#36 - Max Marchione, Co-Founder of Superpower

44:59The second philosophical point here is that just about every single thing in the world is around four out of 10. there's two implicate there's a couple of implications from this one is you cannot copy what is out there because the best of what is out there is four out of ten the second implication is if you create the new best of what is out there it's still probably only six out of ten and that's a really empowering belief because it means you can keep being better you can keep being better you can keep being better the third implication of this is that uh to actually get six out of 10 or seven out of 10, it takes a lot of work, a lot of effort, a lot of focus.

45:36And because it's so, so hard, but because the returns are exponentially distributed to getting there, you should really focus on getting there. And therefore you should do fewer things. You should be very focused. You should really just try to get to great. So there are a few of the underlying philosophical beliefs and I capture these beliefs with the term convexity, right? Most things follow a convex distribution. Some people call it a power curve, whatever. um in terms of actually building a great brand i think brand at the core is a set of beliefs right so before you think about what's your company name or what color do you use it's like what do you fundamentally believe and what do you believe that others might not believe right if you look at religion religion is at a core core is a set of beliefs and everything else builds on top of those belief building blocks so that's where we started we started with a manifesto before we had anything else.

46:26We started with a set of beliefs about the future, about health, about humanity. From there, all we're trying to do is express those beliefs using colors, using a visual identity, using a website, using language, using copywriting. They're all just expression of the fundamental beliefs. And my view is that people chronically under-invest into brand, right? If we genuinely believe that brands are exponentially distributed, but the implications, people are under-investing. The other thing too is I know that people spend a huge amount of money on sales and marketing, but that's not necessarily brand.

46:58That's not the image in people's minds. I think that when you think of Apple or at least Apple from 20 years ago or whatever, you're thinking about this thing, this brand or mission that you are personally aligned with, whereas most sales and marketing is just like buy the product. It's not the why. You're not buying the why behind the product. Yep, 100%. I think strong brand foundations support sales and marketing. Yeah. Right. You still need sales and marketing. But I think when it sits on top of a stronger brand foundation, you can compound for longer. And all of that, again, is just sales and marketing is really just a reflection of a core set of beliefs.

47:34You mentioned that it's basically just one person working on the entire superpower brand. How do you find her? So we have more people now. Okay. um but hannah um did a lot of all of everything we did in the early days yeah and uh one of my beliefs is that talent is exponentially distributed or talent follows a convex curve meaning that there are only maybe a couple hundred or a couple thousand people in the world who are actually good and you should just obsess about finding those people and working along those people um alongside those people and and hannah and our team don't hire her everyone listening is you won't be able to hire her.

48:16So like she quit a job at Canva when she was 17. She was the youngest person at Canva. We co-founded a company together previously. And then Hannah was 19 years old, running a solo design agency, doing a million dollars a year, like$500 ,000 a year. And we're like, Hannah, I know you're making a lot of money. Did you want to work on something more important? And Hannah joined the team really early on. Well, how much time? So when you when you find one of these people, because there's so few of them, you know, logically, it would make sense to spend a insane amount of time and an effort and energy trying to get that person on board once you know that they are really that special.

48:55Do you have any? What have you done that's outside the normal bounds of what people normally do to hire someone to find those people in the past? so one of the things i think i have a high believability weight on is identifying talent quite quickly because it's something i really obsess over um and what that means is that within 10 minutes of chatting with someone i typically know whether we want to hire them so once i've more or less made that decision every subsequent interview there might be 10 of them there might be 20 of them but every subsequent interview is actually a sales um sales process so i i i will after chatting with someone in the first call try to deeply understand what do they want like what what what what what do they want in life what are their goals what makes them happy and then i'll try to construct an interview process that shows them how we can genuinely give them what they want it has to be genuine right smart people that they'll see whether you give them like also partially like maybe reconfiguring how you do things to fit what they need yeah 100 and i'll say okay so then we're going to set up these three interviews or these three chats and i'll say this interview is 70 sales 30 interview right i'll say this is 90 sales 10 interview um and uh a candidate will go through a process of interviewing which is actually being sold on the company if we think they're good enough and my view is that if uh we can make superpower the best the fundamentally best option for them they should join if superpower is not the selfish best option for them they shouldn't join like people should make the selfish best decision for them otherwise you do not have equilibrium the second we manipulate someone into joining us we're fucked up because we're not going to have retention they're going to realize that we were not earnest so we have to genuinely just make superpower the best decision for someone joining.

50:45Yeah. Is there any like very unusual things that you've done for one of the employees that you've brought on board in the past that's like way outside the bounds of what people normally do? Not really, because I think that you start to set a precedent and it's really hard because future hires will anchor to that precedent. We are very generous with equity. I think that if you can genuinely find someone who can materially change enterprise value and you genuinely believe talent is exponentially distributed you need to overpay and i think they're not overpay but like pay a lot and i think a lot of very founders podcast thing where you basically can't overpay for steve jobs looking at apple yeah totally you pay him 400 million dollars to you know come rejoin and suddenly it's worth like a billion you know 100 billion dollars yeah yeah and the best people realize this there's a reason sam is paying six billion dollars for johnny there's a reason zach is giving$200 million salaries.

