Keith Rabois: This One Number Predicts How Long You’ll Live! Why Stress Makes You More Successful & The “No Days Off” Rule!

0:00People who had the most stress in their life live the longest. The more stress you embrace, the better you perform. If you only have one signal about a human and you want to project how long they're going to live, it's your VO2 max that you want to know and improve. Every day, infallibly, I have at least 10 grams of creatine. I do red light therapy. I do cryotherapy every day. You read the encyclopedia from cover to cover. Well, if the President of the United States has time to read an hour a day, I have time to read an hour a day. One of my heroes growing up was Margaret Thatcher. She says, I could assess any minister in like 30 seconds.

0:31And if she can do it, why can't I? Keith, welcome to the show. I'm excited to be here. You have been dubbed as having one of the most strategic minds in venture capital today. And I think about this a lot, that some of the most successful people in the world, in the tech and investing space, consider themselves elite athletes. So let's flip the script right now and talk a bit more about longevity. I want to know about how Keith treats himself as an athlete. So you've been following me, which I'm so happy about on X for quite a while.

1:02I think you actually found me back in like 2021 when I was like prolifically tweeting about sleep. I probably favorited a bunch of your tweets. Yeah, maybe like, who is this girl? And when I found out you followed me, I was like, oh. Who's this random guy favoriting all my tweets? And I loved that, which showed me that you were, hey, you were one of the few people who were treating their brain like an athlete. So you were sleeping well. Now, Elon doesn't sleep. He's not really into sleep. And then I do see other successful entrepreneurs and investors who are treating their bodies like athletes. So I want to completely dissect you right now from the head to the toe.

1:35And let's talk about blood work, for example. You've gone off and done a whole range of longevity workshops. Yeah, I try to find people who are at the cutting edge of research, but very credible, and see what I can learn. And it's intellectual curiosity applied to basically your body and brain and life. So I follow people on Twitter. I read their stuff. I read studies.

2:05And then if I find someone who has a program that I can participate in, I'm likely to opt into it. The benefit of having some schedule flexibility and some resources like money is you can opt into doing some of these programs. So, for example, on the purely sports side, but it involves recovery more than actually training. In 2010, I started doing this training program with a firm called Exos, where basically anybody who wants to play in the NFL trains there. Lots of World Cups winning soccer teams, including the Germans, train there.

2:37And I started doing this sort of for fun, mostly to learn about how do elite athletes train and how do they recover and what's the latest sort of research and techniques. And then I started bringing friends along, actually. So now I did the first trip myself for a week and just read in between sessions. And then I started bringing friends and made it like a group experience. So I've been going back, you know, for like 15 plus years. So I learned, you know, some techniques about training, like literally training.

3:09Also, I had some fun. Like I remember there's a funny anecdote when I was trying to do these drills and Colin Kaepernick was laughing at me because I wasn't doing them. I was not performing them that well. Well, 2010, I'm guessing you weren't doing it. Were you doing VO2 max testing back then? They did do. They did the old school VO2 maxing. Yeah. They didn't know, you know, it was more for athletic purposes than now. You know, one of the things I've learned in the last two years and really started to appreciate is how if you only have probably only have one signal about a human and you want to project how long they're going to live,

3:39it's your VO2 max that you want to know and improve. And so, but back then when we started doing the VO2 max, it was more for improving performance. Let's say I was soccer field or basketball court than it was for life. Now it's more about health. So I'm obsessed. I have all my friend, like I ask all my friends, like, what's your VO2 max? I ask founders, what's your VO2 max? And if I don't think the answer is like age appropriate, I'll be like, you need to change this. I've been having this dialogue with one of my partners at KV. You've got your graph memorized.

4:09Yeah, I've got the graph, but it is amazing. And I highly recommend anybody at least get it tested once a year. I think once you get it tested and have a real baseline, you can use things like your Apple Watch or whatever. They're not super accurate, but they'll give you a relative feel of your improving or regressing. But you need to get the canonical test done, which is unfortunately mostly like a treadmill with an unpleasant mask. But it's incredibly accurate at predicting how long you're going to live. For high performance people that have goals in life that they want to achieve

4:40in a competitive field, you're talking about performance. So it's like performance optimization versus illness. And they're almost like a Jewish spectrum distribution. Performance optimization is like one tail. And then when you're sick, and unfortunately, if you're very ill, you're on the other tail. And so the medical profession is great at dealing with this tail. And almost nobody in the medical profession is really expert at how you optimize your performance. Eventually, I think those will get synced together.

5:11But that's why I wind up going to almost two different professions, actually. And then, unfortunately, they'll share some blood tests, but they usually want their own panels too. But the thing is, anyone can take your blood, right? Anyone can. A phlebotomist takes your blood, right? It takes a very specialized person to be able to interpret it. And when you're looking at this, a very good person is going to look at your blood work and base it on two things, trends and ratios. Yes. Based on your age, sex, and goals.

5:42You and I, right now, are optimizing for something completely different. No, that is very true. So the trends, fortunately, I started working with a concierge doctor in 2003. Yeah. So I have 20-plus years now of trends, which is very helpful, especially when something goes wrong, by the way. It's easy to isolate, like, what is unique to me as a person versus, like, no, there's some very aberrant behavior circumstances here. On the performance side, I think you really do,

6:13because the reference ranges are all wrong. So this is where you need to go to a performance specialist is anything that looks like a normal result is almost surely not the right answer if you're trying to optimize certain things. So every reference range will come back, like, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine. And a really good performance, someone like Dr. Galvin will be like, I don't care what the performance range is. You need to be, like, 20x better over here. Like, VO2X, we can even talk about it this way. You do not want to be in the middle of the current bell curve for VO2 max. What's your VO2 max?

