This is an excerpt from my latest book Dear Hannah: 70 Methods I Used and Abused to Change Who I Am.

Does LSD Impact Charisma?

Date: February 8, 2005

Age: 22

Location: Palo Alto, CA

Subject: LSD and Charisma

Hi Hannah. I think I want to join you at Google, but I really dig the independence and freedom I have right now. I’m still at my Palo Alto apartment, and yes, I’m still drowning in career anxieties, but I have so much space to do all sorts of random experiments.

Six months ago, I went to one of the “hippie dorms” on campus, the Enchanted Broccoli Forest, and met up with Danny, their resident shaman. He gave me about 13 tabs of acid, which sounds like a lot, but he said it was in storage for a year, so it probably diluted some.

I kept it in my closet for about six months, until Gideon and I were bored one day. Gideon is like my Neal Cassady, who is the free-spirited prankster in Ken Kesey and Jack Kerouac’s literary universe. Gideon has been camping out at my apartment, trying to create an automatic video-game-playing bot so that he can passively earn virtual currency. When I asked him if he wanted to try acid, after about five seconds of scratching his eyes in front of his computer screen, he turned to me and said, “Sure.”

He was initially very annoying while on LSD. He kept mentioning how disappointed he was, emphasizing over and over again that he wasn’t feeling anything. He would slouch in his chair, while tapping away at the computer, thinking he was going to do some coding, then he would pace around the room, throw up his hands, and say things like, “This is stupid, what’s the point?” I sat there, eyes closed, arms folded on my chest, seeing the cords of my imagination fold in on themselves. I would look around the room every so often and realize Gideon was indeed tripping out but that he was kind of ruining my trip in the process.

So we got out of the house and walked to a park around sunset, just looking at trees with wonderment and glee. He finally giggled and said, “Yeah, okay, I’m feeling something.” We sat on a giant horizontal tree trunk and laughed ourselves silly. I watched all the leaves and playground equipment pulse with energy, while Gideon kept fiddling with twigs and bugs like a five-year-old boy.

Afterwards, we began an hours-long trek down University Avenue, eventually winding our way to campus. We wound up at Synergy, another “hippie” dorm, and just tested all the doors, found one that was open, and wandered around the building. We saw a girl sitting down in one of the hallways, and I just sat down across from her, starting a conversation. She had no idea we were high, and I was surprised to find myself in complete control. I wasn’t living in my head. Instead, my consciousness was spread out through my arms and fingers. Maybe it’s because blood was pumping hard through my capillaries, or maybe I was feeling everything so intensely, but somehow I really engaged this girl. And it wasn’t clingy, either. I was just moving the conversation toward different emotional centers, and before I knew it an hour had passed.

Gideon and I convinced her to take us to a party. When we got there, sadly, it was mostly taller, jock-looking guys who eyed Gideon and me skeptically. I proceeded to do that emotional center movement thing and I immediately became the life of the party. I wasn’t goofy or anything, I was just good at alternating between modes. In one moment, I would buffet everybody’s ego, but in another moment, I would hold back with cool reservation. At one point — I kid you not — they started chanting, “Phil! Phil! Phil!” for no reason. I know, it totally sounds like I must’ve been clowning around to get all this attention, but I’ve replayed the events over and over in my head and it had everything to do with my subtle conversational timing. I simply had charisma.

Finally, two girls I had known from school showed up, both of whom I had crushed on at one point or another. One of them tried to call us out by asking, mockingly, “Are you guys high?”

I threw it back at her and asked, “Wait, aren’t you?” It was that same vague Jedi voodoo I had applied to the jocks, and immediately the frame of the interaction changed. They started smiling and playing with their hair flirtatiously, following Gideon and me out of the party house for a few blocks. Eventually one of them asked, “So where’s the next party?”

At this point, I felt bewilderingly intoxicated with power. I had to tell myself, “Stop! Stop! Stop! This is insane. You’re in over your head. Get out of here.” Gideon and I parted ways with the girls, marching back to my apartment while awakening from our trip.

What surprises me about how I handled these girls is the syntax of the exchange. My enhanced social skills weren’t at all like my social skills while drunk. When you’re drunk, you’re simply uninhibited, and therefore more confident, but your social skills don’t actually improve. If you’re bad with words, alcohol won’t make you any better. If you don’t have charisma while sober, you won’t have it while drunk. You may be more fun to be around, but to tap into the social energy in the air and then seize it, that needs to come from somewhere else. It’s like acid opened up a reservoir of social creativity out of nowhere.

- Phil

I’ve caught myself a few times poetically sweeping girls off their feet or owning a room before, but I’ve struggled to repeat those same conditions.