51:41There's a reason Master Sun paid Nikesh Aurora like$200 million a year and Nikesh ended up demanding a billion dollars a year in compensation. So yes, talent is exponentially distributed and you need to pay up. And today we're at our series A, approaching our series B. If we found someone who we thought would completely change the trajectory of the company, we'd be happy to give them 5%. Like for the right person, we would give them 5%. And that sounds crazy. at series B, but it's worth it if you find the right person. So I know this sounds almost exactly like what Steve Jobs has talked about, where for the first like 10 people, you want to be even more than like an investor, you know, bring on an early investor.

52:22You basically want to ask yourself for every single person, is this someone who is going to like materially impact the trajectory of the company? Or is there like any possibility that they detract and like just absolutely basically only hire people that you're willing to overpay and like you want to, you know? Yeah, if we're overpaying, I'm so happy. Yeah, by conventional metrics. Because if talent is actually exponentially distributed, we're actually probably not overpaying because the world is so anchored to linear thinking in terms of compensation. So if we're overpaying, quote unquote, I'm very happy.

52:57Yeah. Do you have any other examples of kind of understanding human biases? Like exponential thinking is a very unusual thing for human brains. And even if you try to make yourself, you know, force yourself to think in that way of, you know, two times, two times, two times, two times, like it's very difficult. How do you do that for yourself? I think that there is so I think understanding the limitations of human, the human brain is really powerful. I love the Charlie Munger idea of understand elementary psychology. When I was 18 years old after high school, I didn't go to university. instead I took a learning gap year and one of the ideas of that year was to understand all the foundational principles that in a way define the world right and in the short term the local optima is they become mental models and you reason from the principle and then over time they just become part of your way of thinking and you're combining ideas and novel ways to come up with a certain conclusion I think one example of flawed human thinking is the inability to properly on the same exponentials i think another is probably over indexing on logic um i think that we are trained to just use logic good luck being in a job and your boss asks you how did you come up with the answer like it feels right yeah right it's surprising it's surprising how much actually comes down to like vibes and then properly training your intuition on what what does good look like and then just understanding just through that training of your intuition when you see it you know it, but you can't exactly explain it.

54:28All of my team will laugh because I use the word vibes often. And they're like, why do you think this? And I'm just like vibes. And I will intentionally say that because so often we make a decision and we try to justify it retroactively using logic. Yeah. And we don't realize we're doing that. And I try to be very cognizant of when I'm doing that. And instead of trying to justify it retroactively, I'll just say vibes. And then because people are not happy with vibes, I'm like, cool, I'll give you the logical answer. And I'm like, I promise see this is not the actual logic but it'll make you happy well what's funny is like fives is actually i and so the whole like logic thing a lot of people make decisions i mean i think this is just like a normal human thing where you'll make a decision and then try to justify it because if you just say like i did it because i felt like it it's not a good answer like no one wants that they want a reason for doing they want the why right so you just create the why out of thin air even though the why isn't really there um and it is kind of there but like for for intuition you're you're taking an action based on a bunch of information that you have and you don't necessarily know every single process that your brain goes through to feel the way about a decision that you're making um anyway i think people at the top and bottom both use intuition and that means it's hard for someone to say using intuition is a good thing because some people at the bottom also are just using vibes but then you get to the top and um george soros's son was asked how did george know when to sell and his son said George would wake up like an itch in his back thinking about a company and then he would sell right if you look at master son he uses vibes most of the people at the top will use intuition but they have earned the right to do that because they have proven over an extended period of time that their intuition is correct in other words they have a high believability weight on their intuition.

56:11And the strong empirical view, my strong empirical belief here will say, even if I disagree with someone, if they have a high believability weight on a certain decision, because empirically they made that decision right in the past, I will trust them, even if the first principles disagree. Yeah. It's a lot like, I mean, if you ask Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger to look at a balance sheet or look at a company, they can probably within like a few seconds know whether or not they want to invest in it just because they've looked at so many companies. How many or how do you think about building a really solid foundation for intuition and yourself?

56:45So I think a big part of it is seeing a lot, being obsessed with information, seeing a lot, learning a lot, reading a lot, putting yourself in a lot of situations, taking a lot of actions, taking a lot of action, taking a lot of action, taking a lot of action, getting a lot of action. year. That year, I went to conferences where the average age in the room was probably 45. And I would put my hand up and be like, hey, I'm 18 years old and I'm taking a learning gap year. What's your advice to me? I'd have all sorts of conversations with the older people. I'd just get as many reps as possible per unit time.

