesting little thing in the story? And please don't marry your niece. OK, like I know that they did that back in the day to consolidate power and land and wealth and all of that.

But that I think that was a leading factor in why he got poisoned. I think Agrippina was just like, you know, not not here for this. Claudius. So I thought that was an interesting little thing that. And it shows you it gave you great insight into the CIA under Sidney Gottlieb. It was such a creative free for all. It is not it was not like what we picture a government agency, you know, bureaucracy and following the rules.

The CIA was this freewheeling party bus of people that were encouraged to. Huh. I just read this thing about this Roman emperor. Maybe we could kill people with mushrooms. And boom, you get approved and you get a budget. Sure. It does make you wonder what's going on now. We don't know about. I almost don't want to know.

I almost don't want to know until it's over because it's so it's so scary and it's insidious like it's everywhere. The CIA. Oh, man. What a time to be alive. The CIA during the Cold War. What didn't they get up to? How many times? We're not even trying, y'all. We're not even like I hate the Puritans. I'm not even interested in the CIA as like I'm fascinated by them, but I don't hate them.

Right. The number of times I trip and fall over the CIA and their shenanigans and skullduggery and hijinks and all of that, like you can't avoid them. You're like, oh, my God. Here we go. The CIA. We just had another episode, Max, that touched on Subproject 68 in MKUltra. Remember, like we're constantly tripping over those guys because they just did as they bloody well pleased on the public dime with human beings.

Without getting their consent. And I thought it was interesting when you were talking about the woman, Eva Mendes. Yeah. What was her real name? María Sabina. That what happened to her was so unfair because they weren't she wasn't saying this is how we find God. They were they had a religion, which is how they were doing that.

And the fact that she was told that none of this would be shared, then it was. And then she had every everybody showing up at her doorstep, every celebrity showing up at her doorstep and how this really ruined her life and how sad that truly is. It destroyed her. It destroyed her. And he and it wasn't an accident that destroyed her, that it destroyed her.

Okay. He. Lied to her. And when you look at the Life magazine and it's you know, it's all you can find these things got to hunt for them a little bit, but you can find them. There she is. Yeah, there's a different name under there. But there's her face and the name of her village. And this was a this was a remote little place in the mountains.

And now we've got Bob Dylan knocking on the door, knocking on the door, knocking on heaven's door. Yeah, I couldn't help it. Like it was terrible what happened to her and who gave us nobody cared. Like it just it just happened. And oh, well, what are you going to do? What's what I didn't know. I guess I just assumed I don't know what I thought.

I guess I thought shrooms had always been around in American drug culture. Like maybe because, you know, like people smoked marijuana back in the day. Right. Right. Before before the hippies in quotes. I guess I just thought that shrooms were, you know, a thing that got popularized. But shrooms were unknown in this country as a recreational drug until Gordon Wasson.

Yeah, I was never I was never aware of what that part of the history was. I simply didn't know. I just thought that was I mean, I sat for the longest time before we wrote this episode for the longest time. I was like, damn. So that's where shrooms came from, because I'm not old enough to remember a time before shrooms.

I was born into a world where shrooms were like you. Right. Like the shrooms have been here. So I never really thought about that and how fascinating that was. I've never I've been never around people doing shrooms. I was never around people tripping. I just was never around it. I mean, I was around other things. Trust me, I was.

I was I was working in the radio business during the cocaine days, but I wasn't doing any cocaine. I just drank, you know, but I was but I was never around people doing those things. It always seemed to be so mysterious and and something that I should be afraid of. Well, if you're afraid of your own mind, which is really what it like, I can get I can get dark and weird in a heartbeat with nothing.

What am I going to do after I eat the flesh of the gods? I'm either going to be sailing across the horizon on a flying unicorn or it's going I'm never coming back from it. Like I'm going to claw my own face off and I'm sad because I'm really curious to know what that experience is like. I envy people that know what that experience is like.

Yeah. No, I don't wish that I could have had that experience. I know I don't. But but it does make me feel good that the one woman you were talking about felt a sense of what the bigger picture was and felt a sense of optimism about what happens after we pass from this existence. That stayed with me. There were other people that they profiled that were part of that study, but she was the one who stayed with me because I think not all of us, certainly, but a lot of us, maybe most of us are really afraid to die.

