334 - The Alchemy of Cacao

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Brian Wallace

This podcast features Brian Wallace’s 2012 Palenque Norte Lecture at the Burning Man Festival. Brian, who has been a community organizer for MAPS and other organizations, is also expert on the cacao plant. Originally, Brian titled this talk “The Entheobotany of Cacao”, however, I decided to change the title to better reflect the wide-ranging discussion of a little-understood, but extremely important, plant. Brian’s talk is about significantly more than chocolate treats.

Brian Wallace’s Web Site (click)
Naked Chocolate: The Astonishing Truth About the World’s Greatest Food By David Wolfe

Following Brian’s talk I play a short segment about the work of Occupy Sandy and close with a song sent in from some fellow saloners, The Chooks. It is simply titled “Occupy” and is freely available for download immediately below.
“Occupy” (mp3 file)
by The Chooks
Podcast 256 - “A Drug Enhancer Called Chocolate”
featuring Jonathan Ott
Erowid Search Results for: cacao

The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss
by Dennis McKenna
NY Daily News Channel on YouTube
Direct link to video of this talk

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Loren, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:32 ►

And I have to admit that I’ve had to tear myself away just now from a new book that I just started reading.

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In fact, I’ll probably be keeping my own commentary to a minimum today so that I can get right back to reading it.

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It’s Dennis McKenna’s biography of his brother Terrence. And as you already know, about a year ago, I guess it was,

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Dennis held a Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds necessary to have the time to write

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and also to self-publish, which I really think is the only way to go right now

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for writers who aren’t already well-established.

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In any event, Dennis’s book is titled The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.

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And in it, you’ll read not only about how the title came about,

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but also about some things that have, well, for me at least,

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provided some new insights into the life and mind of Terrence McKenna,

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and that have answered several questions about Terence that have

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puzzled me for quite a few years.

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And although I’m not yet even a quarter of the way through reading it, I can also attest

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to the fact that Dennis is an excellent writer.

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Having previously read some of his scientific papers, I was a little concerned that maybe

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his writing might be a bit dry for us non-scientists.

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Well, nothing could be further from the truth.

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It’s an exceptionally well-written book and is a true joy to read.

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So I recommend that you pick up a copy if you haven’t done so already.

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And next spring, when I resume playing some more of Terrence’s lectures,

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I’m sure that, well, we’ll have a lot of new angles to discuss about

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the bard’s life. And I’ll put a link to the book, that book in our program notes for this podcast,

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which as you already know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.

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And now let me introduce today’s Palenque Norte lecture. It was given by Brian Wallace, and he titled his talk, The Entheobotany of Cacao.

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But as you can see, I’ve changed that title after hearing the talk because, well, I think he covered a lot more ground than the original title led one to believe.

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Now, if you don’t know who Brian is, well, it isn’t because he hasn’t been deeply

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involved in our community for a long time. I first became aware of him when he was working at MAPS,

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and that’s probably where he first crossed your path as well. But what I didn’t realize until I

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heard this talk is that Brian is also what I guess is called a chocolatier, although I suspect that I don’t quite have that title correct.

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Anyway, how can you not like a guy with a great big smile and who’s also an expert on chocolate?

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Sweet, huh?

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I’m sorry, I just couldn’t resist that.

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Anyway, as you and I are about to hear right now, there is a lot more, and I mean a lot more, to cacao than just chocolate treats.

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Now, in this talk, you’re going to hear Brian mention an earlier podcast that I did featuring Jonathan Ott, who is talking about chocolate as a drug enhancer.

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And that remains an excellent talk, but I think Brian’s Palenque Norte lecture that you and I are about to listen to right now is,

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well, I think it’s going to significantly expand your knowledge about a plant that I now have come to think of as next in importance to cannabis,

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which, of course, is my main ally and constant companion.

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my main ally and constant companion.

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So without any further ado, let’s pretend that it is now noon on the Wednesday of the 2012 Burning Man Festival, and that you and I have just now drug ourselves out of our

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sleeping bags, ridden our bikes across the playa, and then plopped down on a big cushion

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at Camp Above the Limit, where Brian Wallace is about to begin his talk.

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This morning we have Brian Wallace with us.

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He’s going to talk to you a little bit about the ethnobotany of cacao,

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and I believe he has some chocolate samples for you as well.

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I met Brian several years ago working in drug policy reform.

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He was working for MAPS at the time.

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And then we kind of crossed paths again before this year’s Burning Man, because Brian here

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designed the speaker series over at Fractal Nation Village. For those who have been over there,

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I encourage you to go check it out. There’s a lot of crossover between the speakers. So if you

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missed something that you wanted to see, or you want to see something that’s not being offered

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here or there, definitely check out their speaker series, which started yesterday at 5pm. Yeah.

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So all day through Saturday, through Friday. Cool. Well, once again, thanks for waking up early.

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With that, here’s Brian Wallace.

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Good morning, or good afternoon. How’s everybody doing? A little groggy, a little warm outside.

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So I’m here to talk to you guys about chocolate. Um, something, uh, a sweet treat

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that is in, uh, it’s pretty pervasive. It’s in everybody’s lives. It’s on the store shelves.

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Um, it’s something, uh, that I’ve noticed people having a hard time, uh, defining, uh, is it a

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food? It’s on the food shelves, but there are components of it that have medicinal aspects.

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There are components of it that when extracted have drug like aspects.

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It tastes delicious. It’s a dessert, you know, and, you know, which one is it?

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Which one of these things could it be? And the answer is all of the

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above. So the title is talk the entheobotany of cacao. I kind of want it my my hope is that I can

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weave a picture for how all of those different labels interrelate with each other. Whether it’s the chemical components

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or how it’s grown, how it’s traded, all of these different things that kind of give a

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better understanding and a better awareness of how you can use or indulge or enjoy in

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or enjoy in this treat in your life.

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And we’ll actually get to do that here too.

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I brought some nice chocolate for you guys all to sample.

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So we’re here at Palenque Norte.

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And you guys, I don’t know,

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have you guys been to other talks here since yesterday?

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Well, you should come other days because they’re all going to be amazing.

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But a lot of the talks here are, you know, psychedelic or entheogenic in nature.

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And to me, I feel like cacao, while it might not traditionally be thought of as a psychedelic or entheogen,

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for me, it’s very much psychedelic and is very much an entheogenic substance.

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Psychedelic, you know, originally coined as a term that means mind manifesting.

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And cacao, you know, when you take a nice, good hit, a strong cacao, which, by the way, how many of you guys have taken taken a good, strong dose of pure 100% cacao?

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Nice.

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What did you think about it?

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Yummy.

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Great, great.

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So psychedelic mind manifesting, cacao definitely has the potential to be used in this way to manifest one’s thoughts, one’s intentions.

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And also, you know, for me is a substance that is a great idea of, I guess, like a reference point for non-duality in that it works on this subjective psychological level.

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But physiologically, the activity that cacao has in the body almost mirrors this consciousness-expanding psychedelic effect.

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So I’ll get into that a little bit later and how that physiology breaks down.

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And also, before I get too far into things, I’m here to talk to you guys about Cacao but if you guys have any questions or something doesn’t seem

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clear, raise your hand. This is meant to be a discussion, a workshop, participatory

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for all you guys. So if you have something to add or a, please, by all means, I encourage that.

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So cacao basics.

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How many people are familiar with how cacao is grown and the different varieties, the

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different cultivars, where it’s grown in the world?

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Awesome.

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Awesome.

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So cacao being, Theobroma cacao is the genus species of it, as named by Linnaeus,

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the godfather of evolution. Theobroma meaning Theo, meaning divine or godlike, and broma meaning

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food. So literally, so named by Linnaeus as the food of the gods.

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So there are three main cultivars or varieties of cacao that are around in the world,

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criollo, forastero, and trinitario.

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Criollo is grown in about, it’s about 5% of production all over the world.

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It’s nice and fatty, has a huge cocoa butter content,

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and you can kind of eat the straight beans and they kind of melt in your mouth. The Forastero is about 80% of the cacao grown in the world.

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Depending, there are even sub varieties of each of these two, but Forastero is more disease resistant. It’s easier to grow. And a lot of the big cacao companies choose this chocolate to grow because of those reasons.

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So it might not be the best tasting in a lot of instances, but it’s very easy to grow and the profit margin is thus really high.

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So Nestle, Hershey’s, all these big chocolate companies are growing a lot of Foresterro, a lot in Africa.

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And then Trinitario is a combination or a hybrid of Criollo and Foresterro.

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And Tunitario is about 15% of production in the world.

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And Tunitario is kind of any combination of a specific type of Criollo

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and a specific type of Foresterro hybridized.

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And there are all different kinds.

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So it’s kind of like the amount of combinations that are possible.

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That’s a good reference point.

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I mean, probably a lot of you are familiar with the cannabis that’s grown out there

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and the indica-citiva hybrids.

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It’s almost the same way with criollo and forastero.

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Depending on the dominant strain, you can get higher fat content, higher alkaloid content.

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You can get more fruity characteristics.

