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Rockstar Nootropic Stack

Want a single nootropic pill that gives you 18 hours of productivity with no crash?

I designed this stack by consulting Scott Alexander’s nootropic survey and also knowing which things stack well together. I think these are good to have around for occasional use. To prepare these pills, you’ll need to buy a Cap-M-Quik pill capper + “000” sized empty 1g capsules ($40), a mortar/pestle ($8), and a milligram scale ($21).

Each pill contains:

100mg Alpha GPC
46mg Vitamin D3 (5000IU)

360mg Bacopa

Here’s the complete shopping list to prepare 50 pills (full tray):

15 pills x Armodafinil (2.25g active ingredient; 7.2g total)
18g Bacopa to fill pills to 1000mg/pill

Author Description

Louie Helm is a Machine Learning Engineer

21 Responses to “Rockstar Nootropic Stack”

  1. April 24

    Dwight Crow

    hm, I metabolize most of these way too quickly for 18hrs 🙁

  2. April 24

    Sarah Constantin

    good lord. 18 hours of work? really?

  3. April 24

    Elizabeth Tarleton

    Yep, really.

  4. April 24

    Austin James Parish

    What’s the chance that, for my specific neurochemistry and liver metabolism, this won’t be much different from just taking 80 mg of caffeine? (I’ve taken up to 600 mg of armodafinil with no noticeable effect on me besides making me worry about my liver)

  5. April 24

    Scott Fowler

    Armodafinil or adrafinil, Austin?

    Breaking this down according to my own nootropic knowledge, it looks excellent. Caffeine+theanine is great, 45mg of armodafinil should be roughly 90-100mg of modafinil which is what most people report as the effective dose (and modafinil is great too, duh), and phenylpiracetam is great. All fine stimulants!

    Coluracetam I haven’t had a chance to try yet, but heard good things. I would have filled the pills with extra choline, but the bacopa is inspired!

    I expect the first four to six hours of this are the strongest, followed by twelve more hours of high productivity?

  6. April 24

    Luke Muehlhauser

    Louie, how close is this to the cocktail I tried which gave me ~28 hrs of alertness?

  7. April 24

    Louie Helm

    Luke: This is that.

  8. April 24

    Sean O HEigeartaigh

    How often would you take this?

  9. April 24

    Austin James Parish

    Scott: you got me! Where can I find armodafinil online?

  10. April 24

    Louie Helm

    It’s probably safe enough to take a few times a week. I’d view it as a similar risk profile to 3 energy drinks, but much better for alertness. I take it somewhat less often… I’m rather conservative in this respect though.

  11. April 24

    Scott Fowler

    Double blind study would be interesting for phenylpiracetam perhaps, but both caffeine and armodafinil have much weight behind them. What would be interesting is testing whether you can distinguish between this pill, an armodafinil-only pill, and a caffeine/theanine-only pill.

    Armodafinil is just the R-enantiomer; modafinil is both R and S. AFAIK the S is inert so you can get 50mg of armodafinil by buying 100mg of modafinil, effectively. I haven’t kept up on good places to buy it but I suspect the list of reliable suppliers sorted by mg/$ in Gwern’s article on modafinil is kept up to date.

  12. April 24

    Louie Helm

    I think your cycling approach seems good Sean. In practice, I use this on the occasional day where I go, “Gosh, I’ve been behind on everything for a week. I should finish everything on my todo list today.”

  13. April 24

    Elizabeth Tarleton

    Do you know of anyone people can buy these from, if they don’t want to collect all the ingredients and assemble the pills themselves?

  14. April 24

    Laura A. Baur

    Regardless of what long term health effects you might ascribe to it, Vitamin D makes people sleepy.

  15. April 24

    Brian Finifter

    Commenting to check back later.

  16. April 24

    Eric Tatro

    Do you have a preferred source for the non-prescription compounds listed here?

  17. April 24

    Misha Gurevich

    Laura I’ve heard the exact opposite: that you should only take vitamin d containing supplements in the morning so they don’t keep you up at night.

  18. April 24

    Louie Helm

    The actual post on RR has links to where I bought everything.

  19. April 25

    David Moss

    What’s the point of the vitamin D? How is it supposed to exert an acute effect within 18hours?

  20. April 25

    Nickolai Leschov

    How does this mix work e.g. why these exact components?

  21. April 28

    Misha Gurevich

    Speaking of pills, does anyone know if there’s a consensus effective probiotic for good gut flora? Id try akkermensis but you can’t really get that at Walgreens