Ever since I was probably 16 years old, I've had a lot of beliefs around healthcare, how healthcare could be better. I remember being 16 and interviewing my doctors and trying to find a doctor who's actually good. And there wasn't a single general primary care doctor I could find who would pass my interview threshold.
It's like, what the hell is going on, where doctors can't answer questions that 16-year-old me knew and wanted to get answers to? Something has to change. I wasn't entrenched in the dogma of what currently exists, and I thought a little bit more about where the future should go. And that allows you to start to dream and start to ask what if. And it's far easier to do that as a patient often than it is as an insider.
Because as a patient, you understand the way patients relate to health, the way patients relate to information. And I think if you're trying to do something in a new way, it's very hard to do that from the model of thinking that created the existing way. You often need to do it from a completely new paradigm.
Max, what's up, brother? Welcome to the show.
Yeah, excited to be here, man.
Max, if your brother was going to describe you in a nutshell, what would he say about you?
Oh gosh, I love this question. Very ambitious, creative, very curious, always asking questions, independent-minded, always doing things my way, smart, always trying to learn, hard-working.
Those are all good things. What bad things would he say?
Oh gosh, what bad things would he say?
Don't out yourself, but just like light-hearted bad things.
Maybe words that could use many of the same things, but potentially as pejoratives, because I think a good thing taken to an extreme potentially becomes a bad thing. And I think you can assume many of them are negative, right? You could say works too hard. You could say sacrifices too much. Gives up too much. He isn't present enough. He is always asking questions, is always obsessed with learning, doesn't relax. So there's the flip side of many of the positives.
Basically an entrepreneur.
Potentially, yeah. I do think that there are some commonalities amongst qualities of entrepreneurs.
Awesome. So maybe could you take us back to like young Max? Like, you know, who was Max growing up, you know, from like 10 to 15 years old?
Yeah, so very young me was obsessed with LEGO, and I wanted to be like a LEGO designer first, and then an architect. And I would spend hours and hours in my room all day building existing LEGO sets, coming up with new ones that I created, and then playing like weird imaginary games with them. And that was very much in my own head, in my own room, doing that for extended periods of my life, until I was maybe like age six or something, maybe seven or eight. But it was mainly when I was quite young.
Then there was that period probably from seven to 10 where I was mischievous, always playing some sort of practical joke or prank, always up to no good, always running amok. I loved exploring. Our house used to back onto this kind of rocky area that you could explore with like bushes and trees, and I climbed and made huts and got up to no good there. Then younger me was always enterprising in semi-commercial senses, right? Playing Minecraft, starting Minecraft servers, auctioning off fake houses in Minecraft. My brother was like a dummy bidder. Selling weird stuff in the playground that was really drop-shipped from Alibaba that I...
Jerseys, hats, these things called power bands, the whole lot.
Yeah, so you had a bit of the entrepreneurial spirit even as a kid. And obviously, like, you know, the building, doing Legos, like, seems like you're creative in a sense.
Yeah, I think so. I think I've always had like a bit of that creative bent, right?
And it's interesting because I never thought of myself as someone who was creative. And I think the reason why is that the first kind of formulaic expression of creativity in the real world for me was art class. And art class was about how well do you draw? And I think in my head I internalized the fact that because I'm not good at drawing, therefore I'm not creative. But then creativity has all sorts of different flavors. Some people are very creative with words and poetry.
Some people are very creative with like buildings in the built world, and they understand how things fit together.
Some people are very creative with ways in which they architect systems.
And some people are good at art in the more classical sense.
Yeah. Yeah. And you know, going into like high school, maybe even early college, what were you like? Were you like a great student? Did you always have an idea of what you wanted to do? What were you like back then?
I was a good student in the sense that I did well. And when you do well, your teachers, one, are kind of happy because it makes them look good, and two, they put up with your... So on the flip side, I gave teachers a lot of... I slept through half of my classes. I snuck out of school. I didn't listen to teachers. I played practical jokes on them. I always challenged them. I made their life really hard. If I didn't think they were competent, I made their life particularly hard. I probably got a few teachers fired. So I was like a good student in the sense that I did well, and a bad student in the sense that when I didn't think a teacher was good, I was kind of coming for them.
Yeah. What made you feel like someone wasn't good as a teacher?
