I’ve been working on a book about psychedelics for the past year and I’m getting close to the home stretch. The book, Shroomies: Our Search for Happiness Through Modern Mycology, explores the history, science, business, and personal experiences surrounding psilocybin.
The book will feature conversations with experts, first-hand accounts from those using psychedelics for therapy and self-discovery, and an exploration of the legal and business landscape. My goal is to present a balanced, research-backed perspective that is both accessible and informative.
I thought it would be valuable to share the first chapter of the book to talk about what I went through and why I’m writing it but I have to warn you: it’s about a near-suicide attempt and may disturb some readers. That said, I’m in a much better place now (partially thanks to your support with this ridiculous podcast and newsletter) and I think it’s important we share what we’re going through.
If you’d like to talk about your personal experiences with psychedelics or know someone working in the space I still need to speak to folks so please drop me a line or pick a spot here.
Let me know what you think.
It was 10:39 p.m. on a rainy May night in Chicago when I decided to walk in front of a bus.
My father had died half a year earlier, in January 2018, after a short but violent battle with lung cancer. I remember the night he died vividly: he told me it was nice knowing me as he passed into organ failure and eventual catatonia. Everything about that period—the frantic trips from Brooklyn to Columbus, where my parents lived, his wheeze that worsened by the day, the hacking cough that brought up seemingly endless liquid—is seared in my memory. He was a big, jovial man, someone who could talk to anyone and who drank like a Greek god. I knew he was dying when he refused a glass of wine on Christmas Eve. He died the day after New Year’s.
The cruel irony was that a man who loved to eat—who once weighed about 400 pounds—was taken by a disease that made his lungs resemble uncut Hormel deli meat. He labored and labored, taking experimental treatments and chemo at various hospitals. I’d fly home to drive him to appointments, sitting with chipper doctors who said he had a chance.
Dad never had a chance.
He was obstinate. One night I yelled at him for drinking a beer—something the doctors had strictly forbidden while he was undergoing some kind of experimental gene therapy. Now I was the one scolding my father—the man who had stood by me and, in his own way, shaped me through his own mix of reprimands and praise. The tables had turned.
He grew weak, thin, distracted.
“Did you see the light outside today? The deer?” he asked me one afternoon in November. I asked him what he was talking about, and he shook his head as if clearing cobwebs.
“It was nothing, don’t worry,” he said.
But I was worrying.
I remember his final moments, the silence after that labored breathing stopped.
I remember the comedy of dragging his massive body out of my parents’ basement apartment, taking him up the elevator where we could barely maneuver his bulk. I remember speaking at the funeral, crying in front of friends and family who had come to carry him to rest.
I remembered it all.
But of my night in Chicago, I can barely recall anything except a series of flashes: the pizza, the guitars, drinks at a bar, the lights of the bus reflecting in the rain, the drops refracting the scene into a thousand pinpricks, the dark street glazed with water.
That morning, I had woken up not feeling anything. I was in Chicago for only two days—I liked to fly in and out of cities as quickly as possible, once even landing, taking a meeting, and flying back to New York the same day. This trip was a bit longer, but not by much.
After breakfast, I set out walking through endless neighborhoods toward Lakeview, on my way to a company called Reverb where I was supposed to interview the CEO. I was still a tech journalist then, and PR people were still my close personal friends. They called me to invite me to parties where I drank too much and talked too loudly, and sometimes they even flew me to exotic locations like Switzerland and Seattle to see new products. It was quite a life.
Reverb buys and sells used music gear—from guitars to keyboards to amps. These days, due to an unfortunate habit of buying too many guitars, I love Reverb. But that day, I felt put upon—forced to talk to someone more successful than me, someone who got the unique pleasure of playing with guitars and music gear all day. I was jealous.
That was another issue I was facing back then: the sense that I had failed, that everyone had the right ideas, the right jobs, the right amount of money. I had none of that, even after a decade and a half of being a tech journalist with bylines in most major outlets—Wired, The New York Times, Men’s Health. I was on a downswing, and I felt it—the lurch in my stomach as I approached bottom.
