October 20, 2022 • 26 mins
A Mexican doctor and former crack addict’s TED talk at Burning Man helped popularize hallucinogenic toad poison as a treatment for addiction…and a shortcut to enlightenment. Host Joel Stein speaks to Kimon De Greef about his New Yorker article “The Pied Piper of Psychedelic Toads.”
You can read the full story here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/28/the-pied-piper-of-psychedelic-toads
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. The story of the week is the Pied Piper
of Psychedelic Toads. By command to Grief from the New Yorker.
(00:36):
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
(00:59):
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 couples therapists in
which they bond while on psilocybin. Then there's toad poison
(01:23):
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,
(01:45):
once I did, I wanted to do it again and
again and again, And they say you shouldn't do it
too much. My way, I gotta, you know, grasp, what's
going on here? Why am I feeling that? Why? Why
did this in a weird way that humbled you. I
don't think you should listen to the people, so you
shouldn't get it 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
(02:08):
from going on. Joe Rogan, So, I was pretty excited
when I saw a story in The New Yorker titled
The Pied Piper of Psychedelic Toads, and I had a
lot of questions writing his hard Who's got that kind
of time when you're already busy trying to be Joe Stein?
So it turns on a mic mab the Twiddles and
(02:29):
Knob because a journalist Frand has got in that dual
Jime Pittory single story Just listen to Smart People Speak Conversation.
Filming Information is a story up. The story in The
New Yorker was written by Kamand de Grief. He's a
(02:51):
South African journalist who often covers the illegal trading of
endangered animals like abalone, which is how he found the
Snoran 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 Octavia Reddick who had become like
(03:13):
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 you 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
(03:35):
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
(03:56):
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
(04:19):
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.
(04:39):
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. Octavio says that as
soon as he inhaled, his cravings for crack completely went away.
He found peace and his calling. He kicked his habit,
(05:03):
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
(05:25):
it to other people. This is a weird definition of clean, right,
Well he wasn't, Yeah, I suppose so. Look 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
(05:45):
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
(06:09):
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 Tedex talk at Bernie Man about smoking toad,
which sounds like an onion headline. He stood up and
(06:31):
he said, basically, I healed myself by smoking toad. I've
discovered myself at this medicine heale of more than three
and a half years of procopi aliction. And then I
went and I healed this marginalized Native Mexican community and
through that work resurrected this practice that had been wiped
(06:54):
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
(07:18):
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 tribe if it's an excuse to get high.
If an indigenous person said, don't build this pipeline, we'd
(07:40):
never listen. But smoking a toad, we're totally in for that,
So buy do everyone in the world. This can be
a direct way to sober sky inside of you that
you just can't remember, because we are full of so
they were. Soon after the ted Ex Talk, white people
(08:06):
with dreadlocks started arriving in the Snoran Desert to 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
(08:29):
rock star because it's not inherently appealing, not just because
of its 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
(08:51):
from this Michael Pollen book about psychedelics or Beavis and Budded.
Are you sure you're liking right? Yeah? I don't get it.
It's supposed to pack an awesome above and the Simpsons, Dad,
are you linking toads? I'm not licking toad. And in
(09:12):
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
(09:33):
specific toad, and I watched them do it. You basically
go to these little bumps on their skin and you
pop them like zitz, and you put a glass above it,
and this white kind of ooze sticks to the glass
and then you dry it and crystallize it and smoke it. Yeah,
that's okay, And you know the toads don't have the
(09:54):
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
(10:16):
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 emmy o dmt, can be
synthesized cheaply and safely in laboratories and gives, according to
(10:41):
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. Yes,
So the writer kemald de Grief wants to see one
(11:03):
of these toad smoking sessions in person. He travels to
this resort Beachtown, to this part airbnb Octavia rented for
a toad smoking retreat. I'm guessing he didn't put that
in these emails with a person renting the house. So
the first time I saw Toad, I walked in. There
were these oversized doors, and they opened onto this kind
of terrace overlooking the water, and there was a woman.
(11:26):
There was someone lying on their back with Octavia and
three or four other people kneeling over her. There was
some music playing on a portable speaker, some sort of
downtemper electronica, and this woman was lying down and whooping
every now and then, and people were very close around
her and putting their hands on her. And she ended
(11:49):
up there entirely randomly because she had matched on a
dating app with one of the crew like the week before.
