Superpower Founder/President Max Marchione

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (00:00.56) 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 DaaS.

Max Marchione (00:13.046) Thanks, Auren. Excited to be here.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (00:15.45) Now, okay, now what is like a billionaire level health protocol look like today? Like what, where, where should, if you had like, 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 you, if money was no option, no, no, a problem at all.

Max Marchione (00:35.054) I love this first question. I feel like so many podcasts are like, 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 I think it starts.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (00:47.692) remember a billionaire your time is also super valuable so you don't want to just like spend random time on stuff either right but you're happy to spend money on things.

Max Marchione (00:51.704) Totally.

Max Marchione (00:55.522) Totally. So I think it starts with testing as much as possible. And if I were a billionaire every month or two months, every one to three months, I'd be conducting a set of tests. Blood testing is the most basic and I'd test over a hundred biomarkers, hormones, inflammation, metabolism, cardiovascular health, liver health. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (01:17.488) And basically you have like the phlebotomist come to your house or wherever you are and just come and get the blood and then, and give you your test results back on those things. Okay.

Max Marchione (01:28.098) Yep, I'd probably do same day every month and it take 10 minutes. The flu on us to 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (01:42.492) Toxin testing with blood or talk? How do do it? What's a toxin test? Urine, okay.

Max Marchione (01:46.254) so urine is, 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 will 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 kind of where I'd start, which is getting as much data.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (01:56.101) It's easy.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (02:08.816) And do those change a lot over time? Like, like toxins, like, are you, and does that like tell you something about your own health if they are changing?

Max Marchione (02:19.578) One of my beliefs is that a lot of people have an overexposure of toxins. That is disrupting metabolism, is disrupting hormonal balance, it is disrupting all sorts of other functions. Some people would even contend that having too many of these toxins results 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 I think 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, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (03:06.684) I'm sorry, but if I get my toxins done like three months ago, is it really gonna change that much today, like three months later, or is it one of those things like just every couple of years, whereas I know your blood could be like changing quite a lot.

Max Marchione (03:22.196) 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. was plastics like BPA. 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, every three months. so I think if you're actively.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (03:32.7) Cause you're eating like sushi. Okay. Yeah.

Max Marchione (03:49.422) trying to target your levels, then you should see a delta every month and definitely every three months.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (03:52.762) 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? And then you want to, you want to be measuring or, or those things. But if your toxins are like relatively low, you don't need to work on it. That maybe, maybe you don't have to get a test that frequently or something.

Max Marchione (04:08.046) Yes, 100%. Yep. 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (04:21.996) And so far, everything you're talking about is like, 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 maximum in the thousands of dollars per year right now, right? And maybe you find a lot cheaper alternative. What else would you be doing?

Max Marchione (04:44.234) Um, I would do organic acid testing. would do less frequently, uh, full body imaging, such as MRI and ultrasound and CT scans. Um, and look, if you do the full test of all of these diagnostics, you're still only set back maximum 10 K. Right. So it's not actually that expensive considering this is a 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (04:51.078) Yep.

Max Marchione (05:13.186) thinking about it and processing it and performing compute. Basically 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (05:19.046) Yep.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (05:22.427) Yep.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (05:26.618) Yep. I would assume whether it's you guys or other software tools or even just chat GPT, like is going to be able to be very helpful in some of these things like going forward, right?

Max Marchione (05:38.978) JGBT and AI with enough context, prompting and medical knowledge will far outperform the best genius doctors. and look, we're, some way off that these doctors who charge a hundred thousand dollars 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 a hundred percent pay for them. totally.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (05:47.47) Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Max Marchione (06:06.892) 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 and the AI is also going to

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (06:18.406) Yep.

One of the things that my, 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. he kind of like 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. he, you know, he, he, he does lots of things like that to, to, know, which like the AI doesn't seem like yet it's good at like nagging me to go do things. And I don't feel bad about disappointing the AI, but I feel bad about disappointing my doctor.

Max Marchione (07:11.825) Yep, I agree. And there'll be all of the people out there that'll be like, no, I can do that. Look, can act, it can nudge, it can be proactive. 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. Right? We know that is true. They know how to put together a program, but

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (07:17.701) Yes, that's right. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (07:27.204) Yes. Yeah.

Max Marchione (07:31.042) They still get personal trainers. and that's the human component.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (07:32.752) Well, the, to me, the, the personal, reason a personal trainer is like, okay, you paid for the personal training. You've got an appointment 6 AM on Monday, whatever you go to set. already paid. So you're kind of, you kind of really need to show up, right? Like you just feel like a total idiot. If like you just, your alarm goes off. You're like, nah, I just want to sleep or something. Right. So like.

