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GET OUTSIDE YOUR HEAD SO YOU CAN SEE INSIDE IT

Time and time again, the world-changers I’ve interviewed have brought up the importance of finding self-awareness in order to achieve success and happiness. In the data analysis, self-awareness ranked as the sixth most important thing for performing better. But what is self-awareness, really? You could define it as an intimate understanding of the normally subconscious factors that motivate you. These factors include not only your passions and your fears but also your limiting beliefs and all of the ways your past traumas—big and small—are affecting your daily life. It is only when you make these normally subconscious pieces of yourself conscious that you can start doing the necessary work to change them and finally get out of your own way.

There are many ways to become more self-aware, from meditation (which we will discuss in chapter 13) to creating intimate connections with others (which we will explore in chapter 5). But there is another powerfully effective—albeit less conventional—method for tapping into an enhanced state that can lead to self-awareness:

Drugs.

More specifically, nootropics—compounds that enhance brain function, also known as “smart drugs,” as well as strategically used (usually) legally regulated substances. Although none of the guests on the show said outright that using mind-altering drugs (psychedelics or hallucinogens such as ayahuasca, DMT, mushrooms, MDMA, or LSD) was one of their most important pieces of advice for someone wanting to perform better, looking at the data and judging from our behind-the-scenes conversations, it became clear that many of my guests have used these tools occasionally as a mechanism to find that all-important self-awareness. Game changers honor and seek the transcendent parts of life because that is where the boundaries of high performance are found. One reason you don’t hear guests talk about it on the air is because microdosing—the practice of taking small, controlled doses of these substances—is still illegal in most places. It does carry real risks, but this book would be incomplete if it ignored this increasingly common and effective technology. Dozens of guests have asked me about it or shared stories—just not when the microphone is live.

It’s important to note that all of the guests who mentioned hallucinogens also have a meditation practice and other means of finding self-awareness that they use in conjunction with natural or pharmaceutical drugs. They’re not taking drugs recklessly or with the goal of getting high. Though there is a vocal minority out there that insists you can simply take a bunch of hallucinogens to find enlightenment or inner peace, that’s not what I’m talking about here, and it doesn’t work. The whole concept of biohacking is about doing everything you can to achieve your biological goals, and it’s up to each of us to define his or her own risk/reward ratio.

For years, I’ve been open about my goals—to live to at least 180 years old, maximize my potential, and literally radiate energy—and my occasional use of carefully chosen plant medicines and pharmaceuticals to help me reach those goals. For some reason, taking brain-enhancing drugs is seen as controversial. Some people view it as “cheating,” but chemicals are just tools: you can use them for good or harm. In my mind, taking a drug to help me become more self-aware or to sharpen my focus is no different from drinking coffee to help me become less tired, using reading glasses to see the words on a page more clearly, or popping a Tylenol to quell a headache that is preventing me from getting my work done. There is risk involved in each—coffee can harm sleep, reading glasses make your eyes weaker, and Tylenol is bad for your liver. Yet we regularly use these tools when the benefit is greater than the risk based on our own goals.

It’s about time that we consider all available options to help people better understand themselves. Face it: spending your whole life slowly struggling to get out of your own way is simply disrespectful of the life you’re lucky to have and all the people you may not treat with compassion or respect because of what’s going on in your head. In my opinion, if an occasional pharmaceutical dosage of a hallucinogenic drug in a legal, safe setting can help, it’s worth considering. It’s helped me.

Few people know that one of the founding fathers of our country was a physician named Dr. Benjamin Rush. He lobbied to include medical freedom as a basic right and warned the other founding fathers of the risk of “medical tyranny” if they did not protect our right to choose what medicines we wanted. Dr. Rush was one of the original biohackers. Two hundred years ago, he believed in organizing all medical knowledge around explaining why people got sick instead of how to treat them and the importance of the environment and the brain on health, and he was a founder of the field of American psychiatry. His science was way off base (inducing vomiting, bleeding, and blistering aren’t really good for you, although they were common tactics two hundred years ago, before we knew about microbes). Still, he’d be at the top of my list of people to interview if he were alive today, based on the change he caused. (I hope Lin-Manuel Miranda, who created Hamilton, is reading this!)

I side with Dr. Rush when it comes to medical freedom. Whether or not you approve of others using cognition-enhancing drugs—including psychedelics—it is a basic human right to choose what we put into our own bodies. My body, my biochemistry, my decision. So let’s talk about it.

Law 7: Smart Drugs Are Here to Stay

When your brain is working at its full capacity, everything you want to do requires less effort, including the work it takes to become more self-aware. Nootropics, or smart drugs, do just that: they make you smarter. Lots of them are legal, but some are not. If you’re not actively supporting your cognitive function in every way, you’re simply less likely to perform well at whatever matters most to you.

There are literally hundreds of compounds documented to increase cognitive function in one way or another, and more of them come from plants than from pharmaceutical manufacturers. Over the last twenty years, I’ve tried every one I could find. Some had relatively no impact on me (other than causing headaches and nausea); others have had a tremendous impact. My feedback from those experiences has resulted in the development of multiple plant-based nootropic formulas at Bulletproof. But what I want to discuss here are the potent nootropics you aren’t going to find made by a supplement company.

A Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann first discovered high-dose LSD’s effects in 1943 when he accidentally ingested some in his lab. At first he was terrified that he had poisoned himself, but when his lab assistant checked his vital signs and assured him that he was fine, he settled down and found that LSD opened his mind to perspective-altering insights and intensified his emotions. He recognized that LSD had therapeutic benefits.

A few years later, Dr. Stanislav Grof, the father of transpersonal psychology, legally, as a licensed psychiatrist, treated thousands of patients with LSD with great success in what was then Czechoslovakia. Today, LSD is probably the most famous psychedelic, but over the last several years the conversation has shifted from dropping acid at Burning Man to taking a controlled microdose as a nootropic. Among Silicon Valley tech employees and other high performers, including ultraendurance athletes, microdosing LSD has become pretty commonplace (and at least one elite athlete disclosed to me that he thought most people running 100-mile races were microdosing LSD).

This idea is not as crazy as it may sound. LSD is certainly a mind-expanding drug. The key to using it as a nootropic is taking a tiny dose—one-twentieth to one-tenth of a full dose. For some people, this leads to increased positivity, creativity, focus, and empathy without creating any psychedelic effects. A few creative leaders have been using drugs such as LSD for years but very infrequently. Steve Jobs credited LSD with contributing to his success with Apple. He said that taking a full dose of LSD was a profound experience and one of the most important things he’d done in his life.¹

LSD causes the region in the brain that is involved in introspection (thinking about yourself) to communicate more intensely than usual with the part of the brain that perceives the outside world.² This could explain why many people feel at one with the universe and others and set their egos aside when using LSD. It also interacts with the brain’s neural circuits that use the “feel-good” neurotransmitter seratonin, mimicking seratonin in the brain.³ Though some people worry that this could potentially cause addiction (when a drug mimics a chemical, the body can begin to rely on that drug instead of producing the chemical itself), studies suggest that LSD is far less risky than its reputation suggests.

Even at a full dose (ten to twenty times a microdose), researchers ranked LSD as the fourth least dangerous recreational drug—far below alcohol and nicotine⁴—and historically not a single person has died from an LSD overdose.⁵ But lots of people have died from doing stupid things while tripping on LSD, and some people who take it end up worse off psychologically than when they started. Long-term usage is also probably a bad idea. In one study, researchers administered full doses to rats every other day for ninety days and found hyperactivity, decreased social interaction, and changes to the genes for energy metabolism.⁶ It is not risk free, especially if you use it for fun instead of for personal growth with assistance from trained and experienced experts, or if you use it before your brain is done growing (in your early twenties).

The benefits of LSD are real, however. In two double-blind studies, participants with life-threatening illnesses showed a significant decrease in anxiety after LSD-assisted therapy with no negative side effects or safety issues.⁷ A meta-analysis of 536 participants taken from studies in the 1950s and 1960s (before the drug became illegal) found that a single dose of LSD significantly decreased alcoholism.⁸ The effect lasted for many months after the single dose. More recently, a 2006 study found that LSD decreased the intensity and frequency of cluster headaches.⁹

More relevant to this book, LSD can actually power up your brain. It increases the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a powerful protein that stimulates your production of brain cells and strengthens existing ones.¹⁰ Studies have found that psychedelics help rabbits learn a new task more quickly.¹¹ We don’t know for sure if this translates to human learning, but it’s promising and may be one reason why psychedelic-assisted therapy helps patients combat depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) more effectively than standard therapy does. Other psychedelics, such as mushrooms and ayahuasca (a shamanic brew from South America containing dimethyltryptamine [DMT], which we will discuss later), also raise BDNF. Exercise also increases BDNF; I like to stack my BDNF stimulators for the greatest possible benefit.

Steve Jobs was not the only game changer to have used psychedelics on the quest for self-awareness. Tim Ferriss, the author of The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, and Tools for Titans, appeared on Bulletproof Radio twice. Tim talked about his experience using ibogaine, an African psychedelic, in a microdosing protocol.

Ibogaine is used by some people as a very mild stimulant. In fact, it was sold in France many years ago for precisely that purpose. Ibogaine has a poor safety record compared to other psychedelics, mostly related to cardiac events. Tim estimates that somewhere between one in a hundred and one in three hundred people who use ibogaine will experience a fatal cardiac event and recommends doing so only under proper medical supervision while hooked up to machines that track your pulse and heart rate. Tim microdosed ibogaine at very low dosages—a range of 2 to 4 milligrams, which is about one-hundredth of a full dose. He experienced a mild prefrontal headache and had a slightly buzzy, very mildly anxious feeling for the first three to four hours. But in that period of time, he did experience heightened attention.

What was most interesting, though, was not what happened on that first day but what happened subsequently. For the next two to three days, Tim reports, his happiness set point was about 15 to 20 percent higher than usual. He also felt highly nonreactive: He was cool and dispassionate and didn’t react emotionally. This is a state he says would normally take him two to three weeks of daily meditation to reach.

Am I suggesting that you microdose ibogaine to increase your performance? Absolutely not. I haven’t tried it and am not planning to because the risk isn’t worth the reward for me. I have young kids. My happiness set point is consistently higher than it ever has been. My flow state comes from service to others, public speaking, EEG neurofeedback, and writing. But again, I believe everyone should have the right to weigh the risks and choose for themselves.

