Yeah. Let's talk about your early biohacking days and your relationship
with modafinil. People ask you about that all the time. You recently posted a
great tweet about it where you just asked a bunch of blog questions.
I just loved to hear your evolution with it and now, the way you talked to
people about it and the way you explained,
"Sometimes I use it, sometimes I don't, and this is the choice that we have."
Can you talk to us a little bit "Well, yeah." about, what it is, your relationship with it, I know, uh,
on your LinkedIn profile you used to stick "Provigil" on there.
It was almost an inside joke to the people who knew about it.
Well, in Silicon Valley, people have known about this for a while.
Modafinil is, is the smart drug, the one, if you've seen Limitless, the movie, with
Bradley Cooper, it,
it was sort of patterned roughly off, off modafinil and it, clearly that was a much
bigger drug. But this is something where you take it and, you're like, "Wow, I feel more
like myself than I have in a long time. And my ability to focus," you feel
limitless. And when I started taking this stuff, I was working at a startup that
sold for about six hundred million dollars in value, and I was getting my
MBA at Wharton, and, doing that, an executive program that was the same
number of hours as a full-time MBA program.
I was full on, balls to the wall. I wasn't succeeding in the classes and there's
something weird going on, because I'm quantitative and I pay attention. I'm like, "Hm."
I sit down to take a test, and the first question on the test, I get a hundred.
Second question I get-it's a hundred percent. Second question, seventy percent. Third question, thirty
percent. After that, zero. And, something's happening here and it's predictable
linear decline in performance and it, and I feel helpless and I'm, I'm actually
scared. "Am I going to graduate?" Because something is trashing my brain - I don't
know what the deal is here. So, I started - in fact, that was when I got my first brain
scan with, with Daniel Amen.
And... it wasn't with Amen, it was with one of the people who trained with him for fifteen
years. This guy was a psychiatrist, and he took one look at me, "Oh, getting
your MBA, working full-time, yeah, I know your type. You want Adderall." Like, there are
people who want Adderall for performance enhancement. Adderall's prescription
methamphetamine.
So, he kind of dismissively looks at me and he said "Well, we'll order the
brain scan for you but, you know, I think, you know, that's probably not
right for you." So, I come back, and he looks at the report, and it's two pages
of bad results and all these red splotches on my brain and he goes, direct
quote, "Inside your brain is total chaos.
I don't know how you're standing here in front of me. You have the best camouflage
of anyone I've ever seen."
Okay, so my brain was not functioning very well. I was succeeding enough to graduate
at Wharton, and I was at a startup that we sold for a lot of money,
okay? It's not like I wasn't performing. I was struggling greatly, and this is a
really important point. Everyone listening to this, if we injected you with radioactive
sugar and scanned your brains,
there are areas for improvement. Everyone has them, almost without, without a doubt.
There's probably a few people with perfect blood flow and perfect metabolic
activity everywhere, and they're probably the happiest, most successful people you
know. But they're very, very rare.
So, we can all improve that way. I had a lot of room for improvement.
So, one of the things, when he saw that, was like, "Good God. What, you know, what
drugs do you want?" And we started out on Adderall.
I took it for about a month and hated it.
I, "What was it like? What'd it make you feel like?" Adderall made, it made me focus a
little bit better. It made me angry, and it made it so I didn't want anyone to touch me.
Like, I just, I would take it and I just want to go, like, sit in a room in
the dark and just chill.
It was really unpleasant for me. "And you call it prescription methamphetamine. Do
people hate it when you say that? Do they disagree when you say that?" I don't think
you can disagree. On the label it said,
"D methamphetamine salts," like, it actually says it on the label. I, it is
prescription methamphetamine. I wasn't saying that as a slam.
That's just the generic name provided for little blue pills that are
also sold as Adderall. And, um, there's Ritalin, which is not prescription meth, but
what I had was actually prescription meth. "Okay. Right.
And this, yeah." It wasn't the Heisenberg level. It's blue, though.
Right.
So you started with that, and then? "And I said, you know, 'There
is research on this new drug called modafinil. I really want to try modafinil. And he
said, 'All right. It's off-label, but we'll give it a try.' And I tried it, I'm
like, 'Holy crap.'
