Becoming Smart With Smart Drugs
Jesse Lawler
Jesse Lawler (US)
Host @ Smart Drug Smarts, Co-founder @ Axon Labs
Jesse Lawler is the founder and host of Smart Drug Smarts, a top rated podcast featuring “practical neuroscience.” Each week he speaks with a world-leading expert in cognitive enhancement, psychopharmacology, brain-tech, or the social issues touching on these sciences. Jesse is also a software developer, self-experimentalist, and a health nut; he tweaks his diet, exercise habits, and medicine cabinet on an ongoing basis, seeking an optimal balance for performance and cognition. In 2015, he co-founded the nootropics company Axon Labs.
Jesse Lawler explores how "smart drugs" and other compounds can
Most of us have more to gain from stopping the things we are doing wrong rather than trying to layer on new things that are right. It is often easier to remove the bad than it is to add the good.
Summary
- Establish a brain baseline by removing neurotoxins, eating whole foods, and prioritizing sleep. Heart health is directly linked to brain health, making exercise a vital cognitive hack.
- Select compounds based on specific needs like wakefulness, mood, or focus. No single drug fits every situation, so substances should be tailored to the desired cognitive state or task.
- Use caffeine and L-theanine together for balanced stimulation. The amino acid L-theanine promotes relaxation and counters the jitters often caused by caffeine, allowing for calm alertness.
- Navigate before accelerating by choosing a goal before taking stimulants. Enhancing motivation without a set direction can lead to intense focus on unproductive or meaningless tasks.
- Personalize cognitive stacks through careful self-experimentation. Individual reactions to substances vary significantly, so users should monitor their own responses to find optimal pairings.
Article
Becoming Smart With Smart Drugs
Strategies To Optimize, Extend And Expand The Brain
At Biohacker Summit 2016 Helsinki, held in Helsinki, Finland, on 17 and 18 November 2016, Jesse Lawler walked onto the stage with a deceptively simple proposition. Before anyone chased genius in a capsule, before anyone reached for prescription stimulants, adaptogens or psychedelics, they first had to ask a more uncomfortable question: what if the brain was not underpowered, but merely overburdened?
Lawler, host of the podcast *Smart Drug Smarts* and co-founder of Axon Labs, framed his talk, *Becoming Smart With Smart Drugs*, less as a celebration of pharmacological bravado than as a plea for discernment. The modern obsession with nootropics often promised brilliance on demand. His argument was cooler, sharper and more useful. The brain, he suggested, was not a machine to be blindly overclocked. It was an instrument with settings, thresholds and trade-offs. “Think of your brain as something with a dial that you can carefully adjust to make it behave just like you want,” he said. “Before you talk about optimization, it is important to bring it up to the baseline where it should operate.”
It was a talk about enhancement, yes. But it was equally a talk about restraint.
Before The Boost, The Baseline
Lawler began where many biohackers do not like to begin: with subtraction. Neurotoxins, poor sleep, processed food and fashionable self-sabotage all came before any intelligent conversation about cognitive enhancement. Smart drugs, in this view, were not magic. They were amplifiers. And amplifiers, applied to a damaged signal, merely made distortion louder.
He singled out the obvious culprits with a bluntness that cut through the usual wellness euphemisms. Ethanol remained one of society’s most normalised neurotoxins. Lead, meanwhile, continued to haunt modern life in less glamorous but no less devastating ways. The first gains, he argued, came not from exotic stacks but from removing what was quietly degrading the system.
His dietary advice was memorable because of its simplicity. If your great-grandparents would not have recognised it as food, he implied, there was a fair chance your brain would not thank you for it either. It was less doctrine than heuristic, a practical filter in an era of ingredient lists that read like industrial chemistry.
And then there was sleep, the least glamorous and most repeatedly ignored enhancer of them all. Lawler treated it not as a lifestyle accessory but as cognitive infrastructure. He also mocked, with dry wit, the kind of sleep hacking that promises transcendence and often delivers only delusion. His swipe at the Uberman sleep schedule landed because it exposed a wider truth about biohacking culture: cleverness is not the same thing as wisdom.
Heart Health Is Brain Health
If there was one line that distilled the moral centre of Lawler’s presentation, it was this: “Heart health is brain health. Anything you can do that is good for your heart and your overall cardiovascular system is going to be good for your brain. There is no exception to that rule.”
It was the kind of sentence that sounded almost too obvious to be revelatory, yet in a conference ecosystem often enthralled by edge-case interventions, it functioned like a corrective. Exercise, circulation, cardiovascular resilience: these were not separate from cognition but foundational to it. The old caricature of brains versus brawn, the bespectacled thinker opposed to the athlete, was not just tired. It was biologically false.
In Lawler’s rendering, the body was not a delivery vehicle for the mind. It was the mind’s operating environment.
Wakefulness, Carefully Tuned
Once the baseline had been established, Lawler moved into the territory the audience had come for: compounds that altered state and sharpened function. But even here, he refused the seduction of a single answer. There was no best smart drug, he insisted, because there was no single best brain state for all occasions.
Wakefulness, for instance, could be supported through a spectrum of interventions. Caffeine was the world’s most familiar cognitive stimulant, but familiarity did not make it crude. Combined with L-theanine, it could produce a more balanced form of alertness, trading jitter for composure. This was the logic of green tea made explicit: stimulation tempered by calm.
