Joyce. Oh no. First episode of the year and no Jim Joyce today, man. I miss our banter. I'm not going to banter today, but Jim and Joyce are at CES, and we'll get some clear IP out there. In the meantime, I could not miss the opportunity. I met Max at Health, I believe. So I'm going to let him in. I've been looking forward to speaking to Max for quite a while. Actually, been following Max along. Max, welcome to the show.
Life is fantastic. Looks a lot warmer where you are. I'm actually back in New Jersey, so cold, and a little snow on the ground.
Man, I want to come to New York, New Jersey, in winter sometime. I see incredible photos on Twitter and the internet, and it looks magical.
I grew up in this area. We now live kind of between Barcelona and here. And I tell you, I don't miss not having snow.
Anyway, I was back home in Australia for a little bit, and in my head I came back over here quite quickly because I was like, Australia is going to be distracting: sun, beach, things to do. And actually, I was more productive over there. And the realization I had is that when the day is longer and you have more light, you have more energy. And I got over here and I was like, I'm struggling to work as hard. So what I did is I bought the biggest possible light I could on my desk, and it hasn't arrived yet, but it's going to sit next to me shining half in my eyes, and hopefully that gives me more energy.
Interesting. I can't wait to get into your story and where you are, but just to comment back on this: it's interesting, right? Because Marina and I, we run your coach, you know, partially in Europe even though the business is all US. We actually love the fact that we're in Europe, and our mornings kind of 6:00 to 9:00 are timed to ourselves. Those quiet mornings, we get the sunlight, we go to the gym, we work with our product team that's across Europe anyway, and then US wakes up. When we're in US, we still go to the gym in the morning, but when we get after breakfast early in the morning, the day just starts. There's no time to yourself. So anyway, I know we got a little bit of time here, but for all of our millions of listeners and viewers, we really want to understand who Max is. And I do miss my partner Jim, he had to fly to see us, so he's in flight. But tell us who you are, Max, and take us back. You mentioned you were born in Australia, so take us to wherever you want, childhood, where you grew up, what really made you you, and then we'll obviously get to what you do now. And lots of questions there.
Yeah, cool. So I guess I was born in Australia and mostly grew up there. Spent a little bit of time living in Italy as well, which is where my family is from, and then moved to the US when I was 22 in 2022 to start Superpower. I guess like growing up as a kid, there were probably a few themes that characterized my life. I simultaneously was very obsessive about a select few things and then also was curious about everything to an extent, right? I was very broad with most things and then there were a few that I went really deep into. I was an obsessive reader, like I would read a book every couple of days, right? Mostly fantasy and fiction when I was a little kid, like sub 10 years old, even sub 14 years old, mostly fantasy and fiction. I was also obsessed with Lego as a little kid. I would be able to spend from when I woke up 8:00 a.m. to whenever I went to sleep 11:00 p.m., midnight, literally just building Lego. Isn't that what startup life is? It's putting puzzle pieces together really at the end of the day.
And then I had a Minecraft obsession era as well. And the really interesting thing is when you're playing a video game or you're building Lego, no one says to you, 'Oh, how can you do that for 16 hours a day and not burn out?' No one says that. They're like, 'You're having fun.' But for some reason, I work 16 hours a day and people are like, 'Oh, take care of your health. Are you okay? Don't burn out.' I'm like, 'I'm having fun.' Like, why would I burn out if I'm having fun?
I was going to say as long as you're treating it as solving puzzle pieces and the way you're handling stress and mentally, and we'll get into markers and biomarkers later I'm sure. But before we keep moving on this, where in Australia and where did you go to school? Tell us a little bit, you know, Jim would always ask the question if he was here, like, you know, your friends were peripheral, how would they describe you as a kid, right?
