This Silicon Valley angel investor loves a drug that gave him hours of seizures

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Most people would stop taking a drug if it caused them to have grand mal seizures for hours and puke uncontrollably. But for Tim Ferriss, the famous author of "The 4-hour Workweek", ayahuasca is a drug that vaporized his anger overnight.

"It’s mind-boggling how much it can do in one or two nights," Ferriss, an early investor in tech startups such as Uber, Evernote and Duolingo, told The New Yorker. 

Ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic drink made from boiling Amazonian plants. It's typically used in religious rituals throughout South America, but lately, at least according to the New Yorker, it's been growing in popularity in Brooklyn and San Francisco.

It's supposed to be a crazy trip and detox for the mind and soul, but most people who take it end up vomiting or "purging". However, that doesn't stop people from preaching how much they love it. 

Even Ferriss stuck with it after what's described as an "harrowing early trip" because of the effects:

"''I felt like I was being torn apart and killed a thousand times a second for two hours.' This was followed by hours of grand-mal seizures; Ferriss had rug burns on his face the next day. 'I thought I had completely fried my motherboard,' he continued. 'I remember saying, ‘I will never do this again.’' But in the next few months he realized that something astounding had happened to him. 'Ninety per cent of the anger I had held on to for decades, since I was a kid, was just gone. Absent.'"

He's not the only person to be praising ayahuasca. Some startup founders are going on retreats to Peru to experience the awakening. In San Francisco, Ferriss convinced everyone is doing it, telling The New Yorker that "Ayahuasca is like having a cup of coffee here. I have to avoid people at parties because I don’t want to listen to their latest three-hour saga of kaleidoscopic colors," Ferriss said. 

Perhaps we hang out in different circles, but I still see more cups of coffee in San Francisco than people having violent trips.

Ferris like his coffee too though — he's also an investor in Blue Bottle coffee.

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