Will Ahmed: Whoop CEO Explains Heart Rate Variability and Sleep Optimization | TUH #061

The best cyclists in the world were quietly doing this as a mechanism again to figure out how much training they should take on. The CIA was using heart rate variability as a form of lie detection. And so I just found the statistic very intriguing. And I was shocked that I had never heard of it before because it was showing to be able to have predictive power for your body's status, take.

Something that we thought would be a metric that would only be measured in a hospital and putting it on your wrist. This is the next generation of medicine. What it was like going up against the big boys, Nike, Apple, Apple, formidable competitors that are actually trying to participate in the same space. What was this journey like for you?

Welcome to another episode of the Ultimate Human Podcast. Today we are thrilled to have Will Ahmed, the visionary founder and CEO of whoops. Will has been at the forefront of the wearable technology revolution, transforming how we understand and optimize human performance with large data. And today we're going to take a deep dive into the world of wearables, explore the future of health tech, and discover the stories of resilience and innovation behind whoop.

Let's get started. Hey, guys. Welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecker, where we go down the road of everything anti aging, longevity, biohacking, and everything in between. Human Know the guest that we've got on today. I'm actually super excited about this interview because I'm so intellectually curious about the data and rarely do I meet someone who is actually using big data to influence the health metrics of human beings. And today's guest is on the forefront of that. No question. I've had the pleasure of getting to know him over the last few days. We had, we did some biohacking here in my unit, which we'll talk about this morning. But you know, we, we share a common love for data and how it can influence the lives of human beings and how we can use this data to improve everything from sleep to recovery to performance to athleticism to just your daily life. So I'm really, really excited about today's podcast. You know, interestingly, I, I, I, I never, I usually do a lot of background research on, on my guests. I did very little research on you because I'm already, I have a thousand questions and I know we're not gonna but really pumped for today's interview. Welcome to the podcast, Willamed.

Thank you, Gary.

CEO and founder of whoop, which even before I was going to have him on a podcast, became A huge fan of, of the whoop. So, you know, I think you and I are both data nerds.

Correct.

And so nerds, Nerds unite. Tell me a little bit about your journey from, you know, being interested in, in the data to actually manipulating this into a functional wearable for human beings. Because at the time that you were doing this, I feel like you are a very, very early mover. I mean, just, just the thought that you could take something that we thought would be a metric that would only be measured in a hospital, like heart rate variability and putting it on your wrist to what it was like going up against the big boys like Nike, Apple, some really formidable competitors that are actually trying to participate in the same space. What was this journey like for you?

Well, I got into this space, you know, some 15 years ago when I was growing up. I was kind of always into sports and exercise. I, you know, my parents would drop me off to a variety of different activities and for me that was kind of how I function and felt happy and, and felt balanced. And I ended up going to, to Harvard and playing squash at Harvard. And you know, being a college athlete, you spend three or four hours a day training. And I was very go, go, go at that time in my life, I thought more was more. And by the way, most I think of athletics at that point in time, this is kind of around 2010 call it was more is more. And no one was really talking about recovery at that time. No one was really talking about sleep at that time and just got interested in, well, what could I measure about my body to know if I'm training properly. I was someone who used to over train and that's kind of the ultimate betrayal, Right. As an athlete, you get fitter and fitter and fitter and then you kind of just fall off a cliff and you don't know why.

Right.

And I wondered if there were certain things I could measure about my body to predict that I was going to overtrain. And I was shocked by how little data there was to be able to measure about your body and specifically in an athletic context. And so that led me to doing a lot of physiology research while I was a student at Harvard. And you know, I read hundreds of medical papers over the course of my time there, and I ended up writing a paper around what I thought you could measure to be able to tell someone what they should do to manage their performance. Wow. And so I did a lot of research on heart rate variability and resting heart rate and sleep and, you know, different measurements for exertion and heart rate.

Variability then was very much of a diagnostic tool for pathology disease. Like it wasn't being used for performance.

Yeah, it was really pretty unknown. But the, the studies, albeit on very small sample sizes, were quite intriguing. So, you know, in the 80s, there were power lifters that were using heart rate variability from electrocardiograms to figure out how much weight they should lift in the morning. There were, there were, you know, the best cyclists in the world were quietly doing this as a, as a mechanism again to figure out how much training they should take on. The CIA was using heart rate variability as a form of lie detection. And so I just, I found the statistic very intriguing and I was shocked that I had never heard of it before because it was showing to be able to have predictive power for your body status. And I said to myself, well, why isn't everyone measuring this if it's so predictive? And it just turns out it was a technology problem. You know, the, the electrocardiogram was, you know, $20,000 hospital equipment required nodes to be put all over your body.

Right?

And, and so, you know, very naive question of a 20 year old was, well, why can't we put this in a better form factor?

I mean, that's, that's, what's so incredible is that you're, you know, you're, you're basically harnessing a technology that existed but was too cumbersome to bring down to the masses, right? And so here's this incredible metric that could lead performance athletes and everyday laypersons to better recovery. And the secret to performance really, really is, is recovery. But you know, in the beginning, I mean, it must have been really clunky for like I'm, I'm envisioning like, you know, the, you know, the old like Apple iPhone, this whole big clunky like shoe size thing that you put up to your, to your head. I mean, so how, how did you make this transition? What were like your early prototypes? I'd love to see some of them.

I'll show them to you.

Not impressive.

Now we had the real like garage where I founded the company in 2012. By that summer, I had graduated from Harvard, but I was still working on campus and I was recruiting a lot of different engineering types and mathematicians and just really, really bright young people. And the goal was to develop prototypes that could measure heart rate and heart rate variability from the wrist, which just hadn't been done before. And in particular, heart rate variability hadn't been done before. And in particular, measuring heart rate from the wrist during exercise hadn't been done before. Wow. Because previously you needed the chest strap, which is a pretty cumbersome, uncomfortable thing to wear. It has issues with data transfer. There's many products that are just too uncomfortable especially for women to wear. And so I asked myself, hey, how could we replace that technology, too? And so we started developing prototypes. And they were really ugly, cumbersome prototypes. But under the hood, there was a ton of math and data science because the challenge for. We measure heart rate and heart rate variability optically, which is the little lights you can see underneath the whoop. One of the challenges for measuring this data optically is that motion can corrupt the data. And so you are combining all sorts of different sensors. So we have, you know, optical photodiodes that we're combining with accelerometers and gyroscopes to understand how much movement's happening in any different direction alongside what's an optical signal that we're getting back from your pulse wave.

Wow.

And it ends up just being an incredibly difficult math problem. And. And it turned out that I was in kind of the perfect place in the world to have a hard math problem.

Yeah. Yeah, it did. And. And for people that don't really have a fundamental understanding of what heart rate variability is, I think it's. It's a term now you hear all over the biohacking sphere. Yeah. What is heart rate variability? Why is it important? And what. What do the different numbers mean? We had an incredible discussion about this last night at dinner because I'm one of those people that my heart rate variability is not that high. Even when my sleep scores are good, recovery is good, strain is in a great place. So give us kind of a fundamental understanding of what heart rate variability is and why is it so important?

So heart rate variability is this lens into your autonomic nervous system. Right. And quite literally, it's a measurement of time between successive beats of the heart.

Heart.