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You can get a more nutty characteristic, all of these different things.

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So there are people that spend their entire lives working on cultivars like this

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to make the tastiest chocolate for you that’s

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also easy to grow for them.

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So it’s also worth noting that there’s the Theobroma genus and there’s also a Herania

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which is closely related to chocolate.

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But in that the tree looks similar, the pods are similar, sort of.

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But the similarities in it that are worth paying attention to from an ethnobotanical perspective

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are how different cultures throughout North and South America,

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where cacao is kind of native to and where it grows most often,

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grows most often, the different uses and the different medicinal applications that these cultures kind of focus their time around, I guess.

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So in terms of these different native cultures that are still using cacao or that have been

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using cacao for centuries or even thousands of years, they’re all over the place.

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And it’s really difficult for us to actually tell what these traditional uses are

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because during the Spanish conquest, you know, 1500 to 1700 or so,

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a lot of the records and a lot of the written records that were around

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are a lot of even the verbal passing down through generations of stories and uses and applications of cacao were lost.

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So there are a lot of native cultures that we see throughout the Americas today that are using cacao in a specific way,

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and it’s really difficult for us to tell, you know, have they been doing that for a hundred years?

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Have they been doing that for thousands of years?

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You know, have they been doing that for 100 years?

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Have they been doing that for thousands of years?

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There are so many different cultures using it that it’s almost impossible to tell.

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So from the Americas, we have traditional uses throughout Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico, Central America, and then a huge amount all around the entire Amazon basin.

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All kinds of different tribes are using cacao,

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have been using cacao for hundreds of years,

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if not much, much longer.

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And we do know that the Spanish actually took cacao.

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Originally, when the Spanish landed,

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basically everybody spit out cacao. were like this is terrible what is

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this this is garbage um and for a while it wasn’t really uh respected in the way that the native

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cultures were using it you know there were a lot of uh you know the mines and the aztecs would

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trade cacao as though as we trade dollar bills they they were used as a currency for a long time.

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And when the Spanish came, they kind of just like, you know, put a stop to that and completely

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devalued the social currency that cacao was.

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But at the same time, later on during the conquest, took cacao and took the value of it and realized the potential for its use in trading with other native cultures and bridging the gap between other cultures that they were inevitably trying to conquer and exploit.

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But it was kind of a foot in the door for them, which is obviously pretty terrible. Um, okay. So let’s,

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let’s talk about a couple of these specific, uh, uses and, uh, and cacao kind of as a, uh,

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you know, what I was getting to earlier in the psychedelic, uh,

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You know what I was getting to earlier in the psychedelic, you know, what is it, a medicine, a plant, a dessert, treats and indulgence, all these different things. So let’s get into a couple of the specifics of them.

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You guys can kind of have a reference point for what we’re talking about.

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So Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia use various preparations of theobroma and

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herania burnt. They burn the leaves, they burn the bark, and actually combine it

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with various types of varroa species to make hallucinogenic snuffs. Which is like

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okay that’s weird why is that happening? So it turns out that actually cacao contains a lot of components

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and a lot of chemical constituents that actually enhance other substances,

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other medicines, and almost focus the activity of those things.

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And shamans and traditions that have had cacao you know in their backyard growing

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natively in the rainforest have kind of picked up on this and kind of used cacao as a as a tool to

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understand how a lot of other plants and substances actually work.

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So how many of you are actually familiar with ayahuasca, the vine?

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Oh, great.

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Well, I don’t have to make too much of a stretch to kind of make the comparison there

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between the traditional use of the vine as a tool to get a better understanding of other plants,

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not just DMT-containing plants to use as a visionary brew, but to actually understand and

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focus the energy or enhance the effect of a specific

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brew or medicine or other plant that’s going to be used.

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So they’re kind of similar in that aspect.

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And I’ll get into the chemistry later and we can draw some comparisons between ayahuasca

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and, you know, pure cacao.

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So, you know, besides being used in hallucinogenic snuffs,

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it’s also used with another traditional Amazonian plant teacher,

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which is tobacco.

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So cacao has been used traditionally hand-in-hand with tobacco by numerous tribes and cultures throughout the Amazon basin

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in various preparations. similar to use with

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varroa. It’s been used burnt as a snuff, and this is just the leaves and the bark again, not the actual

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beans. So we don’t know what alkaloids are actually maintained and concentrated by taking the plant

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matter and burning it, but one would assume that there’s something that gets concentrated

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and enhances the effects of the varroa or the tobacco in a specific way.

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So, you know, like most things that you’ll hear lectures about here in Palenque Norte,

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we need to do more research.

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We need to throw more money at this and, and figure out, uh, what’s actually going on, uh, to get a better understanding of it and see

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how, uh, we can understand it and respect these traditions and kind of bring them into our own

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use. You know, these are, these are things that, you know, the average person is looking at a

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chocolate bar on the shelf and they have no idea, uh, is going on. So, okay, what else? What else? So,

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you know, there are a handful of other, I mean, there are countless other medicinal uses of

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various parts of the cacao tree. It’s used for anywhere from throat infractions to people that

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are malnourished, people that have had difficult digestive issues or diseases or viruses to kind of get some, you know, easy to digest fats into their bodies and kind of get them back and put together physiologically after they’ve been kind of drained by a disease or an ailment.

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So, you know, and then there’s a how many of you have actually seen the actual tree right in front of you?

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And how many of you have seen like the actual pod or even just a picture of the pod?

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OK, so for those of you that haven’t, cacao can be a cacao can be a pod about yay big to a little bit bigger.

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It’s shaped like a football can be any number of colors, depending on some of those varieties that I was talking about earlier. Yellow, green, blue, brown,

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red, maroon, purple, all of these different things. And when you crack, the pod grows

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on the base of the tree. It doesn’t grow kind of from the branches like a lot of fruit trees do.

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So it grows straight from the, from kind of the trunk of the tree.

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So pulling the pod when it’s ready to harvest, you can kind of crack it open,

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and it’ll have anywhere from 30 to 50 or so cacao beans inside of it.

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And they’re surrounded by this white, pulpy, delicious substance that’s, you know, really kind of a delicacy.

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And every time I’ve got to enjoy it, it’s just like,

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words don’t describe how delicious this stuff really is.

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Before cacao was used by a lot of these cultures

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and before they discovered that various preparations of the bean could be eaten

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or various medicinal applications could be, you know, utilized from the leaves or the bark or what have you, people would

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crack open these pods out in the wild and suck out this white nectar.

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It’s almost like the consistency of a pudding and it’s sweet.

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Nothing has to be done with it.

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You can eat it right out of the pod.

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It’s completely delicious. So you can actually take that pulp or pulpa and make it into any number of wines or vinegars or liquors.

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And there are a lot of tribes that are doing this and still do to this day. And some combine it with other different psychoactive substances or medicinal substances to bring out cacao’s enhancing or synergistic effect.

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Tao is used traditionally in various rites of passage, in coming-of-age rites, in puberty rites.

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And it’s interesting to note, I mean, in addition to that, it’s also used, you know, before, during, and after women’s cycles,

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during and following birth to facilitate ease of birth um and you know like a lot of native cultures we don’t know why they just know that it works

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you know they aren’t they don’t say oh well there’s this medicinal component of it and that’s

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why we’re doing it but um from a very simple perspective we can say that you know cacao has

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a very high mineral content um and that resupplementing with minerals during these times

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can facilitate or ease physiological difficulties

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that people can have during these transitionary periods

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or cycling periods in their lives.

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So it’s interesting to note all of these.

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I could spend hours and hours going tribe by tribe and talking about each of these different uses.

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But I want to kind of step back and look more at the meta of it and say that there are countless tribes using cacao in these ways that have never met each other, that are in different parts of the Americas.

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You know, whether it’s, you know, from Panama all the way down to Peru or anywhere in between.

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So, yeah.

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What else? What else?

00:23:56 ►

Let’s see here.

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The other part that’s interesting to note, and I’ve kind of hinted on this,

00:24:01 ►

is this idea of cacao shamanism or cacao ceremony.

00:24:04 ►

to note and I’ve kind of hinted on this is this cacao this idea of cacao shamanism or cacao ceremony um you know it’s it it isn’t quite like ayahuasca in that there isn’t like a uh

00:24:13 ►

a huge tradition of ritual and a huge tradition of ceremony that’s pervasive and in many different

00:24:19 ►

tribes in the use of cacao uh it’s more so used as a carrier or an enhancer, kind of like what I was

00:24:26 ►

saying earlier. And, you know, there have been people, there’s kind of been like a surge of

00:24:34 ►

people in the West, people in the Americas actually taking this and running with it and

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actually trying to create a ritual and ceremony around cacao. Has anyone here actually participated in cacao ceremony?

00:24:49 ►

Oh, nice.

00:24:50 ►

So cacao ceremony is becoming a popular thing in certain parts of the world.

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There’s a large group of people in Guatemala doing cacao ceremony.

