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 To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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.
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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.
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 Daum, and with me is the self-hating millennial, Sarah Hader. Hi, Sarah. Hi.
A conversation show, basically an anti-woke podcast, in which the two hosts, week by week, humorously cataloged 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, 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 cortisol-ed 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.
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.
My name is Sarah Hayter. I am a former activist turned podcaster turned former podcaster.
And can you talk to me a little bit about your path into activism? Like what made you become an activist?
I was born a Muslim. 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 this. 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.
I was fairly lucky in that my parents are liberal for Muslims, which is to say they're pretty conservative as far as 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.
I realized how my experience was actually different than what many other Muslims, even in America, experience when they start questioning religion or leaving religion. And so I found myself in this place where I felt like, okay, 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.
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 okay, 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 flack either from your family or from strangers or from like the larger community?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it was like a hurricane. It completely tore apart aspects. 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 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 speaking up very openly, and it's bringing a lot of shame and dishonor to my
My family and then my community, the Muslim 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.
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. 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 Daum.
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... The interview went along very smoothly, and we found that we were both very interested in a few topics, like culture-warrior 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. 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. It was a unique opportunity to talk to somebody like that. But I didn't know that that would lead to a podcast.
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.
What about the gender thing? Because a lot of these tech guys are... Gender stuff is like a cult.
Whatever it is, 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... Bella 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 have these differences.
It's like, why is it so important to deny this?
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.
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 funds.
Sarah describes this moment in the book where the very pregnant executive had to run across a parking lot to a meeting.
And I'm thinking, I don't want this. If this is success... I feel like my life is precious and my days are important and how I live them is important and I don't want to live that way.
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 going to 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.
Yeah, yeah. And I think that's the best of what the culture war 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.
I see, I see. Okay, so you're making a show. It sounds like in the beginning it's pretty enjoyable. Yeah.
It was, yeah. Most of the time it was enjoyable.
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?
Definitely. Well, it was less of leaving the religion, which generally just left me with a sense of skepticism of religion. 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. 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 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 this might not have been my permanent home.
So I held all these things that we have in the United States, the Western world more broadly, but I think in particular here, and I just cherish them so much. And 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.
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.
What do you mean?
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.
So just to notice a pattern here, if Sarah is 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 how she thought people should live their actual lives. Like, personal stuff.
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.
Was there an episode that you published that you regretted afterwards or something you said in a podcast episode that you regretted afterwards?
I think there was a discussion on divorce that I regretted 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 Phetasy about her experience growing up in a divorced home. 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 trying to build. I think she described herself as kind of a feral child, but just that they were just off on their own. without a lot of parental supervision, and that led her into a lot of trouble.
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 recommend so much anymore and we push back on. But our kind of spice it'll take was maybe there is like a logic to it that is pretty important because these are young people.
So you were like, maybe people should sit down and stay together for the kids.
And people were very upset. Yeah. Yeah, that is what I was saying. That is what I was saying. And I recognized as I was saying it that there are going to be a lot of people very mad at me. And 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.
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 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.
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. 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 personal capture of who I actually am that they were reacting to. And I think that might have been why it was a little bit harder to shake off.
At what point does ayahuasca come onto your radar? What is the first time you even hear that as a word?
Um... I'm not one of those people who does drugs recreationally very much. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Not that I'm judging. Not that I'm saying you shouldn't do it if you want to. But it's just never really appealed to me too much.
Can I actually ask, when you say you don't do drugs, do you drink cannabis?
I drink socially. There were times in my life where I drank a little bit more when I was in my early 20s and going out a lot. I usually don't do marijuana. It has this paradoxical 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.
That's fascinating because you went to the deep end. Yeah. As far as psychedelics go. So just walk me up to that. Do you even recall the first time somebody was like, there's a drug called ayahuasca or a medicine or a plant called ayahuasca?
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I remember. There were conversations happening mostly on Twitter, on some other places as well, on my private chats with people. But there were some conversations happening about specifically ayahuasca as something that could one-shot people. Have you ever heard of this phrase?
One-shot. I'm familiar with it in video games. In video games, if you one-shot somebody, it's like you shoot them once and you kill them. You one-shotted them.
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.
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 has a lot of 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'd be like a founder of a Web3 company, and they would say, I went and took ayahuasca, and I'm quitting. It 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 was funny to them. But so you were seeing similar stuff, it sounds like.
Your exposure to it is people on the internet saying, there's a psychedelic, you can take it, and it could drastically reorient you and what you want and what you think and what you believe.
