What if ayahuasca made you stop podcasting?

An anti-woke podcast abruptly announces its end, and in its final episode, a host offers its listeners some surprising news. She had taken ayahuasca, a powerful psychedelic, and it had contributed to her decision to step away. The internet, itself, now looked different. Huh? A conversation with former podcast host Sarah Haider. Support Search Engine at search engine.show https://www.searchengine.show

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

  Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. No question too big, no question too small. Some weeks, we bring you an investigation. Other times, we have a question for someone who might offer answers in conversation, personal answers based on their own lives. This week, we're going to meet someone who just had a strange experience that changed her mind in ways that she's still processing. That story after these ads.

• 0:27PJ Vogt?

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• 3:04PJ Vogt?

  People sometimes ask me which podcasts I listen to. And my answer is always, not many. I sample here and there, but I only devotedly listen to a few. And they are embarrassingly very popular ones. Every once in a while, though, I stray from my normal imaginary friends and dip into unfamiliar waters. And a month ago, I ended up in what were for me quite strange waters. A friend who delights in texting me unusual things texted me a podcast link. Had I heard this one? I had not. But once I heard it, it got into my head the way only some things do. The podcast was called A Special Place in Hell.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Welcome to A Special Place in Hell, the podcast where an aging Gen X author and a self-hating millennial activist come together to thoroughly and conclusively solve our culture war problems with our combined wit, wisdom, and, most importantly, lived experiences. I am the aging Gen X author, Megan Downe, and with me is the self-hating millennial, Sarah Haider. Hi, Sarah.

• 4:09PJ Vogt?

  A conversation show, basically an anti-woke podcast, in which the two hosts, week by week, humorously catalogued their disagreements with the online left. Sarah and Megan had been running the show for two years. And from the outside, it seemed to be working. They were finding an audience, they were publishing regularly. Things were going well, up until this episode my friend had sent me. The episode which abruptly announced the show's end. Most podcasts end quietly. The very special ones can end in indecipherable drama. This podcast had ended in a way I had never heard of a podcast ending before. One of the hosts, a former Muslim turned atheist activist, who seemed to love getting into scraps online.

• 4:52PJ Vogt?

  She had announced that she had tried ayahuasca. Ayahuasca, an extremely potent psychedelic. And now, the podcast wasn't for her anymore. The topics she'd once so enjoyed being outraged by, she now found them less interesting. What? There are so many people in my life who I've watched just get sucked into the internet, across the political gradient, who've gotten more strident, or more strange, more certain, more cortisolled out, who spend their days screaming at strangers. I worry about them. I wonder what it would take to get them to reconsider at all. I've never found an answer.

• 5:35PJ Vogt?

  Could it be ayahuasca? A psychedelic that causes multi-hour hallucinations and famously makes its users vomit? Probably unlikely, but I couldn't help but wonder. Can you introduce yourself? Just say your name and what you do.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  My name is Sarah Haider. I am a former activist, turned podcaster, turned former podcaster.

• 6:01PJ Vogt?

  And can you talk to me a little bit about your path into activism? Like, what made you become an activist?

• 6:07Speaker 02

  I was born a Muslim, and I was raised a Muslim, I should say, in the United States for the most part, but I was born in Pakistan. And I decided that religion was not for me. It stopped making sense in a lot of important ways. It's not a terribly interesting deconversion story, if you're familiar with that at all. But there's a whole genre of people leaving religion for, you know, kind of standard reasons. Like, I was reading the Quran, and this such-and-such thing didn't make sense, or there was a contradiction there. A similar set of things happened to me. And I left the religion when I was a teenager.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  I was fairly lucky in that my parents are liberal for Muslims, which is to say they're pretty conservative as far as, like, what Western Christians understand to be the spectrum of religiosity. But... Relative to other Muslims, I think they were fairly liberal. So I was allowed to leave unmolested, save for some very interesting conversations with my parents, some of them getting to be quite heavy at times, and some tears from my mom here and there. But as I grew a little bit older, I started to meet other ex-Muslims.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  I realized how my experience was actually different than what many other Muslims, even in America, experienced when they started questioning religion or leaving religion. And so I found myself in this place where I felt like, OK, I can really do something here. I can help a group of people whose struggles I understand intimately, but I am lucky enough not to face them with the same kind of severity as they do.

• 7:58PJ Vogt?

  In 2013, Sarah co-founded an organization called Ex-Muslims of North America. The goal was to provide social support for people leaving the faith and to raise awareness about international laws that criminalize blasphemy. These laws can include the death penalty. Actual death penalty verdicts are rare, but they do happen. In 2023, two men were executed in Iran for running a Telegram group called Critique of Superstition and Religion. And did you, you described how your family was pretty OK, like relatively speaking, with you turning away from the faith. When you decided to poke your head up in this bigger way, did you catch more flak either from your family or from strangers or from like the larger community?

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was a hurricane. It completely tore apart aspects, like some parts of my family, extended family, they just don't talk to me much anymore. They don't want anything to do with me. They don't even want anything to do with my parents because they tolerate me. It caused an enormous amount of, I think, stress for everybody because they had to, you know, individually make that choice of whether or not they wanted to associate with me now that I have done this terrible thing and I'm, you know, speaking up very openly and it's bringing a lot of like shame and dishonor to My family and then my community, Muslim

• 9:27Speaker 02

  community that I used to be in touch with when I was religious. They, you know, don't want anything to do with me. I understand that. I lost many Muslim friends. I think the majority of them, I lost them. And it was kind of like, they just sort of ghosted me. You know, it wasn't like a big argument. Like, it was just suddenly I found myself blocked on Facebook back when that used to be a thing.