To me, the best, most important thing in personal training isn't the fact that they're helping you do the work on that is good. They can like help you with your form and a bunch of other things is great, but like 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 kind of partial workout. And then you just go like sit in the spa or something, right? You do like the real one that you're supposed to do. So again, it's more of that accountability that's there that that's why it's so valuable.

Max Marchione (08:22.766) 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 in the therapeutic side. And this is where it gets expensive. So assuming we know everything about you, have collected all the data, assuming that we've connected the dots between the data.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (08:26.128) Yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (08:33.872) Yeah, why not? Yeah.

Max Marchione (08:51.414) 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 a long tail of therapies. I would take quite a lot of peptides. Some people say they're risky. I think I've always been very risk averse. And I think that they've crossed the safety threshold for me. That would include, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (09:11.984) What's an example? Because I keep hearing people talking about peptides. It's like it's now in the water. Like what are some examples of things that you think people should be looking at or taking?

Max Marchione (09:25.144) So I'll the billionaire version and then I'll say what people should actually take. The billionaire version I would do NAD every week. I would add vitamins to that and I would add

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (09:38.588) And why is that the bill? mean, any of these not that expensive.

Max Marchione (09:42.574) Uh, every week it's going to set you back a thousand dollars. She isn't like, look, it's not billionaire level expensive. Um, but, for a lot of people that's not cheap. Yep. If you're doing it via an IV, yeah. Um, with, with 500 milligrams, I'd add glutathione and add vitamins, add minerals. I would use that instead of many supplements. Um, then if I look at the peptides that I think are actually helpful for people, it depends what they're targeting. So the two maybe.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (09:45.627) Okay.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (09:49.188) Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, no, yeah, that's pretty expensive,

Yeah.

Max Marchione (10:12.012) best-selling drugs. don't if they're best selling drugs, but the two are two of the biggest drugs of all time are insulin and GLP-1s. They're both peptides, right? And GLP-1s 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 GLP-1s don't use them because they're obese. They use them because they're optimizing themselves. Bodybuilders now using GLP-1s 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 that can help you achieve that goal. For example, if you break a bone or tear a ligament, I would say here's BPC 157, and I've seen a lot of friends recover two times faster from it. If you have scarring, I'd say, here's GHK, so you're in BPC 157, let's get rid of that scar. You know all the doctors that 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,

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (10:55.866) Wow. Okay.

Max Marchione (11:08.27) My HRV is really low and I've done a test for mitochondrial efficiency and health and it can't seem to fix it. I'd say, well, maybe we should experiment with MOTC. Again, this is not medical advice. These are not compounds that you can take today, but they are legal in all states. But I think that the future of health starts to look like advanced biotech. And I suspect many of the compounds will come in the form of small proteins, which we call peptides.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (11:35.068) And one of the things that's hard is that everybody is so different, right? Like you and I, even though we kind of look somewhat alike or you're a much better, better looking version of me, you know, we're, we're, we're, we probably have very different DNA, we have different metabolism, different everything. And so while like what works for you might not work for me and vice versa. Like how do we start figuring out that protocol? Cause even working out, I can see like,

certain people are responding better. They build muscles in a way that I don't do or vice versa.

Max Marchione (12:09.678) So what I've seen is, I think 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. I think the same applies to exercising, right? As people spend hours and hours and hours learning about the best way to exercise, the best timing of protein, the best everything.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (12:23.61) Right, get some sleep, get some exercise, eat decently.

Max Marchione (12:38.252) And the reality is that 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 and 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. So that's at one side of the extreme at the other extreme. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (13:05.328) Yeah. And probably the, just the opposite is just like, don't do bad stuff. Right. So try to eliminate as many events. Like what would you be like if you really want it to be unhealthy, what would you do? And there's right 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.

Max Marchione (13:28.598) 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 pre-diabetes, which was surprising because I wasn't overweight. 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, so eat less sugar, exercise a bit more.

None of it worked. still had pre-diabetes. Then one of these genius doctors said to me, take a mega dose of thiamine as vitamin B1. The normal dose is five milligrams. They said take 400 milligrams. And I took 400 milligrams a day of thiamine and my pre-diabetes disappeared. 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 none of one.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (14:11.263) whoa.

Max Marchione (14:27.01) 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (14:33.584) This is where testing is so important too, because like you, kind of like 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, is it producing something? And we don't want to wait like 30 years to learn. so like having some sort of interval of every few months can be really helpful.

Max Marchione (14:58.092) 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 suspect that's where we get to.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (15:04.592) That's true.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (15:09.628) And we're like, I mean, I, I do the blood test. I fricking hate it. I hate like the phlebotomist even I have a phlebotomist comes to our house and then, but it's like, sticks me with some needles and it's just like weird. And I, I, I really want the, the, the finger blood test or just like the, the, thing that's just in my arm and it's constantly like reading, like when's that going to happen?

Max Marchione (15:37.179) 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. TASO 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 OK with needles, I always say needles are better.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (15:47.516) Mm.

Max Marchione (16:04.546) The second thing we're going to get are wearables or devices that continuously provide some of these biomarkers. So I know someone who has developed a ring that can continuously monitor hormones. So you're starting with progesterone and estradiol, but that can be used for any hormone, cortisol, testosterone, thyroid hormones.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (16:27.758) And it's not invasive. It's literally just a ring around your finger, but somehow it's like through infrared or something can figure out some of these things.

Max Marchione (16:37.25) Yep. I can't share how she's done it. When all the VCs hear this podcast, they're going be like, who? But it is really, really impressive. And we're going to see lots of devices that non-invasively monitor biomarkers continuously.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (16:42.598) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (16:48.639) Yeah. Right. Because I assume there's a lot of ways of like, of, of, even your, your Apple watch or whatever, like they've got some sort of infrared that goes in and you're, you know, you can look at blood vessels other way. Like there's lots of like ways of, if, if it's not as good as not even nearly as good, but if it's all the time, you know, you, you can get the error rate out over time. Right.

Max Marchione (17:14.702) Yep. look like Apple has been trying to crack this for years. They patented something in the early mid 2010s, which was a micro needle in the Apple watch that could detect, uh, blood sugar levels. Um, Dexcom and Abbott have, have tried to do it as well. Um, the non-invasive, uh, uh, continuous monitor for X, whether it's glucose, a metabolite or hormone has been a holy grail that no one has really been able to crack.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (17:27.152) huh.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (17:39.035) Yep.

Max Marchione (17:43.511) We're inevitably going to get it. There's a lot of funding going into a lot of companies targeting the problem.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (17:48.496) I mean, there are people who like claim they can even do things with like, you know, where on your camera right now, like maybe I could learn something about you just based on like the coloring of your face. long as I, if I have a good camera, that's like constantly, seeing you, could start to say, wow. Maybe he didn't get as good of a sleep last night or some other things you can start to learn things just like in these, you know, maybe, maybe like even a very perceptive human could do.

Max Marchione (18:16.398) Yep. I'm really optimistic. And I think that's the third way, is continuous interaction with the device, 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. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (18:30.863) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (18:34.972) Cause if you think like, like, you know, the CIA or whoever intelligence services, when they're trying to learn about foreign leaders, you know, sometimes there's a rumor, you know, 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 face and their, 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. And then they could, you maybe you could learn something about yourself through these systems.

Max Marchione (19:09.068) 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 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. 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (19:24.57) Yeah, interesting.

Max Marchione (19:37.612) And I suspect the future of healthcare looks more like enhancement than prevention. I actually think prevention becomes table stakes.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (19:45.308) And then is there a sense that like, like at every, like a seven year old should be doing something very different than a 50 year old or doing something very different than a 30 year old and those types of things.

Max Marchione (19:59.982) Yeah, there certainly is. When I was 12 years old, my liver enzymes are just outside the normal range. And every doctor said to me, don't worry about it. Your face just outside, basically in the normal range. Several years later, I learned that I was in the 97.5 percentile. That's what a normal range is, in that 95th percentile two-sided. So basically, I was worse than 97.5 % of the entire population.

And they, of the entire, not of 12 year olds, right? A 12 year old should be very healthy. Of the entire population. And they said, no. The entire population. And they said, no.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (20:33.033) the entire population. Including like some 90 year old has been drinking their entire life or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Max Marchione (20:39.246) Totally. Yeah. People smoking, drinking with chronic diseases, obese, and they're like, oh no, you're okay. Right. 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 12 year old, I would have been 99.999 % of the 12 year old. And then it's like, oh shit, this is really out of range. Start taking action.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (20:53.434) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (20:58.757) Yep.

Yeah. Yep. Interesting. What, what is, um, like, you know, getting like, so if we want to make this more mainstream for everybody, um, and we want everyone to be healthier, we want everyone to start, um, or at least everyone, let's say in a relatively wealthy country, like the United States to be healthier. Um, what, what are some

steps. mean, there's just still the obvious stuff, right? It's still the 80-20 rule. None of this stuff is that expensive, right? Get some sleep, get some exercise, you know, eat a little few last chocolate cakes or something, right? Maybe cut down on your drinking and smoking a bit. But how do we like, how do we institutionalize this?

Max Marchione (21:46.756) If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing in the US, it would 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 Huberman. I genuinely think that people who listen to Huberman 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.

At the same time, I think we should democratize access to information of what's going on in your body. And that looks like providing, making testing easy. What I see is that 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, got to 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 hundred million Americans that are pre-diabetic and 80 % of them don't know it. So it's like very hard to drive behavior change without actual information.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (23:12.636) 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 some other place. Everyone's got some sort of 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 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.

