RUSH: This is Gus in San Diego. Gus, appreciate your patience. Welcome to the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Yeah, nuclear power dittos.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Yeah, I know the origin of toad licking that you were talking about last week.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: And it comes down to a very simple phrase: ‘I dare you.’ All you have to do is just imagine a couple teenagers walking through the woods, they see a toad, and one of them turns to the other one and says, ‘I dare you to lick it.’
RUSH: Maybe as a general definition, but we actually had somebody call this program who gave us the actual origin. There’s an origin for everything we do it on the planet, somebody had to do it first. When you hear about somebody licking the Colorado River toad or whatever it is, you put it in your own context, you’re walking along, you see this frog, would you pick it up and lick it? What I was told by the expert, nobody picked up the frog and licked it. Back in the days when you ate anything you could catch in order to survive, somebody obviously cooked the frog or ate it in such a way that they discovered that inside the frog was this venom that is a hallucinogen, and they said, hmm, hubba hubba. They then discovered through the process of trial and error they didn’t have to eat the thing in order to get the venom. They could cause it to spew the venom in other ways and thereby keep a constant source of hallucinogen around, and I think I was told it was traced back to the Native Americans.
CALLER: Well, I guess lots of things originated that way. Being hungry can be a great motivator.
RUSH: Absolutely right. In fact, this leads to a lot of the explanation for why certain things like peyote became part of religious ceremonies and practices for Native Americans, it was what was around when they were back in the early days even before we got here, before we came and destroyed this great continent. Thanks, Gus, appreciate it.