So if your heart's beating at 60 beats per minute, it's not actually beating every second. It's a little counterintuitive. But it'll be beat like 1.2 seconds and then 0.8 seconds and then 0.7 seconds, then 1.3 seconds. And it turns out that variability in the amount of time between successive beats is a good thing because it's a sign that your autonomic nervous system is adapting to its environment. Your body's self regulating. Your autonomic nervous system consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. So sympathetic is activation. Right. Heart out, blood pressure up, respiration up. You know, if you have a, a stressful thought, the building's on fire, all of a sudden there might be a sympathetic response. Fight or flight, you know, exercise. Right. Like these are things that cause sympathetic response. Parasympathetics, all the opposite. So heart rate down, blood pressure down, respiration down. It's what helps you fall asleep when you inhale sympathetic, exhale parasympathetic. So heart rate variability is a measurement of how balanced your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are. And you typically want to see your heart rate variability be higher. All things being equal. Heart rate variability is a very sensitive metric. In any given moment, it's changing. Right. For the reasons that we just discussed. And WHOOP in particular is measuring heart rate variability 24,7, which is quite fascinating. We have one specific use case of heart rate variability, which is to understand your body's recovery. So probably the single most novel thing that Whoop introduced to the market now, eight, 10 years ago, was the notion of a recovery score. Every day, right. So you wake up 0 to 100%, red, yellow, green. And that score is really trying to help you understand how prepared your body is for the day. To take on load, to take on exertion, and, you know, to ultimately perform.

Extremely accurate, too.

Yeah, it's powerful.

It really is. I mean, it never is off. When my recovery is really good, my workouts are better. I noticed that obviously it's tied directly to sleep. When I have, you know, those days when I have 100% sleep scores, I have 96, 97% recovery. And I, I feel cognitively and physically the difference. And I. And I notice it too, in my workouts. It's like in the middle of a workout, I want to push and finish the workout rather than just using my own sort of willpower, own stubborn willpower to get. Get through a workout. Because I'll, I'll just through discipline, kind of just push myself through.

Yeah.

But I noticed that, you know, that that recovery metric is absolutely spot on. When it's in the. What's in the green, I feel great. What's in the yellow? Kind of don't notice when it's in the red. I listen to it now.

Yeah. It's a great mechanism for telling you when to go even harder and telling you when to hold back a little bit. In general, I think people could modulate even more what they do to their bodies. You can probably push yourself even harder on days when you're green. And you should actually, when Your body's run down or you're in the red on whoop, maybe do nothing at all or really just focus on recovery modalities. So just back to heart rate variability for a second. One of the other things about heart rate variability is it's incredibly personal. Right. You just talked a little bit about your own numbers. So what we do is we, we baseline you to you, and the key is to understand how your heart rate variability is changing relative to your baseline. If someone came up to me and said, hey, I have a heart rate variability of 45 milliseconds, is that good? I. I wouldn't know what to do with that without being able to look at some data over time on that particular person. Yeah, yeah. And so what Whoop is doing it is, is it's constantly looking at 7 day and 30 day moving averages. And so the reading for this morning would be based on how your heart rate variability looks in comparison to those readings. And in particular, that reading is a reading that we're taking during the last five minutes of slow wave sleep.

I mean, right before you're getting up.

Yeah.

Okay.

So. So WHOOP is incredibly accurate at measuring sleep in general. And we can spend a while talking about sleep if you want.

I definitely want to because my audience is very interested in sleep. And I'm about to launch a sleep challenge. So.

Okay, so we'll go right there. So. So if you ask a client, okay, how much sleep did you get last night? They might say, okay, I went to bed at 10, I woke up at 5, I got 7 hours of sleep. Well, what actually happened is they spent seven hours in bed, Right. And of that time, the seven hours in bed, they were in four different stages. They were awake, they were in light sleep, they were in REM sleep, and they were in slow wave sleep. Now, awake and light aren't doing a lot for you, you know, whereas REM and slow wave sleep, that's like, where all the magic happens. REM sleep is when your body is restoring itself. It's when your body produces 95 of its human growth hormone.

Wow, 95 of growth hormones.

Yeah. So people who want to get stronger in the gym, one of the best ways is try to get more REM sleep.

Right.

Because you're rebuilding your muscles after you've been working out.

We always say that your strength is not built in the gym.

Yeah, you're breaking your muscles down.

Yeah, that's.

And then, you know, slow wave sleep, that's when your, your mind's recovering. And so it's a really powerful combination to be getting a lot of REM and slow wave sleep. And that's when you'll find that your body's ultimately performing at a higher level.

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And we know that when the, when the brain gets into a deep, relaxed state, you know, and activates a system called the glymphatic system, which is like the lymphatic system in the, in the body, the glymphatic system in the brain for eliminating waste and repairing and detoxifying and regenerating. So we want to regenerate the body, but clearly we also want to regenerate the brain. So would it be a safe assumption to say that, you know, your REM sleep is like your body's rest and your deep sleep or slow wave sleep is the, is the brain's rest?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And actually it's the opposite if I, I may have misspoke, but it's the REM sleep is when your mind's repairing. Slow wave sleep is when your body produces 95% of its human growth hormone.

Okay, so in slow wave sleep is when. And slow wave on. On whoop is called deep. Yeah.

Right.

Okay, so the deep, the deep sleep is when you're actually, your body's repairing, you're producing that growth, growth hormone. And I've looked at a lot of growth hormone studies, natural circadian growth hormone studies where, you know, there's a few pulses during the day, but your biggest one is at night. Yeah. And in fact, when, you know, when, when clients, we put clients on peptides and try to enhance the amplitude of that growth hormone pulse. We always had them take the, the peptide late at night. Right, right.

Right before sleep.

And we also have them take it on, on an empty stomach at least two hours after a meal. And you know, I notice a lot of things that impact my sleep. We were, we were talking about this before, I think, I think sleep is finally becoming something that people are developing a routine around. You know, because we have routines around getting our kids to school, we have routines around our exercise. You know, we have a morning routine but, but the majority of people don't have good sleep hygiene and they don't have a good sleep routine. And I think a lot of it's because we don't have data, you know, on, on sleep. Yeah, Most people just basically judge by how they feel, by the, how they feel in the morning. And the fact that you have this technological metric now where you can actually get non opinionated data on what really is affecting my sleep. Not what do I think is affecting my sleep, what really is affecting my sleep. And I, I definitely want to spend some time talking about sleep. In fact, right before we got on the podcast, you were showing me some of the metrics.

Totally.

That you checked that I found pretty fascinating. I'm going to start, I'm going to start doing the same thing. I'm actually excited for the next 10 days because I'm gonna, I'm gonna start tracking all these things and I mean I have theories around red light therapy, I have theories around sauna on cold plunging, I have theories around PMF mats in my bed. I recently started using something called eight Sleep, which, which has had a positive impact according to eight Sleep and Whoop. On my, on my sleep, which is just a way of cooling my body and using different temperatures throughout the night to sort of elongate these timeframes. But if we were to break sleep down for my listeners and talk about what are some of the greatest hacks that we can use to enhance sleep that are supported by large data from whoop.

Yeah, totally. So just for a second, back to the notion of someone who spent seven hours in bed getting seven hours of sleep. What you're actually going to really focus on is, well, of the seven hours, how much was REM and slow wave sleep. So what was your total hour of REM and slow wave sleep? And someone who spends seven hours in bed could get 45 minutes total of REM and slow wave sleep. And someone who spent seven hours in bed could get five and a half hours total of REM and slow wave sleep. So that's just, you know, an ocean of difference. And the person who's getting 45 minutes versus the person who's getting 5 and a half hours, I can guarantee the person who's getting 5 and and half hours has a wonderful life. That person is like doing great, I can promise you. And that's on the outlier high side. And then the other is, you know, on the outlier low side. And I imagine the person who's getting less than an hour has all kinds of problems. So the question, you know, beneath your question around what are the hacks are what are all the things that you can do to optimize the amount of time you spend in bed getting restorative sleep.

Right, right.

And just increasing that number of restorative sleep. So one of the best things you can do, and this, this shows up in my data personally, but it shows up in the whole population of whoop is going to bed and waking up at a consistent time.

I hear that all the time. And so true for me too.

