Superpower Founder Max Marchione - billionaire health protocols and the future of medicine

Max Marchione is the founder and President of Superpower, a digital healthcare platform that recently raised a $30 million Series A to make preventative and personalized medicine accessible to consumers. In this episode of World of DaaS, Max and Auren discuss: Billionaire-level health protocols and testingWhy AI will replace expensive doctorsPeptides, toxins, and human enhancementThe future of personalized medicine Looking for more tech, data and venture capital intel? Head to worldofdaas.co...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Auren Hoffman?

  Hello fellow data nerds. Welcome to World of DAS. I'm your host, Orin Hoffman, CEO of Incubate and GP of Flex Capital. Discover more episodes, get weekly data as a service news, original content, articles on data and more at worldofdaas.com. That's world of das, D-A-A-S, dot com. Hello fellow data nerds. My guest today is Max Marchione. Max is the co-founder of Superpower, a digital health platform to make preventative and personal medicine accessible to everyone in the world. Max, welcome to World of DAS.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Thanks, Orin. Excited to be here.

• 0:37Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, now, what does a billionaire-level health protocol look like today? If you could just spend money, no matter what, what would you be spending it on? Again, you don't want to waste your time, but what would you be spending on if the money was no problem at all?

• 0:52Speaker 01

  I love this first question. I feel like so many podcasts are like, so tell me how you got here. Tell me what you do. This is fun. Gosh, well, I need to be a billionaire to properly put it to the test, but...

• 1:02Auren Hoffman?

  Because remember, a billionaire, your time's also super valuable. So you don't want to just spend random time on stuff either, but you're happy to spend money on things.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Totally. So I think it starts with testing as much as possible. And if I were a billionaire, every one to three months, I'd be conducting a set of tests. Blood testing is the most basic, and I'd test over 100 biomarkers, hormones, inflammation, metabolism, cardiovascular health, liver health.

• 1:30Auren Hoffman?

  And basically, you have the phlebotomist come to your house or wherever you are and just come and get the blood and then give you your test results back on those things. Okay?

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Yep. I'd probably do same day every month. It would take 10 minutes. The phlebotomist would do it. I would also do gut microbiome testing, a little bit less frequently, but I'd still do it. Toxin testing as well. If my levels were elevated in anything, I would test more frequently because I'd be undergoing a protocol to fix that.

• 1:55Auren Hoffman?

  Toxin testing with blood? How do you do it? What's a toxin test?

• 1:59Speaker 01

  So urine is...

• 2:00Auren Hoffman?

  Urine, okay.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  ...one of the ways. You can also do it with blood, and you can also do it with hair. But I would do the urine one most often because it's easy to get a broad set of... And I would look at mold, heavy metals and environmental toxins, things like bisphenol A, BPA, which a lot of people are exposed to nowadays. So that's where I'd start.

• 2:20Auren Hoffman?

  And do those change a lot over time? Does that tell you something about your own health if they are changing?

• 2:25Speaker 01

  One of my beliefs is that a lot of people have an overexposure of toxins and that is disrupting metabolism. It is disrupting hormonal balance. It is disrupting all sorts of other functions. And some people would even contend that having too many of these toxins result in cancer, Alzheimer's or heart disease down the road. That has been something which was hand wavy up until five years ago. And every year that goes by, there's more research to support it. The classic example being microplastics now being linked to cardiovascular disease and neurodegeneration. And that's a harbinger of what's to come, where we start to understand how synthetic and non-synthetic things in the world impact health. So that's where I'd start diagnostics.

• 3:08Auren Hoffman?

  But sorry, but if I get my toxins done three months ago, is it really going to change that much today, three months later? Or is it one of those things, just every couple of years I should, whereas I know your blood could be changing quite a lot?

• 3:21Speaker 01

  I was in the 99th percentile for over 15 toxins. In other words, I had a lot of toxins in my body. And that was heavy metals like mercury. It was plastics like BPA.

• 3:32Auren Hoffman?

  Because you're eating like sushi. Okay, yeah.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  And it was several mycotoxins from mold. And when I started a protocol to systemically detoxify these things, my levels would change every week and certainly every three months. So I think if you're actively trying to target your levels, then you should see a delta every month and definitely every three months.

• 3:54Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, got it. So if you have high and you're just trying to go down, you're trying to say, okay, is this working or something that you want to be measuring? But if your toxins are relatively low, you don't need to work on it, then maybe you don't have to get a test that frequently or something?

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Yes, 100%. I think what's useful about starting with a broad baseline of tests is you start to understand what is going wrong. And that informs where you should be retesting.

• 4:19Auren Hoffman?

  And so far, everything you're talking about, you might have to be well to do, but you definitely do not have to be a billionaire to do any of these things. These are things that might cost you a maximum in the thousands of dollars per year right now. And maybe you find a lot cheaper alternative. What else would you be doing?

• 4:35Speaker 01

  I would do organic acid testing. I would do less frequently of full body imaging, such as MRI and ultrasound and CT scans. Look, if you do the full set of all of these diagnostics, you're still only setback maximum 10K. So it's not actually that expensive, considering this is billionaire level care. Assuming I've got all of those diagnostics, the next thing as well gets expensive, which is paying a genius doctor. So take all of this data, spend hours and hours thinking about it and processing it and performing compute. Basically take getting a genius doctor who can connect the dots. That's expensive because very few doctors are genius doctors. Maybe if assume the genius is three standard deviations, that's 0.3% of the population.

• 5:17Auren Hoffman?

  I would assume whether it's you guys or other software tools, or even just chat GPT is going to be able to be very helpful on some of these things going forward.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Chat GPT and AI with enough context prompting and medical knowledge will far outperform the best genius doctors.

• 5:34Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  And look, we're some way off that. These doctors who charge $100,000 to $500,000 a year to see them, they tend to be pretty good. I know many of them, several are advisors, and if I was a billionaire, I would 100% pay for them.

• 5:47Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, why not?

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Totally. And I do think they still know things that the AI does not know. I call it latent knowledge, knowledge in the brains of doctors that's not on the internet, not in medical textbooks, not in papers, but that these doctors have seen work over 50 years. Now that knowledge is also going to end up in AI.

• 6:03Auren Hoffman?

