Game Changers: What Leaders, Innovators and Mavericks Do to Win at Life

Action Items

The next time you listen to a podcast or an audiobook, close your eyes and see if you can imagine the pictures that the speaker is trying to draw in your head. Closing your eyes puts you into an alpha brain state, which is conducive to creativity and frees up your visual hardware. (Obviously, do this only when you’re not driving or otherwise engaged!)

Try mind mapping—drawing notes on paper using very few words but illustrating the connections between them.

Consider taking Jim Kwik’s courses on memory at www.jimkwik.com.

Especially if memorizing things is a goal, consider Mattias Ribbing’s online courses (including a free training) at www.grandmasterofmemory.com.

Recommended Listening

Mattias Ribbing, “Mastering Memory,” Bulletproof Radio, episode 140

Jim Kwik, “Speed Reading, Memory & Superlearning,” Bulletproof Radio, episode 189

Jim Kwik, “Boost Brain Power, Upgrade Your Memory,” Bulletproof Radio, episode 267

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GET OUTSIDE YOUR HEAD SO YOU CAN SEE INSIDE IT (#ulink_14f7ef79-9d84-50d2-8446-e2538b288300)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)) to creating intimate connections with others (which we will explore in chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)). 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.

(#litres_trial_promo)

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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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 nicotine

(#litres_trial_promo)—and historically not a single person has died from an LSD overdose.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) Studies have found that psychedelics help rabbits learn a new task more quickly.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.