6:44It's probably 60, which, for my age, is actually pretty good. That is phenomenal. That's more than the elite group. I don't know your range. It's probably even a little higher, because, actually, like many people, I hate the test. Yeah. And so I kind of give up a little early, knowing I have a little bit more bandwidth, but I know I'm already, like, past whatever threshold they want me at. Did you wear that harness? I was, like, a kid like that in school. Like, when I was young, I have this problem. If you give me a goal, once I hit the goal, I get a little lazy. So, like, when I get an A on a test, I would just turn it in. Yeah. And, like, just want to be done with it. Yeah. Versus trying to get a better grade. Yeah.

7:14It's, no, though, I don't wish that test upon anyone. However, if you do do it once a year, it's phenomenal. If you do it once a year, it's great. And the reality is, you can probably get a pretty good proxy in about six minutes. But also, it takes about eight months of pure, real training to change that. To change it. Yeah. So, here's the debate, is what are the best ways to train it? Because, depending upon, this is where it gets interesting, is depending upon what your baseline is. So, if you're out of shape, you can make massive gains really fast.

7:46You know, go to a Barry's Boot Camp class, you know, do sprints outside your house or something, and you'll see gains. Now, the issue for a lot of my friends is their results are mediocre, but they're actually training a fair amount. Now, that takes, like, a very thoughtful, calibrated approach. You know, if you're ready, like, a proficient runner, if you're ready to play sports, and your VO2 max is low, that actually is a signal that you might actually have, like, real health issues, too. So, actually, I've had this happen twice in close friends of mine, where either their VO2 max was off, or their resting heart rate was off, but they were young and in pretty good shape.

8:30And when they showed me their data, I was like, you need to talk to a real doctor, like, right now. Yeah. And it turns out, probably both of them actually had substantive issues that would not have been caught by any standard medical test for a 30-year-old. You're not wearing an Oura ring? I don't wear, or I wear this infallibly, like, I actually have this other quirk that if I don't wear my watch and I do a workout, I have this mental block that the workout doesn't count. Yeah. So. I'm the same. I wear a Garmin and a heart rate monitor. And if I don't wear that, it doesn't work.

9:01It doesn't count. I go absolutely crazy. Psychological. Like, once a year, something happens, and, like, my battery dies, and I have to do a workout before I can find a way to recharge it, and it drives me insane for, like, 24 hours. Only because I don't know what my heart rate is, and I've just been doing this for the past 10, 20 years. I just like to track year-to-year progress and stuff like that, and so if I'm not wearing it, it messes up my ability to see whether I'm improving, whether I'm dialing in different zone things, or I want more, a different type of workout. Like, I have changed, you know, some of my goals and edit that, but, yeah, this is with me once I wake up.

9:36I don't wear it at night, actually. I use the H-Sleep to track. Yeah. But once I wake up, until when I go to bed, this is definitely on me, and any time I go to the gym, do anything athletic, even if I'm, like, dancing, I probably have it on. And it picks up as a workout. Yes, it does. I want to close that loop. I asked you if you're taking any more supplements other than creatine. Most of the supplements I take, actually, would probably surprise you how vanilla they are. Like, it's omega-3. You know, it's, like, standard multivitamin. I do take NAD plus supplementation, which we could talk about.

10:08Very, almost nothing I take is what I would call exotic. The closest to exotic would be two things. Tally Health, that is a product produced by David Sinclair, has a couple of different versions of supplements. I do take some of his stuff. And I have a couple of little quirky things that Dr. Galpin added to my regimen, but they're pretty boring, actually, honestly. This is not, I don't take, like, peptides or anything.

10:40Like, I don't do anything that would seem unusual. I take green tea, which is, there's a lot of good evidence, actually, that if it's a green tea, omega-3, like, this stuff is very solid. Omega-3 is part of my top tier and whey protein. I take vitamin D. When I was living mostly in Miami, it was easier to get vitamin D naturally. New York, it's a little harder, more difficult. But I take vitamin D supplementation. I've got pretty convinced that turmeric is magic. Cinnamon and turmeric. But, again, they're pretty vanilla. Turmeric, I actually did injure my back once a few years ago.

11:10And I had the benefit of seeing two very, very good specialists, one in SF and one in New York. And the New York one convinced me that rather than do all these crazy things, I should just take turmeric. And so I've been addicted to turmeric since. Yeah, I think for that, the mechanism of action is in curcumin and the substance in that. So what that does is it's able to block this inflammatory biomarker called NF-kappa B. We don't have to go into that, but it is wonderful from a clinical perspective.

11:41I do want to argue the – we don't have to go into it, but we can argue the NAD if you want. Yeah, I've seen some recent research about that it's not – It's not effective. Yeah. So I found it was to be like potential upside, very limited downside. I read all the studies about cancer. I understand them. It doesn't cause cancer is the most important thing. That's like fake news. But if you had cancer, you would not want to take it, but that's a different set of circumstances. You do a lot of things differently. I do do non-cellulinae stuff. I do red light therapy.

12:12Very addicted to that. I try to do it every day. I do cryotherapy. I try to do that every day. You've got red light panels at home? I have red light panels at home. Yeah, me too. Which makes it easier. You know, like a lot of things in life, if you want to do it regularly, you want to make it so convenient that there's no excuses. So I have red light at home. I don't have cryo at home. Fortunately, there's cryo within walking distance, you know, at least in New York. And so I try to do that almost every day too. You are very interesting.

12:42You're treating yourself like an athlete and yet you are one of the best investors of our time. So on that, okay, predicting how long you're going to live is one thing, yes. And it's one of the strongest predictors of both health span and lifespan. So, for example, one of the arguments Dr. Galpin made to me, those of you who should follow him on Twitter, was a certain percent improvement of your view to max is more important or will have less effect or whatever than quitting smoking.

13:12It's like that's the order of magnitude. Correct. Impact of shifting from like, you know, 20 or 50th percent to top 10 or 25th percent. And so that's pretty eye-opening when you realize like how much time, public education, money has gone into anti-smoking crusades and campaigns, which is a bit effective, I think. But fundamentally, when someone's like, you know, if you just improve your VO2X max by like five points, it's as impactful as not smoking, your eyes like light up. And then they show you the graphs that prove this.

