Trusting AI more than human doctors, with Max Marchione, Co-Founder of Superpower

0:06Where the world gets through is I believe that people interface with the AI doctor before going to a hero.

0:14Max Marchione:Welcome to Curious Customer, the consumer podcast. This show is for anyone curious about the world of consumer. From insights, trends, companies, brands and design, we'll uncover the hidden stories from the people at the forefront of consumer industries. The show has a wide range of guests, from marketing leaders to startup founders. So whether you're in the world of brand building or the startup ecosystem or simply curious about the world around us, then this podcast is for you. My name is Matt. I hope you enjoy the show. Max, thanks so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. You are president and co-founder of Superpower in the preventive health space.

0:53and you've done a lot of stuff before, right? So you were a lawyer, been an investor, operator, and now you're building this business, which is worth over a quarter of a billion, and you're still in your 20s. So you've done a lot more than I did in my 20s for sure. But look, let's kick things off with what superpower is and why you've decided to build in the health space. Totally. So I decided to build here largely from personal experience. From age, call it 8 to 18, I had a whole host of health problems, chronic migraines, chronic sinusitis. It would take me three hours to get to sleep every night.

1:27And I had no idea what was wrong with me. I was told to medicate for life. I had surgery. I saw over a dozen doctors and no one knew what was going on. So I became a huge health geek. I would try everything and test everything and ended up solving my problem by finding someone I call a 10x doctor. We have 10x engineers. I think we also have 10x doctors and that 10x doctor made me realize there's a big gap between the best of medicine the kind of medicine a jeff bezos might have access to and what everyone else has access to as long as that gap exists someone or some company has to come along and fundamentally close it right the the medicine for the best has to be the same as the medicine for the rest and i also believe that the only way to close that gap was going to be using technology or ai if we're going to build a new healthcare system.

2:14It's going to be an informatics problem or a data science problem, not a let's train more humans problem. And in this paradigm, the AI will far exceed what is ever possible for a human doctor. So that was the initial impetus of superpower, those core beliefs, the desire to actually make the best of healthcare accessible to everyone. In terms of what we're doing today, this is what we're doing behind the scenes, but I'll stick on what's the customer experience that people have. We're an annual membership,$499 for the membership a year that's 42 a month and as a superpower member you'll get a few things one is we'll start the year by sending a nurse to your home it's a it's like a great concierge experience and that nurse will collect over 100 plus blood biomarkers it's five times more than a normal annual physical and i honestly think most people should get this blood test it's just like inherently very useful they'll test hormones toxins cardiovascular health liver health inflammation all sorts of things that you probably haven't seen or tested before and that will show you what's going on you can add on other testing so an additional cost you can add on toxin testing or you can add on gut microbiome testing and some people like love them i personally love those tests some people say i'm happy with just the blood test and then we'll repeat the blood test six months in so we'll do another as part of the membership 100 plus blood biomarker tests halfway through the year so that's how it starts which is actually give someone insight into what's happening in their body then we will connect the dots across all the data.

3:40We'll say, here's what's actually going on. And we'll say, here's exactly what you should do. And we'll build this big report. And people read that report and they're like, holy shit, this makes everything makes sense now. I get it. I get what I can do to improve my health. And then the final part of the membership is let's take care of you. Let's actually help you achieve whatever health goals you have. That might be by follow-up diagnostics. It might be by protocols and plans. It might be via supplements or pharmaceuticals or 20 % cheaper than Amazon or Hymns will continue to pull all of your data into one place.

4:10So you have it in a dashboard and that's the membership. So testing, connecting the dots and then making it really easy to take action. Very clear. First questions. Are you better? You sounded very sick for a long time. Yeah, I'm totally fine now. I'm very healthy. You're in the clear. Good stuff. So let's just get onto this macro behind everyone's current obsession with their health. When did this happen? Everyone's wearing a whoop. Everyone's absolutely obsessed with this culture of monitoring, but doesn't seem to have a culture of actually taking action. How do you see that? It started, I feel like trends often start way before people realize they're mainstream.

4:45So like I was wearing Whoop when I was probably 17 years old. And back then it was like a weird thing. And every so often I'd see a fellow Whoop user and there was like a shared look of understanding. And then slowly over time, culture has, because there's some utility in that, it has started to go mainstream. I think the inflection point was probably around October 2023. That was the first time where I felt that the people around me were asking me questions about what they could do for their health. Until then, everyone had laughed and said, stop caring about your health so much. But around September, October 2023, people became really obsessed with health for some reason.