Yeah. I, uh, kindergarten, so year zero to year three, I went to a Catholic primary school near where I lived in Sydney, Australia. And I had maybe three friends, one really close friend. And that one really close friend, we just did everything together. We were in our own bubble. We didn't think about the rest of the world. We didn't think about perception and what others thought and the dynamics between people. We just enjoyed life. And we wrote many books together and created like fantasy worlds, and we were just close friends, and that was good. And then I think he moved to Switzerland to live, and from year four to the rest of my middle through to high school period, I went to a different school, a Jesuit school in Sydney called St. Aloysius. Fantastic place. And it was interesting in certain respects. I think from year four through to the rest of my time at school, I became more conscious of dynamics between people, the in-group, the out-group, the cool group, the not-so-cool group. And I didn't really like that. I think there's this particularly Australian pressure that suppresses individuality, right? I would always try to express what I believed or who I was, and people would laugh, or there's this shutting down mechanism: 'Oh no, just be like everyone else. Be more normal.'
Man, I don't think that's Australia specific. To be frank, it's just human nature, right?
Yeah, I know. And it's weird. I played like I semi-played the normal game, but everyone would have said I was always like eccentric in my own kind of way. And that school was really formative for me because of the emphasis on teaching us how to think and the emphasis on values and principles. I think the Jesuit method, like meditation, was a very common thing. When I was in year, we'd meditate many days, and that was like, oh, okay, that's cool. There are a lot of things that people learn from an executive coach when they're 25, 35 that I was learning when I was 16. And I didn't really think of it at the time. I'm just like, 'Oh, this is school. This shit.' And now I'm very grateful for that in retrospect.
Awesome. So let's keep moving. So you moved at 22 to US, right? And what was the trigger? Why moved to US? And maybe a little bit, I know again, I almost purposely, we don't, Jim and I don't do too much prep for a lot of these. But I know you had your own personal health issues. So maybe take us through a little bit of the personal journey to start Superpower, but also some previous experiences and other things that you were doing prior to Superpower.
Yeah. So personal health issues basically age 8 to 12 had chronic headaches, had no idea what was wrong. No one could solve it. Age call it 10 to 18, I couldn't sleep amongst a handful of other things. I had chronic sinusitis. I still had the headaches. It took me three hours to get to sleep every night. Slept through probably a third of my high school classes. I used to sprint semicompetitively and be asleep just before a race. I used to play soccer at a somewhat high level and be asleep on the way to a game. And that was really frustrating because you feel kind of hamstrung when you're tired the whole time. And I remember thinking to myself, look, if I can do well in sports and academics and school when I'm tired the whole time, hopefully someday there's a time in the future where I'm not tired the whole time, and now I feel like I've got even more of an edge because I did it on hard mode. Now I can do it.
It's like you can have a superpower.
Totally. Yeah, you could say that. And I saw dozens of doctors. No one knew what was wrong. I had dozens of tests. Spent a lot of money. I had surgery, was told to medicate for life, and nothing worked to fix my problems. And then over time got to the bottom of it. Partially through self-experimentation, and partially through finding someone I call a 10x doctor, these genius doctors who spend hours with you collecting your data and trying to get to the root of what is going on.
And ever since then, I've been obsessed with this idea of why can't everyone have a 10x doctor? Why shouldn't everyone know what's actually going on and not have to guess, right? We shouldn't have problems like that. We should know and be able to fix it.
And so I want to touch on a little bit of that self-experimentation. I mean, obviously today, you know, I just saw a post that something like 40 million consumers are using ChatGPT, right, which is an astounding number. And I'm guilty there, and I'm sure we'll get into the details, but talk to me about that self-experimentation pre-ChatGPT, but then also working with that 10x doctor. And what do you mean by the 10x doctor? I think I know what you mean, but kind of so the self-experimentation journey, and I hope you're sleeping well now as part of this process, but give us a little bit on the update on that self-experimentation, 10x doctor.
So self-experimentation for me was just reading everything I could online, listening to everything I could online. I probably started listening to Peter Attia, I think, in probably 2015. No one knew who he was back then. I emailed him saying, 'Can I intern for you?' I think some of these, and this was like pre-this person was big.