Things are effortless. Like, I can pay attention again, like, I got my brain back.
This is amazing. And I was already taking a handful of other smart drugs that are
less effective but still very valuable, stuff I still take today.
This had brought my brain back online from where I had been before, where I probably
wouldn't even be able to get into work. Like, I was zombified for a while. So I'm
like alright, um, this stuff rocks. And I took it
just about every day, maybe I'd skip weekends here and there, but the vast
majority of the time, for eight years. And it helped my career,
it helped me graduate from business school... um, I actually felt a little bit
guilty about it and there's probably people in my class who would remember,
before a few of the tests,
I would actually put the smart drugs I was taking on the desk in front of me and I'm
like, "Guys, I'm not doping.
If you know what I'm doing, and you have the ability to do it too,
then it's not doping. It's not cheating." And I still don't believe it's cheating
any more than wearing a sweater on a cold day is cheating. It's just technology
that helps you do what you're doing. So, I took the stuff, and it really, really
helped my performance. It was amazing.
Then I came out with Bulletproof Coffee and the Bulletproof Diet principles, I
put them online for a couple years before I wrote the Bulletproof Diet book
and there were a few critics who are saying, "Everything you do comes from
modafinil, because there's a study that says it helps you lose weight." I'm like, "You know
what?
This is highly unlikely." And there were a few people who said I was hiding it from
them, even though I'd been on national news talking about it, which I always thought
was one of the more bizarre criticisms of Bulletproof. But - "It was in your
profile for a long time."
Exactly. I was like, everyone else in the Nightline piece was wearing paper bags
over their heads because they wouldn't show their face, and I'm like, "Yes. Yes. I
actually take modafinil. I'm okay with it. Like, it might help you too."
So I consider it to be a profoundly effective drug for occasional use or for
regular use if you need it. And it's changed many people's lives and it's
much safer than Adderall and much safer than Tylenol but it does have some
potential risks.
They're small, though, compared to many of the drugs we take. So, I looked at the
criticism. I'm like, "Okay. Maybe this is valid criticism.
Let's do the experiment."
So I went off of modafinil. And I did it while I was drinking Bulletproof Coffee,
while I was eating the Bulletproof Diet, while I was avoiding the things that make me
weak, and when I did that, I measured, using a university grade cognitive
executive function kind of testing, and what I found was that when I was off of
modafinil, my decision-making time was more variable. It,
in other words, you couldn't predict how long it would take me. Sometimes, I was very
fast, sometimes, I was longer. But my average decision-making time, was, was
somewhere. When I was on modafinil, my average decision-making window was
smaller, it was more predictable, but my average speed was the same. Other than
that, I felt good all the time, which - I didn't have that before, when I started
taking modafinil. I had the energy to make it through the day, to feel good, to
play with my kids at the end of the day. This energy was not something that I
naturally had before.
I'm like, "Alright. Modafinil isn't doing very much for me." Is there modafinil in
my bag right now? Yeah, there is.
I just flew to London, or Scotland and then London, it's been a relatively
intense trip.
I actually just use Bulletproof Coffee and the normal stack of relatively
lightweight smart drugs that I do every day, and the things I know about hacking
light and temperature and all for jet lag, and, you know what? I didn't need
modafinil. But it was there if I wanted it, or if I was going to crash,
like, "Man I'm just too tired."
Like, my brain isn't focusing. I really want to be present for the audience or
for this interview.
I would've happily taken modafinil. But I didn't need to.
So, that's where I am in my relationship with it today. I'm grateful that people
said, "Hey, everything you do, you scammer,
it's because of modafinil," they caused me to experiment with something that I knew
very well worked great, but, when your, when your brain is dialed in, when your
nutrition is where it should be,
when you're doing other things right, and probably some of the meditation and
neurofeedback and things I've done. I'm better-performing now than I was, and, so,
I use modafinil less. "Talk to me about how people can get really
sensitive about what they call 'a drug' and 'not a drug.' Like you said, this is
technology."
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