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

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