Dec 25, 2019. I had some adult film stars to my house and we ate a bunch of mushrooms. Fairly normal event due to my friendships and career at the time.
I know. I know how that sounds. Read it again if you need to. Take your time.
If that sentence alone doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about why this book isn’t going to read like a WebMD article, nothing will. But that sentence is the absolute truth, and the night it describes is the most important night of my life. More important than any birthday, any job offer, any relationship milestone. Because that was the night I smoked my last cigarette. On Christmas, while tripping on mushrooms, with adult film stars in my living room. I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.
It was a small group — people I’d known for a long time. Good people. Weird people, sure. But good. The kind of people you spend Christmas with when you’ve lived in Las Vegas long enough and your family is in another state and you’ve built a life that doesn’t look like a Hallmark movie. My life didn’t look like a Hallmark movie. It looked like a behind-the-scenes feature on a late-night cable network, and honestly, I was fine with that. These were my people. This was my house. It was Christmas.
Somebody had brought the mushrooms. I’d done them before — not a regular thing, not even a frequent thing, but I wasn’t a rookie either. I knew the drill. Set and setting. Good vibes. Music. Comfortable environment. All the boxes were checked. We ate them, settled in, and waited for the come-up.
The living room was warm. Lights were low. Somebody had put on music — I don’t remember what, but I remember it sounded like it was coming from inside my chest. The mushrooms were hitting everyone differently. Some people were laughing. Some people were staring at the ceiling like they’d just found God up there. One person was having a very detailed conversation with my houseplant. Normal stuff. Good energy. Exactly what you want from a Christmas mushroom session with your friends.
Except for me. I was not having a good time.
The come-up hit me like a freight train that had been waiting around a corner specifically for me. My stomach flipped. Then flipped again. Then decided it was done being a stomach entirely and started auditioning for the role of “industrial trash compactor.” I felt the sweat break across my forehead first, then the back of my neck, then everywhere. The walls started doing that thing where they breathe, except they weren’t breathing gently — they were hyperventilating, and so was I.
I made it to the back door. Barely.
Outside, the air was cold and cutting. December in Las Vegas isn’t Alaska, but at night with the wind blowing, it bites. I was in a t-shirt. I was also in the middle of throwing up everything I’d eaten that day, so the cold was the least of my concerns.
I’ll spare you the graphic details. Actually, no, I won’t. I was on my hands and knees in my backyard, puking so violently that I thought I was going to dislocate a rib. The kind of puking where your body is trying to turn itself inside out through your mouth. The kind where you’re making sounds you didn’t know a human being could make. Between waves of it, I’d look up at the sky and the stars were swirling and I genuinely could not remember my own name for a few seconds at a time.
This went on for about an hour. A full hour.
While everyone inside was having the time of their lives — I could hear the laughter through the walls, through the windows, these muffled explosions of joy — I was outside in the cold wind, alone, on the ground, completely panicked, completely lost in my own head. I couldn’t find myself. That’s the only way I can describe it. I was there, but I wasn’t. My consciousness had slipped sideways, and I was watching myself from some weird angle, like a security camera in my own skull, and the footage was not encouraging.
I’ve had bad days. I’ve been in the hospital. I’ve been on house arrest. I’ve woken up in situations that would make your mother cry. But that hour in my backyard on Christmas night, 2019, was one of the loneliest, most terrifying hours of my life. I was surrounded by friends, in my own house, on a holiday, and I was completely alone with the worst version of my own thoughts.
And then something happened.
The puking stopped. Not gradually — it just stopped, like a faucet being shut off. The panic didn’t leave entirely, but it receded, like a wave pulling back from shore. I was still on the ground, still cold, still sweating, still tripping. But the chaos in my head had cleared just enough for one thought to push through all the static.
I was holding a cigarette.
I don’t even remember lighting it. That was the thing about being a smoker for twenty-plus years — cigarettes just appeared in your hand. They materialized. Like breathing, like blinking, like your heart beating. You didn’t decide to smoke. You just were smoking. Always. I must have pulled one out of my pack and lit it on autopilot while I was between rounds of vomiting, because of course I did. What else would a two-pack-a-day smoker do while having a panic attack? Smoke. Obviously.
