a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself

Episode Date: December 4, 2015

What if you could bring the best version of yourself to everything you do everyday? What if you could get the most out of your mind and brain -- or more scientifically, your "cognitive performance" -- without going to those old addictive standbys like coffee or RedBulls? The promise of nootropics or cognitive enhancers is to help us work better and more productively (for example, through more stamina and working memory); stay more awake and alert (without the sudden jolt of coffee); sleep better; and even protect our brains against cognitive impairments or neuro diseases like Alzheimer's. Geoffrey Woo and Michael Brandt, the founders of Nootrobox, believe that nootropics are possible for everyone -- not just for a select or hobbyist fringe of society -- and that part of that mainstreaming will involve a lot of hard science, hard data, and frankly, good user experience and better packaging of raw components ... the same things, in fact, that helped mainstream personal computers from the days of the early hacking at the Homebrew Club to Apple and the world of mass computing today. But how does nootropics move beyond a community movement ... and how does it fit into the context of other trends such as biohacking, quantified self, and more? Is the human body really the next 'platform'? All this and more on this episode of the a16z Podcast. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. Today we're talking about a really interesting trend, neutropics. It's basically supplements that people can take to enhance their cognitive performance. And we're talking about the broader trend. as well as how it connects to other movements like the quantified self, biohacking, whether an argument can be made that we can compare what's happening now to what happened with the early days of personal computing at the home brew club and whether the same thing will happen here. To host this conversation, we brought the founders of NeutroBox, which develops, manufacturers, and distributes prepackaged neutropics, which are currently in the form

of pills for baseline cognition, staying awake, and sleeping. Okay, and moderating this discussion today will be A16 and Z's Kyle Russell. Hi everyone. I'm Kyle Russell. I'm a partner on the deal and research team here at A16Z where I focus on virtual reality, augmented reality, drones, crypto, and other categories that my colleagues roll up into something we call the weird stuff. I'm also joined by my colleague Saku, who also works on a lot of the same topics here at A16Z, as well as Jeff Wu and Michael Brandt, co-founders of Neutcherbox. Just so that our listeners can attach a voice to a name, would you guys like to introduce yourselves and get started? Thanks, Kyle. I'm Chaffrey Wu, co-founder and CEO of NutraBox. I'm Michael Brandt. I'm co-founder on Nutrabox. Hi, I'm Sakenthala, Pansevatner. I'm a partner here at A16C. So you guys are working on a problem that I think a lot of people can relate to, which is trying to get a little bit more productivity out of your brain. I think all of us have had days where we're going, I'm just not able to get through this work. Or, you know, I wish I could have just gotten through this project a little bit faster so I could have gotten started on this next thing and had more time free on my weekend. When it comes to doing that, I think a lot of times the off-the-shelf thing that everyone goes for is coffee. Like, got to get more work done. Let me drink some coffee. Is it, like, am I in the zone now? I'm drinking coffee.

And basically, the entire notion of NeutraBox is predicated on the idea of like, hey, is there something better than coffee that, like, everyone should be having access to on a daily basis. So what's better than my daily cup of Joe? There's a lot of things that are better than your daily cup of Joe. I mean, with coffee in particular, a lot of times people find that it can make them overly active or have a hard time focus. on things that maybe when it comes to purely stimulating your cognition, that just like a jolt of energy isn't necessarily the be all-end-all. There's other things that they can be better. For instance, maybe be more relaxed or less stressed or having better short-term working memory. These are all other aspects of cognition besides just, you know, the pure energy of a cup of coffee. So the broader category is neutropics.

Sort of the colloquial term for cognitive enhancers, or I guess a more scientific term for cognitive enhancers. And it covers a broad spectrum of different compounds, ranging from things that are considered dietary supplements to things that are considered pharmaceuticals to things that are considered research chemicals. And broadly speaking, Neutropics work in three sort of main pathways. One main pathway is sort of increasing the different neurotransmitters levels in your brain. And these can be sort of acetocoline or dopamine, things that are associated with learning and memory. Another main pathway is increasing blood flow to the brain. Your brain runs on glucose and oxygen, so increasing the carriers of those compounds, aka blood to brain, increases the capacity, sort of the horsepower available for the brain.

