I'm Phil Chen, and this is Scaling Performance, a show where I train with founders and operators on what high performance looks like in their work and their life. Let's jump into it.
What's up, dude?
Hey, man. Good to see you.
Good to see you. Welcome, welcome.
Hyped for a podcast workout.
Yeah, this will be fun. This will be fun. All right, let's dive into it.
The point of this is to get your spine warmed up. The body is meant to twist. You're going to hold the foam roller end to end, keep it in front of your chest, and we're just going to twist side to side. And we'll go for about 20 of these.
So Max, what is Superpower for those who don't know what Superpower is, and can you tell us more about your journey towards building Superpower?
Superpower is building a new healthcare system. The current system is good when you're sick, is very bad at preventing you getting sick, and it doesn't do much to actually enhance human life. There should be a system in front of the current one that prevents things and makes people better. So that's what we're doing. Now that starts for us with diagnostic testing. So we bring all sorts of different tests into one place, starting with blood testing. So we'll test 100 plus blood biomarkers, typically twice a year. That's far more than your annual physical. Your doctor might test 20, so they miss a lot of things. Once we do that, we'll pull in other data, connect wearables, upload past data, visualize it, and then tell you what to do. And people come back to us very often. They chat with the AI. Many will come to us instead of their doctor. They discover things their doctor misses, and people are in control of their own health journey, and that's what we're seeing. We're kind of entering this era of health empowerment.
I had a lot of health problems when I was younger, which is part of the kind of impetus for starting Superpower. It would take me three hours to get to sleep. I had chronic migraines, chronic sinusitis, slept through half of my high school classes, saw a dozen doctors, was told to medicate for life, nothing worked. And when that happens, you become very jaded with the system. So that was me. And three years ago I moved to the US to set out to change things and create what we hope will be like the new dominant health system. It'll take us several decades, but that's kind of why we're here.
We're going to do some dynamic exercising, fancy way of saying movement stretching, walking soldier. You're going to kick one leg up as high as you can, reach with your opposite arm. We've got this stuff in your body called synovial fluid, it's kind of a lubricant for your joints. Focus is going to be on warming up your hamstrings, your glutes, your hip flexors. We'll just walk down and back doing that.
Next exercise is going to be a monster walk. We're going to take a band, put it around your knees to keep that tension in the band. We're going to warm up your glutes, specifically your medial glute. Just going to walk down the floor, taking nice big steps.
Next exercise we're going to do is a lunge. It's a variation on the world's greatest stretch. You're going to take a lunge step, you're going to put one hand down, really open up your hips, twist open, and then you'll take another lunge step. And we'll just go all the way down the floor doing that.
Phil, you're going to do jump rope. Max will start with battle ropes. One person on jump rope, one person on battle rope. Bend at your knees, bend at your hips slightly, nice and quick with the ropes, and we'll go for about 60 seconds.
Max, I'm curious, like, as a CEO of your own company, what does your actual day-to-day look like?
Wake up at 8:45. By around 9:15 I'll be in the office. I live next door. In the morning I'll wake up and I'll have like a morning supplement stack. So, around a liter of water. I really believe that we can actually consume more water than we think in the morning. I'll add electrolytes to that, not like shitty LMNT stuff, but actually natural electrolytes with trace minerals. I'll have a morning supplement stack: broad-spectrum multivitamin, omega, NAC. I just added calcium-D-glucarate and DIM to hopefully try to reduce estradiol levels, and a couple of other things that I'll throw in there. Head to the office. I tend to have my first meeting of the day around 9:30, so that's when I'll kind of kick off, and then typically have calls from 9:30 to 4:00. At 4:00 I'll go to the gym or do some sort of exercise for around an hour. I come back, I'll eat dinner, and then I'll work more like deep work, no calls, from like 6:00 to around 1:00 a.m. And then I'll leave the office and go home.
Now, I'm very intentional about finding moments of what I call passive optimization. So when doing the thing that you would do anyway, do that in a more productive way. So during a meeting, practice breathwork. Going up in an elevator, meditate for 20 seconds. At my desk I have a walking treadmill, so I'm walking on that during the day. In meetings I'm often doing like band pull-aparts or something fun. I think as a founder, it's really hard to find time for things, so how can you take the things you're already doing and just make them a bit more productive?
Next exercise we're going to do is going to be a Pallof press. It's a great anti-extension exercise. Don't let the cable pull you back. Feet are going to be pointed forward, slight bend of your knees, slight bend at your hips. You're going to slowly press out and then press back in. You can exhale your breath when you come out.
So I'm curious, given we're working on core now, how do you actually stay grounded when things get crazy in life and at work? Because that's one of the things that I struggle with. So, how do you stay grounded?
