Tim Ferriss: How I Use Smart Drugs, Sex, and Insect Protein to Upgrade My Brain!

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You can kill someone through over consumption of water. If you do an IV drip of vitamin D and you put 100 grams into someone over a short enough period of time, a lot of people will go into diabetic coma. Even people who write early tend to do it before the rest of the world wakes up. So it's this kind of 10pm to like 7:38am range that seems to be very consistent across all of these top writers, musicians, artists.

What's your experience on the flip side as a male in terms of energy, creative force and all of that when it comes down to sex?

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

Today's guest needs no introduction, although I'll introduce him briefly. He is Tim Ferriss, the New York Times bestselling author of three books including the Four Hour Work Week, Four Hour.

Body, Four Hour Chef.

He's been all over the media, more than 100 outlets. He lectures at Princeton. He's a world champion tango guy, Chinese kickboxer, an actor on a hit TV series in Hong Kong, and basically an all around ass kicker. Tim, welcome to the show, man.

Thanks for having me.

I have this theory that like a gazillion years ago, we won't go into exactly how many years ago there were like these two cavemen and one of them came back with fire from a lightning strike and he said, I will keep cave warm OG and or grock actually, and a shout out to Mark Sissen there. So. And then the other guy was like, that might not be safe, let's not use it. And like one of those two cavemen is our ancestor, right? Yeah, definitely cold. I died. So are smart drugs like fire?

I think they actually are. That's a great analogy. I think they're like fire or they're like a really sharp chef's knife. I think that they can be used for benefit and they can certainly be used to severely damage yourself and other people. I think that the, the dose makes the poison. Right? So a controlled fire is one thing versus a fire that consumes your House and everyone in it. The judicious and intelligent use of say a scalpel or a kitchen knife is one thing as opposed to running with a pair of scissors and landing and having it go through your head. And you can look at use of smart drugs and find both good examples, informed examples of use and very haphazard examples of use. And a lot of it comes down to number one, doing your homework and number two, experimenting and having some ability to track. And in my case I do very extensive blood testing among other things and tend not to go more than four to eight weeks without blood testing.

You're that often, huh?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do it really, really frequently.

Is that the full, the full Wellness FX panel? I know we're both advisors. Wellness Effects. You do their full one?

Yeah, I do. I do the full Cadillac everything. And I'm doing another draw this Friday for instance, because I did all of last month without alcohol. To come back to something else that you mentioned also I think that the way we're talking about smart drugs and as you know, I mean I've tried a million different things as I've used so ranging, I mean we can get into it, but I mean vasopressin, hydrogen, you name it, Modafinil, I've tried a lot of these. I generally have two assumptions when I'm doing experiments. The first is what I mentioned, which is the dose makes the poison. It tends to be a, let's just say an inverted or no, it's more of a bell shaped curve of effect and side effect. And in my mind they're typically rather correlated where at some point the dose to benefit ratio is off and you could take something that's thought of as very innocuous like water and you can kill someone through over consumption of water. It's actually very common in marathons because people view dehydration as this demon which has been of course propagandized by a lot of companies like Gatorade. So they over consume and then dilute their electrolyte balance to the point where their heart can no longer function. Vitamin C and other examples. So I'm a huge proponent and consumer of vitamin C. But the fact of the matter is if you do an IV drip of vitamin C and you put 100 grams into someone over a short enough period of time, a lot of people will go into diabetic coma and potentially die from the experience. So the dose makes the poison is kind of number one and then number two is. I just assume, and this may be accurate, it may not Be that there's typically no biological free lunch. So if there's a strong effect, there's typically side effect or side effects or unknown effects, you might want to say, which can be beneficial or be very deleterious. And if you don't know what they are, it's your job to figure out what they are. So that's, that's, that's typically how I think about these things.

It sounds like you come from a world of lots of experience experimenting with smart drugs. The one I was most concerned about was Modafinil, because I took it pretty much daily at varying doses for eight years. And it really, I mean, it changed my world because I did not understand the core biology about why I wasn't performing the way I wanted to. I was going to Wharton. I was working full time at a startup that we sold for $600 million. And I was burning the candle at both ends and two places in the middle. Right?

Yeah.

And I felt like maybe I am cheating. So before, like, a test, I would put, like, the vasopressin and the hydrogen and the Modafinil on the desk in front of me. I'm like, it's only doping if you don't tell everyone. So they have a fair advantage. And whether some of my colleagues in school might have occasionally taken some non prescription smart dose from me is up to them to talk about. But I didn't want to be that guy who was like, you know, cheating. Um, so I decided to be public. Like, Modafinil was my LinkedIn profile 10 years ago. I'm like, I'm just going to put it in here. Like, like all things disclosed. Right, Right. Um, what do you think the downsides of Modafinil are? If you're familiar enough with the pharmacology. But I don't. I don't know.

