#36 - Solving Health Using AI | Max Marchione, Superpower

Summary

Ti Morse interviews Max Marchione, co-founder of Superpower, a company using AI to democratize access to healthcare. The conversation opens with Max describing his team’s Friday ritual of injecting each other with peptides — Thymosin Alpha 1 for immune defense, NAD+ for cellular energy, and Retatrutide (a “GLP-3” triple agonist). Max’s philosophy is that everything he does that people laugh at and call crazy eventually becomes mainstream, and he wants to live in the future by experimenting with cutting-edge health interventions.

The interview covers an extraordinarily wide range of topics: Max’s sleep optimization stack, the risks of blindly following AI health advice, his controversial views on nicotine as a cognitive enhancer, building a “pro autism stack,” learning to dream bigger from Masayoshi Son (Masa) of SoftBank, and his framework of “$100B company in 10 years, $1B company in 3 years, $10M revenue in 1 year.” Max explains why most brands in the world are “3 out of 10” quality, why talent is exponentially distributed (the best person is not twice as good but 100x), how to train intuition, and the US healthcare system’s perverse incentive structures. He also discusses gene editing possibilities like sleeping only 5 hours a night, the importance of obsessing over revenue, and pushing through when nobody believes in you. The conversation touches on Max’s early businesses and his long-term vision of building a city.

Highlights

”Every Friday Our Team Injects Each Other”

“So every Friday our team does a Friday breakfast, which means we inject each other because we think it’s fun and we think that many of these compounds are going to become the standard of care in the near future.” — Max Marchione, 0:31

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”$100B Company in 10 Years”

“$100 billion company in 10 years, $1 billion company in 3 years, $10 million revenue in 1 year. That’s how you work backwards from an ambitious vision.” — Max Marchione, 35:33

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”Why the World Is Full of 3/10 Brands”

“The world is full of 3 out of 10 brands. Most people just don’t care enough to make something truly excellent. The gap between a 3 and a 10 is where all the value is.” — Max Marchione, 44:30

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”Talent Is Exponentially Distributed”

“Talent is exponentially distributed. The best person is not twice as good as the second best — they’re 100 times as good.” — Max Marchione, 47:34

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”Using Gene Editing to Sleep 5 Hours a Night”

“There are people who naturally sleep 5 hours a night and feel fully rested because of a genetic mutation. Gene editing could theoretically give everyone that ability.” — Max Marchione, 1:16:07

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Key Points

• Friday injection ritual (0:31) - Team injects Thymosin Alpha 1, NAD+, and Retatrutide (GLP-3) every Friday
• Living in the future (5:23) - Everything Max does that people call crazy eventually becomes mainstream
• Sleep optimization stack (11:48) - Max’s detailed sleep protocol for optimal performance
• Nicotine as cognitive enhancer (18:42) - Controversial use of nicotine for focus and cognition
• Pro autism stack (20:36) - Tongue-in-cheek approach to optimizing for deep focus
• Learning from Masa Son (33:16) - SoftBank’s Masa taught Max to dream bigger
• $100B/10yr framework (35:33) - Working backwards from $100B in 10 years to $10M revenue in year one
• Democratizing healthcare (40:44) - Superpower’s mission to give everyone access to personalized health data
• 3/10 brands (44:30) - Most brands are mediocre; the gap between 3/10 and 10/10 is where all value lives
• Exponential talent distribution (47:34) - The best person is 100x better, not 2x; hire accordingly
• Training intuition (52:57) - Intuition can be systematically trained through deliberate practice
• US healthcare incentives (1:06:31) - The US healthcare system is designed around perverse incentives that don’t reward health outcomes
• Gene editing for sleep (1:16:07) - Genetic mutation allows some people to naturally need only 5 hours of sleep
• Obsessing over revenue (1:20:19) - Revenue is the ultimate validator
• Building a city (1:22:31) - Long-term vision includes building a city focused on health and learning

Mentions

Companies

• Superpower (0:31) - AI health platform democratizing access to healthcare
• SoftBank (33:16) - Where Max learned to dream bigger from Masa Son

Products & Technologies

• Thymosin Alpha 1 (0:42) - Immune defense peptide
• NAD+ (0:57) - Cellular energy and longevity compound
• Retatrutide (1:07) - Triple agonist GLP drug (GLP-3)
• Ozempic (1:07) - GLP-1 agonist compared to Retatrutide

People

• Max Marchione (0:08) - Co-founder of Superpower
• Masayoshi Son (Masa) (33:16) - SoftBank founder who taught Max to dream bigger

Surprising Quotes

“Every Friday our team does a Friday breakfast, which means we inject each other because we think it’s fun.” — Max Marchione, 0:31

“Everything I’ve started doing that everyone laughs at and calls crazy, several years later starts to become mainstream.” — Max Marchione, 0:08

“The best person is not twice as good as the second best — they’re 100 times as good.” — Max Marchione, 47:34

“Gene editing could theoretically give everyone the ability to sleep only 5 hours a night and feel fully rested.” — Max Marchione, 1:16:07

Transcript

Max Marchione: 0:00 You’re going to have a choice of injection this morning.

Ti Morse: 0:02 I came down with one of the worst sore throats I had in my life.

Max Marchione: 0:05 What did I do? I injected Thymosin Alpha 1. What I’ve at least seen is everything I’ve started doing that everyone laughs at and calls crazy, several years later starts to become mainstream.

Ti Morse: 0:15 That burns a little bit. Super excited to interview Max Marchione. Alright, let’s start off with you injecting me with whatever those three vials are.

Max Marchione: 0:26 You’re going to have a choice of injection this morning. So every Friday our team does a Friday breakfast, which means we inject each other because we think it’s fun and we think that many of these compounds also improve human potential. So there are three different ones here we can play around with. One is Thymosin Alpha 1. I never get sick anymore because every time I’m about to get sick, I use this and I don’t get sick. My sore throat disappears. The second is NAD+, which is used for cellular energy, longevity, and just like energy day-to-day. If you take this, you’ll probably feel a little bit more alive the rest of the week. And this one here is Retatrutide, which is a—I call it a GLP-3. A GLP-1 like Ozempic is just an agonist of the GLP-1 receptor. This is a triple agonist, so it binds to the GLP-1 receptor, the GIP receptor, and that improves insulin sensitivity, so you metabolize carbs more effectively. And then it also binds to the glucagon receptor, which increases basically energy production at rest. So you’ll burn more calories without doing anything different. And Ozempic has a lot of side effects. Retatrutide has very few. So that’s what’s on the menu this morning.

Ti Morse: 1:43 Do you want to just do all three?

Max Marchione: 1:44 All three? Okay. Yeah, why not? Let’s do all three.

Ti Morse: 1:48 Okay.

Max Marchione: 1:49 Cool. Um, so I think that a lot of people will call this pseudoscience. And my golden rule of pseudoscience is you’re not allowed to call something pseudoscience until you’ve tried it. And I think that before there’s clinical data and research, there’s anecdote, right? The first step in the scientific method is a hypothesis, typically based on some sort of empirical evidence. Um, and many of these compounds have been around for decades, and there’s a large body of empirical evidence that has not been effectively collated into a clinical study yet that potentially supports the use.

Ti Morse: 2:18 Is this more of the Bryan Johnson school of thought where you just start, you know, trying things on yourself and then figure out what works through the research?

Max Marchione: 2:25 Kind of. My fundamental problem with what Bryan does is he says ‘I will just follow the data.’ And the problem with that is that we actually cannot collect enough data points on the human body right now to just follow the data. Right? Subjective how we feel also matters. Right? Intuition also matters. Understanding mechanism also matters. You can’t just look at the data because we have a limited data set. In the future, if we had every single data point and we can model every organ, then Bryan’s approach is correct. Right? First principles in the limit is correct. Today I actually think it’s a little bit flawed.

Ti Morse: 3:00 Because you’re not getting like as much measurement, especially on the actual human? It’s, you know, ingesting whatever.

Max Marchione: 3:01 Yeah, it’s just like we can’t measure everything, so we need to actually to an extent also subjectively assess how we feel. Um, for example, one of the things that Bryan does is he tries to reduce his body temperature, which is really interesting because what that means typically is that your thyroid is underperforming. And if you look at Bryan, his thyroid is underperforming. So what does he do? He supplements thyroid hormone. I’m like, ‘Well, maybe if you actually stepped back a second and tried to actually fix the underlying problem, you wouldn’t actually need to take thyroid hormone. Your thyroid would actually perform effectively.’ Um, so it’s kind of like he fucks one thing up and then he tries to like fix it by taking some sort of supplement, whereas if you actually reasoned from first principles you’d probably solve things um at the foundations.

Ti Morse: 3:46 Gotcha. Cool. Okay. So, what are we injecting first?

Max Marchione: 3:49 We’re going to inject Thymosin Alpha-1 first, okay, for immunity. So, um, a couple months ago I was about to fly out to the UAE for some important-ish meetings and I came down with one of the worst sore throats I’ve had in my life and I was about to hop on like a 15-hour flight or something. I’m like, ‘Oh fuck, here we go.’ Um, and I’m not good at sleeping on flights, so what did I do? I injected Thymosin Alpha-1. Um, 24 hours later I had a really runny nose, I was excreting absolutely everything, um, 36 hours later I was perfectly fine. I felt like I never got sick. So that’s Thymosin Alpha-1 for you. This is not medical advice. These are all research compounds. Look, some countries around the world like Russia and China and Italy um use them and you can get them easily. In the US, this is only for research purposes. So we’re performing research right now. There we go.

Ti Morse: 4:45 Nice. And how did it feel?

Max Marchione: 4:47 Pretty much nothing.

Ti Morse: 4:48 Yeah. Cool. Amazing. Are we going to do one more?

Max Marchione: 4:50 Pretty small needle. Let’s do one more. Okay. Let’s do NAD as well. Okay. So I can give you—do you want a dose that you can feel?

Ti Morse: 4:58 Yeah.

Max Marchione: 4:59 Actually, I think I’ve diluted this too much to give you one you can feel, but let’s see. We’ll do 50 units. So about this much in this vial.

Ti Morse: 5:13 It’s crazy how little the needle actually feels like anything. That burns a little bit.

Max Marchione: 5:20 Yeah.

Ti Morse: 5:21 Cool. Amazing. All right. We did it. Yep. You’re kind of like living a few years in the future. You’ve got—you’re taking a whole bunch of things that people aren’t taking, doing a whole bunch of different like injections and pills and all this stuff. What does a week look like right now for Max?

