Sherry and Max have placed true weird stuff on hiatus through the holiday season.

Today, we present to you another one of their award-winning episodes.

Winner of a W3 Award for Best History episode, Once Upon a Shroom dives into the story of the man who popularize shrooms in America.

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.

Psychedelic. Psychedelic.

Psychedelic.

And they got a small beam of light against the mirror.

True. Really? True, weird stuff.

Valentina Pavlovna Gherkin was born in Moscow, but emigrated to the United States with her family during the Russian Revolution.

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