Cannabis evangelist Mary Pryor on climate change, HBO's 'Succession'—and the evils of pumpkin spice

Mary Pryor is chief marketing officer at Tonic CBD, a 2-year-old cannabis brand. She is also co-founder of Cannaclusive, which advocates for improved representation of minorities in the industry.

In this episode of the “Ad Block” podcast, where marketers and agency executives talk about anything other than their jobs, Pryor discusses effective ways to communicate about the climate crisis, with the goal of convincing skeptics or people who underestimate the problem. “We need to make giving a shit cool,” she says. “I see people that just don’t want to pay attention to what’s happening in front of them. That freaks me out, that we’re so afraid to tackle the issue.”

Pryor worries that convincing enough people to actually confront harsh realities may require worse natural disasters than Americans have experienced so far.

“We literally had the top oxygen source on fire, and that didn’t work,” she says, referring to the wildfires in the Amazon rainforest earlier this year. “The whole country doesn’t think about these shifts until there’s an extinction-level event. And that’s usually when it’s too late.”

Pryor also weighs in Kieran Culkin’s masterful turn on HBO’s “Succession” and the strange resilience of villains in anime. She opines at length on the evils of pumpkin spice. Her message to former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz: “You’ve created a monster.”