Max Marchione (23:47.857) 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (23:58.107) Yep.

Max Marchione (24:04.578) 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 multiomic, multimodal data. Genome, blood tests, microbiome, et cetera. Two is longitudinal clinical data.

Right? Not what's happening at the level of your biology, but it's actually, what are you presenting with? What's happening to you at the time? Do you get sick? Do you not get sick? Um, and we partially get that through medical records, but then also get it by virtue of taking care of totally. And genomics like 23 and me doesn't really have that. They give you one survey and ever actually cared for people. Um, but their data was still valuable. They just sold out of bankruptcy for 250 million. The third kind of data is continuous wearable data.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (24:44.508) asking people, yeah, or whatever.

Max Marchione (24:59.822) 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-ermic data. And no one has all three of those data sets and the implication of having them. One is that as a, 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, right? Because of the mapping that exists across these three sets of data.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (25:31.356) When I, what I find is that when I'm not, when I'm traveling, I'm getting less exercise. Um, I'm not sleeping well. Um, and then I'm just much more susceptible to getting sick or, know, whatever it might be. Uh, 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. Um, like, what do you do to just.

make sure you keep it up in the right way while you're traveling.

Max Marchione (26:03.214) On Monday of this week, got back to SAF San Francisco from Austin and had 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. 18 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

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (26:25.98) Yeah.

Max Marchione (26:34.338) 24 hours later, 36 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. When someone gets sick in the office, we'll give them a thumbs now for one and their sickness disappears every time. Not medical advice.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (26:57.372) And it's just, it's like, I mean, I think of myself as like relatively knowledgeable about all this stuff. And I've never heard of any of those things you've mentioned before. some of these things are still really at the forefront or really, you know, they're, they're still, you know, they're not yet in the mainstream for sure.

Max Marchione (27:16.718) 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, maxmarchione.com slash immune. Um, and that's what I used to do. And that was improved, uh, improved health, sickness and pre sickness by maybe like 50 to 70%. But I miss now for one for me is more like a 70 to 90%. It's really powerful.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (27:42.64) Wow. my gosh. Okay. That's crazy. And the downsides are what?

Max Marchione (27:48.174) None as far as I'm aware. But again, not medical advice. I don't know if it's legal. I definitely didn't order or take it ever in the US. Only in places where it's legal. I don't know where those places are.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (27:50.96) Wow. Okay. That's crazy. Yeah. Not medical advice. Right. Right. Right. This is a podcast. Yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (28:01.308) Okay. Okay. Got it. Okay. So some of these things are not even like, they're not even approved in the U S or anything.

Max Marchione (28:10.632) they're on, I think they're, they're, they're two, the class is category two or category three by the FDA. They recognize, but not approved. the, 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (28:18.843) Yep.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (28:33.627) Yep.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (28:39.42) Yeah.

Max Marchione (28:39.648) 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 asked 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 or anecdata as I call it. Most of the smart people I know who are very deep in the biohacking world.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (28:48.955) Yeah.

Max Marchione (29:09.112) We'll use these compounds.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (29:11.194) And how does it like these things, these things are somewhat the fads and trendy, like, you know, a three years ago, everyone was talking about Metformin and they're using Metformin. And now it just seems like people aren't talking about as much. It's not being, you know, the same doctors who were talking about it. Like now they say they don't, they usually recommend it as much today. Maybe it will come back and.

You just go down the list of all the different kind of things. they go in and out of fads pretty quickly, right?

Max Marchione (29:44.334) 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (29:54.352) Yeah, but Metformin's been around forever, but then it got like super popular like a few years ago, right?

Max Marchione (29:59.414) Mm-hmm. 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. The mechanism of action is that it, 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, also malignant cellular growth, AKA cancer.

And therefore some people take an mTOR associated with longevity, potentially causal, and therefore people take metformin. The problem, and that'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 mechanisms, if we purely look at epidemiology, 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 animalism. And like, I don't want that. I'm happy to consume red meat. Even if it might take a couple of years of 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (31:25.274) Yeah, almost certainly. Well, putting on muscle mass is important even when you're older too, right? It's kind of like, obviously, just gets harder and harder to do as you get older. What what of the things that, you know, that are out there and that are kind of current technology things, what are things that you think we're just not making full use of?

Max Marchione (31:31.256) Totally.

Max Marchione (31:48.956) so I do think peptides that have been around for a very long time. I'm like, GOP1s have 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (31:55.984) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (32:07.034) And today there's like, there's a not, you know, slightly different, but there's a creatine craze. Everyone's taking it. I'm taking it. Yeah. Everyone's thinking like, like we're, I don't even know why sometimes I'm taking it, but like my wife thinks I look better now that I take it. like what, w where do where do you think about some of these things?