  I have one of those expensive doctors and one of the things that he does very well is he's very good at nagging me. And of course, you don't need a medical degree to be good at nagging somebody. And he'll be like, Orin, look, you're not building muscle mass fast enough. And he makes me feel bad that I didn't put on enough muscle mass or that I'm not moving my markers in the right way. And he does lots of things like that. The AI doesn't seem like it's good at nagging me to go do things. And I don't feel bad about disappointing the AI, but I feel bad about disappointing my doctor.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Yep, I agree. And there'll be all of the people out there that'll be like, no, I can do that. Look, it can knack, it can nudge, it can be proactive.

• 6:44Auren Hoffman?

  Yes, that's right.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  There's a reason people still use personal trainers, but you haven't really needed a personal trainer for a long time. Bodybuilders certainly don't need one. They could do their own programming. We know that is true. They know how to put together a program, but they still get personal trainers. And that's the human component.

• 7:00Auren Hoffman?

  To me, the reason a personal trainer is, okay, you paid for the personal trainer, you've got an appointment, 6 a.m. on Monday, whatever, you're already paid. So you kind of really need to show up. You just feel like a total idiot. If your alarm goes off, you're like, nah, I just want to sleep or something. So to me, the best, most important thing in personal training isn't the fact that they're helping you do the work. And that is good. It can help you with your form and a bunch of other things is great, but you actually do do the workout. And then, of course, then you do the full workout that you really should be doing and not the partial workout. And then you just go sit in the spa or something. You do the real one that you're supposed to do. So again, it's more that accountability that's there. That's why it's so valuable.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah. And I think that's analogous to a doctor or a coach holding someone accountable to lose weight as well. So I think if I was a billionaire, I would certainly have people holding me accountable and pushing me and telling me what to do. Then if I was a billionaire, I would start getting experimental on the therapeutic side. And this is where it gets expensive. Because assuming we know everything about you, we've collected all the data, assuming that we've connected the dots between the data, using a really smart human brain and lots of human time, or in the future, an AI brain and AI time, now's the expensive part, which is actually therapies. And there are long tail of therapies. I would take quite a lot of peptides. Some people say they risky. I think I've always been very risk averse. And I think that they've crossed the safety threshold for me.

• 8:27Auren Hoffman?

  What's an example? Because I keep hearing people talking about peptides. It's now in the water. What are some examples of things that you think people should be looking at or taking?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  So I'll give the billionaire version and then I'll say what people should actually take.

• 8:41Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  The billionaire version, I would do N A D every week. I would add vitamins to that.

• 8:48Auren Hoffman?

  And why is that the bill? I mean, N A D is not that expensive.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Every week it's gonna set you back a thousand dollars.

• 8:54Auren Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Look, it's not billionaire expensive, but for a lot of people, that's not cheap.

• 8:59Auren Hoffman?

  That's pretty expensive. Yeah.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  If you're doing it via an I V with five hundred milligrams, I'd add glutathione and add vitamins, I'd add minerals. I would use that instead of many supplements. Then if I look at the peptides that I think are actually helpful for people, it depends what they're targeting. So two of the biggest drugs of all time are insulin and G L P ones. They're both peptides. And G L P ones are a harbinger of where the world is going, which is that pharmacology is used for human enhancement. A lot of the people I know who use G L P ones don't use them because they're obese. They use them because they're optimizing themselves. Bodybuilders now using G L P ones for weight loss. Right. So they're an example of a peptide used for human enhancement. And when someone sets a goal, I would say, here's a pharmacological intervention akin to something you'd see in a sci fi movie.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  They can help you achieve that goal. For example, if you break a bone or tear a ligament, I would say here's B P C one five seven. And I've seen a lot of friends recover two times faster from.

• 9:52Auren Hoffman?

  Wow.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  If you have scarring, I'd say here's G H K C U and B P C one five seven. Let's get rid of that scar. You know, all the doctors said you can't get rid of it. Let's get rid of the scar. I've seen lots of friends do that. If you said to me, my H R V is really low and I've done a test for mitochondrial efficiency and health and can't seem to fix it. I'd say, well, maybe we should experiment with M O T C. Again, this is not medical advice. These are not compounds which you can take today. But they're legal in all states. But I think that the future of health starts to look like biotech. And I suspect many of the compounds will come in the form of small proteins, which we call peptides.

• 10:29Auren Hoffman?

  One of the things that's hard is that everybody is so different. You and I, we look somewhat alike. You're a much better looking version of me. We probably have very different DNA. We have different metabolism, different everything. And so what works for you might not work for me and vice versa. How do we start figuring out that protocol? Because even working out, I can see certain people are responding better. They build muscles in a way that I don't do or vice versa.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  I sit at both extremes. One is I believe people are radically different and we need radically personalized medicine. And at the same time, I believe there's an 80 20 that actually generally applies.

• 11:05Auren Hoffman?

  Get some sleep, get some exercise, eat decently.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  I think the same applies to exercising. As people spend hours and hours and hours learning about the best way to exercise, the best timing of protein, the best everything. And the reality is if the only thing you knew was go to the gym every day, push really, really damn hard until you're really tired, eat a ton of protein and make sure you're going up in weight every week. And you just did that and you ignored everything else. My sense is more people would put on muscle. And I think there's a similar thing in healthcare, which is that people are want to learn more and find out more and have the perfect thing for them versus doing the things which we know work.

• 11:43Auren Hoffman?

  Yep, and probably the opposite is just like, don't do bad stuff. If you really wanted to be unhealthy, what would you do? And there's write a whole list of all the things you would do if you wanted to be unhealthy and then try to eliminate as many of those things off the list. That's probably a good way to also be relatively healthy.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Yep, agree. Then if we look at the personalization side, I do suspect that the best doctors, these genius doctors, and AI is going to be able to personalize and drive really material outcomes as a result. One example, just of myself. Two years ago, because of superpowers test, I found out I had prediabetes, which was surprising because I wasn't overweight. I didn't eat much sugar. I felt fine. And I went to a bunch of doctors and no one really knew what to do. They're like, oh, so eat less sugar, exercise a bit more. None of it worked. I still had prediabetes. Then one of these genius doctors said to me, Take a mega dose of thiamine, that's vitamin B1. The normal dose is five milligrams. They said, take 400 milligrams. And I took 400 milligrams a day of thiamine and my prediabetes disappeared.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  My metabolic health improved and it's like, where is that in the literature? You won't really find it online. Will that work for everyone? Certainly not. Otherwise, I think we would have discovered it. But it works for me as an N F one. So I do think there's going to be a lot of things in this category, which the combination of AI, humans, connected systems can solve.