It massively increases the quality of your sleep. There's been a number of studies that have shown that people who go to bed and wake up at the same time get a higher quality of sleep. And we've now looked at this on a pretty massive data set. And that variable is actually more important than total duration in bed.

Right.

Which if you think about it's kind of an amazing thing. Like I imagine you've spoken to people about sleep and they've said to you, you know, Gary, I just, I've got so much going on, I didn't have time.

Yes, well, how much time?

How much time do you spend in bed? Six hours. Six and a half hours. Let's make that six and a half hours. Great. Yeah. And, and a lot of this also goes back to. You can only really manage what you measure. Sleep is this, you know, sort of black box, third or quarter of everyone's lives. And so I really recommend starting out by just measuring some of it. So going to bed and waking up at the same time, that's huge. Let's talk about removing certain destructive experiences or behaviors. So, you know, alcohol is a killer.

Alcohol is the worst.

Yeah.

You actually showed me you actually showed me yours. And we'll throw it up on the screen, if you don't mind. I'll throw some B roll up on the screen so they can see it. Because I'm, I'm, I'm fascinated by some of the things that actually showed no impact. Like they were neutral.

Right.

They're not helping you or hurting you.

Yeah.

And then some were. I mean, alcohol was this just wide red line.

So I've got it here. And I don't know if the screen can pick this up, but we'll share it after the. You know, there's a page on the Whoop app which shows you how all these different variables that Whoop is measuring or that you're inputting into the app affect your sleep or affect your recovery. So this is the impacts page where essentially I'm able to see some of the specific things that I'm tracking, how they're affecting my body's recovery. So my sleep, for example, that has a big impact on my recovery. And just getting over 68%, I know, is a hugely important thing. So that's kind of like minimum viable for me. Meditating. Consistent bedtime, consistent wake. So here are some things that are more neutral or I'm collecting your data on. Okay, Air travel is negative. Being in the high stress zone throughout the day, late meal, alcohol. These are some of the things that are negatively impacting me. And what's powerful is you can go into the Woop journal and you can literally decide what you want to track against. So acupuncture, sugar, medications, air travel, alcohol, anxiety, bloating, blood pressure meds, breath work, caffeine. I mean, this list just keeps going, right? It's about 100 different things that you can track to understand how these different things are affecting your data or affecting your body. So for example, let's say you like doing intermittent fasting. Okay, well, report the days that you do it versus don't, and let's see how that's affecting your sleep. Let's see how that's affecting your recovery. Let's say you're trying a new supplement like magnesium or, you know, marijuana.

Right.

Like, these are different things that you can. Melatonin. These are different things that you may or may not take. And you can see how they're actually affecting your body. And so, you know, for me, meditation is really beneficial. Consistent bedtime, consistent wake time.

What was the big green one at the top?

So this was in terms of getting more, in terms of having a higher recovery. Whenever I get over 70% of my sleep performance or 68% of my sleep performance, that makes a huge difference. So that's like an important tipping point for me. For some people it might be 85%, for other people it might be 65%.

Right.

But again, that's where WHOOP will help you kind of figure out, okay, what is that minimum viable tipping point for you where all of a sudden you're going to see a big recovery impact, tra, air travel, very negative high stress zone. That, that. So WHOOP also measures stress throughout the day. That's the other way that we're using heart rate variability. If you're in a high stress zone for a lot of your day, especially in a non activity setting to your work and your tents and you know, you're sitting and you're, you're sympathetic dominant, that's going to affect your sleep in a negative way. In a negative way. Late meal for me is huge. Alcohol is the biggest killer. Most people have been on WHOOP for a while and I know that there's probably some WHOOP members listen to this. Like WHOOP is something of a salt on, on alcohol because it shows up so vividly in your data how negative your recovery is the next day, how low your heart rate variability is the next day, how disrupted your sleep is. And for a lot of people it can just be two drinks and it's like all of a sudden you're, you're in a completely different.

Yeah, that was the really surprising thing for me was the relatively small amount of alcohol for demonstratively negative outcome. That's why I just cut it out completely.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's really quite bad. Being hydrated makes a huge difference. This is also where it gets helpful to measure your data because then you can start trying different things. You know, you've got some interesting, different supplements that, that like we're drinking hydrogen water right now.

You got the full hydrogen experience this morning.

Yeah, we got to come back, we.

Got to come back to that for sure.

Gary, put me through the, through the ringer this morning of biohacking.

Yeah.

And so like I'm gonna start tracking whether if I drink this hydrogen water before bed or in the morning, if that's going to start to have an impact on things like my stress data or my recovery data so you can run these little AB studies on yourself. Let's talk about the bedroom environment for a second.

Right.

All things being equal, really dark bedroom, good air quality, good humidity, low noise, temperature. Cold.

Cold.

Yeah, so, so those things in General, most people, the room's a little too bright or there's these little lights. If you travel a lot like I do, and you're in hotel rooms, all these weird little lights.

Yeah.

Rooms are often a little worse.

Like these alarm clocks. They might like from 1992, you know.

Or like an iPad this big right by your head.

Yeah.

So. So I like to wear a sleep mask in a lot of. In a lot of environments that aren't my home.

And I always wear a sleep mask. That too, is one of my.

This can be a controversial one because it goes both ways, but sharing your bed with your partner or your spouse, you know.

Yeah.

For some people, we see huge boosts in their data. For other people, you know, there's. There's probably. It's not as good or it's not as effective.

Well, probably, I would imagine for light sleepers, you know, one of the things that we do is we do gene testing, and there's a. There's a gene mutation called compt. Catecholomethyltransferase, and it's a. A gene that. That. That governs the downregulation of catecholamines, which are class of neurotransmitters that create awakened state. They're. They're. They're linked to fight or flight. And in. You know, when these rise, they create a awakened state. So a lot of people are body tired, but mind awake, so that. So they lay down to go to sleep at night, and they're tired, but their. Their mind is just. Just awake. And they tend to have a tendency to be lighter sleepers. So, you know, if their spouse is getting in and out of bed to go to the restroom or something like that, they know every time they get out of bed. My wife could get up or down three times in the night. I have no idea. I'm a deep sleeper, but she's the polar opposite. She's a very light sleeper. If I get up twice during the night, she knows I'm up and back in bed. She usually says something to me when I get back in bed. So she's actually a light sleeper and she's awake. But I saw you on a diary of a CEO podcast. You said that you and your wife have good cuddle hygiene. Yeah, it was really funny. What did you call it? Sleep. We have good sleep hygiene or something.

Sleep chemistry.

Good sleep chemistry, which is really good. So if you're one of those couples that's got good sleep chemistry, your. Your spouse is actually good for your health.

That's Great. So. So that's a collection of, of things that can really help. The other thing is, is when you start measuring your sleep, you accountable, I think, to your decisions right before bed. So I mean, even just the mindset of, okay, I'm gonna spend the next 20 minutes getting into a routine of going to bed, I think for a lot of people there can be a sort of frantic nature to going to bed. And you start to realize too, the conversations that you have with your, your partner or the things you do on a phone or all these right before you go to bed actually meaningfully affect the quality of your sleep.

Yeah.

You know, if you get into a little disagreement versus, you know, just lying there breathing happily, like immediate effects in your, in your first two hours of your sleep.

Yeah.

And. And so you don't want to be.

Going to bed talking about your finances and yeah.

You know, or yeah, you did this during the day or you didn't pick up or this and that, you know. Right. You kind of want to stay away from that stuff right before bed. The couple other ones that come to mind. Caffeine is, is highly personal in general. You know, if you want an ultimatum, you drinking coffee after 2pm or caffeine after 2pm may negatively impact your sleep that night.

Right.

So that's something to look out for.

The half life of it is almost 10 hours. So.

Yeah.