Max Marchione (32:27.747) I'm bullish on creatine. It's one of the most studied compounds and it's been around for decades.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (32:34.908) So you're basically, at least what you're saying is like the downside's low.

Max Marchione (32:39.278) Correct, yes. I will happily take something if there's an equivocal upside, but close to the Euro downside. I'm for those things.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (32:39.92) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (32:46.106) Yeah, why not? Yeah, the downside might just be you have to take it and there might be some cost to it or some increasing, obviously super cheap.

Max Marchione (32:55.49) Yeah. Yeah. if I look at things that are underrated, my sense is sunlight still probably a little bit underrated. I think that micronutrients and minerals under underrated 10 years ago, we had the multivitamin craze.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (33:09.692) And by like go to the sunlight for like, mean, cause most of us get so little sunlight. We're in work, we're working doors where, you know, maybe we sit by a window or something, but it's just not the same. then, and then when we do get some light, like we're slabbing on tons of sunscreen as well. Like, how do you, how do you, should we just be like out walking more in nature more or taking meetings outside or, or trying to do things like trying to just.

Do you at least our hobbies outside like play tennis or something or how do you think about that?

Max Marchione (33:44.467) 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. And part of that is for so-

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (33:51.46) Okay, guys, so like, just like, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (34:01.734) So, and people are wearing sunglasses too outside. Okay. Yeah.

Max Marchione (34:04.984) Totally. So I keep a list of what I call a rational beliefs, which are things that, people say is stupid, that sometimes come true. And one of the things in that list of irrational beliefs is that we 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, right?

We're saying to our body, well, you're in the sun, therefore your body's getting UV. You're either 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 most, of the, a lot of the time these beliefs won't come true.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (34:46.96) Yeah.

So you're not wearing sunscreen, basically.

Max Marchione (34:53.582) 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 sun cream.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (34:56.294) Yeah.

Yeah. So you're you're you're we're really, you're wearing it like kind of the old days, like to protect against sunburn, but not to protect against sun quote unquote damage. which is like a lot of people are wearing sunscreen like every day they're, they're putting on sunscreen, you know, wherever they're driving the car, they're wearing sunscreen on their hands or something.

Max Marchione (35:11.0) No.

Max Marchione (35:19.532) 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 yeah, I think sun cream's overused, but yeah, that's my view.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (35:26.33) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (35:39.644) Okay, interesting. Okay, sorry, I cut you off before, but you're saying, okay, son is one of them. Okay, I like that. Like that just seems like, I don't know, even if it doesn't, it seems like it'll at least make you happier, right? Like I don't even know how good their health is, but it seems like you're just gonna be happier if you're outside a little bit more. You're gonna smile a little bit more, et cetera. What else?

Max Marchione (36:01.344) Yeah, for most people I see it improve their energy levels, improve their sleep and improve their hormone balance. the, and 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (36:08.603) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (36:18.086) Yep.

Max Marchione (36:31.182) 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, B1, 6, 9, 12, C, D, E, K, and then there are a handful of minerals.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (36:38.671) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (36:48.219) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (36:55.548) And how do you think about it? Cause it's like, it's a, you know, it's a, you know, I take some of these B six and B 12s and the curcumens and things, but they're like, I don't even know. It's like, I take them. not sure if they're good or they're not. And I'll talk to my doctor about them. And, but you don't want to take like 500 pills every day either. It's just like, it's so, it's so annoying. Like, you know, to do so, how do you, how do you think about

Max Marchione (37:18.988) Yep. think a lot of the ones people are taking are the wrong form. they have additives in them. was trying to, in the pharmacy and in Riyadh and Saudi Arabia, other, was trying to buy a vitamin C and a vitamin D and every single bottle is like, and this is the same in the U S it's full of shit, pro preservatives, additives, soybean oil, canola oil, all sorts of shit. yep. Many of the forms and the dosing is completely off in the U S for example, B12 you can get as metal.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (37:39.588) really? Okay.

Max Marchione (37:48.27) Cobalamin or you say an okabalamin cyanocobalamin was cheap us. That's what you see everywhere. It's nowhere near as effective B9 folate

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (37:57.21) Okay. So I'm looking at my B6 one right now, and then it says, okay, B6, whatever, but says other ingredients, hypoallergenic plant fiber cellulose. don't know what that is. Vegetarian capsule. Okay. Well, that makes sense. It's a capsule. then ascorbic palmatite or something. Okay.

Max Marchione (38:10.179) Yeah.

Max Marchione (38:17.89) Yeah, they're fine. This already sounds like a healthy one. 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 thing's 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (38:38.193) Yep.