But she was sort of into spirituality and inner work
and healing. WHOA, those seating apps are even better than
I thought. Felt like with someone who you should have
sex with, I'll match you with someone you should smoke
(12:11):
Toad with that's amazing. I mean she came to me,
she had tears in her eyes, she was in him.
She was middle aged, and she kind of gripped me
by the arm and said, I've never had anything like this.
It's absolutely amazing. And so that was the first hood
smoking that I saw in real life after the break
(12:33):
people die. That was that too dark. I'm new with
this podcasting teaser stuff, but people do die. I'm not lying.
We'll be right back now, back to our story. I
pictured people who administer psychedelics to be sweet hippie types,
like giving their clients lots of guidance and good vibes,
(12:56):
lots of you're surrounded by people who love you and roll.
The way to do this is not how Octavia does it.
He administers toad like he's Enroal. Patton wanted to keep
World War two going and marched straight through Germany into
the Soviet Union, something that Octavio has come to embody
(13:17):
in the world of toad smoking is a very kind
of maximalist, freewheeling approach to smoking toad, where you sign
in an empty form and you know, a few minutes
later you're around people lighting up and then it's your turn,
and then you send home, whether that's you know, people
in their eighties. Octavia has also served toad to children,
(13:39):
to a five year old, he told me, with the
permission of the five year old's mother. The other amazing
thing to me is that Octavia is so aggressive when
you see him administer this stuff, both in like admonishing
people to like suck on this pipe harder, but also
that he doesn't seem to measure out a certain amount.
He seems to just be kind of winging it. And
(14:00):
then he like, has you smoke this stuff, and then
there's a little extra in the bowl when you pass out.
He just sucks it up himself, like it doesn't seem
like the way you'd want to have it administered in
a perfect setting. It's not the way I would want
to have it administered. But you know, well over ten
thousand people have had it administered this way. And so
(14:21):
he serves large doses. They're called breakthrough doses, like to
break through your ego. He refuses to measure them, and
then he has a very fixed ideology around what happens
when people have bad trips. So many people smoked toad
and have incredible experiences, some people become terrified and you know,
(14:43):
their body clenches up like they're going through the most
terrifying experience of their whole life. Octavio's philosophy is that most,
if not all, challenging experiences on Toad are a product
of the toad smoker seizing up in fear, and what
they need to do is be pushed through that fear
(15:03):
into the glory of the high. That's exactly the way
Mike Tyson described smoke Toad on Joe Rogan. He said,
he physically describes us the way he was fighting it
and fighting it. It comes off you know, you're you're
so scared. You know, it starts off like this, I
mean like no, no, no, yeah, hey, I wanted to
(15:27):
stop now, and like I was like, hey, you're on
the rhyde. I'm like, no, no, no, yeah. I love it.
I love you. I love you, I love you. I
kind of have thought of it as there are certain
sports coaches who will have the same kind of philosophy
that to kind of yell at you and push you
beyond your limit. I think, just as that doesn't work
for all athletes, it does not seem to work for
(15:49):
all toadsmokers, and so Octovia has done on video some
fairly violent looking things, like there's one video of October.
He used to have a little kind of electric shocking
device like a taser that he would sort of go
and like zap people with. Um. He called it a toy. Um. Yeah,
it's it's why to kind of tell them to stop
(16:10):
the bullshit and stop sucking around and like, smoke the toad,
do your toad trap properly? Kind of yeah. So I
asked him about this when I was with him, and
he said, it is my role as a practitioner to
make sure that people get the experience that they came
to me for. And many people are scared, and many
people who have gone to other rehabs, and they spent
(16:33):
a lot of money, and it's time to stop the bullshit.
That's kind of how he defended it to me. And
I said, well, you know, what do you say to
critics who think that this is all precisely not what
people need during the peak and most vulnerable psychedelic experience
of their lives. And he was like, well, I've served
more toad than anyone on the planet, which which is true.
(16:53):
So he kind of gets to say that he is
an authority and that he's developed this and that he's
the one who resurrected this indigenous practice. The video of Octavia,
you are administering what he calls medicine, looks very different
from the way this CBS pharmacist explain my prescriptions. And
it doesn't just look haphazard. It is haphazard, which I
(17:14):
know because he's faced legal action for awful things that
have happened during his sessions. In addition to toad secretion,
Octavia works with a number of other substances, one of
which is called repair. It's an aggressive tobacco snuff traditionally
from the Amazon, and you have it blown up your nostrils,
and he does it to people during their toad trips
(17:38):
as well, which is something that freaks a lot of
other people out. Why would you need extra if you're
already smoking toad. He has theories, but a lot of
people disagree with them, So he serves repair to a
lot of people, often to sort of prepare them for toad.