• 13:04Auren Hoffman?

  This is where testing is so important too, because everyone is in some ways experimenting on themselves all the time, even with a diet or whatever, they're always experimenting on themselves. And then you want to say, okay, is this experiment actually working? Is it producing something? And we don't want to wait 30 years to learn. So having some sort of interval of every few months can be really helpful.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And look, even if only a subset of the population tests, that will give us data to start to segment the rest of the population and provide personalized medicine for them. So I suspect that's where we get to.

• 13:36Auren Hoffman?

  I do the blood test. I freaking hate it. I hate the phlebotomist. Even I have a phlebotomist comes to our house and then it sticks me with some needles and it's just weird. And I really want the finger blood test or just the thing that's just in my arm and it's constantly reading. When's that gonna happen?

• 13:54Speaker 01

  So there are really three directions that I suspect the world will go in here. One is we have the devices on the arm. We have them already. A Tasso is the main one. They can collect a small sample of blood and new machines and new labs are good at drawing data from a small sample of blood. The problem is that error rate is quite high, variance is quite high, accuracy is lower. So if you're okay with needles, I always say needles are better. The second thing we're going to get are wearables or devices that continuously provide some of these biomarkers. I know someone who has developed a ring that can continuously monitor hormones. See, it starts with progesterone and estradiol, but that can be used for any hormone. Cortisol, testosterone, thyroid hormones.

• 14:39Auren Hoffman?

  It's non-invasive. It's literally just a ring around your finger, but somehow through infrared or something can figure out some of these things.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Yep, I can't share how she's done it. When all the VCs hear this podcast, they're gonna be like, who? But it is really, really impressive. We're gonna see lots of devices that non-invasively monitor biomarkers continuously.

• 14:59Auren Hoffman?

  I assume there's a lot of ways of even your Apple Watch or whatever, they've got some sort of infrared that goes in and you can look at other ways. There's lots of ways, even if it's not as good, not even nearly as good, but if it's all the time, you can get the error rate out over time.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Yep. Apple has been trying to crack this for years. They patented something in the mid 2010s, which was a microneedle in the Apple Watch that could detect blood sugar levels. Dexcom and Abbott have tried to do it as well. The non-invasive continuous monitor for X, whether it's glucose, metabolite or hormone, has been a holy grail that no one has really been able to crack. We're inevitably going to get it. There's a lot of funding going into a lot of companies targeting the problem.

• 15:45Auren Hoffman?

  I mean, there are people who claim they can even do things on your camera right now. Maybe I could learn something about you just based on the coloring of your face. As I said, if I have a good camera that's constantly seeing you, I could start to, oh, wow, maybe he didn't get as good of a sleep last night. Or some other things you could search or learn things, just like in these, maybe like even a very perceptive human could do.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Yep, I'm really optimistic. And I think that's the third way, which is continuous interaction with devices in the world and detecting disease that way. And we're a little bit further off there. It's hard to actually build the mapping between what you're seeing and what's happening. But I think we'll get there. I am optimistic.

• 16:24Auren Hoffman?

  Because if you think of the CIA or whoever, intelligence services, when they're trying to learn about foreign leaders, sometimes there's a rumor leader of X country has cancer or something. They're trying to do a lot of analysis about how they walk and they're trying to do lots of analysis about their faces and their body movements. And I don't know if any of these things really work at all today, but you can imagine over time, like these can be really good. Maybe you could learn something about yourself through these systems.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've heard of people using that to predict Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, neurodegenerative diseases, and the mapping there is probably clearer because they result in the changing the brain, which changes how we move. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up being able to do it for cancer as well.

• 17:08Auren Hoffman?

  Interesting.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  I suspect that diagnostics will commoditize and become ubiquitous and zero cost far faster than therapeutics. And I suspect the future of healthcare looks more like therapeutics than diagnostics. And I suspect the future of healthcare looks more like enhancements than prevention. I actually think prevention becomes table stakes.

• 17:27Auren Hoffman?

  And then is there a sense that a seven year old should be doing something very different than a fifty year old, very different than a thirty year old and those types of things?

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, there certainly is. When I was twelve years old, my liver enzymes were just outside the normal range. And every doctor said to me, don't worry about it. It's just outside, it's basically in the normal range. Several years later, I learned that I was in the ninety seven point fifth percentile. That's what normal range is, ninety fifth percentile, two sided. So basically, I was worse than ninety seven point five percent of the entire population, not of twelve year olds, right? A twelve year old liver should be very healthy, of the entire population.

• 18:06Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, the entire population?

• 18:08Speaker 01

  The entire population. And they said, no.

• 18:10Auren Hoffman?

  Including like some ninety year old has been drinking their entire life or something?

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah, people smoking, drinking with chronic diseases, obese, and they're like, oh, no, you're okay. And where we, I think inevitably need to get to is where we have reference ranges by gender and by age, because the liver of a twelve year old, I would have been ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of the twelve year old. And then it's like, oh shit, this is really out of range. Start taking action.

• 18:35Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, interesting. So if we want to make this more mainstream for everybody, and we want everyone to be healthier, we want everyone to start, or at least everyone, let's say, in a relatively wealthy country like the United States, to be healthier, what are some steps? There's still the obvious stuff. It's still the eighty twenty world. None of the stuff is that expensive. Get some sleep, get some exercise, a few less chocolate cakes or something, maybe cut down on your drinking and smoking a bit. But how do we institutionalize this?