So some people realize that they're like, it's a big European thing to have like a double espresso after dinner.

Yeah. And look, people metabolize caffeine differently.

Right.

But yeah, that, I mean, that would be a nightmare for me.

Oh, it would be a nightmare for me too. And I, and I metabolize caffeine fine, but I can tell that it keeps me in a more. A much lighter state.

Another amazing hack that I'm addicted to is blue light blocking glasses. So, you know, it's just a red tinted glass and you put them on anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours before bed, and immediately you just feel calmer and you'll start to even feel sleepy if you're not used to the glasses. And what they do is they block all the blue light in your environment.

You know, highly stimulatory to cortisol.

Yeah.

You know, creating awakened state in the mind when you get a lot of blue light.

Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm still probably optimizing a little more as being a CEO than a human. So I'm on my phone a lot, you know, in the evening sometimes my wife and I'LL watch TV or something. So like all of that light is stimulating your brain and saying, stay awake, stay awake, stay awake.

Right.

And so when you wear these glasses, it's like your get out of jail free card, you know. Right. All of a sudden you, you know, you're, you're much sleepier.

It's an inexpensive life hack. You know, I, I, I feel the same way. I mean I have the red light filter on my phone, you know, triple click and it, and I'm gonna, I'm.

Gonna send you our new Woo Blue light black.

I'm pumped about that. You told me that before.

We spent a long time actually researching the right tint to ultimately create the, the best filter for the blue light.

Right. And, and you have data on that now? See what I, what I'm fascinated about by, by Whoop is that I come from a big data background and you know, the mortality space where we were predicting life expectancy, we'd use large pools of data to hone in with incredible accuracy on, on what ailments were going on in people's body that actually did have a demonstrative impact on lifespan and health span. Because, you know, lifespan was essentially what we were trying to predict for the maturity of a life insurance policy or an annuity or a reverse mortgage. But I think in a lot of ways accurate large data is even more actionable than things like, you know, clinical trials, randomized clinical trials that are only looking at one metric and isolating one metric. Because you can take large pools of data on large pools of human beings across multiple ages, across, you know, sexes and, and you can get very accurate information about what is having the, the biggest effect on sleep, on recovery, on strain. And this data is, it's, it's constantly educating itself. You know, I mean like you, the amount of data that you probably gather now versus even two years ago, that's exponential. There's gotta be some exponential difference. And, and the thing is it's actionable.

Right.

So when you get back to some of these sleep hacks. So consistency in bedtime, cool environment, dark environment. Have you actually gotten people to opt into using the red light and glasses and saying, oh yeah.

Okay, so we have this capability in the, in the WHOOP Journal, which I'll bring up here for a second.

Yeah. And we're going to show this on the, on the screen for you guys too.

Yeah. So when I go in the WHOOP journal, I can hit settings and I'm just going to look at it so I can remember all like we have About a hundred different things that you can track. So acupuncture, sugar, ADHD meds, AG1s on here, air travel, alcohol, anti anxiety meds, artificial light, bloating, blood pressure meds, blue light blocking glasses. And like I just got into B, but you know, so blue light blocking.

Glasses are on there.

Yeah, yeah.

So I can opt in and say, click, I wore those tonight.

Yeah. So what you can do is you first say you want to start tracking it. And so you opt into tracking it. And then what you do is every morning it'll ask you certain characteristics about the thing that you chose. So like caffeine, it'll ask you, okay, how many cups of coffee did you have and when was your last one? Calcium might ask you, okay, you know, how many milligrams or whatever did you take of a specific supplement? You know, we've got cat in bedroom on here, cat in the bedroom. I mean, chemotherapy, clean eating, cold shower, compression therapy. So there's just an enormous number of, you know, creatines on here. Cupping, you know, obviously all sorts of massage things. Certain diets are on here. Dairy free diet, your device in bed in a dim.

Now are these your metrics or these. Are you able to see?

Whoops.

Metrics and suggestions. Will it push me? Suggestions saying, you know, red light glasses have.

Oh, totally. So you can actually go into some of these different things and look at. Okay, from a population standpoint, how is this affecting WHOOP members?

Wow. So that is really good data.

So, so it's, it's pretty fascinating. And we, we published data on it too. So we'll show, because we're looking at it on a pretty large data set. So we'll be able to show here are some of the different behaviors that were positive or negative for WHOOP members.

So, so all of those metrics with, you know, dark, cold, consistent bedtime, blue light glasses, you can actually record whether or not you slept with your partner or didn't, your partner wasn't in the bed. And you can actually see what kind of effect that's having. I think probably the notion of what kinds of conversations you're having going into bed, those are huge. I mean, I know my wife in particular is very sensitive to that. She'll shut me down when I actually try to have an intense conversation and not, not a confrontational one. But when we're talking, you know, we're building a business together and when I talk about business deals that we have on the table, she's like, I'm not having that discussion right before sleep. Because I'll go straight to sleep and then she'll lay up all night just thinking about what we just talked about this. Squirrels will start running.

Yeah. I mean, you know, do you want to look at your email right before bed or not? Right. So there's certain things, it's like just being a little more intentional. And I do think that when you start measuring it, it just. It just dials up your awareness so high.

Yeah. What I'm most excited about is what we talked about earlier was, you know, measuring some of the modalities, you know, that I'm doing. Because, you know, when you. When you start doing red light and cold plunging and. And, you know, and breath work and sunlight exposure and grounding PEMF and all of these different things, you sort of, you know, assume that they're all cumulatively having. Yeah. A good effect. But it'd be really nice to understand which I'm going to start tracking and publishing which of these is having for the time spent the greatest impact.

Yeah. We were looking at your restorative sleep a little earlier, and I think you were around three hours. And then there was one night you had four to five hours of restorative sleep. And so we were talking about, okay, well, the day before that or the night leading into that sleep, what were some of the things you were doing? Right.

Yeah.

And so whenever you have these sort of like great outlier moments of positive data, it's interesting to try to unpack. Well, what did I do to create that result?

Yeah.

And for.

And for me, it was. I remember the day before that was a Sunday that I had that sleep. But the day before, I had gotten up and gotten morning sunlight exposure. I'd done my breath work. I had, you know, some sun exposure on my skin. And then that night I. And it was actually kind of a stressful day in terms of, you know, I had a big speaking engagement.

Sure.

Anytime that I speak, I always. You always get the butterflies. And then you're up on stage and you're sort of amped up on. On adrenaline, especially when, you know, large crowd. So it wasn't stressful, but I was very in a heightened state of. Of awareness. And. And then that night I used the PMF mat. I actually used mouth tape, which I'm intermittent about, but I used mouth tape that night. And I also use the. The, you know, my, My little goggles. I use a soft mask now. And so I sleep in the complete abyss, you know, darkness. And. And the room was very cold, so.

So that might be your formula right there.

Yeah, I think that's dialing into my, my formula. And you know, I have this sleep challenge coming up in, in another week, and I really data, you know, basics that they can measure, inexpensive basics that they can measure. Everybody can make the room darker. Everybody can chill their room down a little bit more. Everybody can try to be consistent about sleep. And I think being consistent about sleep is also being consistent about making small promises to yourself. Like, I noticed you kind of cut dinner off last night. You didn't cut it off. You were done. But you're like, hey, I'm, I'm.

Yeah.

And I'm the same way. Not trying to be rude, but yeah, my, you know, I, I try to. That's why I set our dinner so early.

Right.

Because I knew you gave it a few hours. I didn't want it to be 12:30 in the morning when everybody was going home and then come run a podcast on deeps. But we had quite the, quite the biohacking morning this morning.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, my big takeaway was hydrogen. Hydrogen. Hydrogen.

Yeah.

So why don't you explain to your audience some of the things you took me through.

