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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

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