Yeah. You know, I've looked at, you know, I've looked at Provigil, so Modafinil. I've looked at Nuvigil.

Yeah.

I'm honestly not familiar enough with the pharmacokinetics and the actual biochemistry of Modafinil to have a fantastically informed conversation about it. Okay. I do recall at one point, and I'd love for you to correct me if I'm wrong, that this is the case. Oftentimes, with even prescription medications, sometimes the mechanisms are not entirely understood. I mean, they are hypothesized to work in a certain way, but not exactly understood. And that can also relate to, say, a new target of some type. Right. So they act as an agonist or antagonist for receptor. They may be poorly understood or partially understood. Modafinil I've used before, and it has spectacular results. I mean, it really does. It performs as advertised. And I actually became familiar with it a long time ago when it was being used by sprinters with narcolepsy. And also since that run, those two correlate so highly. And military, who, of course are very well known for using uppers and downers. I mean, they use like greenies, so, you know, methamphetamine, plus any number of different sleeping medications to turn them off. And the. But Modafinil is one of those drugs that I seem to have a certain sensitivity to, much like. And this is very common Viagra. And you have to be very careful with, let's say, vasodilators or constrictors. I get a very sharp pain, like a very acute migraine, like pain from using Midafinil for more than one day. And that to me is a cue just to be very, very careful and particularly when it relates to any type of cerebral sensitivity. And of course, you know, this. But that's, that's been really brought into sort of high def for me with the unfortunate passing of Seth Roberts recently.

I was, I was shocked to hear that.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, very otherwise healthy guy, from all outward indications, like drops dead on a hiking trail in Berkeley from what appeared to be. And there may be more information that's brought this to light, but I think it was a cerebral hemorrhage or some type of aneurysm. And there are. There are a lot of theories as to why this may have happened. One of which is that it appears he was consuming 10 times the sort of suggested higher tolerance dose for flaxseed oil and other types of oils, which can be dangerous. I mean, there's a lot of anecdotal evidence to support increased frequency of, say, intestinal bleeding or stomach bleeding if you consume massive, massive quantities of fish oil, for instance. So it's. I'm particularly sensitive to Modafinil, so it's not something I use on a very highly frequent basis, oddly enough, you know, I get the question, what's your favorite smart drug? A lot. And I've tried.

Yeah, you look at them.

Yeah, you look at my, my pharmacy I have in my house, and it's like, well, what are you feeling like today? Like, you know, phenylpiracetam or aniracetam, or maybe you don't want the rest. How about, you know, whatever Like I have all of them. But for creative work, for synthesis and connecting dots I might not otherwise connect. Yerba mate is still my favorite. I mean yerba mate tea and consumed over a long period of time. And this is another point I'd encourage. Yeah, this is another point I'd encourage people to think about is chemical is highly, the effect of a chemical is highly dependent on its means of administration. Right. So you take for instance testosterone, you could have a gel, an injectable and oral. The way that, that affects your body, the way that affects your liver, the way that determines dosing side effects, very, very different. And similarly with yerba mate, you have, let's say bagged yerba mate. For tea bags, you have iced the yerba mate that you can get in ready to drink packages. Neither of which give me the effect of filling a gourd. In this case, I actually have a metal container, a small metal container with the yerba mate leaves and then sort of sipping it over the span of say an hour or two, which is how they traditionally consume it in Argentina or Uruguay or any of these places. And it has, at least based on my understanding, it has the stimulants you would find in coffee. Right. So methylxanthine, green tea, xiophylline and then dark chocolate like C O bromine.

Right.

And you get therefore three very different pharmacokinetic profiles. Meaning for those people don't know the term, the rate at which those peak in your blood plasma. And so for me I get a two to three hour steady, even keeled, moderate high cognitively from sipping yerba mate. That is just. It's the perfect storm for me for writing.

You've inspired something. I've enjoyed the taste of yerba mate, but never gone after the high from it. So one of the reasons bulletproof coffee works is when you're blending the butter and specifically the brain octane, you get small micelles that cross the gut barrier more easily that carry in the basically the pharmaco active things in the coffee, you know, the coffee oils and the other chemicals. I'm going to try it with yerba mate and blend it up that way to see if basically I can boost the levels of those things that get past the gut, which is intriguing and exciting.

Yeah. So. So I'll tell you, actually I've done some, I've done some experiments. Not. Yeah, surprise, surprise, not with, not with yerba mate, but there was a period of time where I was traveling quite heavily and I love, I love Puerto and I also love green tea. Pu erh, despite the fact that it's dark, tends to be lower in caffeine or stimulant properties. So I would combine the. The pu with the. With the green tea, and then I would blend it with Kerrygold and a small amount of mcts.