Well, you know, first, I'm a huge believer in hydrogen, not just hydrogen water. And you know, for those of you that are science geek like myself, you can go to a website called hydrogenstudies.com about 1300 studies on that on that site, you can actually select out the animal studies. You can look just at human trials and probably 3, 400 human trials on that on that site looking at everything from pathologies like the use of hydrogen gas and hydrogen water on Alzheimer's, dementia, you know, Parkinson's, autoimmune, autism, Asperger's, all kinds of neuroinflammatory conditions in the body and autoimmune conditions in the body. But also there's some interesting studies on there just about basic health biometrics. Reduction of inflammation, improving the absorption of, of supplements and nutrients, improving the absorption of our, you know, our food and our, and our vitamins and, and minerals. And then also helping to heal the gut by restoring a natural state of having hydrogen gas in the, in the gut. So we ran you through the hydrogen garden today for sure. I think we started with when you showed up this morning. We did a nice. I have a four stage RO filtered steam room here and, and the reason why I'm just so obsessive about filtering the steam is a lot of times if you're going into a municipal steam room, you know, they're just vaporizing. The chlorine, chlorine gas, the, the microplastics, pharmaceuticals, the, the, the fluoride. And, and you, the first thing you said to me this morning, we were in the steam room and we also have Ryan in there from the plunge was, man, I could tell this is really clean steam. Yeah. And so we steamed for about 15, 20 minutes and then we did 5 minute cold plunge and then we got out of the cold plunge and I put you in a hydrogen bath, which is just 102 degree bath, nice warm water. And we ran hydrogen gas into, into the bath. And that's why you felt so amazing when you get out of that. I mean, I've personally seen miracles with people getting in and out of these baths that have any kind of joint pain, joint or muscle pain, scleroderma, eczema, psoriasis. Again, don't take my word for it. Go to hydrogenstudies.com and just read the studies on the impact of hydrogen gas on, you know, bathing in hydrogen gas and its effect on inflammation, joint pain, all those things.

Well, one thing that was fascinating, getting in the hydrogen bath is it's a very cloudy looking liquid when you get in.

Yeah, looks like milk.

It's really white and kind of gray and cloudy and. And plus you had the hose running on it the whole time, which you.

Kept throwing on the floor of my bathroom.

Yes, I appreciate that. And so, but when I got out and I looked back in the, in the tub, the water was clear and so it just shows you the absorption that must have happened.

Well, we could see it. You know, you can see the gas going into the water and it just going right transdermal. And that's why you feel so good. I mean, so people that have any kind of joint pain, it's, it's a, it's a miracle.

Yeah. I hadn't done it before, but I, I can feel the benefits now. Your body just feels a little loose and your muscles feel relaxed but also stimulated. Yeah. You know, it's a weird state to kind of feel like you could both lie down and do a deadlift.

Right.

You know?

Yeah.

Normally my muscles feel like they're more primed for one or the other.

Yeah, it's, it, it puts you in a state of just being very calm, very cognizant, very clear, kind of kind of awake. And then we moved you into a red light paddle and I bio stacked this red light bed too. So it has PMF and it has this pulse electromagnetic field which is just A low gauss magnetic current. And I put the hydrogen goggles on you. So we ran hydrogen gas into the eyes. We, we actually had earbuds that actually run hydrogen Right. Right in against the tympanic membrane, you know, the eardrum. And then we ran a nasal cannulous in. So you got hydrogen gas, you know, intranasally.

People are listening to this and they're, they're like, wow, this is epic. Or this is like a hazing mechanism or.

These people are nuts.

Yeah.

But I'm, I am such a believer in hydrogen. Hydrogen gas, hydrogen bathing, hydrogen water. And, and then, of course, now you're drinking hydrogen water bottles, so, you know, you're getting the full monty this morning. But you did say that, you know, you felt like it made you more clear and more cognizant, you know, for sure.

Yeah. I would say I feel clearer. I. It. The only challenge now is it's hard for me now to pinpoint which of the things. Right.

Yeah.

Right.

And my guess is all of them have.

Well, that's what I'm excited about with. Woohoo. Exactly. We should have tagged it and seen. Yeah.

So. So. But I'm gonna go back and figure out the times that I was in there and, and then add them on my Whoop app.

Okay.

And I'll see what my body was doing during some of them.

Yeah.

I have a feeling that the period in the bath was very parasympathetic. And I wanted to kind see of to check that whether that's the case.

Well, definitely. I mean, it's definitely shifting you from that sympathetic fight or flightish into that parasympathetic.

Because we had also just gone from a cold plunge.

Yeah.

Which depending on how good you are at breathing and how often you do it, can be sympathetic or parasympathetic, depending on how you feel.

Yeah, I want to get back into the woo for a minute because there's, you know, you could get paralysis of analysis also, you know, with, with data. That's the Achilles heel of data. But, but if you're tracking your sleep and you're sort of hacking your way into better sleep, you're looking at your DEEP and your rem, and then that's directly going to correspond to some of the other metrics on whoop, like strain and recovery. So talk a little bit about what the strain metric does because, you know, when you look in the literature, there's not a lot of, you know, strain is not a category of thing that is, that is highly studied. I feel like it's a WHOOP thing. So what, what makes up the strain and how is it?

Yeah, so if you just go back a little bit to our earlier conversation, which was around this idea of how do you tell someone what to do or how do you balance someone's body? All the research I had done, you know, 15 years ago even, was. Well, really, you want to balance someone's recovery with the strain or the stress they put on their body.

Right.

So if your body is well recovered, you take on a lot of strain, and if your body's run down, you take on less strain and, you know, medium and medium and so forth, which.

Which obviously sleep plays a major part in that, but it's not the only part.

Yeah, sleep is a major driver of recovery, but you can actually find on whoop, there'll be some nights where you don't get that much sleep, but you have a high recovery. And there may be other physiological things that are going on. So maybe your heart rate variability was higher, maybe your resting heart rate was lower, maybe your respiratory rate was. Was declining, your pulse ox was high. These are all other metrics that whoop is looking at to make sure your body's recovered. And strain is really a measurement of cardiovascular or muscular load. So the primary metric that people will be observing throughout the day is related to their heart rates. And so if your heart rate is spending more time in an elevated percentage of your max heart rate, you're gonna have a higher number on whoop.

Right.

And it's a zero to 21 point scale. It gets actually harder to go up the. The scale.

Oh, it does? Yeah. You really have to have.

So going from 0 to 10 is much easier. From 10 to 15, it's much easier than 15 to 21. So. So people will notice that as well. And, and so it's really looking at cardiovascular exertion. But however, in the last year, we added muscular load as well. So if you do a weightlifting workout and you want to add what your weights were in your reps and all of that, WHOOP will now be able to calculate the effective tonnage on your body, and it'll include that in the strain score.

When you say, calculate the effective tonnage, like the total amount of load strain that you put on the body over that period of workout time.

Yeah. So we acquired a company two and a half years ago that had developed some pretty sophisticated algorithms for understanding the velocity of all sorts of different, you know, reps and weights. So essentially how your. Your body was moving weight and how that then directly correlated to the muscular strain that was happening to your body. So we acquired that hardware and then we actually were able to take a lot of the algorithms and produce the same results from our smaller form factor, which had, again, similar capabilities around accelerometry or gyroscope. So a lot of. A lot of it's using movement to understand what was the. The actual rep that you did.

Yeah.

So when you input that you were doing, say, bicep curls or a squat or something. Whoopo. Identify that rep in the. In the workout that you did, it'll look at the. The velocity at which you did it. It'll then take the number of reps and the weight that you told us that you did, and it'll use that to spit back out a muscular load. Score.

Wow.

Which is pretty powerful.

That is amazing.

Yeah. So. Whoops. The first wearable to incorporate muscular load alongside cardiovascular load.

