Biohacking for Maximum Intelligence & Performance
Serge Faguet
Founder of Mirror AI, Ostrovok, TokBox. Stanford GSB, Cornell, YCombinator, Google alum. Extreme biohacker. Born in Siberia. Live all over the world.
Serge Faguet explores extreme biohacking strategies he employs to maximize his
Our minds and bodies are our most important compounding assets. You have to invest in them as soon as possible because otherwise, people who invest in them will outperform you in whatever they do.
Summary
- Optimize hormones through clomiphene and thyroid supplementation to increase energy and mood, treating the body as a chemical system that can be fine-tuned for peak performance. - Use specific psychoactive substances to enhance emotional intelligence, eliminate social fears, and foster radical vulnerability, leading to improved mental health and social success. - Focus on biological fundamentals like pitch-dark sleep, sugar-free nutrition, and heavy compound exercises to create a necessary foundation for advanced biohacking interventions. - Protect cognitive focus by practicing meditation, undergoing specialized psychotherapy, and aggressively removing negative influences like news media and toxic individuals. - Utilize regular medical testing and performance-enhancing drugs like Modafinil to gain a competitive advantage and transition toward a technologically enhanced, post-human existence.
Article
Biohacking For Maximum Intelligence And Performance
Serge Faguet’s Radical Case For Treating The Human Body As A System To Be Upgraded
At Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm, held on 18 May 2018 in Stockholm, Sweden, Serge Faguet did not offer the audience a familiar sermon about better sleep, more sunlight or an extra dose of vitamin D. He offered something far more provocative: a manifesto for radical optimisation.
Faguet, the founder of Mirror AI, Ostrovok and TokBox, and a Stanford, Cornell, Y Combinator and Google alumnus, stood before the crowd as both entrepreneur and experiment. Born in Siberia and shaped by a life lived across continents, he presented biohacking not as wellness culture but as a competitive strategy, a philosophy of self-engineering and, ultimately, a wager on the future of humanity.
His presentation, "Biohacking for Maximum Intelligence & Performance", unfolded with the clipped confidence of a founder pitch and the unsettling intimacy of a confession. It was, at once, an argument about molecules, ambition, fear, sex, status, medicine and mortality.
The Promise Of An Unfair Advantage
At the core of Faguet’s thesis was a stark proposition: what most people call focus, happiness, resilience, energy and even love are not mysteries of the soul but outputs of biology.
“Focus, energy, happiness, resilience, and Zen are biological functions that you can affect,” he said. “You will be significantly more successful at anything you do if you have more of these on an everyday basis.”
In his telling, biohacking was less a lifestyle than an arms race. He spoke openly of seeking an “unfair advantage”, a phrase that revealed the worldview beneath the protocols. The body, for Faguet, was a platform. The mind was a resource. Chemistry was leverage.
He cast biological enhancement as an emerging hierarchy already sorting winners from losers. “Biological inequality is already here,” he said. “You either upgrade or you're going to be obsolete because those who do will win all of the races in the competition for resources or for anything else.”
It was a chilling sentence, not because it sounded futuristic, but because it sounded present.
Hormones, Beta Blockers And The Pursuit Of Control
Faguet began with what he called extreme examples. He told the audience that he was taking beta blockers while speaking, using them to blunt public speaking anxiety by suppressing the body’s sympathetic stress response. The logic, he explained, was elegantly mechanical: if the body does not accelerate into panic, the brain receives fewer signals that danger is near.
From there he moved to hormone optimisation, especially testosterone. By using clomiphene, an estrogen receptor blocker acting at the pituitary, he said he had raised his testosterone substantially over time, with marked gains in free testosterone, the biologically active form. He described similar interventions with thyroid hormones through T3 and T4 supplementation.
The language was clinical, but the effect he described was almost euphoric: better mood, more energy, sharper capacity. Hormones, in his account, were not simply medical matters. They were executive tools.
This was one of the most revealing aspects of the talk. Faguet did not frame medicine as a response to illness alone. He framed it as a route beyond baseline.
“When you're healing someone from below the baseline to the baseline, you can also take someone from the baseline to above the baseline,” he said. “Medicine is about human enhancement and moving beyond our biological constraints.”
Emotional Intelligence By Chemical Means
If hormones represented one frontier, psychoactive drugs represented another. Faguet spoke candidly about using MDMA three to four times a year with friends and family, describing it as a way to heighten emotional intelligence, dissolve fear and allow unusual vulnerability.
He credited those experiences with helping him repair friendships, apologise more honestly and become more emotionally open. For him, the substance was not recreational in the conventional sense. It was instrumental, even therapeutic.
He placed this alongside broader remarks about drugs, noting that substances deemed illegal could, in his view, be less harmful than socially accepted ones such as alcohol or tobacco. The point was not merely pharmacological. It was moral and political. Faguet challenged the audience to reconsider who decides which altered states are acceptable and why.
What made this part of the presentation striking was not only the candour but the coherence. In Faguet’s world, emotional intelligence was not exempt from optimisation. Fear of criticism, social masking, relational friction: all were problems to be hacked.
“Focus, happiness, energy, resilience, and love are ultimately one hundred percent molecules bumping against other molecules,” he said. “Since these are biological functions, they can be invested into anything you want.”
The Robotics Approach To Human Need
Then came the part of the talk that seemed designed to test the room’s limits.