Max Marchione: 5:35 Yeah, well I guess stepping back to the living in the future idea. When I was um 16, it was 2016. I remember wearing a big Gen 1 Oura ring and everyone made fun of me for tracking my sleep, right? It was such a weird thing back then. And then I pulled out the the red blue light blocking glasses and the mouth tape and they thought I was certifiably psychopathic at that point. And what I’ve at least seen is everything I’ve started doing that everyone laughs at and calls crazy… Every few years later starts to become mainstream. Same with CGMs, same with different headbands to track and modify human experience. Same with some of the things I supplement today, and I suspect soon, same with peptides and compounds that can actually enhance and extend human potential. If I look at a day in the life, so, my general view is that there’s no universal recommendation. And I think people have to be very good at understanding what is good for them at this particular point in their life. There was a period in my life where I woke up at 5:00 a.m. Now I wake up at 9:00 a.m. and get to bed at like 2:00 a.m., right? And any longevity person would be like, ‘that’s stupid’. But the reason that works for me is that I’m very bad at going to sleep. And therefore, going to bed at 2:00 a.m. means that there’s a two-hour window where I’m just with my laptop and my thoughts without the world distracting me and keeping me awake. So I go to bed late, I wake up late-ish. When I wake up, the first thing I do is I jump out of bed. I like literally try to jump because I find that it increases energy by 20% instantly. I’m like, ‘well, that’s a pretty easy hack’. I will go to the bathroom and I will do a couple of things. I will use a tongue scraper because there’s a lot of bacteria that accumulates in your mouth during the night. It also feels good. I try to pay careful attention to subjectively what feels good. Yes, what does the data say? But also subjectively what feels good for me. And I will put coconut oil in my mouth and swish it around for around five minutes. And that’s called oil pulling and there’s some evidence for why this is effective from Ayurvedic medicine, and then just subjectively for me, I have noticed that it improves oral hygiene, that it improves gum health. I remember after I started doing it, I went to the doctor—the dentist—and they’re like, ‘whoa, I’ve never seen your teeth and gums look this healthy’. And then later in the dental appointment I said to them, ‘have you heard of oil pulling?’ and they’re like, ‘yeah, that doesn’t work.’ I’m like, ‘hmm, okay’.

Ti Morse: 7:31 Does—is it specifically for coconut oil? Or is it something—will work for other things?

Max Marchione: 7:33 Coconut oil is, is the one that’s meant to be effective. I think it’s antiviral and antibacterial, which is potentially why it has that property. Then I’ll come upstairs, I will make one or two cups of green tea. I use Gyokuro green tea, it’s a Japanese green tea. I just find it’s the tastiest. I also like the caffeine response. I brew that quite intentionally, 64 degrees Celsius water, so whatever that is in Fahrenheit, maybe 180 or something. And that gives me around 50 milligrams of caffeine, which is around right for me. I will take a multivitamin. There’s only one brand I like of all the brands on the market, and it’s not Bryan Johnson’s, sorry Bryan.

Ti Morse: 7:54 Is the reason for that brand that has vitamins that others don’t? Or what’s logic?

Max Marchione: 7:57 Yeah, there’s probably like three or four things you want to look for. One is ingredient quality. That’s kind of obvious, but for every vitamin, there are multiple forms of it and you want the highest quality form. The second thing is the right dosing. For example, a lot of multivitamins will have 300 IUs of Vitamin D. This has 3,000 IUs of Vitamin D. And I’d contend that you need closer to 3,000 IUs of Vitamin D. The third thing is you want the right cofactors to improve the absorption of certain nutrients. So again, take vitamin D, you need vitamin K to absorb it. Now if you look at a lot of vitamin Ks that are added, they might add one form of vitamin K, but there’s actually three forms you need. You need vitamin K1, you need K2, and of K2 you need both the MK7 form and the MK4 form. And no multivitamin is thinking about all of this stuff except for this one brand. And then the final thing that I look for is just having a broad enough spectrum of the things that I want in my body. So I’ll take that. I take Fatty 15, which is kind of like an alternative to omega-3. I’ll take that in the morning and then omega-3 at night. And then I will take taurine, which is good for longevity, energy, and several other functions. And depending on what I’m going for in a certain day, I might supplement other things. If I’m trying to improve verbal fluency, like I want to do now for a podcast, I would take L-carnitine, which for some reason for me improves verbal fluency. It doesn’t for everyone. If I’m trying to lock in and focus and get into deep work, I’ll likely take nicotine or some sort of cholinergic like Alpha-GPC. So depending on exactly what I’m going for, I’ll take different things. I get to work. I don’t eat until nowadays 4:00 PM. This has changed. I’ve been parts of my life where I eat first thing. Now I don’t eat until 4:00 PM. I make a massive smoothie. This smoothie’s a hack. It has 60 grams of protein, 30 grams of fiber, dozens of nutrients, dozens of things that support gut health, and only maybe 400 calories, but it fills me up more like 1000 calories due to…

Ti Morse: 10:32 Do you take that every morning and like do you have a very specific set of things that you put in it?

Max Marchione: 10:38 Yeah, I would do that every afternoon now at around 3:00 to 4:00 PM. And I will add three different forms of protein. I’ll add a organic goat whey protein, which is high in amino acids like leucine, which is good for muscle building. I’ll also add a plant protein because the amino acids in the plant protein are different to the one in the whey. And then I will also add a collagen because that’s high in glycine and things which are low in whey. And I find that if you want to balance amino acid profile, it’s helpful to add multiple different forms. I’ll add different kinds of fiber. So I’ll add green banana flour, which is one of the few resistant starches you can get. And resistant starch is really good for your gut. I’ll also add a soluble fiber. There’s all sorts of different soluble fibers you can use. I’ll add colostrum, I’ll add glutamine, I’ll add a high polyphenol cacao powder, and a handful of other things that get a lot of nutrients in in a way that fills you up, is very high in fiber, very high in protein, very easy to do. And I find that kind of a hack. I’ll do that, I’ll go to the gym, I’ll exercise, I’ll come back, I’ll eat a really big dinner, and then I will lock in and work for the rest of the night and do a sleep stack before bed.

Ti Morse: 11:48 Wait, what’s your sleep stack?

Max Marchione: 11:49 So there’s two. There’s one which is like frequent, regular, very safe, and that’s basically just amino acids. And that will be L…

Ti Morse: 12:00 it will be glycine, um, it will be glycine, um, it’s around 200 milligrams of l-theanine, around 3 grams of glycine, 100 milligrams of inositol and around 600 milligrams of magnesium. Um, and that’s the simple stack, that’s one that I’ll do most nights. If I want to induce sleep onset, um, because I’m feeling like I don’t, I’m not going to be able to sleep, I’ll add a couple of other things. I might double the dose of theanine, I might add 250 milligrams of PharmaGABA, and I might add around a milligram of melatonin. Um, so that’s and maybe I’ll add a gram of l-tryptophan as well, which is another amino acid.

Max Marchione: 12:41 And like a milligram is like one-fifth of what they typically sell in like a tablet, right? Because they typically sell like five milligram tablets, I think.

Ti Morse: 12:48 Yeah, like in the US, people have gone overboard with melatonin and I don’t think that you actually have a high marginal benefit and I think the higher dosing of melatonin can actually impact your body’s natural ability to produce melatonin.

Max Marchione: 13:01 The thing I’ve noticed is like when I take a higher dose of melatonin, I just wake up halfway through the night, I just can’t go back to sleep. Um, which I don’t know, but it’s like consistent, so I know that there’s a direct correlation with that.

Ti Morse: 13:13 Well, I think there’s an interesting matter in there, right? Which is there’s the general objective truth, which is does melatonin wake you up in the middle of the night? And then there’s like the for me what happens. I think the for me what happens is really, really interesting. And in today’s world we’re not good at performing individualized randomized control trials, individualized trials controlling against our own body. I think where we need to get to with health is we use our own body as a control and we learn what individually works for us. And it’s going to be very hard for the human brain to do that because a doctor can’t do that for every single individual on earth. The AI will probably get to the point where it knows exactly what works for us because we’ve built a closed-loop feedback system of intervention and result, therapeutic and diagnostic. And the AI will tell us here’s exactly what you need to do. And in this world we will, I think, blindly follow the AI because we know it is far better than what we can work out on our own.

Max Marchione: 14:30 Or like at least the people that want to be super optimized for their health, I’d imagine.

Ti Morse: 14:34 I don’t know. I think like that’s kind of where it starts. And I think in a world where the AI is imperfect, that’s where it starts. But the idea is if the AI actually has full context on what you care about, it will know whether you maybe not caring about being optimized for your health and it will give you the recommendation based on that. So I think if we assume that context is genuinely infinite, one of my hypotheses is that we actually blindly follow the AI for most decisions in our lives. something you have to have some thing that’s kind of taking in signal and so do you have like a wearable or how do you get that information?

Max Marchione: 15:03 Yeah, I think that like the less cognitive load you have, the better and people really don’t like to think, honestly, and make decisions. Yes, this three kinds of data which are helpful in healthcare. No single company has all three of them. If we can gather all three of them, we potentially build the AI doctor that redefines medicine, we build this system I’m talking about. The three kinds of data are one, multimodal, multi-omic data. So think your genome, blood biomarker testing, proteomic testing, metabolomic testing, basically biological assays. The and you and you want multiple kinds of them over time. The second kind of data set you want is longitudinal clinical data, which is basically what happens to someone over time. Do they do they become healthier, do they become less healthy? That’s basically the label on the omic data. And again, it’s very rare to have both these data sets in concert. If you look at 23andMe, yes they have genomic data, but they don’t have clinical data. They don’t take care of you over time to see what happens. They give you a big survey when you join and that survey plus the genomic data is worth three hundred million dollars for someone trying to like acquire 23andMe, but they don’t see what happens over time. So the second thing you need is longitudinal clinical data. The third thing you need is continuous wearable data. And the reason why is because today what we try to do is we try to map from omic data to clinical data. We try to say I saw this in your genome and therefore I predicted this outcome. And that is very episodic. You can’t do blood tests that often and therefore prediction is not that effective. What we want to potentially do is move to continuous prediction. I saw this thing in your wearable or in some sort of biosensor in your environment and that allowed me to predict what is happening clinically. So having all three of these data sets in concert right now is something we do and if we build up enough data there we start to be able to create the AI doctor.

Ti Morse: 15:10 Yeah and like people say no but I want to make this, I want to choose this restaurant, the AI’s never going to know my preference. I’m like, this assumes that you don’t have infinite context. If the AI has infinite context, I don’t think people are going to want to make these decisions.

Max Marchione: 15:25 Do you think that like there’s some future iteration of or version of superpower where I’d imagine to understand how your body is reacting…

Ti Morse: 16:51 Yeah, does that include stuff more than just, you know, your personal wearable, but it’s also like the I don’t know, if there’s smoke in the air or something outside, you might predict that your body is reacting less well or something?

Max Marchione: 16:58 Yeah, we want to lower the barrier to collecting as much data as possible. And what we might see is that the iPhone can scan your face and that is useful data point. The iPhone can see how fast you’re typing and that’s a useful data point. There’s some sensor in your environment that collects the it collects data about your environment and that’s a useful data point. So yeah, as much we want to lower the barrier to collecting continuous data because of how that will be useful for for prediction.

Ti Morse: 17:29 Is this is this a company that just couldn’t get built like six or seven years ago? Is this something that it can only get built now?

Max Marchione: 17:37 Oh, yeah. I think the company that tried to do something similar to what we’re doing was Forward. Um, they burned 400 million dollars and got nowhere. And there was a few reasons for that, but I think one is that there were very few APIs and and and not much healthcare infrastructure. And that mean they had that meant they had to try to build every single thing themselves. They ended up having like five to ten companies in one. Um, And at the same time, APIs got built that basically said let’s take one part of the health stack and turn that into infra. And now a company like Superpower can come along and do a large chunk of what Forward does in a year with $10 million rather than $400 million because there’s healthcare infrastructure.

Ti Morse: 18:15 Interesting.

Max Marchione: 18:16 And then there’s a couple of other trends, right? Which is that the cost of biological assays is going down, the prevalence of wearables is going up, language models are quite an effective modality at connecting the dots across lots of data points. More people actually care about their health, so more people are opting in, deciding to pay us to perform this kind of testing. So there’s technological trends, there’s biotechnology trends, and then there’s also consumer trends.