So this is giving you a real indication of not only how ready you are to potentially take on intense, intense workouts, but the effectiveness of that workout on.

Yeah, so. So, for example, if you wake up on Whoop, and you have, like, an 80% recovery, WHOOP will recommend, okay, you should do between a 15 and a 17 strain today. And depending on how long you've been on whoop, it might even tell you. And you could do these different types of activities. So for me, that would be, you know, I've got a bunch of different weightlifting workouts in the app that I do, so it might recommend those, or it might say, go play squash for 50 minutes or go for a run for 90 minutes at this heart rate. So each of these different activities, you can tell that the, the amount of time is changing depending on which the activity is and even, you know, the specification for what the activity would be.

Yeah, it's so fascinating. You know, my, My son is a. Is kind of an extreme athlete. He does these ultra Spartans and He also trains MMA. And, and, you know, he's 23 years old, so you're pretty headstrong at 23, and you don't think you can be killed by a bullet. But what was really interesting was for several weeks, his, his, his strain was very, very high, and. And his recovery was. Was dropping. And Whoop was sort of warning him about this.

Yeah.

And, and he, he's. He's so headstrong, and he had, you know, he was training MMA and he wanted to start, you know, training for this, like, extreme Spartan race, and he didn't want to give either one of them up. So he was, you Know, over training and, and the, the lights were flashing on. Whoop. And you know, one day he woke up and he had something called rhabdomyelitis. And rhabdo, if you're an athlete, is, is a, can be a serious condition. You know, it's a muscle wasting issue where, you know, the body starts to break down muscle from over training, training, and it can really put a lot of strain on your kidneys. It could potentially be. Be, be fatal. So I mean, he had to go into a month of just complete neutral, focusing on hydration, remineralizing, not even putting his body under strain and like cold plunges and, and saun using basics like red light, pmf, you know, just breath work, walking. And you know, he came out of it just, just fine. But what the fascinating thing to me was that, you know, here's a young conditioned, you know, highly conditioned athlete and wux started giving him the warnings weeks before this happened totally. That you really need to take a break. You really need to focus on recovery. Your strain is very high now. Your strain's high again. It's high again. Recovery is actually getting worse. And then bang. This, this hit. And I remember last night. So these are sort of some of the predictive analytics. And this is, this is again what's so exciting to me about big data. Because when you look at, you know, testing, for example, like we're getting very ac. We're getting very good at that. Early detection of certain diseases and pathologies, like early. Early detection of cancer, early detection of autoimmune disease, you know, early detection. But. But with big data, you actually get predictive analytics.

Yeah.

So rather than actually catching something early, you catch it before it starts. And I think this is the real fascinating thing about the convergence of artificial intelligence and big data. And you told me a story about during, and it was probably a pivotal moment for whoop, but during COVID how you were tracking respiratory rate and it became a leading indicator, very accurate leading indicator for, for Covid. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah. So in, In January of 2020, a board member of. Of ours came to me and said, hey, I think this virus is going to be a global pandemic. And I said, why is that? And he said, well, if you just look at the r naught of how fast it's growing, it's going to be everywhere. He had a background in growth because he worked at Facebook during the boom years and he worked at Uber during the boom years.

Funny, he's not a virologist, but he's.

Like he was a growth expert and he just said, based on the way it's growing, it's going to be everywhere. And so I said to my team, like, well, let's assume for a second this is true. What would we have want to have done now before this happens? And. And we agreed we'd want to be able to track Covid and we'd want to be able to know that someone gets COVID 19. And so we just started building a very simple thing in the WHOOP app, which was the ability for someone to log that they tested positive for COVID 19. And we rolled that out in March of 2020. And by the end of March of 2020, we had 2,000 people who had reported testing positive for Covid. Now, if you go back in time and just think March of 2020, like, most people were just waking up to the idea that there was a virus.

Floating around super early.

Yeah, we had a set relative to anyone else in the world. And so we partnered with Cqu and Cleveland Clinic, who are two different leading research institutions. And we said, hey, let's look at this data together. And, you know, over the course of the next few months, we found what was a smoking gun in the data. Now, when you get sick, WHOOP will often be able to tell very easily. There's a lot of things about your body that change when you get sick. So let's just talk about, for example, a cold versus the flu versus COVID 19. All of those, you'll find that your resting heart rate goes up, your heart rate variability goes down. You'll likely have, you know, these low recoveries on whoop. You'll likely get more sleep disturbances throughout the night. Your quality of sleep will probably be down. So, you know, WHOOP will be flagging for you. Hey, something's up here. The interesting thing, though, is the difference between the cold, the flu, and COVID 19 was one more metric, and it only showed up for Covid, and that was an extremely elevated respiratory rate. Your respiratory rate really doesn't change that much when you have the cold or the flu. And in fact, your respiratory rate really doesn't change at all. Like, when you look at people's respiratory rates, they are very steady. We measure it to the 10th. And, you know, if I looked at my last month of respiratory rate, it'd probably be between, you know, 12.7 and 13.0. Like, it's just like a very tight band. Does not change.

Right.

What we saw for the people who had reported having Covid is they had a jump of 20 to 30% in their respiratory rate.

Wow.

I mean, you don't need any data science to be able to see this in a graph. Like, it just went like this and then like this. Wow. And so someone who had a respiratory.

Rate was this prior to the symptoms hitting.

Yes. So in many cases, it was two to three days before symptoms. Wow. And so we. We published this research in June of 2020, and. And it went on to be peer reviewed and. And all the like. And so it was kind of a big moment of us saying, hey, everyone, watch out for your respiratory rate. At that time, a lot of sports were coming back, right? Or they were trying to come back, and they were trying to figure out, hey, what is. What is the protocol going to be for. For us to return to play? And, you know, this is a time when people were wearing hazmat suits, and it was a pretty crazy time to go back. And. And so the PGA Tour was the first sport back, and In June of 2020, there was a golf tournament. And the protocol was you would get tested on a Tuesday, and if you tested negative, you were cleared to play the rest of the week. Week. Okay. And golf tournaments go from Thursday through Sunday. And there was a guy named Nick Watney who had been wearing whoop for a long time because he really liked whoop. And. And so he tested negative on a Tuesday. And then on Thursday, he woke up and he saw on whoop all of the things that we had written about, in particular the huge spike in respiratory rate.

So he saw this, and he's whooped out.

He saw it in his. Whooped out. And again, it's not subtle. We. We wanted to make it very obvious that someone had an elevated respiratory rate. Great. And. And so he went to, you know, the doctors and he said, hey, look, I've, you know, identified this in my whoop data. And. And I think I should get tested again. They're like, what is whoop? And, you know, you can imagine other conversations. But anyway, they, you know, they. They originally told him, you're cleared to play. And he said, no, I want to get one more test. And so he got one more test, and sure enough, it came back positive.

Wow.

And he, you know, didn't even have symptoms. And so he. He dropped out of the tournament. And later that day, you know, we get a call from. From the PGA Tour saying, hey, we need to procure a thousand whoop straps to put on everyone on.

You're like, we. We can accommodate that.

Yeah, yeah.

They put on all the. The Players and the media members and the caddies and whatnot. And, and so we became part of the bubble of the PGA Tour.

That's.

And we had probably, you know, five staff traveling from all these, you know, all these different places. And that's one of those sort of moments in time. I realize you'll never, you'll probably never repeat where I would go to a golf tournament. And, you know, it's like joining, you know, a country club with 150 of the best golfers in the world because you're kind of just sitting in the.

Locker room and there's no one else around.

Yeah. And it's like you have lunch with Rory and Tony Finau and John Rom, and everyone's looking at their whoop data. And it was just, it was a, it was a crazy moment in time.

That's awesome.