The interview was uneventful. I recorded it, probably, but I don’t have the recording anymore. We walked around the warehouse, looked at stuff going in and out, stared at some amazing musical instruments from every decade.
After the interview, I went for deep-dish pizza at a place called The Art of Pizza near the Chicago Music Exchange. After eating nearly the entire fourteen-inch pie, I wandered down the street to Chicago’s temple of Fenders and Gibsons, where my eyes glazed over, uninterested in anything. The normal me—the me from a decade before—would have been salivating over guitars that were simultaneously beautiful and, thanks to my job at the time, affordable. But I felt nothing. I picked up a few, strummed them listlessly, texted my friend Rob some photos.
“Nothing cool here,” I remember saying to him.
This version of me—the one wandering around Chicago on that rainy afternoon—was pushing 300 pounds and traveling nearly 200 days a year. I was writing about the startup economy of a globe clambering out of the 2008 financial crisis. Hell, by 2018, I wasn’t even really a journalist anymore. I had given up the best job I ever had with some of the best colleagues to try to build startups on my own. My old outlet, TechCrunch, let me pretend to be a writer for a few years after I quit, giving me access to events where they’d fly me out, put me in a hotel, and get me drunk until I hit the stage—where I was surly and uncomfortable for about thirty minutes until I could get back to drinking.
Venture capitalists were throwing money at startups, and thanks to my own ego, I thought I could gather some for myself. I wanted to become the hero of my own founder’s journey. By 2018, I had failed twice—once raising and losing about half a million dollars, and another time building an entire product that became wildly popular with a few thousand people but couldn’t gain real traction. Now I was freelancing for the site I had essentially founded, and was quickly on my way to becoming irrelevant.
On that day in Chicago, I knew why I had failed so catastrophically: I was incompetent, incapable, unworthy of success. I was a lumbering oaf, too distracted to get anything done except write 500-word articles about guys who were making more money and winning more laurels than me.
I was a real treat to be around.
That night in Chicago, I had been invited to manage a pitch-off between multiple startups. These were fledgling companies just taking off and, due to the vagaries of the startup market, many of them would fail. In the theatre of entrepreneurship I was participating in, you weren’t supposed to talk about that. Instead, you were supposed to be roundly enthusiastic and open. I wasn’t. The pitch-off was unmemorable—more companies that wouldn’t make it out of the miasma of the Chicago startup scene—but they had an open bar.
I found myself in a futile argument with a guy who had apparently been Barack Obama’s CTO. I was petulant, angry, and drunk, having finished a huge beer at the pizza place and then polishing off glasses of free wine at the event. The debate—centered on which city was more entrepreneurial—was trivial, yet arguments like this were becoming increasingly common for me. My demeanor was bland. My expressions were bored and mean. I wasn’t being a nice person.
The problem was inside me. I was broken and angry. Innovations were becoming monotonous and repetitive. Moreover, the startups I engaged with were churning out cookie-cutter businesses—emerging scooter services, car-sharing clones, apps designed to locate friends in crowded clubs. I was utterly exhausted. I could fly to Chicago and see the same crop of startups I saw in Tokyo. I had been writing about tech since 2000, and at that point, I had seen enough.
Further, my first reader—the man I wrote for—my father, was dead. When I dashed off a TechCrunch post, I was writing for him. He had been an English teacher turned government worker turned Rush Limbaugh Republican, and he was the guy I was writing for: someone who needed to know about the latest and greatest to stop the despair of his politics from making him too depressed. I wanted to show him that, globally, the world was getting better and that all the bullshit he listened to on AM radio was fake. But he was gone.
So there I was—fatherless, isolated in a damp, chilly city, angry at the world. I had overeaten that day, consuming the pizza alone, and I was intoxicated. I felt as large as my father had been and wished to be as dead as he was. A bus approached on Elm Street just as I left the historic Biggs Mansion (no relation), where I had smoked a cigar with some friends. They had chosen that location with me in mind—a Biggs in the Biggs.