Ti Morse: 18:43 Do you kind of think, I know you mentioned nicotine, has that kind of been scapegoated the past few years? You know, when people think of nicotine, in most cases they think of like cigarettes equals bad for you because there’s, you know, cancer stuff or carcinogens and stuff. What form of nicotine do you think is a good form of nicotine? Like a powder or a pouch?

Max Marchione: 19:00 Yeah, so I think that it depends what your goals are. My general, one of my general views is that IQ is one of the most important inputs into being able to create great things in the world. If we believe this, what we’re trying to solve for is how can I increase my IQ, increase my focus, increase my ability to come up with interesting ideas. If we fix that goal, we say, okay, well nicotine is one of the things that allows us to do that very effectively. It’s a really potent nootropic. It’s very safe. The risk of developing any sort of disease using low amounts of nicotine infrequently is very low. Some people say nicotine has all sorts of protective properties, some say it’s neuroprotective and it might reduce incidence of Alzheimer’s. It’s a very well-studied and well-understood compound. For anyone who is questioning nicotine, I would recommend them to go to gwern.net, G-W-E-R-N.net, I think /nicotine, although there might be a—so just have a look at the nicotine article on that site and it aggregates so much of the research about nicotine and says it’s actually quite safe. So I was staunchly anti-nicotine because I hadn’t actually looked into the research and hadn’t thought for myself; instead, I listened to everyone else. And now I’m quite pro-nicotine.

Ti Morse: 20:22 Yeah, I I was basically completely anti-nicotine or not necessarily anti-nicotine, but definitely not going to, you know, pick up smoking and stuff. Um, but then I went down to Escondido and everyone was either smoking or using, you know, a ridiculous number of like Lucy pouches because, you know, John Coogan sponsored them. And it was just very obvious like after using them for a few times, I was like, this is useful. But like super low dose, like three milligrams and stuff. Yeah.

Max Marchione: 20:37 Yeah. I think it depends what for. I think nicotine is part of like a pro-autism stack and then sometimes you want the anti-autism stack. So pro-autism stack I think is nicotine plus some sort of cholinergic, so increase acetylcholine secretion in the brain. Alpha GPC is an example, phosphatidylcholine is an example, CDP choline is another example. I think the anti-autism stack are things that increase GABA or serotonin.

Ti Morse: 21:00 Would this be like—

Max Marchione: 21:00 a… you know, psychedelic kind of thing? So psychedelics would be pro-anti-autism. MDMA is anti-autism. Pharma GABA is anti-autism. Theanine is anti-autism. Phenibut is anti-autism. I think alcohol’s anti-autism. Alcohol, actually red wine increases GABA and…

Ti Morse: 21:16 Do you want to talk about your thoughts on red wine real quick?

Max Marchione: 21:19 Look, I think it’s been overly demonized. Um, there’s a couple of ways to think about this. One is let’s just be strong empiricists and let’s look at all of the empirical and epidemiological evidence we have and say, is there any observed correlation between low amounts of alcohol consumption and lifespan? And the answer’s no. If you look at blue zones, just about all of them will consume small amounts of alcohol. The second thing is we can be, okay, let’s just reason by first principles. Let’s try to look at mechanisms. And if you try to look at mechanisms, there are very few mechanisms that can allow you to create an argument for saying one glass or half glass of red wine a night is bad for you. And for every argument that says it’s bad for you, you can also argue the opposite. You could say it’s an antioxidant, you can say that it reduces stress, you can say it’s done socially, you can say it’s anti-viral and anti-bacterial. Then the final thing is I can be like, okay, let me just look at the people who have like, who are at the frontier, right? Who are the people at the frontier who have been delivering care for a long time? And what do they say? One of our doctors is probably the leading cancer doctor around the world. People fly from all around the world to see her and she cures incurable cancers, incurable autoimmune diseases, etc. If I look at what experts such as her say, she will personally drink half a shot of tequila every night because she enjoys it, right? So I think it’s very hard to create an argument that between one to call it five glasses of a healthy form of alcohol per week is bad for you.

Ti Morse: 22:54 So what is your regimen? Do you drink? What is your stack?

Max Marchione: 22:59 I focus a lot on what brings me joy. Like, I think a lot about one of the biggest inputs into health and lifespan is am I happy? Am I enjoying myself? Am I relaxed? Am I not over-intellectualizing absolutely everything? And if I’m at a restaurant and there’s a nice glass of red wine, I will have a glass of red wine. Now will I have five glasses? No. Will I do that every night? No. But if I get joy and satisfaction from drinking a very small amount, I happily will.

Ti Morse: 23:27 Part of it is spacing it out over the week so you aren’t slamming all five glasses at once, which you’d do for an entire month, 21 nights.

Max Marchione: 23:35 Yeah. Now that said, I’m increasingly thinking there could even be an argument for doing a large amount of alcohol all at once from an increasing the odds of success standpoint. Right. So my general view is that two variables that matter the most for success are IQ and…

Ti Morse: 24:00 And, um, low fear. And I think having one night a month where you get quite drunk in an intentional way can solve for both these things. I think it can solve for IQ because it changes the way you think over an acute one-day period. And one part of IQ is creativity or lateral thinking. But I think more importantly, it solves for low fear. It basically shows you what does having no inhibitions feel like in my body. And if you can take that set of feelings and learn how to bring that out even when you’re not drunk, you now all of a sudden have a superpower which is that you can take more action with less fear even when you’re not drinking. So again, I don’t get massively drunk once a month, but I’m increasingly thinking there could be an argument for why it’s actually a highly productive thing.

Max Marchione: 24:46 Do you think that you would do this once a month or once, you know, a year or what’s the like optimal, I don’t know, time frame in which you remind yourself?

Ti Morse: 24:58 I probably think once a month. Once a month is probably optimal. It’s hard to argue that doing it once a month is going to have an adverse effect on your health as well.

Max Marchione: 25:06 Is there any other thing kind of like getting slammed once a month that people, in most cases, might, doctors or whatever might be like, “I don’t know if that is the right thing to do”, but based on your, you know, experience, it seems like the right move?

Ti Morse: 25:21 Well, it depends what we say it’s the right move for. Is it the right move for maximizing my health today? Probably not. Is it the right move for helping you build something great? Potentially. Like if we genuinely believe that it has a positive effect on IQ by changing the way you think over a short term period and a positive effect on lowering fear, it might be an input to building something great. And at the same time, I think all of these micro-optimizations are not going to materially move the needle on healthspan or lifespan. They’re not. The thing that is is deep biotech. And we can assume that access to deep biotech is unevenly distributed. So the thing that moves the needle on health is having the money. Having money to afford deep biotech. And if improving, increasing IQ and lowering fear allows you to make more money, then actually drinking alcohol might increase lifespan.

Max Marchione: 26:18 It’s like the game optimal move.

Ti Morse: 26:20 Maybe. Like, look, I could argue against myself right now. I think I’m like being rhetorical for the sake of it. But I think the meta here is that people are over-optimizing on things which have very low marginal impact. And the reality is the way we extend lifespan is deep biotechnology, not “did I have zero glasses of wine over the past three years”.

Max Marchione: 26:31 What do you think the biggest thing that most people could do that they’re just not tracking or not getting enough of to like materially improve their general health?

Ti Morse: 26:41 I think that one is just testing and seeing what is wrong with you. Um, when you test and you see what’s wrong, you can start to fix those things with very simple interventions and you also start being motivated to fix those things. I think the second thing is, uh, well, I have a short story. So this cancer doctor I mentioned, one of the best cancer doctors in the world, I asked her… What is the number one thing you recommend to prevent cancer?

Max Marchione: 27:03 And she replied PMA, positive mental attitude is the number one thing you can do to prevent cancer. And I think there’s a really interesting learning in here, which is that the way we like appraise our everyday life, the way we choose to feel actually has a really big impact on biology. Right, we know that the subjective can modify the objective. What exists in our brain can actually modify our biology in the world, and I think not enough people in the world of health actually give weight to the impact of psychology and the brain and the subjective on modifying our actual reality. Um, so PMA is something which I think is massively under-practiced.

Ti Morse: 27:48 Is it—is it kind of like when you’re happy, you just release different kinds of chemicals in your brain and your body, or—or what is it?

Max Marchione: 27:57 Yeah, there’s—there’s a lot of anecdote and some research to say that what we believe actually creates or—or becomes reality. And we can do that at the very micro level of, if I believe this about a drink, it will have this effect on my biology and there’s all sorts of interesting studies. Um, and I think the way to put this into practice is to every day say, ‘I’m healthy and I’m happy.’ Like I think my problem with the Oura ring is people now have seven hours of sleep and they wake up and they’re like, ‘Fuck, my sleep score’s 70. I’m going to choose to feel shit today.’ Um, whereas I think the opposite approach is I wake up and I feel amazing, so I’m going to choose to feel really good and I’m going to choose to be really happy. And we know—there were—we know the studies between happiness and longevity and happiness and lifespan or low stress and lifespan. And I think it’s often people assume that the environment determines our happiness levels and our stress levels. I would contend that we can actually modify our happiness and stress levels by just choosing to do that. Right? It’s actually a very malleable thing. Which is why I dislike the question ‘how are you?’, because it assumes that how you are is a product of the world, whereas I think there’s only one valid answer to ‘how are you?’, which is ‘really fucking good. I’m choosing to be really fucking good right now.’ Um, so that—that—that’s kind of how I think of PMA. For me, it has a good component to it. I can appraise that event as doing something positive. I can appraise a tough event as doing—and it doesn’t mean I’m not going to feel hurt. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to feel sad. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to feel really angry. But I could, I’m feeling those things. That’s fine. That’s human. That can actually be a good thing.

Ti Morse: 30:09 Amazing. I—I think that there are like very few people like you, to be honest. I think—I think most people are a little bit more, uh, influenced by their environment. But you’re also—you’re kind of like manufacturing an environment where you can be this like version of yourself that is happy, you know? Like you can’t, you know, if you’re living out of your car for example, it’s a little bit difficult. Yeah, the way I think about it is I just pretend that I’m on a quest and it’d be very boring if the quest, like everything worked out and it was just this, you know, clear step ladder up, you know? If you don’t get enough sleep one night, you’re just on a quest, right?

Max Marchione: 30:30 I feel like you have this mentality bit as well. Like you have this crazy resilience and positivity.

Ti Morse: 30:34 Yeah, no, I well, I just like I love this line, ‘just figure out what works and then do it’. I think that’s from Charlie Munger and it’s like, if, you know, people like happy people. People like people that they enjoy being around and we are very like influenced by the people around us. And so if you smile, it like causes chemicals to be released in your brain, you know, if I do it. So, anyway, okay.

Max Marchione: 30:38 But not everything around me has to be really fucking good. Right? Stuff around me can be really hard. I can be going through a low and at the same time I can choose to be like, ‘Good. So yeah, I’m going through a low, good. This is an awesome opportunity to actually develop myself and improve.’ So I’m not saying that everything around you has to be good. I’m not saying that, um, everything that happens to you has to be something which is like a good or bad event. The events can be bad, but I can say that a bad event… Just on the Charlie point, I love people who have two supposedly—who hold two supposedly paradoxical views at the same time. So Charlie has two views. One, the algorithm of life is repeat what works. Two, is don’t copy others, don’t follow the herd, reason from first principles, reason from the fundamentals, question everything. And he holds both of those views at the same time. And I actually kind of love that because I think you can hold both of those views at the same time.