13:44It's actually true. Well, how does... By the way, I've never smoked. Me either. How does increasing and optimizing your VO2 max make you a better investor? So here's where it gets a little bit complicated. I can take it at a high level and then try to build it up bottom level. One of the things that's challenging about being a VC as you get older is many things about being a VC do not age gracefully. Building companies is kind of a young person's game in many ways. You can debate exactly how young.

14:14It's a little bit like professional sports and staying relevant as decades go by, technologies change, founders grew up in different generations using different technologies, different techniques, different cultural norms even. Staying relevant is really difficult. So I think one way you do that is you just keep your body and brain to be very young, very intellectually curious, very sharp. I actually have some fun now. I get to occasionally spend time with professional athletes who've been able to perform at a high level, more like an advanced age, like 40, or like DJs is a good example, where being a professional DJ at the high end of the profession is typically a very young person's game for lots of reasons.

15:01But there's a few. Tiesto is basically my age. Armand van Buren is basically my age. And so when I get to meet up with them, I'm more curious not about their music, but about how they stay at the top of their game at roughly my age. Because if they can do it against the up-and-coming 21-year-old DJ, then I should be able to do it against the up-and-coming VC and stay relevant to the up-and-coming founder. Yeah. Is there something that you've noticed against all of these athletes, entrepreneurs who are nearing the 50-40 zone in age and something that they do differently that others don't?

15:38You know, the funny thing is 80% of this stuff is basic common sense. Yeah. They optimize their sleep. It's like they take their sleep seriously. They try to avoid alcohol, like some of the people I named, completely off alcohol. But it's like sleep and alcohol are just like inversely correlated in many ways, quality of sleep, depth of sleep, all that stuff. That stuff is fundamental. Like I saw Brian Johnson's on this crusade where he's right. You know, 80% of what you can do is like get high-quality sleep consistently. And then, yes, you can tune other things, but the fundamentals trump a lot of the advanced stuff.

16:15So just start. So like back in the day, one of the first investments I made when I became a VC was age sleep. It was intuitively obvious to me. What year was that? 2013. Okay. It was intuitively obvious to me that the best way to improve people's life, health, professional performance was better sleep. And in 2013, was there any product on the market that would improve your sleep? Blackout shades, you know, air conditioning. But not really. And then I met these founders, and they talked about how they showed me studies that if you lowered your core body temperature, you would induce more deep sleep.

16:55I was like, perfect. Now you have to build a product that does that, but connecting the dots seemed easy. Interestingly enough, the way I met the founders is kind of an interesting story. So I had a friend that was a tech, successful tech person in the Bay Area, and he was terrible with his sleep. He was very smart and very successful, but he would like not sleep, go out all night, like whatever. But I would always be yelling at him, admonishing him that he has to sleep more and stop going out and stop doing this crazy thing. Anyway, about eight years go by, and he emails me and said, I found the perfect company for you.

17:30It's about improving your sleep. So it was all because I'd been admonishing him while we were working out about his need to sleep that he remembered me. And then as soon as I found it and they showed me the study, I was like, great, we can connect the dots and productize it. And that became 8 Sleep. So I led the seed round and then led the A for that company. You know, I proselytize about it all the time. I've probably purchased more than many. Like every place I stay, how's an 8 Sleep? Like I go stir crazy if I have to travel and I can't get my hands on an 8 Sleep.

18:01It is really effective. Yeah. 8 Sleep was my very, very first sponsor back in 2021. See, they're really good. They obviously have taste. They believed in me and I believed in them. I'm up to the pod five now. So I love my 8 Sleeps. Yeah, I want to stay on this because one of the best things you can do for your brain and to become, you know, cognitively acute and be able to make the best decisions is resistance training. And I'm guessing you're doing that. Look, well, let's put this right. There's things that clearly have some potential upside and that have no downside.

18:32So sleeping better, all upside, hard to measure exactly how much it improves things, how much it expands your lifespan, but it clearly has no downside. And the lack of sleep definitely has significant downsides that are very empirical. Same thing is a little bit like creatine. I started taking creatine three years ago. There's clear evidence that it improves cognitive function. I used to resist it for like aesthetic goals for a variety of reasons you can talk about. I got comfortable that that was no longer a major concern.

19:04But as soon as I started reading the cognitive research every day, infallibly, I have at least 10 grams of creatine. At least. Some of the research on the cognitive stuff is actually maybe you should be even pushing the dose of that up. But right now I'm on the 10 to 15 grams program. Why are you taking between 10 to 15? When do you take 15? Well, so for aesthetic purposes, 5 grams is probably the right amount. But if you look at the cognitive studies, you could argue it's 20 to 25, but that feels like a lot. Yeah. Because there is processing with your liver and stuff.

19:35And I don't think you want to push the envelope there. But the cognitive studies are very compelling. Now there's like three to five years worth of them. You know, this was three or four years ago. There's only one or two, I think. So it's like, it's pretty novel. But I'm completely convinced that it's a good idea for almost anybody to be at creatine. Yeah. Do you feel the difference? I actually don't. Although I do, there are some recent studies about if you have poor sleep. Yeah. That if you take 15 grams, you can suppress some of the symptoms for at least that day.

20:07It's not a good idea to rely upon creatine to avoid sleep. But on, you know, like anybody, I have days that I don't sleep perfectly. I wake up in the middle of the night. I have to travel across time zones. On those days, I will take another incremental 5 grams. And I do think it has some impact. It does. It does. There was a recent study within the last year that showed that you can offset some of these symptoms of sleep deprivation if you have around 15 grams of creatine. And likely, if you go and do a bout of high-intensity exercise after sleep deprivation, which consists of around six hours, I would say, then you can also offset the effects.