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And kind of like the idea with cacao in ceremony is that, uh,

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you know, it’s not, uh, it’s, it was, it wouldn’t be comparable to a traditional psychedelic that’s

00:25:14 ►

strong and kind of forceful. It’s almost more like, uh, an MDMA like substance that kind of

00:25:20 ►

like provides an opening and depending on the set and setting can really

00:25:26 ►

provide a therapeutic effect for people or it can just be something that you enjoy and that you have

00:25:33 ►

fun with so in the cacao ceremony this is kind of like the idea is to create a ritual or a setting

00:25:39 ►

that can create the maximum benefit for that window that cacao can provide.

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So the cacao ceremony, you know, is almost like it can almost be thought of as a,

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like a group therapy session in that, you know,

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some people come and they ingest the cacao and they feel nice.

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And that’s it.

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And some people come and they enjoy their cacao and you know

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within a few minutes of you know really releasing into their experience have a

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complete heart and a heart opening effect and you know are sobbing tears of

00:26:17 ►

various emotions that they’re working through you know various traumas can

00:26:23 ►

come up can be dealt with and these kind of group settings really facilitate

00:26:27 ►

the integration

00:26:32 ►

and the work around those things that can come up

00:26:35 ►

so yeah, I think there was only

00:26:40 ►

one hand that came up for people that have participated in a cacao ceremony

00:26:44 ►

and I’d really encourage you guys to try it and you know it doesn’t have to be like well

00:26:50 ►

i have to find a cacao shaman it’s something you can go do uh with a friend uh with a lover uh with

00:26:59 ►

you know a group of people um i would recommend if you’re going to do this though, to get cacao,

00:27:06 ►

that’s minimally processed, something that’s in a paste. You can make a strong decoction,

00:27:10 ►

uh, with the beans, um, themselves. And, uh, I would really recommend against the,

00:27:17 ►

the urge to, to sweeten it. Uh, maybe a little bit is okay, but you know, you really kind of

00:27:22 ►

need to get a good, strong, uh strong dose of cacao in your body.

00:27:25 ►

And it’s going to be bitter.

00:27:28 ►

The bitter aspect from a traditional perspective is very energy moving, very clearing.

00:27:36 ►

So it’s good.

00:27:38 ►

Embrace the bitterness.

00:27:39 ►

Embrace that movement.

00:27:40 ►

And try it out.

00:27:42 ►

And let me know how it goes.

00:27:43 ►

and try it out and let me know how it goes.

00:27:51 ►

So I’ve been talking a little bit about this enhancing or carrier-like aspect of cacao, of pure cacao.

00:27:57 ►

How many of you have listened to the Polenka Norte talk

00:28:01 ►

that was delivered by Jonathan Ott called

00:28:04 ►

A Drug Enhancer Called Chocolate? Okay, nice. to the Polinkinorte talk that was delivered by Jonathan Ott called a drug enhancer called chocolate okay nice I was thinking that there might have been

00:28:11 ►

more people that heard about it so I tried to actually remove a lot of the

00:28:14 ►

stuff from my presentation that’s in there so I’m just gonna say that it’s a

00:28:18 ►

fantastic talk and if you’re more interested if you’re interested in

00:28:21 ►

learning more about this listen to to that talk uh there’s great

00:28:26 ►

information in there and kind of john gets into more specifics about some of the things i’ve got

00:28:31 ►

into here um so check it out it’s on psychedelic salon yeah um i’m not sure what year it’s actually

00:28:41 ►

it’s in there you can find it so you know what i’m going to skip some

00:28:47 ►

of the stuff that i was going to talk about on on ecology um and get into more of the the juicy

00:28:52 ►

stuff on the uh the actual chemistry of cacao so we can give a you know our our western minds

00:28:57 ►

or a lot of our western minds i shouldn’t generalize everybody here uh like to know

00:29:02 ►

the specifics how does it work uh Where’s the research? What’s the

00:29:05 ►

science? So to feed that a little bit, I want to get into the chemistry of cacao, which we actually

00:29:13 ►

know quite a bit about. It’s extremely complex. There are a host of alkaloid substances and chemical components that produce the effect of cacao in your body,

00:29:27 ►

in your mind, and the relationship between the two. The components can be completely different,

00:29:37 ►

day and night different, depending on the variety, depending on the part of the plant,

00:29:41 ►

whether it’s the bean, which is what the chocolate that you’re familiar with eating comes from,

00:29:46 ►

or the leaves or all of these other parts of the plant.

00:29:51 ►

So also, you know, I got a little bit ahead of myself here.

00:29:56 ►

How many of you guys are familiar with a process where they take the bean

00:30:00 ►

and actually make it into something that can end up in a store shelf,

00:30:05 ►

actual chocolate. That’s like sweet and delicious. Okay. So cacao beans are pulled from the tree,

00:30:14 ►

uh, ground down the shells removed. Um, they’re fermented for a period of five to eight days,

00:30:24 ►

They’re fermented for a period of five to eight days, depending on who’s doing it.

00:30:43 ►

And then they’re dried, roasted, ground down, and gone through various steps of processing to get the chocolate that most of us know and love, that you can buy in the stores, that’s sweet.

00:30:45 ►

And when you bite into it, it kind of dissolves in your mouth in a particular way and there are people that have spent millions

00:30:51 ►

of dollars on this literally to to get the perfect micron size of chocolate so when you bite into

00:30:59 ►

that piece of chocolate it dissolves in your tongue and your mouth in a particular way to carry

00:31:03 ►

those molecules of taste all the way to your taste buds and kind of open things up.

00:31:08 ►

So I mentioned that now because part of this, the chemistry of cacao is really impacted

00:31:17 ►

by how it’s processed, by the steps that it goes through before it gets to you.

00:31:22 ►

So fermenting and roasting specifically,

00:31:25 ►

and then also some of the high heat processes

00:31:28 ►

and the grinding and the refining

00:31:29 ►

can really completely change

00:31:31 ►

the chemical components of cacao,

00:31:35 ►

the things that have the psychoactive or the medicinal

00:31:37 ►

or just the feel-good effects.

00:31:41 ►

So there’s a huge kind of popularity uh popularity that’s uh focused on probably the

00:31:49 ►

west coast you know california the bay area which is where i live so i’m a little partial

00:31:53 ►

to that but uh in in the raw foods movement which is eating less processed minimally processed foods

00:32:00 ►

that are kept under a certain temperature range so cacao is kind of like this hotbed topic for the raw food thing, because generally raw foods are said to not be over 118, 120.

00:32:12 ►

And cacao can actually reach 130, 140 degrees when it’s being fermented.

00:32:17 ►

And then obviously roasting it is going to really get the temperature soaring up to 200,

00:32:25 ►

going to really get the temperature soaring up to 200, sometimes almost 300 degrees.

00:32:34 ►

So, you know, a lot of these components that I’m about to talk about are destroyed or neutralized or completely broken down by a lot of these processes. So actually, when you buy nine out

00:32:39 ►

of 10 chocolate bars from the store, they don’t have a lot of these things in them or the content of them is

00:32:45 ►

so drastically resuced that, you know, you’d have to eat, you know, a kilo of these bars to actually

00:32:53 ►

get the effect. And by then you’d have so much sugar in your body that you’d just be spinning

00:32:57 ►

so hard and crashing from the sugar is pretty, pretty unpleasant kind of thing. So anyways, let’s get into the chemical components.

00:33:06 ►

So main chemistry of cacao revolves around these methylxanthines.

00:33:12 ►

So methylxanthines are a class of chemicals that include caffeine,

00:33:18 ►

is the most pervasive methylxanthine that a lot of you are familiar with.

00:33:23 ►

Also theophylline, which is in various

00:33:27 ►

types of tea, higher content in green, white, oolong teas, and it’s also very high in yerba mate.

00:33:34 ►

There’s also tetramethylureate is another different type of methylxanthine that’s

00:33:37 ►

found in cacao. And then the big one for cacao is theobromine. So theobromine is related structurally to these other stimulant compounds,

00:33:48 ►

but it has a little bit more of a grounding effect, which is kind of strange.

00:33:57 ►

I don’t know if you guys are familiar with, you know,

00:34:01 ►

ingesting high amounts of yerba mate versus high amounts of coffee.

00:34:04 ►

you know, ingesting high amounts of yerba mate versus high amounts of coffee.

00:34:11 ►

And the difference here is that coffee, you know, is going to be much higher in caffeine content.

00:34:15 ►

It’s a little bit more jittery, a little bit more anxious, I guess you could say,

00:34:17 ►

depending on, you know, your own makeup.

00:34:23 ►

But yerba mate, people, you know, a lot overwhelmingly say that it’s a little bit more grounding.

00:34:24 ►

It’s a little bit more grounding. It’s a little bit more focusing. Um, I’ve talked to a lot of students that really, once they get into mate,

00:34:28 ►

love mate so much more for studying, uh, than they do coffee because of its kind of grounding effect.

00:34:35 ►

And, uh, this is because the stimulant in it is, is closely related to caffeine, but it’s,

00:34:42 ►

it’s, it’s theobromine. It’s different. It’s a little bit different. So the, the stimulant effects of cacao that, that like, uh, you get when you take

00:34:51 ►

a nice, solid dose of it, uh, comes from this theobromine. Um, and the theobromine, uh, you know,

00:34:59 ►

unlike caffeine can be actually a little bit more grounding, a little bit more centering, a little bit more heart-centered.