Max Marchione (38:45.46) 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. and minerals are the same. People add electrolytes and you add like 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. And what I found is there's all these hacks to increase testosterone. I found literally just get sunlight.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (38:53.276) Oh my gosh.

Max Marchione (39:13.44) improve mineral balance, improve micronutrient balance, and testosterone will improve as a simple example.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (39:20.622) If is there like one test, like, like you look at them like one marker or what? Like if I just get this well, if I just know this thing, this is going to tell me so much.

Max Marchione (39:34.446) gosh.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (39:37.564) Cause one of the problems is, it's like, no, no, you're, you're in the top point. 1 % of people knowledgeable about this stuff. You're thinking about it for the rest of us, you know, mortals. It's just like, it's become so overwhelming. And we're just like, we just want to measure one or two things. We want to know what's going on. We want to have some sort of, you know, we're already relatively healthy. want to, and we just want to make sure we're optimizing. It's as simple to just optimize a small number of things.

Max Marchione (39:38.222) I'm biased, I'm gonna say... yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (40:07.002) And then I try to get that better or something. You know, like, well, I asked this to Brian Johnson. He was on this podcast and he said, you know, resting heart rate, you know, before you go to bed or something like that was, he was trying to like, get something relatively simple.

Max Marchione (40:21.682) Yeah, I'll give two answers. One, and it's bias is the superpower 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (40:33.244) Okay, yep.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (40:43.151) Yep.

Max Marchione (40:49.762) 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 gameable than say superpower score or biological age. But those are three that I think are interesting.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (41:03.162) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (41:11.708) Okay. Interesting. what are, uh, you know, w where do you think is like the most misunderstood biomarkers or when people are talking about it, like where do you think just like either what's in the ether is wrong or the end of humans, right? Like all those, where's where are we misunderstanding things today?

Max Marchione (41:35.726) 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 enclimaphene.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (42:01.808) Yep. Yep.

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

Max Marchione (42:18.38) Yep. I think there's more information in AST and ALT, the liver 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 kind of 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. 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

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (43:06.556) Mm-hmm.

Max Marchione (43:17.634) There's a smaller set of conclusions you can draw from it. You have high APO-B. It's basically like your, their, their eschlerotic burden is high. Your plaque is more likely to calcify or your, your lipids are 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (43:39.886) If you think of guys like Peter T, like he has moved a bit from diets important to exercises more important. I'd say that like that's his arc. and maybe some of the pharmacological stuff is less important and exercises. Like how do you, where do you think that is on the spectrum and where, know, how do think we should be thinking about these things?

Max Marchione (44:02.734) Depends who he's talking to. For the average American, fixed diet. Like if you're talking to an educated and healthy crowd that's already eating somewhat well, then the nuances of diet matter.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (44:12.196) Yeah. That doesn't like, it doesn't make sense to optimize from the 90th to 99th or something. Yeah. Okay.

Max Marchione (44:18.008) Totally. I eat pizza, I eat cookie. I still think my diet's really healthy, but that stuff's fine. I eat croissants, it's not gonna kill me. And I actually... There we go. Yeah. So I think for people who are generally healthy, like us, matters more. For the average American, I think diet matters more.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (44:24.496) Yeah, yep. I mean, I love cookies. I love cookies, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (44:40.316) Okay, got it. So it really depends on where you are on the spectrum and then start with that.

Max Marchione (44:48.366) And look, in the future, pharmacology will matter more than any of it. I was staunchly anti-pharma until a year ago. if we fast forward 100 years, does the future of healthcare look more like perfect diet, perfect exercise, perfect sleep? Or did it look more like a magic pill? Definitely in 100 years, it looks more like a magic pill. And the implication...

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (44:56.396) so what changed your mind?

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (45:09.092) Yeah, yep. Yeah, and you can already see that with these GLPs, right?

Max Marchione (45:15.042) Totally. Yeah. And in some time between now and a hundred years time, a magic pill has to exist. And I contend that 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, more biotechnological advancements.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (45:42.524) One of the problems with the pharmaceuticals, you don't know how like 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, you know, they may, it could even have negative effects if you take them together. Cause these things, it's so hard to test all these different things in different environments.

Max Marchione (46:04.546) Yeah, I don't know enough about that to comment. I 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. I think the other thing is that...

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (46:18.214) Hmm, interesting. Okay. Yeah.

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

Max Marchione (46:31.246) Yeah. Yeah. Um, and look, 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'd give me just a little injection. And that was just normal. Like, well, this was like what? 19, like 79 to 80 and you're getting injections to hear it. She's like, yeah, it's like totally normal. And they all know what to inject for what. And that really shocked me. Um, and it surprised me that that hadn't been more globally distributed.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (46:43.397) Yeah.