20:44So I do that to, again, I'm going to do the high-intensity exercise anyway. But if I have had poor sleep, the first thing I will do is go right to the most high-intensity exercise I can tolerate. The first eight minutes is usually very painful mentally and physically. If you can get past that, endorphins, adrenaline kick in, and, you know, the rest of the class or whatever is easy. But it does have an adrenaline sort of power refresh, you know, sensation that does avoid or mitigate some of the effects of poor sleep.

21:20What are the other supplements that you're taking? Because we mentioned earlier offline that you did a whole range of biomarkers. So you've tested your blood aggressively. I'm guessing you've done around 22 vials of blood in one take. Oh, yeah. It's not particularly fun. No. You almost pass out. But if you can get 1,000 biomarkers tested and then optimize from that. I kind of split it into two worlds. So I do this with, like, my physician and medical team. And they're looking for mostly different things than, like, someone like Dr. Galpin would. There's some overlap.

21:51Yeah. So I do both. One thing I've noticed is that the men that I work with are incredibly intentional about what they eat. They know about their protein, their creatine, their supplements. But very few of them know about what they're putting on their bodies every single day. And this is why I've started recommending Based Body Works. Now, it's not for me, but it's a men's grooming company built around clean plant-based formulations without sulfates, parabens, or endocrine-disrupting chemicals. But the products still perform exactly the way you expect it. I always tell my girlfriends who are trying to conceive to get their partners on this

22:26so the endocrine-disrupting chemicals in other products doesn't disrupt their conception process. You know, I tell them just switching from your shampoo or your body wash is one of the easiest upgrades that you can make. So if you want to get some of this, then use code NEURO for 20% off at basedbodyworks.com. Rather than taking the approach of how do you take a company to exit, I want to know about the brain behind these strategic decisions. I remember a story that your mom tells a lot, which is that at the age of four,

22:57you read the encyclopedia from cover to cover. And that is very interesting to me. So tell me, have you always been intellectually curious? Well, I guess, you know, I started at four reading the World Book Encyclopedia cover to cover. I don't think it's changed much since then. It's probably a good predictor of who'd be a good venture capitalist because basically the job is to learn new things every hour, every day. I like to joke that venture capital is the only job where you get paid to learn new things. Journalists are supposed to learn new things, but they don't get paid. But we actually get paid for learning new things.

23:29So I've always been that way. You have to be a little bit ADD too. Like intellectual curious is the more pleasant way to say it. ADD is a little bit more reality too. Yeah. I think when I hear this story, it kind of reminds me of Elon. He did the same thing. He ran out of books. He read the encyclopedia, ran out of books in the library, and he was just hungry for more. And it makes me think that are all of the greatest minds in history. And even if you read the Walter Isaacson Jobs autobiography, it says the same thing. Voracious readers, I've noticed that it's not the only signal that predicts success,

24:02but many, if not most, if not virtually all of the most successful people in fields I've worked in, politics, law, tech, are voracious readers. Patrick Halson's a voracious reader. And as you probe into people's history, my parents incentivized it too. I grew up in a middle-class household, and we definitely had scarce resources. We couldn't just spend money frivolously. But I had an infinite budget for books. As long as I read the book, I could buy as many books as I wanted. And so what did I do? Since I had limited budget for clothing and limited budget for other things,

24:35I substituted into reading, and it worked magically. So I would just take a trip to the bookstore, and then I'd go to the – fortunately, I had a library that was a public library. Well, two public libraries that were pretty proximate and very nice. And so I would show up at the public library and probably check out 40 books. And then actually read them all, and then go back a week later and get a new 20. And it became, like, addictive to you, and that's what you learned. Oh, yeah, I love to read. I started, you know, maybe interestingly enough, I didn't start with nonfiction. I actually started with fiction for the most part.

25:07I used to read these, like, classic, like, spy novels, like thrillers, like Jean Le Carre and Frederick Forsyth, and later Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum. And that made me a proficient reader. I enjoyed reading, so I just read more. And then over time, read more and more nonfiction and substituted now to be 90% nonfiction, actionable, things that, you know, sort of are productive and that I can leverage, versus fiction I rarely read now.

25:37I try to occasionally when I go book shopping, find a new piece of fiction, but I sort of have to force myself. It's like eating your vegetables. It's very fascinating to me that somebody like you, with where you're at right now in life and in business, has even time to read. Well, you sort of force it. So one of the books I read when I was growing up in high school, or maybe junior high school, was one of the books Richard Nixon authored, which is one of my favorite books of all time, is called Leaders, and it's a profile of, like, the most important 10 people, like,

26:07that, like, different countries in his career. The two chapters, though, that are most fascinating are the introduction and the, whatever, epilogue or something. The introduction, he talks about when he was in the White House, as President of the United States, he forced himself to read an hour a day. And I just woke up and said, well, if the President of the United States has time to read an hour a day, I have time to read an hour a day, period. What's your thoughts just on that subject? I saw not long ago a graph, I think it was around three months ago, that was publicized that showed that 100 million Americans don't even need a fifth grade level reading.