They typically weren't that smart or insightful. They didn't actually effectively teach. They often had what I perceived as like flaws of character—that might be objective; it's probably just like my subjective assessment. That might look like bullying kids or like telling someone they're stupid for asking a question. There were like certain things that would rub me the wrong way. And there were times when, as a result, I decided I didn't like a teacher. I didn't have respect for them. I didn't think they were smart. I didn't think they did a good job of teaching. And then why should I listen to someone who is in a position of title but isn't actually showing that with the way they act?
Right. Okay. Interesting. And what would you say—like, what were your parents like? Like, what kind of influence did they have on you growing up?
They let me explore most things so long as it wasn't something unsafe. They were pretty strict with the people who were friends of mine. Like they were hypercritical of people. There were some of my friends who they loved, and they'd speak highly of that friend and their family. And then there were other friends, they're like, 'No, that person shouldn't be your friend.' And I think at the time that was frustrating; in retrospect, I'm very grateful. They were always very giving people. My parents always thought about others potentially even before themselves, which is very rare, I think, just as humans in general. They didn't treat my brother and me like little kids. They gave us more kind of empowerment and the ability to like reason and think. We had a lot of debates as a family; debating was kind of the norm. And all of these things at the time were frustrating; in retrospect, I'm very grateful for.
Did they let you fail a lot?
Maybe, I don't know. I don't know whether they ever thought about that.
Yeah. Interesting. And this goes without saying, obviously you grew up in Australia. We're in Sydney, Australia, is that right?
Cool. And what was that like growing up in Sydney compared to like now living here in San Francisco?
It was cool because the house where I grew up, as I mentioned, I'd walk outside and there'd be this like big bush and rocky area I could explore and run around, and we backed onto kind of like a cul-de-sac, and I'd play cricket and soccer there. And in the backyard, we transformed our backyard, you know, kind of dug it out and transformed it into a mini futsal field, like a mini soccer field. So I was very active. I was always running around, and I think that's very characteristic of an Australian lifestyle.
I think that Australia is very safe, and you start to take that for granted. I think Australia is very happy, and you start to take that for granted.
There's a lot of space. It's very sunny and warm. But I don't know. I think I often hear, 'Oh, this place is good or bad to bring up kids.' I don't actually have a good sense for what makes somewhere good or bad to bring up kids. I think more important than the place are the family and how the family brings the kids up, and the school, and the kids' friends. And that can be in an insulated place of a city that is not classically good to bring up kids, or it can be within any place of a city that is classically good to bring up kids.
Yeah. Interesting. So Max, a lot of our listeners, you know, they have healthcare backgrounds, or they're doctors, or nurses, or physical therapists, and you know, they see someone like you building in healthcare. A lot of people aspire to start a company or to, you know, build in healthcare, to even innovate in a new way, especially healthcare professionals, right? And so, you know, part of what I'd love for people to see is kind of like to peel back the curtains, because like careers are not—they're not linear, right? They're up and down. You learn a little bit here, a little bit there, and then maybe you start a company one day.
And so, you know, I'd love to just kind of like look at your career progression, you know, leading up to founding Superpower, which has, you know, done amazing things up until like today. Like you guys have only been around two years and have already accomplished so much. But what was, you know, like your career like, if you could, you know, chronologically walk us through this kind of journey since maybe high school or college?
I don't really think that much about career progression, and I definitely don't think about chronology and linearity. I think we love to connect the dots looking backwards, and we love to attribute strong causal reasonings to everything that happened to getting us where we are today. And I think the world is actually far more random; it's far more non-linear. I think people try to look at history as a way to say, 'Oh, therefore I need to do all of these things to then do the thing I actually want to do.'
And the reality is, most people can just do the thing they want to do in the most direct way possible.
I explored all sorts of different things. I started a small venture capital fund. I worked in finance, in banking—small bank and big bank. I worked at a couple of VC funds and public market funds. I worked at two different startups. I started my own small thing. I've been starting lots of my own small things over an extended period of time. I started studying law, and then finance, and then mathematics and statistics, and then biomedical engineering. And I dropped out of all of them. My basic view was: do the thing for long enough to be ranking first at the school, and then drop out and do the next thing.
And my view there was, people often drop out because they're not doing well at the thing. So I'm like, if I'm going to drop out, I kind of have to be first at the thing to prove that I'm good at it.