Okay.

I mean, in this case, coconut oil. I ended up later experimenting with caprylic acid. I'm not sure how much you played.

Around with it is my brain octane is made out of. It's actually tricopylate. Like, you need to have all three molecules in the right place.

But, yeah, so that. Yeah, it's so adjusting for gut tolerance, which is to say adjusting to avoid disaster paths, I sort of ended up with this fat tea concoction that really seemed to magnify the effects of the tea so I could get by. I had my stash of tea and it was going to last a very limited period of time, so I was sort of extending my stash by combining them. So it should work. The challenge I'd be curious to see with Yerba Mate is how good it is for creativity, simply because to get enough volume of Yerba Mate tea to blend it with the butter or the mcts would sort of necessitate a higher dose at once, if that makes sense.

Right.

So you'd have to steep it for a potentially longer period of time anyway. Yeah, I'll read about it. So definitely.

All right. I'm going to give it a try because I never thought of that until you just mentioned this, so thank you, Tim.

Of course.

That's cool.

Yeah, yeah.

When I. When I'm doing writing, probably. Well, Bulletproof coffee. For some reason, I get most creativity at night, so this is biologically destructive. But if I just really want to just, like, do 10,000 words, it's like 11pm Bulletproof coffee, aniracetam stacked with phenylpiracetam and some Siltap. And like, I've been helping Abelard Lindsay out on, you know, promoting siltap and that whole combination, I'm like, I'm good to go. And it's like I just disappear. And then like eight or nine hours later, there's all these words and they're good, right? Yeah, that kind of flow state.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And Siltep is great stuff. I originally connected with Abelard. I ended up mentioning the Siltep stack in Wired magazine. This was well before he was producing it with, I guess, Natural Stacks as the brand. And he's close by, obviously. He's kind of in the backyard up in Norcal and. And I'm a huge fan of the stack. What I find personally. And again, so much of this is dependent on your individual biochemical signature. I love Siltep. If I use it, I just need to ensure that I can budget for like 10 to 12 hours of sleep that night because I need to replenish whatever is being put into hyperdrive. But for writing, it's fantastic. And I've found also in terms of peak creative states, and I tend to use the word synthesis just because I realized for book writing myself, I could do the interviews, I could do the research, I could do the gathering throughout the day, but the only time I actually put out good drafts of finished content, the synthesis was between say 10pm and like 5am oh, so you have the same window. Yeah. It's horrible for your social life or any of your relationships, but what I noticed is that even people who write early tend to do it before the rest of the world wakes up. So it's this kind of 10pm to like 7:38am range that seems to be very consistent across all of these top writers, musicians, artists. And actually one of the books in my. I have a book club and one of the books that struck me was Daily Rituals, which is about 200 of these people. And it's extremely consistent. Like, you almost never find someone who's like, yeah, I do my best work after lunch. Almost never happens.

So by the way, how can people find out more about your book club? Because I just got your quarterly CO package that you just sent kind of unexpectedly, and it was an awesome selection. And like you're curating amazing stuff there and I'm walking around all day long, like learning about grip strength, you know, look, there we go, the beginner one. I can do it. Anyway, so like, you pick out good stuff. Where can people learn about the books you're recommending? Because I'm totally going to read those. I'm joining your book club.

Yeah, the book club is. The book club has been really fun. I've been basically acquiring rights to books that I think are underappreciated and then promoting the living hell out of them and in some cases producing audiobooks and things like that. So if you just go to the blog is fourhourblog.com, f o u R H O U R b l o g.com and then just either search Tim Ferriss Book Club, there will be a dedicated page shortly, or look under topics and click on Book Club and there are four or five books thus far. And you know, you mentioned something I was worried about maybe getting hungry while we were doing this. And it's so crazy that this ties into your cool fact of the day, but. So I have these things I've been experimenting. I'm not sure if you've seen these. Yeah, the Exo cricket flower bars.

So I'm meeting with those guys, I think, in New York or somewhere in the next couple weeks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Gabby and Greg are great and they're working with, you know, the former head of R and D at the Fat Duck, which is the number one ranked restaurant in the world, to develop insect protein into an American sort of mainstream food product, which is a huge challenge. I'll be helping them. But these may, these may or may not pop up in your next. In your next quarterly box. There's going to be a lot of fun stuff coming.

I just gave my kids cricket bars for the first time. I found some up here in Canada. It's not the XO brand, but the next time I'm in the States, I'm definitely going to be getting some of those because it's a good idea. And I'll tell you, compared to soy or tofu, I'll be eating crickets all day long.

Oh, yeah.