26:42And that's because of AI. How do you feel about that? Well, it's sad. The way, if you learn, I have a simple philosophy in life. If you learn to read, write, and basically perform math at a high level, you can do anything you want, like you have the raw ingredients to teach yourself to succeed. And so I'm adamant about you must learn to read, must learn to write, and must learn to do math, period. Everything else is optional. Yeah, it's interesting. The math and the logic behind, I think we're losing this now, even just because of the advent

27:17of chat, GPT, and artificial intelligence. It's so easily becoming something of the past. You know, I was a mathematician before I got into this, and I remember being able to do sine, cosine, just with my hands. And now I'm working out 20% of a check after dinner. And so it's quite scary to see that kids are going through this life not knowing how to do basic arithmetic. But on this level of reading, I was doing a lot of preparation for this podcast. One of the things that kept coming up, one of the themes about you was that you are able

27:48to form very high-performing teams, being able to really look at people, restructure, and look for intelligent outcomes in people. Do you think you got that? Was that a gut instinct? No. Unfortunately, you know, I get asked this question a lot about how do you get better at this, let's say, for founders, other investors, even politicians, they're hiring staff and people like that. And as far as I can tell, there isn't any great book on this topic that's very actionable. I'd say the best book is there's a book called Who, and it's got some subtitle that's pretty

28:24good, but it's not awesome. And given how important this is, like building a team, hiring, assessing people, you would think that there should be some library somewhere of insights that you can read, and I have not found it. I've tried, I keep trying, every time I go to the bookstore, I look for something, I scan books, I've read many, nothing that I find exciting, interesting, actionable, unfortunately. Maybe one day I'll have to write it myself.

28:55But so the way I've had to learn this is like many other skills in life, trial and error. It's like a muscle. You kind of have to interview people, assess people, hire people, learn from your mistakes and learn from your successes, what worked, what didn't. You learn hacks and techniques of shortcutting. Right now, I'm very proficient at, like I can look at like a LinkedIn profile and immediately sort into yes, no, maybe. And just being able to sort that fast.

29:25The maybes take study, but the yeses and noes are pretty quick. And so that allows you to move very rapidly. I also learned this, another, one of my heroes growing up was Margaret Thatcher. And also in high school, I read her, let's see. I read her autobiography. Her first volume of her autobiography. Yeah. It was amazing. And I remember reading it. And in there, there's a sentence where she says, I could assess any minister in like 30 seconds. She might have said three minutes. It's either 30 seconds, three minutes. And I was like, boom, that's my goal is I need to be able to learn to assess people in

29:58three minutes or 30 seconds. And if she can do it, why can't I? And so that was always the goal. I think I actually can do it now, most of the time, pretty damn well. And it's very relevant and very useful as an early stage investor. But it took, you know, years to practice that craft, devise insights, edit the insights. It's still fraught with error. Like there's definitely a high variability there. But being able to know when someone has very high potential very quickly is extremely valuable

30:33as a VC. I mean, I love what you said about being able just to go onto LinkedIn and being able to specifically look at that. What is it on LinkedIn? I've never heard anyone say that. So there's several things. One is like you're looking for and, you know, some of this would be, let's say, mundane. But it's worth restating. You know, sometimes restating the obvious is useful. And then there's something that's a little more subtle. So one is just simply like, is there a trajectory of success? Like, have you broadened yourself? Do you get increasingly asked to take on more difficult challenges?

31:04What kinds of challenges are you usually assigned or what do you gravitate to? There's a lot of signal in there. A little bit more subtle is depending upon the pool of people that you were working with at various places on your LinkedIn profile. There are things about that pool that probably apply to you. So for example, let's say, you know, in my generation, you worked at some prestigious high profile investment bank. You probably have the capability for pretty high work ethic. Like young investment bankers, you know, in my era, easily work 80 hours a week, easily.

31:39And so if you thrive at Goldman Sachs, plus or minus 20 years from like when I grew up, there's no way that you don't have the ability to work hard if you want to, period. There's no way you could have survived two years even as an associate there. Or like, you know, there's places that are notorious for IQ. Like there's just no way to get a role and succeed for years and get promoted without pretty high intellectual horsepower. So if you know something about the pool, the hardest thing about LinkedIn is when there's

32:10some role and responsibilities that you don't have any familiarity with. So I see a company I've never heard of. I don't know how to sort of triangulate or normalize against that. But for companies that I've worked with, for companies that I know, people that I've worked at, companies, you know, that I understand their hiring process, it's fairly easy to detect a lot of things. And then what I do with that is when I do interview a candidate, I skip over the things that I already pretty confident that the candidate will be good at. So if I think you have strong work ethic, I won't ask any questions about it.

32:43I'll only ask questions about things that I'd be more concerned about. Like, so I might, I may be concerned about creativity. So I'll just probe on that. So it makes the interview that scarce time, that 20 minutes, 40 minutes, 60 minutes, two hours, whatever it is, be highly productive, high leverage, because I'm only trying to learn things that I can't learn from paper. Do you remember the day that you met the founder of DoorDash? Oh, of course. And how did you look at him and think this is the one? Well, so he was an intern at Square. So it was actually pretty easy.

33:14So I had a lot of experience. I remember the day when I first met him, when there was a VP named Alyssa at Square who wanted to hire him as an intern. And I had never approved a business intern before. I only believed really in design interns and engineering interns. And so she knew I'd be somewhat critical of the idea. So she's like, you need to meet this guy. And his profile was actually, even back then, pretty interesting. While he was, so first of all, he did really well in math at Berkeley, like 4.0, which Berkeley

33:45back then did not have great inflation, certainly not in math. So that was impressive. Secondly, he had, while he was working, managed to navigate an internship or maybe even a more formal title, I think maybe associate, at a pretty good VC fund. Those are not easy roles to get your hands on. And then he had worked with Alyssa at eBay PayPal. So I remember meeting him in the conference room. I remember exactly what conference room we were in. And he basically talked me into the role. But then by the time he was leaving to start a company, he went to GSB.

34:22I tried to convince him to not leave, to go to business school. He didn't listen. But when he finally found what he wanted to do, he used the time at GSB to network actually with CS grads and CS students. So he had co-founders, which he actually wound up working with two that he met who were undergrad CS students. And then by the time they had an idea, a specific idea, he came by my office and I was pretty sure I wanted to invest. But that was easy because of the prior, like, history. The hard, assessing, so actually this is a good point.