• 9:48PJ Vogt?

  Sarah says her life changed in other ways. For the first time, she had to think about her safety. She became a target for religious extremists. She says there were some countries she could no longer travel to. But her activism, she said, it also changed her life for the better. She met new people. She sat for interviews. As she began a life as a public thinker, one role model she found herself admiring was the late writer Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens, a real bomb thrower, someone who changed his mind frequently, thought out loud, picked fights with gleeful abandon. Sarah said it wasn't that she agreed with all of his positions, but that she liked the way he conducted himself. Like Hitchens, Sarah was an atheist who, over time, found herself drifting further and further from the ideological left.

• 10:33PJ Vogt?

  Sarah, in her new life, found herself frequently appearing on podcasts. And it was on one of those podcasts where she would meet her future co-host, Megan Downe.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Megan invited me on to her podcast, The Unspeakable, which she had been hosting for several years. And it's an interview-style podcast where she just invites people she finds interesting or, you know, thinkers who are in the heterodox world. And she invited me on to talk about a few things. And it was an interesting conversation. I had a good time with her. I felt like it was easy to talk to her. She's a great interviewer. So it was, the interview went along very smoothly. And we found that we were both very interested in a few topics, like culture-worthy topics. And we had a similar perspective on them as well, but we were coming at them from very different starting points. You know, Megan has lived a very different life than I have.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  She continues to live a very different life than I do. So our focuses, even in the issues that we shared political opinions on, our focuses tended to be very different. So it was It was a unique opportunity to talk to somebody like that. But I didn't know that that would lead to a podcast.

• 11:44PJ Vogt?

  In June 2022, they published their first episode of A Special Place in Hell. It's funny, actually, listening to it, as I found myself doing this month, working backwards from its ending. The topics are pretty bread and butter anti-woke material. They're annoyed by DEI programs. They don't think trans kids should be getting surgeries.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  What about the the gender thing? Because a lot of these tech guys are-

• 12:07Speaker 02

  Gender stuff is like a cult, whatever. The cult hacking, mental hacking- I think of Greta Thunberg. I think of the environmental activists throwing shit on art, you know? And I'm disgusted by them. And I think of- Della was a DEI candidate. She didn't deserve to be there. Nobody wanted her to be there. She got in because the Democrats and the left- Denying sex differences is really bizarre.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Why, why is it so important to deny this? Like, why?

• 12:31PJ Vogt?

  A lot of that stuff. But what actually I found surprising about the show was something else. Sarah is married and a mom. She's in her early 30s. Her co-host, Megan, is unmarried, doesn't have kids. She's a Gen Xer in her 50s. As women, they've made different choices. And they talk about those choices sometimes in unguarded ways. Like, when Sarah's talking about balancing being a professionally ambitious mother, she describes reading the book Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg's book, where Sandberg talks about being a corporate executive at Facebook and the mom of two kids.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  She starts with a story about how she's pregnant, like crazy pregnant, and she's swollen and she's gained all this weight and she has to make it to this meeting because the CFO quit or something and now she has to raise-

• 13:14PJ Vogt?

  Sarah describes this moment in the book where the very pregnant executive had to run across a parking lot to a meeting.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  And I'm thinking, this, I don't want this. You know, like, if this is success, um, I don't, I, you know, I'm, I feel like my life is precious and my, my days are important and how I live them is important and I don't want to live that, that way. And if that means-

• 13:35PJ Vogt?

  They end up having this conversation about kids, motherhood, jobs, and what women end up having to sacrifice. There's moments like this, sandwiched between all the talk about how progressives online are being unreasonable, or discussion of whoever's behavior has gone viral that week. So it's funny, it's like you're making a culture show. You're making a culture show where you're like, we're gonna take some bit of nonsense from the internet, but then we're going to use it to talk about the things we care about, which are questions about how to live.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And I think that's the best of what the culture work can give you. It can lead to some really interesting discussions, but those are usually deeper down into the comments or replies somewhere or threads of threads, quote tweets of quote tweets, and then somebody writes an article and then there's more discussion based on that. So I think there is something interesting there. It's just hard to find unless you're deeply online like we are.

• 14:27PJ Vogt?

  I see. Okay, so you're making a show. It sounds like in the beginning, it's pretty enjoyable.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  It was, yeah. Most of the time it was enjoyable.

• 14:37PJ Vogt?

  And so also, I'm just curious, like, do you feel like, do you feel any connection between, like, your choice to leave your religion? Do you feel like it affected your political views in ways that ended up infusing what you ended up talking about on the podcast?