We're afraid because we it's so unknown. And you have your faith if you're a person of faith. But I've seen even people of faith who lived a faithful life panic at the end. I think we all probably have. You know, one of the last conversations I had with my father and you were talking about somebody who was a devout Catholic his entire life.

And not only he didn't just talk the talk, he walked the walk. He really did. And he said to me, he said, where do you think we go when you die? And I thought, well, if anybody has this knocked, you should. That's what I thought. But I said to him, I said, Dad, I guess that's why they call it faith, because, you know, I I am of the belief that something something good awaits on the other side with that.

Max, be honest, though, did that question because Max's dad was a person of true faith and service, like as good a man as they make and hotter than a hot dog back in his day. But Max's dad was as good a man as as ever has walked. When your dad asked you that, did that not throw you? It did and it didn't. It did, because perhaps I have always had him on some sort of pedestal that his everything's unshakable.

You know, it's the thing like when they went after Mother Teresa died, they uncovered some letters. And this is somebody who's a saint who devoted her life to helping others. And they uncovered letters that she had written during this time when she was helping the poorest of the poor and she was having a crisis of faith.

She would share this with her friends, but she wouldn't publicly share this. And what that means is having faith means you are human. And some days you're not going to feel it. Some days you're going, it's all nothing. Some days you're going to put your you get up and you put your feet on the floor and you go, I can't do this.

It doesn't mean anything. It's all nothing. There's nothing. There's nothing afterwards. And, you know, so so I think that being human means that your faith waxes and wanes with that. There's sometimes that, you know, you feel like, oh, I really feel it. And then there's other times where you don't. So I did not. I had to step back and look at my father as a human being and not as this man who is my father, who I'd put on some kind of pedestal and say, ah, here at the end, he's human, just like all of us.

That's so hard because your dad, Max's dad, lived over 100 years. I mean, your dad had 102. Yeah. And and sharp as a tack up until the end. Like maybe toward the very end, he couldn't find the TV remote, but I couldn't find it last night. So I don't know that that had to do with him being honored to. But Max's dad was not just like a stable.

Ultimately, trustworthy force in Max's life, he was he was someone that you looked up to, you know, he was someone who was worthy of admiration. And so like I'm he's not even my dad. And when you told me about that conversation through me, because I'm like, oh, wait a minute, Frank, I'm counting on you. He was always sort of a tangible, tangible entity.

That was a demonstration of the faith, you know, the thing that seemed to be so mysterious. It was like, yeah, but he you can touch him and he is the real deal. And he is he was he really was the real deal. But he was human. And I think that's what it comes down to. Yeah, really? I mean, I just think that any kind of faith, no matter what it is that you're believing in, whatever whatever you do, you're you're you always come back to the fact that you're human and you have those you have those frailties.

That's just man. And you gave him exactly the right answer, which is not easy to do in that moment. Because you want to get it right. You want to nail it. And but you're also a little bit, you know, it's your dad. I didn't want to see your dad be so vulnerable. Right, right. And I didn't want to give him a trite answer because it was dismissive of the fear he was feeling in that moment.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I, you know. Mm hmm. It's a it's a tough one. And because of our because of the puritanical foundations of the Puritans, I fear that we have and we've made some choices as a as a populace that we may have slammed the door. On some research that could really ease people's suffering and help people be well.

And wellness isn't just physical, right? Wellness is mental and emotional. And if you've if you've read up on any of the research into micro dosing. I talked to someone who was trying a micro they would they did a micro dosing protocol for depression for, I want to say, almost a year. And I said, well, what what what's it like?

Like, are there side effects? Like, do you like are you aware that you're taking psychoactive materials? And she told me that the only thing she noticed and she got used to it so fast that it was only the first week of the protocol. She said, I just felt like like when I looked at things, they were bright and crisp and clear and sharply outlined.

Like visually, like things were just more present and vibrant. But she got used to it really quick the way like you get used to your new glasses. Suddenly the world isn't blurry. Right. So it wasn't like she spent a year walking around going, oh, man, look at this avocado. Like she got used to it. And so I said, well, what do you know?

