At his seasoned age of 55, boxing icon and renowned jokester Mike Tyson continues to make headlines with his quirks. Whether it be scheduling a fight with Logan Paul or admitting to crying before fights, there is never a dull moment with Iron Mike Tyson
At Wonderland: Miami, a conference dedicated to psychedelics, micro-dosing and medicine from Nov. 8-9, Mike Tyson was a guest speaker. In promotion of psychedelics, Tyson spoke on how smoking toad venom altered his perspective on life and death: "I ‘died’ during my first trip. In my trips, I’ve seen that death is beautiful. Life and death both have to be beautiful, but death has a bad rep. The toad has taught me that I’m not going to be here forever. There’s an expiration date."
Smoking "toad" has become a growing hobby among the affluent, but it is a very particular practice. The venom comes from the Sonoran Desert Toad in Mexico. It only spends five months of a year living above ground, and smoking its poisonous venom can induce short psychoactive trips.
In a recent interview on his podcast, Tyson explained how he used to have very low self-esteem in his career, which led him to overcompensate for it with a big ego. He told the crowd at Wonderland that the toad helped him relinquish his ego: "It’s another dimension. Before I did the toad, I was a wreck. The toughest opponent I ever faced was myself. I had low self-esteem. People with big egos often have low self-esteem. We use our ego to subsidize that. The toad strips the ego."
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Tyson says he has smoked toad venom over fifty times in his life, and says he is a completely different person than he was in the prime of his boxing career: "I did it as a dare. I was doing heavy drugs like cocaine, so why not? People see the difference [in me]. It speaks for itself. If you knew me in 1989 you knew a different person. My mind isn’t sophisticated enough to fathom what happened, but life has improved. The toad’s whole purpose is to reach your highest potential. I look at the world differently. We’re all the same. Everything is love."
Would you experiment with toad venom?
[Via]