YouSaid · the spoken record

Saku Tuominen

lines on the record
28
first
2015-12-04
most recent
2015-12-04
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “See human knowledge as not a non zero or a zero sum game. We think that if Michael, you're smarter of Saku and everyone in this building, in the world was a little bit smarter, the whole world has stands to benefit. For example, like wearing glasses, you're boosting your personal effectiveness in some way. But do I consider that crowding out my ability to compete with you? No, 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.”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “This is the description of what happened when they brought about Ethernet and a couple of people had Ethernet cards, not that useful, but if everyone in the office has a connected computer, suddenly everyone'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 this is like incomplete contrast to doping and sports where if someone takes it, you're disadvantaging everyone else. In this case, if you make yourself a little bit smarter, you're actually just helping the people around you because you can do your job better.”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I saw recently there's an 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.”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “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 a best version of yourself. And I think one thing that's also really interesting when you mention limitless is limitless is the movie, 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?”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah. And hey, it might be great for brainstorm. 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 Yerks 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 imagine you on your best day or imagine you when you 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.”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “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. And those might be two different things. Actually, they might be competitive. Enhancing one might decrease the other 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 snowboarder racing down a mountain, jumping off of half place. But when you think of hitting flow state with your mental output, it looks more like a surgeon or a chest 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.”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “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'll 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-inotropics.”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, I think, yeah, there's the post facto data, which is sort of running n equals one experiments on yourself. Another realm of data that hasn't been tapped into from the supplement sort of health regimen perspective is a priority 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 23andMe and UBIM 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 a priori data.”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “It's also creating real actionable data or recommendations on top of this data. How I see it is that sure, we have a lot of data. And I like to call a ton of data data porn. 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?”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “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 Detail what's going on with him 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 and in an objective, reliable, routine type of way.”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “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.”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “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 people's improving people's cognitive performance?”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “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 Go Cubes, our tubal coffee cubes that has done sort of 150% of its predrowding goal on Indiegogo. So I think unique form factors, interesting form factors is another way we look at sort of our Apple II. Also, just developing and figuring out ways to actually be quantitative with the whole space. The biggest criticism that you can level at the spaces that one, it's very self-reported, it's very sort of subjective. And how can we bring actual objective metrics to this space so you can actually measure improvements and measure the difference?”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “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. And I think that's the big problem we're solving, not only just developing and curating the best understood nootropics out there, but also putting that together in a convenient, easy to use, easy to access package where 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 mailed to your door every single month.”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “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.”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “When we see all this excitement going around in nootropics, and it reminds us that maybe just like with computers, maybe nootropics 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 real, 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”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “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 Atariis, right? Like these were super raw components. And we see that similar behavior.”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “But the thing is, like this folk knowledge is not properly quantified and it's not very transparent, even though there is something there. I think what NutriBox have done is brought some hard science and data to it to kind of bring that out of the dark.”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah. So Michael and I have literally visited dozens of contract manufacturers. Basically, people who are manufacturing supplements for your big box retailers. We've seen people that manufacture. It currently exists. And the proprietary blend moniker, as you mentioned, Saku is essentially a code word for industry that whatever was 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 something in there, then they can put it as a proprietary blend. And I think from a marketing standpoint, the business 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”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Should just be available so there's supplement. Be able to buy Pharmaceuticals are 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 burns and things like that. And even they don't have data to back up what they're doing.”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Correct at Nutribox. We have a couple MDPHs 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 nootropics, but also being the most legitimate welcome mat for people interested in generics.”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “The pharmaceutical industry is a very interesting one where their business model is predicated on the government giving the company 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 nootropics is that a lot of neotropic compounds fall under open domain or are well understood.”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Of different things that people from different sort of auric 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 how rigorous and how statistically significant some of these results are. And those are the compounds that we work with at Nutrabox.”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “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 personal trials and reading those stories 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 this space. I think the biggest concern in the whole nootropic space is this 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 effects that we see on ourselves. But 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 NutriBox focused on. There's a whole universe.”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “The broader category is neutropics 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, nootropics work in three sort of main pathways. One main pathway sort of increasing the different neurotransmitters levels in your brain. And these can be sort of acetylcholine 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, the horsepower available for the brain. And the last main pathway that nootropics work is”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I mean, with coffee in particular, a lot of times people Hard time focusing 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 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 the pure energy of a cup of coffee”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “It comes to doing that. I think a lot of times the off the shelf thing that everyone goes for is coffee. Got to get more work done. Let me drink some coffee. Am I in the zone now? I'm drinking coffee. And basically the entire notion of NutriBox is predicated on the idea of like, hey, is there something better than coffee that everyone should be having access to on a daily basis?”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Hi everyone, I'm Carl 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, the co-founders of NutriBox. Just so that our listeners can attach a voice to name, would you guys like to introduce yourselves and get started?”

    2015-12-04 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Nootropics and the Best Version of Your Brain, Yourself · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source