It's like a kind of a bit of a purgative
One evening in the Seri village of Punta Chueca, where
(18:02):
there was a New Year celebration going on, because they
traditionally celebrate new in July. I saw you give repair
to these young boys and young men that were kind
of One of them was fourteen, I found out after us,
and they all started throwing up, like violently on the
dirt and kind of lying around moaning. There's a lot
(18:23):
of stray dogs in Punta Tweka, and the dogs arrived
and began lapping up the vomit, and I was just like,
this is a really, really, really fucking weird scene. And
then there was a man standing there and I went
to introduce myself to him, and then Octavia came over
to us, and he had just smoked repair, so his
(18:45):
eyes were streaming, and he kind of flung his arm
around the shoulder of this dude and just said to me,
I love this guy. He just got me off on
a manslaughter charge. And I was like, this is the
most insanely baroque environment in which to have this information disclosed.
And if I read this in any story of mine,
(19:06):
I would almost certainly assume that the writer was talking
absolute shit. But I swear to god it happened that way.
Octavio was charged with manslaughter for the death of a
Mexican woman who was seeking help for depression. She died
during a toad smoking trip that he administered. Hers isn't
(19:27):
the only death linked to Octavio's medical practice. At least
two other people have died after smoking toad with him,
and one of Octavio's many girlfriends disappeared after going on
a walk with him. Divers later found her corpse in
a body of water. Octavio says her death had nothing
to do with him, but some people told Kaman in
the story that she died after they smoked toad together.
(19:50):
When Kaman asked him if he regretted the people who
died when he was administering toad to them, he responded, quote,
they made me a better human being. Octavio has never
been convicted in any of these cases. They have this
great quote about smoking to in your story. I'm just
gonna read for a second. When you come back from
(20:12):
that and your ego reasserts itself, there's a potential to
hold onto that belief that there's no difference between you
and God. Is that what happened to Octavia? Like? Does
he think he's God? Does he smoke the toad? I
guess is the best version of my question. Well, the
person who gave me that quote is a professor of
psychology and psychiatry who studies psychedelics, and he articulated this
(20:37):
as a risk kind of more broadly in the field
of well, I guess a very fine line between ego
death and becoming one with universe and becoming God and
what happens afterwards, and how that can potentially give rise
to a god complex. Certainly, some of Octavia's behavior and
(21:00):
lack of repentance or remorse or unwillingness to adjust his
practices does seem to me to stem from an overinflated
sense of ego. And he's not the only person in
the toad world like there are a lot of egomaniac
toad practitioners. So I do think there's something there about
(21:24):
the fraught business of transcendence for mere mortals like us,
because at the end of the day, we remain human,
with all of our flaws and our blind spots and
our darkness and so on. And that's something that I
began thinking about quite a lot and have been thinking
about quite a lot since then. Because you can take
the toad and you get to level ten on the
(21:47):
kind of spiritual experience meter. But then you land back
in yourself, and unlike spiritual practice that has a lifetime
of training about how to maybe integrate that, this is
a quick in and quick out. I'm not quite sure
what it all means. What did I did you get
(22:08):
in touch with you to the story? Whether you say
he didn't like the story, he said I'd made it
a lot of it up and that history will not
remember me as what did he say? He said, I
made a lot of stuff up and that sadly I'll
never amount to anything more than a mediocre reporter. But
he will be remembered through history, not just in the
(22:31):
realm of psychedelics, but in medical signs at large for
his work with five IMMUDMT. And we haven't spoken since then.
It's such a narcissist response, like history will remember me
and not you, Like it's it's what Faulkner says when
he's drunk to his daughter on when she asked him
not to drink for his birthday. He's like, nobody remembers
(22:51):
Shakespeare's daughter. That's a horrible Faulkner impression. But it almost
proves your point that that's what he said to you,
it was quite on the nose. After meeting me briefly,
should I or should I not smoke the toad? If
you haven't on any other psychedetics, I wouldn't make that
your first jump. Okay, yeah, go enjoy whatever you're doing next.