Tim made sure to have medical personnel in attendance when he tried ibogaine, in part because he has witnessed the negative effects of hallucinogens firsthand. When he was much younger, he experimented with LSD, decided to go for a walk, and stepped right into the street. He “came to” standing in the middle of the road at night with headlights bearing down on him. Tim’s cousin, who had a family history of schizophrenia, went from being a super-high-functioning chess whiz to being barely communicative after using LSD. Some medical experts believe that psychedelics can exacerbate or even trigger mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Yet there are many applications for these drugs, and Tim and I are both glad that many game changers are initiating a responsible conversation about them.

In service of my own growth, I traveled to Amsterdam nineteen years ago to try medical mushrooms, which were legal there. That single experience profoundly changed my brain, drawing my attention to hard-to-find patterns. It taught me to look at the world more closely, and I believe it helped me process some of my own fears that were holding me back and to see the stories I was telling myself so I could start editing them. That’s the real value of this type of medicine. Did taking mushrooms help in my success, and would I do it again? Absolutely, and without reservation.

Note that I was in a country where I could legally use mushrooms. As a biohacker, I make it a point to try everything that might help me raise my limits, but I don’t want to go to jail, either. In 2013, I microdosed LSD for thirty days straight and found the effect to be similar to that of other entirely legal nootropics you’ll read about later in the chapter. I found it’s not worth the legal risk because the rewards weren’t that high for me. If it were free of legal risk, I’d add it to my nootropic stack some of the time.

Even microdosing isn’t without career risk. During my thirty-day experiment, I accidentally took a slightly higher dose than planned one morning. I felt mild elation right before I went onstage in front of a room of about 150 influential executives in Los Angeles to be interviewed about biohacking. Not good. I made it through the interview mostly unscathed, although I cracked a couple jokes that weren’t funny to anyone except me. If the dose had been even a little bit higher, who knows what else I would have said? Even when you’re far from high, your judgment may be altered when microdosing, and you won’t know it until later.

And yes, I go to Burning Man and greatly value my experiences there, some of which may include full-dose psychedelics. When they do, it’s always with people who are there to make it safe (including medical professionals), and I walk away better off. More on full-dose experiences later. The bottom line is that microdosing psychedelics is neither a panacea for personal growth and performance nor entirely useless and dangerous. Psychedelics can heal. They can harm. At very low doses, they can increase your performance. If you decide to use them, start slowly, do so with a trusted person, do so for the first time when you’re not planning a big day at work, and do so in a legal jurisdiction. These aren’t party drugs.

You also can’t expect to pop a pill and suddenly possess new levels of self-awareness. When used appropriately, these drugs can activate an elevated consciousness that triggers new insights, but to truly cultivate self-awareness, you still have to do the work. In other words, drugs in and of themselves won’t make you more aware, but they can give you the opportunity to see the things you need to work on. It’s up to you to then take action and work on them!

But microdosing psychedelics is far from the only way to benefit from certain drugs. I have actively benefited from another class of drugs, nootropics, since 1997, when I was grappling with a steep decline in my cognitive performance at work. When my doctor was ill equipped to help, I took matters into my own hands and ordered almost $1,000 worth of smart drugs from Europe (the only place where you could get them at the time). I remember opening the unmarked brown package and wondering whether the contents would actually improve my brain. They did, and I’ve been a big fan of certain cognitive enhancers ever since.

Like psychedelics, smart drugs won’t automatically blanket you in self-awareness. Finding self-awareness takes energy. Anytime you can give yourself better cellular function, more energy, increased neuroplasticity, and improved learning abilities (which many of these drugs do), it makes gaining self-awareness easier. You can progress more quickly if you’re running on high power.

The trouble with using a blanket term such as nootropics is that it lumps all kinds of substances together. Technically, you could argue that caffeine and cocaine are both nootropics, but they’re hardly equal. With so many ways to enhance your brain function, many of which have significant risks, it’s most valuable to look at nootropics on a case-by-case basis. Below are just a few of the nootropics I’ve had the most success with over the years.

RACETAMS

Perhaps the biggest supporter of the racetam family is Steve Fowkes, a biochemist who wrote and edited a newsletter called Smart Drug News starting in the 1980s. It was his early work that brought nootropics to my attention and inspired me to order that umarked brown package of smart drugs. Imagine my delight when he ended up becoming a guest on Bulletproof Radio twenty years later! Steve explains that the racetam family of pharmaceuticals contains dozens of related compounds, including a few well-known nootropics. The best studied one is piracetam, but the most effective racetam nootropics I’ve found are aniracetam and phenylpiracetam. I like aniracetam more than piracetam because it is fast acting, reduces stress, and increases your ability to get things into and out of your memory. Phenylpiracetam is highly energizing and stimulating, which helps with some tasks but hinders some others. It is also a banned substance in some sports.