5:19If I look at why, there's a couple of things. One, there's a response post-COVID, right? The GFC was financial disenfranchisement. COVID was health system disenfranchisement. Post-GFC, there was the emergence of fintechs, e.g. Robin Hood. Post-COVID, we're going to see the emergence of consumer health companies, such as Superpower. And in the same time, there are key people who are progressing health forward. I do believe in the key person version of history. Huberman, I actually think, was, if not, Huberman and Brian Johnson have probably done more to progress frontier health forward than many other individuals.

5:55They've turned it into something in popular consciousness. And then the final thing is we solve a lot of like base problems of human existence. Health is the marginal problem which really matters, right? You can always spend more on health, focus more on health. And as a result, health is becoming a status symbol. My status symbol is no longer do I have a nice house. Instagram doesn't care that much about that because you can just rent a nice house and it looks the same on Instagram. The thing valorized by the social media value system is actually health. What are your health metrics? How do you look?

6:25Do you look healthy? Do you act healthy? So I think this convergence of systems, individuals, and social media-led culture has made health something front and center for people. You mentioned Robinhood. I just want to go back there. Post-financial crash gave opportunity for that business to succeed and grow to the scale that it has today. Why does healthcare not yet have its own Robinhood? Because it's hard and the business models are less proven. In Robinhood's case, yes, they counter positioned against the exchange business model by saying you get free trades and they'd sell order flow and then launch all sorts of other financial products.

7:01But the core value prop of buy and sell shares was deeply proven. In health, the core value props are slightly less proven. It's slightly more nebulous what the consumer first version of healthcare looks like. And it's hard to get the pricing low, right? It's an art to work out the right way to get the pricing low. And look how, in many respects, I think Robinhood has similarities to what we're doing. They made accessible to many what was once accessible to the few, and they did that using technology. And as a result, they created something that was simultaneously better, cheaper, and more accessible.

7:38It's pretty rare to have higher quality, lower cost, and higher access. And that's what they did. And in many ways, that's what we're doing as well. So let's get back into your product. So you mentioned you send a nurse to the home. Why do you do that? Is that a point of trust? And then the second part of this is the actual sort of product experience from that point forwards, the taking of the test, the pushing that through your labs, the number of tests, more than a hundred. Why have you made all those different decisions to go so deep and so broad where presumably that has placed a lot of stress right on the back end where you're actually having to do all these tests and that might hit your unit economics.

8:12Just help me understand the trust piece and then the next flow for your users. So we always start by saying, what is the best for customers? And what do our members want? We never start with, here are the unit economics, here are the operational requirements, here are the engineering requirements. The starting point is always, what is best for customers? Then we work backwards from that. We say, okay, given this is the best for customers, what does this imply about unit economics and cost? What does this imply about engineering and products and operations? And sometimes we'll realize, oh, even though this is good for customers, it's actually not feasible from an engineering perspective.

8:44So let's actually change it a little bit. But the starting point is always what is best for customers. And in our context, our belief is that 100 plus blood biomarkers gives you the set of things that we believe most people should be monitoring every year. The cost of that is not actually that high for members relative to the utility. And that's how we reason what is best for customers. And so when your customers actually come to you, at what stage are they at in their health journey? Are these people that perhaps have had health complications, are they coming in to have a much better look or are they just starting and you're actually seeing really interesting early adoption?

9:18So a lot of people have had health complications of some sort. I just think that's just true generally of the world and the population. But when people come to us, it's less, oh, I have this health problem, I want you to fix it and it's more. I identify as someone who cares about my health. I spend maybe 10K a year in insurance. And as someone who cares about my health and wants to prevent things and wants to be in optimal health and wants to feel good, why wouldn't i spend 42 a month to move towards optimal health and i think that's the mindset that people are coming in with got it so in terms of the product so you've taken everything you need i've run the tests i get the results back how do i interpret those tests and then actually what comes next how do i actually drive action to approve say i've got high blood pressure now what does that mean what action steps can i take you'll get all of your results populated in the data and we'll build a big report.

10:10And that started off as a team of a couple of doctors spending hours and hours connecting the dots across all your data and telling you what to do. Now that's mainly automated with AI because the AI is far better than any human can be. Now we have clinicians who will validate it and will check it and edit, but the quality of this report is far better than what used to be possible when we just threw the best doctors in the world at the problem. In terms of taking action, our goal is to make it as simple as possible to know exactly what you should do. What we hear from our members is, look guys, just tell me what to do.

10:41I trust you. I don't want to have to think about this. Just like put health on autopilot for me. So we try to do that. That means organizing, booking follow-up diagnostics for someone, sending them supplements if they're necessary, sending pharmaceuticals or peptides if they're necessary and the person wants them, and then allowing someone to message their medical team at any time. So any member of Superpower can pull out their phone and send a text message to their medical team. And that's part of what we think healthcare should look like. So high-end concierge care should look like. So why shouldn't everyone be able to just pull out their phone and message their medical team?