And then when I drop out, it's kind of more comical, seen less as a response to not doing well and more as an independent judgment around what could be a better use of time.
Yeah, it sounds like you're very curious. Like you like to try different things and learn about them, get good at them. Maybe it's just like the thrill of getting good at something.
Yeah, I've always asked lots of questions, and I think dumb questions are amazing. I remember in high school, in my math class, I used to always ask the dumb question, and the teacher would always laugh at me. And then every test he'd be like so surprised that I'd be ranking first. He's like, 'What? The kid who asked all the stupid questions? How is that right?' And I think that being willing to be dumb is almost a prerequisite to be smart. And I think the synonym of that is like being willing to fail is almost a prerequisite to succeed.
Being willing to be wrong, even. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of people go through like their careers and, you know, I speak generally, like for this show, obviously a lot of our listeners are in healthcare. And they reach a point, maybe a couple years into training, where it's like, 'Okay, I did this for a while and now I want to try maybe something new. Do I start over? Do I go back to school? Do I risk that?' And I like that you're kind of saying like there's no linearity. It's just like, 'Hey, if you went to school for this—I went to school as a doctor, I dropped out of residency, and then I started a new career path.' And I was already 30 by the time that happened. And so I think that there's always like this fear of taking the next step or doing the thing, or even not doing the thing, because you have so much sunk cost, right? And sunk cost holds a lot of people back in their journeys.
Did you ever feel like you invested too much into something and, you know, maybe like you couldn't jump out of it, or was that not really part of your program?
I don't think sunk costs are that useful. The question is always just opportunity cost, which is: today, given my set of options, what's the best option?
And that's independent of what has happened in the past, right? Now, what's happened in the past modifies the set of options, but it's still just a set of options. So I just think: what's the actual set of options here? And let's not think about the set of options in the opportunity set over the next one to two years. Let's actually extend the time axis, right? Let's assume that we're all going to be on this planet for at least 100 years. If that's the case, we have a long time over which we can test things, explore things, create things, start things. And I think a lot of people take a very short-term view. The short-term view means your option set is very constrained. The long-term view means your option set is almost unlimited.
Yeah. Interesting. I haven't really thought about it like that. Like, 100 years is a long time, right? If you really think about it. You know, we're still in the first quarter—first third, I guess, really, if you think about it. But yeah, I guess we don't really think about how long life really is. And you know, maybe this is a good segue into Superpower and obviously building a longevity company. I guess how are you thinking about this stage of your, you know, of your career and also building in the longevity space?
I again think of it less as a stage of career and more as: there comes a time in your life where you have to find—at least in my view, I wanted to find the one thing that I wanted to commit a large part of my life to. And a large part of my life here I see as at least 30 years, and hopefully far longer.
And there were very few ideas of things that I actually wanted to work on and cared about and that mattered to the world enough for me to say, 'This deserves working on for 30 years.' And I think one of those things is extending and enhancing human life. And I think one of the most important things in the world is human life and human health, right? I think if we improve health, we improve life. If we improve health, we're smarter and happier and more present, and can create more and do more.
And that starts with our biology, our health. So for me, that's crucially important.
I mean, is there a particular reason that you wanted to focus on healthcare? Because I've known you for a while now, even before starting Superpower. And I know that you've always had this interest in healthcare specifically. And I remember actually we were talking one day, and maybe we were talking about Forward or something else, but we were talking about just kind of like re-envisioning healthcare. And like you were talking about this for a long time. And we'd talk about like, 'Hey, is this going to work? Is that going to work? Is this possible? Is that possible?' But, you know, from what I remember about you is like you always had this idea that healthcare could be different and it could be reinvented. It could be futuristic.
Is there a particular reason it was just like really the focus on healthcare? Is it just because like it's one of those challenges? It's like healthcare is 100 and 0 against everybody, right? Against the big payers, against the big startups, against Forward, against everyone. No one's figured out healthcare.
Yeah, I think there are very few problems that matter in the world and were personally meaningful for me. I had a lot of health challenges, and when you go through that experience, you start to form beliefs around how healthcare can be better.
And I remember—ever since I was probably 16 years old, I've had a lot of beliefs around healthcare, how healthcare could be better. I remember being 16 and interviewing my doctors and trying to find the doctor who was actually good, and there wasn't like a single general primary care doctor that I could find who would pass my interview threshold.