Like, talk, talk to me about this, because I'm super curious about this. And she said, I don't feel different, but I feel like, OK, I can handle this. Like what had been overwhelming and exhausting suddenly was, well, it's a lot, but I'm just going to break it down into pieces and I can handle this. She went from I can't do this anymore to I think I can handle this.

I just have to do it in steps. So, Max, as someone who knows what depression looks like, has been around people, has worked with people that have struggled with depression. Do you think that's progress? A person going from I can't I can't even get out of bed to I got this. I just need a minute. Give me a minute to think about it.

Well, I think that my progress, I think that it's it's incredible progress. And it's and and I think it's a reasonable expectation of any kind of treatment you have for depression because. Listen, it is somebody's happy all the time. I'm concerned about that, too. They make me nervous. Oh, there is. I think that, you know, the way we're built emotionally, we're going to have the ups and the downs and you're going to have days where you're going to just feel great despair, you know.

And and the hope is that you process through that and and and that you come out on the other side of it and you say, well, yeah, I can handle this, you know. So I think that if if there is some sort of progress that's making that's being made with micro dosing this and they're able to see some results, even if even if it was just in 50 percent of the people that they were doing it to.

Can you imagine what a wonder that would be? And doesn't it? I don't know which I don't know whether it makes me more furious or more grief stricken. The knowledge that this is available right now, but it's only available to people who have the resources because your insurance ain't covering psilocybin micro dosing. OK, that's on you.

So the people that can benefit from this are, of course, the people who have access to disposable income when in theory on paper we could be changing people's lives and giving people back their their wellness and their peace. If we weren't so handcuffed by our weird, twisted puritanical views that have commingled mental and emotional health with morality.

That's where we really are stuck. We're stuck in drugs are bad, drugs are bad, drugs are bad, drugs are bad. And indeed. But we're also so hypocritical because the opioid crisis, drugs are bad, drugs are bad, drugs are bad, unless we're making batshit crazy money off of it, in which case here's a handful of oxy for your wisdom teeth removal.

And what did we do? We did what when that turned into a shit show. What did we do? We did what we always do. We rode the pendulum as far and as fast in the opposite direction as we can. And now it's like and this open heart procedure is outpatient and here's a little. Yeah. So now, you know, because we're all we're so afraid of getting people hooked and we should be afraid.

But there's no moderation for us. Like we just swing from one extreme to the other. I would I would love to see. I don't think I will, but I would love to see these this research into psilocybin and into LSD. Honestly, for people in these extreme situations, I'd love to see that go somewhere where people could actually be helped.

What I didn't expect to see, the last thing I expected to find was that the dude who brought shrooms to America was a freaking banker with JP Morgan. Isn't that the craziest part of the story? What the what? But there you go. That's America. We are. What did my brother, my brother Mark, when he was in high school, he had this like he used to laugh about it.

The standard thing that he would put in term papers, whatever it was, it could be Dwight D. Eisenhower. It could be World War One. It could be the Monroe Doctrine. It could be psychedelics in America. He would always have a couple of sentences that went something like this. And what a mosaic it is. It's different. Oh, hey, Mark, that's some great padding right there.

The mosaic of the Monroe Doctrine, the mosaic of all the players in World War One, the complicated mosaic of illicit drug culture and psychedelic culture in America and psilocybin and mental health and ancient rituals. And the fact that we share more DNA with a mushroom than a mushroom shares with a bush. Yeah, a mosaic indeed.

Yeah. So there you go. There you go. Anything else we need to cover? No, I think but I but we can close with it. I think that what you close with with the fungus and the DNA and us, I thought that was one of the most fascinating parts of that. It was something that I knew, but I hadn't thought about in a long time. But now that you've brought it up, I'm thinking about it more.

I tried to I tried to like low key the fact that, you know, did people do not want I can tell you one thing people do not want to hear is, hey, everything you believe might have come from an ancient person tripping on shrooms. You do not want to tell people that. It's very upsetting to find that extremely destabilizing.