00:35:08 ►

So that, in combination with some of the other components that I’ll talk about in a sec,

00:35:13 ►

give cacao this, almost like, it’s like a heart-centered stimulant, you could say.

00:35:20 ►

It’s a little bit more grounding, but still stimulating. So, um, so the next part are the

00:35:28 ►

polyphenols, polyphenol classic compounds that are in cacao, um, which are the antioxidants.

00:35:34 ►

Everybody’s like crazy about antioxidants. They got to get their blueberries and their acai.

00:35:38 ►

They got to get, uh, you know, all these things into their body. Um, and it’s a little bit of a fad, but, um, it is

00:35:46 ►

good to have a lot of antioxidants in your body. It’s, it’s nice. It’s good for you. It’s healthy.

00:35:51 ►

Um, you know, and the, and the polyphenols that are in cacao, uh, you know, in addition to have

00:35:57 ►

super strong antioxidant activity, cacao is actually, cacao is actually, uh, one of the

00:36:03 ►

strongest, uh, antioxidant foods that you can take you can take in terms of the amount that you actually have to eat to get the effect.

00:36:11 ►

It’s higher than blueberries, higher than acai, higher than a lot of these things that people associate this purple color with antioxidant activity because a lot of the things that actually color foods purple,

00:36:28 ►

like blueberries and acai,

00:36:29 ►

are actually providing the antioxidant activity as well.

00:36:33 ►

So a thing that a lot of people don’t know is that cacao beans are actually purple.

00:36:38 ►

You open up that pod, you remove that pulp from the outside of them,

00:36:42 ►

and you crack open a cacao bean.

00:36:44 ►

They’re purple on the inside.

00:36:45 ►

They’re bright, bright purple.

00:36:47 ►

They’re really beautiful and very nice.

00:36:50 ►

And I actually have a good pocket full of cacao beans here that I was going to pass out.

00:36:57 ►

You guys interested in trying some straight cacao beans?

00:37:02 ►

I’ll just run around Burning Man with a pocket full of cacao.

00:37:04 ►

It’s not bad.

00:37:07 ►

So they are bitter. Be prepared. Um, to reduce the bitterness, you can remove the shell on the

00:37:16 ►

outside. Um, if you like, um, you can kind of crack it with your teeth and remove the shell

00:37:20 ►

and eat the inside. Uh, but it’s still even the, still, even the seed in the inside is going to be pretty bitter.

00:37:27 ►

The outer husk that you can peel off is actually where a lot of the magnesium is.

00:37:33 ►

So depending on the traditional application that I was talking about earlier,

00:37:39 ►

you know, with birth, women’s cycles, these different things,

00:37:42 ►

the husk is actually left on in the preparations

00:37:46 ►

and ground down or kind of mashed down with a stone to be prepared.

00:37:52 ►

But it does add a little bit of bitterness, which some people don’t prefer.

00:37:55 ►

All the chocolate that you eat from the store shelves has had the husk completely removed.

00:37:58 ►

There are these really elaborate, crazy machines that kind of dry out the cacao

00:38:02 ►

and make the inner seed dehydrate,

00:38:10 ►

desiccate a little bit, which loosens up that husk. And then there are all kinds of elaborate blowing, like air blowing machines that just blow the husk off. They’re really kind of wild

00:38:17 ►

to actually watch these things work. Anyways, I don’t want to get too far off topic.

00:38:21 ►

Um, The antioxidants.

00:38:30 ►

So the two main antioxidants that are in cacao are epicatechin and procyanidin.

00:38:35 ►

The procyanidin being what actually makes them purple.

00:38:42 ►

So procyanidin, besides being a super strong antioxidant, is also an anticoagulant for your blood. It helps blood flow.

00:38:43 ►

is also an anticoagulant for your blood, helps blood flow.

00:38:47 ►

And like I was saying earlier,

00:38:50 ►

these different chemical components can be really changed by the fermenting and roasting.

00:38:52 ►

And procyanidin specifically can be drastically lowered

00:38:56 ►

depending on how high the temperature gets.

00:38:59 ►

And there are people in the raw food movement

00:39:02 ►

trying to understand if that number is 120, if that number is 140?

00:39:05 ►

And I really hope we get some clarity on that because the traditional cacao people, the traditional chocolate purveyors are really putting heat on a lot of people to actually give some evidence on why raw chocolate is better.

00:39:21 ►

Because there isn’t a lot of science on this kind of stuff.

00:39:25 ►

Even though, you know, when you eat a lot of this stuff, you can feel it in your body, you know.

00:39:31 ►

It’s a hot topic, to say the least. So the other main antioxidant here is epicatechin, which is

00:39:37 ►

really the fun one and really one of the more interesting ones. So, epicatechin, besides being a strong antioxidant,

00:39:46 ►

stimulates nitric oxide synthase in your body. So, nitric oxide is what is given to people with

00:39:53 ►

various types of cardiac ailments, hypertension. This is kind of these little tablets. I don’t

00:39:59 ►

know if you’ve ever seen people with like the little necklace that’s really super small and

00:40:02 ►

they have little tablets in it that are sublingual nitric oxide. So you can take nitric oxide because it’s a, it’s a vasodilator. And if

00:40:10 ►

you start having kind of chest pain or something like that, that’s your signal that you should be

00:40:13 ►

taking your heart pills. And, uh, cacao, uh, has its own effect like this. Cacao actually stimulates,

00:40:20 ►

uh, the enzyme in your body that produces nitric oxide. So it helps with this vasodilating

00:40:27 ►

effect. It’s also, you know, you guys know the biggest muscle in your heart and your body is

00:40:33 ►

your heart. So cacao has literally and metaphorically this heart opening effect in the body.

00:40:42 ►

effect in the body.

00:40:47 ►

So the other thing that’s just kind of fun to point out,

00:40:51 ►

is anybody else familiar with a really common drug that has activity on nitric oxide in the body?

00:40:58 ►

Viagra.

00:41:00 ►

Viagra works very strongly on nitric oxide synthase. So, you know, we have this lore of cacao as a very strong aphrodisiac.

00:41:10 ►

And, you know, Casanova was said to lure women to his chambers with cacao specifically.

00:41:22 ►

That was kind of his M.O.

00:41:28 ►

with cacao, uh, specifically that was kind of his, uh, MO. Uh, so, you know, we have this, uh,

00:41:33 ►

this tradition, this idea of cacao as an aphrodisiac, and that’s because, uh, you know,

00:41:39 ►

um, not only is it nice, a sensual indulgent kind of treat, but it also works in your body to kind of activate, uh, these different parts of your physiology that really can enhance arousal and can enhance

00:41:45 ►

sensitivity. So I talked a little bit earlier too about cacao’s traditional use as an enhancer

00:41:54 ►

for other substances. And as it turns out, cacao actually has MAO inhibition activity. Are you guys familiar with MAO inhibition activity

00:42:06 ►

like in the ayahuasca brew? So cacao, like ayahuasca, actually has very light,

00:42:12 ►

not nearly as strong as ayahuasca, but has light MAO inhibition activity.

00:42:19 ►

There are various tetrahydrobetacarbolines. And the epicatechin, the one that I was just talking about that works on nitric oxide synthase,

00:42:29 ►

is actually a MAO-B inhibitor as well.

00:42:33 ►

So when you ingest this good, strong dose of cacao, you get a lot of these chemical components,

00:42:40 ►

but you also get ones that actually enhance the effects that cacao has in and of

00:42:45 ►

itself. So it’s kind of like this synergistic effect feedback loop that just kind of builds

00:42:50 ►

upon itself. And also, cacao contains tryptamine, various other types of amino acids, different

00:43:02 ►

things like that. It contains serotonin, but some of you probably

00:43:05 ►

know that serotonin doesn’t immediately cross the blood-brain barrier when you ingest it,

00:43:09 ►

but it’s in there. It contains tryptamine as well, precursors to various types of things

00:43:17 ►

in your body. It also contains another component that people are just trying to kind of get an understanding on, which is anandamine, ananda being Sanskrit for bliss.

00:43:31 ►

And anandamine is actually a component of some things that some foods, some medicines that agonizes or has activity at the endocannabinoid system. So, you know, when you ingest cacao,

00:43:46 ►

not only are you getting some, you’re getting tryptamine, you’re getting monoamine oxidase

00:43:50 ►

inhibitors, you’re getting stimulant compounds. You’re also getting endocannabinoid activity

00:43:55 ►

in your brain, which is kind of like the bliss, like the, oh, my eyes are rolling back in my head

00:43:59 ►

kind of feeling. So they all kind of work together and synergize. You know, and all of these things

00:44:04 ►

are of course enhanced by cacao’s high mineral content, lots of vitamin C, lots of vitamin E.

00:44:11 ►

It’s just all around lots of yummy, good stuff in that cacao.