When I take 800 milligrams of aniracetam, I find I speak more fluently and don’t ever grasp for words. This effect is likely due to the fact that the racetam family improves mitochondrial function and sends extra oxygen to the brain. Most of the research has been done on people with neurological problems (with amazing results), but there is plenty of good evidence to support its use in healthy individuals. In studies, 400 milligrams of phenylpiracetam taken daily for a year significantly improved brain function and cognition in people recovering from a stroke;¹² 200 milligrams of phenylpiracetam taken for thirty days improved neurological function by 7 percent in people with brain damage¹³ and by 12 percent in people with epilepsy.¹⁴ In studies on rats, aniracitam improved memory and countered depression.¹⁵ A single small study of piracetam in healthy adults found that after fourteen days it significantly improved verbal learning.¹⁶

The side effects are minor—mostly racetams can amplify the effects of caffeine or use up a nutrient called choline, which you can easily replenish by eating egg yolks or supplementing with CDP choline or sunflower lecithin. The risk/reward ratio of this family is very good. They’re legal in the United States and widely available online. Do not start with a “stack” of multiple racetams. Try each one separately and note how you feel; the effects of each are highly variable. You’re as likely to get angry, develop a headache, or feel nothing from a stack as you are to get what you’re looking for because of cross reactions.

MODAFINIL (PROVIGIL)

Have you ever seen the movie Limitless with Bradley Cooper? It’s loosely based on modafinil. This stuff gives you superhuman mental processing powers with few to no downsides. Studies show that in healthy adults, modafinil improves fatigue levels, motivation, reaction time, and vigilance.

I used modafinil for eight years—it helped me with everything from studying at Wharton to working on a start-up that sold for $600 million. I wouldn’t have an MBA without it. I’ve recommended it to countless friends with great results, and you may have seen me on ABC’s Nightline or CNN talking about using it for executive performance. Nightline sent a crew to my house for two days because I was the only executive they could find who would publicly admit I was using it to get ahead at work and school. I was public about it because I wanted to drive a national conversation about smart drugs and remove the stigma. It worked, and smart drugs are much better known now.

Modafinil improves memory and mood, reduces impulsive decision making, increases your resistance to fatigue, and even improves your brain function when you are suffering from lack of sleep. A recent peer-reviewed analysis from Oxford and Harvard of twenty-four studies of modafinil since 1990 found the same things I’ve been writing about based on what it did for me: it significantly enhanced attention, executive function, and learning in healthy people who were not deprived of sleep while they were performing complex tasks—with just about zero side effects. The authors concluded that “modafinil may well deserve the title of the first well-validated pharmaceutical nootropic agent.”¹⁷ Bam!

Unlike many other smart drugs, modafinil is not a stimulant; it is actually a eugeroic—a wakefulness-promoting agent. That means it doesn’t make you speedy or jittery like most classical stimulants do, and it doesn’t cause you to crash or go through withdrawal because it is not addictive.¹⁸ I found that I could actually decrease my dose as my health improved and I needed less of it to function optimally. At this point, it’s been four years since I’ve had a use for it. When I apply all the other hacks, there is no meaningful measurable difference between my brain on modafinil and off it. But I keep it in my travel bag in case I want to pull out all the stops in an emergency. I don’t think I’ll ever need it again because I have built energy reserves beyond my wildest expectations, but I’m glad it’s in my bag of tricks if I ever do.

Actually, screw that. After rereading all the research that went into writing this section, I just decided to take 50 milligrams in case it makes the rest of the book better. I’m kind of excited to see what happens.

If you deal with jet lag or intense fatigue or occasionally really want to get something done, this can be a powerful nootropic and a life changer. It’s not risk free—some people develop headaches when using it, and about five in 1 million people can develop a life-threatening autoimmune condition—a risk similar to that of taking ibuprofen. If you know your genetic sequence (from 23andMe or a similar service), you can check to see if you have the genes that put you at risk. They are listed on the Bulletproof blog. Modafinil does not mix well with alcohol.

You can buy modafinil online from India without a prescription from a US doctor, and most of it is real. However, to get a prescription in the United States, it really helps if you can claim to have symptoms of shift worker sleep disorder, which most insurance companies will reimburse. Since this is a medical drug, it’s best to get a prescription. Your doctor may recommend a more expensive, sometimes more potent, form, called Nuvigil.

Holy crap, the modafinil from two paragraphs ago just kicked in. Why have I been writing this book without it?

NICOTINE

I have never been a smoker, and smoking is gross and bad for you. But nicotine, separately from tobacco, is just one of the thousands of chemicals in cigarette smoke. And when you use it orally at low doses in its pure form—without toxins and carcinogens wrapped around it and rolled into a cigarette—nicotine can be a formidable nootropic. It’s reportedly the most widely studied cognition-enhancing substance on Earth, even more than coffee.

When you take the right amount, nicotine can do a lot for your performance. For starters, it gives you faster, more precise motor function. People show more controlled and fluent handwriting after taking nicotine, and they’re also able to tap their fingers faster without sacrificing accuracy.¹⁹ Nicotine makes you more vigilant and sharpens your short-term memory. In a study, people who were given nicotine via patches and gum better recalled a list of words they’d just read and also repeated a story word for word making fewer mistakes than people who took a placebo.²⁰ You can even speed up your reaction time with nicotine. Both smokers and nonsmokers reacted more quickly to visual cues after a nicotine injection,²¹ although I’ll save my injections for vitamins, thanks.