Yeah, correct. And I tested and tried everything. I convinced the pharmacist to give me a continuous glucose monitor. I would prick my finger as well and prick my family's finger. I'd wear blue light blocking glasses when no one knew what they were, and everyone thought that was super weird. Mouth tape, similar story. I remember the first time I told someone I use mouth tape at night. They're like, 'What the f**k? Are you okay? Are you going to suck face?' And now it's just a normal thing. Oura ring, similar story. I had this big Gen One Oura Ring at the time. Yeah. So I spent a lot of time reading articles, trying to see experts, going through forums to see what was going on. I kind of got to some answers. I definitely learned that health was an input into improving my life. And I strongly cemented this belief that if you improve your health, you improve your life. And that was part of that journey. And then if I look at what a 10x doctor is, my basic belief is most humans do not have the brain capable of practicing medicine. It's not really the human's fault. It's just that it's a very, very, almost impossible ordeal to practice medicine. And because that's the case, what we've tried to do is we've tried to simplify medicine into specialties and frameworks and standards of care that humans can understand. And that's okay if the only tool we have to deliver medicine is humans. But if we were just trying to say, what's the best possible way we can deliver medicine, not with humans, but just with medicine full stop, we would actually do it a little bit differently. We'd collect far more data. We'd be far better at connecting the dots between the data. We would look more holistically rather than just in a silo or specialty. So a 10x doctor is one of these like one in a million people who can do that. They're geniuses, right? They spend a ton of time with you. They see patterns. They connect dots. Very few humans on earth can do that. So my belief—
But also I would say, and again I'm not putting any doctors that can spend this much time with you, you know it is a costly proposition. I mean we all know around the world healthcare systems are near failing from being able to support individuals, right? And I think you're in US now. When a family making a little over 100 grand is going to be paying 30 grand for insurance, why, when I can get a superpower? When I can get a health coach? When I can get, you know, I'm going to assemble this together, and then there's emergency care of course, right? So I'm going to maybe double click on the 10x doctor because to me I think it's, and I've heard this line right, the doctors and the nurses that are not using AI are the ones left behind, but the ones that are using AI to augment themselves because it's impossible for doctors to keep up with all the latest studies. So I guess I'm trying to understand a bit more on that 10x doctor. It's not that they're able to spend more time, yes maybe that's part of it, but it's pinpointed time on 'Hey Max, your particular biomarker that's relevant to you, and by the way this AI helper will help me correlate this, and I'm going to apply now my skills that I learned in medical school to help you get better.' Right? But again, I'm just trying to double click a little.
If we look at what medicine is from first principles, it's a database of what we know about the patient: all of your data points, personal history, family history, preferences, biomarkers. And then it's a database of what we know about medicine: all the latest research, all of the different studies. There are dozens of things that we know about medicine. And those databases are massive and exponentially growing. It's very hard for a clinician to store those databases in their head. Now the medical step, or the doctor brain step, is the computation step: database one, database 2, we need to connect them or compute between the two. Again, very hard, right? We have this massive combinatorial matrix and problem that humans aren't necessarily well equipped to solve. But if you look at what informatics or data science or AI can do, it can take a big database and another big database and perform computation, right? And classically could only do that in a reasonably deterministic or defined way. Now we can do that in a very fuzzy way with AI, right? AI can come up with patterns that we didn't hardcode in, and that allows it to be very effective at solving this problem. So that's what a 10x doctor is. They store everything about you. They know everything about medicine, and they're excellent at connecting the two. Hard to do.
Yeah. And but you still see that human in the loop. That was, again and selfishly, I mean, we run a health coaching company, and our belief system is that you know, there are individuals that are just intrinsically motivated like you were to solve your own problem and lean on somebody and pull them in, right? And at the end of the day, we're in charge of our own health. I don't care what anybody says. We're the only ones that are. And we strongly believe that these tools, right, self-paced whether it's ChatGPT or self-paced digital therapies, but you need a human and that accountability partner. That's our belief system. How are you guys thinking about it at Superpower? That still human in the loop, or do you see the future where I as a consumer get my labs, buy a marker, so that's the history bucket, and then automatically compare it to the RCTs and studies that are continuously growing, and then I'm going to have my diagnosis and care plan generated?
So in the short term, if I was recommending to my parents how do you get the highest quality care, I would say to them, find a doctor, find a health coach. Here are the ones I think are really great. Work with them. I said to my dad two nights ago, 'Dad, I think this is the best doctor I can find in Australia. You need to see this guy.' And my dad's like, 'Why? I don't have a problem.' I'm like, 'Just see him. You never know.' Which is part of the challenge how society thinks about it: I only go to a doctor when I need when I hurt, right? Versus being in preventative mode.