At 10:35 p.m., I was trying to find my way back to my hotel, pecking at my phone for a map. Then my brain broke and something told me to look up.
By 10:39 p.m., I had resolved that all it would take to end this day was to step directly into the path of the number 70 bus, approaching the corner of Elm and Dearborn. The lights inside the bus were as bright as day, and I remember seeing the driver’s face—his eyes a passive mask at the wheel.
By 10:40 p.m., I was ready to take that step. Then I looked again at the driver. Caught in the bright light of that massive machine, eyes at half-mast, going through the motions.
I felt sorry for him. He didn’t need his night ruined.
That thought stopped me—the realization that this poor driver would end his night cleaning his bus, haunted by the memory of the fat fool who threw himself in front of his vehicle.
I wasn’t thinking about my family, my kids, my wife, my mother, or my sister.
I was concerned about this unnamed bus driver.
By 10:41 p.m., I realized that while he might get a few days off if I went through with it, the moment had passed.
I called a psychiatrist the next day.
I am not unique. In the United States, fourteen in every 100,000 people commit suicide, with the rate for males at 22.8 per 100,000—significantly higher than that for females, at 5.7. I belonged to that sad dads contingent, a legion of men who felt their best years were behind them yet also ahead—except those years, the ones between diaper changes and pre-retirement, were tearing them apart.
Who was I to complain? I was where I wanted to be, where I needed to be. My career was stable; I was a D-list Internet celebrity. At my tech blog, which garnered a hundred million page views a month, people recognized me. They sought me out, hoping for a mention that could catapult them from the entrepreneurial trenches to dreams of Uber or Facebook billions. Yet I wasn’t seen as human—just an opportunity.
This was my curse: I had thousands of acquaintances worldwide but no one I could truly rely on or confide in. I could announce my arrival in a city and attract a hundred people to a bar, where I’d outdrink them while discussing startups. People pitched to me in bars, hotels, even bathrooms—cornering me at urinals. They sought my attention, and yet, I still felt like a failure.
My suicide attempt was a wake-up call to myself. My family didn’t see it as urgent, but I knew I needed help. My psychiatrist—whom I nicknamed The Thing for his calm demeanor and imposing presence—said I needed medication. I didn’t argue. I didn’t know any better.
For most of two decades, I had run on autopilot. My brain was empty of drama or regret. I spoke my mind in a way that was probably deeply insulting (nobody called me on it), and I filled rooms with gloom and anger. I thought I could get away with it because I was a journalist, a teller of truths. It was their fault if they didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t care if what I said hurt.
Little did I know, I was the one being hurt. Everybody else was just happy to get an article and then forget about me. I was just the asshole standing between them and their next million-dollar investment.
I started taking desvenlafaxine, an antidepressant that was promised to be “mild” and “pleasant” by The Thing. I dove right in, gained lots of weight, and waited for things to get better. The Thing and I didn’t do any talk therapy—I was too smart for that—and we just chatted for half an hour while he made sure the drugs were taking hold.
The meds “worked.” I wasn’t falling apart. I wasn’t crying in the shower. But I wasn’t laughing either. I wasn’t really anything. I’d been turned down to some middle setting where nothing hurt too much but nothing felt good either.
And there was this new issue: I couldn’t stop.
Missing a dose was like yanking a wire out of my brain. The zaps would start—little electric shocks in my skull, especially when I moved my eyes. It felt like flicking a loose cable behind a TV. So I’d go back on. Not because I wanted to, but because withdrawal was worse.
This went on for about a year. A long, gray, shapeless year. I showed up for work. I made small talk. I went to bed early and scrolled endlessly. I got through things. But I wasn’t living in any real sense. I was stalled. I knew it, even if I didn’t want to admit it.
This couldn’t be it. This couldn’t be my only option.
This wasn’t how I wanted to live. I needed something different.
Then I met the Shroomies.