• 14:50Speaker 02

  Definitely. Well, it was, it was less of leaving the religion, which generally just left me with a sense of skepticism of what I know and feeling very passionate about open discourse, civil liberties, freedom of speech and thought issues in general, because that was, I often thought about, you know, when I was young, what would have happened if I had just been raised in Pakistan? What if my parents had never left and come to the United States? Would I have stayed religious for, you know, maybe forever? Maybe I would have never really left. Maybe I wouldn't have had the exposure to contradictory, like, viewpoints and perspectives.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  And maybe it might have been difficult for me to question, and I might have not come to those conclusions at the age that I did. And so I value what we have here. And I think of it from the perspective of an immigrant, which is that I, until I got my citizenship, which was kind of late in the game for me, I had always thought about the fact that I could be leaving, that I, that this might have not have been my permanent home. So I held all these things that we have in the United States, the Western more broadly, but I think in particular here, and I just cherish them so much and I, I, you know, hold them as like these precious things that can be taken away from me at any moment. I just haven't shed that sense.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  And I think that that's sort of the broad understanding, that kind of anxiety that fuels the things that I tend to focus on now.

• 16:27PJ Vogt?

  What do you mean?

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Like, I mean, it's cliche to talk about, but like cancel culture in general, you know, that kind of intolerance towards upsetting viewpoints. Censorship on the internet, even for good reasons. I don't know how much the left cares as much about. I think they have a different perception on freedom of speech than they used to, on censorship than they used to. So that led to a rift between me and other people I knew around me and then the culture at large.

• 16:58PJ Vogt?

  So just to notice a pattern here. If Sarah's in a group and the group is following rules that don't make sense to her, she'll question the rules and then often she'll leave the group, even if there's a cost. Most people don't do this, but Sarah does. She left her religion, which cost her her community, even some of her family. Then she left the left and her friends there, in part because she thought liberals had become too hostile to ideas they didn't agree with and to the people who held them. And the way we were talking, she just left her heterodox podcast. And even while she was still hosting that podcast, she would manage sometimes to run afoul of her own audience. Not because of her politics, actually, but because she would express opinions about

• 17:39PJ Vogt?

  how she thought people should live their actual lives, like personal stuff.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  Anytime we found ourselves getting too close to a prescriptive discussion, and that was often something that I fell into. I can't help it, I'm an activist. So I always seek, okay, here's this problem that we're having. What's the solution? Here's the solution. So people should do X. And I would voice it. I would voice how I felt about it and that would lead to trouble.

• 18:07PJ Vogt?

  Was there an episode that you published that you regretted afterwards? Or something you said in a podcast episode that you regretted afterwards?

• 18:14Speaker 02

  I think there was a discussion on divorce that I regretted like for such reasons, for these reasons that we've been discussing. I think the lead off to our discussion in that episode might have been this piece that was published by British Fetish about her experience growing up in a divorced home, like as a, I think it was she and her brother that were growing up as children in a divorced family. And she talked about how they had no attention from either of their parents who were very involved in their new lives that they were, they were trying to build. I think she described herself as like kind of a feral child, but just that she, they

• 18:55Speaker 02

  were just off on their own without a lot of parental supervision and that led her into a lot of trouble, um, you know, drugs, not paying attention much to school, that kind of thing. And then there were, you know, some other people agreeing with her, talking about their stories in a similar environment. And so that led to a broader discussion of divorce and our conception of marriage. And that whole saying stay together for the kids that has been, for very good reasons, not something that we, that we recommend so much anymore and we push back on. But our kind of spicy little take was maybe there is like a logic to it that is pretty important because these are young people.

• 19:37PJ Vogt?

  So you were like, maybe people should sometimes stay together for the kids. And people were very upset.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is what I was saying. That is what I was saying. And I, I recognized as I was saying it, that there are going to be a lot of people very mad at me. And I, I, I get it. I get why they're mad. Because here's a stranger who knows nothing about their particular circumstances. I can't possibly know the details, the nuances of their challenges and why they made the particular decision that they made. And yet I am giving this kind of a broad prescriptive opinion.

• 20:18PJ Vogt?

  This thing that Sarah and I both do professionally, speaking into a microphone regularly, then putting it out into the world, it's risky. You can hurt people's feelings. You can set off chain reactions you do not intend. The thing that I make is scripted, it's edited. We have time to weigh what we're saying to protect our guests, to protect me. And still, I've stepped in it. Conversation shows are a much more high-wire act. They usually work by being provocative, but they have to be strategic in their provocations. Even if you're a bomb-throwing, anti-woke provocateur, yeah, you might not care what blue sky or New York podcast critics think about your show, but everyone has an audience. And that audience lives in their

• 21:01PJ Vogt?

  head in ways that are quite powerful. You might feel like you have no choice but to please them, or to fight them, or to somehow make them see you or the world differently than they currently do. Sarah had already been ostracized from two different worlds. She'd held beliefs that made her an apostate, cut her off from family members, and she'd been okay. But now, she found that the podcast feedback was affecting her in ways she wasn't used to.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  It's hard not to have that feeling of frustration at being misunderstood, but it's just, it feels so personal, because I'm talking about personal things. I'm making recommendations about how people should live their lives, their real life, not their, not, I'm not making a political comment, I'm making a very personal comment. And it understandably leads to very personal exchanges afterwards. And when I get blowback, it tends to be very personal, too. And I think partially because it was a conversation that I was having. It was my voice. We released videos of it, so there was videos of me out there, too. It felt like it was a lot more of a, like, a personal capture of who I actually am that

• 22:09Speaker 02

  they were reacting to. And I think that might have been why it was a little bit harder to shake off.

• 22:14PJ Vogt?

  At what point does "Iowa" come to your radar? Like, what, what is the first time you even hear that as a word?