Ti Morse: 31:26 Yeah, I think I think one leads into the other. First you question the thing that, you know, is the perceived or conventional wisdom, and then if it is actually right, then you just do it forever because you don’t need to relearn. Do you have any views in your own head that kind of are mutually conflicting a little bit?

Max Marchione: 31:39 Uh, yeah, many. Um, one is that I’m simultaneously someone who likes to reason from fundamentals and I say that I’m a strong empiricist. So the strong empirical view of the world says, I do not understand the fundamentals, I’m just going to look at what empirically is true and assume that is true even if I don’t understand why. Right? So a classic example, I have a lot of friends who ask me, um, should I start my company in Australia or the US? And they will say, ‘Here are all of my reasons for starting the company in Australia.’ And if we just reason from fundamentals there, from first principles, often I’ll be like, ‘Yeah, those reasons sound really good. I think you’re right. You should start your company in Australia.’ If I’m a strong empiricist, I say, ‘I don’t give a shit about your reasons. All I care about is what does the empirical data support? I’m going to assume I don’t understand all of the reasons.’ And the empirical data supports the fact that if you want to start a great company, you should be in the Bay Area, with a deep tech exception of in LA and maybe like a CPG and Fintech exception in New York. So the strong empirical view is move to the US. Now, at the same time, I believe that often a lot of the dogma is wrong, right? Often we shouldn’t reason from analogy and shouldn’t reason from dogma and shouldn’t follow advice and instead should say, ‘What is fundamentally true?’ Right? I’ll have a lot of people be like, ‘Oh, so this company did this thing with their product…’ but why? Like, like why? That doesn’t work for our specific situation. In our specific situation, here is the set of facts and this is the conclusion based on that set of facts. So I think they’re two conflicting views that I simultaneously hold. There’re a bunch of others, but I’ll I’ll start with that.

Ti Morse: 33:15 I think you talked about like Masa a lot. Can you tell me what makes or what you find special about Masa and like why you have studied him?

Max Marchione: 33:26 He is one of the only people who dreams big enough. I was watching an interview with Masa in January and the interviewer opens with Masa, here are all of the things you’ve done. It’s amazing. You raised a hundred billion dollars, blah, blah, blah. And Masa says, I fear that in my sixty-five or however many years of life I’ve spent on this earth, I fear that I’ve wasted every year. And I’ve done nothing yet. And I haven’t dreamed big enough yet. And that is fucking awesome. Right? The world makes it so hard to dream big. It’s so scary for people to be ambitious enough because people laugh. When Masa said I’m gonna raise a hundred billion dollars, everyone laughed. People today still call Masa an idiot. He takes so much risk. He’s stupid. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He just like flies by the seat of his pants. No one gets it.

Ti Morse: 34:14 Well, what’s funny also is like, it actually works. Like if you look at even the whole like hundred billion dollar raise or whatever, on the plane ride over to Saudi Arabia, he like decides what number he’s going to ask for, and I think it was initially like fifteen billion and then he was like, no, a hundred. Just wrote it down and then asked for it and he got forty-five.

Max Marchione: 34:34 Totally. So you don’t get what you don’t ask for kind of thing. Like like literally, I believe in the meeting with one of the people who anchored the fund, he was planning to ask for, I think it was ten billion dollars. And he was forty-five minutes into the meeting and they said, how much are you looking to raise? He’s like, forty-five billion dollars. Like four x the number. And this isn’t a hundred k to four hundred and fifty k, right? This is thirty-five billion delta we’re talking about because you know he wanted to raise a billion dollars per minute. So so that’s Masa. And I think he has a very good understanding of how the biggest ideas and the biggest trends can be far bigger than anyone else actually ever thinks. Right? It’s the whole like thrive idea of Fifth Avenue. And I think that consensus and right is actually a very non-consensus idea. Right? Because consensus and right typically means betting far bigger and believing that the best of the best can compound far faster than anyone else believes and that belief is actually non-consensus and Masa holds that belief.

Ti Morse: 34:56 Let’s take let’s take the ambition angle, you know, from Masa. What about like how you think and how you approach things is different because you’re trying to constantly think about what is the more ambitious version of what I’m trying to do?

Max Marchione: 35:04 I think there’s three frames that people should think about in the context of building a company. Um, or three guiding questions. Question number one is um assume you have to be a hundred billion dollar company, In around 10 years. Maybe it’ll take 15, 20 years, but assume you have to do it in around 10 years. What has to happen? What has to be true? How can you get there? And that’s an amazing guiding question because it means right from the start just about every single idea you could work on is not worth working on.

Ti Morse: 36:15 Yeah.

Max Marchione: 36:15 Like no SaaS idea is worth working on anymore.

Ti Morse: 36:16 It just makes it easy to say no.

Max Marchione: 36:18 It just makes it easy to say no, right? You need to work on something that actually matters for the world and can progress humanity forward because that allows you to create a hundred billion dollar company in around 10 years. The second view is how do you be a billion dollar company in three years? So few people try to think this way, but the second you fix the assumption that we need to be a billion dollar company in three years, you start to make a different set of actions. You hire different people, you raise money in a different way. And I’m not saying you will be a billion dollar company in three years, but what if you operate under the assumption that you have to be? I think that is really, really powerful and only happens if you dream big. The dogma of the world will tell you that’s stupid. If you say this on camera, people will laugh at you. Like, oh be less ambitious, come on, no one does this. So I think that’s the second frame. And then I think the third frame is how do you get to—and this isn’t useful for every company, but it’s how do you get to 10 million in revenue in one year? And the only reason this is a useful frame is that revenue is typically the primary input into capital, which is the primary input into team, which is the primary input into product. Right? So if we actually use that line of reasoning it’s like, actually let’s get a lot of capital early and revenue’s one thing that unlocks that. If you’re Palmer Luckey, that’s not—that’s not the case. If you’re—if you’re Elon, that’s not the case. If you’re a first-time founder who’s moving to the US at 22 years old, that might be the case.

Ti Morse: 37:34 Yeah, that’s one of your main constraints. Yeah. Okay, so you have this like long-term vision, you think, you know, putting—like setting really audacious targets and then also like working backwards on how do you get there. How do you think through, you know, figuring out what the critical path is in any given moment and then just like relentlessly executing on that to make the end goal of a year or 10 years work?

Max Marchione: 37:56 I think a couple of things have to be true at the same time. So I think one is you need to know more or less the end state and the next best step, but you don’t have to know most of the things in the middle. So for the most part, I think a lot about how can we be a billion dollar company in three years? How can we be a hundred billion dollar company? And then today, what is the fastest path to like 20 mil revenue or 50 mil revenue? And they require very different kinds of thinking. The hundred billion kind of thinking requires you to be very opinionated, to have views that others don’t have, to make certain assumptions about how the market evolves, whereas the 10 million in one year or the 50 million in a couple of years view says the exact opposite. It says, I’m going to have very few opinions. I’m actually going to be very consensus. I’m just going to focus on what does the market want? What is the market at today? What works? The Charlie Munger idea. Let’s actually assume that my opinions, even if they’re correct in the limit, might not be true today. Right? So let’s actually focus on what is true today. So those two things simultaneously have to—have to exist. And then there’s the question about how does that action I’m taking today actually potentially put me on the critical path there. And the way to work that out is not by sitting there and twiddling your thumbs and thinking about things, it’s actually just taking action. I do think action creates information. So, know the thing you have to do today, start taking action, assume you’re smart enough to continue to change and modify the kind of actions you take based on the information you get to put you on the critical path to building the thing that’s great.

Ti Morse: 39:27 Do you have a few examples of paths that you’ve thought at some point in time were the optimal path and then you figure out at some point, oh shit, this is the wrong direction to be going in, you know, after new information came?

Max Marchione: 39:40 There was a period of time where I had a similar hypothesis to Forward, which is that you needed to own actual clinics. And the belief there was that a lot of things in health actually require the physical environment and the physical world and therefore you need some physical place to interact and interface with the person. I no longer believe that is the case.

Ti Morse: 39:59 How did you - how did you make that transition? Like what led you to believe that that wasn’t the right model?

Max Marchione: 40:05 I just think that most things that you would do physically can be done at home. And if you need to physically interface with someone, you can do that without the CAPEX constraint of a clinic. I also think if you fix the assumption that you need to be a billion-dollar company in three years, you basically say, well, we can’t do something physical because it doesn’t have the - now in the limit, maybe you can open the Apple Store, you can have some sort of location that allows you to therapeutically interface with a human. But like, that’s something that can evolve over time. Um, so that’s like one example. I think another example is one of our guiding principles in the early days was let’s take high-end concierge medicine that costs $100,000 a year, $500,000 a year, make that cost as close to zero as possible, right? I now believe that that is, at least today, the local optima of healthcare. It won’t be in the future, that’s like the best today, so let’s try to democratize access to that. And our hypothesis was to do that, let’s start by offering a 5K membership, and then we’ll move to 2K and then 1K, etc., etc. The problem is the second you anchor to a 5K membership, you operate as if you have 5K to play with, obviously. You start including humans in the loop, you add more services, you don’t build as much technology, and you create - you do not create the forcing function to actually reduce price. So we started at between two to 10K and that was a mistake. What we then did is we said, “You know what, let’s fix the price at 499 and let’s operate with the constraint that the price is 499 a year.” And all of a sudden it’s like, “Well, goodbye, humans. There’s no humans.” Like, we can’t do anything synchronous with humans. Great, let’s not have humans in the loop and let’s triple the size of the engineering team.

Ti Morse: 41:51 Are you trying to like actively stop yourself from kind of like getting on the IV drip of a local maxima when you know that the global like thing is basically…

Max Marchione: 42:00 have to serve kind of everyone and you’re trying to design a product that can do that. 100%. The temptation of the 10K membership is that we could have a thousand members and do 10 million in revenue. So—

Ti Morse: 42:12 Whoa, that’s not that hard. I think we can do that pretty easily.

Max Marchione: 42:15 You could probably do that in a year.

Ti Morse: 42:17 Yeah, like three people a day.

Max Marchione: 42:18 That’s not that hard. So in the short term, if all we did was optimize for revenue in the short term, we would price higher. And a lot of people as a result will say price higher, look at the revenue. But what they don’t realize is that they’re just looking at the short-term payoff curve. The game we’re playing is the long-term payoff curve. And we will happily go into a slightly deeper J-curve where we need to spend more money on product, supply chain, operations, technology, because we believe if we do that, we start to create a membership most people should own, which has a far greater local optima potential being the global optima.

Ti Morse: 42:53 Oh, so are you trying to take the same model as kind of like an early Amazon Prime, where you’re basically understanding that you’re going to get the whales at the beginning, or not necessarily in this case, but you’re not going to earn as much money short term, but long term once it scales to everyone, you’re making way more money that way.

Max Marchione: 43:08 Yeah. So I guess like an interesting thought experiment here. So there’s three parts to what we do. Two of them are the membership. You’ll have a hundred-plus blood biomarkers tested that will cost two thousand dollars in the hospital. All your data in one place, past medical records, wearables, access to the AI that tells you what to do, access to a 24/7 medical team, primary care, urgent care, prescriptions, referrals, care navigation, access to a protocol that tells you here’s exactly what you should do, and then an ecosystem with 20% off all supplements, pharmaceuticals, and diagnostics test, right? That product most people should genuinely own. Like the test itself is going to cost two thousand dollars.

Ti Morse: 44:08 You want to basically make it like stupid for you not to, irrational not to.

