Long before “biohacking” was a buzzword, Dave Asprey was open about using modafinil, the prescription wakefulness drug often called a “smart drug”. In this clip from his 2015 London Real interview, Brian Rose asks him to tell the whole story: why he started, what it did for him, and why he barely needs it now.
It’s a candid account, including a brain scan result he still quotes, and an experiment he ran on himself after critics accused him of hiding the real reason for his energy.
▶ Watch the full episode: Dave Asprey – Bulletproof
A brain in “total chaos”
Asprey says the story starts when he was working at a start-up that later sold for around $600 million, while studying for an executive MBA at Wharton. He noticed a strange pattern in exams: he would get the first question fully right, the second 70% right, the third 30%, and after that nothing. The decline was predictable, and it scared him.
A psychiatrist ordered a brain scan, half expecting a stressed MBA student looking for Adderall. The report came back with two pages of problems, and Asprey quotes the doctor directly: “Inside your brain is total chaos.” His broader point is that almost everyone would find areas to improve if their brain were scanned.
Adderall: not for him
They first tried Adderall, an amphetamine-based prescription stimulant that Asprey bluntly calls prescription methamphetamine. He took it for about a month and hated it. It helped him focus a little, he says, but made him angry and made him want to sit alone in a dark room.
Modafinil: “I got my brain back”
He then asked to try modafinil, which his doctor prescribed off-label. The effect, he says, was immediate: paying attention felt effortless again. He took it most days for about eight years, and credits it with helping him graduate and with his career. He even put his pills on the desk before exams, telling classmates it wasn’t cheating if everyone knew. In his view it’s technology, no different from wearing a sweater on a cold day.
The experiment
When Bulletproof Coffee took off, some critics claimed everything he achieved was really down to modafinil. Asprey points out he had talked about it on national television. But he took the criticism seriously and tested it, coming off modafinil while following his own diet and routines, and measuring himself with cognitive tests.
The result, he says: off the drug, his decision time was less consistent, but his average speed was the same. And for the first time, he felt good all day without it. He still carried modafinil on the trip to London for this interview, he says, but didn’t need it.
What to take from it
Asprey’s story is less about a pill than about trying to fix the underlying problem. He used a prescription drug under a doctor’s supervision, then changed his diet, sleep and habits until he needed it far less. He calls modafinil much safer than many common drugs but acknowledges it has some risks.
This clip reflects Dave Asprey’s personal experience. Modafinil and Adderall are prescription medicines. This is not medical advice; speak to a doctor before taking any medication.
Who is Dave Asprey?
Dave Asprey is an American entrepreneur and author, often called the father of biohacking. He founded Bulletproof, the company behind Bulletproof Coffee, and has written several bestsellers, including The Bulletproof Diet and Super Human. He hosts the long-running podcast The Human Upgrade.
This 2015 conversation was his return to London Real, covering coffee, mould toxins, meditation and more. You can also watch his first London Real episode: Dave Asprey – The Bulletproof Executive.
See everything Dave Asprey has done with London Real on his guest page: Dave Asprey on London Real.
More on London Real
Transcript
Transcript: Dave Asprey – Modafinil, Adderall And Why He Uses Smart Drugs Less Today
0:00 Brian Rose: Let’s talk about your early biohacking days and your relationship with modafinil. People ask you about it all the time. You recently posted a great tweet about it. I’d love to hear your evolution with it, and the way you explain it: “Sometimes I use it, sometimes I don’t, and this is the choice we have.” On your LinkedIn profile you used to have “Provigil”. It was almost an inside joke for the people who knew.
0:28 Dave Asprey: In Silicon Valley people have known about this for a while. Modafinil is the smart drug. If you’ve seen the movie Limitless with Bradley Cooper, it was roughly patterned off modafinil, though 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 your ability to focus: you feel limitless.
0:48 Dave Asprey: When I started taking it, I was working at a start-up that sold for about $600 million, and I was getting my MBA at Wharton in an executive programme that was the same number of hours as a full-time MBA. I was going full on. And I wasn’t succeeding in the classes, and something weird was going on, because I’m quantitative and I pay attention. I sit down to take a test, and the first question I get 100%. Second question, 70%. Third question, 30%. After that, zero.
1:24 Dave Asprey: It was a predictable, linear decline in performance, and I felt helpless. I was actually scared. Am I going to graduate? Something is trashing my brain. So that was when I got my first brain scan, with a psychiatrist who’d trained with Daniel Amen for 15 years. He took one look at me: “Getting your MBA, working full-time, I know your type. You want Adderall.” There are people who want Adderall for performance enhancement. Adderall’s prescription methamphetamine.