• 22:23Speaker 02

  I'm not one of those people who does drugs recreationally very much. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Not

• 22:29PJ Vogt?

  Not that you're judging.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  Not that I'm judging, not that I'm saying you shouldn't do it if you want to. But it should never really appeal to me too much.

• 22:37PJ Vogt?

  Can I actually ask Vol up, like, when you say you don't do drugs, like, do you drink cannabis?

• 22:42Speaker 02

  I drink socially. There were times in my life where I drank a little bit more when I was my like early twenties and going out a lot. I usually don't do marijuana. It has this like paradoxical like reaction with me. It makes me more nauseous rather than less nauseous. So it's just not that pleasant of an experience. I tried magic mushrooms in college, but it was a very small amount and it didn't affect me very much. That's the totality of my drug experience.

• 23:12PJ Vogt?

  That's fascinating because you went to the deep end.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:16PJ Vogt?

  As far as psychedelics go. So what, just walk me up to that. Like, what, like, do you even recall like the first time somebody was like, there's a drug called ayahuasca? Or a medicine or a plant called ayahuasca?

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. Yeah, I remember. There were conversations happening mostly on Twitter, on some other places as well. On my like private chats with people. But there were some conversations happening about specifically ayahuasca is something that could one-shot people. Have you ever heard of this phrase?

• 23:43PJ Vogt?

  One-shot? I've been familiar with it in video games. Like in video games, if you one-shot somebody, it's like you, you shoot them once and you kill them.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:50PJ Vogt?

  You've one-shot them.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  That is what it's referring to. So ayahuasca evidently is so powerful, such a strong drug that you can one-shot yourself. You can take it once and then lose the mind that you had previously entirely. Or you can lose your ambition for whatever it is, whatever passion project that you pursued up until this point. You could decide to leave your life behind and go braid hair in Peru.

• 24:17PJ Vogt?

  There was a thing that I saw happening on Twitter. I did a podcast a few years ago that was all about crypto. And so my Twitter feed is a lot of like crypto people still. And there was a thing that was happening often enough that I noticed it, which is that I'd see a massively retweeted tweet from somebody where they would, they'd be like a founder of a web three company. And they would say, I went and took ayahuasca and I'm quitting. It was like, I was like, that's very funny. I think people were retweeting it because it was very funny because obviously. People who found companies feel like they're engaging in something deeply meaningful, but a lot of people feel like crypto is not deeply meaningful. And so watching these people go to have a psychedelic drug and then be like, I'm never doing this again.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:59PJ Vogt?

  Was like funny to them. But so you were seeing similar stuff. It sounds like, like your exposure to it is people on the internet saying, there's a psychedelic, you can take it and it could drastically reorient like you and what you want and what you think and what you believe.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was seeing that discourse. I was seeing many people react to others around them having taken it and being alarmed by the extent of the changes they began to make in their life. So to me, it was, it's strange because I was seeing a lot of evidence that this is possibly too dangerous of a thing to try. And I'm thinking, okay, then maybe it's worth doing.

• 25:46PJ Vogt?

  If this all sounds still a little like a strange choice, I should say that part of the appeal for some people of psychedelics is that they promise to suppress your ego. Thoughts you may have that you've repressed because you tell yourself, you're not the kind of person to think those thoughts might bubble up. For Sarah, who'd wandered and searched, leaving places that told her what she wasn't supposed to think or say, maybe ayahuasca seemed like a way to overcome the last and most powerful censor, her own mind. After a short break, Sarah Haider goes on a trip.

• 26:32PJ Vogt?

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• 28:48PJ Vogt?

  Before we return to our story, a little bit about ayahuasca for people who are less familiar with it.

• 28:55PJ Vogt?

  It's a psychedelic that originates in South America. Ayahuasca is a brew made by combining a couple of different plants. Once consumed, it has an unbelievably strong hallucinatory effect. Ayahuasca is used as a sacrament, consumed by followers of some religions. The word itself, ayahuasca, translates to something close to spirit rope, because some believe that it allows your soul to leave your body and visit a realm you'd only otherwise travel to after death. In the past few years, quietly, it's become more popular in some communities in North America. People will go away for a ceremony some weekend where they drink ayahuasca and then sometimes come back very different. Some number of people who take a psychedelic drug will have mental breaks, psychosis.

• 29:40PJ Vogt?

  But the difference people are looking for isn't that. It's usually some kind of profound insight, the kind of spiritual vision that, in antiquity, you would climb a mountain for. Anyway, that's what I knew about ayahuasca. I asked Sarah how she found a ceremony to attend in the United States, where it's illegal in most contexts.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  So I'm gonna try to just anonymize it to a reasonable degree. But it was through a friend of a friend I found a connection to a ceremony. Now, you can find ceremonies online. There's these retreat centers that are primarily housed in Peru.

• 30:15PJ Vogt?