Faguet described sex as a biological requirement, akin to food or sleep, and argued that unmet sexual desire consumed mental bandwidth better spent elsewhere. In one of the event’s most controversial moments, he said he had adopted what he called a “robotics approach” to sex, using paid companionship to avoid what he saw as the time and energy drain of bars, dating apps and courtship rituals.
The statement was jarring, even by the standards of a summit devoted to self-experimentation. Yet it revealed something essential about his philosophy. Efficiency was not simply a preference. It was a moral architecture. Any human need that could be streamlined, outsourced or neutralised in service of greater output was, for him, a candidate for redesign.
The same logic shaped his fascination with wearables. He cited the Oura ring as a tool for measuring sleep and physiological feedback, and even described Bluetooth-connected hearing aids that could augment perception, mute unwanted noise and update through cloud-based systems. Enhancement, in this vision, was not metaphorical. It was literal.
Sleep, Fasting And The Foundations Of Performance
For all the extremity of his examples, Faguet repeatedly returned to fundamentals. Sleep, nutrition and exercise, he argued, formed the indispensable base layer beneath more advanced interventions.
His approach to sleep was rigid: regular timing, eight hours of real sleep, dark and cool bedrooms, strict reduction of alcohol and careful management of caffeine. He stressed that caffeine’s half-life was often underestimated, making afternoon coffee a hidden saboteur of sleep quality.
On nutrition, he took a hard line on sugar, linking it to metabolic disease and broader long-term health decline. He also urged caution about cheap industrial animal products, arguing that low prices often concealed degraded production systems and compromised quality.
His more aggressive strategies included intermittent fasting, often eating once a day several times a week, and monthly fast-mimicking diets designed to push the body toward ketosis. The point was not asceticism for its own sake. It was mental sharpness, time efficiency and metabolic control.
Exercise followed the same logic. He favoured heavy compound movements and high-intensity interval training over aesthetic gym routines or long steady-state cardio. Train the largest muscle groups, he suggested, and the hormonal and metabolic returns will be greater.
Mental Health As A Performance Discipline
Perhaps the most surprising element of the presentation was the seriousness with which Faguet treated mental health. Not as a soft concern, not as an afterthought, but as a central discipline of performance.
He described meditation as a daily practice, psychotherapy as a high-performance tool and emotional openness as a learned skill. He called for the removal of negative people from one’s life and argued that news media functioned as a machine for stress, outrage and cognitive waste. He also advocated aggressive reduction of digital distractions, even down to redesigning the layout of his phone screen.
Underlying these recommendations was an ethic of psychic conservation. Attention, for Faguet, was finite and precious. To squander it on gossip, doomscrolling or corrosive relationships was to erode one’s chances of becoming more capable.
He also spoke passionately about radical honesty, rejecting the split between private self and public self. It was one of the few moments in the talk where his project seemed to move beyond control and toward a kind of liberation: a wish to live without masks, without social fragmentation, without the exhaustion of concealment.
Testing, Tracking And The Datafied Self
Faguet’s body was not only modified. It was monitored.
He described regular blood testing, genomic analysis, continuous glucose monitoring and extensive medical oversight. He emphasised that these interventions were carried out with physicians, including doctors linked to Stanford, and warned against amateur hormone manipulation without expert support.
His goal in testing was twofold: identify hidden defects and quantify change. The body became a dashboard of metrics, a living spreadsheet of variables to be tuned.
This, too, was quintessentially of its moment. The quantified self movement has long promised that data can reveal the invisible truths of health. In Faguet’s version, that promise hardened into ideology. To measure was to know. To know was to optimise. To optimise was to survive.
From Longevity To Post-Human Ambition
Yet longevity itself, interestingly, was not his deepest obsession. Faguet suggested that by the time his natural lifespan approached its limit, technology would likely have solved enough of ageing to carry him further. What mattered more was reaching the threshold of something larger: the singularity, the merger with forms of intelligence unconstrained by current biology.
“My goal is to become part of a post-human immortal superintelligence and see a future where we are unconstrained by our biology and see something much more in terms of beauty, intelligence, and change into something better,” he said.
It was a statement that sounded, depending on one’s sympathies, either visionary or chillingly detached. But it was unquestionably sincere. The houses, the status markers, even family life, seemed small to him beside that horizon.
In this sense, the talk was never merely about supplements, fasting windows or wearable sensors. It was about transcendence recast in technological language. A secular immortality project dressed in biomarkers and endocrine graphs.
The Uneasy Future Inside The Room
What Serge Faguet presented at Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm was not a public health programme and not a practical guide for ordinary life. It was a frontier ethic for a class of people determined to convert every inch of biology into strategic advantage.
Some of his methods remain controversial. Some are ethically fraught. Some belong firmly in the domain of medical supervision rather than imitation. But to dismiss the talk as mere extremism would be to miss what made it consequential.
It captured a growing conviction in elite technological culture that the human organism is obsolete in its default state, that enhancement is not optional, and that the future will belong to those willing to redesign themselves first.
Whether that future proves emancipatory or brutal may depend on who gets access, who sets the terms and what remains of the human once optimisation becomes the highest value.
For one afternoon in Stockholm, Serge Faguet gave that future a voice. It was articulate, data-driven, impatient with limits and almost religious in its certainty that biology was only the beginning.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm