We called the company Superpower, which is like unusual. It's controversial if you're doing health. The purpose of health is to improve life. It's to give your life superpowers.
So, you've got Logan Paul, you've got Steve Aoki, Mbappé, a soccer player. What is it about this space that is attracting all of the elites?
Well, if you look at an athlete or a celebrity today, who's sponsoring them? They're sponsored by like a f***ing watch company or a fashion brand. And if you look at what an athlete stands for, they don't stand for Rolex. They stand for: I want to use health to allow me to perform better, to be better, and be capable of more.
What's the single biggest dietary lie of the last 20 years?
So, GLP-1s have caused obesity to drop for the first time in 60 years. Is obesity solved? Obesity is almost solved, yeah. The reality is that every single year that goes by, we have GLP-1s that are resulting in more body weight loss. The latest is Retatrutide, the GLP-3. We just saw the phase three results read out. Eli Lilly published the studies. The average person in the study lost 28% of their body weight at week 80, and over half the people in the study lost over 30% of their body weight, right? Which is like equivalent to bariatric surgery. And every single year we're going to see a GLP-1 that has even more potency at basically annihilating body weight. So I think obesity is almost a solved problem, and it's happened in a very short span of time.
That's actually incredible. When is Retatrutide hitting the market?
Uh, probably May next year. April next year.
Well, technically April next year, but everyone's getting it from the gray market at the moment.
Everyone... are you taking Retatrutide?
I have taken Retatrutide, yeah.
It's really great. It improves quality of life, because when you're on Retatrutide, you have more focus. You don't have food noise, right?
Food noise meaning like when you're thinking about food, you don't have to use self-discipline.
Your insulin sensitivity improves, so you have more energy. Carbs, if you eat them early in the day, don't impact your biology as much, and then you feel less inflamed. So even independent of weight loss, people find they look better or their face feels slimmer because inflammation goes down. So I think a microdose of Retatrutide, even for people not looking to lose weight, actually just improves quality of life.
I love that. So, Superpower is an incredible company. First of all, congratulations. I think what you guys are building here in the office, everything is fantastic. I'm really excited for you guys. I'm excited to be an investor and be on this journey. You had 150,000 people on a waitlist before you even launched. How did you get 150,000 people on a waitlist?
So, I think the first thing is buy a good domain name. So, Superpower.com helps. Look, I think—
How much did it cost you?
We actually got it for really cheap. We got it for like under $200,000.
And then, six months after, we were offered almost $2 million for it.
Who was trying to buy it?
Uh, the guys behind Limitless. The, like, the—no, no, no, not the movie. There's this AI kind of note-taker thing.
Anyway, I think building a waitlist is two things. One is, are you very good at when someone lands on your site, converting them into a waitlist customer? And then two, are you good at getting someone on the site? The conversion part is: have a really stunning and beautiful site, make the waitlist front and center, the CTA throughout, have a good domain name, and when someone's on the waitlist, set up a referral mechanism such that they move up the waitlist if they send it to friends.
In terms of getting someone on the site, yeah, that works. In terms of getting someone on the site, we did all sorts of different viral drops. We were running a beta and we'd let people on the beta if they posted on Twitter. Or we did this baseball card drop where we generated baseball cards that show someone's health stats, and we got that shared on Twitter. So, lots of just viral moments that brought someone to the site, and then it was up to us to kind of convert them.
I love that. So, you've got Logan Paul, you've got Steve Aoki, Mbappé, the soccer player, Giannis, the basketballer. You also recently partnered with David Beckham's company, IM8. What is it about this space that is attracting all of the elites?
Well, if you look at an athlete or a celebrity today, who's sponsoring them? They're sponsored by like a f***ing watch company or a fashion brand. And if you look at what an athlete stands for, they don't stand for 'look at my fashion Rolex.' They stand for: I want to use health to allow me to perform better, and be better, and be capable of more. And I think this is one of the first times when athletes have actually been able to partner with a company that champions taking care of your health, that champions using health as a tool to improve everyday life. We called the company Superpower, which is like unusual. It's controversial if you're doing health, but our view is the purpose of health is not the Brian Johnson 'don't die.' The purpose of health is to improve life. It's to give your life superpowers. And I think many of these people see that, and that's the ethos they believe in that's allowed them to be great, and they want to be part of that.
So, for our listeners who aren't familiar with Superpower, what is Superpower in a few sentences?
When someone comes to us, we test their blood, gut microbiome, toxins, cancer, anything someone wants to test, and then we put someone on different therapeutic protocols—supplements, prescriptions, peptides, again, whatever someone wants—in one place. And then we'll aggregate all of someone's data as well. So you can connect your wearables, you can upload past labs, that visualizes. And when you bring all this together, you start to realize pretty quickly that, hold up, this is basically replacing my doctor, right? And what we see is many of our members don't have doctors anymore. They have a more tech-forward preventative kind of platform instead.
And so, if you're a patient of Superpower—do you refer to your users as patients?
If you're a member of Superpower, how often do you have to draw blood?
