Tony Huge

I Tested 5 Nootropics: The Nootropic Stack That Rebuilt My Brain: Tony Huge’s Video Guide

Table of Contents

Asked for his top five brain supplements, Tony Huge gives the stack he says rebuilt his brain function rather than the one that made him feel sharp for an afternoon. That distinction runs through the whole video. Three of the compounds are for building new brain cells and connections. One is for memory and learning on demand. One is for waking up. And the popular choline sources most biohackers put at the top of their list are the ones he had to drop, because they made his anxiety worse. He explains what each does, why he needed them after decades of sleep deprivation and a bad post-viral inflammation, and why the stack is only half of the job.

Video: I Tested 5 Nootropics, Here’s What Happened. Published February 4, 2026. Watch on YouTube.

What the video covers

This video has no chapter markers; timestamps marked ~ are estimated from the transcript.

The stack, sorted by what it is for

Tony’s five are not five versions of the same thing, and he sorts them by job. Dihexa, NSI-189 and lion’s mane, with 7,8-DHF alongside, are the compounds he used to build new brain cells, and he calls the effect very noticeable. PRL-8-53 is different: it is for extreme memory and learning, taken right before a task that demands it. His example is learning a new language, which he plans to do, and he has used it as a powder held in the cheek and as a capsule, with both working. Flmodafinil does nothing for long-term brain building. It is the one that gives him immediate energy and, most importantly, wakefulness.

The wakefulness point has a specific reason behind it. Tony takes an antihistamine before bed, sometimes an orexin blocker, sometimes something on the GABA pathway, and any of those can leave him drowsy in the morning. He needs something that wakes him through more than one route. Caffeine, he says, promotes wakefulness only through adrenaline and by blocking adenosine receptors, two of many pathways. Flmodafinil covers several. So his morning is flmodafinil plus a little coffee, and that is his alertness and focus.

The choline he had to drop

Alpha-GPC and CDP-choline sit at the top of most biohackers’ lists, and Tony used to take them. He already has anxiety, and they made it worse. Through a lot of experimentation on the acetylcholine pathway he concluded he is simply very sensitive there. He now uses CDP-choline only when he is also taking a racetam, such as noopept or piracetam, where the pairing makes sense. On that pathway he uses something else he does not name, and remains sensitive to that too. His point is not that choline sources are bad. It is that the standard list was built by people with a different nervous system than his.

“It’s like doing a mass blast without exercise. I need to be reading more complex material. I need to be doing more complex problem solving.”

Tony Huge, ~06:40

Why he needed to rebuild rather than boost

Tony’s brain history explains the emphasis on neurogenesis. He had a concussion when he was younger. He spent years, in his words, trying to dumb himself down because he thought he would be happier, and was comfortable losing brain cells to do it. Then decades of insomnia, starting when he worked himself into the ground at a law office on five hours of sleep a night. He agrees with the view that sleep quality is the single most important thing for health and longevity, and says it is foundational. But a man who has been sleep-deprived for decades has already lost something, and no amount of good sleep going forward rebuilds it on its own.

The most recent damage was a severe viral illness. He is careful to say the virus itself is not the point; what mattered was massive brain inflammation from an overactive immune response, and afterward his reading speed, comprehension, focus and memory were all worse. He asked himself whether he could ever get back to his peak, the courtroom, the research, the four monitors and the fast, complex legal writing. His answer now is that the foundation of his brain feels as effective as it was, even if he is not there in practice, because he is not exercising it the way he used to.

Brain steroids, and the exercise he is not doing

That is the analogy he lands on. The neurogenesis stack is like brain steroids, and more precisely like a mass blast with IGF-1 LR3, insulin and growth hormone, where new cells are being built. But a mass blast without training builds less than it could, and Tony admits he is running the stack without the equivalent exercise. Complex reading, hard problem solving, challenging meditation, a new language, a musical instrument, anything requiring coordination. He is not doing most of it, and he says so. His plan is to test what advantage chemical biohacking gives in learning a language, and to report on it.

A friend in his seventies

The clearest outcome Tony describes is not his own. A friend in his seventies, wealthy and anti-supplement, was showing signs Tony read as memory decline: slower reading, worse recall. It took Tony a year of gentle nudging to get him to try the stack. Afterward, Tony noticed the friend’s speech was clearer, his memory better, his overall function improved, and Tony suspects he noticed it more than the friend did. He frames it as the one thing he could give back to someone who had given him a great deal, and as a reminder that the question is not just business performance but quality of life.

The herbal shelf

Tony has tried the over-the-counter options: ginkgo biloba, vinpocetine before it was restricted, bacopa monnieri and the rest. They are good, he says, and stacking ten of them together makes a noticeable difference. But even all of them together did not get him to where this stack did on the thing he cared about, which was rebuilding foundational function rather than feeling sharper for a day. Fish oil and magnesium he treats as the base of any brain stack. The five compounds are what he builds on top.

Cheat Sheet Pivot

What Tony reported using and why, not instructions.

  • Neurogenesis layer, by his account: Dihexa, NSI-189, lion’s mane and 7,8-DHF, used to build new brain cells with a noticeable effect.
  • On-demand layer: PRL-8-53 before a memory-heavy task, in cheek-powder or capsule form.
  • Wakefulness layer: flmodafinil with a little coffee, chosen because it acts on more wakefulness pathways than caffeine alone.
  • Dropped: alpha-GPC and CDP-choline on their own, because of anxiety; CDP-choline only with a racetam.
  • Foundation: fish oil and magnesium, and sleep quality above everything, with the caveat that past sleep debt needed active repair.

These compounds are in the Miracle Molecules Cheat Sheet. For the one with the most published mechanism behind it, read NSI-189: Hippocampal Neurogenesis Peptide, and for a peptide pair on the anxiety side of the same problem, see Selank and Semax: The Nootropic Stack I’ve Run for 5 Years.

Where the evidence stops

No studies are cited in this video, and several of the compounds lack FDA approval, which Tony says. The effects on his own cognition, and on his friend’s, are impressions, not tests; there is no before-and-after measurement of reading speed, recall or anything else. The mechanism claims, that three of the compounds build new brain cells, that flmodafinil acts on several wakefulness pathways, that caffeine acts on two, are his summaries rather than citations. The choline sensitivity is one person’s nervous system. The strongest claim in the video is a caution, not a promise: a stack that builds capacity does little without the cognitive work that uses it, and he is honest that he is not doing enough of that work.

Keep going

For a compound Tony reviews on brain function with the human studies laid out, read Methylene Blue for the Brain: What the Human Studies Show. Companion articles go out first to the tonyhuge.is email list, and the nootropic archive is on tonyhuge.is.

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