Today’s track: Lucille — B.B. King
I grew up in a pretty magical place. Springboro, Ohio — tucked between Dayton and Cincinnati, fortunately surrounded by great jobs. Ten thousand people when I was a kid. Second-fastest growing city in the state now. There wasn’t much crime. People were nice to each other. Not a lot of rainy days.
After I graduated, we did get our own little Breaking Bad moment. A sitting city council member got raided and resigned after drug agents pulled eleven small baggies of cocaine and two cars out of his house. And the guy owned the local donut shop — the Donut Haus — which sat adjacent from the our local police station. You can’t make it up. Donut shops have always been a cash business, too, which, you know… makes the books a little easier to keep tidy. Allegedly. My Uncle David lost his first job at a Duncan Donuts in Rhode Island because they “wanted to keep it in the family.”
After my mother passed away from drinking, I was cautious about everything. Religious family, raised in the church. And somewhere in there I decided drugs were beneath me.
There weren’t many people around me doing them. The few who were, I got along with great — I just didn’t hang out with them. I went off to college. Never touched tobacco. Never have, to this day, because I know I’d like it too much. Not worth the risk.
But looking back, I wish I’d gravitated toward the guys smoking weed and taking mushrooms instead of the guys leaning into drinking — which was never my speed anyway. The curious ones. Some of the coolest, most intellectual people I now are endlessly curious about life, always experimenting. And I was like — no. Not me. Not me.
I think I missed finding some of my tribe that way.
Fast forward. I’m thirty-eight now.
About three years ago I started smoking weed. Began with edibles — oh, this is nice, I like this. Got back from a trip to Italy and decided to actually start smoking. I wanted to participate in the way all the generations before me had. And I found it was everything I’d been looking for.
Here’s why. I was prescribed ADD medicine my whole childhood — Adderall, Ritalin, Concerta, you name it. But it always muted me. Flattened my personality, drained the joy right out. I lost my Me.
Weed does the opposite. It helps my executive function. A lot of ADD people struggle to take action — we build mountains out of molehills, we freeze. For me, a little weed and suddenly it’s: I’m going to do laundry, take out the trash, pick up the guitar and write a song, read ten pages, knock out that paperwork, flesh out that business idea, start a short story. It just cuts out the friction and I’m happier, kinder.
That’s been a huge discovery. Big enough that I feel obligated to be an advocate — the same way I’ve been about sleep studies and early cancer detection.
So now I feel like I need to be one for weed. And for mushrooms.
Mushrooms were below me too. Same principle as everything else. I’ve only done them in a real capacity three times, about three years ago — two doses of three and a half grams in tea, where I barely saw any squigglies. What I did notice was the week after: I’d be so deliberate. That executive function again. It actually creates neurological pathways in your brain!
It took a lot of research to get there, by the way. Three or four documentaries. Picked up a copy of How to Change Your Mind. There is also a documentary on Netflix.
One time I microdosed before a fundraising-and-capital conference — way out of my real estate wheelhouse, but I wanted to expand my horizons. I’d gotten invited to some cool rooms with incredible people, and honestly I didn’t know if I’d bring any value. The microdose just made me talk less than usual. Listen more.
And what I found out, sitting quieter than normal, was that I was actually one of the smarter people in the room — I could add value in a different way than their backgrounds did. So I started talking more. And three separate people pulled me aside and asked if I offer coaching or mentorship for a living.
I laughed. No, no, no. I just get genuinely excited about helping people with their businesses. I’m ADD, so I think a little differently — tell me your bottleneck and I’ll go whoa, have you thought about this?
It’s the same thing that made my Dad special at LexisNexis. He was an engineer-architect, also ADD, and that’s a hard way to be wired in that world. But because he understood how everything connected, people brought him their problems to solve. He was the troubleshooter.
I do the same thing in real estate — Winner Realty, data centers, HireMySub, OffMarket.deals, our data company Property Partner. Look at all of it and there’s a unifying thread.
The common thread for my two choices? Both all-natural. I haven’t messed with anything that isn’t. Not for me — or not yet.
This one’s scarier to write, because a lot of you carry the exact attitude I used to carry, before I got curious. I hope it doesn’t take anything away from what you think of me. But it had to be said.
Here’s what’s wild. Seniors are the highest adopters of marijuana right now. And what’s happening is some young person convinces their grandparent to try mushrooms or weed for cognitive health — because there’s incredible research on how psilocybin builds new neurological connections in the brain, which matters enormously as you age. Kentucky, by the way, is the number one state for psychedelic research.
There’s a study where seniors did the Finger Tap Test, a simple metric to measure psychomotor performance in seniors. When combined with psilocybin microdosing, researchers found that adults over the age of 55 showed up to a 40% increase in total taps, along with improvements in mood and mental health! Simply incredible! You can learn more about it here.
So a “youth” gets grandma to try an edible or some weed. Grandma tells her friends. And next thing you know a whole group of older folks are coming off medications they’ve been taking for years — pills they don’t even know the contents of — because they just feel better.
I think that’s great. I just think it’s a shame we’re only getting here now, when we could’ve been exposed to this stuff so much earlier. Can’t complain about progress. The world’s changing. I just hope people aren’t as closed off as I was.
I try to be open about this with my friends, because not everything’s for everyone.
If I drink a beer or a bourbon, it just makes me fart and makes me sleepy — and it’s a carcinogen, so it’s more likely to give me cancer. So I don’t. But for some people, it lightens them up, chills them out, makes them happy. Some people’s drug of choice is a cup of coffee first thing in the morning, caffeine. We all run differently.
Took me a while to understand that. I used to be the you have to try this, you’ll have the exact same experience I did guy — about food, concerts, everything. People aren’t you. We all experience life in our own special way.
Have a great day!
Be curious, not judgmental. Quoting Ted Lasso again — it just fits!
Bonus track: Flying on the Ground Is Wrong (Live at The Cellar Door) — Neil Young
Kindly,
Rob Bergeron
Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
Schedule a time to discuss your goals, bottlenecks, whatever is on your mind.
The Morning Bergeron daily track playlist: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/the-morning-bergeron/pl.u-pMyl2GlSW1N3qv
PS: May’s Personal Consumption Expenditures inflation — the Federal Reserve’s preferred gauge — jumped to 4.1%, the hottest since April 2023, and the core reading hit 3.4%, the highest since October 2023. Inflation is officially running at more than double the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. And the economy isn’t cooling to help: jobless claims fell to 215,000 against 225,000 expected, and first-quarter 2026 gross domestic product was revised up to 2.1% from 1.6%. Hot inflation plus a strong labor market is not the setup for rate cuts — I’m hoping falling oil prices drag it down fast. One bright spot: mortgage rates dropped ten basis points to 6.33%. Hoping that trend holds. Sellers now outnumber buyers by 630,000, the largest gap ever recorded (roughly 1.99 million sellers to 1.36 million buyers). Shift your strategy with a shifting market.
PSS: Americans with more than one income stream now total 51 million, up from 41 million just two years ago. That’s 10 million more people building something on the side in 24 months. So I’m curious: what are you doing? And if the answer is “nothing yet” — what do you want to be doing?