2:04 Dave Asprey: So he ordered the brain scan, and I came back and he looked at the report. It was two pages of bad results and red splotches all over my brain, and he said, 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.” So my brain was not functioning very well. I was succeeding enough to graduate from Wharton, at a start-up we sold for a lot of money. It’s not like I wasn’t performing. But I was struggling greatly.
2:40 Dave Asprey: And this is a really important point. Everyone listening to this: if we injected you with radioactive sugar and scanned your brain, there would be areas for improvement. Almost everyone has them. There are 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. I had a lot of room for improvement.
3:05 Dave Asprey: When he saw that, he said, “Good God, what drugs do you want?” And we started on Adderall. I took it for about a month and hated it.
3:15 Brian Rose: What did it make you feel like?
3:16 Dave Asprey: It made me focus a little better. It made me angry, and it made it so I didn’t want anyone to touch me. I’d take it and I just wanted to go and sit in a room in the dark. It was really unpleasant for me.
3:29 Brian Rose: And you call it prescription methamphetamine. Do people disagree when you say that?
3:34 Dave Asprey: I don’t think you can disagree. On the label it said “D-methamphetamine salts”. I wasn’t saying it as a slam; that’s just the generic name for the little pills sold as Adderall. Ritalin is different, but what I had was prescription meth. It wasn’t the Heisenberg level, though.
4:00 Brian Rose: So you started with that, and then?
4:02 Dave Asprey: I said, there’s research on this new drug called modafinil, I really want to try it. And he said, “All right, it’s off-label, but we’ll give it a try.” I tried it and I was like, holy crap. Things are effortless. I can pay attention again. I got my brain back. This is amazing. I was already taking a handful of other smart drugs that are less effective but still valuable, stuff I still take today. But this brought my brain back online. Before, I was zombified for a while.
4:37 Dave Asprey: So I took it just about every day, maybe skipping weekends here and there, for eight years. It helped my career, it helped me graduate from business school. I actually felt a little guilty about it, and people in my class might remember that before a few tests I’d put the smart drugs I was taking on the desk in front of me and say, “Guys, I’m not doping. If you know what I’m doing and you have the ability to do it too, 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.
5:20 Dave Asprey: Then I came out with Bulletproof Coffee and the Bulletproof Diet principles, and put them online for a couple of years before I wrote the book. A few critics said, “Everything you do comes from modafinil, because there’s a study that says it helps you lose weight.” I said, this is highly unlikely. And a few people said I was hiding it, even though I’d been on national news talking about it. Everyone else in that Nightline piece wore paper bags over their heads, and I was saying, yes, I take modafinil, I’m OK with it, it might help you too.
5:59 Dave Asprey: I consider it a profoundly effective drug for occasional use, or for regular use if you need it. 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 compared with many of the drugs we take.
6:10 Dave Asprey: So I looked at the criticism and thought, maybe this is valid. Let’s do the experiment. I went off modafinil while drinking Bulletproof Coffee, eating the Bulletproof Diet, and avoiding the things that make me weak. I measured myself with university-grade executive function testing. Off modafinil, my decision-making time was more variable: sometimes very fast, sometimes longer. On modafinil, my decision-making window was smaller and more predictable, but my average speed was the same.
7:00 Dave Asprey: Other than that, I felt good all the time, which I didn’t have when I started taking modafinil. I had the energy to get through the day and play with my kids at the end of it. That energy wasn’t something I naturally had before. So I thought, modafinil isn’t doing very much for me. Is there modafinil in my bag right now? Yes. I just flew to Scotland and then London, a relatively intense trip. But I used Bulletproof Coffee, my normal stack of relatively lightweight smart drugs, and what I know about hacking light and temperature for jet lag, and I didn’t need it.
7:42 Dave Asprey: It was there if I was going to crash, if my brain wasn’t focusing and I really wanted to be present for the audience or this interview. I would have happily taken it. But I didn’t need to. So that’s my relationship with it today. I’m grateful that people said, “Everything you do is because of modafinil,” because it caused me to experiment. When your nutrition is where it should be, and you’re doing other things right, probably including the meditation and neurofeedback I’ve done, you perform better. So I use modafinil less.
8:19 Brian Rose: Talk to me about how sensitive people get about what they call a drug and not a drug. Like you said, this is technology.