I looked down at it. The cherry was glowing in the dark. The smoke was curling up into the cold air, getting shredded by the wind. I watched it for what felt like a long time. Maybe it was ten seconds. Maybe it was five minutes. Time was not behaving normally.
And then the thought arrived.
It wasn’t a gentle thought. It wasn’t an angel on my shoulder whispering wisdom. It was loud. It was clear. It punched through the psychedelic haze like a fist through wet paper:
I would not light a trashcan fire in my bedroom and then go to sleep. That would mess my lungs up. Why the fuck am I doing this to myself every hour of every day?
That was it. Word for word.
A trashcan fire in my bedroom. That’s what my brain chose as the metaphor. Not lung cancer. Not heart disease. Not the surgeon general’s warning or the picture of the blackened lungs on the anti-smoking poster. A trashcan fire. Because that’s how obvious it suddenly was. Smoking was exactly as stupid as lighting a small fire inside a closed room and breathing the smoke on purpose. I’d been doing it for over twenty years, and in that moment — with mushrooms dismantling every defense mechanism and rationalization I’d built up — I saw it with perfect, nauseating clarity.
I’d been lighting a trashcan fire in my body. Every hour. Every day. For my entire adult life and most of my childhood.
I looked at the cigarette one more time.
And I tossed it.
I tossed it into the dark, and I watched the cherry arc through the air, and I watched it hit the ground and throw up a tiny shower of sparks, and that was it.
That was the last cigarette I ever smoked.
I went back inside. I was still a mess — still tripping, still shaky, still tasting bile. But I had this bizarre, unshakable certainty. Like someone had flipped a circuit breaker in my head. The light was on now. I could see. And what I could see was that I was never going to smoke again.
I told everyone.
I told a living room full of people who were peaking on mushrooms that I had just quit smoking. On Christmas. After puking my guts out for an hour. While still actively tripping.
They thought I was absolutely insane.
And honestly? I get it. Because smoking was my fucking personality. That’s not an exaggeration — that’s what people said about me, to my face. “Oh, that’s just him. He smokes.” I was the guy who moved to Las Vegas partly because he could smoke indoors. The guy who got fired from Nvidia because he couldn’t go thirty minutes without a cigarette. The guy who chose every bar, every restaurant, every hotel, every flight, every friendship based on whether he could smoke there. The guy who sat outside a hospital on dilaudid with an IV pole, chain smoking, and told the nurses they could kick him out if they wanted to.
That guy just announced he was done smoking. While tripping on mushrooms. On Christmas.
“Sure, man,” someone said, laughing. “Merry Christmas.”
Nobody believed me.
I didn’t care.
The mushrooms didn’t quit smoking for me. I need you to understand that. The mushrooms did not quit smoking for me. What they did — what psychedelics can sometimes do, and there’s actually real research on this now — is strip away the bullshit. All of it. Every excuse, every rationalization, every “I’ll quit tomorrow,” every “it’s not that bad,” every “I enjoy it,” every single layer of self-deception that I’d been building for over two decades. The mushrooms took a blowtorch to all of it, and for about ten seconds, I saw the truth with no filter.
And the truth was simple: I was killing myself, and I knew it, and I was choosing to do it anyway, and there was no good reason.
That’s it. That’s the truth that every smoker already knows but can’t feel. You know it intellectually. You’ve read the statistics. You’ve seen the commercials. You’ve heard the warnings. But there’s a difference between knowing something and feeling it in your bones, in your gut, in every cell of your body screaming at you at the same time.
The mushrooms let me feel it. All at once. And once I felt it, I couldn’t unfeel it.
But I was ready.
This is the part people skip over. They hear “mushrooms” and they think that’s the story. It’s not. The mushrooms were the match. But I’d been building the bonfire for two years.
Two years of looking at every cigarette and thinking not today, but soon. Two years of silently plotting. Two years of mental preparation — the cough that wouldn’t go away, the feeling like I had the flu all the time, the constant choking on phlegm. Two years of knowing I was approaching the edge. The Juul documentary three months earlier, planting seeds. Every single day of those two years was a brick in the wall, and on Christmas night, the wall was high enough for me to see over it.