00:44:18 ►

The last chemical component that I wanted to talk about is phenethylamine. Are you guys familiar

00:44:23 ►

with the kind of two

00:44:25 ►

major classes of traditional psychedelic compounds, atryptamines and phenethylamines?

00:44:30 ►

So, uh, cacao actually contains phenethylamine, which, you know, in and of itself isn’t psychedelic.

00:44:36 ►

Um, in your body, it’s actually released, uh, when you have, uh, uh, it’s, it’s released, uh, in,

00:44:49 ►

you have, it’s released in, how to best say this, when a person is in love, when a person is feeling specifically that kind of like longing and like urgency feeling that people

00:44:56 ►

can get with a partner or a lover or a crush or whatever.

00:45:01 ►

Phenethylamine is released at that time and it has a lot of activity on dopamine systems and

00:45:06 ►

different norepinephrine and systems like that in your brain. So again, phenethylamine being

00:45:17 ►

strongly activated and many psychedelics being strongly activated and enhanced by MAO inhibitors,

00:45:24 ►

phenethylamine in and of itself, unlike the traditional psychedelics being strongly activated and enhanced by MAO inhibitors.

00:45:29 ►

Phenethylamine in and of itself, unlike the traditional psychedelics that are made from phenethylamine or have that as a backbone, it’s metabolized in the body very rapidly.

00:45:37 ►

So the MAO inhibitors are actually needed for that effect.

00:45:41 ►

And there have been a lot of, you know, chocolate is a love drug.

00:45:44 ►

I don’t know if you guys have ever heard or seen articles on this, but there was a guy that got a lot of heat for

00:45:50 ►

really being a proponent of like, cacao is a love drug because of all of this phenethylamine that

00:45:55 ►

gets in your body. And it turns out that phenethylamine is broken down rapidly within a

00:45:59 ►

couple of minutes. But luckily, in this moon only process stuff, stuff get your MAO inhibition activity

00:46:07 ►

that happens as well

00:46:08 ►

that actually allows that phenethylamine to circulate

00:46:11 ►

in your synapses a little bit longer

00:46:12 ►

a little bit more, have a little bit more activity

00:46:14 ►

so yeah, all around yummy, all around good stuff

00:46:19 ►

I think I’m about out of time

00:46:21 ►

I do still want to pass out some chocolate treats and do Q&A.

00:46:30 ►

And let me just take two minutes here real quick to get into something that’s kind of like the,

00:46:37 ►

I don’t want to be the Debbie Downer and end the talk on this,

00:46:42 ►

but it’s something that’s very real for me

00:46:45 ►

and that I think a lot of people could bring more attention and awareness to.

00:46:51 ►

You know, as Westerners in the political systems that we’re in,

00:46:55 ►

one of the strongest things you can do to promote social change

00:46:59 ►

and social justice is actually to vote with your dollar.

00:47:03 ►

And as it turns out, cacao in the Ivory Coast and in many parts of Africa

00:47:09 ►

is still being grown, being harvested, being processed by using child slave labor.

00:47:15 ►

Children are being abducted from their families, from their homes.

00:47:19 ►

They’re being sold into slavery to farmers on the Ivory Coast.

00:47:25 ►

And it’s terrible.

00:47:27 ►

It’s something that not a lot of people like to talk about,

00:47:30 ►

and it’s something that the big cacao and the big chocolate companies

00:47:34 ►

are completely pushing under the rug.

00:47:36 ►

There was actually a protocol, the Harkeningo Protocol,

00:47:41 ►

was drafted in 2001 as a piece of legislation in the U.S. that would actually

00:47:49 ►

require chocolate companies to certify that their products were child slave labor free.

00:47:57 ►

And, you know, since all this, you know, child slave labor is cheap.

00:48:03 ►

And that’s why it’s used.

00:48:04 ►

And these companies are very protective over their profit margins. And child slave labor is cheap, and that’s why it’s used.

00:48:09 ►

And these companies are very protective over their profit margins and got in a big fuss over this and actually put up a lot of money

00:48:15 ►

and a lot of resistance to get the wording and the actual logistical what would happen.

00:48:33 ►

And the actual logistical what would happen, the consequences of this protocol changed to be less hard for them to protect their profit margins. So the goal was to have child slave labor be completely ended by 2005.

00:48:45 ►

The protocol was redrafted in 2008 because it didn’t work,

00:48:49 ►

in 2010 because it didn’t work,

00:48:52 ►

and still the goals and the tenets of this piece of legislation

00:48:59 ►

have still not been met.

00:49:01 ►

Now we’re getting over 10 years later,

00:49:03 ►

and it’s really just a tragedy. It’s really

00:49:07 ►

terrible, and we could talk about that a lot, but really I’m here to take my SoBox moment and

00:49:14 ►

urge you that when you’re buying chocolate products, to not buy them from the Ivory Coast,

00:49:20 ►

to not buy them from Africa, and if you can buy them fair trade these are all ways that you

00:49:25 ►

can influence companies with your voting dollar to actually make a difference and put their money

00:49:32 ►

back into protecting the interests of these children so who’s ready to eat some chocolate sure um fair trade uh what do i think about fair trade

00:49:49 ►

um i think it’s great and i think uh i wish all chocolate was uh produced fair trade

00:49:57 ►

um one of the things about uh that i was going to get into on the ecology of cacao is that uh

00:50:04 ►

that relates to the fair trade thing

00:50:06 ►

is that a lot of the traditional cultures that have used cacao

00:50:10 ►

are actually the ones that are growing it for a lot of places that are fair trade.

00:50:13 ►

So there are a lot of native tribes throughout the Americas,

00:50:21 ►

throughout Central America and South America,

00:50:23 ►

that are represented by a cooperative or a collective

00:50:27 ►

that’s kind of like the warehouse or the place

00:50:32 ►

where a family can pull a kilo of cacao beans

00:50:38 ►

off of the tree that’s growing in front of their hut

00:50:40 ►

and bring it to the collective and get a couple dollars for it,

00:50:43 ►

or a different family

00:50:45 ►

or a different group of farmers can grow thousands or more kilos and bring it to the cooperative

00:50:52 ►

and that cooperative is actually what’s fair trade certified so the cooperative has the relationship

00:50:57 ►

with all the individual farmers and the thing about this relationship is that some of these native cultures have such a strong cultural tradition around cacao that they actually don’t want to be, they don’t want to change the way that they grow their cacao.

00:51:16 ►

So the bri bri in Costa Rica are a good example of this.

00:51:21 ►

Cacao is sacred for them.

00:51:25 ►

Rica are a good example of this. Cacao is sacred for them. I got a chance to go down there and hang out with a cacao shaman and do cacao ceremony there. And it was different because it wasn’t used

00:51:31 ►

for necessarily a psychoactive effect. It was actually used almost as a purification rite. So it’s actually used to, uh, bless, uh, dead bodies or it’s used during

00:51:48 ►

funeral rites and it’s used, the butter is used to, um, clean the hands, um, and the hearts of

00:51:55 ►

family members and friends and people that come to a funeral, uh, ceremony for people. So

00:52:01 ►

that have these people that have, you know, touched the body of the

00:52:06 ►

deceased, the cacao is actually used to cleanse. But anyways, I got back to your back to fair

00:52:13 ►

trade. The brie brie don’t want to change how they grow their cacao. Cacao, if you have a

00:52:20 ►

monocropped field, a forest of cacao, you can get 2,000, 3,000 kilos per

00:52:27 ►

hectare.

00:52:28 ►

The brewery maybe get 20, 30.

00:52:33 ►

They have hectares and hectares of cacao and they might get a couple pods out of it.

00:52:39 ►

And people have tried to come in and say, well, you know, let me help you with your

00:52:44 ►

cacao and let me teach you how to grow, get a better yield.

00:52:47 ►

You know, anywhere from cutting off the pods that are diseased to different trimming techniques to growing different cultivars or what have you.

00:52:56 ►

And they don’t want to do it.

00:52:58 ►

So it’s limiting for them in that they can’t actually, you know, they can sell to the fair trade places but they aren’t

00:53:09 ►

selling a lot they could be making a lot more money um and then there are tribes like the angabe in panama that are like tell us how to grow the cacao we want the money give us the money

00:53:15 ►

you know and and they understand it as a tool for economic development so you, kind of two ends of the spectrum in terms of how that fair trade thing influences how cacao is grown and all the different cultural factors, traditional factors that are weaved into that in your end product.

00:53:37 ►

There are also people that say fair trade cacao isn’t very good.

00:53:40 ►

I think that’s a bunch of crap.

00:53:43 ►

But, yeah, hopefully that answers your question. It was a’s a bunch of crap. But yeah.

00:53:48 ►

Hopefully that answers your question. It was a long-winded answer.

00:53:51 ►

Anybody else have any questions?