The like 80/20 of that for me is sleep at least six and a half hours. If I sleep less than that, I feel very dead. Now, I like to sleep more, but it's sometimes hard to find time to sleep more. Get enough sunlight. If I'm not seeing light, I feel very lethargic throughout the day. Make sure that my diet's good enough. It doesn't have to be perfect, but I think the key thing is avoiding food that is processed, which taxes energy, and then avoiding throwing my metabolic health out of whack. So if I have too many carbs in the morning, I feel lethargic throughout the day, so I'm very conscious of that. And then ensuring my foundations of health are in check, right? Is my gut fine? Are my toxin levels low? Are my hormones balanced? Do I have the right amount of micronutrients and minerals? And I find having all those kind of foundations in place are really powerful as well.
And then depending on the kind of period I'm going through, I will exogenously support in different ways. So if I'm going through a period of very large amounts of stress, I will take supplements to de-stress, whether that's more glycine, more theanine, more GABA. If I'm going through periods of lack of sleep, I'll take supplements to increase energy. That can be higher B vitamins, it can be taurine, it can be larger amounts of caffeine. Day to day, I don't consume a lot of caffeine, but the reason I like that is if I really need it, the caffeine has a large impact for me. So that's kind of how I think about things.
Third exercise is going to be a core exercise, a stabilization exercise. You're going to do a plank on the ball on your elbows, and you're going to slowly press your elbows out and in. Don't let your hips fall on this one. Another great anti-extension exercise. Nice flat plank. Elbows out and back, out and back. Try to breathe as normal as you can, and we'll go for about 20 of those.
We do some sled runs. One of you will push it down, the other person will push it back, and then you can walk it backwards. This is a great exercise to warm up your knees, warm up your glutes, warm up your hamstrings, get the heart rate going a little bit, and then we'll move on to some core stuff.
One of the things that I find super interesting is health equating to performance. So when did it click for you that health can mean performing at a higher level? Did you learn that throughout building Superpower? Did you already know that very young?
Man, I think what happens when you sleep through like a third of your high school classes and you're dead half of the day is you see what happens when your health is not at its peak, right? Cognition goes down, sporting performance goes down. I used to, as I mentioned, sprint quite competitively, and I'd be asleep like 20 minutes before a sprint, like asleep in the tent. I've always had this belief that if you solve for your health, you solve for everything else, right? You solve for health, you solve for cognition, focus, happiness, energy levels, productivity, what you can do in life. So I think the purpose of health is not health; the purpose of health is like life, right? How can health allow you to live better and do more? And I've held that belief for a long time. And that used to be kind of controversial, right? Ten years ago when I used to say that to people, no one was thinking about that. No one was really thinking about health as a tool to allow people to do more. And slowly we're starting to see that become consensus, right? Health isn't about taking you from minus 10, very sick, to just healthy. Health is about taking you from a baseline state to a far more optimal state. And I think that is a big part of health.
What do you think the world of startups and tech gets wrong about that notion of health as performance?
Oh, I think startups glorify beating yourself up in a non-productive way. They glorify the 12 a.m. Red Bull and pizza, and it's kind of like, it's so dumb, right? The point of building a company is to get the maximum out of yourself and kind of the team, and that's really hard when you're glorifying the midnight Red Bull, right? It's hard to do as much, to be as cognitively performant. And even if that might give someone a short-term boost, in the long run that's going to start ruining someone's body, which certainly causes like a long-term detriment. So I think that we need to actually realize that, look, founders have executive coaches, why don't they have the equivalent for health, right? And I think we have to actually start realizing that health is an input into the productivity and kind of success of the company, and we don't have that literacy yet.
Yeah, that's so interesting. I'm a core believer in that as well. I think the world of tech and startups underutilizes and underindexes on the actual performance and the physical aspect of this game, because I think people within startups and the corporate world, we're all corporate athletes. We're all athletes, right? And to not take care of yourself is a disservice to the level of performance that you're operating at work, but also at home.
And we think about this very intentionally, even at the level of the office. The office is very bright, a lot of natural light. At night we dim the lights and the red lights kind of come on. I'll turn all the lights off. We have maybe 10 air purifiers around the office. We filter all of our water. And I think all of these things slowly add up to allow people to be more productive, to feel better, to feel happier, aka health is an input into life and improving everything else.
Next thing we're going to do is a kettlebell goblet squat with your heels elevated. The point of elevating your heels is to reduce the need for ankle dorsiflexion, which is the ability to flex your feet upwards. A lot of people are not able to squat super low with their feet pointed directly straight forward, so this really helps with that. Just going to hold this kettlebell right below your chin with two hands, and you're just going to focus on going down as low as you can and then stand back up. We'll do about 15 reps of these. You can exhale your breath on the way up.
Next thing we're going to do is going to be a seated cable row. So you're going to sit down on this pad, sit upright, chest out. You're going to pull this cable, pull your elbow down to your hips, and then back. We'll go back and forth like this for about 20 reps.