And we don't know we weren't there. Right. We don't know. We don't know if mushrooms made people believe in God or if mushrooms and psychedelics in general, because we don't understand our own brains. We don't understand consciousness. There's a lot of talk now and a lot of research going into something called the quantum field.

Is human consciousness part of the quantum field? Can we plug in to the quantum field and be connected to everything? And many physicists say, yeah, it's kind of looking that way. So what if what if gentle, good person who is totally freaked out at the thought that people just imagine God while they were tripping? No, no, no, no, no. I want you to look at it this way.

What if human consciousness can connect to the quantum field? But we can't function in that state. We would be overwhelmed. We can't even manage the amount of sensory input coming into our eyes and ears right now. Our brain moderates that. The world around us is about a gajillion times more intense than what we're able to perceive and experience.

So what if what if psilocybin or lysergic, you know, the LSD that what if these hallucinogenic chemicals don't trick us into seeing things that aren't there? What if they lift the gates that block us from perceiving all that there is? And you would think I just hit the bong before saying that, wouldn't you? But we don't know.

We don't. Yeah. So don't get all don't be scared that you're half mushroom and that, you know, there's nothing except your mushroom self. No, no, no. You don't know that. You don't know that. It's entirely possible that right on the edge of your ability to perceive it is a world so intense and wild and filled with wonder that if your brain didn't keep those gates down, all we'd all we'd all do all day long is lay on our backs looking up at the sky and giggling, which honestly does not sound like a bad word.

Sure. I'm all for it. I'm all for it, too. So I am I have a couple of things on my on my bucket list. I want to do a past life regression and I want to do a guided shroom trip. And I promise you the minute I do those, I'll I'll record it and turn it into an episode. I have no interest in the mushroom trip. However, the past life regression.

I don't I don't know who does that, but I would love to do that. It's pretty intense from what I've read, like you want to be you want to know that you want to do that before you do it. Right. Because you want to be able to handle what you may or may not find. Max, Max, if I decide to do the shrooms, do you want to come?

You don't have to do it, but you could like, you know, supervise. So you don't want to supervise my first shroom experience? I mean, I don't blame you. No, I don't. You need somebody that knows what they're doing. I mean, all right. So what's happening now? Absolutely no one that knows me wants to supervise my shroom experience.

I would be there to support you, but I can't be the guy. I don't know what the hell I'm doing. No, I mean, I would go and I would support you. I'd be in the room or in the next room or whatever you'd want if you felt that that was supportive. But no, I'm. All right. So what if I get an official shroom guide and you just comment and observe?

And that way that way when we talk about it later, we'll have two perspectives. How many hours is this going to take? Because, you know, I'm going to I'm going to have to bill for it. Max, we're going to have fun with it. It's just going to keep getting easier. And when Tony Garcia hears this, he's going to be like, am I paying for these shrooms?

Well, yes, Tony. Yes. Hey, Tony, you're also paying for me to go along just so you know. And can I tell you some of the working conditions around here lately? We should be. You should be giving us the shrooms, not questioning whether or not you have to pay for them. We deserve it. All right. So that is the end of this episode.

We hope you all have a fantastic if you're listening to this when it was released. Hope you all have a fantastic holiday, however you celebrate it. The next True Weird Stuff episode, we're going to take a look at curses. The power of laying a curse upon someone. And coming up in the new year, we're also going to pay a visit to a deserted island occupied by the king of the coconuts.

We have some fun stuff for you coming up on True Weird Stuff. Thank you so much for sticking with us for 2024. We had some pretty unexpected, wonderful things happen this year. And and we're going to we're going to dig deep. I'm going to try not to be tripping and we're going to be back with more. And thanks to all of you for listening.

And thanks to all of our voice towns who who work for that great fee. Nothing. Yeah. You know what? I'm going to get text messages after this. Well, Tony's giving you guys shrooms. I would like to. I'm not doing shrooms. No, Max is just going to he's going to drive me there and back. Yeah, there's like no one wants me driving now, much less when I'm tripping.

OK, thanks, y'all. We love you. We'll see you on the next True Weird Stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it. If you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website, True Weird Stuff dot com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it.

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