Max Marchione: 44:11 Totally. The 20% off supplements and pharmaceuticals will pay off super quickly. And we have the second part of what we’re doing is the ecosystem. So we’ve said in the short term, let’s be a horizontal wrapper on top of all supplements, all diagnostics, and all therapeutics. Let’s bring everything into one place and make it 20% cheaper and only have the best. So as a thought experiment, let’s assume everyone should own this. Let’s assume only 10% of people own this, right? 10% of people own the membership. And let’s assume they spend only 10% of their dollars with us. Why wouldn’t they? It’s 20% off everything. That’s a 200 billion dollar company. 10% of 10% is a 200 billion dollar company, right? Um, and all of a sudden we’re like, whoa, okay, this is a far greater local optima than the 10K a year membership that might cap out pretty quickly.

Ti Morse: 44:30 Interesting. Okay. Um, and I know you mentioned it in another thing, that you’re basically talking about or you’re thinking about brand and you believe most companies have like a two or three out of 10 brand, um, and that you’re at like a six or whatever. How do you think about like what makes a great brand and how do you get that last like three or four points?

Max Marchione: 44:47 Yeah. So first, the philosophy here, which is that, um, everything sits on a convex curve. Meaning nine out of 10 is 10 times better than eight out of 10, which is 10 times better than seven out of 10. The second philosophical point here is that just about every single thing in the world is around four out of ten.

Ti Morse: 45:04 Hm.

Max Marchione: 45:05 There’s two implication— there’s a couple of implications from this. One is you cannot copy what is out there, because the best of what is out there is four out of ten. The second implication is if you create the new best of what is out there, it’s still probably only six out of ten. And that’s a really empowering belief because it means you can keep being better, you can keep being better, you can keep being better. The third implication of this is that, uh, to actually get six out of ten or seven out of ten, it takes a lot of work, a lot of effort, a lot of focus. And because it’s so, so hard, because the returns are exponentially distributed to getting there, you should really focus on getting there, and therefore you should do fewer things, you should be very focused, you should really just try to get to great. So there are a few of the underlying philosophical beliefs and I’ve captured these beliefs with the term convexity, right? Most things follow a convex distribution, some people call it a power curve, whatever. Um, in terms of actually building a great brand, I think brand at the core is a set of beliefs. Right? So before you think about what’s your company name or what colors do you use, it’s like what do you fundamentally believe? And what do you believe that others might— might not believe? Right? If you look at religion, religion at a core is a set of beliefs and everything else builds on top of those belief building blocks. So that’s where we started. We started with a manifesto before we had anything else. We started with a set of beliefs about the future, about health, about humanity. From there, all we’re trying to do is express those beliefs using colors, using a visual identity, using a website, using language, using copywriting. They’re all just expressions of the fundamental belief. And my view is that people chronically underinvest into brand. Right? If we genuinely believe that brands are exponentially distributed, the implication is people are underinvesting.

Ti Morse: 46:54 The other thing too is I know that like people spend a huge amount of money on like sales and marketing, but that’s not necessarily brand. Like that’s not the image in people’s minds. Like I think— I think that when you think of like Apple or at least Apple from, you know, 20 years ago or whatever, you’re thinking about this— this thing, this brand or mission that you are personally aligned with, whereas most like sales and marketing is just like buy the product. You know, it’s not the why. You’re not buying the why behind the product.

Max Marchione: 47:18 Yep, 100%. I think strong brand foundations support sales and marketing, right? You still need sales and marketing, but I think when it sits on top of a stronger brand foundation, you can compound for longer. Um, and all of that again is just sales and marketing is really just a reflection of a core set of beliefs.

Ti Morse: 47:37 You mentioned that it’s basically just one person working on the entire Superpower brand. Um, how’d you— how’d you find her?

Max Marchione: 47:44 Um, so we have more people now. Um, but Hannah did a lot of all of everything we did in the early days. Yeah. And, uh, one of my beliefs is that talent is exponentially distributed, hmm, or talent follows a convex curve. Meaning that there are only… Maybe a couple hundred or a couple thousand people in the world who are actually good. And you should just obsess about finding those people and working along those people and alongside those people. And Hannah on our team, don’t hire her everyone listening. You won’t be able to hire her. So like, she quit her job at Canva when she was 17, she was the youngest person at Canva, we co-founded a company together previously and then Hannah was 19 years old running a solo design agency doing a million dollars a year, like five hundred thousand dollars a year. And we’re like, “Hannah I know you’re making a lot of money, but do you want to work on something more important?” And Hannah joined the team really early on.

Ti Morse: 48:41 What how much time, so when you when you find one of these people, because there’s so few of them, you know logically it would make sense to spend an insane amount of time and effort and energy trying to get that person on board once you know that they are really that special. Um, do you have any, uh, what have you done that’s outside the normal bounds of what people normally do to hire someone to find those people in the past?

Max Marchione: 49:03 So one of the things I think I have a high believability weight on is identifying talent quite quickly because it’s something I really obsess over. And what that means is that within 10 minutes of chatting with someone I typically know whether we want to hire them. So once I’ve more or less made that decision, every subsequent interview, there might be 10 of them, there might be 20 of them, but every subsequent interview is actually a sales, sales process. So I will after chatting with someone in the first call try to deeply understand what do they want, like what do they want in life, what are their goals, what makes them happy?

Ti Morse: 49:51 You even like also partially like maybe reconfiguring how you do things to fit what they need.

Max Marchione: 49:56 Correct. 100%. And I’ll say, “Okay, so then we’re going to set up these three interviews or these three chats,” and I’ll say, “This interview is 70% sales 30% interview.” Right, or I’ll say, “This is 90% sales 10% interview.” And a candidate will go through a process of interviewing which is actually being sold on the company if we think they’re good enough. And my view is that if we can make Superpower the best, the fundamentally best option for them, they should join. If Superpower is not the selfish best option for them, they shouldn’t join. Like, people should make the selfish best decision for them, otherwise you do not have equilibrium. The second we manipulate someone into joining us, we’re fucked, because we’re not going to have retention, they’re going to realize that we were not earnest. So we have to genuinely just make Superpower the best decision for someone joining.

Ti Morse: 50:46 Yeah, is there any like very unusual things that you’ve done for one of the employees that you brought on board in the past that’s like way outside the bounds of what people normally do?

Max Marchione: 50:56 Not really because I think that you start to set…

Ti Morse: 51:00 set a precedent, and it’s really hard because future hires will anchor to that precedent. We are very generous with equity. Um, I think that if you can genuinely find someone who can materially change enterprise value, and you genuinely believe talent is exponentially distributed, you need to overpay. And I think well not overpay but like pay a lot. And I think a lot of

Max Marchione: 51:22 Founders Podcast thing where you basically can’t overpay for Steve Jobs coming back to Apple. Yeah. You pay him 400 million dollars to you know come rejoin and

Ti Morse: 51:30 suddenly it’s worth like a billion you know hundred billion dollars.

Max Marchione: 51:34 Something, yeah.

Ti Morse: 51:35 And the best people realize this. There’s a reason Sam is paying 6 billion dollars for Jony. There’s a reason Zuck is giving 200 million dollar salaries. There’s a reason Masayoshi Son paid Nikesh Arora like 200 million dollars a year and Nikesh ended up demanding another billion dollars a year in compensation. Um, so yes, talent is exponentially distributed and you need to pay up. And today we’re at our series A, approaching our series B. Um, if we found someone who we thought would completely change the trajectory of the company, we’d be happy to give them 5%. Like for the right person, we would give them 5 and that sounds crazy at series B, but it’s worth it if you find the right person.

Max Marchione: 52:18 So I I know this this sounds almost exactly like what Steve Jobs has talked about where for the first like 10 people you want to be even more than like an investor, you know bringing on an early investor, you basically want to ask yourself for every single person, is this someone who is going to like materially impact the trajectory of the company or is there like any possible possibility that they detract? And like just absolutely basically only hire people that you’re willing to overpay. And like you want to.

Ti Morse: 52:46 Yeah, if we’re overpaying, I’m so happy.

Max Marchione: 52:49 By conventional metrics.

Ti Morse: 52:50 Because because um if talent is actually exponentially distributed, we’re actually probably not overpaying because the world is so anchored to linear thinking in terms of compensation. So if we’re overpaying quote unquote, I’m very happy.

Max Marchione: 53:08 Yeah, do you have any other examples of kind of understanding human biases like exponential thinking is a very unusual thing for human brains and even if you try to make yourself, you know force yourself to think in that way of you know two times two times two times two, like it’s very difficult. Um, how do you do that for yourself?

Ti Morse: 53:30 I think that um there’s so I think understanding the limitations of human the human brain is really powerful. I love the Charlie Munger idea of um understand elementary psychology. Um when I was 18 years old after high school I didn’t go to university, instead I took a learning gap year. And one of the ideas of that year was to understand all the foundational principles that in a way define the world. Rather than the short term, the local optima, they become mental models, you reason from the principle, and then over time they just become part of your way of thinking and you’re combining ideas in novel ways to come up with a certain conclusion. I think one example of flawed human thinking is the inability to properly understand exponentials. I think another is probably over-indexing on logic. Um, I think that we are trained to just use logic. Good luck being in a job and your boss asks you, ‘How’d you come up with the answer?’ and you’re like, ‘It feels right.’ Right?

Max Marchione: 54:12 It’s—it’s surprising how much actually comes down to vibes and then properly training your intuition on what—what does good look like? And then just through that training of your intuition, when you see it, you know it, but you can’t exactly explain it.

Ti Morse: 54:27 All of my team will laugh because I use the word ‘vibes’ often and they’re like, ‘Why do you think this?’ And I’m just like, ‘Vibes.’ And I will intentionally say that because so often we make a decision and we try to justify it retroactively using logic. Yeah. And we don’t realize we’re doing that. And I try to be very cognizant of when I’m doing that, and instead of trying to justify it retroactively, I just say vibes. And then because people are not happy with vibes, I’m like, ‘Cool, I’ll give you the logical answer.’ And then I’m like, ‘I promise you this is not the actual logic, but it’ll make you happy.’

Max Marchione: 54:54 Well, what’s—what’s funny is like ‘vibes’ is actually—and so the whole like logic thing, a lot of people make decisions—I mean, I think this is just like a normal human thing where you’ll make a decision and then you’ll try to justify it because if you just say like, ‘I did it because I felt like it,’ it’s not a good answer. Like no one wants that. They want a reason for doing—they want the ‘why.’ Right? So you just create the ‘why’ out of thin air even though the ‘why’ isn’t really there. Um, and it is kind of there, but like for intuition, you’re—you’re taking an action based on a bunch of information that you have and you don’t necessarily know every single process that your brain goes through to feel the way about a decision that you’re making. Um, anyway.

Ti Morse: 55:32 I think people at the top and bottom both use intuition. And that means it’s hard for someone to say using intuition is a good thing because some people at the bottom also are just using vibes. But then you get to the top and, uh, George Soros’s son was asked, ‘How did George know when to sell?’ And his son said, ‘George would wake up with an itch in his back thinking about a company, and then he would sell.’ Right? If you look at Masa Son, he uses vibes. Most of the people at the top will use intuition, um, but they have earned the right, uh, to do that because they have proven over an extended period of time that their intuition is correct. In other words, they have a high believability weight on their intuition. And, um, the strong empirical view—my strong empirical belief here will say even if I disagree with someone, if they have a high believability weight on a certain decision because empirically they made that decision right in the—in the past, I will trust them, even if the first principles disagree.