00:53:55 ►

I was wondering

00:53:55 ►

if you could just describe one of your

00:53:57 ►

own personal experiences of

00:54:00 ►

taking a lot of cacao, just

00:54:01 ►

like subjectively, so we can understand

00:54:04 ►

what you feel like

00:54:06 ►

sure so taking uh what are my experiences uh i assume taking like good strong uh you know

00:54:14 ►

what i would call a medicinal dose of cacao um it sure is uplifting um you, you know, I have a, I have a friend that, uh, was on antidepressant medication,

00:54:26 ►

um, that, uh, tells me that she stopped taking her medication because she uses cacao. Um,

00:54:34 ►

she uses good, strong doses of cacao. If she gets into a funk, she’ll make a nice,

00:54:39 ►

strong brew of cacao or make some good little truffles with it or something like that. And,

00:54:43 ►

um, you know, eat those for a couple of days to try to get over the hump of it

00:54:48 ►

without having to be dependent on this kind of long-term medication.

00:54:54 ►

So it’s uplifting. It feels good.

00:54:56 ►

It feels good in your body too.

00:54:59 ►

And I was kind of saying earlier that it’s stimulating,

00:55:03 ►

but at the same time it’s grounding.

00:55:06 ►

When I ingest a good, strong dose of caffeine, I’m kind of up in the ether, kind of jittery,

00:55:12 ►

like, oh, I got to go do this other thing, and I got to be around and keep moving, and da-da-da-da.

00:55:17 ►

With the cacao, I feel a lot more centered.

00:55:19 ►

I feel a lot more focused and calm and ready to sit into my experience or my intention of

00:55:28 ►

whatever it was using the using that dose of cacao whether it was

00:55:32 ►

just to enjoy it just to feel the effects to help me wake up or what have you

00:55:39 ►

I still feel like it has a very strong therapeutic potential. Um, I don’t know if

00:55:46 ►

you guys are familiar with some of the work that’s being done with, with MDMA, um, and

00:55:52 ►

psychotherapy. But for me, um, I feel like a cow is, is almost like a great substitute for that.

00:55:58 ►

And a strong medicinal dose of cacao is a great substitute for that. Um, and also it makes me feel great after I take it. Um, I

00:56:06 ►

don’t get a big crash from it. Um, and, uh, it still has a, uh, an almost similar effect in that

00:56:13 ►

it’s, it’s stimulating, but at the same time, calming and heart centered and can really, uh,

00:56:18 ►

for me has opened a lot of windows into myself, into my physiology, into how, um, I appreciate,

00:56:23 ►

into myself, into my physiology, into how I appreciate the relationship between my mind and my body.

00:56:31 ►

How about cacao and morphine and Ativan?

00:56:36 ►

So combining cacao with morphine and Ativan.

00:56:39 ►

That’s interesting. I haven’t done that myself.

00:56:45 ►

Okay.

00:56:46 ►

How did that go?

00:56:50 ►

It makes you hyper.

00:56:53 ►

Interesting.

00:56:54 ►

I have not tried that one.

00:56:56 ►

I don’t know much about it.

00:56:57 ►

It sounds fun.

00:57:02 ►

It is?

00:57:03 ►

Okay.

00:57:13 ►

fun it is okay because my grandpa we get sometimes with a person they’re talking about for the cacao and something makes from medication for I don’t know that. Cacao mix.

00:57:27 ►

Addicted.

00:57:30 ►

And did you try the cacao?

00:57:33 ►

If the cacao is right, the yellow?

00:57:35 ►

The white one?

00:57:37 ►

With the pulp on the outside?

00:57:38 ►

Yeah.

00:57:38 ►

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that.

00:57:39 ►

Yes, it’s very delicious.

00:57:41 ►

It’s really good and sweet.

00:57:43 ►

Okay.

00:57:44 ►

So was the idea with combining these things that the cacao would enhance the effects of the other substances?

00:57:52 ►

Yeah.

00:57:52 ►

Okay, great.

00:57:54 ►

Well, it sounds like it’s being used everywhere for that, I guess.

00:58:00 ►

Definitely being used in Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean too, uh, quite a bit.

00:58:06 ►

The cacao you just fed us, is that of the, when you were talking about the different percentiles

00:58:11 ►

of types of cacao grown in different parts of the planet, what did you just feed us?

00:58:15 ►

One question. Great, great. So what was the, what were Peru. And yeah, I actually just got it. A friend of ours

00:58:31 ►

that came into camp with us at the burn brought in, you know, 20 kilos of cacao and like, you know,

00:58:36 ►

one pair of clothes for Burning Man. It was his first time. But he brought the important stuff,

00:58:41 ►

which was a briefcase full of cacao, suitcase full of cacao.

00:58:49 ►

And then my next thought kind of ties into what she was saying.

00:58:59 ►

Using the cacao as a container, like the optimal container to work with other plants.

00:59:05 ►

One, mushrooms, and then like I know, on the legal front in the country,

00:59:10 ►

at least they use other superfoods in tandem with the cacao and how that’s just like this super container for bringing those minerals

00:59:15 ►

and the different foods and the superfoods into your body.

00:59:18 ►

And the idea that in the, you know, just tying in some of the mystical aspect of this

00:59:26 ►

in the king’s chamber of the pyramid of Giza

00:59:28 ►

is this chocolate granite empty container

00:59:32 ►

and I don’t know

00:59:34 ►

there’s been some thinking around the idea

00:59:36 ►

that’s kind of speaking to this time

00:59:39 ►

where we grow into chocolate consciousness

00:59:41 ►

where we begin to exercise our ability

00:59:43 ►

to use this plant in a super

00:59:45 ►

sacred way and honor it and hold it in high reverence and regard or whatever so yeah i

00:59:51 ►

definitely agree um i you know my hope was that uh chocolate can change the world uh you know

00:59:57 ►

it’s it’s something it’s a it’s it’s pervasive um and uh it’s something that is in people’s lives

01:00:03 ►

and that they actually don’t

01:00:05 ►

know a lot about. Um, so it’s kind of a good, uh, window of opportunity, uh, to get people,

01:00:11 ►

um, to kind of bring more awareness into, uh, their indulgences or, um, you know, even the, uh,

01:00:19 ►

what cacao could potentially be used as an enhancer for or as a carrier for. You know, I mentioned John Ott’s talk on cacao as a drug enhancer called chocolate.

01:00:29 ►

And in it, he talks about some of the traditional uses of cacao used with mushrooms, you know, in the Americas and things like that.

01:00:38 ►

So, yeah, it definitely has a tradition of being used with any number of, uh, you know, psychedelic compounds as an

01:00:45 ►

enhancer and as a carrier, as an activator, um, and something that I feel, um, brings a more

01:00:51 ►

heart centered, uh, gravity to the experience. Um, so yeah. Yeah. So I’ve used, I’ve used Costa Rican, Panama, Peruvian, Ecuadorian, Balinese, Venezuelan, tons of different cacao.

01:01:12 ►

It’s really an incredible thing if you can find a company that does single source or single origin cacao.

01:01:21 ►

Even if it’s something that’s not a superfood or that’s not necessarily raw you can

01:01:28 ►

really like some of these companies sell a single origin pack where you can get eight different

01:01:32 ►

chocolate bars that are super high quality and that only that have kind of a standardized

01:01:37 ►

list of ingredients which is usually just vanilla and some kind of sweetener in the cacao and kind of sample the different origins

01:01:45 ►

and see how different each different origin of cacao can be completely separate in taste from the other ones.

01:01:55 ►

You know, there are, I wish I would have brought one of my color wheels.

01:01:58 ►

I have a couple of really nice color wheels for cacao,

01:02:01 ►

which have flavors all the way around the outside of them.

01:02:05 ►

nice color wheels for cacao which are have flavors all the way around the outside of the floral nutty astringent bitter all of these different flavors that cacao can contain so yeah there’s

01:02:12 ►

a lot of variability between the different origins and people have major preferences for one or the um i like my cacao with uh floral notes and like uh like a hazelnut uh together i think the two of

01:02:30 ►

those are good and that’s also because of the things that i like to combine my cacao with in

01:02:35 ►

the preparations that i use um which you know i use a lot of floral flavoring flavoring ingredients

01:02:42 ►

um and i also like a lot of like the hazelnut or pistachio and different things like that.

01:02:47 ►

And when the cacao has those flavors innate in it, they kind of enhance and synergize

01:02:51 ►

with the other flavoring components of it.

01:02:53 ►

So it’s kind of like an alchemy or an art form to take a cacao that has an essence of

01:02:58 ►

a particular variety and combine it with different flavoring components or even with

01:03:03 ►

different medicinal components.

01:03:05 ►

You know, and this is kind of like the alchemy of cacao, you could say, or the shamanism of cacao.

01:03:11 ►

Sure, so speaking to the relationship and my calling to be a proponent of cacao,

01:03:20 ►

Chris mentioned earlier that I have worked in drug policy reform for a few years and worked for an organization called MAPS that does some…

01:03:33 ►

Got the party bus going by.

01:03:37 ►

Yay, Burning Man.

01:03:40 ►

I worked for an organization for many years that was doing work with MDMA, an MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.

01:03:48 ►

It’s called MAPS. You can find them on the web at maps.org.