And the last main pathway that neutropics work is sort of anti, sort of neuroprotective effects. There are different therapeutics for Alzheimer's, different sort of cognitive impairments. You know, when you're looking at these things, besides maybe, let's say, pharmaceuticals, which go through like the kind of complex FDA approval process and all of the tiers and tiers of scientific work that has to go into proving a single drug in years of repeated studies. For those, the other, you know, kind of avenues to improving cognitive performance, how do we know they work? Our process has been sort of driven from multiple different levels. One, just seeing what the hobbyist community really have sort of battle tested on n-equals one sample size, like personally. trials and reading those stories and and talking to those hobbyist hackers and experimenting with them ourselves to actually looking at the Western clinical randomized sort of gold

standard trials in the space. I think the biggest concern in the whole neutropic space is is this, you know, too good to be true. Is this placebo? Is this snake oil? That was sort of our immediate concern as entrepreneurs looking at the space. Hey, like this seems really cool. We like the that we see on ourselves, but, you know, is there actual a large body of rigorous science around this? And in fact, there is a lot of science around certain compounds. That's the stuff that we at NutraBox focused on. There's a whole universe of different things that people from different sort of Ayuritic sort of Hindu medicine traditions from Chinese Tibetan medicines. We focus on compounds that have been studied in sort of the pharmaceutical regimen, actually. So double-blind,

randomized controlled trials. If you do the research, you actually could be surprised with, you know, how rigorous and how statistically significant some of these results are. And those are the compounds that we work with at NutraBox. But that raises the question. If these supplements are actually so effective, how come they're not prescribed by doctors? The pharmaceutical industry is a very interesting one where their business model is predicated on the government giving the company, you know, a 20-year monopoly on different compounds.

Therefore, there is an economic incentive for pharmaceutical companies to now put hundreds of millions to a billion dollars into R&D to bring new compounds to market. So the thing with neutropics is that a lot of neutropic compounds fall under open domain or well understood. So generic supplements. A.k.a. generic supplements, exactly. So they cannot be patented. Therefore, there's not a monopolistic end goal for companies to pharmaceuticalize. if I just invented a word, these supplements. So they didn't put it through the sales process, so the regular drug would go through?

Correct. At Nutrobox, we have a couple MDPAs on our team. We're running our own clinical trials on these compounds. And we see long term that we're not only increasing the science and pushing forward our understanding of neutropics, but also being the most legitimate welcome mat for people interested in generics. To also answer your question, Saku, about

But why are, if things work, why are they not pharmaceuticals? I think a big part of the supplements industry in general is predicated on the notion that people should just have basic access to like fundamental nutrition or fundamental compounds that exist out there, that those things, rather than being pharmaceuticals by default, they should just be available. So there's supplements that are just available. You should be able to buy ginseng. You should be able to buy protein powder.

That shouldn't be a pharmaceutical. that there's basically increasing research done on that class of compounds that are regarded as supplements and generally regarded as safe. There's increasing research on how those things actually can drive cognitive improvement. But they're not pharmaceuticals. They're just publicly available. It's interesting you say that because the actual supplements industry doesn't have that kind of transparency. A lot of the time, the things that are sold as supplements are a mixture of compounds, like proprietary brands and things like that.

And even they don't have data to back up what they're doing. And they're not required to submit it, right? Yeah. So Michael and I have literally visited dozens of contract manufacturers, basically people who are manufacturing supplements for, in your big box retailers. We've seen people that manufacture soft gels for your visors and marks of the world. So we've become experts in the production and how business is done as usual in the supplements industry as it currently exists. And the proprietary blend moniker, as you mentioned, Saku, is essentially a code word for industry that whatever is on our shelf at the time, we can just dump in into your capsules.

And usually if you look at the proprietary blend list, it's just like 17 different compounds. And as long as there is some minute trace of, you know, something in there, then they can put it as a proprietary blend. And, you know, I think from a marketing standpoint, the business might be. You might claim that, hey, this is a special ratio of compounds. That's really just obfuscating. It's not going to be a consistent blend necessarily that you take every single time. And I think we are super keen on the fact that our formulas are open source. You should know what you're taking into your body.

We think that's just critical to your health decision making. So, Saku, here inside A16C, you surfaced the Neutropic community to us, made us all aware of what they were all up to. Where are those discussions happening? And what are they doing with these compounds? The big community of Neutropics uses the Reddit, the subreddit are on Neutropics. It's probably going to around 60,000 subscribers at the moment, which is, it's going very, very fast.

They have this whole wiki full of stacks, which is combinations of Neutropics that they think work really well together. So what's your stack is like, you know, what are you having today? What's your mixture? What are you going for? It's just like this folk knowledge has developed and share their results with other people in the forum, which is how you get accumulated. knowledge. It kind of reminds me of people building their own gaming PCs on the gaming subreddit.