• 19:07Speaker 01

  If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing in the US, I'd start with the food system. I think that's where a lot of the problems are. Unfortunately, that requires public sector intervention, which is going to be challenging. If I look at a way that we can drive change more easily as an individual company or from a private sector standpoint, I do think democratizing access to information, both about medicine and about your body, is really important. About medicine, a very classic example is human. I genuinely think that people who listen to human have become healthier. Most of my friends who listen to Andrew Huberman get sunlight in the morning now and they take a few more steps during the day. That is a small change that does drive health outcomes. Maybe they practice gratitude more and breathe more deeply.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  At the same time, I think we should democratize access to information of what's going on in your body. And that looks like making testing easy. What I see is when someone does a comprehensive blood test or any test, and they see something is wrong with them that they were not aware of, the first reaction is, see, I'm gonna fix this, help me, what's wrong, alarm bell. And I think that people don't even know what's wrong with them today. There are a hundred million Americans that are prediabetic and eighty percent of them don't know it. So it's like very hard to drive behavior change without actual information.

• 20:26Auren Hoffman?

  From the data side, and this is a data podcast. One of the things that irks me is it's just really hard to get your data. It's hard to move your data. It's hard to send your data to some other place. Everyone's got some proprietary format or you're getting a bunch of PDFs here and there, or your medical records don't really move easily. Can you imagine a world where it's just much easier to ingest and bring in and manage your own data and ship it to or give access to people you want to have access to it, et cetera?

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, we want everyone to have all of their data in one place. And we do that for people today. We integrate with the EMRs and we pull it in. Different labs use different machines with different units and different ranges. We normalize that. We have a team of scientists that builds out the normalization algorithms. We integrate wearable data. We allow you to conduct new tests. And the implication is we get to a world where we have three kinds of data simultaneously that basically no one else has. One is multi-omic multimodal data, genome, blood tests, microbiome, et cetera. Two is longitudinal clinical data, not what's happening at the level of your biology, but what are you presenting with? What's happening to you over time? Do you get sick? Do you not get sick?

• 21:42Speaker 01

  We partially get that through medical records, but then also get it by virtue of taking care of someone.

• 21:46Auren Hoffman?

  Asking people, yeah, or whatever.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Totally. And genomics, twenty-three in me, doesn't really happen. They give you one survey. They never actually cared for people. But their data was still valuable. They just sold out of bankruptcy for two hundred and fifty million. The third kind of data is continuous wearable data. And I think what's interesting about that is when you look at multiple wearables and concert, and then intersect that with the longitudinal clinical data and the multimodal multi-omic data. And no one has all three of those data sets. And the implication of having them, one is that as a patient or person, I feel more empowered and I can make better decisions today. The two is that we actually start to be able to discover new things because of the mapping that exists across these three sets of data.

• 22:30Auren Hoffman?

  What I think I find is that when I'm traveling, I'm getting less exercise. I'm not sleeping well. I'm just much more susceptible to getting sick or whatever it might be. I know you're someone who travels all the time. For people who can't see this on video, you're in a hotel room right now. What do you do to just make sure you keep it up in the right way while you're traveling?

• 22:54Speaker 01

  On Monday of this week, I got back to SF, San Francisco from Austin, and I'd been at a leadership retreat thing and I'd hardly slept at night because I was working through the night. And I came down with a really bad sore throat. And that same day, I was meant to fly out to Saudi Arabia for some big important meetings. I'm like, oh shit, here we go. Eighteen hour flight on a really bad sore throat off of a weekend where I already didn't have sleep. What do I do? I took a peptide. I took thymus now for one. And thirty-six hours later, the sore throat had disappeared completely. And I just was left with a runny nose. Now I've got a little bit of a runny nose, but I'm perfectly healthy. I was exercising just before. So I think, again, we have biological tools that we can now use to not get sick.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  When someone gets sick in the office, we give them thymus now for one and their sickness disappears. Every time. Not medical advice.

• 23:44Auren Hoffman?

  I think of myself as relatively knowledgeable about all this stuff and I've never heard of any of those things you've mentioned before. So some of these things are still really at the forefront or really not yet in the mainstream for sure.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And look, there's a stack of other things people can do, but none will be as effective. So I actually have it online that I send to friends when they get sick, maxmarqioni.com/immune. And that's what I used to do. And that improves health post sickness and pre sickness by maybe 50 to 70%. Dimethrinol-1 for me is more like a 70 to 90%. It's really powerful.

• 24:19Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, my gosh. Okay, that's crazy. And the downsides are what?

• 24:24Speaker 01

  None, as far as I'm aware.

• 24:25Auren Hoffman?

  Wow. Okay, that's crazy.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  But again, not medical advice.

• 24:28Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, not medical advice. This is a podcast.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's legal. I definitely didn't order or take it ever in the US.

• 24:35Auren Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Only in places where it's legal.

• 24:38Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, got it.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  I don't know where those places are.

• 24:41Auren Hoffman?

  Some of these things are not even approved in the US or anything.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  I think the class is category two or category three by the FDA. They're recognized but not approved. My approach to those things is if there's any risk of harm, and if there has been evidence of harm over the past 30 years of their use, stay away from them. If they've been used for 20 to 30 years with no evidence of harm, then explore. In exploring, I'll go around to the best doctors I know, the ones who charge $100,000 per patient. They tend to be 50 to 70 years old. They're billionaires, doctors, and I ask them, what do you think? And if there's consensus amongst them, then I deem it safe, which is a heuristic way of reasoning through it. I also try to at a high level understand the mechanism, but I think that's less useful than listening to experts and seeing anecdotes

• 25:28Speaker 01

  or anecdata, as I call it. Most of the smart people I know who are very deep in the biohacking world will use these compounds.

• 25:36Auren Hoffman?

  These things are somewhat fads and trendy. Three years ago, everyone was talking about Metformin and they're using Metformin. And now it just seems like people aren't talking about it as much. It's not being the same doctors who were talking about it. Now they don't usually recommend it as much today. Maybe it will come back and you just go down the list of all the different things. So they go in and out of fads pretty quickly.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, they can. Depends how long they've been around. The longer something has been around, I think the more likely it's going to continue to be around. The Lindy effect, I've heard it called.