11:13So is the intention here to close the loop? So you do the tests, you provide the feedback, you suggest action, people then take the action. And then ultimately in their next test, you can see whether they've been successful or not, and you can course correct. Is that ultimately the position that you've arrived? The idea is to drive health outcomes. And the way we've found most effective to do that is to create an all-in-one ecosystem where care within the ecosystem is higher quality, lower cost, right? There's a reason why everything we do is 20 % less than anything you can get anywhere else and more accessible than anywhere else.

11:46And that, we think, helps drive outcomes when everything's in the ecosystem. How have you done that on the cost side? How can you be 20 % cheaper than, I don't know, would you count Function Health as a competitor? I think Function is a good consumer product company. They're not really a technology company. They don't do much with your data or with AI. And I think if I look at the cost side, it's a combination of partnerships and business model. We decide to underprice and everything. That's like our core philosophy, right? So they're the decisions that allow us. And then probably technology as well.

12:17And the more opinionated and sophisticated we are with tech, the more we can drive costs down too. Let's get into that then. So on the tech side, you've mentioned one example of how you're leveraging AI, but are there other examples? Yeah, there are a lot. So where the AI is going to, where the world gets to is I believe that people interface with the AI doctor before going to a human, right? So today someone might send a message to their medical team and their concierge. Where we're going to get to is someone is just going to message their AI doctor. And that's because the AI doctor is going to know more about them, more about medicine, be able to take action.

12:52We'll know more than any human doctor. So we're building intentionally into that AI doctor product. and someone today can hop on the app and there's an AI and they can chat with the AI and it already knows about all of their health, which people tend to like. And the AI also supports our medical team when they're messaging. Because again, if you send a message to a doctor saying, what tests do you recommend? Your doctors provide a good response and they know all of your past data. They know every past test you've done. They just scroll. It'd take them like 30 minutes to provide a really good response to that question.

13:22When the AI knows everything you've done, it can start by drafting the response for the clinician and saying, here are our thoughts. Here's the tests are done. Here's where this person sits across these biomarkers. This is the test. And that supports the clinicians. How are you seeing trust in that sense? So are you seeing any challenges from people providing data access, conversing with an AI doctor versus how they traditionally did it with a human, where you would have that person sat opposite you who could be emotionally aware as well? So sometimes people are going through difficult times. We don't see any real problems with trust.

13:58I think what we're seeing now is people are in a way trusting AI more than human doctors. They might go to their doctor and their doctor says something and they go back home and they pull out their phone and they start asking Chachabiti. That's kind of the world we're in today. So I think increasingly people are trusting their AI. let's talk about distribution so at least where i'm sat there's a lot of people building consumer product i think in healthcare it's very different it's non-trivial to build what you've built but also one of the very hard things is actually getting that distribution where you have incumbent health players that already have it how are you thinking through that how are you cutting through the noise i mean one very obvious thing you've done is you've built an electric looking brand you know people just need to go on your website to see how different you are from traditional incumbent players and how they speak to their market.

14:45But are you doing anything else? And whilst you're talking about distribution, maybe you can talk about brand as well. We believe that healthcare should be a brand that someone loves like a Nike or an Apple. Whereas if you look at healthcare today, it feels cold and sterile. There's no one walking around wearing like a One Medical t-shirt or a UnitedHealth hoodie. There's no real love to brands in healthcare. And we started with this belief of how can we have people love us as a company and as a brand in healthcare. And that was a starting point for us. And I think we've done that. Like we have hundreds of people around the world who wear superpower hoodies and evangelize us and love us.

15:22We think a lot about brand as a set of beliefs. At the most fundamental level, brand is a set of beliefs. Brand is like a religion in many respects. And then everything else stems from that. How does that set of beliefs look? How does it talk? Where does that set of beliefs show up. And when we start with our set of beliefs, it's obviously our name is super parent, obviously our color is orange, and obviously we look and talk like this because that is the reflection or manifestation of the fundamental belief system. So that's how I think about brand. On the distribution side, for us, it's largely been word of mouth to date, people referring others, folks organically sharing on Twitter, someone gifting it to their mom or their dad or their significant other.

16:03And I think that comes down to having built something which solves a real problem and something that people really want. Let's just follow this thread on brand because you've got your own website, your name. And I think that's really interesting. It's a very open reflection and insight into your inner thoughts about what you want to do with your life. And also you talk about things that you want to improve. It's really interesting. How do you think about your own personal brand? I mean, is that strategic in relation to this business or is that just the type of character that you are? You just want to put yourself out there and you're very happy to do so.

16:36A personal brand also starts with a belief system and not a fabricated belief system. It has to fundamentally be an expression of what do you believe about the world that others might not. So that's how I think about personal brand. What do I believe about the world that others might not? And how can I find the most authentic representation of those beliefs? And that's very hard to do because it's very scary to create an authentic representation of everything you believe in the world. But in my mind, that's what a personal brand is. And whenever I'm thinking about personal branding, I'm thinking, does this feel like me?