But, but, you know, we, we had a bunch of other examples like that. And throughout really, the whole Covid, you know, period, we were getting messages every day about people realizing they had Covid from the Whoop app.

Yeah. And, and I mean, even today, if you're, if you're looking at your respiratory rate and you see that, that that spike might be indicative that you've got, yeah, Covid coming around.

If you see the respiratory rate alert and you, you know, you tap on it, it'll say something to the effect of, you know, this could be caused by a massive change in altitude, heavy smoking, or COVID 19.

So it's easy, easy to narrow down.

So people will figure that out for themselves.

Yeah. And, you know, and again, I think that this, this lends itself to the big predictive analytics of, of, of big data. And I think therein lies when we talk about longevity, anti aging, bio optimization. When you combine, you know, the technologies for early detection, you combine large pools of data, but now with AI, you can actually get predictive analytics like, like this, this is the, this is the next generation of medicine. I feel like because people can make behavioral modifications that will have demonstrative impact on, on their lifespan, on their health span. We, we knew in the mortality space that the, the reason why most people were not living healthier, happier, longer lives were what we called back then modifiable risk factors. You know, if they changed a few things about diet, lifestyle supplementation, it had to had credible impacts on, on healthspan and lifespan. But now it's reaching the masses through things like whoop, where I can sort of take this into my own hands, become my own citizen scientist, totally run my own experiments and really feel really figure out what's working to me, not working for me, not just what I, you know, what I think is working for me.

Totally. And, and we recently announced and launched a partnership with OpenAI where you can really get very exploratory about your data inside the Whoop app. So there's an interface inside the Whoop app where you can talk directly to Whoop. And this is powered by OpenAI. It has completely non retentive data permissions, so your data is completely secure and you get to ask, you know, whoop, essentially, how does my HRV compare to, you know, 50 year old men or what are they doing that I'm not doing? Or wow, how's my training compared to.

This is available now. Yeah. And I can speak it into the.

App and tap it into the app.

Dude, I'm loving this thing.

Like, yeah, I want to get over.

This podcast so I can go do this right now. Like so excited.

So I'll show you this off air, but you know, you can literally can go into the app and, and, and start talking to Whoop. And this is a capability that is only going to get better in the coming months and years. And our aspiration is to have Whoop be able to function as your 247 coach or your trainer or your nutritionist and eventually, you know, continuation of the doctor's office where you can ask Whoop questions about your data or it'll prompt you and say, hey, we're seeing these different variables. What's going on? And you all of a sudden just feel like you've got this coaching interface that sits on top of all your data.

Yeah. Oh my God, that's so awesome. What, what is that you can talk about that you're comfortable talking about? Where is Whoop going in the future? I mean, what are some of the things that are inspiring you right now about all of this data and all of these metrics and the impact that you can make? Because clearly it's become sort of morphed right from being this data analytics tool with some, some basic features to now combining all of this data with more intrinsic features about the person themselves. And you know, I feel like you could get a PhD and going down the rabbit hole of what this, this could do. But what's really inspiring you about where Whoop's going and what are some, maybe some things on the horizon we could expect to see from you guys?

Yeah. If you think about the last 12 years of, of building this company, our mission has always been to unlock human performance. And I think what's powerful is our definition of human performance has changed throughout, throughout the company's growth. You know, in the, in the earlier years we were working entirely with professional athletes. Two of our first hundred users were people like LeBron James and Michael Phelps. Like, we just started at the tip of the pyramid. And so human performance then meant winning an NBA championship or a gold medal. Right, right.

And they were really the only area of society probably at that time that was that focused on those kinds of things.

And recovery even was still a new concept for pro athletes as a metric. And then from there it was fitness enthusiasts and it was, you know, people who are kind of hardcore in their own right, but you know, have day jobs. And in part from COVID and in part from our expanding health capabilities. Now today we have a pretty wide ranging consumer on whoop. And it's everyone from people who want to get fitter to people who want to get healthier, to people who are just aspirational in their daily lives and want to think about how measuring their bodies can increase their awareness or increase their performance a little bit. And if you think about that sort of next chapter for whoop, it's pulling that continuation of performance even further. And that's where WHOOP will be obviously playing in the medical space very directly. We'll have capabilities that are, are medically approved. We will have information that I think interacts very closely with the healthcare system. I truly believe the potential of 24,7 health monitoring is to be able to predict or diagnose things before they happen. You know, the healthcare system's messed up, especially in the United States, because it's all curative costs. Right. Like something bad has happened, let's fix it. And if you can shift curative costs costs to being preventative costs, you can really turn the industry on its head, not to mention improve people's lives considerably. So I'm very excited about the work that we're doing to develop this technology to, you know, provide a much wider range of capabilities and play a role in preventative care.

Yeah, I mean, I think that too when you start taking because you have more voluminous data and more accurate real time data, then you know, your trips to the doctor's office are, are very point in time. You know, like your toothache that you've had for three weeks never hurts when you go to see the dentist. Right. And so they're, they're very point in time. And I think as such we also. Medicine, in my opinion historically is also very point in time, meaning it's it's about the acute event that's going on at the moment that you're interfacing with your, with your doctor. And I think if you look at most medical research, you know, a lot of the research that's out there right now is we study a single metric at a time, right. We don't study the, the human being, the inter, we don't study the sphere of, of how we live our lives. You know, we talked about this last night. How I feel like some of the worst research we do in, in medicine is, is when we study things in isolation, right. You take a cell out of the human body, you put it in a petri dish and you introduce toxins or beneficial compounds and you look at how the cell behaves. But the truth is that that cell is behaving in a community and it's, you know, it's normal environment. It's not isolation, it's normal environment as a communal environment and there's all kinds of interactions going on. And I think that when you start studying human beings like that, when you look at behavioral patterns, sleep patterns, recovery patterns, strain patterns, and then you start to get big data on what's influencing this, you know, some of the sleep hacks you're talking about or nutritional impacts, you know, now we're able to slice this down to not only predicting early on where the, you know, where the accident could be down, down the road, but really feeding data real time into a medical system instead of just taking a snapshot. Lot of when I show up in front of, in front of my doctor because the doctor doesn't know, well, what have been doing for the three months prior to this?

Oh, totally. The goofiest day of the year is when you show up for your annual checkup and like they're taking your pulse reading and, and exactly your blood pressure. It's like, look, I can show you this continuously for the last 10 years if you'd like. Right.

And I can show you, and I can show you an average.

Yeah.

And I can show you what makes it better, what makes it worse. You know, maybe I had just a little bit of water white coat syndrome that day. And they're like, oh, you got high blood pressure.

Yeah. I think what we'll ultimately get to is you're not going to go see your doctor on a random day of the year. You're going to go see the 30 minutes before something's about to happen.

Yeah, yeah, that is, that is really just fascinating.

Most of us have a very difficult.

Time meeting our protein needs.

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So I'm also fascinated by like the cardiac metrics that you're taking, like the accuracy that you have with heart rate variability and some of the other cardiac metrics. Because I have a very close friend who's a cardiologist at Cedar Sinai and one of the things that he told me was that he believes that wearables are the future of cardiovascular medication, cardiovascular medicine. Because we do have these like long histories of warnings usually before there's some kind of catastrophic event in, in advanced cardiovascular disease, one of the, one of the first symptoms is sudden death. And as that's a tragic symptom. Right. So if you can have.

That's high stakes.

That's high stakes. I mean so if you can have some kind of predictive analytics that's like, like feed something to you or even to your cardiologist to say, hey, these are some anomalies that are creeping up, like the respiratory rate increasing before you actually are symptomatic. I mean, it's just fascinating to me that we're going actually beyond early detection, that we're going to predictive analytics.