Right. So it's, you know, hey, here's the parts I was using. I got these results. But the thing is, like, this folk knowledge, it's not properly quantified and it's not very transparent. Even though there is something there, I think what NutriBox have done is like brought some hard science and data to it to kind of bring that out of the dark. I love the analogy to the gaming rigs. We recently published a byline on TechCrunch comparing the biohackers of today to the homebrew club of the 70s and 80s where a bunch of hobbyists

were figuring out, hey, we have these computer parts, we have monitors, we have these teletype terminals, how do we put them together, what can we even do with these things? Some of the most early programs were making beeping music out of their

Atari's, right? These are super raw components, and we see that similar behavior in the biohacking community today. When we see all this excitement going around in neutropics, and it reminds us that maybe, just like with computers, maybe neutropics and biohacking actually makes sense for everyone, that in one lens you look at it and it's 60,000 people nerding out on Reddit

about their personalized stacks. But on another hand, it's like, hey, this is the tip of an iceberg for something really big and that we're seeing a larger trend around human enhancement, that there's going to be multiple billion-dollar companies in the space, that there's going to be really interesting stuff, really novel new science, ways of understanding our body and ways of affecting it. To further the analogy to hardware,

it's like you think of a typical computer system, and there's usually a way to read from it and a way to write from it. You can read data, you can save a file, you can write to it. What if the analogy carries to the human body where you're able to read from your body, read signals and then intelligently affect them. You're able to write to your body essentially and make changes,

lower your level of stress, increase your level of vitamin D, understand your level of sensitivity to caffeine, be aware of your predisposition to something. And when you think about it that way, it's like, wow, that should be for everyone. That's not just 60,000 people on a subreddit. Everyone can benefit from that. Coming out of those homebrew clubs was the apple one, which kind of crystallized the idea that it's,

computers aren't just going to be these things where it's either these big giant machines that companies buy or these little machines where you can just kind of tinker, but there will be a mainstream version that is more broadly useful. It can be used for work, but also for entertainment. You know, what it makes the jump from people hacking around with different stacks to something that can improve the lives of many, many more people who don't necessarily want to experiment with their bodies, but just want something that they know, like, input one pill, output, like, this much more work. What I think Apple did very well was bundling into a very seamless, convenient experience where a lot of the friction of acquiring 17 different computer parts were abstracted away. I think that's the big problem we're solving, not only just developing and curating the best, you know, understood neutropics out there, but also can, you know, putting that together in a convenient, easy to use, easy to access package where, you know, you can actually trust that we're sourcing the highest quality raw ingredients, going through all the heavy metal, sort of adulterant testing, and having that reliably mail to your door every single month. things that don't require doctor's prescription, you know, regarded as by the FDA is as safe and sellable as supplements. You can pick it up at 7-11.

You can sell it online. You can just buy it. So, if these pills are kind of, you know, the approximate Apple 1 of Neutrophics, the ones that you're making and letting people subscribe to, what's the Apple 2? Is it different compounds or is it

making it even more accessible? Like, what does that look like? One, There is a bunch of super exciting compounds out there. Two, it's playing with different form factors. One form factor we're super excited about is our GoCubes, our chewable coffee cubes that has done sort of 150% of its pre-crowfunding goal on Indiegogo. So I think unique form factors, interesting form factors is another way we look at sort of our Apple 2. And then also just developing and figuring out ways to. to actually be quantitative with the whole space.

The biggest criticism that you can level out the space is that one, it's very self-reported, it's very subjective, and how can we bring actual objective metrics to the space? So you can actually measure improvements and measure the difference. So one area that we are pretty interested in is the idea of leveraging the computer

that everyone has in their pocket to collect more data about themselves and then get more output. Here's what you should be doing based on how you're living. So how are you thinking about incorporating that kind of thinking into improving people's cognitive performance?

I think just the notion that, hey, there's going to be a ton of sensors that are going to be constantly on you, super exciting from a quantified self-health perspective. This is sort of unprecedented in terms of the amount of access now that we can collect on anyone's daily routines. As Jeff mentioned, there's this wealth of data that we're able to access that individuals

are able to access due to just the devices in their pocket or ancillary devices to that that can measure your posture, your breathing, your footsteps per day, your heart rate. And one of the other really interesting areas is just mental state. So there's hobbyists, there's this notion of the quantified self movement where people track in very scrupulous detail what's going on with them every step of the day. We've seen this happen in the fitness, health, dieting space, but people are also, hobbyists again, are getting a lot of value out of tracking their mental state, how productive am I feeling today, what's my mood today? So that's something that we're interested in unlocking as well, helping people track that in an objective, reliable, routine type of way.

It's also creating real actionable data or recommendations on top of this data. You know, how I see it is that, sure, we have a lot of data, and I like to call a ton of data data porn. Like, it's cool to see, but what are we actually doing about it? How do we process massive amounts of data and produce interesting signals, interesting correlations on top of that data in ways that actually can recommend actions and change the decisions that you make in your daily routines? Yeah, sometimes supplements may work for some people, but not others, but at the moment we don't have a way of telling what supplement will be right for you. And with data, you can change that. Yeah, I think, yeah, there's the post facto data,

which is sort of running N equals one experiments on yourself. And another realm of data that hasn't been tapped into, from the supplement sort of health regimen perspective, is a priori data. And that data, we consider your genomic data, your biome data. And sort of going back to our human as the next platform, human as a hardware analogy here,

you have companies like 23 and me, and you biome, essentially serving as APIs now that open up capability of reading what your genome is, reading what your biome is. And we're super interested in capturing and informing our stacks with your post facto data as well as your apriory data. So given, you know, let's say the five-year vision of there's going to be more data about ourselves, our bodies, how we're feeling, Do you think that over time they maybe like wind up best with what you in particular need, not necessarily just a generic option? Absolutely.