So, the annual membership is a bit under $200, and we'll draw blood once a year for people on that membership. Actually, halfway through the year, we message people and give them another test for free on us. We actually tell them that when they sign up. Then some people will draw more often, because what happens after you do your first draw is you see things that are wrong and you want to double-click, right? 'Oh, my heart markers are out. Let me do the advanced heart test. My inflammation was high. Let me dive into that a bit more.' So we'll have some people come back every couple of months, some people twice a year, some people once a month. It's a bit of a mix.
The average billionaire right now who's obsessed with their health is spending $500,000 a year on a personal doctor, and that doctor is going really deep with them on all sorts of things. You're offering a similar kind of service for $200 a year. What is the $500,000 doctor giving the patient that you are not able to at this point in time?
So yeah, the mission of Superpower has been: take billionaire-level care, democratize that for the masses, bring concierge medicine to everyone. And I think we've done a lot of that—we can do a lot of the testing for quite cheap. The AI memory system and inference now outperforms the cognition of many of these billionaire doctors. And I think increasingly what we're seeing is concierge medicine—the kind of care that the elite get—is now less about the quality of the medicine and more about the doctor actually being like a coach or an executive assistant, rather than an actual doctor.
So does that mean that we're heading towards a world where—and I think you may have said this in several interviews in the past—but we're heading towards a world where AI is going to be making the medical decisions? And you're for that, you're not against that?
I think AI is going to replace just about all doctor decision-making, and I've been saying this for five years, and every year people disagree with me a little bit less and less, and I think we'll get to the point where it's consensus. The thought experiment I love is: would you hop on an airplane if you were told there was no tech and no autopilot and it was just the pilot flying? You'd be like, no f***ing way—I didn't trust just the pilot. And I think that's where we're going to get to in medicine, where it's like, would you trust the doctor if it was just the doctor and no tech? And you'd be like, no, I want the doctor to have the AI, because that technological system is far better at understanding me and all the data and the latest in medicine. And I think the implication in the long term is AI replaces the cognition of doctors.
So, let's put a timeline on that. What do you think is the first field of medicine that will be completely replaced by AI?
Primary care. Okay. Interesting.
Yeah, it's just about replaced already.
What is it about primary care that lends itself so well to AI replacement?
So much of primary care is like do a blood test, navigate someone somewhere else, right? The actual navigation function is maybe write a prescription or write a specialist referral. Those are pretty easy things to do digitally. And then the interpretation of someone's initial results, the ingestion of an intake, the asking of questions to that patient could also be done digitally with the AI doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Specialty care is a bit harder because they have specialist machines, they're doing things in person, they're performing surgery, but primary care is not doing that. So, already many of our members don't have a primary care doctor anymore. They use us. They can get the things they got through their primary care doctor with us, and they find like we listen and we know them and we're 24/7, and they don't have to wait and drive to a doctor's office for a 10-minute appointment.
Does that mean that Superpower is able to give referrals to a specialist?
We will have that soon. So, there are two features of primary care that we don't have yet. One is specialist referrals, coming soon. And then the second is we do some prescriptions like hormones and GLP-1s, but we don't do others like statins. We're adding that soon as well.
It's like statins, like heart medication. Yeah.
Yeah. What is the last field of medicine that you think will be replaced by AI?
I think really complex surgery is going to be the hardest to replace, because that requires robotics rather than just digital AI. I think digital AI is already better than doctors—we have the papers that show that. Robotics is not autonomously better than surgeons at all surgeries. I think people kind of assume that the soft human things would be the last to go, but the great irony here is like the first AI medicine use case was the AI therapist, right? People thought it would be the last thing.
Yeah. And what we realized pretty quickly is like humans aren't as good at this empathy thing as we thought.
I'm not sure if that's the takeaway I have, but I think it's more that the human brain was more simple than we thought. Maybe.
I'd like to hope that we're good at empathy.
I don't know, man. Like these AIs are pretty good at empathy. I don't know how many people are like, 'Oh, I love how empathetic my doctor is. How well they listen.' But people chat with the Superpower AI like dozens of times a day. We use a handful of different models, but we changed one of the models from Claude Opus 4.6 to Claude Opus 4.7, and our members would complain. They said the personality feels a little bit different. So we went back to 4.6 because we could steer the personality a little bit better.
That's so funny. What happens when Anthropic deprecate 4.6?
We have our own personality steering, and it's just like which model can we steer to the personality of our AI most effectively.
That makes sense. So I think something that's often glossed over in the—well, it's a fairly new company, but the brief but pretty remarkable chapter that has been Superpower so far—is your origin story, because you were the number one student in Sydney law. How did you end up out here in San Francisco building the future of health? It feels like such a major pivot. Someone in your position feels more geared towards big law. How did your parents take that decision, and how did that all come about?
Yeah, I know. I've always been interested in lots of things, right? Like I studied law. I dropped out of that. I picked up finance. I dropped out of that. I picked up statistics and mathematics. I started a bunch of companies. I worked at a bunch of places. But I've always been of the view: learn as much as humanly possible, upskill, become inherently good. Don't actually care as much about the whole signaling thing. Just become inherently good at a thing. Two, get to the point where you can do the one thing you want to do for a very, very, very long time. So in 2022, I was 22 at the time, I moved to the US with a simple idea: let's find the company I want to work on for at least the next 30 years, ideally longer. And I felt like I'd experienced enough things to at least not be completely imbecilic when starting the new thing. The only material regret in my life is not moving to the US sooner. I just think that it's very hard to create things in Australia. It's far easier to create things in the US. So I wish I moved here sooner, but I caught on eventually.