(23:15):
I imagine it's smoking toad, but whatever it is all
the time. I have a great rest of your day.
And thanks for writing the story. I loved it. Cool.
Thanks for having me on. I have a good one.
When I was young, my mom told me never smoke
crystallized frog. Ben, I'm given to you by a former
crack addict and a Mexican desert. That was a long
(23:37):
time ago. The rules changed. They're now ways to get
beyond our own perception, to gaze into a world that's
for a perspective outside of our own brains. Is that
worth the risk of death? Most people who's smoked toad
seemed to say yes. But I'm not an early adopter.
(24:00):
I don't own any crypto. I wrote this narration myself
without the help of any artificial intelligence. Let's face it,
I'm not smoking any toad, at least not until I
can find a licensed toad therapist who administers legalized toad
pills and whose name is not Octavio command De Grief's
(24:22):
story The Pied Piper of Psychedelic Toads was published in
The New Yorker. At the end of the show, what's
next for Joel Stein? Maybe He'll take a never poke
around online. Our show today was produced by Lydia Gencott
and Nishavencott. It was edited by Robert Smith. Our engineer
(24:44):
is Amanda kay Wang, our executive producer is Katherine Girardo,
and our theme song was written and performed by Jonathan Colton.
And a special thanks to my voice coach Vicky Merrick
and my consulting producer laurenz Elasnick. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(25:06):
listen to your podcasts. I'm Joel Stein in this is
Story of the Week. Did you smoke the toad? You
know I've taken to not answering that question, Oh, you
smoked the toad? How would you think differently of the
story if I had or hadn't. I guess if it
(25:27):
were me, I probably would have chickened out, but I
would have wanted to have smoked the toad. As a journalist,
I feel like, um, you would have just more information
you would have gathered. Well we'll never know, but it
was nice to hear you think that one through coming
up on Story of the Week. Are you still on Tinder?
And if so, can we do it together? I am
(25:50):
still on Tinder? Can we swipe? All? Right? What? What? What?
Just to start? Wait? Let me see the phone. Is
it Alec Baldwin? Oh my god? Is this a winner
or a loser? Well s, I I'll read the bio
to you because it's just not read the biom looking
for a submissive female who enjoys being dominant in bed, spanking,
(26:11):
hair pulling, being told what to do. If that's something
you enjoy, contact me very forward. That's how we started.
That was number one
Pushkin. The story of the week is the Pied Piper
of Psychedelic Toads. By command to Grief from the New Yorker.
(00:36):
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
(00:59):
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 couples therapists in
which they bond while on psilocybin. Then there's toad poison
(01:23):
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,
(01:45):
once I did, I wanted to do it again and
again and again, And they say you shouldn't do it
too much. My way, I gotta, you know, grasp, what's
going on here? Why am I feeling that? Why? Why
did this in a weird way that humbled you. I
don't think you should listen to the people, so you
shouldn't get it 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
(02:08):
from going on. Joe Rogan, So, I was pretty excited
when I saw a story in The New Yorker titled
The Pied Piper of Psychedelic Toads, and I had a
lot of questions writing his hard Who's got that kind
of time when you're already busy trying to be Joe Stein?
So it turns on a mic mab the Twiddles and
(02:29):
Knob because a journalist Frand has got in that dual
Jime Pittory single story Just listen to Smart People Speak Conversation.
Filming Information is a story up. The story in The
New Yorker was written by Kamand de Grief. He's a
(02:51):
South African journalist who often covers the illegal trading of
endangered animals like abalone, which is how he found the
Snoran 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 Octavia Reddick who had become like
(03:13):
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 you 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
(03:35):
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
(03:56):
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
(04:19):
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.
(04:39):
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. Octavio says that as
soon as he inhaled, his cravings for crack completely went away.
He found peace and his calling. He kicked his habit,
(05:03):
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
(05:25):
it to other people. This is a weird definition of clean, right,
Well he wasn't, Yeah, I suppose so. Look 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
(05:45):
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
(06:09):
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 Tedex talk at Bernie Man about smoking toad,
which sounds like an onion headline. He stood up and
(06:31):
he said, basically, I healed myself by smoking toad. I've
discovered myself at this medicine heale of more than three
and a half years of procopi aliction. And then I
went and I healed this marginalized Native Mexican community and
through that work resurrected this practice that had been wiped
(06:54):
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
(07:18):
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 tribe if it's an excuse to get high.