• 26:07Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, but Metformin's been around forever, but then it got like super popular like a few years ago.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, my problem with Metformin is if you actually understand the mechanism, it's hard to create a case for why you should take it. But one of the mechanisms of action for longevity is that it down-regulates mTOR. And mTOR is increased through things like protein. mTOR is required to put on muscle. By down-regulating mTOR, you reduce the risk of malignant cellular growth, all cellular growth, but also malignant cellular growth, AKA cancer. And therefore, some people take, and mTOR is associated with longevity, potentially causal, and therefore people take Metformin. And it's the same reason people might not eat red meat or avoid protein. It's potentially the same reason why if we purely look at epidemiology, which is just like observation, not understanding mechanism, if we purely look at epidemiology,

• 26:57Speaker 01

  someone might say red meat is bad. My problem with Metformin is that what it's also saying is put on less muscle, down-regulate anabolism. And like, I don't want that. I'm happy to consume red meat, even if it might take a couple of years off my life. I'm willing to make that performance trade-off or quality of life trade-off. And Metformin for me is problematic because it will make it harder to put on muscle mass. And my view is at least when you're younger, putting on muscle mass is going to improve longevity more than taking Metformin between the age of 20 and 30.

• 27:29Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, almost certainly it will. Putting on muscle mass is important even when you're older, too.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 27:34Auren Hoffman?

  Obviously, it just gets harder and harder to do as you get older. Of the things that are out there and that are of current technology things, what things do you think we're just not making full use of?

• 27:45Speaker 01

  So I do think peptides that have been around for a very long time. I'm like GLP-1 has been around for decades. It's just that we slightly modified the chain of amino acids in a way that slightly changed the effect and allowed large pharma companies to patent it, that they became mainstream.

• 28:05Auren Hoffman?

  And today, there's a creatine craze. Everyone's taking it. I'm taking it. Everyone's taking it. I don't even know why sometimes I'm taking it, but my wife thinks I look better now that I take it. Where do you think about some of these things?

• 28:18Speaker 01

  I'm bullish on creatine. It's one of the most studied compounds and it's been around for decades.

• 28:23Auren Hoffman?

  That's what you're saying is like the downside's low.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Correct. Yes, I will happily take something if there's an equivocal upside, but close to the euro downside.

• 28:32Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, why not? The downside might just be you have to take it and there might be some cost to it or something. Creatine is obviously super cheap.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. If I look at things that are underrated, my sense of sunlight is still probably a little bit underrated. I think that micronutrients and minerals are underrated. 10 years ago, we had the multivitamin craze.

• 28:51Auren Hoffman?

  There's sunlight because most of us get so little sunlight. We're working doors, maybe we sit by a window or something, but it's just not the same. And then when we do get sunlight, like we're slapping on tons of sunscreen as well. Should we just be out walking more in nature more or taking meetings outside or trying to do at least our hobbies outside, play tennis or something? How do you think about that?

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think all of those things certainly help. I think it helps to absorb sunlight through your whole body as well, not just your face. That's hard to take your shirt off and walk down the street. I think that it's important to get sunlight in your eyes, not through a glass window.

• 29:31Auren Hoffman?

  And people are wearing sunglasses too, outside.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Totally. So I keep a list of what I call irrational beliefs, which are things that people would say are stupid, that sometimes come true. And one of the things in that list of irrational beliefs is that we need to aim for synchronicity with our bodies. And in the context of sun, synchronicity means that if you're outdoors. If you're at the beach, be barefoot, don't wear sunscreen and don't wear sunglasses. That's like synchronous, we're not sending mixed signals to our body. Saying to our body, oh, you're in the sun, therefore your body is getting UV, your eyes are getting UV and we're not sending mixed signals. Again, this isn't a rational belief because it's more something that comes from intuition and fully understanding mechanism. And a lot of the time, these beliefs won't come true.

• 30:14Auren Hoffman?

  So you're not wearing sunscreen, basically?

• 30:17Speaker 01

  If I'm going to be outdoors for a very long time and get sunburned, then I'll wear it. If I'm outdoors day to day, I'm not wearing sunscreen.

• 30:24Auren Hoffman?

  You're wearing it in the old days to protect against sunburn, but not to protect against sun quote unquote damage. Which is a lot of people are wearing sunscreen every day, they're putting sunscreen wherever they're driving their car, they're putting sunscreen on their hands or something.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, certainly not, particularly a lot of the chemical sun creams. I think they're more harmful than helpful. If I do use sun cream, it's mineral based, something like zinc is a classic example. And I think sun cream is overused, but yeah, that's my view.

• 30:54Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, interesting. Okay, sorry, I cut you off before, but you're saying, okay, sun is one of them. Okay, I like that. That just seems like it'll at least make you happier. I don't even know how good their health is, but it seems like you're just going to be happier if you're outside a little bit more. You're going to smile a little bit more. What else?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, for most people, I see it improve their energy levels, improve their sleep and improve their hormone balance. The other reason people might use sun cream is preventing wrinkles. I think that's the most valid reason to use sun cream. The next thing I'd say is micronutrients and minerals. I think that there was a period where people thought these were interesting. Now people aren't talking about them as much anymore. We're talking about creatine and magnesium, but what about maybe vitamin D? But what about all of the other minerals and nutrients? There's a long tail of nutrients, A, B, not just one, B, B one, two, six, nine, 12, C, D, E, K, and then there are a handful of minerals.

• 31:56Auren Hoffman?

  And how do you think about some of these B6 and B12s and the curcumin's and things? But they're like, I don't even know. It's like, I take them. I'm not sure if they're good or they're not. And I'll talk to my doctor about them and you don't want to take 500 pills every day either. It's just so annoying.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  I think a lot of the ones people are taking are the wrong form. They have additives in them. Australia has in the pharmacy in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia the other. I was trying to buy a vitamin C and a vitamin D and every single bottle, and this is the same in the US, is full of shit, preservatives, additive soybean oil, canola oil, all sorts of shit.

• 32:30Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, really? Okay.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Yep. Many of the forms and the dosing is completely off in the US. For example, B12, you can get as methyl cabalamine or you say anokabalamine. Sayano cabalamine is cheaper. That's what you see everywhere. It's nowhere near as effective. B9 folate.

• 32:47Auren Hoffman?

  So I'm looking at my B6 one right now and then it says, okay, B6, whatever. It says other ingredients, hypoallergenic plant fiber cellulose. I don't know what that is.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:00Auren Hoffman?