57:15I think in many ways, intuition is access to experience stored in subconscious. I think the second thing is being very aware of what is coming up in your body, right? I think a lot of people have like blunted their ability to interocept or feel what is happening in their body. But it is something we have. Animals have some animals, all animals have intuition and instinct. Some have emotion. Only humans have logic and we've used logic to get in the way of everything else. So when I see, for example, a designer, I see something rather than asking myself, do I think this is good? I ask myself, how does this feel in my body?

57:50you we saw each other yesterday i was in a plant shop and you asked me which plants are you deciding to buy i'm like just the ones that feel right and you understood that as like a viva thing but actually what i was trying to say is there's some logical process that is happening but i want to notice the emotional feeling that comes up around a certain thing so that's the second thing being aware of what's coming up in your body and the third thing is paying attention over time to where your intuition is correct and incorrect to understand where you have a high believability weight. For example, I've got a very high believability weight on talent.

58:26I over time have not made many wrong talent decisions and I made many contrarian talent decisions which have turned out to be correct. But I have a low believability rate on something like a Facebook ad. I don't think I have a good intuition for the kind of Facebook ad that performs well, whereas someone in our team has a far better intuition. And therefore, even if I disagree with that decision on the Facebook, I'm like, you're at a higher, higher believability weight than me. I'm just going to trust you on that one. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Uh, how do you, uh, think so you've got like, I think you said 16 founders.

58:58Is it 16 founders on the team? Yeah. 15 founders on the team. 15 founders on the team. How do you think about 15 co-founders with 15 people on the team are former founders that have previously built something. And six of them are former YC founders. And more than half of these founders have had reasonable exits, not billion dollar exits, but like reasonable exits. Yeah. How do you, how do you attract those types of people? And like in your, in your mind, when you're going through the kind of reasons for, you know, who to hire, what, what, what about a former founder is super attractive to you?

59:30So there are two kinds of people we try to hire. Um, one is someone who is best or second best in the world at solving a certain thing. And again, similar to what I said before, which is when you fix the assumption you need to be a billion dollar company in three years, you make decisions to make that come to reality. The same happens here. When you fix the assumption that you need to hire the best or second best person in the world, you start to only look for those people. And it's very easy to just say no to everyone else. So that's the first kind of person we will hire. The second kind of person we will hire is someone who per unit time has done more than just about anyone else and anyone else on earth and this person typically looks like a 19 20 21 year old who is absolutely brilliant absolutely cracked three to four sigma worth work ethic three of three to four sigma iq three sigma creativity like they're just like really brilliant people i call them spiky people they're people who have done things that are not just at the very pinnacle of what they could have done also done that in an idiosyncratic way it's kind of an idiosyncratic so they're the two kinds of people that i think companies should hire best or second best in the world or like a very spiky young person the very spiky young person will end up exceeding best or second best person in the world that's very spiky because the very spiky young person um when i say best or second best in the world i mean as an operator solving a specific business function right whereas the spiky young person by the time that the age by the time they're 35 or 40 they're going to be starting their own multiple billion dollar company right like i think we have probably five to ten young people in our team who will start billion dollar companies the catch is they're like 19 today or 20 today and their growth curves are absolutely wild and i believe in this idea of radical empowerment which is you give them way more empowerment than they quote unquote deserve even if they can't do the thing yet you have to empower them because they will grow into that role and exceed the expectation that existed for that role very quickly.

1:01:33So that's the kinds of people to hire. Going back to how to persuade these people to join the team, I think a couple of things have to be true. One is you need to be working on something that actually matters for humanity, that actually pushes the world forward. The best people want to work on a mission that matters. The second thing is you need to work on something that can be a trillion dollar company and has a reasonably clear path to being a hundred billion dollar company. The third thing is you need to also have a very clear path to being a billion dollar company in the next couple of years.

1:02:02So you see how several of the beliefs I had before now completely change your ability to hire. And because you can now change your ability to hire, you can actually make those things come to life. That's probably the third thing. the fourth thing is i think being able to being able to allow someone to understand the the mission and the vision and the potential through brand and marketing is really important right a lot of our initial marketing and branding wasn't actually targeted at customer acquisition it was targeted at talent acquisition right we focus intentionally on silicon valley or on talent clusters because our belief was we're not gonna build the world's best company by having 5 ,000 customers versus 3 ,000 customers in the early days, but we will by having the best people on earth.