If I’d eaten those mushrooms two years earlier, I’d have had a bad trip, puked, and smoked a cigarette when I got back inside. The insight would’ve bounced off me like a rubber bullet, because I wasn’t ready to receive it. The preparation matters. The two years matter. The silent, internal work of getting yourself to the point where you’re ready to hear the truth — that matters more than the moment itself.
You’re reading this book. Maybe you’ve been reading it in secret. Maybe you told someone. Maybe you’re sitting on a patio right now, smoking, reading about how I quit, thinking about how different your situation is.
Your moment is coming.
It might not be mushrooms and adult film stars on Christmas. In fact, it almost certainly won’t be. That’s my moment. It’s weird and it’s specific and it’s mine. Your moment is going to look completely different.
Maybe it’s your kid looking up at you and saying, “Why do you smell like that?” Maybe it’s a chest X-ray that scares the shit out of you. Maybe it’s a doctor appointment that doesn’t go the way you expected. Maybe it’s watching your parent die of something smoking-related and realizing you’re on the exact same path. Maybe it’s waking up at 3 AM coughing so hard you can’t breathe and your partner is lying next to you pretending to be asleep but you can feel them worrying in the dark.
Maybe it’s just a Tuesday. Maybe you’ll be standing outside your office building in the rain, smoking, and you’ll look at the cigarette and something will click. No fanfare. No mushrooms. No drama. Just a quiet, certain voice in your head that says: I’m done.
Every single ex-smoker I’ve ever talked to has a moment. Every one. And here’s the wild part — nobody’s moment makes logical sense from the outside. I’ve talked to people who quit after their doctor told them they had six months to live. Makes sense, right? But those same people had ignored twenty years of warnings before that. I’ve talked to people who quit because their dog looked at them funny while they were smoking. A dog. That was the thing that did it.
The moment doesn’t matter.
What matters — the only thing that matters — is what you do with it.
Because here’s the dark truth that nobody talks about: most people have their moment and ignore it. Most people feel that flash of clarity, that second of truth, that gut-level understanding that they need to stop — and then they light another cigarette and push it back down into the pile of things they don’t want to think about. I know because I did it too. I had a hundred small moments before the big one. A hundred times I looked at a cigarette and thought this is stupid. A hundred times I coughed myself awake at night and thought I need to stop. And a hundred times, I smoked anyway.
The difference on Christmas wasn’t that the moment was bigger. It was that I was finally ready to act on it. Two years of preparation. Two years of building toward being the person who could look at that cigarette and actually throw it away instead of taking another drag.
Stop waiting for the perfect moment.
The perfect moment does not exist. There is no cosmic alignment where quitting suddenly becomes easy. There is no magical experience that removes the difficulty. There is no scenario in which you quit smoking and it doesn’t completely suck for a while. I quit during a psychedelic experience surrounded by adult film stars on Christmas Day, and you know what? It still sucked. The insight was clear. The execution was hell. The weeks and months that followed were some of the worst of my life.
The perfect moment is the one you actually act on. That’s it. That’s the whole secret. It’s not about finding the right time. It’s about deciding that this time — this moment, right now, whatever it looks like — is the one where you stop making excuses.
Maybe your moment already happened and you ignored it. That’s okay. It’ll come around again. It always does, because some part of you knows the truth, and that part doesn’t shut up. It just gets quieter the longer you ignore it. But it’s still there. It’s still waiting.
And next time it speaks up — next time you’re standing in the cold, or sitting in your car, or lying in bed at 2 AM, and that voice says I need to stop — listen to it. Don’t argue with it. Don’t negotiate. Don’t say “after this pack” or “after the holidays” or “when things calm down.” Things never calm down. There’s always another pack, another holiday, another excuse dressed up as a reason.
Listen. Act. Throw the cigarette away.
I did it on Christmas night, puking and terrified and tripping, in the cold wind, alone.
You can do it wherever you are right now.
But I won’t lie to you. When I walked back into that living room and told everyone I was done with cigarettes, I felt like a genius. I felt invincible. I felt like I’d cracked the code that had been beating me for twenty years.
That feeling was about to get me into a whole different kind of trouble.
Because I had quit smoking. But I had not quit nicotine. Not even close.