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

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.

(#litres_trial_promo)

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.

(#litres_trial_promo) Many scientists believe that ayahuasca is so effective because it increases serotonin receptor sensitivity in the brain.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.