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'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.
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 sensor, her own mind, After a short break, Sarah Hader goes on a trip. This episode is brought to you by Microsoft Copilot Plus PCs, powered by Snapdragon, the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever.
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Before we return to our story, a little bit about ayahuasca for people who are less familiar with it. It's a psychedelic that originates in South America. Ayahuasca is a brew made by combining a couple 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. 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.
So I'm going to try and just anonymize it, just 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.
It's legal in Peru.
Yeah, 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 your 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 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 a 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.
And so... This friend, or friend of a friend?
Yeah.
This friend of a friend had said that in their own mind, like, that's the experience they have, and that ayahuasca had helped them with it.
And then did you say to them, oh, can you just, like, put me in touch with... 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 retreat. And And 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 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. It 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. You're using the restroom a lot. So it's better if you don't eat too much. or eat it all actually after 1 p.m., 2 p.m. 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. You hallucinate five to six hours each time. And so every next day is a more powerful experience.
What were the hallucinations like? What happened to you?
So it's interesting because they talk about set and setting so much, and I try 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 kind of spiritual, shamanistic approach. 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... I think sometimes they're called ayahuasqueros. That's not what the lady called herself. She called herself something else. I forget. What did she call herself? 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 is what you call it. You call it the medicine, not a drug. She was educated on it. She's grown up with it. There are tribes in various parts of South America that really, I mean, it's part of their routine ayahuasca ceremonies. And they start participating in these ceremonies since they're kids, which is really interesting.
It's interesting that they seem normal as They don't have a lot of anxiety. They just seem like normal, happy people, I guess. 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. Yeah. 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, it could be maybe a little bit disturbing. In this case, it was like the most powerful, one of the most powerful psychedelics around.
And so you're waiting for something to happen. I imagine you're feeling a little bit anxious.
Very anxious, yeah.
And so what happens?
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?
This is a podcast about dignity. But hell?
Have you seen the show Stranger Things?
Yeah.
You know, the upside down?
Yeah. Yeah.
So it was like our world, but it wasn't our world. It was our world, but had 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, 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.
And were you lucid? Like, did you understand, I'm having a hallucination, but I know where I am? 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.
Right. And so you're perceiving this place that you're experiencing as hell. I'm assuming that's scary.
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, 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.
and asking myself, why did I do this? Like, why did I do something that could really transform my mind, which 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?
This sounds awful, by the way.
You know, it's hard to describe. I don't think it was awful. It was terrifying, but then when I was done, I felt very good. Immediately after, like as the hallucinogen 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 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 new pathways to form neurologically. 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.
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?
No, 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. 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 up. And in paying attention to these things...
as part of what we were doing, 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 way.
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 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 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.
But 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?
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.
Took the option away. Yeah. 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.
It foregrounded it and it just, I couldn't get angry.
What do you mean?
For the first month afterwards, I found it impossible to be outraged. 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 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 by something.
The feeling you're describing, it's hilarious that I'm taking the time as an interviewer to ask you to describe it accurately because whoever you vote for, whatever you think, 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.
Yeah.
And you feel it in your body. And the feeling is, I can't believe this person thinks like this. Yeah. 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 that is how the internet is created right now. That is what exists.
But you, this is fascinating, after you had this experience, people talk about being impotent with rage. You were impotent of rage. You could not feel the feeling that social media internet most thrives on for a moment. You would go there, you would expect it, and it just would not be there?
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 going to do? 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. It was difficult to go and do the podcast after that.
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 Daum and Sarah Hader, humbly accept this mission to bring you conversations that are equal parts stunning, brave, and accomplished. Mission accomplished. Our work is done here.
Hence the episode that I'd heard, which had led me to this conversation. Episode 115, entitled Adios Amigos, The Special Place Finale.
So a couple of months ago, this was not recent. No. We had a conversation. Megan and I had a conversation.
You called me, yes.
Yeah, I called Megan and I was like, you know what, I'm done.
And I was like, shut up, please.
Yeah, I think you didn't believe me, and then you did. And we had plans to, like, end the podcast.
Okay, wait, hold on. Why were you done? Why were you, what did you say exactly?
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.
And it has left me with the sense of like, you know, I don't give a shit. I also called you after that and I said, look, we got to end it actually sooner than... Yeah. Because I don't think I can do it.
Okay, because you see that this is also trivial and pointless and that there's a bigger universe out there or like multiple planes of existence.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's so... Well, I fully depersonalized after my last night, which is why I left, 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. Why not both? And I do feel like, you know, just all the shit we talk about.