If an indigenous person said, don't build this pipeline, we'd
(07:40):
never listen. But smoking a toad, we're totally in for that,
So buy do everyone in the world. This can be
a direct way to sober sky inside of you that
you just can't remember, because we are full of so
they were. Soon after the ted Ex Talk, white people
(08:06):
with dreadlocks started arriving in the Snoran Desert to 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
(08:29):
rock star because it's not inherently appealing, not just because
of its 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
(08:51):
from this Michael Pollen book about psychedelics or Beavis and Budded.
Are you sure you're liking right? Yeah? I don't get it.
It's supposed to pack an awesome above and the Simpsons, Dad,
are you linking toads? I'm not licking toad. And in
(09:12):
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
(09:33):
specific toad, and I watched them do it. You basically
go to these little bumps on their skin and you
pop them like zitz, and you put a glass above it,
and this white kind of ooze sticks to the glass
and then you dry it and crystallize it and smoke it. Yeah,
that's okay, And you know the toads don't have the
(09:54):
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
(10:16):
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 emmy o dmt, can be
synthesized cheaply and safely in laboratories and gives, according to
(10:41):
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. Yes,
So the writer kemald de Grief wants to see one
(11:03):
of these toad smoking sessions in person. He travels to
this resort Beachtown, to this part airbnb Octavia rented for
a toad smoking retreat. I'm guessing he didn't put that
in these emails with a person renting the house. So
the first time I saw Toad, I walked in. There
were these oversized doors, and they opened onto this kind
of terrace overlooking the water, and there was a woman.
(11:26):
There was someone lying on their back with Octavia and
three or four other people kneeling over her. There was
some music playing on a portable speaker, some sort of
downtemper electronica, and this woman was lying down and whooping
every now and then, and people were very close around
her and putting their hands on her. And she ended
(11:49):
up there entirely randomly because she had matched on a
dating app with one of the crew like the week before.
But she was sort of into spirituality and inner work
and healing. WHOA, those seating apps are even better than
I thought. Felt like with someone who you should have
sex with, I'll match you with someone you should smoke
(12:11):
Toad with that's amazing. I mean she came to me,
she had tears in her eyes, she was in him.
She was middle aged, and she kind of gripped me
by the arm and said, I've never had anything like this.
It's absolutely amazing. And so that was the first hood
smoking that I saw in real life after the break
(12:33):
people die. That was that too dark. I'm new with
this podcasting teaser stuff, but people do die. I'm not lying.
We'll be right back now, back to our story. I
pictured people who administer psychedelics to be sweet hippie types,
like giving their clients lots of guidance and good vibes,
(12:56):
lots of you're surrounded by people who love you and roll.
The way to do this is not how Octavia does it.
He administers toad like he's Enroal. Patton wanted to keep
World War two going and marched straight through Germany into
the Soviet Union, something that Octavio has come to embody
(13:17):
in the world of toad smoking is a very kind
of maximalist, freewheeling approach to smoking toad, where you sign
in an empty form and you know, a few minutes
later you're around people lighting up and then it's your turn,
and then you send home, whether that's you know, people
in their eighties. Octavia has also served toad to children,
(13:39):
to a five year old, he told me, with the
permission of the five year old's mother. The other amazing
thing to me is that Octavia is so aggressive when
you see him administer this stuff, both in like admonishing
people to like suck on this pipe harder, but also
that he doesn't seem to measure out a certain amount.
He seems to just be kind of winging it. And
(14:00):
then he like, has you smoke this stuff, and then
there's a little extra in the bowl when you pass out.
He just sucks it up himself, like it doesn't seem
like the way you'd want to have it administered in
a perfect setting. It's not the way I would want
to have it administered. But you know, well over ten
thousand people have had it administered this way. And so
(14:21):
he serves large doses. They're called breakthrough doses, like to
break through your ego. He refuses to measure them, and
then he has a very fixed ideology around what happens
when people have bad trips. So many people smoked toad
and have incredible experiences, some people become terrified and you know,
(14:43):
their body clenches up like they're going through the most
terrifying experience of their whole life. Octavio's philosophy is that most,
if not all, challenging experiences on Toad are a product
of the toad smoker seizing up in fear, and what
they need to do is be pushed through that fear
(15:03):
into the glory of the high. That's exactly the way
Mike Tyson described smoke Toad on Joe Rogan. He said,
he physically describes us the way he was fighting it
and fighting it. It comes off you know, you're you're
so scared. You know, it starts off like this, I
mean like no, no, no, yeah, hey, I wanted to
(15:27):
stop now, and like I was like, hey, you're on
the rhyde. I'm like, no, no, no, yeah. I love it.