Personalization will happen across all segments of the economy, right? There's already personalization for your financial advisor. There's personalization on what things you want to buy from Amazon. And it stands to reason that there will be personalization for things you consume and things that optimize your productivity and performance. So I think that's a larger opportunity that people are just starting to wake up to with the quantified self and eutropics. I think that when a lot of people think of the idea of a cognitive enhancer, smart drug,

however you want to refer to it colloquially, people tend to think of, you know, like limitless of this drug that maybe it's, is it that like Adderall? I don't know. I've never taken it. So, but it makes you look smarter and you're able to process more information and all of that. What is the experience like when you consume one of these? Is it, you know, you're up and at them, you're really intensely focused on something. What does it feel like?

There's a lot of different ways of thinking about cognitive enhancement because there's a lot of different ways our brains work, right? So you can think of enhancing your cognition with respect to creativity or with respect to focus. I mean, those might be two different things. Actually, they might be competitive. Enhancing one might decrease the other, you know, for an afternoon. One way we think about it is you think of the Red Bulls and the energy drinks and things like that is like, you know, it's snowboarder, racing down a mountain, jumping off of half a pipe. But when you think of hitting flow state with your mental output, it looks more like a surgeon or a chess master. So there's a sense of alertness, but it's not a overly stimulated sense of alertness.

It's a calm, cool, and collective sense of alertness. Right. What's the value of being incredibly pumped and feel like your heart is racing if what you're trying to do is sit at your desk and crank through writing a document or preparing a presentation? Yeah. And hey, it might be great for brainstorm. If you're, yeah, go chug two red bulls. It might be good for certain types of things, but I think in general, when we're thinking about cognition, you're spending several hours, you're writing something, you're reading

something, you're coding something, you're designing something, and there's this higher level thought going into it, and it helps to be able to be alert but not overly active. There is a sense, like this is a well-documented psychological phenomenon. It's called the Yerkes-Dodson curve where if you're too activated, you actually, your performance on mental tasks decreases. If you're overly alert, you do worse. I think one thing that is good to think about is, like, imagine you on your best day or imagine you when you're really prepared for the exam and you're sitting there taking

the exam and you're really crushing it. What if you could have access to that mental state, like every afternoon, like reliably? That's really interesting. So does it make so you can learn Mandarin in a day, like in limitless? No, not necessarily, but what it does allow you to do is access of. a best version of yourself. And I think one thing that's also really interesting when you mention Limitless is

Limitless is this movie about one guy who gets super smart and takes over the world. But in reality, it might be interesting to imagine a world where it's not one guy who's massively smarter than everyone. What if across all of society, everyone is a little bit higher functioning? That raises an interesting possibility,

which is products aren't necessarily distributed evenly. among a society. So is there an issue with, you know, some people have access to something that improves cognitive performance while others are left behind maybe? I saw recently there's a Android phone available for $10. And you can buy it and have access to a smartphone, the internet, Google at your fingertips. And that sounds to me like complete democratization of technology. So I think that in general for new trends, you will see an early adopter curve where new technologies will be more expensive and available to an

elite group of people, but I think that over time, what you see is if these things are legitimately useful, then they end up spreading and becoming accessible to all levels of society. And to riff on that, I think one interesting, another interesting computer analogy is Metcalf's law.

The value of a network exponentially increases by the number of sort of valuable nodes in the network. Right, and this is the description of what happened when they brought about Ethernet And, you know, a couple of people had Ethernet Cards, not that useful.

But if everyone in the office as a connected computer, suddenly everyone's, it's facilitating a lot more communication. If everyone in the building has it, if everyone in your industry has it, what does that mean? So, yeah, this is like in complete contrast to doping in sports where if someone takes it, you know, you're disadvantaged to everyone else. But in this case, if you make yourself a little bit smarter, you're actually just helping the people around you, right? Because you can do your job better. Yeah, basically we see human knowledge as it's not a non-zero or a zero-sum game. We think that if Michael, you're smarter of Saku and Kyle and everyone in this building in the world was a little bit smarter, the whole world has, you know, stands to benefit. For example, like wearing glasses, you're boosting your personal effectiveness in some way.

But do I consider that, you know, crowding out my ability to compete with you? know it's i think it's like you're going to your full potential and you're adding your own knowledge and insights back into the world back into the system this was a great discussion guys uh thank you for your time and thanks for coming in