Of course, there are some real downsides to nicotine, the most infamous of which is its addictive potential. Nicotine activates your mesolimbic dopamine system, which scientists have aptly nicknamed the brain’s “pleasure pathway.” The pleasure pathway is a double-edged sword. Food, sex, love, and rewarding drugs all cause this part of your brain to light up, sending a euphoric rush of dopamine through your system and leaving you in bliss. If you indulge on a regular basis, though, the constant stimulation dulls the pathway. Your receptors start to pull back into your neurons, where they are very hard to activate, and you start to feel physically ill unless you get more of whatever you were enjoying or something else equally stimulating. That’s how dependence starts. The good news is that the physical symptoms of nicotine withdrawal peak three to five days after quitting. It’s the psychological withdrawal from smoking (not just nicotine) that is famously hard to resist. So don’t smoke or vape. Lozenges, gum, spray, and patches work better and are less habit forming.

Nicotine by itself (separate from tobacco) also promotes cancer in rats and mice. This cancer link has never shown up in human studies, even after lots of tries. What is known is that nicotine promotes angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels.²² If you have heart disease or are exercising or training your brain, angiogenesis is a good thing because your body is supposed to be growing new blood vessels as part of its self-repair. If you have existing tumors, this is a very bad thing.

If you don’t have cancer, nicotine, taken orally, is kidney protective, and it mimics the effect of exercise on the body through a protein called PGC-1 alpha. Researchers believe this compound may have played a key role in differentiating humans from apes,²³ and it is the master regulator of mitochondrial biogenesis.²⁴ In other words, it makes your cells (including brain cells) build new power plants. It’s also a key regulator of energy metabolism and upregulates thyroid hormone receptor genes and mitochondrial function. If you read Head Strong, you know that almost anything you do to make your mitochondria function well is going to help your brain. Nicotine fills the bill!

(Pardon me while I take a writing break to enjoy an unreleased early version of a “clean” nicotine product. It seems that a great many works of literature have been written under the influence of caffeine and nicotine, including this one.)

You can get addicted to nicotine, so it is good for occasional use unless you decide that it’s okay to be addicted to something that grows new blood vessels and increases mitochondrial function. It is profoundly helpful for writing, and the test product I mentioned earlier contained 1 milligram of oral nicotine, compared to the 6 to 12 milligrams you would find in a nasty cigarette. Gums, patches, and oral lozenges or sprays are the best forms because oral (not smoked or vaped) nicotine provides different benefits. Most oral nicotine products have bad artificial sweeteners and chemicals in them. If you’re using nicotine for your brain, why add in crap that moves the needle in the wrong direction? I’m a fan of start-ups such as Lucy gum (www.lucynicotine.com) that are working to release nicotine products with clean ingredients. Gum chewing never makes you look cool, so it’s a good thing that you use nicotine gum by tucking it into your cheek instead of smacking it.

I’m so glad nicotine is in my brain. And smoking is gross.

CAFFEINE

Few people know this, but the first commercial product ever sold over the internet was a T-shirt that read, CAFFEINE: MY DRUG OF CHOICE. I know this because in 1993 I sold it out of my dorm room, resulting in a photo of my three-hundred-pound round-faced self appearing in Entrepreneur magazine wearing the shirt in size XXL. So of course, caffeine is my favorite nootropic of all time. Actually, coffee is. Coffee is made up of thousands of compounds, and caffeine is just one of them.

By itself (not just in coffee), caffeine is an energy booster and cognitive enhancer. Caffeine may even help ease cognitive decline and lower your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease by blocking inflammation in the brain.²⁵ You already know that this book is powered by coffee (and just a few additional nootropics).

One reason caffeine is in this book is to give you pause. If you think cognition-enhancing substances are something too crazy to try, put down that coffee cup and pick up a glass of nice, bitter kale juice. See how long that change lasts! If you’re like most people, you’ve been taking one of Mother Nature’s greatest nootropics for years, without knowing that you were on nootropics. The truth is that mankind has sought out cognitive enhancement since the beginning of civilization, and the technologies in this chapter are just a continuation of that long and noble tradition.

The bottom line is that all cognitive enhancers carry some risks, but top performers decide whether those risks are worth the rewards. It’s up to you to weigh the benefits against the potential downsides and determine if it’s worth it to you. If you do decide to experiment with any nootropics, please be safe, know your local laws, and follow the recommendations of a medical professional.

Smart drugs make you more of what you are, and they can be important tools in your self-awareness arsenal. They won’t make you an enlightened, loving human overnight. If you’re an asshole generally, you’ll be a bigger one on smart drugs. But the experience of taking these drugs can help you to see your asshole tendencies when you would ordinarily be blind to them. The goal is to observe yourself and use your newfound smarts to do important personal development work if you haven’t done so already.

Action Items

 Use psychedelic drugs only with intention, supervision, and solid legal advice to make sure you’re not breaking the law. These are powerful tools, not toys. And do it after age twenty-four, after your brain’s prefrontal cortex is fully formed.

 If you’re going to microdose anything—from nicotine to LSD or anywhere in between—do your research first and know what you’re getting. Start slow. Don’t break the law. And don’t do it for the first time before you go onstage, into a big meeting, or even behind the wheel of a car.

 Consider trying aniracetam or phenylpiracetam, the entry-level, very safe, quasi-pharmaceutical smart drugs.

 Consider a plant-based nootropic to see how it makes you perform. There is real science behind plant-based compounds for cognitive enhancement, but it would take a whole book to write about them all. (I recommend Bulletproof’s Smart Mode because I formulated it, but there are many.)