I love you. I love you, I love you. I
kind of have thought of it as there are certain
sports coaches who will have the same kind of philosophy
that to kind of yell at you and push you
beyond your limit. I think, just as that doesn't work
for all athletes, it does not seem to work for
(15:49):
all toadsmokers, and so Octovia has done on video some
fairly violent looking things, like there's one video of October.
He used to have a little kind of electric shocking
device like a taser that he would sort of go
and like zap people with. Um. He called it a toy. Um. Yeah,
it's it's why to kind of tell them to stop
(16:10):
the bullshit and stop sucking around and like, smoke the toad,
do your toad trap properly? Kind of yeah. So I
asked him about this when I was with him, and
he said, it is my role as a practitioner to
make sure that people get the experience that they came
to me for. And many people are scared, and many
people who have gone to other rehabs, and they spent
(16:33):
a lot of money, and it's time to stop the bullshit.
That's kind of how he defended it to me. And
I said, well, you know, what do you say to
critics who think that this is all precisely not what
people need during the peak and most vulnerable psychedelic experience
of their lives. And he was like, well, I've served
more toad than anyone on the planet, which which is true.
(16:53):
So he kind of gets to say that he is
an authority and that he's developed this and that he's
the one who resurrected this indigenous practice. The video of Octavia,
you are administering what he calls medicine, looks very different
from the way this CBS pharmacist explain my prescriptions. And
it doesn't just look haphazard. It is haphazard, which I
(17:14):
know because he's faced legal action for awful things that
have happened during his sessions. In addition to toad secretion,
Octavia works with a number of other substances, one of
which is called repair. It's an aggressive tobacco snuff traditionally
from the Amazon, and you have it blown up your nostrils,
and he does it to people during their toad trips
(17:38):
as well, which is something that freaks a lot of
other people out. Why would you need extra if you're
already smoking toad. He has theories, but a lot of
people disagree with them, So he serves repair to a
lot of people, often to sort of prepare them for toad.
It's like a kind of a bit of a purgative
One evening in the Seri village of Punta Chueca, where
(18:02):
there was a New Year celebration going on, because they
traditionally celebrate new in July. I saw you give repair
to these young boys and young men that were kind
of One of them was fourteen, I found out after us,
and they all started throwing up, like violently on the
dirt and kind of lying around moaning. There's a lot
(18:23):
of stray dogs in Punta Tweka, and the dogs arrived
and began lapping up the vomit, and I was just like,
this is a really, really, really fucking weird scene. And
then there was a man standing there and I went
to introduce myself to him, and then Octavia came over
to us, and he had just smoked repair, so his
(18:45):
eyes were streaming, and he kind of flung his arm
around the shoulder of this dude and just said to me,
I love this guy. He just got me off on
a manslaughter charge. And I was like, this is the
most insanely baroque environment in which to have this information disclosed.
And if I read this in any story of mine,
(19:06):
I would almost certainly assume that the writer was talking
absolute shit. But I swear to god it happened that way.
Octavio was charged with manslaughter for the death of a
Mexican woman who was seeking help for depression. She died
during a toad smoking trip that he administered. Hers isn't
(19:27):
the only death linked to Octavio's medical practice. At least
two other people have died after smoking toad with him,
and one of Octavio's many girlfriends disappeared after going on
a walk with him. Divers later found her corpse in
a body of water. Octavio says her death had nothing
to do with him, but some people told Kaman in
the story that she died after they smoked toad together.