34:54I've found the first thing to learn and get really proficient at is assessing people you know well. Yes. People you've worked with, people you've grown up with, people you went to school with. Lots of data points. The most difficult thing about assessing is random stranger acts where you have no context other than maybe a LinkedIn profile and you meet them for the first time and you have to make a judgment call. Should I hire this person? Should I fund this person? That's an order of magnitude more difficult than assessing people you've worked with. I actually sort of point out to my colleagues all the time that anybody who I worked with,

35:28I need to make that call as a VC 90%, 99% correctly. Like, there's no excuse for being wrong about that because I have enough data points that I just need to be able to draw the line of this person's potential and, you know, really shoot myself if I'm wrong. Random strangers, if you're really good at early stage investing, if you get those calls right 30, 40, 50% of the time, that's like Hall of Fame level because you just have so few data points, I mean, since you were math, geometric point, you can draw one data

36:01point, you can draw an infinite number of lines through. You have two data points, there's only one line you can draw. Yeah. It's interesting because you said that in the earliest days of PayPal, there was about three to 400 of the best tech employees in the world and there was only about 17 barrels. Barrels. Yeah. What's a barrel? So a barrel is a person who can basically take an idea at a pretty conceptual level and just make it happen. Yeah. It sounds simple, but very few people can actually do that. Zero to exit?

36:32Yeah. There's a better, there's an old school expression that maybe is more compelling and more intuitive called fire and forget. You just aim someone at some direction and then you just don't have to think about it. They're going to make it happen. And if they can't make it happen, they will come back to you for feedback along the way in a timely manner where you can help, you can inject yourself before it's too late. As time gets closer to deadlines, the options and the ability to intervene successfully really radically reduce.

37:03I used to draw this graph of like, as T gets close to zero, your options like compress fairly substantially. So those people are very scarce, very rare and indispensable to building a company. Has there ever been a, in your perspective, a time where you thought you had failed, you made the wrong decision? No. I mean, if you're ambitious, you're always like trying to be better. So it's not even a failure thing. It's just like, you want to be better. Like investing is actually a rough business.

37:34You're not, you're only really as good as your last investment. Like it doesn't, building a company is interesting. You create momentum and for a while you have these accumulating advantages. So once you get the right company rolling with the right product, market, team, you have a lot of momentum for a long time. Investing, you have to go back to the drawing board at least every year. It's kind of like a sports team. You win the Superbowl this year. That's great. You wake up next year, your record's zero and zero again. And so if you're ambitious and you want to be successful in investing, you're always

38:09on edge. And because of these dynamics, which we don't have to talk about in this podcast, but there are a lot of dynamics that make you worse as an investor as you get more experience. Because of those dynamics, you have to fight uphill, I believe, and get better every year if you're going to offset that. And so that's what I'm trying to do. But then I do things like high intensity training, which do sharpen your brain. I try to read.

38:34The high intensity training also has the benefits of health, whether it's via 2max or other benefits. The other signal I love, you can debate this a little bit more, is resting heart rate. I personally like a two-minute recovery better, but not everybody knows how to measure their two-minute recovery, and even this isn't perfectly accurate, but resting heart rate's really easy to measure. You know, anybody can learn to measure the resting heart rate. And so I'm always optimizing that kind of stuff. Yeah. I think one of the biggest things that high intensity training gives me is the ability

39:07to manage my emotions better. And I think that's another proxy for success. Well, I like it. I also like it because it takes my mind, like many successful people, my mind does ruminate on topics a lot. And so there's not that many things that take my mind off the topics. But if you do a high intensity workout, you don't have the ability to think about your work stuff. So you get an hour where you can kind of take your brain off of all the other topics. And I think that is refreshing and useful. And so when you get out of the exercise, your brain is ready to fire.

39:40And I think that's been productive. Like my phone, I don't get distracted with my phone. Like my phone doesn't come with me when I'm doing high intensity training. If I do a regular workout, I do sometimes like many people in a regular gym, do take out my phone. Yeah. But you get me at a super high intensity workout. There's no time. There's no possibility checking my phone. And I think an hour or two not being near my phone is a very productive offsets the rest of my day. You said that out of about seven years of exercise, you probably only missed seven days. And even that has really upset you.

40:11Oh, it drives me crazy. Like, so I measure this and post it every once a year. The benefit of having worn this is there's various apps that synthesize the data and make it like more intuitive, like UI wise. But anyway, so since 2000, at least 15, maybe before I measured, you know, every workout every day. And in the last few years, actually the last two years, I haven't missed any days, but over the last seven years, I missed seven, which is annoying. There's one day coming up that I'm a little nervous about. I know my schedule, like in advance for the next six months.

40:42I'm like, there's one day it's going to be really challenging to get my normal workout in. So I'm going to have to be creative. What is that day? Oh, well, I have some commitments in a weird location and it depends on what kind of gym I can find around there and whether there's a run I can do. I'll try to find it, but like I'm like nervous. But so yeah, I never miss. Those seven days like include things like one day I traveled across an international time zone and I couldn't figure out what to do about that. Another day actually wouldn't have happened, but I had incredible like flight issues and

41:14I had left more than enough time to fit in real workouts. But between the confluence of like two or three things going wrong, I wound up like basically sitting in an airplane all day and there was just no way around. Like the wedding was going to start by the time I got to the hotel. I barely had enough time to shower and put on talks. So that was very frustrating. It's like things like that. And then there was one day I missed due to this back injury. Literally, when my doctor found out the first time, when I talked to my regular doctor about it, my concierge physician, he's like, this sounds like you're going to have to be like

41:49pretty casual for about a month. So when I talked to my specialist, I was like, you have about 24 hours to fix me. Yeah. And he did. You seem so maniacal about this, right? Yes. Which is great, right? So let me derive where this comes from. Yeah. One of my favorite expressions in life is called no days off, hashtag no days off. It's kind of like an expression that became popular for a while when the Patriots were winning a few Super Bowls and when they had their parade to celebrate, you know, whatever