Not only does it not matter, it just doesn't interest me at all. Like, and I was losing interest for a while. I've been losing interest. But at this point, you know... I can't—when I go on Twitter, I'm not outraged.
I'm just not outraged. I don't know what to do. All right, this is a hard sell for ayahuasca.
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 freethinkers. And then they wrap things up.
Let's work on that metaphor. All right, well, please—okay, everyone— 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.
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 going to leave the comments open. We can leave the comments fully open this time and let them all know. No, no, fuck that. No, they're going to hate.
Look, I mean, okay, the paying subscribers can leave comments. Everybody else, they can tweet at us or leave YouTube comments or whatever.
It's funny how no matter the podcast, the content, the audience, everybody ends up cajoling their listeners with a very similar pattern. They sign off.
I'll be seeing you. We'll be chatting.
No, of course. Okay.
All right, everyone.
After a short break, what's it like to post on Twitter when a psychedelic drug has diminished your capacity for outrage? The following conversation is brought to you by Microsoft Co-Pilot Plus PCs, powered by Snapdragon. The fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever.
Hello?
DJ. Andre. Can you hear me okay? I can. It's actually amazing to speak to the voice behind the podcast I've been listening to for two, three years. This is nuts.
I recently got on a video chat with a listener named Andre. Andre is a very kind soul and a talented musician based in the UK.
I'm a blind musician. I do accessibility testing for companies. I write my own podcast music. Primarily, I do a bit of jazz and R&B and soul, but I also do finger drumming on a keyboard. This keyboard. Sorry, for someone who doesn't know what finger drumming is. What is finger drumming? Well, it's drumming, but done on a keyboard. Very silly, but very fun.
That's awesome, honestly. Andre told me he's recently started using AI tools in different parts of his life. Like he'll take a photo with his phone and then have the AI describe what's in the image to him.
You take a picture within the app and it comes back with a very detailed description of whatever you take a picture of. So it's extremely cool and extremely useful. So what types of things will you take pictures of and get descriptions of? Any and everything. Because for the first time in my life, I feel like I can enjoy pictures.
And my family sends me pictures when they're out or I just snap a random picture if I turn to my left or my right and I get a description of that picture. And it comes back with a really detailed description of whatever it is. It has been, and I hate this term, but it's so true.
It has been a cliche game changer because for the very first time in my life, I feel like I can enjoy pictures in the way that you can.
Andre says he's gotten a lot of use out of AI in his creative life. He says he sees these tools as digital collaborators with different strengths.
I like AI because it's going to do things I don't do, but I'm still going to do things it doesn't do either. And I'm really intrigued to see where we go.
Oh, Andre, it's so lovely to talk to you about this.
Thank you so much.
Take care, sir. Once again, the previous conversation was brought to you by Microsoft Copilot Plus PCs. With the Snapdragon X Elite chips enabling 45 trillion operations per second, up to 22 hours of battery, and AI-powered co-creator to unleash your creativity, this much power is a beautiful thing.
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Go to viore.com slash pjsearch and discover the versatility of Viore clothing. This episode is brought to you in part by Mint Mobile. You know when you discover a new binge-worthy show or a song that you bump on repeat and you have to share it with your friends so they can experience just how awesome it is?
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Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at mintmobile.com slash search. $45 upfront payment required, equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. 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. Do you feel like the feeling of outrage has returned to you?
Um, 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 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.
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 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
start speaking about it, not because this is where I wanted to be intellectually, not because this is 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.
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.
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. He went to Fox News and he would challenge people directly and debate with them and come out the other side stronger even.
Yeah. It's funny. I mean, I think 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.
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. Where the idea was not that we consume the work of people whose opinions we entirely agree with. That we want to be challenged, 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 understand why that is really valuable. And sometimes I wanna 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 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 in public on social media are both writing in public, I find the one more perilous than the other just for one's own ability to continue to think.
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's something for the public to gain, but privately, I completely agree with you that the thinker over time becomes deranged and loses something in the clarity of their thought.
But so for you, 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.
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.
So that is Sarah Hader's answer to whether ayahuasca can reprogram your relationship to the Internet. Maybe a little bit. Or maybe it just helps you be more okay with the feeling of not knowing. You can find her on Substack. Her newsletter is called Hold That Thought. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions.
It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruthi Pinamaneni, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking by Mary Mathis. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Additional production support from Sean Merchant. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Denis. 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, Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schaaf. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vogt now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.