(19:50):
When Kaman asked him if he regretted the people who
died when he was administering toad to them, he responded, quote,
they made me a better human being. Octavio has never
been convicted in any of these cases. They have this
great quote about smoking to in your story. I'm just
gonna read for a second. When you come back from
(20:12):
that and your ego reasserts itself, there's a potential to
hold onto that belief that there's no difference between you
and God. Is that what happened to Octavia? Like? Does
he think he's God? Does he smoke the toad? I
guess is the best version of my question. Well, the
person who gave me that quote is a professor of
psychology and psychiatry who studies psychedelics, and he articulated this
(20:37):
as a risk kind of more broadly in the field
of well, I guess a very fine line between ego
death and becoming one with universe and becoming God and
what happens afterwards, and how that can potentially give rise
to a god complex. Certainly, some of Octavia's behavior and
(21:00):
lack of repentance or remorse or unwillingness to adjust his
practices does seem to me to stem from an overinflated
sense of ego. And he's not the only person in
the toad world like there are a lot of egomaniac
toad practitioners. So I do think there's something there about
(21:24):
the fraught business of transcendence for mere mortals like us,
because at the end of the day, we remain human,
with all of our flaws and our blind spots and
our darkness and so on. And that's something that I
began thinking about quite a lot and have been thinking
about quite a lot since then. Because you can take
the toad and you get to level ten on the
(21:47):
kind of spiritual experience meter. But then you land back
in yourself, and unlike spiritual practice that has a lifetime
of training about how to maybe integrate that, this is
a quick in and quick out. I'm not quite sure
what it all means. What did I did you get
(22:08):
in touch with you to the story? Whether you say
he didn't like the story, he said I'd made it
a lot of it up and that history will not
remember me as what did he say? He said, I
made a lot of stuff up and that sadly I'll
never amount to anything more than a mediocre reporter. But
he will be remembered through history, not just in the
(22:31):
realm of psychedelics, but in medical signs at large for
his work with five IMMUDMT. And we haven't spoken since then.
It's such a narcissist response, like history will remember me
and not you, Like it's it's what Faulkner says when
he's drunk to his daughter on when she asked him
not to drink for his birthday. He's like, nobody remembers
(22:51):
Shakespeare's daughter. That's a horrible Faulkner impression. But it almost
proves your point that that's what he said to you,
it was quite on the nose. After meeting me briefly,
should I or should I not smoke the toad? If
you haven't on any other psychedetics, I wouldn't make that
your first jump. Okay, yeah, go enjoy whatever you're doing next.
(23:15):
I imagine it's smoking toad, but whatever it is all
the time. I have a great rest of your day.
And thanks for writing the story. I loved it. Cool.
Thanks for having me on. I have a good one.
When I was young, my mom told me never smoke
crystallized frog. Ben, I'm given to you by a former
crack addict and a Mexican desert. That was a long
(23:37):
time ago. The rules changed. They're now ways to get
beyond our own perception, to gaze into a world that's
for a perspective outside of our own brains. Is that
worth the risk of death? Most people who's smoked toad
seemed to say yes. But I'm not an early adopter.
(24:00):
I don't own any crypto. I wrote this narration myself
without the help of any artificial intelligence. Let's face it,
I'm not smoking any toad, at least not until I
can find a licensed toad therapist who administers legalized toad
pills and whose name is not Octavio command De Grief's
(24:22):
story The Pied Piper of Psychedelic Toads was published in
The New Yorker. At the end of the show, what's
next for Joel Stein? Maybe He'll take a never poke
around online. Our show today was produced by Lydia Gencott
and Nishavencott. It was edited by Robert Smith. Our engineer
(24:44):
is Amanda kay Wang, our executive producer is Katherine Girardo,
and our theme song was written and performed by Jonathan Colton.
And a special thanks to my voice coach Vicky Merrick
and my consulting producer laurenz Elasnick. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(25:06):
listen to your podcasts. I'm Joel Stein in this is
Story of the Week. Did you smoke the toad? You
know I've taken to not answering that question, Oh, you
smoked the toad? How would you think differently of the
story if I had or hadn't. I guess if it
(25:27):
were me, I probably would have chickened out, but I
would have wanted to have smoked the toad. As a journalist,
I feel like, um, you would have just more information
you would have gathered. Well we'll never know, but it
was nice to hear you think that one through coming
up on Story of the Week. Are you still on Tinder?
And if so, can we do it together? I am
(25:50):
still on Tinder? Can we swipe? All? Right? What? What? What?
Just to start? Wait? Let me see the phone. Is
it Alec Baldwin? Oh my god? Is this a winner
or a loser? Well s, I I'll read the bio
to you because it's just not read the biom looking
for a submissive female who enjoys being dominant in bed, spanking,
(26:11):
hair pulling, being told what to do. If that's something
you enjoy, contact me very forward. That's how we started.
That was number one
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