17:10Am I doing this for someone else? Or am I doing this because this is a form of self-expression? And I believe that if I'm self-expressing, then I'm building a personal brand. And the point of that is that if someone expresses their beliefs to the fullest extent, it should be opinionated and distinctive and unique and have character and flavor and nuance because everyone's different. I just think most people don't think deeply enough about what's authentic and then think about the way to express that in the world. So what do you believe about the world that others might not? Gosh, I believe that energy in the woo-woo sense will inevitably become a science.

17:45And this is the arc of human history where things that we call woo-woo eventually become science. We've seen this play out over 60 ,000 years, and yet people have not learned a lesson. And we still condemn independent thought. I believe that the mind determines a lot of outcomes, whether it's health outcomes. I think the mind determines arguably more health outcomes than a lot of these micro lifestyle optimizations that people are doing, or whether it's quote unquote career outcomes. I believe that a lot of that starts in the mind. And the amazing thing is that we have the ability to choose how we want to configure our mind and in which direction we want to configure it.

18:21And I always try to take the empowering configuration versus the disempowering configuration. I believe that people can be inherently good and successful. I think there's this narrative in Silicon Valley that is, well, to be successful, you need to compromise morals or compromise values. And some people do that, right? I call that the dark side. Star Wars drew this analogy 60 years ago. There's the dark side of the force. And equally, there's the light side, right? You can be good and successful. And maybe the light side is a little bit harder. You always have someone whispering in your ear, pulling you to the dark side.

18:53And it takes a lot of character and results is to stay on the light side, but I believe it's entirely possible. So just picking up on that positive, when you're talking to maybe the younger generation that are thinking about what to do with the next phase of their career. And when I speak to some folks, they go, AI is tough. The on-ramp into that first internship or that first job looks really difficult. And how would you encourage them to reconfigure their minds to the positive speak that you just laid out? Maybe we get to a point where AI is more dystopian in its outcomes. But today, AI looks a lot like innovation over the past few hundred years, where the industrial era replaces people, mechanized farming replaces people, calculators replace people, automation replaces people, cars replace people, the computer replaces.

19:42There's been this narrative for hundreds of years, which is technology replaces people. And that's not true. We know that with every new technology, new jobs have emerged. Now, yet, I don't deny the fact that AI might get to the point where that changes, but we're nowhere near there yet. I think we're further off that than some people would contend. And there's more opportunity than ever to do your own thing. My brother, he won't say this publicly, but I said to him, oh, why don't you start this business? He was working a job. I'm like, why don't you start this business instead? I'll support you in the early days.

20:12He's three months in and he's doing a million of revenue. He has started something, right? So I think now more than ever, we actually have autonomy to just do things. And that is really unique. I love it. Reconfiguring the mind. Yeah. I picked up one thing you'd written on your website, which is one thing on your wish list, which is to help the world get eight hours of sleep in five hours. What do you mean by that? So there are a lot of people who have a genetic mutation, which allows them to sleep only five hours and feel like they've had eight hours. They live the same. They perform the same intellectually and physically.

20:44So we know it's possible. How can every single person have what those people have? And the reason this is interesting is that we're fundamentally extending human life by doing this. We are giving people more waking hours. I think this is actually the most reliable path to increasing lifespan, which is giving people more waking hours because millions of people already do it. Whereas every other attempt at lifespan is something which is completely new and unproven. No one has lived past 140, no one. Whereas millions of people get an extra 15 to 20 years of their life by sleeping four hours a night.

21:13Yeah, super interesting. max now just to wrap up because we're a consumer podcast i always like to ask everyone if there's a consumer product service brand artist musician that they want to shout out then please do the like funny little productivity things but i love the pace app on my computer it's completely changed the way i interface with the computer and i love the carabiner app which has allowed me to map applications to keyboard shortcuts. So I never have to navigate applications. I just use my keyboard. Both of these applications are two small things that save me a lot of time and make using the computer way more fun.

21:55And they're both free or roughly free. So they're two consumer-esque things that most people hopefully don't know about, which I think is important. Awesome. Max, thank you so much. Really appreciate you coming on the show. Fantastic array of insights. Appreciate it. Thank you again. Thank you, Matthew.

22:13Max Marchione:And that's it, folks. Thanks so much for listening. As mentioned, please do provide any feedback or ideas of future guests via the website curiouscustomer.co. And please do click subscribe if you did like it, because it really helps improve visibility in the algorithm and makes the podcast more discoverable amongst a sea of great content. So that one click does really help. My name's Matt. I hope you enjoyed the show.

22:42Thank you.