 Ask three people you trust to give you honest feedback about how you behave when you start using any nootropic—one family member, one close friend, and one colleague. Sometimes when you get a lot faster all at once, everyone else seems stupidly slow. You can act like a jerk or get depressed and not know it. These people will be your feedback system. Who will they be?Family __________________Friend __________________Colleague __________________

Recommended Listening

 “Mashup of the Titans” with Tim Ferriss, Parts 1 and 2, Bulletproof Radio, episodes 370 and 371

 Tim Ferriss, “Smart Drugs, Performance & Biohacking,” Bulletproof Radio, episode 127

 “The Birth of LSD” with Stanislav Grof, Father of Transpersonal Psychology, Bulletproof Radio, episode 428

 Steven Fowkes, “Increase Your IQ & Your Lifespan for a Dime a Day,” Bulletproof Radio, episode 456

 Steve Fowkes, “Hacking Your pH, LED Lighting & Smart Drugs,” Parts 1 and 2, Bulletproof Radio, episodes 94 and 95

Recommended Reading

 Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, and Transcendence

Law 8: Get Out of Your Head

There is incredible value in accessing altered states where you face your inner demons. This is where magic and healing happen. Ancient cultures have always known this, and today’s game changers do, too. So go to the jungle and try ayahuasca. Do a ten-day silent meditation Vipassana retreat. Fast in a cave on a vision quest. Stick EEG electrodes on your head to access altered states. Do advanced breathing exercises until you leave your body. Go to Burning Man. Or consider consciously and carefully using full-dose psychedelics in a spiritual or therapeutic setting. Do whatever it takes to occasionally get out of your own head so you can more powerfully own what you do once you’re back. And do it with help from experts.

Not long ago, when I was visiting New York City, my friend Andrew invited me to a dinner party hosted at his hip $20 million SoHo penthouse. Given that I didn’t know he owned a place like that, I was blown away when I stepped through the door into what looked like a palace. He obviously likes surprising people, because I had no idea that the “dinner with a few friends” would turn out to be a gathering of incredibly powerful, successful, and influential people from across New York’s industries, ranging in age from twenty-five to seventy-five. The dinner was structured as a Jeffersonian dialogue. Only one guest spoke at a time, so the entire table stayed on topic. When I had an opportunity to ask a question of all the guests, I asked, “How many of you have used psychedelics for personal development at least once?”

Every hand at the table went up, from hedge fund managers to artists, from CEOs to professors. We talked about it for the next half hour in one of the most fascinating conversations I’ve had in a long time.

Though psychedelics have been lumped in with other illicit drugs and labeled “bad” by the government, when used therapeutically, they can be extremely powerful tools for finding self-awareness and (debatably) getting into a state of flow. High performance is an altered state. When you’re willing to go to an even more extremely altered state at times, you can learn things that will make you stronger in your regular living and working states.

This is a topic that has come up with many of the people I’ve interviewed, from award-winning journalists to doctors and lots of people who are changing the world in between. One of them is Dr. Alberto Villoldo, who spent more than twenty-five years studying the healing practices of the Amazon and Incan shamans. He is a psychologist and a medical anthropologist, a bestselling author, and the founder of the well-respected Institute of Energy Medicine of the Four Winds Society. Back when Dr. Villoldo was twenty-seven years old, he was a broke grad student. A big pharmaceutical company gave him a grant to go to the Amazon and help it discover the next big drug. He went to remote areas and learned from native healers.

Three months later, the pharma executives asked him what he had found. “Nothing,” he said. “I didn’t find anything because the people I visited had no Alzheimer’s, no heart disease, and no cancer.” There were no diseases to cure, so they had no need for pharmaceutical drugs. But he went back anyway and trained to become a shaman.

Dr. Villoldo credits the differences between the health of the people in the Amazon and in Western culture to stress. When you live in a state of fight or flight, the brain secretes two steroid hormones, cortisol and adrenaline. This leads you to always being hyped up and prevents you from accessing the ecstatic, blissful state where you can actually be creative and dream the future into being, which is called a state of flow. When your brain is riddled with stress hormones, it activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. When the HPA axis is turned on, it is dedicated to the fear hormones and triggers the pituitary gland to keep manufacturing more and more stress hormones. When you are not in a state of fight or flight, however, under the right circumstances the pituitary gland can help you get into a state of flow by transforming neurotransmitters such as serotonin into dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a molecule that occurs naturally in many plants and animals.

DMT is one of the most powerful psychoactive substances on the planet. It is prepared by various cultures for healing and ritual purposes. It triggers visionary ecstatic states. And we can produce it ourselves. We do so naturally after giving birth and at the end of life, but Dr. Villoldo says that we can do it other times, too, when we are in the right mental state.

Yet, according to Dr. Villoldo, 99 percent of us have brains that are broken from stress and cannot create their own hallucinogenic substances. This is why we cannot hold or entertain the idea that we can manifest our dreams into reality. When Dr. Villoldo was in the jungle in the Amazon as a medical anthropologist and eventually as a student of the shamans, the shamans told him, “You have to eat the bark of that tree and those roots over there.” When Dr. Villoldo asked why, they simply said, “Because the plants told us.” That wasn’t good enough for him. He wanted to learn the science behind it, but he went ahead and ate them.