42:20Super Bowl number or X it was in a row, Bill Belichick on the podium was like, well, the reason we won was because we took no days off. And so it became like a good mantra. Um, but if you take a step back, um, everybody talks about compounding habits. And I think basically I just treat my workouts fitness program as brushing my teeth. It's like, you don't skip brushing your teeth. And if you do it every day, you're just going to continue to do it every day. And what I'm afraid of actually is if I take one day off, then the next day I might take

42:52a day off. Like if you just don't allow yourself to think of it as optional, it never becomes optional. And I'm terrified that if I take one day off, there's always some reason why I should take a day off. Like, you know, I slightly aggravated my back this morning. I can, in theory, take off my afternoon workout or an evening workout tonight, but I'm not going to. But what, if you start thinking that way, then well, in theory in the morning, maybe it feels a little uncomfortable and maybe I miss that. So it's like, if you just don't allow that to enter your brain, it just never enters your

43:24brain. Is this how you treat investing with this much precision and obsession? A little bit. I think people who are successful in any field are a bit obsessive. Like I think obsession is what yields success in a craft. Like if you want to be a great basketball player, the best way to become a great basketball player is take 500 shots a day when you're growing up. Every day. Is there anything that you're afraid of? Yeah, I'm claustrophobic, so I hate MRIs. I was going to ask you if you've done a full body MRI. I do, but I have to, fortunately, well, actually, thank God for mid-journey just announcing

43:58yesterday a solution. Mid-journey just announced, yes. It's the best thing ever for me. It's unbelievable. I'm not super claustrophobic, but moderately claustrophobic. Is that in the US? Are we going to be able to do it here? Yeah, it's ready to go. This will solve my life. So anyway, when I have to have an MRI, if my head has to be under the MRI, I go crazy. And so fortunately in the US, there are these open air MRIs to like one side, but there's like about one of those per city. Like New York has one, but there's like one or two locations. Miami had one. There's like one location.

44:30So if the MRI is mostly optional, you can set it up there. The resolution is a little worse, but it's very convenient and I can tolerate that. But a full MRI over my face would absolutely drive me insane. And, you know, the doctors were like, well, you should just take Cavalium. I'm like, no, I don't take drugs. Like, don't take drugs. They're talking about not interfering with your brain. Like I refuse to take any drugs unless the doctor convinces me, A, it will address not the symptoms, but the root cause of a problem.

45:03And they can convince me that it's very unlikely to have cognitive impact. And actually, they don't usually know. You have to probe a fair amount. There's a lot of drugs that people prescribe frequently that actually do pass through the blood-brain barrier, which therefore means it's not particularly safe. The other thing about the mid-journey MRI is it has no radiation. So regardless of what people are taught, there is no safe, in quotes, dose of radiation. You may have, like, just like we make trade-offs in many things in life, we do things that are

45:34not perfectly safe all the time, drive a car, you know, et cetera.

45:39You should not really want any doses of radiation in your life. And so the ability to do, like, this new product as an alternative to an MRI with no radiation is incredible. Isn't that interesting that an art AI company has formulated this? I'm just ecstatic, though. This is the happiest I've been in such a long time. Both it's great for society. Yeah. Resolution's better. Cost should be better. All the benefits. No radiation is definitely better.

46:09But it solves my personal problem before, God forbid, I have to have another MRI. Healthcare has become incredibly specialized. One doctor looks at your hormones. Another looks at your cholesterol. Someone else reviews your imaging. But very few people actually connect all the pieces together. And I think that's the biggest problem in healthcare right now. You just don't know where to go. This is what I like about Kinsin. It brings your health information into one place and connects you with licensed healthcare providers who can help you understand what your data actually means.

46:41So you guys know that I spend a lot of time talking about personalized medicine. That's because I don't believe there's a single longevity protocol that works for everyone. There's no one size fits all. Your biology is different to mine. That's why your strategy should be too. What they do is they help you move from collecting health information to actually using it. Go and check it out at kinsin.com slash neuro. Take the quiz. And then if you use code neuro at checkout, you'll get 20% off your subscription order. By the way, guys, they provide clinician guided wellness programs and metabolic health programs.

47:12I want to, before I go into stress, I actually want to talk to you about the world of biotech. So I just spent some time in SF meeting some amazing founders in biotech from, you know, there's brain computer interfaces. There's neural chips for solving blindness, glaucoma. There's just so many things happening right now, especially in the therapeutic space for Alzheimer's disease. Most of them are therapeutic and, you know, addressing maladies. Yes. There are some that are supposed to be performance enhancement. That's where I would personally draw a line.

47:43I probably would not be willing to use anything that would affect my brain for the potential upside. It's pretty Darwinistically evolved to perform pretty well. So anything that had potential downside, I'd be very... Therapeutic. So, but what about neurotech? I personally wouldn't. Why? Because I'm afraid of... I think each person's brain that performs really well has its own quirks.

48:13So, like, for example, one of my quirks is almost every conversation I've had in my life with anybody I can recall. Yes. Terrifies people sometimes. No, I heard that about you. Yes. So it's very useful sometimes. But that's not normal. And I'm afraid, like, if you do anything to my brain, I might lose that. Or I heard a story. I was watching a podcast with a very successful founder yesterday. And he was talking about how basically he has 1,200 books in their office. And he basically can tell you what page any passage is on.

48:45So I wouldn't want to interfere with his brain either. That's, like, a very useful skill. You know. So I think if you get, you know, really proficient at some cognitive stuff, you don't want to play around too much. With things that could change what's made you successful. It's a little bit like athletes. A lot of professional athletes become very successful with a fairly unorthodox, let's say, shot or swing in baseball. Shot, basketball, swing. If they're already the best in the world of what they do, you do not want to be the coach playing around with that shot too much. It's, like, don't fix what's not broken.