  It's legal in Peru.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  It's legal in Peru. It's legal in, I think, a few other places, under certain circumstances. So you can go and have like a 10-day retreat in Peru, or a seven-day retreat. You purchase a ticket and you go there and go to the middle of the jungle, I presume, with a bunch of strangers. I found that concept to be very alarming. I was always just afraid that I would end up in the hospital somehow. And then now I'm in a Peruvian hospital with no way to contact my family or limited ways of contacting my family. So that was kind of a nightmare scenario that I did not want to live in this life. So I asked around if anybody had a connection. And it just so happened that somebody brought it up,

• 30:59Speaker 02

  without me bringing it up first, at a dinner party. She and I were talking about autism. I was talking about how I think I'm a little bit on the spectrum and she said she's definitely on the spectrum and she is. And she said that she recently did ayahuasca, went to retreat and it helped her connect with others, like normies, helped her connect with normies better. And I thought that was really interesting and that opened up a new way of thinking about it for me as well.

• 31:28PJ Vogt?

  And so this friend, or friend of a friend?

• 31:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:33PJ Vogt?

  This friend of a friend had said that in their own mind, like they, that's the experience they have and that ayahuasca had helped them with it.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:41PJ Vogt?

  And then, did you say to them, oh, can you just like put me in touch with?

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I said, can you let me know if there's a retreat that you can get me in touch with? It's kind of a shady thing to do. I mean, not just because it's highly illegal, but also because you don't know these people. And this is an incredibly powerful substance. So you're in this like very vulnerable state for five hours, six hours for every ceremony and you might have more than one. In my retreat, there were three, but sometimes people have like five ceremonies throughout the course of their, of their retreat. And in, it's fascinating because every day you're a little bit more sensitized to the substance. You are on a special diet with ayahuasca because evidently there are certain foods

• 32:24Speaker 02

  that can interact in a not pleasant way with the compounds in the brew itself. You're kept on this kind of very restricted diet, really feels like you're not eating very much. You're not supposed to eat past a certain part of the day because ayahuasca makes you incredibly nauseous. Many people purge, you know, what they call purging, but it's really, you're just vomiting a lot and you're using the restroom a lot. So it's better if you don't eat too much or eat at all actually after 1:00 PM, 2:00 PM for a nighttime ceremony. So you're going through this day after day. You're in this environment that sensitizes you to the drug more and more as each day passes because you're on this restricted diet. You're not sleeping very much.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  You hallucinate five to six hours.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  Each time. And so every next day is a more powerful experience.

• 33:16PJ Vogt?

  What were the hallucinations? Like, what happened to you?

• 33:19Speaker 02

  So it's interesting because they talk about set and setting so much. And I tried to prepare myself as much as possible for this experience. And the setting is very interesting with ayahuasca because it is approached very much with this, this kind of spiritual shamanistic, really religious. It's a kind of a religious context. You have somebody there who is kind of like a shaman. I don't know if there's like a more official word for it, but.

• 33:48PJ Vogt?

  I think sometimes they're called ayahuascaros.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  That's not what the, what the lady called herself. She called herself something else. I forget. I forget exactly what she called herself, but I mean, I just knew her name. I called her by her name. She was somebody who was educated on the medicine, which this is what you call it. You call it the medicine, not a drug. She was educated on it and she's grown up with it. There are tribes in various parts of South America that really, I mean, it's part of their like routine ayahuasca ceremonies and to start participating in these ceremonies since they're kids, which is really interesting. It's interesting that they seem normal as well. They don't have a lot of anxiety. They just seem like normal, happy people, I guess.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  And yeah, so she was conducting the ceremony. She was also taking it with us, which I did not realize she would be doing. But she takes the plant. She offers you one cup and then you can take more as the night progresses. She gave us two more opportunities to take more ayahuasca if we felt as if we weren't where we wanted to be that evening. And there's this chanting going on in the background. It's incredibly dark. There are no lights on, just like a candle or two. So this environment was, if you can imagine being on any kind of psychedelic and being in that kind of environment,

• 35:07Speaker 02

  it could be maybe a little bit disturbing. In this case, it was like the most powerful, one of the most powerful psychedelics around.

• 35:15PJ Vogt?

  And so you're waiting for something to happen. I imagine you're feeling a little bit anxious.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  Very anxious. Yeah.

• 35:21PJ Vogt?

  And so what happens?

• 35:22Speaker 02

  I went into hell, I think. I don't know how else to describe it. It's hard to talk about this without sounding silly. You know, even to myself, I sound silly. It's like describing a dream. How do you do that without losing a little bit of your dignity? But.

• 35:37PJ Vogt?

  This is a podcast. We've got dignity. But hell.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Have you seen the show Stranger Things?

• 35:44PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  You know, the upside down?

• 35:47PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  So it was like our world, but it wasn't our world. It was our world, but

• 35:55Speaker 02

  had

• 35:58Speaker 02

  just a very nefarious smell about it. The hallucinogen was so powerful. I saw a lot when I closed my eyes, but I saw quite a bit when I opened my eyes as well. I had difficulty seeing faces. I couldn't see anybody's face, actually. When I started to, if I would look at your face, I wouldn't be able to see it. I would see like two dark spots where your eyes are and everything else would be just wiped clean.

• 36:21PJ Vogt?

  And were you lucid? Like, did you understand? I'm having a hallucination, but I know where I am?

• 36:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. A part of me was always lucid, was lucid throughout the whole thing. A part of me always knew that I had taken something. When I say lucid, though, lucid in the way that you're lucid in a lucid dream, which is not with your full capacities, but aware that something's happening, aware that yes, I've taken this. I've taken this drug, so what I'm seeing is probably a part of that drug. So at no point did I feel as if this was real. I always thought I was having a hallucination.

• 36:58PJ Vogt?

