In 2018, GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons was sitting with two self-styled shamans in Hawaii, one of whom had brewed a small pot of psilocybin tea. The pot held three cups, enough for three people, but Parsons was feeling indulgent. He drank the entire vessel, down to the drop. Then he ate the tea bags.
“I was sailing,” the billionaire says.
Psychedelics have become a clichéd pastime for the ultra-rich, with Elon Musk and Google founder Sergey Brin reportedly among the devotees.
“I wonder… when you realize you have everything you could possibly want, but you still have the vulnerabilities of being human and are eventually going to die, maybe the psychedelic experience sort of fills that gap,” says Jerrold Rosenbaum, director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics at Mass General Hospital.
But Parsons is not just a bored rich man licking toads. Until his four-day psychedelic whirlwind, he suffered from crippling post-traumatic stress, which he attributes to a rough childhood and the horrors he lived through in Vietnam.
“I grew up in East Baltimore, mean streets, mean streets,” he told a state legislative panel in Arizona this week. “[The] guy across the street from me was beat to death. They found him and his teeth in different parts of the house.”
“It was a lot of tears. I mean, you deal with everything, it all comes back. And I mean, it is hard.”
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-Bob Parsons on his psychedelic trip
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