Let's open with five hippies, all wearing white smocks,

puffing through a very dense patch of jungle.

They're in the Amazon rainforest in Colombia, and they're trying to get to this town called La Chirera.

This has not been an easy trip.

There's been detours, there's been a lot of tension among the crew.

Everybody is tired.

Some of them have only been eating fruit, but we'll come back to that later.

But then, on February 22nd, 1971, they reach the mother load.

This is a stinky mother load.

It's a bunch of piles of cow dung.

But this crew is more concerned about what's growing out of this dung,

which is a huge patch of shiny gold-capped mushrooms.

Their slender stems veiled with pink.

These are psychedelic mushrooms, and they each took six.

The leader of this little expedition is a guy named Terence McKenna.

Terrence was a complicated cat.

By most accounts, a really lovely, charming, gentle guy, but with some fairly complicated

ideas.

He was a kind of forgotten and overlooked guru of a psychedelic 60s and 70s who had an outsized impact on the psychedelic

underground and our current psychedelic movement. Today's psychedelic mushrooms are practically

mainstream in the U.S. Tech gurus talk about microdosing them for greater productivity.

People go on mushroom retreats.

...