Max Marchione: 56:30 Yeah, it’s a lot like, I mean, if—if you ask Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger to like look at a balance sheet or look at a company, they can probably within like a few seconds know whether or not they want to invest in it, just because they’ve looked at so many companies. How many—or how do you think about building a really solid foundation for intuition in yourself?

Ti Morse: 56:46 I think a big part of it is seeing a lot. Being obsessed with information. Seeing a lot, learning a lot, reading a lot, putting yourself in a lot of situations, taking a lot of action, getting a lot of reps in. Like I mentioned, I took a learning— Gap year. That year I went to conferences where the average age in the room was probably 45. And I would put my hand up and be like, ‘Hey, I’m 18 years old and I’m taking a learning gap year, what’s your advice for me?’ I’d have all sorts of conversations with older people, I guess, get as many reps as possible per unit time. I think in many ways intuition is access to experience stored in the subconscious. I think the second thing is being very aware of what is coming up in your body. Right? I think a lot of people have, like, blunted their ability to interocept or feel what is happening in their body. Um, but it is something we have. Animals have—some animals—all animals have intuition and instinct, some have emotion, only humans have logic. And we’ve used logic to get in the way of everything else. So, when I see, for example, a design or I see something, rather than asking myself, ‘Do I think this is good?’, I ask myself, ‘How does this feel in my body?’ You—and we—saw each other yesterday, I was in a plant shop, and you asked me, ‘Which plants are you deciding to buy?’ and I’m like, ‘Just the ones that feel right.’ And you understood that as, like, a vibe-y, ALA thing, but actually what I was trying to say is, there’s some logical process that is happening, but I want to notice the emotional feeling that comes up around a certain thing. So that’s the second thing: being aware of what’s coming up in your body. And then the third thing is paying attention over time to where your intuition is correct and incorrect to understand where you have a high believability weight. For example, I’ve got a very high believability weight on talent. I, over time, have not made many wrong talent decisions. Not that I’ve made many contrarian talent decisions, which have turned out to be correct. But I have a low believability rate on something like a Facebook ad. I don’t think I have a good intuition for the kind of Facebook ad that performs well, whereas someone in our team has a far better intuition. And therefore, even if I disagree with their decision on the Facebook ad, I’m like, ‘You have a higher believability weight than me, I’m just gonna trust you on that one.’

Max Marchione: 58:52 Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Uh, how do you—uh, think—so you’ve got like, I think you said 16 founders on the team? Is it 16 founders on the team?

Ti Morse: 59:03 Yeah, 15 founders on the team.

Max Marchione: 59:04 Not 15 co-founders.

Ti Morse: 59:05 No, no. Yeah. 15 people on the team are former, former founders.

Max Marchione: 59:10 That have previously built something.

Ti Morse: 59:12 And six of them are former YC founders. And more than half of these founders have had reasonable exits. Not billion-dollar exits, like reasonable exits.

Max Marchione: 59:22 Yeah. How do you—how do you attract those types of people and like, in your—in your mind when you’re going through the kind of reasons for, you know, who to hire, what—what about a former founder is super attractive to you?

Ti Morse: 59:35 So, there are two kinds of people we try to hire. Um, one is someone who is best or second-best in the world at solving a certain thing. And again, similar to what I said before, which is when you fix the assumption you need to be a billion-dollar company in three years, you make decisions to make that come to reality. The same happens here: when you fix the assumption that you need to hire the best or second-best person in the world, you start to only look for those people, and it’s very easy to just say no to everyone else. So that’s the first kind of person. The second kind of person we will hire is someone who per unit time has done more than just about anyone else on earth. And this person typically looks like a 19, 20, 21-year-old who is absolutely brilliant, absolutely cracked, three to four sigma work ethic, three to four sigma IQ, three sigma creativity, like just really brilliant people. I call them spiky people. They’re people who have done things that are not just at the very pinnacle of what they could have done, but also done that in an idiosyncratic way. There’s kind of an idiosyncratic way. So there’s two kinds of people that I think companies should hire, best or second-best in the world, or like a very spiky young person. The very spiky young person will end up exceeding best or second-best person in the world.

Max Marchione: 1:00:48 Why is that?

Ti Morse: 1:00:51 Because the very spiky young person, um, when I say best or second-best in the world, I mean as an operator at solving a specific business function. Right? Whereas the spiky young person, by the time they’re that age, by the time they’re 35 or 40, they’re going to be starting their own multiple billion dollar company. Right? Like I think we have probably five to 10 young people in our team who will start billion dollar companies. The catch is they’re like 19 today, or 20 today. And their growth curves are absolutely wild. And I believe in this idea of radical empowerment, which is you give them way more empowerment than they ‘quote-unquote’ deserve, even if they can’t do the thing yet, you have to empower them because they will grow into that role and exceed the expectation that existed for that role very quickly. So that’s the kinds of people to hire. Going back to how to persuade these people to join the team, I think a couple of things have to be true. One is you need to be working on something that actually matters for humanity. Right? That actually pushes the world forward. The best people want to work on a mission that matters. The second thing is you need to work on something that can be a trillion dollar company and has a reasonably clear path to being a hundred billion dollar company. The third thing is you need to also have a very clear path to being a billion dollar company in the next couple of years. So you see how several of the beliefs I had before now completely change your ability to hire. And because you can now change your ability to hire, you can actually make those things come to life. That’s probably the third thing. The fourth thing is I think, uh, being able to, like, being able to allow them to understand the, the mission and the vision and the potential through brand and marketing is really important. Right? A lot of our initial marketing and branding wasn’t actually targeted at customer acquisition, it was targeted at talent acquisition. Right? We focused intentionally on Silicon Valley or on talent clusters because our belief was we’re not going to build the world’s best company by having 5,000 customers versus 3,000 customers in the early days, but we will by having the best people on earth.

Max Marchione: 1:02:49 Do you feel like the brand has been more than just… so the brand initially is actually not targeting the customers at all? It’s just targeting investors and hiring and like people that…

Ti Morse: 1:03:00 want to potentially partner with you.

Max Marchione: 1:03:02 Um, is- it’s both. If I looked at the initial website, that was a shit website for conversion, right? But it was like cool, and because it was distinctive, it was useful for talent and capital acquisition more so than customer acquisition. We’ve now changed that and it’s rotated into a customer acquisition website, which is completely different. But yeah, that that was true in the early days. I think the next thing you need to do to hire these great people is just be really good at selling them, right? I actually think that sales is also highly convex, um, where a great salesperson is a thousand times better than just a good salesperson. And I used to a year ago think I was good at sales. I realized that I was really shit back then. I’m a little bit bet- better at it now, and in a year I’m probably going to realize I’m really shit now. Um, so being good at selling people is important, and that means deeply understanding what they want, right? Being able to communicate and construct that, and then creating a sales process to educate someone on why this is going to get them what they want more effectively than anything else.

Ti Morse: 1:03:59 What was your process a year ago and what have you, like, shifted or evolved since then?

Max Marchione: 1:04:06 The best sales- well, when I’m around an elite salesperson, I’ll chat with the person for 30 minutes about something that’s not the company, and I will leave that conversation thinking, ‘Holy shit, this company’s going to be a trillion dollar company.’ But we haven’t chatted about the company. In other words, the best sales doesn’t even feel like sales.

Ti Morse: 1:04:28 Yeah.

Max Marchione: 1:04:29 And the best sales is often about planting a vision in someone’s mind rather than just stepping through all the logic, right? Elon does this so well. He says so, so, so little, but you’re left with this feeling of ‘this can be huge’. Self-driving, autonomous robots. He says so little, but he just anchors the vision in your mind such that you can imagine it being huge. That’s one view. The other view’s the complete opposite, which is actually do hardcore, very obvious in-your-face sales. And the way I learned this was I was chatting with someone who was debating between joining Apple Design Lab or Rev, which is Mike Speiser and Sutardja Hill Ventures’ new company. Mike has incubated many unicorns, Snowflake amongst others. And I asked this person, ‘Why did you decide to join Rev versus Apple Design Lab?’ And he said, ‘Well, um, Mike, um, sat me down and we chatted for two hours. And Mike basically said, ‘I’m going to sell to you for two hours and tell you why joining us is by far the best decision.’ And he’s like, ‘Mike did not let me leave that conversation until I said I was joining.’ And he literally, ‘I’m just going to like hardcore sell you.’ And sometimes I’ll do the subtle sales, sometimes I’ll literally say to someone, ‘Look, I genuinely think this is the best decision for you to join us. I’m just going to sell you.’ And I just like keep going and going and going and going until they join. And it’s surprisingly what works.

Ti Morse: 1:05:49 So being, like- so just being, like, extremely transparent about, like, ‘here’s what I’m doing and I know that I’m going to make- I know that I want you to make the right decision, and I’m just going to keep on working until you make it’? right decision. Yeah, I can’t sell someone unless I genuinely believe it’s the right decision. Like there have been times when I’m like this is not the right decision for you. But if I genuinely believe it, look, you’re smart, you’re logical. I’m just gonna share all of my thinking around why all the other options are kind of stupid and this is the best decision for you right now and I’ll say I’m probably a bit biased like like I have a lot of I’m probably a bit biased, but I’m just gonna share and I just do that very explicitly.

Max Marchione: 1:06:22 Another, another Charlie Munger quote is like, uh, you’re smart and I’m right, eventually you’re going to figure out that I’m right.

Ti Morse: 1:06:29 I absolutely love that.

Max Marchione: 1:06:31 Yeah. How do you think about incentives?

Ti Morse: 1:06:34 I think that you can predict most behavior by incentives, particularly in the US. I think that the higher the individualism of any system, the more incentives matter. I remember moving to the US and I would often have people ask me, how do you seem to know so much about the US healthcare system? You just moved here. and I’m like, it’s pretty easy. I only need to know one thing, which is how does money flow. And I’m not exaggerating, I’m not being facetious here. All you need to know about the US healthcare system is how does money flow. You can predict most outcomes. You can predict, um, why certain things are the way they are. Often when I see something that is seemingly irrational or suboptimal, the first thing my mind goes to is, what’s the incentive? Right, because there’s nearly always some sort of incentive that describes a certain behavior.

Max Marchione: 1:07:21 Can you walk through the incentives of like the current healthcare system and like how hopefully this is going to change that?

Ti Morse: 1:07:30 So, in the US, about 20% of GDP is spent on healthcare and life expectancy is going backwards. If you look at the most OECD countries, around 7 to 10% of GDP is spent on healthcare and life expectancy is going up. So we conclude empirically that the US healthcare system’s really fucked up. Okay, cool. Well let’s dive a little bit into the incentives. So under the Affordable Care Act, the margins of health systems are regulatorily fixed. The second your margin is fixed, the only way to increase revenue is to increase costs. So how’s that for guess what costs are going to do? Right? The way most hospitals make their money are procedures and pharmaceuticals. So if you go to a hospital, guess what’s going to happen? Lots of procedures and lots of pharmaceuticals. Right? The largest companies in healthcare are pharmaceutical companies. Um, so some of the largest donors are pharmaceutical companies. So guess what, pharmaceuticals are quite pervasive. I love this articulation of pharma companies as as uh law firms with biotech interests. Right? That’s fundamentally what they are. Um so there’re all sorts of these like weird incentives throughout the healthcare system that result in something which is very much a like local optima. Even if you look at peptides, which we were injecting ourselves with earlier, um many of these compounds have been around for 10 to 20 years. But because they’re naturally occurring in the human body and because

Max Marchione: 1:09:00 has been around for a while, pharma cannot patent it. Because pharma can’t patent it, pharma can’t make much money from it. Because pharma can’t make much money from it, there’s no submission to the FDA that results in them being legalized, right? Um, now pharma all of a sudden discovered that you could take a GLP-1 and you could change the amino acid chain ever so slightly and you could create semaglutide aka Ozempic and you could patent it, and all of a sudden a GLP-1 which has been around since the 2000s or like 90s is this blockbuster drug because there was an incentive and pharma could patent it. Right? So there are a couple of the incentives that exist in the US healthcare system. There are all sorts of perverse pricing models with like middle people who get this kickback and that kickback. Um, there’s this meme in healthcare which is like, no, you can’t do kickbacks in healthcare. It’s like, for like the entire fucking system is structured by kickbacks that aren’t aren’t called kickbacks.