  Vegetarian capsule. Okay. Well, that makes sense. It's a capsule. And then ascorbal palmatite.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  They're fine. This already sounds like, okay, healthy ones. That one's okay. The classic pharmacy ones are worse. So one is additives. Two is the actual specific kind of the vitamin. Three is the dosing, which is often completely off. Often it's just symbolic that the things in there rather than effective. And then four is the combination or the synergy between nutrients. For example, if you have vitamin D, you need vitamin K for absorption. And ideally you want K1, K2, and if you have K2, there are two forms of K2, MK4 and MK7. And good luck finding a multivitamin that thinks about all of these factors. So and minerals are the same. People add electrolytes and you add three electrolytes. Now there's 70 trace minerals and our water used to contain them. Our soil used to contain them, but it doesn't anymore.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  And what I found is with all these hacks to increase testosterone, I found literally just get sunlight, improve mineral balance, improve micronutrient balance and testosterone will improve as a simple example.

• 34:03Auren Hoffman?

  Is there one test, one marker? If I just know this thing, this is going to tell me so much.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Gosh.

• 34:11Auren Hoffman?

  Because one of the problems is, is you're in the top 0.01% of people knowledgeable about this stuff. You're thinking about it. For the rest of us mortals, it's become so overwhelming. We just want to measure one or two things. We want to know what's going on. We're already relatively healthy and we just want to make sure we're optimizing the small number of things and then try to get that better or something. Well, I asked this to Brian Johnson, who's on this podcast, and he said resting heart rate before you go to bed or something. He was trying to get something relatively simple.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll give two answers. One, and it's biased, is the superpowers score, and I'm cheating because that's an aggregate of dozens of biomarkers. The second is biological age, because that is also in a way an aggregate of lots of different things. There are different measures of biological age, but many will regress a set of biomarkers against time to death. So moving that up or down will improve health. I think Brian's one is interesting, resting heart rate before bed. My problem with that is I do believe that people could have a low resting heart rate before bed and still not be healthy. I think that would actually be quite easy. So therefore it's more gamable than, say, superpower score or biological age. But those are three that I think are interesting.

• 35:26Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, interesting. Where do you think is the most misunderstood biomarkers? When people are talking about it, where do you think just either what's in the ethers wrong or a man or humans or like all those, where are we misunderstanding things today?

• 35:40Speaker 01

  I think that there's a lot of misinformation out there about hormones, testosterone in particular. I think that the sex hormone system is quite complex and there are a lot of people who see low testosterone and rather than solving for the foundations of health that support testosterone production, they take testosterone or inclinophine.

• 36:04Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, there's a lot of people who are getting testosterone injections or whatever today, just because, yeah, they see that low testosterone marker.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  I think there's more information in AST and ALT, the lyca enzymes, than the world tends to give them credit for, partially because they're showing. The amount of work your liver is doing to process everything in the environment, including toxins, I think they're like a proxy measure for toxin exposure. They can also be a measure for metabolic health. And I don't think a lot of people understand them that way, but they're related to processing fructose, for example, and therefore you can partially understand metabolic health through those liver enzymes. The reason I call them out is not because they're the best biomarkers ever, but because they're very under ignored. Compare that to something like APOB. A lot of people are talking about that now.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  That's the biomarker that is according to many, the best predictor of heart disease or the number one thing you want to lower for heart disease. The reason I think APOB is less interesting is because there's a smaller set of conclusions you can draw from it. If you have high APOB, it's basically like your atherosclerotic burden is high, your plaque is more likely to calcify, it's more likely to calcify, therefore lower it. Whereas AST and ALT are more systemic and more complex and interface with other biomarkers to tell a broader story.

• 37:28Auren Hoffman?

  If you think of guys, Peter Kier, he has moved a bit from diets important to exercise is more important. That's his arc. Maybe some of the pharmacological stuff is less important and exercise is more like, where do you think that is on the spectrum? And how do you think we should be thinking about these things?

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Depends who he's talking to. For the average American, fix diet. If you're talking to an educated and healthy crowd that's already eating somewhat well, then the nuances of diet matter.

• 37:58Auren Hoffman?

  Like it doesn't make sense to optimize from the 90th to 99th or something. Yeah. Okay.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  I eat pizza, I eat cookies. I still think my diet's really healthy, but that stuff's fine. I eat croissants, it's not going to kill me.

• 38:09Auren Hoffman?

  I mean, I love cookies. I love cookies.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  There we go. For people who are generally healthier, like us, exercise matters more. For the average American, I think diet matters more.

• 38:20Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, got it. So it really depends on where you are on the spectrum and then start with that.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Look, in the future pharmacology will matter more than any of it. I was staunchly anti-pharmon until a year ago. If we fast forward a hundred years, does the future of healthcare look more like perfect diet, perfect exercise, perfect sleep? Or does it look more like a magic pill? Definitely in a hundred years, it looks more like a magic pill.

• 38:45Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, and you can already see that with these GLPs.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah. In some time between now and a hundred years time, a magic pill has to exist. And I contend they're coming along in the next five to 10 years. And GLP-1s are one of the first examples. Obesity has gone backwards for the first time in 60 years in the United States. Obesity is potentially the number one killer. So I'm increasingly pro pharmaceutical as we have more biotechnology and more biotechnological advancements.

• 39:12Auren Hoffman?

  One of the problems with the pharmaceuticals, you don't know how they interact with you. So you interact with each other. So you've got the GLP, but then you're taking these three other things. And then they may cancel each other out, or they may have negative effects if you take them together. Cause these things, it's so hard to test all these different things in different environments.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know enough about that to comment. I guess some things that I believe is when you're injecting versus going through the gut, you probably have less of those interaction effects because you're not exposing them to each other in the gut and relying your gut and liver to process it. And it's a pass through the gut wall.

• 39:48Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, one of the nice things about the GLPs is like 99% of people who have them are injecting today. They're not taking a pill.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Some countries do this around the world. I remember speaking to my parents growing up in Italy and my mom was like, oh yeah, I get sick. And they give me just a little injection and that was just normal. This is what 1970, 1980 and you're getting injections to hear. And she's like, yeah, it's like totally normal and they all know what to inject for what. And that really shocked me and it surprised me that that hadn't been more globally distributed. But I do think we'll see more things delivered via an injection rather than via a pill. Just because downside is lower and upside is higher.