1:02:49Do you feel like the brand has been more than just, so the brand initially is actually not targeting the customers at all, it's just targeting investors and hiring and like people that want to potentially partner with you? It's both. If I look at the initial website, that was a shit website for conversion, right? But it was like cool. And because it was distinctive, it was useful for talent and capital acquisition more so than customer acquisition we've now changed that and it's rotated into a customer acquisition website which is completely different but yeah that that was true in the early days i think the next thing you need to do to hire these great people is just be really good at selling them right i actually think that sales is also highly convex um where a great salesperson is a thousand times better than just a good salesperson and i used to a year ago I think I was good at sales I realized that I was really shit back then I'm a little bit better better at it now and in a year I'm probably going to realize I'm really shit now um so being good at selling people is important and that means deeply understanding what they want right being able to communicate and construct that and then creating a sales process to educate someone on why this is going to get them what they want more effectively than anything else what was your process a year ago and what have you like shifted or evolved since then the best sales well when i'm around an elite salesperson i'll chat with the person for 30 minutes about something that's not the company and i will leave that conversation thinking holy shit this company is going to be a trillion dollar company but we haven't chatted about the company in other words the best sales doesn't even feel like sales.

1:04:29And the best sales is often about planting a vision in someone's mind rather than just stepping through all the logic, right? Elon does this so well. He says so, so, so little, but you're left with this feeling of this can be huge, self-driving, autonomous robots. He says so little, but he just anchors the vision in your mind such that you can imagine it being huge. There's one view. The other view is the complete opposite, which is actually do hardcore very obvious in-your-face sales and the way i learned this was i was chatting with someone who was debating between joining apple design lab or rev which is mike spizer and sully hill ventures new company mike has incubated many unicorn snowflake amongst others and i asked this person why did you decide to join rev versus apple design lab and he said well mike sat me down and we chatted for two hours and mike basically said i'm gonna sell to you for two hours and tell you why joining us is by far the best decision.

1:05:29And he's like, Mike did not let me leave that conversation until I said I was joining. And he literally said, I'm just going to like hardcore sell you. And sometimes I'll do the subtle sales. Sometimes I'll literally say to someone, look, I genuinely think this is the best decision for you to join us. I'm just going to sell you. And I just keep going and going and going until they join. And it surprisingly works. So being like, so just being like extremely transparent about like here's what i'm doing and i know that i'm gonna i know that i want you to make the right decision and i'm just going to keep on working until you make that right decision yeah i can't sell someone unless i genuinely believe it's the right decision like there have been times i'm like this is not the right decision for you but if i genuinely believe look you're smart you're logical i'm just gonna share all of my thinking around why all the other options are kind of stupid and this is the best decision for you and i'll say i'm probably a bit biased like like i have a lot of i'm probably a bit biased i'm just gonna shit and i just do that another charlie munger quote is like uh you're smart and i'm right eventually you're going to figure out that i'm right i love that yeah how do you think about incentives i think that you can predict most behavior by incentives particularly in the u.s i think that the higher the individualism of any system the more incentives matter i remember moving to the U.S.

1:06:47and I would often have people ask me, how do you seem to know so much about the U.S. healthcare system? You just moved here and I'm like, it's pretty easy. I only need to know one thing, which is how does money flow? And I'm not exaggerating, I'm not being facetious here. If all you know about the U.S. healthcare system is how does money flow, you can predict most outcomes. You can predict why certain things are the way they are. Often when I see something that is seemingly irrational or suboptimal, the first thing my mind goes to is, but what's the incentive? because there's nearly always some sort of incentive that describes a certain behavior.

1:07:20Can you walk through the incentives of like the current healthcare system and like how hopefully this is going to change that? So in the US, 20 % of GDP is spent on healthcare and life expectancy is going backwards. If you look at the most OECD countries, around 7 % to 10 % of GDP is spent on healthcare and life expectancy is going up. So we conclude empirically that the US healthcare systems are really fucked up. Okay, cool. Well, let's dive a little bit into the incentives. So under the Affordable Care Act, the margins of health systems are regulatorily fixed. The second your margin is fixed, the only way to increase revenue is to increase costs.

1:08:05So how's that for instance? Guess what costs are going to do, right? The way most hospitals make their money are procedures and pharmaceuticals. So if you go to a hospital, guess what's going to happen? Lots of procedures and lots of pharmaceuticals. The largest companies in healthcare are pharmaceutical companies. So some of the largest donors are pharmaceutical companies. So guess what? Pharmaceuticals are quite pervasive. I love this articulation of pharma companies as law firms with biotech interests. as like fundamentally what they are um so there are all sorts of these like weird incentives throughout the healthcare system the result in something which is very much a like local optima even if you look at peptides which we were injecting ourselves with earlier many of these compounds have been around for 10 to 20 years but because they're naturally occurring in the human body and because they've been around for a while pharma cannot patent them because pharma can't patent them pharma can't make much money from them because pharma can't make much money from them there's no submission to the fda that results in them being legalized right um now pharma all of a sudden discovered that you could take a glp1 and you could change the amino acid chain ever so slightly and you could create semaglutide aka zampic and you could patent it but all of a sudden that a glp1 which has been around since the 2000s like 90s is like this blockbuster drug because there was an incentive and pharma could patent it right so there are a couple of the incentives that exist in in the u.s healthcare system there are all sorts of perverse pricing models with like with like middle people who get this kickback and that kickback um there's this meme in healthcare which is like no you can't do help kickbacks in healthcare it's like full and like the entire fucking system is structured by kickbacks that aren't aren't called up uh kickbacks they have special names yeah there's all sorts of like like this is like literally this is a specialty drug And because this is a specialty drug, the way we price it is kind of different.

