Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, broken record listeners, It's justin Richmond. We'll be
Speaker 1: back with our regularly scheduled episode next week, but today
Speaker 1: I'm bringing you a preview of a new show from Pushkin.
Speaker 1: I think you're really going to like. It's called Story
Speaker 1: of the Week with journalist Joel Stein. A lot of us,
Speaker 1: myself included, wish we had the time and attention span
Speaker 1: to leisurely pass through the latest and long form journalism.
Speaker 1: But the reality is most of us don't. Joel Stein, however, does,
Speaker 1: and is sharing his findings with all of us. Each week,
Speaker 1: Joel chooses an article that fascinates him, convinces the writer
Speaker 1: of said article to tell him all about it, and
Speaker 1: then interrupts it perfectly good conversation by mostly talking about himself.
Speaker 1: The story Joel covers on a given week might be
Speaker 1: one everyone is talking about, or it could be a
Speaker 1: story that you missed, like the Vergess piece about a
Speaker 1: rock groupie termed Hacker who had huge corporations at her mercy.
Speaker 1: Either way, it'll always be a story you tell your
Speaker 1: friends about, a story that sticks with you long after
Speaker 1: you forget whatever headline you just doomscrolled through Today's story
Speaker 1: about smoking hallucinogenic toads was written by Commone de Grief
Speaker 1: for The New Yorker. A Mexican doctor turned to toad
Speaker 1: poison to help cure himself of a crack addiction. The
Speaker 1: doctor then talked about his experiences during a TEDx talk
Speaker 1: at Burning Man, which started his career as a world's
Speaker 1: leading proponent of the drug. All right, here's the clip
Speaker 1: about the toad smoking doctor. I hope you enjoy it
Speaker 1: as much as I did. You can hear the full
Speaker 1: episode and more from Story of the Week wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts. The Story of the Week is The
Speaker 1: Pied Piper of Psychedelic Toads by command de Grief from
Speaker 1: The New Yorker. Back in May, a friend of mine
Speaker 1: invited me to a rich person's house in the Hollywood
Speaker 1: Hills for one of these elite all day networking events.
Speaker 1: I'd gone to dinner she'd organized before, and they were fun.
Speaker 1: A few days before I was going to go, she
Speaker 1: called me to give me some more details. It was
Speaker 1: a mushroom party where we were going to take mushrooms
Speaker 1: and then go home and somehow take care of our
Speaker 1: kids after eating mushrooms. This seems to be happening all
Speaker 1: the time. Over the last few years, psychedelics have become
Speaker 1: weirdly mainstream. People I know go to mushroom parties, take
Speaker 1: trips to South America to do ayahuasca and see couple's
Speaker 1: therapists in which they bond while on psilocybin. Then there's
Speaker 1: Toad Poison from the Sonoran Desert. Toad is the Mount
Speaker 1: Everest of psychedelics. The trip can be as short as
Speaker 1: a half an hour, but apparently it's so intense it
Speaker 1: can wipe out your ego, leaving you all alone in
Speaker 1: the empty void, kind of like hosting a new podcast
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty two. Nevertheless, celebrities like Joe Rogan and
Speaker 1: Mike Tyson love Toad. You know, once I did, I
Speaker 1: wanted to do it again and again and again, And
Speaker 1: they say you shouldn't do it too much. Way, I gotta,
Speaker 1: you know, grasp, what's going on here? Why am I
Speaker 1: feeling that? Why? Why did this? In a weird way?
Speaker 1: Like humbled you. I don't think you should listen to
Speaker 1: the people say you shouldn't you know too much. I
Speaker 1: think you should do it as much as you want.
Speaker 1: That's what I agree with, too. Yeah, I agree you
Speaker 1: could handle it. Apparently the ego dissolution doesn't last so
Speaker 1: long it keeps you from going on Joe Rogan. So
Speaker 1: I was pretty excited when I saw a story in
Speaker 1: The New York Are titled The Pied Piper of Psychedelic Toads,
Speaker 1: and I had a lot of questions. Writing is hard?
Speaker 1: Who's got that kind of time when you're already busy
Speaker 1: trying to be Joe Stein until it turns on the
Speaker 1: mike me It twiddles enough because the journalist friend, who's
Speaker 1: got in that jewel job? Single story? Just listen to
Speaker 1: smart people speak conversation. Filming information is a story. The
Speaker 1: story in The New Yorker was written by Command de Grief.