49:15Yes. So anything that doesn't touch the blood-brain barrier, I'd probably be fine with. But I'm very leery. Now, if I had, you know, some traumatic experience, if I had some malady. There was a few years ago where I had a scare that I might have, like, a brain cancer. It turned out I did not. I thought someone, there was one symptom I had that could, one likely result, one likely cause could have been a tumor. It turns out I don't. But, you know, obviously I would do things differently and relax some of my constraints if I had a tumor.

49:48Yeah. So you're not really interested in getting elective brain surgery to get the neural chip in? That's where I would do, like, all kinds of crazy stuff elsewhere, but probably not that. Okay. That's interesting. But are you excited about, like, are you thinking of investing in the biotech space? Oh, investing, yeah. Absolutely. Our fund at Coastal Ventures, we invest in many of those companies. We have lots of brain interface stuff. We have lots of things that can improve, really serious issues that people confront. We have a whole portfolio. We have a whole medical team. So we'd love to invest in this space.

50:19But personally, I would probably only use most of these things if I had one of those, you know, unfortunate issues for me or my family. So let's go to stress because you've said publicly, and I quote, stress is the key to health, wealth, and happiness. Yes. And you love this book called The Upside of Stress. The Upside of Stress by Kelly McDoodle. Most people don't really understand stress. The way that I like to conceptualize it is in order to grow your muscles, you need to place stress upon this system in order for it to grow. So, however, right, however, chronic stress can give you the opposite effect.

50:54Well, let's define. So I think, think of stress, people use the term a little bit loosely.

51:01You want to challenge yourself constantly. And the challenge is what leads you to be better. But her research in the book is incredibly compelling. So she starts in the beginning of the book, and there's a TED Talk for those of you who want to watch. The book's better than a TED Talk because she wrote the book out for the TED Talk, so it's got more depth to it. But she started the research, and the thing that comes through in the TED Talk and the first chapter of the book is people who had the most stress in their life live the longest. And that's what shocked her. That's what led her to dig into this.

51:32She used to believe all the canonical things you're taught about stress is bad, blah, blah, blah. And then she saw the studies and just said, okay, something interesting, an anomalous is going on. I need to dig into it. And then every chapter is a proof that the more stress you embrace, and that's the key, you have to embrace it, the better you perform. And you can show it at the micro level, like the cellular level. You can show it at the output level, like your performance on tests or interviews. Like they do these experiments with like interviews, kind of a fun, easy experiment is you have three groups.

52:05One group is told stress is great. The other group's told like try to avoid the stress, minimize the stress. One third group's told nothing. Every single version of this test, the group that's told stress is good outperforms the other two groups. Any version of a test you give these people, you can give them an objective test, subjective test, interview panel. Doesn't matter. They outperform every single time. Do you think that the reason why people aren't as successful is because they're afraid of stress? I think so. I think this is – so basically what she also exposes in the book is most of the research that led to this sort of cultural norm that stress is bad was actually torturing people and torturing animals in the 1950s.

52:42It wasn't stress. It was like, you know, like let's subject people to like literally torture and then see if that's good for them. But shocking, chronic torture is not good for people's performance health. But she actually does go through all the original studies that led to this conclusion. And it's either real torture or borderline torture. It's not stress in the sense that most of us use the term. Is it psychological stress? Is it physical stress? Both. Chronic stress – so let's talk about chronic stress. There is a caveat here.

53:13Chronic stress, which means constant pressure where you don't have a feeling that you can control the outcome, is bad for you. So there's two ways to do that. One is you can modulate some of the chronic nature, like the consistent nature of it. And some of it's giving you belief and or ability to shape the outcome. So that's how you turn that into a positive. But I highly recommend reading the entire book. She's an assistant professor at Stanford, like totally worth reading for everybody.

53:43It'll change your life. This is the number one book when people are like, what book should I read that will most likely change my life? This is the book I give people. But wouldn't there be moments – and you can probably speak more profoundly to this – where founders are on a roll, but then they're not able to – something happens. A divorce or a death in the family, and they're not able to manage that stress, and everything goes downhill after that. I think – look, everybody goes through life with significant challenges. Yes. Significant others, your own health. It is part of life. Like I was watching, you know, the Knicks winning their championship last week, and Mike Green, the broadcaster for the Knicks and for NBC, had this great line at the end.

54:21He's like, life isn't perfect, but there are perfect moments. And so, you know, everybody has to navigate the imperfect moments, but it's also the mentality you bring to the imperfect moments that does improve your odds of succeeding ultimately. I feel like I would thrive working under you only because of one thing, and it's what we spoke about. It was this notion of psychological safety and high-performance teams. Can you talk about what you think about this realm and being able to criticize people publicly?

54:52Yep. High-performance people are very demanding, period. It's the only way – like, think about it this way. Take a competitive world. Again, pick your profession, tech, investing, Wall Street finance, DJing, music, sports, whatever sport you like. It's hyper-competitive, and if you want to be the best and outperform everybody else who aspires to do the same, you typically are obsessive. An obsession comes with very high standards and very high demands on yourself.

55:23If it's an individual sport, it's on yourself. Typically, it's not just yourself. It's everybody around you. One of my sort of favorite books to recommend people who want to really see it on steroids is – and in sports, you can read this book, Jordan Rules. It's about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. It illustrates it very well about how the best are demanding of everybody around them and either don't suffer fools or mediocrity very well. If you want to read it in a – you want to read about it, there's a kind of amusing movie, more Devil Wears Prada.

55:58It's a little bit more amusing version of the story. You want to read the more sad version but relevant version of Whiplash conveys some of the obsession that we'll yield success to. But that's what being very successful entails. Now, that goal is not for everybody, and everybody doesn't have to have that goal. It's perfectly fine to wake up and say, I don't want to be an Olympic medal-winning gymnast. But some people do want to be an Olympic medal-winning swimmer. And if you want to be that, there are consequences and changes you have to make in your life to make that dream reality.

56:32Have you read Walt Disney's biography? I have not. He borderlines on this obsession. And when he was talking about the way that he got Snow White to where it was and got this standing ovation,