  Right. And so you're perceiving this place that you're experiencing as hell. I'm assuming that's scary.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  It was very scary. It was very scary. And I was there for hours. And I remember looking around the room and being horrified by what I was seeing. The people in the room, the ones who gave me a bad vibe when I was sober were monstrous on ayahuasca. There's something about people's, they give you a certain kind of feeling. It's not a big deal when you're sober. When you're on psychedelics, vibes are important. And on ayahuasca, it was, some people were monsters. It was as if they were monsters. And I didn't want to be anywhere near them or around them. And I would have to like turn away from them. At the time, in the deepest part of the trip, I remember thinking, I'm losing my mind and I'm incurring brain damage, like what must be brain damage.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  And asking myself, why did I do this? Like, why did I do something that could really transform my mind, which?

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Is a good mind. It's served me well up until this point. So why would I play with such an important tool in my toolbox?

• 38:15PJ Vogt?

  This sounds awful, by the way.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  You know, it's hard to describe. I don't think it was awful. It was terrifying, but then when I was done,

• 38:28Speaker 02

  I felt very good immediately after, like as the hallucination was wearing off, as it was coming off of the high. I had this moment where I felt that my brain was finally on again, but it was on in a different way. It was creative in a way that it never is. I mean, it is, but not in a way I had ever experienced before. I was able to make all these like rapid fire connections that I had never seen. I think that's why people are referring to when they say that ayahuasca is like 10 years of therapy in a day. I think what it literally is doing to your brain is creating an environment for, you know, new pathways to form neurologically.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  And for some people, that can feel like therapy because your ego is decreased, if not eliminated. And so you can come to conclusions that otherwise you might be too afraid to reach. You can see things that would scare you and make you feel bad about yourself. And you can see them more clearly and come to terms with them under the influence of the drug. I think that's why people feel so connected to it or people feel so driven to seek it, despite the fact that it can be horrible because of this afterglow aspect of it. Even when it is a bad trip, it can be useful.

• 39:46PJ Vogt?

  So at any point, sorry, this is like a trivializing question slightly, but at any point during the trip, are you like seeing these crazy hallucinations in a place that feels like the upside down and you're like podcasting?

• 40:02Speaker 02

  No, no, not at all. I wasn't thinking about work at all. I think it was just that I felt trapped in a lot of ways. I felt trapped intellectually. I felt nihilistic about the world around me. And the podcast had something to do with that, not fully, but it played a part in that day after day, we would be staring into the abyss. You know, we would be reading these articles that were designed to make you a little mad because of course, they want to provoke conversation. They want people to be a little bit riled

• 40:42Speaker 02

  up. And in paying attention to these things, as part of what we were doing, you know, as part of our quote unquote job, I was forced to stare at that abyss day after day and contemplate it deeply all the time, but not deep enough that I could do something about it, not deep enough that I could find a solution, just deep enough that it would unsettle me in some significant way. And then we'd have to move on to the next topic, the next unsettling culture war discussion. So something about doing that, I think over and over again, it was not a healthy practice, but it also led me to have a definitely not

• 41:24Speaker 02

  a very positive view on human nature, on our culture as a whole, on our society. And I didn't want to think like that because that's a really, it's a really terrible way to think, not just because it feels bad while you're feeling all these negative feelings, but also because it takes away your drive to be that positive force in the world.

• 41:49PJ Vogt?

  But were you, would you have said all this, had we had an interview the week before you went on this retreat and I was like, how's your job? How's your life? Did you have an awareness that you didn't enjoy the diet you were feeding your mind of like things on the internet designed to make you specifically mad? Like, did you see that as a problem? Or did you just see that as a thing you were doing?

• 42:09Speaker 02

  I think the ayahuasca didn't really change the way that I felt about that. I think it made it impossible for me to pursue. You know, it almost said as if it took the option away from me.

• 42:20PJ Vogt?

  Took the option away. Like you had a background awareness that you were doing something that might not be right for you, but you could keep it in the background and just keep doing what you had to do. It just foregrounded that in a way that made it unavoidable.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  It foregrounded it and it just, I couldn't get angry.

• 42:34PJ Vogt?

  What do you mean?

• 42:35Speaker 02

  For the first month afterwards, I found it impossible to be outraged.

• 42:41PJ Vogt?

  Wow.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  So I would log on, I would see the same feed that I've been seeing for a long time. I tried to manage to like, to muster up enough outrage that I could write a little bit about it. And outrage is a strong word, but just to be provoked enough about, by something.

• 42:57PJ Vogt?

  I, the feeling you're describing, it's like hilarious that I'm taking the time as an interviewer to ask you to describe it accurately because everyone, like whoever you vote for, whatever you think, like it is the experience of going online. It's like, you open the feed and you're like, oh, that's funny. That's interesting. And then you see something that like, agitates you.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:15PJ Vogt?

  And it, and you feel it in your body and the feeling is, I can't believe this person thinks like this.

• 43:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:22PJ Vogt?

  And what is wrong with them? And how could they not understand this? And then you post something and somebody else looks at what you said and they feel the exact same way. And like, that is how the internet is created right now. Like that is what exists. And, but you, this is fascinating. Like after you had this experience, people talk about being like impotent with rage. You were like impotent of rage. Like you, you like could not feel the feeling the, that social media internet most thrives on for a moment. Like you would go there, you would expect it and it just would not be there.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  It wouldn't be there. And it felt strange because I have been expecting that response for a long time. And interesting actually to not be able to feel it. Part of me was alarmed because it was like, okay, then what am I gonna do?