Speaker 1: He's a South African journalist who often covers the illegal
Speaker 1: trading of endangered animals like abalone, which is how he
Speaker 1: found the Sonoran desert toad, which was being foraged for
Speaker 1: its hallucinogenic properties. But that led him to a much
Speaker 1: weirder story about the number one toad Guru. Okay, so
Speaker 1: you heard about this Mexican doctor named Octavio Reddick who
Speaker 1: had become like the guy you go to to smoke toad.
Speaker 1: So he went down to meet him at his house
Speaker 1: in Mexico, And so, first of all, can he describe
Speaker 1: what he looked like and what he what he was
Speaker 1: like to be around. Yeah, he is good looking. He's
Speaker 1: kind of leanly muscular. He has long, dark hair, he
Speaker 1: has a beard, kind of like a telegenic cliche reincarnation
Speaker 1: of Jesus in a sense, like he looks like a guru.
Speaker 1: He looked like every cult leader on all the Netflix
Speaker 1: documentaries about Yeah, besides his good looks, he's very intelligent.
Speaker 1: He's very charming. He gives the impression that he really
Speaker 1: wants you to like him in a way that you
Speaker 1: don't dislike him for it. There's something almost quite oh wow,
Speaker 1: there's something quite pure about it. So you liked him
Speaker 1: at times? I liked him very much, and it was
Speaker 1: it was interesting to kind of notice that in myself
Speaker 1: a lot of people like him very much. A lot
Speaker 1: of people venerate him in fact, like a god literally
Speaker 1: some people. And he hates shirts, takes his shirt off
Speaker 1: quite often. Yeah. Octavio the Guru of Toad grew up
Speaker 1: in Guadalajara. His dad taught calculus at a college and
Speaker 1: his mom owned a bookstore. He went to medical school,
Speaker 1: got married, had a kid, But then he tried crack cocaine,
Speaker 1: and like many who try crack cocaine, he became addicted.
Speaker 1: His life fell apart completely. At one point, he takes acid,
Speaker 1: picks up a hitchhiker, falls in love with her, and
Speaker 1: ends his marriage. Then, in two thousand and six, a
Speaker 1: friend introduced him to the toad. Octavia says that as
Speaker 1: soon as he inhaled, his cravings for crack completely went away.
Speaker 1: He found peace and his calling. He kicked his habit,
Speaker 1: he told me, by locking himself in a room and
Speaker 1: smoking toad secretion for an entire year, which is just
Speaker 1: kind of crazy for me to think about that volume
Speaker 1: of psychedelic experience being compressed into a year. But he
Speaker 1: was clean for the first time in years, and then
Speaker 1: you know, he started offering it to friends and giving
Speaker 1: it to other people. This is a weird definition of clean, right, Well,
Speaker 1: he wasn't, yeah, I suppose, so it looked like many
Speaker 1: other psychedelics. Toad secretion is not in any way chemically addictive,
Speaker 1: or it's thought to be very low intoxicity as well,
Speaker 1: so it's not like a thing of cravings. Some people
Speaker 1: just end up using it a lot, because I guess
Speaker 1: they like dissolving their ego a lot. I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: I am certainly not someone who would do that myself,
Speaker 1: but a lot of people do. Doctor Octavio got obsessed
Speaker 1: with toad when his brother visited his apartment. He said, quote,
Speaker 1: you would sit on the couch and a toad would
Speaker 1: jump out. He started looking into the history of toad
Speaker 1: and got introduced to this Seri tribe and had them
Speaker 1: try it. The elders there started talking about an ancient
Speaker 1: tradition of smoking toad, and that gave Octavio a sales pitch.
Speaker 1: Octavio got famous by making that very pitch. At a
Speaker 1: twenty thirteen TEDx talk at burning Man about smoking toad,
Speaker 1: which sounds like an onion headline. He stood up and
Speaker 1: he said, basically, I myself by smoking toad, I discovered
Speaker 1: myself that this medicine healing of more than three and
Speaker 1: a half years of proby adiction. And then I went
Speaker 1: and I healed this marginalized Native Mexican community, and through
Speaker 1: that work resurrected this practice that had been wiped out
Speaker 1: during the colonial era, which is about as good a
Speaker 1: pitch for a psychedelic as I think anyone would could
Speaker 1: come up with. And the craziest thing is that it
Speaker 1: might be true. There is no way of knowing if
Speaker 1: it's true. You don't think it's true, though, I don't
Speaker 1: know if it's my place as a non indigenous white
Speaker 1: guy from South Africa to really weigh in. As another
Speaker 1: non indigenous white guy, I will weigh in. Non indigenous
Speaker 1: white people are eager to believe this. We love a
Speaker 1: story about how non white people can teach us simple truths.