01:03:51 ►

Wonderful organization and really inspired by the work that I did there and the greater social change that can be brought about when people have a heart-opening experience

01:04:05 ►

and when people have a therapeutic window

01:04:08 ►

or when people have a set and setting that’s designed to help them facilitate

01:04:14 ►

a particular kind of experience to work through.

01:04:18 ►

And something that I feel like is a major problem in the world and society as a whole is people’s

01:04:26 ►

difficulties with their own emotional capabilities and their own emotional selves and their ideas of intimacy and their relationship between their indulgences,

01:04:48 ►

whether it’s with people or substances or food or different things like that.

01:04:52 ►

So for me, cacao is almost a tool that I hope can allow more intention and more awareness and more focus

01:05:02 ►

to be brought into people uh, people’s relationships

01:05:06 ►

with these different things. So, uh, yeah, that’s kind of my hope. And, uh, you know,

01:05:12 ►

I’m also have a heart of an activist and, uh, you know, getting behind, uh, the idea of, you know,

01:05:20 ►

stopping child slave labor, uh, is, is, is pretty strong. I mean, you can’t really argue against that.

01:05:27 ►

And, you know, the thing is that a lot of these big cacao companies

01:05:31 ►

are just pushing it under the rug and acting like nothing is happening.

01:05:35 ►

And I think it’s ludicrous that this exists,

01:05:39 ►

that these companies can be making billions upon billions of dollars

01:05:43 ►

in high profit margins.

01:05:45 ►

You know, cacao is a luxury food.

01:05:48 ►

You know, it’s something that, you know, is a vice for some people.

01:05:53 ►

It’s not something that is often, the sales of which are not often affected by economic tumultuousness.

01:06:08 ►

uh, tumultuousness. So, uh, these guys are, you know, even if the economy currently is in like a drastic, uh, bad state, uh, these guys are still having huge profit margins and they’re not putting

01:06:14 ►

money behind making sure that there aren’t children being abducted, sold and forced into

01:06:19 ►

child slave labor, uh, for the products that they sell, you know, and they’re, they’re marketing

01:06:24 ►

their products as good and wholesome.

01:06:26 ►

Sometimes a lot of these companies are buying up organic companies,

01:06:30 ►

fair trade companies even,

01:06:32 ►

and changing the business models to reflect their profit margins.

01:06:37 ►

And I think it’s just terrible.

01:06:40 ►

I think it’s just completely terrible.

01:06:41 ►

And it’s something that I want to bring awareness to and focus on

01:06:45 ►

and also empower people to actually make a change because it’s something that you can do very easily.

01:06:51 ►

It’s very easy to look at the cacao on the shelf.

01:06:54 ►

Is it fair trade? Yes.

01:06:56 ►

Okay, that’s good. That’s great cacao.

01:06:58 ►

I can vote with my dollar and buy this cacao. It’s delicious.

01:07:01 ►

Or is it made in Africa?

01:07:02 ►

Does it say it’s child slave labor-free?

01:07:04 ►

If it’s not, put it back on the shelf.

01:07:07 ►

You know, the legislative changes haven’t done anything.

01:07:12 ►

And I don’t know if they will.

01:07:13 ►

And I’m encouraging people to vote with their dollar to try to influence change in this respect.

01:07:19 ►

So, yeah, that’s my journey.

01:07:22 ►

Yeah, that’s my journey.

01:07:29 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:07:33 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:07:38 ►

When Brian was talking just now about his work with MAPS, I remembered that, if I’m not wrong,

01:07:41 ►

I think he was the moderator of that MAPS conference in Colorado a couple of years ago that was titled the Mile High Summit.

01:07:50 ►

Now, while I can’t point to a direct link here, of course, I believe that it should be noted that this year, Colorado became one of the first two states in the U.S. to legalize cannabis.

01:08:07 ►

lives cannabis. And my guess is that the conference that MAPS and Brian helped organize at least had a little something to do with the ongoing and very positive news coverage about cannabis in that

01:08:12 ►

state. And I don’t know about you, but some of the information that we just now heard about cacao

01:08:19 ►

was actually big news to me. Hopefully you’ve also had some new vistas open up to you.

01:08:26 ►

I sure know that I have.

01:08:28 ►

And hopefully we’ll have a good flow of comments

01:08:31 ►

to the program notes for this talk

01:08:33 ►

and can learn about other aspects of cacao

01:08:36 ►

that Brian didn’t have time to get into just now.

01:08:39 ►

And I’ll also post a link to the arrowid.org section

01:08:43 ►

dealing with this wonderful plant so that you can follow up with some in-depth and more specific information about cacao that you may be searching for.

01:09:05 ►

work that they are doing to help people who are still in dire distress as a result of the superstorm Sandy, which devastated parts of the U.S., the Northeast in particular, last month.

01:09:12 ►

As you know, if you’ve been keeping up with the news from that area, there’s still a very large

01:09:18 ►

number of people who have not yet been able to return to even a semblance of normality.

01:09:23 ►

This is a disaster that’s going to take a long time to recover from,

01:09:27 ►

but unless you dig deeply into the news,

01:09:30 ►

well, you aren’t going to find out much about it.

01:09:32 ►

So what I’m going to play for you right now is a brief report

01:09:36 ►

that I came across on the New York Daily News channel on YouTube,

01:09:41 ►

and it was just posted a couple days ago on November 30th,

01:09:44 ►

and so it’s fairly recent news.

01:09:48 ►

Many who believe the Occupy Wall Street movement was all but dead after its dramatic removal from

01:09:52 ►

Zuccotti Park last fall may have been surprised to see the group popping up once again in the

01:09:57 ►

days after Hurricane Sandy. But this time, Occupy wasn’t organizing protests. They were calling on

01:10:02 ►

their large network to come to the aid of those hit hardest by the storm.

01:10:06 ►

Operations in Jacoby started the Wednesday after the storm.

01:10:10 ►

I came in that Friday, so within the first week.

01:10:15 ►

Brett Goldberg joined Occupy last fall and considers himself to be a full-time activist.

01:10:20 ►

He started working with Occupy Sandy in the aftermath of the storm,

01:10:24 ►

helping to coordinate volunteers at the group’s hub in Brooklyn’s St. Jacoby Church.

01:10:28 ►

So I came in, started fielding questions and inquiries that were coming in on Twitter and Facebook.

01:10:34 ►

And then within a few days, because by answering all those questions and things,

01:10:39 ►

I started getting a big picture idea of what was going on.

01:10:44 ►

I started doing site coordination, and that’s primarily what I’ve been doing since.

01:10:49 ►

For longtime Occupy supporters like Jessica Roth, the shift from organizing in the park

01:10:53 ►

to community aid was a natural extension of the movement’s original mission.

01:10:58 ►

When we were down in the park those first couple of months, it really was a community

01:11:02 ►

that was really communal and really supportive

01:11:06 ►

of itself and of each other and of people coming in.

01:11:09 ►

And there was feeding going on, and there was care going on, and there was medical attention,

01:11:13 ►

and there were clothing, and there were tents, and there were sleeping bags, and people’s

01:11:16 ►

needs were provided for in that park, whether you had the means to bring it yourself or

01:11:19 ►

not.

01:11:20 ►

And that’s what we’re doing out here, too.

01:11:21 ►

So I don’t really think it’s that different.

01:11:24 ►

What Occupy Sandy is doing is it’s making a lot of the Occupy organizing very tangible for people.

01:11:31 ►

Jill Dowling was not a regular Occupy participant,

01:11:34 ►

but reconnected with the group in the days after Sandy while looking for a way to help.

01:11:38 ►

I did go out to some of the Occupy Wall Street protests

01:11:42 ►

on days when there were larger groups of people who were out out there like there were teachers and unions out one day and that was a really motivating March

01:11:49 ►

to be a part of so I’d say I’m

01:11:52 ►

friends with Occupy Wall Street, but

01:11:55 ►

and I try and keep

01:11:58 ►

Aware of what’s going on and so and I do that mainly through Facebook or through my friends who are involved

01:12:05 ►

It is definitely bringing in people who never really connected with Occupy before,

01:12:12 ►

but now it’s starting to click for them in a different way.

01:12:17 ►

And we’re working with a lot of communities that we were never really able to reach with the park.

01:12:24 ►

Being in the financial district was limiting in a lot of communities that we were never really able to reach with the park, being in the financial district, was limiting in a lot of ways.

01:12:28 ►

But now we’re in there actually working in the communities.

01:12:33 ►

Many of the donations collected at St. Jacoby Church are taken to the Rockaways, where residents are still struggling weeks after the storm.

01:12:40 ►

Volunteers like Chris Devlin, who are helping with recovery efforts on the ground, may not have been affiliated with Occupy before Sandy,

01:12:46 ►

but have come to be sympathetic to the political aspects of the movement.

01:12:50 ►

I mean, I was a little wary, just as I am generally, of ideology

01:12:55 ►

and sort of, you know, moving in political directions.

01:12:59 ►

I understand a lot of the positions that they take, and I get it,

01:13:01 ►

and I know that there ultimately is going to be some agendas that are going to have to be hashed out. To me it was immediate and it

01:13:07 ►

was like kind of, you know, it was action.

