This Life: Volume 3
The Curiosity Thread: A NAVY Seal, A Priest, and Warren Buffett
“In The Sun, In Good Times, In The Sun Bleaching”
Now Playing: “Soft One" – Yellow Shoots
Gregory Matthews, aka“Yellow Shoots” is a Brooklyn-based artist and producer I think you should get to know this summer.
Press play while you read.
Well,
Here's volume 3. Which ended up in a strange place.
I started this past week reading about a Republican NAVY Seal who transformed his life by taking Ibogaine in Mexico. This led me to Michael Pollan's piece in The New Yorker about religious leaders on psychedelics, too. Somehow I ended the weekend reading Warren Buffett's final letter to shareholders as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.
If only Warren Buffett did mushrooms this whole thing would be a lot easier to tie together.
I thought about just scrapping this one. Like, what's the through-line? Where is this going? No one is going to care about the intersection between a transformed NAVY Seal, tripping priests, and the greatest investor of all time. A thought process that brought me to something else.
I think many of us have been conditioned to think we need to "pick a thing" and stick with it. (At least I have.) But it’s been my observation that creative breakthroughs happen when I let my mind wander between seemingly unrelated topics.
In the middle of my wrestling with this question, Rick Rubin’s latest newsletter dropped into my inbox:
Following the pull, I decided to stop typing, open Instagram, and “doom scroll” with a new lens. It's just where my curiosity went — what might I find? No kidding, the first post I stumbled on was this:
I'll let you watch the video and read the post yourself. But to summarize: focusing on doing one thing really well is just one measure of success. What if instead your measure of success was "how much can I enjoy this?" This meaning your career, your life, your relationship(s), your whatever.
Thank you, Sir Richard Branson and Grace Beverley, for the reminder that some of us aren't built to focus on just one topic or go deep on one subject for an entire lifetime.
There’s something interesting about connecting the dots between seemingly disparate things, puzzle piecing them together in retrospect.
Mike
What I Read / Listened To / Watched This Week
Lawmaker 'Reborn' Through Psychedelic Therapy Wants the GOP to Embrace It (WSJ) — A bipartisan coalition is quietly advancing support for psychedelic-assisted therapy, especially for veterans and first responders. The article includes a powerful clip of Texas Republican Morgan Luttrell sharing how an ibogaine session in Mexico helped him heal both his PTSD and his relationship with his mother. Read ›
This Is Your Priest on Drugs (The New Yorker) — Written by Michael Pollan, this piece revisits a study from 2015 in which religious leaders—priests, rabbis, ministers—took guided psilocybin journeys. Nearly a decade later, the impact still resonates. It's a revival of mystery and direct experience in a profession built on faith. Read ›
Warren Buffett's 2024 Shareholder Letter (Berkshire Hathaway) — I read this one late this year, but it's always worth the time. It's likely his last letter as CEO of Berkshire, and it reads exactly how you'd hope: calm, sharp, and uninterested in hype. One stat that stuck with me—Berkshire paid 9 billion dollars in federal taxes last year, about 1/700th of all U.S. income tax revenue. Read ›
Pro tip: Don't have a news subscription? Insert the article links into ChatGPT and ask for a summary.
What I Learned This Week
The Veteran
According to a 2022 report from the Department of Veterans Affairs, 6,407 veterans died by suicide that year—nearly double the rate of nonveterans. In response to this ongoing crisis, a growing group of lawmakers, many of them veterans, are pushing for federal research into psychedelic-assisted treatments for PTSD, depression, and substance abuse. One of the most vocal advocates is Morgan Luttrell—a retired Navy SEAL and now a Republican Congressman from Texas—who in 2018 underwent a three-day psychedelic therapy session in Mexico involving ibogaine and DMT, both illegal in the U.S. He described the experience as transformative, helping him process trauma, save his marriage, and repair his relationship with his mother. He likened it to an "exorcism," marked by intense physical reactions and vivid visualizations that helped him "turn the page" on his life.
In 2023, Rep. Dan Crenshaw led a bill mandating federal research into these therapies for veterans and active-duty service members, with studies now underway at the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health. The Congressional Psychedelics Advancing Therapies (PATH) Caucus, co-led by Reps. Jack Bergman and Lou Correa, is also advocating for expanded clinical trials. Regulatory concerns remain with the FDA and others, including safety, efficacy, insufficient data, and challenges with trial design. While critics like Rep. Lauren Boebert raise concerns about potential recreational use, others—like Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks—have shifted their stance after hearing veterans' firsthand accounts.
The Priest
In 2015, researchers at NYU and Johns Hopkins conducted a study involving approximately 30 religious leaders from a variety of faith backgrounds, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. The participants were predominantly male (69%), white (97%), and Christian (76%). Each was given a high dose of psilocybin in a controlled clinical setting to observe its effects on spiritual life and vocational function. In follow-up assessments conducted months later, 96% of participants reported that the experience ranked among the five most spiritually significant of their lives. Approximately 79% said it enhanced their effectiveness in their work, deepened their prayer life, and enriched their sense of the sacred in daily experience. Many described encountering a divine presence that felt maternal or womb-like, challenging conventional masculine portrayals of God. Some reported visions or symbols from religions other than their own, which led to greater appreciation for interfaith connection. Several participants later became involved in faith-based psychedelic initiatives, applying their experience to religious education, pastoral counseling, and broader spiritual outreach.
The Investor
In his 2024 letter to shareholders—likely his last as CEO—Warren Buffett reported that Berkshire Hathaway paid $9.2 billion in federal income taxes in 2023. That's roughly 5% of all corporate income taxes paid by the 1,000 largest U.S. companies, or about one out of every 700 dollars collected by the U.S. Treasury from all sources. Buffett also noted that, between 2019 and 2023, the words "mistake" or "error" appeared 16 times in Berkshire's letters — an unusual level of candor compared to many public companies and other investment firms.
The Retrospective Through-line
Here's the thing I couldn't see while I was wrestling with this newsletter, sticking to the format of writing about what I read this week: the thread isn't about what these three stories have in common on the surface. The through-line is about how breakthrough learning happens.
A Navy SEAL discovers healing through plant medicine. Religious leaders find God in psilocybin. Warren Buffett admits his mistakes in public. These couldn't be more different stories.
But for me, looking closer, they're all about the same radical act:
the willingness to go where conventional wisdom might say you shouldn't.
The veteran stepped outside military protocol to heal trauma the establishment couldn't. The priests ventured beyond doctrine to experience the divine directly. Buffett built an empire on radical honesty, something many might think ignores the corporate playbook.
Each story is about someone who followed their curiosity into uncomfortable territory and discovered something on the other side. They didn't know where they were going when they started. The SEAL didn't plan to heal his relationship with his mother. The priest didn't expect to encounter a maternal God. I doubt Buffett set out to become famous for admitting his mistakes, or expressing gratitude to the corporate tax system for enabling his success.
I think the through-line here is about the willingness to wander. To trust that curiosity is its own kind of intelligence.
Try this on
Be curious. That's it.
Let your mind make connections that might not make sense until later.
What are you curious about right now? Go there.
Interesting intersections happen when we're not trying to force them.
Mike