He also pointed to Rhodiola rosea, the long-revered adaptogenic root associated with endurance, resilience and recovery. Here, the old botanical traditions met modern self-optimization culture on unusually solid ground. Rhodiola was not merely folklore in capsule form. It was a tool for those seeking mental and physical energy without the harsher profile of stronger pharmaceuticals.
Then came the Afinil family: Adrafinil, Modafinil and Armodafinil. Lawler described them as compounds that reduced sleep pressure rather than simply whipping the brain into false alertness. It was an important distinction. The appeal of Modafinil, especially in performance-driven circles, lay in its ability to make wakefulness feel voluntary rather than desperate. Yet even here, he was careful to note trade-offs, including the metabolic burden of precursor compounds such as Adrafinil.
What emerged was not evangelism but taxonomy. The point was not to glorify wakefulness. It was to understand its mechanisms.
Mood Is Not A Luxury
One of the subtler strengths of Lawler’s talk was his insistence that mood deserved to be taken seriously as a cognitive variable. Productivity culture often treats mood as decorative, useful only if it happens to coincide with output. Lawler reversed that logic. Better mood, he argued, often meant better follow-through, more sustained effort and greater engagement with the tasks intelligence is meant to serve.
Music, he suggested, remained one of the most neglected cognitive tools available. Cheap, immediate, portable and highly personal, it could alter emotional tone with remarkable efficiency. This was enhancement technology hiding in plain sight.
He also highlighted lemon balm, a botanical with a dose-dependent profile that made it especially interesting. At lower amounts, it appeared to aid cognition; at higher ones, it became more distinctly calming and mood-lifting. Once again, his larger point held. The value of any compound depended on the state one was trying to create.
Focus, Dopamine And The Temptation Of Precision
Energy and focus, Lawler noted, often arrive together because evolution designed them that way. In the ancient world, concentration was rarely a desk-bound phenomenon. It was action-oriented, physical, urgent. The neurotransmitter dopamine sat near the centre of that system, less a chemical of pleasure than of pursuit.
He moved through a series of compounds that influenced this territory, from choline sources that support acetylcholine pathways to the far more consequential terrain of methylene blue, Ritalin and Adderall.
Methylene blue, in his account, was one of the more intriguing and dangerous substances in the nootropic canon. Historically significant and biologically potent, it was associated with increased oxygen throughput and accelerated ATP production in active nerve cells. Yet it demanded precision. The margin between beneficial and harmful dosing was uncomfortably narrow.
Prescription stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall occupied a similarly ambivalent place in the talk. Lawler did not deny their efficacy. These drugs could sharpen performance, increase speed and intensify task engagement. But their costs, including dependency risk, cardiovascular strain and the possibility of aiming heightened motivation at the wrong object, remained inseparable from their benefits.
That warning mattered. One of the most incisive ideas in the talk was that acceleration without direction is not optimization. It is merely intensified drift. As Lawler suggested, one must navigate before one accelerates.
Creativity Lives At The Other End Of Focus
Where focus narrows, creativity diffuses. Lawler presented the two not as enemies but as opposing poles on a spectrum. To become more focused often meant becoming less associative. To become more creative often required relaxing the strict filters that focus depends on.
This was the context in which he discussed the racetam family, compounds associated with memory enhancement and, by extension, expanded creative potential. His account of working memory was particularly compelling. Creativity, he argued, depends partly on the number of ideas the mind can hold and combine at once. Increase that capacity and you increase the combinatorial possibilities from which insight may emerge.
Piracetam, Aniracetam and their chemical relatives were not sold as miracle substances. Their effects varied, and some users, Lawler included, found themselves non-responders to certain members of the family. But the principle underlying their appeal was clear. Creativity was not merely spontaneity. It was architecture, and working memory formed part of its scaffolding.
He pushed the argument further into more controversial terrain with psychedelics. LSD, psilocybin and mescaline, he suggested, could plainly assist the ideational half of the creative process, the generating of possibilities, the loosening of conceptual borders. They were less reliable, perhaps, in the pruning phase, where judgement and discrimination had to return. But Lawler did not mention them for shock value. He mentioned them because any honest discussion of exogenous creativity, he seemed to argue, had to reckon with them.
The Wisdom To Follow One’s Own Advice
For all its references to stimulants, neurotransmitters and molecular handedness, the deepest insight of Lawler’s presentation may have been the least biochemical. “Wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow your own advice,” he said. “You likely know the thing you could do right now to make the biggest impact in your life, and it is just a matter of making that change.”
That sentence landed because it punctured a fantasy common to enhancement culture: that the next compound will save us from the discipline of the obvious. More often, Lawler implied, the neglected miracle is not hidden in a research chemical or imported herb. It is in the sleep not taken, the exercise postponed, the alcohol rationalised, the task avoided.
Even his practical maxim carried that same ethic of intelligent self-management. “If you find yourself slogging through something and you are trying to force yourself to work on it but you are just not feeling it, move on. Thou shalt not slog.”
It was funny, but it was also serious. The future of cognitive enhancement, as imagined on conference stages and in startup labs, often promises control. Lawler’s talk at Biohacker Summit 2016 Helsinki suggested something more mature: not control for its own sake, but calibration. Not stimulation without purpose, but state matched to need. Not the fantasy of becoming superhuman overnight, but the slower, less marketable work of becoming functional, then capable, then perhaps, in rare and carefully chosen moments, extraordinary.
That may not have been the most intoxicating vision on offer. But it was one of the wisest.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2016 Helsinki