• 40:27Auren Hoffman?

  And you think for the GLPs, I have so many friends who are on them and then they go off them and they put the weight back on. You have one friend and he lost a lot of weight, then he went off it, then he put the weight back on. But he said, one of the reasons he put the weight back on is he knew in the back of his head that he could always take it off again by taking the drugs. So there was just less of an incentive. Essentially what I'm worried about is we become a little bit more reliant on some of these. Do you think that is a problem or do you think the drugs are just going to get better? Or it's just going to be fine to be reliant on it?

• 40:59Speaker 01

  I think we are going to become more reliant on them. I do think that for a lot of people, they can't get the weight off to start with. And when you lose weight, once it makes it easier to stay at that weight, it makes it easier to reset, have more energy, start exercising, keep it off. You do need to stay at a low weight for some time. So there might have been an argument that your friend should have stayed on them longer to normalize and stabilize at that weight. I do think that if you're combining biological intervention with lifestyle change, it's going to be far more effective. But the reality is every year, the US gets fatter and fatter. So like, yes, we can say, let's just get everyone doing perfect lifestyles. It's not working. It has not worked in 60 years.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  We need something to change, either at the level of the food system, regulation or pharmacology. And I think we're starting to see one early example of that. And I think we'll see much better examples going forward.

• 41:52Auren Hoffman?

  Now, we've covered most of the fads that people have been talking about or most of the things we've been talking about. But there's two things that I'd seen a lot of people talking about, I don't think we've covered yet. The first one is cold exposure. What do you think about that?

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Good, but overrated. I don't think it's going to materially change much. It might have a small impact on lifespan. It might have a small impact on hormones. It might make you feel a little bit better. It's good for inflammation for sure. It's good for recovery for sure, but I think it's overrated at the moment.

• 42:19Auren Hoffman?

  Okay. And second would be fasting.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Intermittent, so fasting within a day is, I think, good for some people for gut health reasons. We're not meant to be snacking all day long. And I think it can be effective for weight loss.

• 42:32Auren Hoffman?

  The 16 off, 8 on type of thing or whatever. Yeah.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. It can be effective for weight loss purposes as well, because you're compressing the same calories into a smaller window. So you feel full during that window and you're less likely to overeat. I don't think it impacts longevity much. Controlling for the effects of just fewer calories, I don't think it impacts longevity much. Longer fasts, I think, do increase lifespan. And we understand some of the mechanisms such as autophagy that result in increased lifespan. I don't think they're going to make it to the mainstream because if you have done a three to five day fast before, it's really brutal. So I just don't think it's going to make it to the mainstream.

• 43:10Auren Hoffman?

  A longer fast, you're really talking about a three plus?

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a three to five or three plus. Yep.

• 43:15Auren Hoffman?

  And why do you think that three day, is it just because it's flushing things out? Why is that so valuable?

• 43:22Speaker 01

  So autophagy, which is the process of your cells, I don't know the exact scientific language, but I think it's your cells renewing or your organs or parts of your body renewing. That process of autophagy starts around day two, two and a half. And therefore the longer fast is helpful. And I'm sure there are other mechanisms as well that make the longer fast helpful.

• 43:42Auren Hoffman?

  And do you have your own protocol for it? On day one, no food, day two, a little bit of miso soup or something. And I don't know, do you have some sort of protocol on it or?

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Lots of salt, lots of electrolytes, eating fewer carbs leading into the fast. Having exogenous ketones at the start of the fast as well, so I enter ketosis faster.

• 44:06Auren Hoffman?

  What does that mean?

• 44:07Speaker 01

  So your body can burn glucose or ketones for energy. Most of the time, our body is burning glucose. When we enter into ketosis, our body runs ketones, which are fats. Part of the purpose of fasting is to get your body to enter into ketosis. And when your body's in ketosis, the fast becomes easier. Unfortunately, that normally takes one to two days to get into ketosis. So day one and two are typically the hard parts of the fast and day three and four are actually easier. Now you can accelerate your path to day three and four by taking ketones exogenously in a liquid form and drinking them. They taste foul, but they get you into ketosis faster, which makes your fast easier.

• 44:48Auren Hoffman?

  Interesting. Okay, cool. You've got a couple of interesting, I would say, contrarian beliefs. Maybe one, I don't even know second turn anymore, but you had said a couple of types of seven hours of sleep could make you less sleepy than eight plus hours of sleep. What do you mean by that?

• 45:05Speaker 01

  I just see this anecdotally across a lot of people, which is that when you have seven hours of sleep, you feel more energetic than eight hours. I don't fully understand the mechanism, but I've seen it anecdotally enough to believe that there's something we don't fully understand there. There might be a mechanism that's understood, but I believe that anecdotal observation is the first step in the scientific method. And before we have research papers, we have hypotheses. So many of these things exist in the world of hypothesis. And then hopefully one day someone will explore them and turn them into science, as we call it.

• 45:39Auren Hoffman?

  You're anti AirPod, though you are wearing them right now. So what do you mean by anti AirPod?

• 45:45Speaker 01

  So I think for most of the day, the potential risk of AirPods outweighs the benefits. The benefit is that I can walk around without having a cable on or without big headphones. The potential risk is brain damage and cancer. Now, the chance of that risk is super low. I do not think AirPods give you brain damage, but I do think there's a very, very low probability they could. And because of the very low probability they could, I'll choose to not use it. There's smart people who think similarly. We do know that electromagnetic radiation impacts the brain. We also know that all electromagnetic radiation follows an inverse square law of distance.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Intensity is an inverse square law of distance. So if something's that far away, if something's a foot away, it's not emitting that much EMF. But it's literally inside your ear, like squeezed inside your ear, that's really close to the brain. You don't have much to protect it. So there could be more of an impact there, even from something as small as Bluetooth than people think. There's also anecdotes of some people saying, I started using AirPods next way as it had happened. There are smart people who avoid them, and there are anecdotes of advanced doctors, I know, cancer doctors, who genuinely believe that AirPods are giving people brain cancer. And when I take into account all of this, my conclusion is they're almost definitely safe. They might be a risk, and therefore, most of the time, I won't use them.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Now, sometimes I'm traveling, I lost my cabled headphones, I'm gonna use them, but I'm not wearing them all day long, six, seven hours for every call, listening to every song. I'll instead get cabled headphones for that.