01:13:12 ►

Chris has even taken on an organizing role and has started attending Occupy meetings.

01:13:16 ►

So far I’ve been like really impressed and have met amazing people and have been really

01:13:22 ►

glad to work with everybody from Occupy.

01:13:25 ►

As far as the next operation, like I said before, ideology is not really my big thing,

01:13:31 ►

so I wouldn’t be like, yes, I will support everything that this group does, but I’m an

01:13:36 ►

ally, so that’s what it is, I guess.

01:13:39 ►

People come in as volunteers and very quickly become organizers. And then the next step as we continue to push this politically

01:13:47 ►

is to take volunteers into organizers and then make them activists.

01:13:54 ►

But there have been a lot of people that were around in the fall and in the spring

01:13:59 ►

who kind of dipped out in the summer or even earlier that have now started to pop back up

01:14:05 ►

because it’s the work that everyone has always wanted to do. For committed activists, Occupy

01:14:10 ►

Sandy isn’t just about the relief effort. They see this as an opportunity to draw attention to

01:14:14 ►

the same message they’ve been delivering since their days at Zuccotti. You know, we’re in this

01:14:19 ►

situation because of what’s happening with the climate and all of us in it. And this is an exacerbated situation of it,

01:14:26 ►

but it’s ongoing.

01:14:28 ►

You know, this is literally in our backyards right here,

01:14:30 ►

and in some people’s, it’s actually their front yard

01:14:32 ►

and it’s their home.

01:14:33 ►

So it’s really the time now is to figure out

01:14:35 ►

how can we rebuild the community

01:14:36 ►

in a way that gives them the resources that they need

01:14:39 ►

to prepare for the changing, you know,

01:14:42 ►

global climate situation that we’re in,

01:14:44 ►

as well as working against making it any worse.

01:14:47 ►

Something hit New York, it feels very real, it feels very tangible,

01:14:51 ►

and people feel like there is a way that they can contribute

01:14:54 ►

without just donating a dollar to the Red Cross when they go to the ATM.

01:14:59 ►

And it’s a unique opportunity, much like Zuccotti Park, Liberty Square was, where it’s a radicalizing moment,

01:15:08 ►

where our job, while we’re doing this relief and recovery work, is also to show people how this situation is inherently political.

01:15:18 ►

Whether or not community groups agree with Occupy’s political agenda, they certainly welcome the help.

01:15:23 ►

agree with Occupy’s political agenda, they certainly welcome the help. My wife commented the other day that I didn’t know what to think of Occupy until they started

01:15:29 ►

actually doing what they did because people have their own impressions of different things.

01:15:35 ►

But since the storm, we have gotten nothing but tremendous support from Occupy. They have been there. They’re here every day. Every single day

01:15:45 ►

they’re here with supplies, food, and moral support. And they even have a network set up

01:15:52 ►

where, you know, we’re in contact with a lot of other people who are helping through

01:15:56 ►

Occupy. So they’ve been a tremendous help to us. Sammy O’Dell, who has run the Action Center in

01:16:01 ►

the Rockaways for the last 12 years, says Occupy Sandy’s volunteers have made up a significant percentage of the outside help they’ve received since the storm.

01:16:09 ►

As you can see from the lines outside, there’s a huge need.

01:16:13 ►

Some of the people have gotten power and electricity back,

01:16:18 ►

but we still have a lot of people who still don’t have heat.

01:16:27 ►

a lot of people who still don’t have heat and NYCHA is working on that project and we’ve been told that the city is doing everything to have these people rehabilitated. Most of

01:16:32 ►

them can’t return back to their apartments because their apartments have molding and

01:16:38 ►

because most of the first floors in each of these buildings was flooded, including here. So this is work in progress, and it’s going to take a long time.

01:16:49 ►

You know, we’re kind of saying we’re here until we’re not needed anymore,

01:16:52 ►

but what exactly that means we don’t know yet

01:16:55 ►

because the relief effort will hopefully not be needed after the next couple weeks.

01:17:04 ►

But recovery and rebuilding is going to go on for a very long time,

01:17:08 ►

and our role in that will change and evolve.

01:17:11 ►

We may not necessarily be doing the construction work,

01:17:14 ►

but we’ll still be engaging with the communities and doing community building

01:17:20 ►

and helping community empowerment and community connections.

01:17:26 ►

That’s the role that I hope we’ll still continue to play.

01:17:34 ►

And while I realize that helping out in a disaster isn’t for everybody,

01:17:39 ►

not to mention the fact that unless you live close to the site of some of these problems,

01:17:44 ►

there really are limits to what you can do to help.

01:17:47 ►

But nevertheless, the Occupy movement isn’t just about one issue or one cause or even one part of the world.

01:17:55 ►

It’s a truly global shift in consciousness that I think has actually been going on for a number of years now, but which is only now becoming more visible since

01:18:05 ►

the events of Occupy Wall Street, etc. in 2011 and 2012.

01:18:11 ►

All of that’s really led to the awareness that we aren’t the only ones who have been

01:18:16 ►

thinking that, well, things have to change and change soon if our species hopes to prosper

01:18:23 ►

seven generations from now.

01:18:26 ►

And as an example of something that people are doing to support the Occupy movement,

01:18:31 ►

even if they live in a very remote area,

01:18:34 ►

it comes from two of our fellow salonners who are, well,

01:18:37 ►

they’re about as far removed physically from Wall Street as I can imagine.

01:18:42 ►

And here’s the last part of an email I received from them the other

01:18:45 ►

day. On another note, I have been enjoying the Occupy Wall Street parts of the podcast.

01:18:52 ►

They are quite inspiring. I am emailing from the northern rivers of New South Wales,

01:18:58 ►

where I live on a property with my partner Sarah. We are doing, or trying to do, the whole self-sufficiency thing, basically

01:19:07 ►

trying not to contribute to this destructive system we’ve been born into. As well as learning

01:19:13 ►

about nutrition and natural medicine slash herbs, we’re also a songwriting duo called The Chooks.

01:19:20 ►

That’s C-H-O-O-K-S. I think I got that right. We write protest songs, I guess you could

01:19:26 ►

say. Social commentary. And the Occupy Movement inspired the song I’ve attached to this email.

01:19:34 ►

This song is given free to the movement to download and share. We would be honored if you

01:19:38 ►

thought it appropriate to play on your podcast. Please also feel free to pass it on to anyone you think would appreciate it.

01:19:45 ►

Hope you enjoy it.

01:19:46 ►

Peace, Felice.

01:19:48 ►

Well, Felice and Sarah,

01:19:50 ►

I truly did enjoy your music

01:19:52 ►

and I hope that the rest of our fellow salonners

01:19:55 ►

do as well.

01:19:56 ►

In addition to posting a download link to it

01:19:59 ►

in the program notes for this podcast,

01:20:01 ►

I’m also going to play it for us all right now.

01:20:04 ►

So, this is Lorenzo signing

01:20:06 ►

off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends.

01:20:19 ►

High priests of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve. Their corruption has cost us the earth.

01:20:29 ►

But they don’t want us all to think.

01:20:32 ►

They just want us all to drink coke.

01:20:38 ►

Just go to work, shut up and buy.

01:20:42 ►

work shut up and by And the media

01:20:50 ►

is a corporate machine

01:20:52 ►

Manufacturing this climate

01:20:56 ►

of fear

01:20:57 ►

But don’t you worry

01:20:59 ►

you’ll be safe if you give

01:21:02 ►

up all your freedoms

01:21:04 ►

Well every word has been a lie

01:21:12 ►

Occupied

01:21:14 ►

Yeah

01:21:18 ►

Well now they’re changing legislation again

01:21:26 ►

To make it easy for a handful of men

01:21:31 ►

To trash the commons for a profit

01:21:34 ►

Leaving us a wasteland

01:21:38 ►

But there’s a better way of life

01:21:46 ►

Occupy

01:21:48 ►

Occupy

01:21:52 ►

Finally the people have worked out

01:22:00 ►

Just what’s going on

01:22:02 ►

There’s no time to waste, we can stop this

01:22:07 ►

We need to say war is terror and greed is greed

01:22:12 ►

It’s clear the ends do not justify the means When politicians serve the power elite

01:22:31 ►

Life gets harder for folk on the street

01:22:36 ►

Our public assets privatised at 1%

01:22:41 ►

Hike up the prices We are the other 99

01:22:49 ►

Occupy

01:22:53 ►

Occupy

01:22:58 ►

Well now the empire is making its move

01:23:05 ►

Illegal conduct, pepper spray and abuse

01:23:10 ►

But they won’t show it on the news

01:23:14 ►

It’s a peaceful revolution

01:23:16 ►

This is a call to occupy

01:23:23 ►

The public space is stolen by

01:23:30 ►

Seed and greed of those on high

01:23:35 ►

Occupy

01:23:39 ►

Occupy

01:23:44 ►

Occupy Occupy

01:23:47 ►

Occupy

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

334 - The Alchemy of Cacao

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Program Notes

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