1:10:04With anyone that's really good, the mental models don't just happen overnight. And so you don't just immediately wake up one morning and say, I should only optimize for$100 billion outcome or be more ambitious or whatever. Can you talk about what was the first company that you started? And what was the thinking behind doing that? The two companies I started around the same time. one is i would uh sell fake shit on the playground at school when i was i think eight or nine years old for example there was this trend of power bands they were these rubber bands that you could put on your wrist and apparently they would allow you to jump higher and be more sporty and they were selling in stores for around 70 so i went to alibaba i think this is in 2012 or 20 and 2010 i went to alibaba and i bought several hundred of these power bands and i sold them for five in the playground and i would say to people um uh the more of these you have the better the effect so you need as many of them as possible and that was kind of business number one on the playground the second was i was playing minecraft um at the time i used to love it as a game and uh i was playing a large like several tent like maybe 50 000 person server and there was a leaderboard that ranked people by wealth.

1:11:26Like, well, I want to be the richest person on this server. So I set myself the goal of being the richest person on the server. And that's pretty hard. It's basically a mirror of the economy. It functions like the real world, like the real economy. There are lots of like 40-year-old, very smart people who spend a lot of time trying to be the richest person on the server. And I became the richest person. And at the time, I didn't think much of it. um but in retrospect the exact kind of actions that were taken in that world i could have taken in the real world the only difference is in the real world as a kid you're not allowed to do that stuff you're not meant to be able to do that stuff you can't think about this stuff right whereas in that game world it was just a game anyway once i was the the wealthiest on the server i had local status in that community so i started my own server um started monetizing that made some money from that and that was uh kind of happening at the same time yeah did you did you have a like a few year pause in between starting the you know doing the minecraft server doing the power bands um and then starting like the next company or what happened during like a high school years yeah i didn't start any company in my high school years you know why um i don't know why no it's strange i think i think i probably became too perfectionistic and too high fear i think when i was doing that stuff when i was younger i had zero fear i think i was that idea of just like a child playing around i had an internalized dogma i hadn't been told this is what you can or can't do i'm just do whatever whereas i suspect in high school there's probably a combination of of internalizing more fear probably a pressure to uh be cool or like fit in um and i i took inform and i didn't feel like i was as authentic instead social pressure held more weight i think i started playing more conventional games i'm like well i want to top every subject i do i want to be the captain or be be one of the best people at all the sports i'm playing so i think i played a lot of those conventional games and that takes time particularly if you're doing it across most kinds of achievements that maybe played into it was there a different version of max for let's say like a few years where you were trying to kind of go down the you know pre-built path because it kind of looked like you were doing that you know you go to high school and then you go to law school or college or whatever and then you decide to opt out at some point how would how did you how was your thinking during those few years that you were going kind of going down the traditional path yeah i think i think i definitely did to an extent and it felt very non-authentic um so i took the learning gap year i mentioned and that was deeply authentic i started some small businesses i learned about a lot of things what types of small businesses uh like agency kind of businesses no nothing that meaningful i started a company that still operates today called next chapter which is basically a community for the most talented young people around the world and the talent basically teal fellows before teal fellows the talent bar in there is absolutely brilliant i think most people in there are going to start billion dollar companies which is really cool and my brother is now the ceo of that business and he started all sorts of businesses that come out of that that actually make cash a dirty word in silicon valley um um and yeah i did a little bit of the conventional path um uh those conventional things and i think that was potentially a product of environment um i didn't really know the u.s was a thing the idea of going to a u.s college was not in the set of options no one around me had ever done that and in retrospect going back in time i would have moved to the u.s at 18 rather than 22 and honestly i think that single decision probably would have had the most impact on my life if i could go back and change from one thing it would have been that decision but we live and we learn i remember i was listening to to like sam alton the other day and he was talking about how he played that conventional game i'm like what he seems like such a startup bro and say no you play those games for a bit but i tapped out of them pretty quickly and i did think of them as stepping stones too so we did the law thing i came first my first year of law at australia's top law school i dropped out i after only one year of university interned at goldman sachs and like that's weird to do after one year of university and then i spent a couple of months there and then i'm like this and what i find funny about the goldman sachs story is that that was actually sam's like that's where he was going to go it was either y combinator or goldman sachs and he like did i think like a few interviews at goldman and like was going to have a job but then he just decided to get on a plane and fly out to Silicon Valley, even though Paul Graham said, like, don't do it.