Ti Morse: 1:09:54 They have special names.

Max Marchione: 1:09:55 Yeah, there’s all sorts of like like this is like literally this is a specialty drug and because this is a specialty drug, the way we price it is like kind of different. Anyway.

Ti Morse: 1:10:06 With anyone that’s really good, the mental models don’t just like happen overnight and so you don’t just immediately wake up one morning and say I should, you know, only optimize for like a hundred billion dollar outcome or be more ambitious or whatever. Um, can you talk about like what was the first company that you started and like what was the thinking behind doing that?

Max Marchione: 1:10:26 The the two companies I started around the same time. One is I would sell fake shit on the playground at school when I was I think eight or nine years old. For example, there was this trend of power bands. They were these rubber bands that you could put on your wrist and apparently they would allow you to jump higher and be more sporty. And they were selling in stores for around seventy dollars. So I went to Alibaba, I think this is in 2012 or 2010. I went to Alibaba and I bought several hundred of these power bands and I sold them for five dollars in the playground. And I would say to people, the more of these you have, the better the effect. So you need as many of them as possible. And that was kind of business number one on the playground. The second was I was playing Minecraft, at the time I used to love it as a game. And I was playing on a large like several ten like maybe fifty thousand person server. And there was a leaderboard that ranked people by wealth. Like, whoa, I want to be the richest person on this server. So I set myself the goal of being the richest person on the server. And that’s pretty hard, it’s basically a mirror of the economy. It functions like the real world, like the real economy. There are lots of like forty year old very smart people who spend a lot of time trying to be the richest person on the server. And I became the richest person. And at the time I didn’t think much of it, but in retrospect, the exact kind of actions that were taken in that world I could have taken in the real world. The only difference is in the real world as a kid you’re not- allowed to do that stuff, you’re not meant to be able to do that stuff, you can’t think about this stuff, right? Whereas in that game world it was just a game. Anyway, once I was the best on the server, I had local status in that community. So I started my own server, started monetizing that, made some money from that, and that was kind of happening at the same time.

Ti Morse: 1:12:19 Yeah. Did you, did you have a, like a few year pause in between starting the, you know, doing the Minecraft server, doing the power bands, and then starting like the next company? Or what happened during like your high school years?

Max Marchione: 1:12:30 Yeah, I didn’t start any company in my high school years. You know why? I don’t know why. No, it’s strange. I think, I think I probably became too perfectionist and too high fear. I think when I was doing that stuff when I was younger, I had zero fear. I think I was that idea of just like a child playing around, I hadn’t internalized dogma, I hadn’t been told this is what you can or can’t do, it’s like, I can just do whatever. Whereas I suspect in high school, there was probably a combination of internalizing more fear, probably a pressure to be cool or like fit in. And I, and I took to conform and I didn’t feel like I was as authentic, instead social pressure held more weight. I think I started playing more conventional games. I’m like, well, I want to top every subject I do. I want to be the captain or be be one of the best people in all the sports I’m playing. So I think I played a lot of those conventional games and that takes time, particularly if you’re doing it across most kinds of of achievements, so that maybe played into it.

Ti Morse: 1:13:34 Was there a different version of Max for let’s say like a few years where you were trying to kind of go down the, you know, pre-built path? Because it kind of looked like you were doing that, you know, you go to high school and then you go to law school or college or whatever and then you decide to opt out at some point. How would you how was your thinking during those few years that you were kind of going down this traditional path?

Max Marchione: 1:13:59 Yeah, I think I definitely did to an extent and it felt very non-authentic. Um, so I took the learning gap year I mentioned and that was deeply authentic. I started some small businesses, I learned about a lot of things. I, what types of small businesses? Uh, like agency kind of businesses, nothing that meaningful. I started a company that still operates today called Next Chapter, which is basically a community for the most talented young people around the world and the talent basically Thiel Fellows before Thiel Fellows, the talent bar in there is absolutely brilliant. Like I think most people in there are going to start billion dollar companies, which is really cool. And my brother’s now the CEO of that business and he’s started all sorts of businesses that come out of that that actually make cash, a dirty word in Silicon Valley. Um, and yeah, I I did a little bit of the conventional path, um, uh, those conventional things. And I think that was potentially a product of environment. Um, I didn’t really know the US was a thing. The idea of going to a US college. which was not in the set of options. No one around me had ever done that. And in retrospect, going back in time, I would have moved to the US at 18, um, rather than 22. Um, and honestly I think that single decision probably would have had the most impact on my life. If I could go back and change one thing, it would have been that decision, but we live and we learn. Um, I remember I was listening to like Sam Altman the other day and he was talking about how he played that conventional game for. I’m like wait what? He seems like such the startup bro. And he was like, no, you play those games for a bit, but I tapped out of them pretty quickly and I did think of them as stepping stones too. Through the law thing, I came first my first year of law at Australia’s top law school, I dropped out. I after only one year of university interned at Goldman Sachs, and like that’s weird to do after one year of university and then I spent a couple of months there and then I’m like fuck this and dropped out.

Ti Morse: 1:15:47 What I find funny about the Goldman Sachs story is that that was actually Sam’s like that’s where he was going to go. It was either Y Combinator or Goldman Sachs and he like did I think like a few interviews at Goldman and like was going to have a job but then he just decided to get on a plane and fly out to Silicon Valley even though Paul Graham said like don’t do it.

Max Marchione: 1:16:05 Yep.

Ti Morse: 1:16:06 Yep. One of your goals is you want to help people like I have I sleep in my optimal state. I’m sleeping for 10 hours a night between like 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. the next morning every night. I love that. Sadly, I travel a bunch so I don’t get to do it all the time. Um, but one of your goals is to basically get people from like 8 hours of sleep down to 5 hours of sleep, but rested, you know, you feel rested when you wake up. How is that possible? What levers can you pull on to actually make that happen?

Max Marchione: 1:16:34 So this comes from two questions. One is how do we maximize productivity and human output with the belief that there’s increasing returns for marginal unit of time. Again, it’s convex rather than concave. And the second belief this comes from is this idea of how do we actually extend human life? And if you look at the 60 billion people to ever live on earth, no one’s lived past 150, just about no one has lived past 120. It’s very, very, very rare. So one thing we can try to do is we can try to add years to the end of life. But the other thing we know is that of 60 billion people to live on earth, millions have had genes that allow them to sleep 4 hours a night or 3 hours a night and live the same, be cognitively just as performant, be physically just as performant, feel the same. So I’m like, okay, well, of these two pathways to extend lifespan, which one’s more reliable? Modifying genes to do something we know that millions of people have done or doing something that’s never ever been seen in human biology. I’m like, well, probably the sleep one, right? And if you do this, you actually add around 15 years to someone’s life, and you don’t add that to the end of someone’s life, you add it right through someone’s life. So I think it’s actually one of the most reliable ways to increase lifespan. The other reason I love this idea is I just want to spend more time awake. I’m quite obsessed with productivity and I think this is one way you can be more productive. When I was younger I wanted to learn to lucid dream. And like most people want to learn to lucid dream to like fly and have sex. My like thinking was I could work while I slept. I want to learn to lucid dream so I can like learn more. So I always want to be like productive when I sleep because it just feels like a waste to spend eight hours in bed at night. So I love all of those different devices that are trying to either compress sleep or enhance lucidity and allow you to actually do things in your dream state.

Ti Morse: 1:18:18 Yeah. What products have you tried to use? I know that you talked about like you use the Ace Sleep for what was it, like a few nights or before deciding to return it. What other products have you tried to try to pull on the lever to improve things?

Max Marchione: 1:18:33 Yeah, so from the age of 17 to 20, I used a headband that would actively improve my sleep and my deep sleep percentage went up and I could sleep fewer hours and still feel the same. And that would basically play sub-audible sounds via bone conduction to hold you in deep sleep longer. And that company was discontinued for a bunch of reasons. Um, some say the science didn’t work. Subjectively, I felt it was effective. So I tried that. I’ve tried pulsed EMF, which is this device you can wear on you. I’ve tried other headbands that actively improve sleep. I’ve tried all sorts of different supplements. I’ve tried the lucid dreaming thing. I suspect the only… I’ve tried certain peptides, so Epitalon has a positive effect on sleep for me in particular. I think that likely we’re going to need to find a path to solve this problem through genomics, either by editing the genome. I think that will be a reliable path in time, but it’s unsafe right now. CRISPR isn’t perfect. It’s also illegal. So we’ll probably see the application happen first in China or in the US in the military rather than… so I think genomic editing. The other thing that’s interesting is looking at, of the people who have the gene that encodes for the phenotype of short sleeping, what chemicals are they expressing? Or what is actually occurring in the body? And can we…

Ti Morse: 1:19:21 Replicate?

Max Marchione: 1:19:23 Yeah, can we introduce some sort of molecule that signals to the body to have that effect? For example, we can introduce a peptide into the body that signals to the body to produce orexin, um, which is one of the things that is overproduced in short sleepers. And maybe that induces wakefulness and allows people to sleep for short… I don’t know, but I think these are like the interesting things to play around with.

Ti Morse: 1:20:16 Interesting. Okay. Um, for you yourself right now, when you’re thinking through all the things you can be doing at any given moment, what is the highest leverage lever that you kind of think most of the time that you’re pulling on?

Max Marchione: 1:20:32 It’s different at different points in time. Right now, it’s getting the company to obsess over revenue. The reality is we have an amazing team. We have a product that is great for this specific stage we’re at. We have a very clear strategy and strong hypothesis in the market. Um, we need a lot of revenue to bring in the capital required to build the next stage of the company, right? We also need a lot of revenue because that’s correlated with the number of custom- as we have and that allows us to get data to build the AI doctor which is like the long-term vision of where we’re getting to. So right now it’s like how do we how do I create a system that people can operate in that allows them to effectively drive revenue and how do we create a culture internally that results in things being prioritized that result in revenue. Now at different stages there are different things. A month ago the number one most important thing for me was hiring. So we have three best in world people we’re trying to find how do I find the best person in the world and that meant literally saying here are the 30 companies that have done this best, let me chat with the key person at every single one of those companies, say this person is the best of all of them, let’s try to hire that person and that was the biggest lever. Um in four months from now the biggest lever is probably going to be capital, it’s probably going to be fundraising. Um so it changes at different points in time and I’m very obsessive with this idea of what is the core constraint right now? And I think there’s a tendency to look do a million different things and say this is important and this is and I’m like yeah they’re all important and my job is to say none of them are as important as the single most important thing. So how can I say no to most things but the single most important thing?