• 44:06Speaker 02

  It's kind of an indictment of the work that I used to do that it required this. But I think everything to some degree requires you to be frustrated by something, frustrated by the lack of a solution to an important social problem, the lack of an answer. So you're searching. What ayahuasca did to me that was, I think, the most directly relevant to my work was that I could just step away because my eyes weren't being like magnetically pulled towards the most outrageous stuff. I would spend more time on other things, but I would see the outrageous stuff. I would read it. I would digest it. It just wouldn't have that effect on me. It would just come right back out and I would be able to focus on the next thing.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  It was difficult to go and do the podcast after that.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  In the culture wars, there are no winners, just podcasters. Only a few are willing to risk their lives in the face of some of the dumbest ideas to have ever captured human civilization. Every week, we, Megan Downe and Sarah Haider, humbly accept this mission, bringing you conversations that are equal parts stunning, brave, and accomplished. Mission accomplished. Our work is done here.

• 45:23PJ Vogt?

  Hence the episode that I'd heard, which had led me to this conversation. Episode 115, entitled, Adios, Amigos, The Special Place Finale.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  So a couple of months ago, this was not recent. We had a conversation. Megan and I had a conversation.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  You called me, yes.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I called Megan and I was like, you know what? I'm done.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  And I was like, shut up, please.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you didn't believe me and then you did. And we had plans to like end the podcast.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Okay, wait, hold on. Why were you done? Why were you? What did you say exactly?

• 45:59PJ Vogt?

  They take a minute to get to the punchline, like maybe they're avoiding it. They talk about the recent election, some other stuff, before finally returning to this ayahuasca experience. Sarah explains how she's been feeling, how she's changed her view on online discourse.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  And it has left me with the sense of like, you know, I don't give a shit. I don't, like, I don't.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  I also called you after that and I said, look, we gotta end it actually sooner than.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  Because I don't think I can do it.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Okay, because you see that this is also trivial and pointless and that there's a bigger universe out there or like

• 46:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  multiple planes of existence.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's so, um, well, I fully depersonalized

• 46:43Speaker 02

  after my last night, which is why I left, um, which is to say I didn't have a self anymore. It was really crazy. And this was after like some pretty incredible and intense hallucinations, possibly brain damage, I don't know, you know, and/or both.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  Why not both? Um, and I, I do feel like, you know, it's just all the shit we talk about. Not only does it not matter, it just doesn't interest me at all. Like, and I, I, I was losing interest for a lo- for a while. I've been losing interest. But at this point, you know, I can't, I, when I go on Twitter, I'm not outraged. I'm just not outraged. I don't know what to do.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  All right, this is, you're, this is a, you're, this is a hard sell for ayahuasca.

• 47:25PJ Vogt?

  The conversation moves on. One last episode where they talk politics, Trump, Vance. Sarah starts to wonder out loud about how maybe the right isn't welcoming enough of apostates, of free thinkers. And then they wrap things up.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Work on that metaphor. All right, well, please, okay, everyone.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  I don't know what to say. I know you're crying. You thought you were upset about the election, but now you can be upset about this.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, we've left some plenty to be mad about. And like, no way to really get it to us, right? I mean, I guess we're gonna leave the comments open.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  You can leave the comments.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  Open, fully open this time and let them all, let them all, no, no, fuck that. No, they're gonna hate.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Look, I mean, they could, okay, the paying subscribers can leave comments. Everybody else, they can, they can tweet at us or leave YouTube comments or whatever.

• 48:13PJ Vogt?

  It's funny how no matter the podcast, the content, the audience, everybody ends up cajoling their listeners with very similar patter.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  Comment, share.

• 48:22PJ Vogt?

  They sign off.

• 48:23Speaker 02

  And I'll see, I'll be seeing you. We'll, we'll be chatting.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Oh, of course. Okay. All right, everyone.

• 48:33PJ Vogt?

  After a short break, what's it like to post on Twitter when a psychedelic drug has diminished your capacity for outrage?

• 49:10PJ Vogt?

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• 50:19PJ Vogt?

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• 51:04PJ Vogt?

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• 51:27PJ Vogt?

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• 52:39PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show. A week after I first spoke to Sarah, we spoke again. I was curious how she was doing as time went by. Specifically, I had a question about her renewed presence on one social media platform. You mentioned you briefly deactivated Twitter. You're back on. I was looking at your feed. To my eye, you seem to be pretty happily lobbing bombs back into the culture wars.

• 53:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:05PJ Vogt?

  Do you feel like the feeling of outrage has returned to you?