1:16:05Yeah. Yep. One of your goals is you want to help people like I have I sleep in my optimal state, I'm sleeping for 10 hours a night between like 10 a 10pm and 8am the next morning. Every night, I love that. Sadly, I travel a bunch, so I don't get to do it all the time. But one of your goals is to basically get people from like eight hours of sleep down to five hours of sleep, but rested, You feel rested when you wake up. How is that possible? What levers can you pull on to actually make that happen? So this comes from two questions. One is how do we maximize productivity and human output with the belief that there's increasing returns per marginal unit of time.

1:16:44Again, it's convex rather than concave. And the second belief this comes from is this idea of how do we actually extend human life? And if you look at the 60 billion people to ever live on Earth, no one's lived past 150. Just about no one has lived past 120. it's very very very rare so one thing we can try to do is we can try to add years to the end of life but the other thing we know is that of 60 billion people to live on earth millions have had genes that allow them to sleep four hours a night or three hours a night and live the same have be cognitively just as performant be physically just as performant feel the same so i'm like okay well of these two pathways to extend lifespan which was more reliable modifying genes to do something we know that millions of people have done of doing something that's never ever been seen in human biology i'm like probably the sleep one right and if you do this you actually add around 15 years to someone's life and you don't add that to the end of someone's life you add it just through someone's life yeah so i think it's actually one of the most reliable ways to increase lifespan the other reason i love this idea is i just want to spend more time awake i i'm quite obsessed with productivity and i think this is one way you can be more productive when i was younger I wanted to learn to lucid dream.

1:17:55And like most people want to learn to lucid dream to like fly and have sex. My like thinking was, I want to learn to lucid dream so I can like learn more. So I just want to be like productive when I sleep because it just feels like a waste to spend eight hours in bed at night. So I love all those different devices that are trying to either compress sleep or enhance lucidity and allow you to actually do things in your dream state. Yeah. What products have you tried to use? I know that you talked about like you use the A-Sleep for, what was it like a few nights or yeah before deciding to return it what other products have you tried to try to pull on the lever to improve things yeah so from the age of 17 to 20 i used to wear a headband um that would actively improve my sleep and my deep sleep percentage went up and i could sleep a few hours and still feel the same and that would basically play um sub audible sounds via bone conduction to hold you in deep sleep longer and that company was discontinued for a bunch of reasons um some say the science didn't work subjectively i felt it was effective so i tried that i've tried pulse emf which is a device you can wear on you i've tried other headbands that actively improve sleep i've tried all sorts of different supplements i've tried the lucid dreaming thing i suspect the only i've tried certain peptides so um epitalon um has a positive effect on sleep for me in particular i think that likely we're going to need to find a path to solve this problem through genomics, either by editing the genome.

1:19:27I think that will be a reliable path in time, but it's unsafe right now. CRISPR isn't perfect. It's also illegal. So we'll probably see the application happen first in China or in the US in the military rather than genomic editing. The other thing that's interesting is looking at of the people who have the gene that encodes for the phenotype of short sleeping, what chemicals are they expressing or what is actually occurring in the body? and can we like replicate that yeah can we introduce some sort of molecule that signals to the body to have that effect for example we can introduce a peptide into the body that signals to the body to produce a rexin which is one of the things that is over produced in short sleepers and maybe that induces wakefulness and allows people to sleep for sure i don't know but i think these are like the interesting things to play around with interesting okay um for you yourself right now when you're thinking through all the things that you can be doing at any given moment uh what is the highest leverage lever that you kind of think most of the time that you're pulling on it's different at different points in time right now it's getting the company to obsess over revenue the reality is where you have an amazing team we have a product that is great for this specific stage we're at we have a very clear strategy and strong hypotheses in the market we need a lot of revenue to bring in the capital required to build the next stage of the company right we also need a lot of revenue because that's correlated with the number of customers we have and that allows us to get data to build the ai doctor which is like the long-term vision of where we're getting to so right now it's like how do we how do i create a system that uh people can operate in that allows them to effectively drive revenue and how do we create a culture internally that results in things being prioritized that result in revenue now at different stages there are different things a month ago the number one most important thing for me was hiring so we have three best in world people we're trying to find how do i find the best person in the world and that meant literally saying here are the 30 companies that are on this best let me chat with the key person at every single one of those companies say this person is the best of all of them let's try to hire that person and that was the biggest lever um in four months from now the biggest lever is probably going to be capital it's probably going to be fundraising um so it changes at different points in time and i'm very obsessed with this idea of what is the core constraint right now and i think there's a tendency to look do a million different things and say this is important and this is i'm like yeah they're all important and my job is to say none of them are as important as the single most important thing so how can i say no to most things but the single most important thing.

1:22:08Interesting. Yeah. And so does that kind of translate to the same way? Like, how do you think about learning? Do you, for myself, I typically, if I want the result of someone else, or, you know, if I want to, you know, create something specific, I'll go to the person that I look up to the most in that, like, if I want to be a billionaire or build a massive company, you just go to the people that have actually done it and then listen to what they say. Right. How do you think about learning in that way? I think learning, there's different kinds of learning that are necessary to solve a certain constraint.

