by 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. There were three cups in the pot, enough for three, but Parsons was feeling indulgent. He drank the whole vessel, down to the drop. Then he ate the tea bags.
“I was sailing,” says the billionaire.
Psychedelic is a clichéd pastime for the super-rich, with Elon Musk and Google founder Sergey Brin reportedly among its devotees.
“I wonder… when you realize that you have everything you could ever want, but you still have the vulnerabilities of being human and you will eventually die, maybe the psychedelic experience fills the that gap,” says Jerrold Rosenbaum, the Center’s director. for Psychedelic Neurology at Mass General Hospital.
But Parsons isn’t just a bored rich man who accuses a toad. Until his four-day psychedelic whirlwind, he suffered from terrible post-traumatic stress, which he attributes to a rough childhood and the horrors he endured in Vietnam.
“I grew up in East Baltimore, mean streets, mean streets,” he told a state legislative panel in Arizona this week. “[The] A man across the street from me was beaten to death. They found him and his teeth in different places in the house.”
In two interviews with The Daily Beast, Parsons, 73, elaborated on the turbulent life that led him to natural medicine. As a child, he was the victim of an armed robbery. At 17, he enlisted in the Marine Corps with two of his friends; one was killed before he could deploy, the other lost three limbs in combat. Parsons himself was evacuated from the fight after starting a triple whammy and dislocating his legs and leaving the elbow.
He says psychedelics helped him process the trauma. Now he is funding more research into the drugs. Last year, the Bob & Renee Parsons Foundation gave $6 million to the University of California, Berkeley. The couple has spread millions more to Mount Sinai Health System and the Bronx VA, among other institutions. In Arizona, Parsons is pushing to legalize psychedelic-assisted therapy centers.
Rosenbaum praised Parsons’ commitment to funding scientific research, although he cautioned that psychedelics are not a panacea. “Even for the conditions we’ve studied, not everyone gets better,” he said. “We don’t know how long it lasts or how you feed it or how often you have to do it.”
Rosenbaum emphasized that patients should be screened for a family history of bipolar disorder, psychosis, and other mental illnesses. “I would worry a little bit about people who need more comprehensive care,” he said.
Parsons is convinced that the upside is with him, a hero of drugs. After his 2018 experience, he finally let go of years of suppressed pain. “It was over,” he says, pausing for several minutes. “It was over.”
Below, Parsons shares more details about his work. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The Daily Beast: I’m curious about the environment you grew up in. Can you tell me a little more about your childhood?
Parsons: I grew up in East Baltimore. My parents were both gamblers but not very good at it, so my family was always broken. I mean, stark broke. My mother had a nervous breakdown when I was about 8 years old. And when I was 8, my father transferred me to the Catholic school for some reason or another, and not because he was going to church. The nuns there, they were all nuts. They were quite brutal in their punishment and treatment.
I was transferred back to public school in seventh grade, and then to high school. And I was a terrible student. Senior year, I didn’t think I would graduate. I joined the Marine Corps with two friends, and I came back and showed my orders to my teachers, and they all gave me a pass. It was mostly a miserable pass, I’d say.
The Daily Beast: Tell me about your experience after deployment.
Parsons: I served with a Marine Corps rifle company during the Vietnam War. And when I left there, I was a very happy man, and, you know, quite gregarious and so on. And then, I saw an opponent. And when I came back, I was a different man. I mean, I had PTSD to beat the band. The man who came back had a flash temper and was very strict, he didn’t smile much.
My experience also had positive effects. It helped me focus. I put myself in my work to block the PTSD, and I was able to achieve what I did for nothing.
Bob Parsons at the iConic Conference in Washington, DC, in 2015.
Paul Morigi/NBCUniversal via Getty
The Daily Beast: How has PTSD affected your personal life?
Parsons: PTSD cost me two marriages, no doubt. I mean, those two ex-wives were good women and good partners, and they lived as long as they could. And then I got the boot. And then my third wife, Renee, she hung on and really tried to work with me on this. And I read this book called How to change your mind, by Michael Pollan, about what psychedelics can do and how they work and how healing they can be. And the book was like shining a flashlight in a dark room.
So Renee connected me with two guides who travel under the radar and help people, especially veterans with PTSD. So I worked with them for the better part of a week and took three different psychedelics. It was a lot of tears. I mean, you deal with everything, it all comes back. And I mean, it’s hard.
The Daily Beast: Can you walk through my experience of taking the drugs? How does it feel when they start kicking in, and where does your brain go?
Parsons: You sit there with your guide and you take the drug. Probably about 40 minutes to an hour later it starts to take effect and you can feel jaundice and heat and see things. For example, I walked into what I thought was a very regular water closet, with just, you know, a white commode and a closet all painted white inside. When I entered it, it was the most ornate and beautiful thing.
The Daily Beast: Did the psychedelics trigger any particular memories?
Parsons: One of the memories I had forgotten, because I had blocked it out, was from the last few months of my deployment. I was in troop processing in Okinawa, where I would put guys on flights to come home and verify their unit on the way to Vietnam. And I would look at the guys, and I knew that they were all going to units with the heaviest combat. I knew that many of them would have their ribbons cut, and that none of them would come home the way they came. The mushrooms turned out to really bother me. I mean, I was back there. I could see them. And I cried. I cried as hard as I can ever remember crying. But now I can talk about it.
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The Daily Beast: How else have the drugs changed you?
Parsons: After I finished, people could not believe the change in me. My son said to his wife, “You know, daddy keeps calling and he’s so nice and happy. I think he found out that he’s going to die soon.” So, anyway, when I took psychedelics, it was 49 years since the war. And I finally came home.
The Daily Beast: After that experience, would you say you felt like a new person or that you finally felt like yourself again?
Parsons: I would say both. Because there are some issues I believe the psychedelics have helped with rights I’ve always had. You know, like a lot of us, I grew up tough, and I carried all that into the Marine Corps. So when I joined the Marine Corps, I was probably halfway to PTSD, and the war did the rest.
The Daily Beast: Has your brain been wiped clean once psychedelic? Or are they something you continue to use for ongoing treatment?
Parsons: I went through it another time with two guys from my squad. One was a machine gunner and one was the squad leader. And, you know, I’m glad to say I went ahead and brought them both home.
The Daily Beast: Tell me about the bill to legalize therapy centers in Arizona. Are you optimistic that it will succeed?
Parsons: I feel like Dorothy i The Wizard of Oz. There are many different personalities involved when it comes to government. Do I think it will pass? Yes, but more hope than know.
The Daily Beast: Maybe this is stereotypical, but I would think Arizona is more conservative about this kind of thing. Is that your experience?
Parsons: It can be. But marijuana was passed for therapeutic use, and five years later, it was opened for recreational use. Arizona is a little more liberal about that kind of stuff than you might think.
The Daily Beast: you are writing a book, Fire in the Hole! Can you explain that title?
Parsons: I am descended from coal miners, and they use that term when they send a charge to loosen some rock. And when I was in the Marine Corps and we found an enemy tunnel, we would never go down it. We would just set up a charge and throw some plastic explosives down there. When you look at the rest of my life, how it happened, how it happened, that term works.
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