Ti Morse: 1:22:11 Interesting. Yeah. And so does that kind of translate to the same way like how do you think about learning? Do you- for myself I typically if I want the result of someone else or you know if I want to you know create something specific I’ll go to the person that I look up to the most in that like if I want to be a billionaire or build massive company you just go to the people that have actually done it and then listen to what they say, right? How how do you think about learning in that way?

Max Marchione: 1:22:34 I think learning there’s different kinds of learning that are necessary to solve a certain constraint. When I was 19 taking the learning gap year the most important thing I think to learn was one, learning how to learn. Right that’s a meta skill that improves the acquisition of every other skill. And two was learning foundational principles. Foundational microeconomics, foundational macroeconomics, evolutionary evolutionary biology, um fundamental psychology, etc. And then there was a point in time where the useful learning for me was um deeply understanding the the US healthcare system and how that worked and that meant working as a receptionist in a fucking doctor’s clinic, um investing in a lot of health companies, reading medical textbooks. I read like four textbooks in the span of a week. Um then there was a point in time where the most productive way to learn was chatting with people who had done it before at the pinnacle. Then there was a point in time where the most productive way to learn was just taking action like literally- I’d done enough thinking so it’s like action produces information type of thing so take maximum action. And now the most productive way to learn is probably two things for me. One is finding very, very smart first principles thinkers and having debate. Having debate and discussion that’s often slightly philosophical in nature. I think I find that that really pushes thinking forward. And the other most valuable way to learn is just being by myself. Like taking walks in nature, doing something deeply introspective, deeply thoughtful, um Because I think that I’m probably at the point now where the important ideas are unknown ideas, and if I can induce my brain to recognize that thing, um, then then that that’s that’s powerful.

Ti Morse: 1:24:13 Yeah. Yeah, that’s that’s an interesting. How do you think about you mentioned that you want more like beautiful products and you want more like beauty in the world. How do you think about creating something like that or why more people don’t?

Max Marchione: 1:24:27 I have this thing which is my my North Star is build beautiful things, physical and digital, that that improve the world. And this is just something that’s personal to me. I I believe that um a founder in many respects is an artist and the the act of art is the act of creation. And it’s uh partially an act of selfish creation, which is I derive joy from this thing, and then it’s a partially an act of altruistic creation, which is beauty actually changes human psychology and behavior and how we feel in the world, right? There’s a reason people like the feeling and emotions that come from walking through nature because there’s beauty in nature. It’s all in the golden ratio. There’s lots of micro things that nature has optimized over time to result in what we call beauty. Um and then I modify that by saying things physical and digital. I’m just my belief that we’re going to see this movement from from the cloud to the ground. Or the things that are going to really matter over the next decade are things that are more physical in nature, right? Software’s kind of commoditized, code writes code, um and to actually change the world we need to interface with the physical world. Um so I think about things that that modify the physical world as well. Um when two and a half years ago when deciding what I wanted to spend the next 30, 40, 50 years on, uh there were two things that I deeply cared about. One was building a new healthcare system and the other was building a new city. And they were the things that were personally meaningful to me, I thought mattered for humanity and could support really generational companies.

Ti Morse: 1:25:58 Why why the city?

Max Marchione: 1:26:00 I think that building a new city allows you to solve so many things in concert. You solve for health, you solve for innovation, you solve for education, you solve for culture. I think at the same time there aren’t many great cities. Like there’s actually no city I really love in the US. They all have different flaws. I think at the same time you can create a new city that leverages the network effect of an existing city because of fast transportation. So I hate the idea of let’s create a city in the middle of like bumfuck nowhere in the Mediterranean. I don’t think it works because you need to kickstart the network again. What is possible is creating a city between SF and LA, connected to both via hyperloop. Now you can get to both in maybe 10 minutes, so you can inherit the network effect of those cities. But then this city can maybe have a special economic zone, it can be structured to support innovation, happiness, health, culture, uh and it’s very hard to modify that much about the world without actually modifying the the physical environment, which is the city. Um and I think cities are some of the greatest business models of of all time. Like the UAE is in many respects… It’s a combination of cities. Singapore as a city. What they’re doing with the line is a way to Neom, that big project, is a way to diversify away from the oil economy by creating a city. Um, and then something that’s been deeply personally meaningful. The first job I ever wanted was to be like an architect, right? I love this idea of expressing visual taste into the world, um, like in the most physical way possible, which is through city building. And the final thing is I think this is very robust to AGI. Um, I ask the question often of assume AGI is here. What does this imply about the world? Right? And if you assume AGI is here, most companies are actually irrelevant. Right? I think two things that still matter are like human health and the physical environment in which we exist in, okay, cities.

Ti Morse: 1:27:43 Why did you decide to kind of put that off and and focus on the health angle?

Max Marchione: 1:27:47 The health system has to happen now. Um, I just think we’re at a pivotal like turning point.

Ti Morse: 1:27:53 Is it also more like a of an impact perspective? You can have a bigger impact on like a billion people versus a city as, you know, maximum of a few million people as…

Max Marchione: 1:28:05 Yeah, I I think the city can have a big impact because of the derivative impact, which is what are the people in the city do. Right? If you actually create a foundation that allows for more innovation, that has a big derivative impact. So it’s probably less the impact standpoint. It’s more like what matters right now. And like right now, we’re at this turning point where we can see a new health system emerge. We can see a health system before the health system emerge. We’re going to have AI doctors. Right? Again, health is a platform solution because if you solve for people’s health and you the idea of solving for health isn’t just preventing disease. That will be table stakes. Solving for health is enhancing human capability. If we actually enhance human capability, that also is a platform that results in derivative impact. The people’s whose capability is enhanced now do more things. Um, so that was part of it. Um, that that was like the timing component. The other part of it is like what is more possible for me right now? For me right now, it’s more possible to start a new health care system than to start a new city. I think that the health care system one can compound faster. I believe that the new city one will still be a problem that can be solved in 30 years’ time. Right? It’s hard to predict because of AGI, but I do think that problem will still exist in 30 years’ time. And I think going into it with like like hundreds of billions is again, I’m making assumptions is like easier than going into it um um from scratch.

Ti Morse: 1:29:18 Is it also probably easier from a perspective of like you have this track record of successfully building something in the form of a company. Thus, more people will trust you when you’re trying to build this new thing.

Max Marchione: 1:29:29 Yeah, like I look, I might change Look, most of my life there’s been two things I’ve cared a lot about which is health, human potential, productivity, what we can do, and the physical world and environment. So that might be true in 30 to 40 years’ time. But there’s a world I get like it’s 2080 I’m like, actually I don’t care about building a city anymore. That problem’s solved. So it’s just so hard to predict 50 years in advance. I do think though, what I can understand is what what are some of the problems that I think…

Ti Morse: 1:30:00 going through the most important health and the physical environment and some of them.

Max Marchione: 1:30:03 So like a few months ago I started taking a big old regimen of, you know, seven different pills in the morning and like a powder with creatine and all these all these different things. And I noticed not only was like motivation to do productive things just massively improved, but I also did become somewhat smarter. Um, I know that you focus on trying to kind of systematically improve IQ. Uh, what are the biggest things that we can or that you can focus on uh to improve IQ?

Ti Morse: 1:30:31 So I think most things, most great things that have been created in the world can be explained by people who simultaneously had two traits. One is high IQ and two is low fear, right? You need to be at least three sigma on both, and the catch is they’re inversely related. So there are very, very, very few people on earth who are three sigma IQ and three sigma lack of fear. I think both of these things are also very malleable, right? So as a result I try to systematically do things that improve IQ. Um, and I will because I’ve tried to develop interoception over the years, sometimes be sitting there and I’ll be like, I can’t solve this problem at my level of IQ, I need an extra five IQ points. And I will do something that gives me an extra five IQ points. It might be like Semax or Selank, which are like nasal sprays for cognition. It might be that nicotine is the kind of IQ I need. It might be that I need like completely lateral thinking and I need to do something else. Um, it might just be sleep, right? Um, but I will try to have a sense of here is a problem that I can’t quite solve, let me increase IQ and solve it. Um, and I will use some sort of compound that increases IQ in the direction I want to allow me to effectively solve a problem. And it’s really weird. It’s almost like I used to, I used to study mathematics, right? And sometimes when you’re in a high IQ state, the solution just comes to you. It’s this amazing feeling of I didn’t do anything, it’s just like here.

Max Marchione: 1:31:38 It’s the whole like I just, you know, how did you come up with this equation? I it’s like came to me in a dream.

Ti Morse: 1:31:43 Like it’s the weirdest feeling but when your IQ is high enough, and my IQ’s not always high, I have a sense of when my IQ’s high and low. Um, the solution just comes to you, and that’s not just for a math problem, that’s for like any problem in the world. And you make better decisions and what we can do is a function of the set of decisions we have made. Um, so I do think about systematically increasing IQ.

Max Marchione: 1:32:00 Okay, let’s, let’s end it on like what’s the hardest thing you’ve ever overcome?

Ti Morse: 1:32:05 When I moved to the US in 2022, um, I was broke, I had no money in my bank account. I was sleeping on the floor of a friend’s apartment. No one gave a shit about who I was. I was just some random person in Silicon Valley. It was impossible to meet anyone, to meet investors. The only people who cared were actually ironically the smartest and most talented people. Like the people at the top gave me some light of day and everyone else like no, you’re just a signal monkey and you don’t have enough signals yet. Show me your five million or ten million dollar fundraise, then we’ll care.

Max Marchione: 1:33:00 Um, at the same time, I had a lot of beliefs about the future and the world that everyone disagreed with. I was strongly of the view there was a big gap between the best of care and what most people had access to. And all the doctors are like, ‘What are you talking about? Quality’s fine.’ I had this very strong belief that AI was going to far outperform doctors, and again, this was before ChatGPT had come out. So everyone was like, ‘No, this is bullshit. What about the human art of medicine? What are you talking about?’ I had this strong belief that people would care about health. And again, the insiders were like, ‘No, people don’t care about health until they’re like deathly sick.’ And I had all of these beliefs that everyone told me were wrong. At the same time, I, I had like zero leverage, very, very, very little money in my accounts, had just gotten out of a really tough relationship where I was like kind of bullied, and the world felt really, really tough. Everyone was like, ‘Go back to Goldman Sachs’ or ‘Go get a job here.’ Um, your life’s kind of crumble— there was so few people who actually believed. And that is hard, right? To push through when no one believes and to hold beliefs that everyone thinks are wrong is really, really, really hard. And I see this pattern in so many founders, which is the storm before the calm, right? It happens all the time where there’s this low people go through. And now when I see a founder going through that, I see my job as giving them belief and support because I’ve seen the pattern so many times, the storm before the calm, the low where everything looks like it’s going to shit and no one believes and everyone starts rejecting that person and not listening to that person. And then they come up the other side of the J-curve. So that, that was a tougher moment over the past few years.

Ti Morse: 1:34:37 Interesting. Has there, has there been any moment, this might have been at Goldman Sachs or somewhere else, where you just felt like you were definitely moving in the wrong direction?

Max Marchione: 1:34:48 Not really. I’ve always been very intentional with the decisions I’ve made. Even with the Goldman thing, I was like, ‘I’m going to be here three to six months and I’m going to leave.’ And as a result, it was like one of the most fun three to six months. Like, yeah, I was working 110-hour weeks and it was so fucking fun because I was learning so much, right? I think it probably helped that I knew how to break out. Um, so no, not really. I think I’ve been quite intentional with the, the decisions, um, that I’ve made.