Twenty years later, when he took these things to the lab, he found that the shamans had been repairing his brain. The barks and roots they had told him to eat had turned on the Sir2 longevity genes, and there are very few substances that do that.

Dr. Villoldo says that we can also repair our brains by healing the gut and by consuming omega-3 fatty acids, which are essential building blocks of the brain. When we do all these things, the mystical abilities that we associate with voodoo priests, shamans, and psychics have the potential to become the natural abilities of us all. Now, we find these abilities in such a small number of the population that we consider them abnormal or even silly or laughable. But Dr. Villoldo says that they are ordinary, and so do other ancient traditions from other parts of the world, including the yoga sutras of Patanjali. When you repair the brain, heal the gut, feed the brain with high-mitochondrial foods, and trigger mitochondrial repair, these abilities can begin to appear on their own. You just have to do the basics, and then your human potential will begin to reveal itself to you.

For thousands of years, the shamans in the Amazon have been using ayahuasca, a psychedelic that is known to induce these kinds of spiritual experiences. The ayahuasca vine contains DMT, but you can use it only when it is brewed with other plants containing chemicals called monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitors. Yes, the same DMT that your body can produce is the active ingredient in the powerful psychedelic ayahuasca. Without the right combination of plants, your gut would destroy the DMT and you would feel no effects from it at all.

Studies on ayahuasca have shown that it does more than just provide a spiritual experience. In a 2015 pilot study by the University of São Paulo, researchers gave ayahuasca to six patients with treatment-resistant depression. Their symptoms of depression decreased significantly within an hour of ingesting ayahuasca, and they showed an approximately 70 percent decrease in their depressive symptoms twenty-one days after taking that single dose. They reported no significant side effects except vomiting shortly after taking it, which the shamans consider cleansing and essential to the experience.²⁶

There is also evidence that ayahuasca can help alleviate addiction. In a 2013 study, twelve participants who went through therapy sessions while on ayahuasca reported significant decreases in alcohol and cocaine abuse even six months after the therapy ended.²⁷ Many scientists believe that ayahuasca is so effective because it increases serotonin receptor sensitivity in the brain.²⁸ Popular drugs that fight depression, such as Prozac, push your brain to release more serotonin, a neurotransmitter that contributes to feelings of well-being and happiness. But those medications take about six weeks to kick in and actually deplete the brain of serotonin in the long run,²⁹ while ayahuasca seems to better enable the brain to utilize the serotonin you already have.

That compelling science led me to seek out the world’s top experts in plant hallucinogens. Dennis McKenna’s work focuses on ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens. When he received his doctorate in 1984, his doctoral research was actually on ethnopharmacological investigations of the botany, chemistry, and pharmacology of ayahuasca and oo-koo-he, two orally active tryptamine-based hallucinogens used by indigenous peoples in the northwest Amazon. (Who knew you could get a PhD in hallucinogens?)

Dennis credits (or blames) his famous brother Terence for his interest in the topic. Terry was four years older than Dennis, who always wanted to do whatever his big brother was doing. It was the 1960s and Terry was living in Berkeley, where everyone was taking LSD. When Terry discovered DMT and shared it with Dennis, they both thought it was amazing and decided to throw everything else away and focus on what they believed was the most important discovery that man had ever made.

Forty-five years later, Dennis hasn’t really changed his mind much about that. He believes in the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, which was pretty thoroughly explored in the 1960s as a treatment for alcoholism and depression. It’s taken forty years or so to get back to where that research left off. But Dennis says that the therapeutic potential is clear. The challenge is how to take these substances, which have long been reviled and prohibited, and reintegrate them into medicine, particularly when drug companies rely on profits from consumers who take their drugs every day instead of the three or four times it takes to get the same or better benefits from a psychedelic.

Yet we must find a way, because, as Dennis puts it, not only are psychedelics therapeutic for individuals, but used in the right context they would also be therapeutic for societies and ultimately for the whole planet because they tend to make us more compassionate. He believes that this was one of the reasons the government wanted to suppress the use of LSD in the 1960s; people were taking LSD and saying, “You want me to go to Vietnam and kill those people? Why would I want to do that?” That is particularly ironic because there is compelling evidence that the CIA actually did introduce psychedelics into the United States, although I believe the outcome today is not what it anticipated.

Dennis and I agree that a society of people who are less interested in killing others is a good thing. So does Rick Doblin, the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit research and educational group that he started in 1986 to do the important work of developing medical, legal, and cultural contexts for people to benefit from the use of psychedelics and marijuana. You might not expect someone with that job description to have a PhD in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Rick works to progress the research and education behind the benefits of psychedelics and marijuana primarily as prescription medicines, but also for personal growth for otherwise healthy people.

Like Dennis, Rick grew up in the 1960s, but he believed the propaganda that one dose of LSD would make him permanently crazy. Yet he was studying the psychological mechanisms of what was going on in the world and the dehumanization of the “other”—the core belief that can cause people to fear and then work against and kill other people. It started him thinking that if people could be helped to experience their sense of connection with others, it would lead to more peaceful discussions and negotiations. Of course, that led him to LSD, which made him feel connected, as if he were going beyond his ego. He realized that psychedelics were incredible tools with major therapeutic and political implications, and when the government cracked down on those drugs and criminalized the people who sold and used them, Rick became an underground psychedelic therapist. Then he began to work on bringing psychedelics back up from the underground.