• 47:23Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, another thing I saw that you did is you sometimes listen to things at 4X speed, which I don't even know where the setting is to go do that. How did you train yourself to do that?

• 47:35Speaker 01

  I'm unfortunately capped at 3.5X now. The podcast app I used to use got up to 32X, but they decommissioned it sadly. So 3.5X is what Spotify and Audible can get to. And part of it is having high-quality headphones. It makes a difference. Blocking out surround sound. Part of it is doing it often. So just continuing to increase the speed at which you listen. And then part of it is recognizing you're going to process less. That's the reality. Like, I'm not going to understand more at 4X speed, but...

• 48:06Auren Hoffman?

  Are you listening and not doing anything else? You're just closing your eyes? Because I feel like I can process more. But if I'm driving, or if I'm doing some other thing, which is usually what I'm doing when I'm listening, I'm working out, or I do, I lift weights, I don't know if I'll be able to process at that speed.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  I won't listen to things unless I'm doing something else, otherwise I feel like I'm wasting time.

• 48:25Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, okay.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  So I am doing something else. It's not always 3.5X.

• 48:29Auren Hoffman?

  So you can still listen at 3.5X?

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Depending on what it is, certainly. Andrew Hyman, 3.5X, any day of the week. He's very structured, he's very clear, and he speaks slowly. Whereas Mark Andreessen, he's not getting 3.5X.

• 48:42Auren Hoffman?

  No, Mark Andreessen, he is one of the fastest speaking people. You move it around.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, also depending on my mental state. Sometimes I'm in 3.5X mood, sometimes, fuck it, I'm brain fried, 2X. I just want to chill.

• 48:55Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, got it. I listen to a lot of science books. It's very hard for me to really get over 1.5, 1.6, but then a typical podcast, I might be more at 2. I haven't tried to go over 2, but maybe I should. I'm going to experiment with it. I'll let you know how it works. So I know that on my podcast, for people listening to my podcast, I definitely sound much smarter at 2X. So if you're listening to this right now at 1.3, 1.4, just move it up to 2. First of all, you'll get it done faster, and you'll think that Orin Halfpitt is just a much smarter person. Our last two question we ask all of our guests, what is a conspiracy theory that you believe?

• 49:31Speaker 01

  Oh gosh, so many things that I'll get cancelled for.

• 49:34Auren Hoffman?

  They don't get cancelled anymore. It doesn't happen anymore.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Oh, you don't know some of my conspiracy theories.

• 49:39Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, alright, that's fair.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  I do think the AirPods one is one I tend to take reasonably seriously. I do think that vaccines have a bigger impact than we understand. They might be related to things like autoimmunity. They might be related to things like autism. I don't know, but I think that we've pushed under the rug the possibility that they might have that relationship.

• 50:04Auren Hoffman?

  Or they might for some small number of people or something like that or whatever. Yeah.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, my response with these things is typically, I don't know. And if there's a very low chance, there's a 5% chance I'm going to explore it rather than just saying no. I do believe that magic exists and I think it has always existed. And over time, magic becomes called science. 200 years ago, if someone said to you, this rock is emitting waves through your body and it's going to kill you, people would have laughed at you. Now, we know that's a thing. It's a radioactive rock. This rock can kill you. That's magic. It's pseudoscience shit. Same with a mobile phone. We're shooting energy around the earth and we're going to see someone else's face. That's magic. So I think there's a lot of things today which we laugh at that are the radioactive rocks of today's era that we will call science. And I like this idea of the science of applied magic.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  How can we actually learn to harness some of these things which we call magic? For example, I have a friend who through touch can make someone feel tingles anywhere in their body. And you can placebo control this because others who pretend they can do it can't actually do it. And he can heal people as a result. And I know several billionaires who he has healed and who swear by him.

• 51:12Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, cool.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  So I do believe that there's a lot of this stuff that we just do not understand and people call it bullshit today, but we'll call it science soon enough.

• 51:19Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah. Alright, this is great. Last question we ask all of our guests. I've almost asked you this question almost every time, so maybe it's asking for a new one. What conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Listen to advice.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  I think that most advice is not that helpful. We go on Twitter and we read articles about how ex-company did this thing. Or here's how to build a company culture. Here's how to do B2B sales. Or here's how to fundraise. I think 90% of it should be ignored in favor of just reasoning from first principles. I think often the actual story is different to the marketing, which is online. Everything online ends up being marketing. So the answer is typically discard 80 to 90% of advice. Reason from first principles. Be hypercritical of advice.

• 52:04Auren Hoffman?

  But you can't spend the time reasoning for first principles for everything. I mean, it sounds like you're the type of person who reasons much more than the rest of us. But still, I have no idea if the world is round. I honestly have not really reasoned it through at all, but I just accept that it is rounds. And I could probably spend the time improving it to myself, but I just have never done it. So there's just certain things you just have to go with. And that's out there based on your experience, or you just don't have the time to do it all. How do you know when to go first principles?

• 52:38Speaker 01

  I think that intuition and heuristics matter a lot. Many of the things I said in today's episode, I did not understand the first principles and the mechanisms of.

• 52:46Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, okay, got it.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  The scientists will laugh at me and I'll be like, yeah, and I just saved 10 weeks researching it because I'm relying on experts. And that's a strong enough heuristic for me.

• 52:56Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, okay.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  That's the main thing that I would say that.

• 52:59Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, cool. Well, this is amazing. Thank you, Max Marchione, for joining us on World of DAS. I follow you at Max Marchione on X slash Twitter. I definitely encourage our listeners to see you get you there. This has been a ton of fun and I really learned a lot.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Thanks, Auren. This was really fun.

• 53:19Auren Hoffman?

  Thanks for listening. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe to World of DAS wherever you consume your podcasts. YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and more. And please help us get discovered by leaving a review and check out worldofdaas.com. That's worldofdaas.com. And of course, connect with me on Twitter, at Auren. That's A U R E N. Would absolutely love to hear from you.