Max Marchione (46:59.032) But I do think we'll see more things delivered by an injection rather than via appeal, just because downside is lower and upside is higher.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (47:09.084) And you think like 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. Um, and I have one friend and he, 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, he kind of 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 to really.

Yeah. So we become essentially what I'm worried about is we become a little bit more reliant on some of these. You think that is a problem or do you think that's just, or the drugs are just going to get better or it's just going to be fine to be reliant on it.

Max Marchione (47:37.038) 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 lower weight for some time. So there might've been an argument that your friend should have stayed on them longer to normalize and stabilize that weight. I do think that if you're combining any biological intervention with lifestyle change.

going to be far more effective. But the reality is every year the US gets fatter and fatter. Right? 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. Like, like 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (48:47.644) Now we've covered like most of the fads that people have been talking about or most of the things people are talking about. There's two things that I've seen a lot of people talking about. I don't think we've covered yet. First one is cold exposure. What do think about that?

Max Marchione (49:00.174) Um, good, but overrated. No, I don't think it's going to materially change much. Um, 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. Um, but I think it changes far less than it's good for inflammation for sure. It's good for recovery for sure, but I think it's overrated at the moment.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (49:05.659) Yep.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (49:18.052) Yeah. Okay. And second would be fasting.

Max Marchione (49:24.078) think intermittent, so fasting within a day is, I think good for some people for gut health reasons, right? We're not meant to be snacking all day long. And I think it can be effective for weight loss. Yeah. Yeah. 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 overate. I don't think it impacts longevity much, but controlling for the effects of just fewer calories.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (49:31.985) Mm-hmm.

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

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (49:45.498) Yep.

Max Marchione (49:53.39) I don't think it impacts longevity much longer fasts, I think do increase lifespan. Um, and we understand some of the mechanisms such as autophagy, um, that results in increased lifespan. I don't think they're to make it to the mainstream because like, 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (49:53.467) Yep.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (50:11.856) Yeah. A longer fast. You're really talking about a three, not, not a two day fast, but a three, a three plus. Okay.

Max Marchione (50:17.044) No, yeah it's three to five or three plus, yep.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (50:21.05) And why do you think that has so much, like why do you think that three day is it just cause it's flushing things out? why is it so, why is that so valuable?

Max Marchione (50:29.368) Yeah.

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. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (50:40.378) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (50:51.1) Got it. And do you have your own protocol for it? Like, okay, on day one, no food, day two, you know, a little bit of, you know, miso soup or something. And I don't know, do you have some sort of protocol on it or?

Max Marchione (51:05.626) 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. So your body your your body can burn glucose or ketones for energy, most of the time our body is burning glucose when we intend to enter into ketosis

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (51:14.084) Aha.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (51:18.394) What's does that mean?

Max Marchione (51:33.004) our body burns 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, so in a liquid form and drinking them. They taste foul.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (51:40.337) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (51:51.972) okay.

Max Marchione (52:01.304) but they get you into ketosis faster, which makes your fast easier.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (52:05.852) Interesting. Okay. Cool. Um, you've got a couple of interesting, um, I would say, uh, contrarian beliefs. Um, maybe one, I don't even know if it's that contrarian anymore, but we, you had said a couple of times that seven hours of sleep could make you less sleepy than eight, eight plus hours of sleep. Like, what do you mean by that?

Max Marchione (52:27.214) I just see this for 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (53:02.074) Now you also have a, you're kind of anti-air pod. and, though you are wearing them right now. So what do you mean by anti-air pod?

Max Marchione (53:13.368) 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 on Alzheimer's. I don't think they do.

But I do think that the very, very low probability they could, and because there's a very low probability they could, I would 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 with distance. Intensity is an inverse square law with distance. So if something's that far away, or if something's a foot away, it's not emitting that much EMF.

when it's literally inside your ear, 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, started using AirPods the next way as that happened. There are smart people who avoid them. And there are anecdotes of really advanced doctors, I know cancer doctors who genuinely believe that AirPods are giving people brain cancer.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (54:39.873) wow. Okay.

Max Marchione (54:39.982) When I factor into, 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. Now, sometimes I'm traveling. don't want to bring, I lost my cable headphones. I had, I'm going to 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 cable headphones for that.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (55:02.876) Okay, another thing I saw that you did is you sometimes listen to things at 4x speed, which I don't even know sometimes I don't even know where the setting is to go do that. How did you train yourself to do that?

Max Marchione (55:16.846) 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. makes a difference. Blocking out surround sound. Part of it is doing it often. Right, so just continuing to increase the speed at which you listen. And then part of it is recognizing you've got to process less. That's the reality.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (55:29.583) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (55:42.609) Mm-hmm.