Speaker 1: Usually that person's Morgan Freeman. But we'll listen to an
Speaker 1: indigenous try if it's an excuse to get high. If
Speaker 1: an indigenous person said, don't build this pipeline, we'd never listen.
Speaker 1: But smoking a toad, we're totally in for that. So
Speaker 1: you buy to everyone in the world, it's gonna be
Speaker 1: a direct way through hober something inside of you that
Speaker 1: you just can't remember. He goes, We're a full off,
Speaker 1: so they were. Soon after the TEDx Talk, white people
Speaker 1: with dreadlocks started arriving in the Scenoran Desert just smoke
Speaker 1: toad and spend money. Octavia became the world's lead proponent
Speaker 1: and practitioner of toad smoking, like If you want to
Speaker 1: go to the top toadsmoking guy in the world, you
Speaker 1: travel to see Octavio, or just wait till he shows
Speaker 1: up with a basket of toads at your all day
Speaker 1: networking event in the Hollywood Hills. Toad smoking needed a
Speaker 1: rock star because it's not inherently appealing, not just because
Speaker 1: if it's scary, effects because the idea of it's gross,
Speaker 1: Like you can romanticize eating a mushroom that grew up
Speaker 1: from Mother Earth, but extracting poison from a frog and
Speaker 1: putting that into your body does not seem like a
Speaker 1: good idea. Now, all my knowledge about toad comes either
Speaker 1: from this Michael Pollen book about psychedelics or Beavis and
Speaker 1: butt Head. Are you sure you're licking right? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: don't get it. It's supposed to pack an awesome above
Speaker 1: and the Simpsons, Dad, are you liking toads? Nut licking toad?
Speaker 1: And in those situations people licked the toad, which is
Speaker 1: what I thought you did, But that's not at all
Speaker 1: what you do. If you lick practically any species of toad,
Speaker 1: you're likely to be hospitalized and may die. And some
Speaker 1: people have died from from doing exactly that. So just
Speaker 1: licking a toad. All toads are a little poisonous, yeah
Speaker 1: they are. They are very choices. But in this case,
Speaker 1: you grab this specific toad and I watch them do it.
Speaker 1: You basically go to these little bumps on their skin
Speaker 1: and you pop them like zeitz, and you put a
Speaker 1: glass above it, and there's white kind of ooze sticks
Speaker 1: to the glass and then you dry it and crystallize
Speaker 1: it and smoke it. Yeah, okay, And you know, the
Speaker 1: toads don't have the best time being picked up and squeezed,
Speaker 1: especially now that so many people are doing it. Some
Speaker 1: toads are caught and handled and squeezed repeatedly to the
Speaker 1: extent that their toad secretion has a kind of pinkish
Speaker 1: color from drops of blood getting into the toad. And
Speaker 1: you know, these toads used to be very abundant in
Speaker 1: pots of sonora in summer they would kind of bloom.
Speaker 1: And many areas where these toads were are now conspicuously
Speaker 1: absent of toads. So there are some concerns that they
Speaker 1: may be in trouble. And to any listeners who are
Speaker 1: curious about the mind bending effects of toad I would
Speaker 1: just say that the psychoactive compound in TOAD five m
Speaker 1: e O dmt can be synthesized cheaply and safely in
Speaker 1: laboratories and gives, according to a large number of TOAD smokers,
Speaker 1: in identical high without harming any toads. So there's a
Speaker 1: lot of people who say, smoke synthetic, don't smoke toad.
Speaker 1: This is the weirdest PSA that's ever been done. People, Please, please,
Speaker 1: for your own safety, smoke the synthetic toad, not the
Speaker 1: real toad. Yes, that was a preview of Story of
Speaker 1: the Week with Joel Stein, a new podcast from Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: Find Story of the Week wherever you get your podcasts.