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e stuck near the Internet, hovering like a fly waiting for a dog to take a shit. Under the guise of the
Dread Pirate Roberts, Ross told his confidant, “I organize my life around being on my computer in
private.” And this lifestyle was killing him.
“Brb, gotta move.”
In one of the more nauseating experiences, while on his travels, Ross had set off to a sleepy
surfer town in the middle of the jungle in Thailand. The plan was to lap up the waves, enjoy the
beach, hike through the palm trees, maybe smoke some weed, and (if all went well) meet a pretty
young backpacker. Except something went catastrophically awry on the site the moment he pulled into
town. Someone had started stealing Bitcoins from his account as a result of a major programming
error. Ross had no choice but to fix it right there and then—and it wasn’t an easy fix.
He was holed up from morning until night in the local Internet café, incessantly biting his nails
while he tried desperately to stop the Bitcoin robbery, all while locals and backpackers
lackadaisically wandered down the jungle town’s dirt roads, drank beers, and surfed in the warm
ocean waves. (“The people there thought I was a nut,” Ross later told Variety Jones. “There I was 18
hours a day on my laptop chewing my nails off. All these mellow people on vacation lookin at me
like wtf is up with that guy?!”)
Adding to this anxiety, Ross was terrified that someone would see the Silk Road logo or images
of drugs on his screen or ask questions about the code he was writing. Worse, a local, trying to gain
favor with his local cop buddies, might anonymously alert the authorities.
The anxiety could be petrifying when he was at his most lucid. Given that Ross’s site was making
it possible to buy drugs from anywhere with Internet access, he was technically a wanted man all
around the world. That meant he could be subject to the laws of almost any country on the planet. And
the last place Ross wanted to be arrested for enabling the sale of vast amounts of drugs was in
Southeast Asia, where Westerners had been hanged when they were caught trafficking mere ounces of
heroin.
So there was only one thing to do. When it was clear that Erica’s Facebook post had gone
unnoticed and that no one else suspected him of being anyone but Ross Ulbricht, he set a date to return
to Texas. That alone didn’t resolve the anxiety of running the site. But Ross had a plan there too. He
promised Variety Jones that he would start taking long walks, eating healthier meals to stay focused,
and tripling his daily meditation quota to at least thirty minutes before he went to sleep. With VJ
counseling him, Ross was going to try to handle the stresses that came with running the biggest drug
Web site the world had ever seen.
As for the nails? On April 10, a few days before he left Australia, he walked into a pharmacy,
slid a few dollars across the counter, and walked out with a bottle of anti-nail-biting formula.
He excitedly told Variety Jones about his new purchase. Ross said that he was going to apply the
magic ointment to his nails at least once a day for the next week. “Time to kick the habit,” he told VJ.
But he wouldn’t be able to kick it for long. Upon returning to America, Ross was going to
discover that not only had the Silk Road grown immensely over the past few months, but law
enforcement’s zeal to capture the Dread Pirate Roberts had too.