• 53:09Speaker 02

  Uh, no, no, I don't think it has, not in the same way. I think I, I don't have the perspective that, I mean, maybe, maybe this is not so unique. But when you were talking about the fact that our show is a culture war show and that you don't find it very enjoyable, like this kind of provocative kind of conversation. I mean, I never thought I was going to end up doing anything like this. I don't see it as my personality, but this is where the activist part of me takes control. In that, I think the thing that is so wrong with our discourse is that so many people who should be talking are not talking.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  I think that that creates an environment in which our public discourse is captured by the most extreme voices, like the people who are very, very good at just distilling a one-sided account and performing really well for one particular audience. I thought that's what was broken about the conversation we were having around Islam too. I saw that there were, you know, I mean, there were a few atheist types that I thought were doing a decent job, but then there were also anti-Muslim bigots, you know, people who were really opposed to Muslims being in the United States.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  Like they didn't, they had problems with the religion that were really akin to xenophobia. And I come from a Muslim family, so I, you know, I'm sensitive to the consequences of those kinds of politics. So I started speaking about it, not because this is where I wanted to be intellectually, not because this is how I'm enjoying, this is my, the best way for me to spend my day, but because I just didn't want to abandon this ground to a certain kind of voice.

• 55:13PJ Vogt?

  Sarah believed then, as she believes now, that she has a responsibility to describe the world as she sees it. So she's not leaving social media, but she is trying to engage in a way that better protects her mind, which might look differently for her than it would for someone else.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  I think people think that in order to be nuanced, you also have to be very soft spoken and hedge your words and not directly poke at, you know, the fire at the moment. And again, this is why I brought up Christopher Hitchens as an example of somebody who I thought was doing it right. In that, I mean, there were many things he was doing wrong. And there are many, many issues in which I completely disagree with him on. But in that, he was both highly intellectual, nuanced, brought something to the debate and wasn't worried about fighting fire with fire if he needed to, you know? But he showed up for the debate. He showed up to battle. And I thought that that was incredible.

• 56:09Speaker 02

  He went to Fox News and he would challenge people directly and debate with them and come out the other side stronger even.

• 56:20PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, it's funny. I mean, I think it's, you and I, I don't want to persuade you to think differently about the internet. But the place where, like you and I have different politics, but the place where we were like, I find myself, the other place where we disagree, I think, is that I think, I totally understand why you admire Christopher Hitchens. And it's like, or at least my understanding of why you admire him is he's a figure from an age where we expected intellectuals to provoke and to throw punches and to, where the idea was not that we consume the work of people whose opinions we entirely agree with, that we want to be challenged,

• 57:05PJ Vogt?

  even by people who we think of as occasionally or often on our side. We want to think as a kind of conflict. And I think that I, I understand why that is really valuable. And sometimes I want to think that way, too. I think what's hard is that I think people go on social media thinking this is a place where I'm gonna like boldly say what I think. And what often happens is that people don't just say what they think, they think what they say. By which I mean, once you've expressed an opinion there, just even a sentence saying like, this is wrong, or this is good, and a huge audience has shown up both to attack and support you. For me personally, I find that it makes it hard for me to continue to think in a way

• 57:50PJ Vogt?

  that I know is clear. Because the cost of reversing a choice, even if like you still do it some of the time, but the cost has just gone up so much. And even though like writing in public in a book and writing on in public on social media or both writing in public, I find the one more perilous than the other, just for one's own ability to continue to think.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  You don't even have to convince me because I agree with that. I agree with you that there's a peril in doing that and that the people who do that are often, they're risking something. And I actually am of the opinion that they are not even risking, it's kind of guaranteed you will lose yourself. It's guaranteed that you will lose your honest, clear thinking as you continue, but that it still must be done by somebody. I think somebody has to do it. I almost see it as public service. Like you go in for five, 10 years, you become deranged, then you leave, and then new people come in and then they think openly and engage on these issues and then they leave. I think there is something for the public to gain, but privately, I completely agree

• 58:59Speaker 02

  with you that the thinker over time becomes deranged and loses something in the clarity of their thought.

• 59:07PJ Vogt?

  But so for you.

• 59:10PJ Vogt?

  Ayahuasca did not tell you the internet is dangerous, leave it. Ayahuasca told you this one mode of engagement feels wrong, but to find other ones.

• 59:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, and I don't, I'm still not committed to X. It's just that, once it's on, then I'm engaging with it in that way. I don't need to be on it, and I don't feel the need to be on it. I don't feel as angry when I'm engaging in, I think, the way that I used to. I'm still searching. I don't think I have an answer of exactly what not to do and what to do.

• 59:50PJ Vogt?

  So that is Sarah Haider's answer to whether ayahuasca can reprogram your relationship to the internet. Maybe a little bit. Or maybe it just helps you be more OK with the feeling of not knowing. You can find her on Substack. Her newsletter is called Hold That Thought.

• 1:00:53PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vought, and Trudy Pinamanini, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact checking by Mary Mathis. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Basarian. Additional production support from Sean Merchant. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perrello, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Matt Casey, Moira Curran, Justina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schaff. Our agent is Orin Rosenbaum at UTIA. Follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vogt now for free on the Odyssey app

• 1:01:36PJ Vogt?

  or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

• 1:02:08PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by VistaPrint. As a small business owner running a podcast, I'm always looking for authentic ways to connect with listeners, which makes VistaPrint such a valued expert partner for us. I was on their site the other day brainstorming new things we could make for our show, and the creative momentum took over. I ended up designing Search Engine stickers and I tried to make a sign for our office. When your physical branding looks this sharp and professional, it immediately communicates credibility and shows your audience that you mean business. VistaPrint truly helps every dollar go further, delivering premium quality and design support that make your company look established without breaking the bank. Whether you need your design tweaked or a total rebrand, VistaPrint has you covered with the expert service small businesses deserve.

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