Today, MAPS is a nonprofit pharmaceutical company working to develop psychedelics and marijuana into FDA-approved prescription medicines. It is making an effort to work within a very rigorous scientific context to make the drugs available as prescription medicines to be taken only a few times and only under supervision. They often work with veterans through a three-and-a-half-month-long treatment program. During that time, patients take the drug once a month combined with weekly nondrug psychotherapy for about three weeks before their first dose and then again after each dose to help with the integration. It’s essentially an intensive psychotherapeutic process that’s punctuated occasionally by powerful experiences with hallucinogens that bring traumas and experiences to the surface, where they can be fully explored and worked through so that healing can begin.

Another guest I spoke with on Bulletproof Radio is the three-time Emmy Award–winning journalist Amber Lyon. Amber is a former CNN investigative correspondent who used psychedelics to treat her own PTSD. Amber is a filmmaker, photographer, founder of the news site Reset.me, and host of the podcast Reset with Amber Lyon, both of which cover potential natural therapies and psychedelic medicines. As a journalist who covered war zones and child sex trafficking, she began experiencing many of the same symptoms of PTSD as soldiers facing combat. She had absorbed the trauma she had witnessed, was having trouble sleeping, and was hyperaroused. If she heard a loud noise, she’d start to panic. That began affecting her career and her entire life.

Amber knew that she needed help, but she didn’t want to go the prescription drug route after having reported on the negative side effects of prescription medications throughout her career. She started researching natural medicines, and a friend suggested psychedelics. At first she was suspicious. She had always thought that psychedelics were dangerous drugs. But when she began reading anecdote after anecdote of people who had been healed of mental health disorders, including PTSD, by psychedelics, she began to believe that they could help her. She went down to Iquitos in Peru and attended a ceremony with about fourteen other people led by a shaman. In a yurtlike structure, they all consumed ayahuasca at the same time and then stayed together and discussed their experiences the next day to integrate what they’d learned.

Amber found it to be a beautiful and profoundly healing process. Within twenty seconds of consuming the ayahuasca, she realized that there was so much more to the universe than she had been experiencing. It also allowed her to process a lot of the trauma that she’d stored in her body. She felt a presence in front of her sucking dark forms of energy out of her body. One took the shape of a thirteen-year-old sex-trafficking victim she’d interviewed for a documentary. Another was in the shape of an animal she’d seen covered in oil during an oil spill. Those forms departed from her until all of the trauma she’d been carrying had left her body.

Then she was able to go back in her mind and watch a movie of her life to see where her own trauma had started, which was in childhood during her parents’ tumultuous divorce. She relived and reprocessed those experiences, moving them from the “fear and anxiety” memory folder in her mind to the “safe” folder. That was tremendously healing.

Like Amber, I tried ayahuasca in Peru. That was back in 2003, when I was fat, burned out from working in Silicon Valley, and slowed by mold poisoning I didn’t know I had. The traditional medical approach had failed me, so I began looking into alternative ways to improve my mood and cognitive performance. I ended up in a guesthouse in the Peruvian Andes, asking the owners in horrifically broken Spanish to connect me to an ayahuasca shaman. Back then it was hard to find someone who would agree to do so with me, a gringo. Now I notice a huge difference in Peru, where locals are lined up offering “ayahuasca tours.” It’s more important than ever to be careful about whom you trust with this experience. I knew the shaman I found was good when he asked me whether I was taking MAO inhibitors or other antidepressants that interact with Banisteriopsis caapi, one of the plants used to brew ayahuasca. You could die if you try ayahuasca while on certain antidepressants.

At dawn the next morning, the shaman led me to a hill overlooking the Sacsayhuamán ruins, just outside the capital of the ancient Incan Empire. He set up a tent and pulled out a little bag of stones, which he set around us in a circle while he chanted. I was skeptical of the stones and the chanting, but I was willing to suspend my disbelief and enjoy the experience. The first cup, to my surprise, he poured into his dog’s mouth, explaining that his dog always journeyed with him. He drank the next dose and then gave a double dose to me. (I’m six feet four and weighed around 260 pounds at the time.)

I don’t remember much about the few hours that followed, just fleeting images and a feeling of freedom I had never experienced. I did come away from the experience with enormous, bounding energy. For my whole life up until that point, I’d had to push so hard to do everything because I was always tired. All of a sudden that was gone, and that feeling lasted for several months. On a deep level, it helped me understand that we are more than just meat robots. There’s more in there, and what we think, feel, and do must be in alignment. That made me focus on creating alignment in my life. Then again, so did many other things that weren’t drugs. In my case, the things I experienced helped me to understand that I needed to work on my physical body as well as the emotional side and that the two were inseparable.

It comes as no surprise to me that more and more people, especially high-powered executives, are “coming out of the closet” about their use of therapeutic psychedelics. If you have a mission in life and you’re stuck spending two-thirds of your time dealing with childhood trauma that instilled a pattern into the way you interact with the world, why would you spend all of your time and energy using low-powered techniques to heal when you can choose from an array of faster techniques that can get you to the point where you can see your programming? Yes, they are certainly scarier and even more risk prone, but for many the risks are worth it to gain access to that programming more quickly. Then you can rewrite the code so that you are in charge of your biology and how you interact with the world instead of letting your primitive systems choose for you.