Max Marchione (55:46.178) I'm not going to understand more for XP, but.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (55:46.3) Yeah. And is it just like, are you listening and not doing anything else? Like you're just kind of closing your eyes and then, you know, cause I feel like I can, I can process more, but like if I'm driving or like, or if I'm doing some other thing, which is usually what I'm doing when I'm listening, I'm working out or, know, I do why, why, why lift weights. Then I, I, I don't know. I don't know if I'll be able to process it at that speed.

Max Marchione (56:10.454) Yeah, no, I won't listen to things unless I'm doing something else. Otherwise, I feel like I'm wasting time. So I am doing something else. It's not always 3.5x.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (56:15.004) Yeah, okay. Got it. So you can still you can still listen at three three and a half X.

Max Marchione (56:20.898) Depending on what it is, certainly like Andrew human 3.5 X any day of the week. He's very structured. He's very clear and he speaks slowly. whereas Mark Andreessen, he's not getting 3.5 X. he's.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (56:31.354) No, Mark Andrew said like he is one of the fastest speaking people. Yes. Okay. Got it. Yeah. Okay. Good point. So you can, you can, you can move it around. all right. Two more questions.

Max Marchione (56:40.942) Yeah, also depending on my like mental state. Like sometimes I'm like, I'm in 3.5x mood. Sometimes I'm fuck it, I'm brain fried. 2x. I just wanna like chill.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (56:48.7) Yeah. Okay. Got it. Yeah. And I have like, I listen to a lot of science books and they're like, you know, it's very hard for me to really get over 1.5, 1.6, but then, you know, a typical podcast, might be more at two. I haven't, I haven't, I haven't tried to go over two, but maybe I should. I'm going to, I'm to, I'm going to experiment it with it. I'll let you know how it works. Um, so I know that on my podcast for people listening to my podcast,

Max Marchione (57:13.464) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (57:16.124) 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 two. First of all, you'll get it done faster and you'll think that Orhan Hoffman is just a much smarter person. Our last two questions, ask all of our guests, what is a conspiracy theory that you believe?

Max Marchione (57:34.535) gosh, so many things that I'll get cancelled for.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (57:40.454) People, they don't get canceled anymore. It doesn't happen anymore. Yeah. Okay. All right. That's fair.

Max Marchione (57:43.278) you don't know some of my conspiracy theories. 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (57:53.306) Yep.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (58:12.688) Yep. Or they might for some small number of people or something like that or whatever.

Max Marchione (58:13.275) what a

Max Marchione (58:18.734) Yeah, my response with these things is typically, I don't know. And if there's a very low chance, if there's a 5 % chance I'm going to explore it rather than just saying, no, there's 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 radioactive rock.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (58:28.635) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (58:47.814) Yeah.

Max Marchione (58:47.982) This rock can kill you. That's magic. It's a hand wavy pseudoscience ship. Same with a mobile phone. We're energy around the earth and we're 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. 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (58:52.731) Yeah.

Max Marchione (59:18.326) 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. so I, 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.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (59:28.171) cool.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (59:36.56) Yeah. All right. This is great. Last question. We ask all of our guests and really I've almost asked you this question almost every time. So maybe it's just a, maybe I'm really just asking you for a new one. What conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

Max Marchione (59:52.398) listen to advice. like I think that most advice is not that helpful. We go on Twitter and we read articles about how X 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. know, everything online ends up being marketing.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (01:00:01.029) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (01:00:19.099) Yeah.

Max Marchione (01:00:20.91) So the answer is typically discard 80 to 90 % of advice reason from first principles be hypercritical of advice

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (01:00:28.518) you can't, you can't reason, you can't spend the time reasoning for first principles for everything. mean, it sounds like you're the type of person who reasons much more than the rest of us, but still even like, I have no idea if the world is round really. Like I just haven't, like, I honestly have not really reasoned it through at all, but like, I just kind of accept that it is rounds and you know, there's just, I could, I could probably spend the time improving it to myself, but I just have never done it.

And so, like, there's just certain things you just kind of have to, at some point you just have to go with that's out there based on your experience or based on, otherwise you just don't have the time to do it all, right? Or like, how do know when to go first principles?

Max Marchione (01:01:11.662) 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 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. And yes, that's the main thing that I would say that.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (01:01:22.714) Yeah, okay, got it. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (01:01:30.693) Yeah, yeah, okay.

Auren Hoffman (@auren) (01:01:39.706) Okay, cool. This is amazing. Thank you, Max. Wait, tell me how to pronounce your last name one more time. Marchione. Thank you, Max Marchione for joining us on World of Daz. I follow you at Max Marchione on X slash Twitter. I definitely encourage our listeners to get you there. This has been a ton of fun and I really learned a lot.

Max Marchione (01:01:46.869) Marchione.

Max Marchione (01:02:02.296) Thanks, Auren. This was really fun.