Going for the Gold: One Man’s Exploration of the Tie Between Cannabis and Creativity

Story by: Eben Benson, Photos by: Max S. Gerber

Originally Published on Different Leaf

Creativity, it’s a known fact that grass increases creativity from eight to eleven times. In fact, everyone finds that they’re more creative stoned than straight.

If you’ve never listened to Madvillainy, the collaborative album from era-defining producer Madlib and late master wordsmith MF DOOM, now’s the time to do it. On one of the album’s strongest and most memorable tracks, “America’s Most Blunted,” a comically clinical voice sample relays the above message as if it were being read verbatim from the New England Journal of Medicine. This may well be a fact for many people: weed makes you more creative. Anyone reading this magazine can likely think of a few artists, designers, and maybe even bankers that use cannabis daily and can attest to how it helps them think outside the box. But probably just as many of us try to get creative while we’re high and end up watching a TV show or worrying about bills.

Shawn Gold has been both types of people, and that’s why he started Pilgrim Soul. He’s been a high-energy marketing guru, lifelong cannabis enthusiast, and multi-industry entrepreneur—and in all of his ventures, especially now, a connoisseur of creativity. Pilgrim Soul is, in Gold’s words, “a creativity company with cannabis as one of its products. We create curricula, content, community events, and merchandise, all meant to increase the efficacy of the cannabis product.”

Its latest offering, the Pilgrim Soul Creative Thinking Journal, has “Please use this journal while you are high” printed in bold capital letters on the cover, and its purpose is more or less exactly that. It contains numerous exercises and prompts that encourage its audience to look at the world with a sense of humor, empathy, and ultimately creativity—in any circumstances, but especially when high. The prompts range from imaginary protest signs and intentionally bad poems to a motivational speech for a child’s basketball team you bet money against. Each of these can help you get out of your own head and imagine scenarios that are just challenging enough to require creative thought, but just funny enough to keep you from overthinking.

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“There can be a misconception that creativity means drawing, painting, writing poetry, et cetera, which is why I started thinking of the journal through the perspective of creative thinking,” Gold says. “Anyone can think creatively, but I am trying to reach more people like educators, computer programmers, engineers, lawyers, and anybody who is paid to create and innovate— or just wants to.

“I’ve been using cannabis to aid creative thinking, make non- linear connections, empathize, focus, and a lot more, for most of my life,” he says. Gold also reiterates a statement that can be found in the journal: “Cannabis is a hack. It does too many things with the brain. It enhances firing in the frontal lobe, which is great for idea production, but it also represses the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is more of the judgment area of the brain that’s repressed when you daydream.” Using what cannabis can already do to encourage creative thinking, the journal presents solvable problems to produce the kind of experience that gets you in touch with your innate creativity.

For Gold, the journal and company are in part a summation of what he’s learned from life and his experience building and growing companies in budding industries. “I’ve always been a little bit of a weirdo— very ADD, couldn’t pay attention in school—and after college, I couldn’t quite fit in at larger established companies,” he says, referring to his early years. “Later on, I really found my niche working for and helping build new businesses, and imagining things.”

In the burgeoning tech world of the late 1990s and early 2000s, he did just that. He began in digital advertising working with brands such as Procter & Gamble, General Mills, Nestlé, and Mattel before becoming a founding publisher of Weblogs, Inc., a blog network that was later sold to AOL. In 2006, Gold became Myspace’s SVP, head of marketing and content, where he grew the audience from 25 million to 110 million. “I like solving problems and figuring out systems that haven’t been defined yet,” he says about his experiences in the tech industry. “I thrive in ambiguity. I always look to hire people who do the same. It means being excited about finding an answer, setting the parameters, considering the variables, making guesses and testing them, seeing what works, and working through the inevitable failure moments.”

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After Myspace, Gold became the CMO of Inside Studios (a video and mobile app company), then head of entertainment brand partnerships at Wattpad (a social storytelling platform), and finally CMO at TechStyle Fashion Group (an online, membership-based fashion retailer) before landing in the cannabis industry.

“When [cannabis] became legal, I was just fascinated by it, and I started advising a good friend of mine from the tech world who was working at Lowell Herb Co,” Gold says. It was through this connection that he ended up diving deeper into the cannabis world, meeting the CEO of MedMen and later the CEO of Charlotte’s Web and advising both of them as well. In 2018, he became the CMO of Lowell Herb Co, one of the best-selling cannabis brands in the United States and producer of California’s best-selling pre-rolls.

His work and success in the cannabis industry is a testament to the purpose of the journal. “Out-of- the-box thinking is 100% required every day in the cannabis industry because of the restrictions,” Gold says. “A lot of people think of creativity as this no-holds-barred, fully free thing, but I think creativity is really something that transpires much more readily with restrictions.” Those restrictions are exactly what a prompt can assist with, which is how the journal guides users through using it. In our everyday life and with real, survival-level restrictions, it’s easy to get overwhelmed when sitting down and trying to “be creative.” But imagining the world through a different lens—say, while high and filling out some funny exercises—can alleviate pressure and make it a lot easier to weave in and out of ideas and get in touch with what makes creativity fun and useful.

One of Gold’s numerous passions is quotations. “Growing up, I read quote books. I read every quote book possible. I read the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations cover to cover with a highlighter, basically highlighting my favorite bits and then literally creating quote books.” He lists two quotations as his favorite, and they go in tandem: “Where there is an open mind, there is always a frontier,” and “Only the insane take themselves seriously.” A self- proclaimed serious, one-track-minded Shawn Gold would never have made it this far, and that version of Shawn Gold also wouldn’t be very creative.

If we’re going to use cannabis to get more creative, maybe we should take ourselves a little less seriously and imagine that there’s always something out there to explore. Creativity isn’t limited to being a painter in a studio or a poet in a field. Maybe it can be you and your friends maniacally laughing about misspelling the word “marijuana” like at the end of “America’s Most Blunted.”