1:22:39When I was 19, taking the learning gap year, the most important thing I think to learn was one, learning how to learn, right? That's a meta skill that improves the acquisition of every other skill. And two was learning foundational principles, foundational microeconomics, foundational macroeconomics, evolutionary biology, fundamental psychology, et cetera. And then there was a point in time where the useful learning for me was um deeply understanding the the u.s healthcare system and how that worked and that meant working as a receptionist in a fucking doctor's clinic i'm investing in a lot of health companies reading medical textbooks i read like all textbooks in the span of a week um then there was a point in time where the most productive way to learn was chatting with people who had done it before at the pinnacle then there was a point in time where the most productive way to learn was just taking action.

1:23:29Like literally, I don't know. Action produces information type of thing. Take maximum action. And now the most productive way to learn is probably two things for me. One is finding very, very smart first principles thinkers and having debate. Having debate and discussion that's often slightly philosophical in nature. I think I find that that really pushes thinking forward. And the other most valuable way to learn is just like being by myself like taking walks in nature doing something deeply introspective deeply thoughtful um because i think that i'm probably at the point now where the important ideas are unknown ideas and if i can induce my brain to recognize that thing um then then that that's that's powerful yeah that's that's interesting uh how do you think about you mentioned that you want more like beautiful products and you want more like beauty in the world how do you think about creating something like that or why more people don't i have this thing which is my north star is build beautiful things physical and digital that that improve the world and this is just something that's personal to me i believe that um a founder in many respects is an artist and the the act of art is the act of creation and it's uh partially an act of selfish creation which is i derive joy from this thing and then it's a partially an act of altruistic creation which is beauty actually changes human psychology and behavior and how we feel in the world right there's a reason people like the feeling and emotions that come from walking through nature because there's beauty in nature it's all in the golden ratio there's lots of micro things that nature has optimized over time to result in what we call beauty and then i modify that by saying things physical and digital and it's my belief that we're going to see this movement from the cloud to the ground or the things that are going to really matter over the next decade are things that are more physical in nature, right?

1:25:26Software's kind of commoditized, code writes code and to actually change the world, we need to interface with the physical world. So I think about things that modify the physical world as well. When two and a half years ago in deciding what I wanted to spend the next 30, 40, 50 years on, there were two things that I deeply cared about one was building a new healthcare system and the other was building a new city. And they were the things that were personally meaningful to me, I thought mattered for humanity and could support really generational companies. Why the city? I think that building a new city allows you to solve so many things in concert.

1:26:03You solve for health, you solve for innovation, you solve for education, you solve for culture. I think at the same time, there aren't many great cities. There's actually no city I really love in the US. They all have different floors. I think at the same time you can create a new city that leverages the network effect of an existing city because of fast transportation so i hate the idea of let's create a city in the middle of like bum fuck nowhere in the mediterranean i don't think it works because you need to kick start the network again what is possible is creating a city between sf and la connected to both via hyperloop now you can get to both in maybe 10 minutes so you can inherit the network effect of those cities but then this city can maybe have a special economic zone it can be structured to support innovation happiness health culture and it's very hard to modify that much about the world without actually modifying the physical environment which is the city um i think cities are some of the greatest business models of all time the uae is in many respects like a combination of cities singapore is a city what they're doing with the line is a way to neom that big project is a way to diversify away from the oil economy by creating a city um then it's something that's been deeply personally meaningful the first job i ever wanted was to be like an architect right i love this idea of expressing visual taste into the world um in the most physical way possible which is through city building and the final thing is i think this is very robust to agi um i ask the question often of assume agi is here what does this imply about the world right and if you assume agi is here most companies are actually irrelevant right i think two things that still matter are like human health and the physical environment which we exist in aka cities why did you decide to kind of put that off and and focus on the health angle the health system has to happen now um i just think that we're at a pivotal like turning point is it also more like of an impact perspective you can have a bigger impact on like a billion people versus a city is you know maximum of a few million people i assume yeah i think the city can have a big impact because of derivative impact which is what are the people in the city do right if you actually create a foundation that allows for more innovation that has a big derivative impact so it's probably less the impact standpoint it's more like what matters right now like right now we're at this turning point where we can see a new health system emerge we can see a health system before the health system emerge we're going to have ai doctors right again health is a platform solution because if you solve for people's health and you and the idea of solving of health isn't just preventing disease that will be table stakes solving for health is enhancing human capability if we actually enhance human capability that also is a platform that results in derivative impact the peoples whose capabilities enhance now do more things um so that was part of it um that that was like the timing component the other part of it is like what is more possible for me right now for me right now it's more possible to start a new healthcare system than to start a new city i think that the healthcare system one can compound faster i believe that the new city one will still be a problem that can be solved in 30 years time right it's hard to predict because of agi but i do think that problem will still exist in 30 years time and i think going into it with like like hundreds of billions is again i'm making assumptions it's like easier than going into it um from scratch is it also probably easier from a perspective of like you have this track record of successfully building something in the form of a company thus more people will trust you when you're trying to build this new thing yeah like look I might change look for most of my life there's been two things I've cared a lot about which is health human potential productivity what we can do and the physical world and environment so that might be true in 30 to 40 years time but there's a world I get like it's 2080 I'm like actually I don't care about building a city anymore that problem solved so it's just so hard to predict 50 years in advance I do think though what I can understand is what what are some of the problems that I think are going to be the most important and health and the physical environment are some of them.

