I. The thing that did not feel right
In 2007 my mother died. She was fifty-four. She was not overweight. She was not unwell in any way a chart could show. She was happy, and she was full of life, and she went to several different doctors and told each of them the same sentence: something does not feel quite right.
Not one of them consulted a colleague. Not one of them ordered the test that would have found it. They told her it was in her head, wrote a prescription for an antidepressant, and sent her out the door.
Sit with that for a moment. A woman describes a symptom she cannot name. The people trained to find the cause decide instead that there is no cause, and hand her a pill for the imagining of it.
Two days later she had a massive heart attack and died.
She had taken one of those pills. One. You may draw your own conclusion; I have drawn mine and I have lived inside it ever since.
The autopsy found an enlarged heart — a condition a routine test would have shown, that a competent eye would have caught, and that could have been managed. It was not hidden. Nobody looked.
What that did to me was not grief alone. It was fury with a direction. A team of experts had been handed every warning sign they needed and did the one thing a professional must never do: they stopped asking. And into the space where the asking should have been, they put a drug.
II. The question that followed me
I started asking things I had never thought to ask. Do these people actually know? Or are they moving product for an industry with no stake in whether I am well? Is what they hand across the counter safe, effective, or simply a way to stop a symptom from being audible? Do I trust any of this with my body and my mind?
I was not looking for an enemy. I was looking for something that would hold up when I pushed on it. Something measured — not asserted, not marketed, not believed. That search is why every claim on this site carries its study one tap below the sentence, and why the studies that answered against us are down there too.
A receipt you are not allowed to read is not a receipt.
Interstellar Transmissions. Six nights a week, eight hours a night, inside a bus rebuilt as a venue.
III. Eight hours a night
By 2012 my band, Interstellar Transmissions, was living the best years of my life at a pace almost nobody could hold. Six and seven nights a week. Six to eight hours of demanding, technical live music a day. We had built a bus into a moving venue and we filled it, city after city, and I would not trade a single night of it. It was also grinding me into the ground.
After the better part of a year of it I asked the only question that mattered: how does anyone keep this up, night after night, without being on something?
The history of my profession supplies the answer, and it is not a good one. Musicians have been reaching for chemistry to keep up for as long as there has been a stage to stand on, and it has taken a great many of them. The stage, the bus, the crowd. This is what the pace bought.
On the bus, between sets. Pegasus — Interstellar Transmissions, from New Beginnings (2011). Listen on Apple Music →
The record was called New Beginnings. It came out in September 2011, the year before the search for a sustainable way to hold that pace began. Nobody planned the title.
I wanted the peak state without the bill that comes due. So I went looking somewhere I had no background at all: the Chinese materia medica, and specifically the supertonic and longevity herbs — many of them from the superior class of the Shennong Bencao Jing, the oldest Chinese pharmacopoeia, whose 120 upper-class drugs were recorded as safe to take across a long life rather than a short crisis. (That book survives only as a reconstruction, quoted back together out of later works — and not every herb I ended up with is in it. Which ones are, and what their entries actually say, is on the page itself.)
I gathered them from wherever they grew. I read everything I could find. I tried everything I could get my hands on, on myself, on tour, under load — the only honest laboratory a working musician has.
IV. What did not exist
Slowly the field narrowed. Certain herbs kept answering. And then I hit the wall that made this company inevitable: nothing on the market put the right herbs in one formula at a potency that did anything.
Not close. Blends built to a price. Labels that named a plant and delivered a rumor of it.
So I made it myself. Innumerable sources, innumerable variations, one prototype and then another — the same refusal to accept an approximation that I had brought to music, turned on a jar. Out of that came The Interstellar Blend.
I took it alongside daily intermittent fasting, and it was not long before friends, family and then complete strangers began asking what I was doing.
The road years.
V. The two maps
Here is the thing nobody told me, and I had to live inside both of them to find it out.
The old pharmacopoeia and the modern literature are not rivals. They are two descriptions of one body, written by people who could not see the same things.
The physicians who built that materia medica could not measure a hormone. No assay, no microscope, no way to see a single molecule. What they had was time, and attention, and generations of it — so they described what they could watch, and they organised it into three: what you are made of, what you run on, and what makes you you. Essence, energy, spirit. Jing, Qi, Shen. The Three Treasures.
The modern literature could measure the molecule, and so it went the other way — down, into AMPK and SIRT1 and cortisol and BDNF, into a hundred separate mechanisms, each one measured honestly, and almost none of them ever put back together into a person.
One map is the shape of a whole life with nothing underneath it. The other is a thousand true details with no shape at all. I wanted both — not a compromise between them. Both, whole, each held to its own standard.
So that is what this is.
The new map is the one you will touch first. Tap a goal — fatigue, sleep, stubborn fat, memory — and the site does not reach for a product. It resolves your goal into the biological pathways underneath it, finds which blend is the specialist in each one — the blend that owns that pathway rather than merely touches it — and builds the single combo that covers the most of them. The pathways open to the published work behind them.
The old map is the lens over the same set. Sort those mechanisms by what each one acts on — the body’s stock, its flow, its signal — and you are looking at Jing, Qi and Shen, named long before anyone could measure one of them. We did not find that in the texts. We put it there, deliberately, and we say so on the page. It is how we navigate. It is not a claim that anyone in antiquity knew what a sirtuin was.
And here is why I will not drop either half.
Drop the pathways and you are left with a beautiful story and nothing to check — which is precisely what was handed to my mother.
Drop the Treasures and you are left with a hundred true facts and no idea what to do on a Tuesday morning.
She was failed by people who had the measurements in front of them and stopped asking what they meant. I am not going to repeat that in the other direction.
VI. Word of mouth
People would say: you look well for your age, and you never seem to tire. How?
And I would tell them. I fast. I take a supertonic longevity formula I built because the one I wanted did not exist. I feel extraordinary nearly all of the time. In the studio. I began selling it to friends. It moved the way only a thing that works moves — by one person telling another. Testimonials arrived from across the country. I put up a website and watched the business grow on almost no advertising, because I have never had to buy the thing I was given for free.
VII. What this is for
The goal has not changed since the first batch. Take out the anxiety, the low mood, the fog, the fatigue, the grinding stress. Put back the energy, the health, the passion, the appetite for being alive. Do it with the purest and most potent material that can be obtained, in small batches, to a standard I will not move.
And do it so every claim can be checked by anyone — including the physician my customers show it to.
My mother was told her symptom was imaginary because that was easier than looking. Everything here is built so that nobody has to take my word for anything.
This work is dedicated to her.
— Gavin Robert McGowen