It's a shame. I wish that our venture capital scene was larger and more well-promoted, especially—at least you were from Sydney. I came from Perth.
I don't think we have a single fund. Maybe we do—and respect, there is a Perth VC fund—but it didn't feel like an option, building a company.
There's a Perth VC fund. I spoke to them and I told them I wanted to start a new health system, and they laughed at me, like 'yeah, good luck, mate.' And a big part of—when Superpower is successful, what I'll do is I'll throw those people under the bus, because f***ing people who shit on founders, right? It's so hard to start anything. Innovation's incredibly challenging. A lot of founders fail. That's the reality. But what I think a good investor can do is give people belief, and give people this sense of: you know what, I'm not saying you will be able to do this, but give it a go—because that's how we actually create better things in this world.
So speaking of the US, has RFK been good for the health system or bad?
Some things he's done are good. I think he's put more emphasis on getting rid of preservatives, artificial dyes, unnatural things that have entered the food and supply chain. I think he's done a good job of steering the food pyramid in a slightly better direction, and nutrition guidelines in a slightly better direction. And then some other things he's done are maybe questionable. Under pressure from Trump, Froot Loop flavored vapes are allowed again, and the commissioner of the FDA was fired because he did not allow Froot Loop flavored vapes. But Trump said, 'No, we need those flavored vapes because big cigarette pays me a lot of money.' Maybe some of this stuff that RFK has done around mRNA I don't necessarily agree with. I think mRNA is actually a quite promising technology. So on net I think it's been positive, but these things have had two sides.
Interesting. There's an increasing trend in the US that nicotine itself is actually quite good for you.
I put nicotine in right now.
I was going to ask you that. So the theory is, you know, nicotine is actually really good for you, and it's smoking that is bad for you. It feels like you embrace this. What are your thoughts on nicotine?
Look, if we look at the data, nicotine is quite well studied. There are some studies that show that it reduces risk of Parkinson's, that it could be neuroprotective against things like Alzheimer's, and it could be cardioprotective. There are also some downsides. It can accelerate the recession of gums. It can be addictive in nature. But the reason I like nicotine—I'll microdose. I'll take like 1.5 milligram doses, right? In Sweden, I think a third of the population takes like 50 milligrams a day. I take 1.5 milligrams. So, a really small dose, but I find that the benefit it has for focus, for productivity, for energy makes it—and given that there aren't clear obvious downsides for me—makes it worth it.
Do you still get the gum recession side effect if you're not using Zyn—another form?
I presume that like a patch doesn't have that effect, right? And a vape might not have that effect, but that could have problems with the lungs. And gum probably doesn't have as much of an effect as, say, a lozenge. So I do think the form factor matters a little bit.
Yeah. A few months ago you guys kindly sent me a hoodie, marketed as it was the world's—what was the right term?
World's healthiest hoodie.
The world's healthiest hoodie. Yeah. So, a few months ago you guys sent me a hoodie.
Marketed as the world's healthiest hoodie. What about this hoodie was so special? And then a few months later, I saw it on Grailed listed at $2,000 a hoodie. So now this hoodie is worth quite a lot of money. Tell our listeners about this hoodie and what makes it so special.
Don't sell it yet, man. This is a collectible.
One day. So we care a lot about building a health company that feels more like a lifestyle brand, right? That feels in culture. One Medical—no one's walking around wearing One Medical merchandise, right? And we made this statement of: clothing is harming your health. It's often polyester made from synthetic fabrics, or artificial dyes. What does it look like to have the world's healthiest hoodie? So we said: fully organic cotton, algae-based screen printing. And we launched it. We put it out into the world. They sold out very quickly, and now some people have decided to try reselling them for very large amounts.
Yeah. I think it's brilliant. Is there more clothing coming?
We have hats. We're debating whether we release them. They're like somewhat controversial hats. We have one that says 'Make America Hot Again.' We have another hat that just says 'Peptides.' We have another one that says—I should have worn this other one. It says: 'Disclaimer: Not Medical Advice.' So, we'll release that. And we're going to do a world's healthiest series with many things. So, like what does it look like to do the world's healthiest coffee? Lots of coffee has like mold or things added to it. We're going to do the world's healthiest maybe toilet paper, right? A lot of toilet paper has BPA in it. People don't know that. People try to avoid BPA, and meanwhile your toilet paper has it. So we want to do this world's healthiest series as essentially part of it being a lifestyle brand and having products beyond just the clinical products we sell, and then part of it is telling the story of what we believe in, which is health is not just 'oh, what medication did you take when you're sick.' It's also everything in your environment, in your life. And then part of it is just marketing, right? How do you get eyeballs in a way that's different? With marketing, we always ask this question of: what can we do that no one else is doing? It's hard to have answers for, but I think that's one version.