1:30:03So like a few months ago, I started taking a big old regimen of, you know, seven different pills in the morning and like a powder with creatine and all this, all these different things. And I noticed not only was like motivation to do productive things just massively improved, but I also did become somewhat smarter. Um, I know that you focus on trying to kind of systematically improve IQ. Uh, what are the biggest things that we can, or that, that you can focus on to improve IQ? So I think most things, most great things that have been created in the world can be explained by people who simultaneously have two traits.

1:30:38One is high IQ and two is low fear, right? You need to be at least three sigma on both and the catch is they're inversely related. So there are very, very, very few people on earth who are three sigma IQ and three sigma lack of fear. I think both of these things are also very malleable. So as a result, I try to systemically do things that improve IQ. And I will, because I've tried to develop interoception over the years, sometimes be sitting there and I'll be like, I can't solve this problem at my level of IQ. I need an extra five IQ points. And I will do something that gives me an extra five IQ points.

1:31:14It might be like C-Max or Solanque, which are like nasal sprays for cognition. It might be that nicotine is the kind of IQ I need. It might be that I need like completely lateral thinking. I need to do something else. it might just be sleep right um but i will try to have a sense of here's a problem that i can't quite solve let me increase iq and solve it um and i will use some sort of compound that increases iq in the direction i want to allow me to effectively solve a problem um and it's really weird it's almost like i used to i used to study mathematics right and sometimes when you're in a high iq state the solution just comes to you it's this amazing feeling of i didn't do anything it's just like here it's the whole like i just you know how did you come up with this equation i like came to me in a dream like it's the weirdest feeling but when your iq is high enough and my iq is not always i have a sense of when i iq is high and low um the solution just comes to you and that's not just for a math problem that's for like any problem in the world and you make better decisions and what we can do is a function of set of decisions we have made um so i do think about systemically increasing iq okay let's let's end it on like what's the hardest thing you've overcome when i moved to the u.s in 2022 um i was broke i had no money in my bank account i was sleeping on the floor of friends apartment no one gave a shit about who i was i was just a random person in Silicon Valley.

1:32:43It was impossible to meet anyone, to meet investors. The only people who cared were actually, ironically, the smartest and most talented people. Like the people at the top gave me some light of day and everyone else was like, no, wait, there's a signal monkey and you don't have enough signals yet. Show me your 5 million or$10 million fundraise and then we'll care. At the same time, I had a lot of beliefs about the future in the world that everyone disagreed with. I was strongly of the view there was a big gap between the best of care and what most people have had access to. And all the doctors were like, what are you talking about?

1:33:11Quality is fine. I had this very strong belief that AI was going to far outperform doctors. And again, this was before ChatGPT had come out. So I was like, no, this is bullshit. What about the human art of medicine? What are you talking about? I had this strong belief that people would care about health. And again, the insiders were like, no, people don't care about health until they're like deathly sick. And I had all of these beliefs that everyone told me were wrong. at the same time i i i like had zero leverage very very little money in my accounts i just gotten out of a really tough relationship where i was like kind of bullied and the world felt really really tough everyone was like go back to go up at sacks or go get a job here um your life's kind of crumb there's so few people who actually believed and that is hard right to push through when no one believes and to hold beliefs that everyone thinks are wrong is really really really hard and i see this pattern in so many founders which is the storm before the calm right it happens all the time where there's this low people go through and now when i see a founder going through that i see my job is giving them belief and support because i've seen the pattern so many times the storm before the calm the low where everything looks like it's going to shit and no one believes and everyone starts rejecting that person and not listening to that person and then they come up the other side of the j-curve so that that was that was a tougher moment over the past few years interesting has there has there been any moment this might have been at goldman sachs or somewhere else where you just felt like you were definitely moving in the wrong direction not really not really i've always been very intentional with the decisions i made even with the Goldman thing I was like I'm gonna be here three to six months I'm gonna leave and as a result I was like one of the most fun three to six months like yeah I was working 110 hour weeks that was so fucking fun because I was learning so much right I think it probably helped that I knew how to how to break out so no not really I think I've been quite intentional with the the decisions that I've made