I think it's really exciting. I think also having so many people now starting to collect data on their bodies. You build population, population level data sets. You know, we're starting to observe things about different countries and different cultures and you know, how different behaviors are affecting a wide range of people.

You know, I, I, I, I also want to, you know, my audience is really fascinated by all the talks that we just covered, but I also have a large entrepreneurial audience and, and before we wind down the podcast, I'd be doing everybody a disservice if I didn't talk a little bit more about your entrepreneurial journey because I think it's fascinating anytime you say somebody with a dream go against the grain and, and, and build a multi billion dollar company. The last valuation that I read about your company, I don't know if it's accurate or not, was about three and a half billion dollars, $3.6 billion accurate. You recently raised $400 million at that, at that valuation. Did you ever actually see yourself in the seat of a multi billion dollar company? And if you did, that's great. But when you were starting this out, were you like data nerd with a dream or did you say this is going to change the world?

I think I had a belief system that that health monitoring was going to change the world and that I was going to build a team that was going to build that health monitor. And so, you know, a step further than that is saying you're going to change the world or a step further than that is acknowledging that you believe you're going to run a multi billion dollar company. But I never was driven by the financial impact that, that it could have. I was always extremely focused on the technology piece of it it and the, you know, the metrics that, that our customers were getting, our members were getting and whether that was actually helping them. And it's worth noting that there were a lot of kind of contrarian decisions along the way. You know, if you think about the wearables industry, there's actually been an enormous number of companies that have entered in the space and failed. Yeah. And some of the biggest, most powerful companies in the world. You take your sports apparel brands, you know, there was Nike and Under Armour and Adidas and Puma and you know, all these, these companies came to market with wearable products and then on the technology side you had, you know, starts and stops from Google and Amazon just exited and you know, Microsoft said a lot of challenges. Samsung's had wearable space.

I didn't know they were even in it. Yeah, well, maybe that's why they, that's why they exited.

There you go. That's not. If you don't know if they're there. So, so we saw a lot of companies fail and in a way a lot of companies sort of mimicking each other. You know, the sports appel brands tried to have a little bit of, you know, sizzle and branding on their stuff, but they lacked the tech and the substance.

Right.

And the tech companies, I think, lost sight of the fact that it wasn't just good enough that it measured stuff. You know, what was the identity behind it? Why does someone want to wear it on their body? You know, how does it feel? How does it look? Right. And, and so we tried to, to thread this needle of borrowing from, you know, brands like Nike and tech companies like Apple and, and, and to be able to build a technology that people get real data and value from but also feel good about wearing. When you, when you're gonna wear something on your body 24 7, it starts to say a lot about who you are. Yeah. And you want that to be a positive connotation.

And there's, and there's a, I mean there's almost a cultish following and, and whoop, if you will. And you know, I've, I've been blessed to work with some very prominent, you know, athletes, a listers, celebrities, what have you. And, and the majority of them use whoop. Yeah.

Appreciate that.

Yeah, yeah, they, they, they really do. I mean, I was just, you know, visiting one very prominent athlete, you know, recently and I walked in with a whoop. He. And he was wearing a whoop. And it was initially how we started the conversation and we actually went into strain and, and sleep and recovery and it led into our whole biohacking discussion and our whole discussion on genetics and targeted supplementation and everything. But it was like an instant, an instant common bond. And we talked about some of the other wearables we tried to use. We didn't like our, you know, on our hands because we, you know, when we were working out and that. I actually never take this thing off. I mean, I cold punch with a Sauna with a steam with it, a shower with it. I basically. I don't even know that it's there. I think my body's just desensitized to it. But there also had to be some, you know, points along the way. Some. Some. Some tipping points where you were looking in the mirror and either going, this is not going to make it, or, you know, I've. We've grown too fast, and now we are. We're not. Not making enough revenue to sustain our operations. But talk about just some of those tipping points for you on your. Your entrepreneurial journey where maybe it was a real alone time where maybe you were only admitting it to yourself and not your staff. Or did you ever have any of those tipping points where you almost threw in the towel or thought the towel was coming over the ring?

Yeah, I mean, I think there were a number of. Have periods of time like that. And I would also think about it through. Through two lenses. One is the I'm not gonna make it feeling, and the other is the company's not gonna make it feeling. And sometimes those overlapped and sometimes they didn't. And in the early days of building, whoop, you know, I think I was maybe 24 years old at that point. I was two years into it. I managed to raise maybe 10, $20 million, which felt like an enormous amount of money. I had a staff of 25 people. Our technology was just starting to work, and yet I personally was strung out of my mind. Like, it was really the first time in my life where I felt so overwhelmed and so under pressure, and I felt an enormous accountability for all the capital we'd raised and the shareholders and, you know, these new customers who were trying it. And I was, you know, drinking kind of an unlimited amount of coffee, which had no effect on my body. I was drinking too much alcohol. Like, it was just a period.

Building a wearables company, too.

Yeah. All around health. Health, right.

Yeah.

And so it was a. It was a period of time where I was just kind of spinning out of control. And. And so that was a time when I was able to reset personally. I got really into meditating. I. I met my now wife. I, you know, really focused on what's my identity in building this company and how do I take care of myself. First, I think there was a period of time where I really thought of my performance and the company's performance as one. One and the same. Yeah. And I think that's a dangerous thing that a lot of entrepreneurs can do where, you know, you've Your company's doing great, so you're doing great. Your company's doing poorly, so you're doing poorly. Your company's failing, you're failing. And the reality is you can actually be taking a lot of great shots on goal. You can be showing up for work every day and doing a better version of yourself. And the business could be having all kinds of sorts of issues for maybe things that are out of your control.

I find it very, very hard to separate from that. I think.

Yeah.

99 of entrepreneurs and anybody that's built a business with their spouse knows that, you know, it's very difficult to say, if you have a great day at the office, you're gonna have a great day at home. If you have a really shitty day at the office, you have a really shitty day at home.

Yeah.

And you're saying you learn to create and separate.

And I learned. Yeah, I learned to separate them and just get into a mindset of, well, how can I be a little bit better every day? How can I control the things that I do and focus on that? You know, at the end of the day, if you're pitching an investor, the only thing you can do is make a great pitch.

Right.

You can't, you know, reach into their pockets and have them invest in your company. Like, you know. You know what I mean? Like, there's only so many things you can control. And so when you get into a mindset like that, it becomes much healthier, and you start to really focus on your own growth and independent from the performance of the business.

Right.

And. And then often what happens is the business follows along as you're getting a little bit better, or what happens is you just get better at dealing with the highs and the lows, where you no longer feel like you're on a roller coaster. Like, I felt like I was on a yo yo.

And for you, a lot of this was the discovery of meditation. I've actually heard you talk openly. I think it was on Diary of CEO podcast about, you know, your very first panic attack.

Yeah.

And about how your field of vision narrowed and how scary that was, the tingling and numbness and. And. And driving yourself to the er.

Yeah.

I mean, that had to be one of those Perry Mason to da moments, like, okay, I need to. I need to dial in this.

I need to reevaluate. Yeah. Yeah. I had a panic attack when I was 24, you know, right around the company period that I just described. And. And I was so oblivious to the idea that I could even have a panic attack. That I assumed I had had, like, food poisoning or something. Right. So I'm like racing to the ER thinking, I've been poisoned. And of course, it was just my, my own body saying, hey, enough is enough.

Nervous system fried.

Yeah, nervous system was fried. And so that's when I discovered transcendental meditation. I started doing that, you know, twice a day for 20 minutes each, each session. And it just helped. It helped me in a lot of different ways in the context of, of, of being a businessman, but also being a person and just being like a present human and, you know, having my senses more aware, being much calmer, being more comfortable with. With negative feedback. You know, I, I was at a stage early on in building Whoop, where there was a lot of negative sentiment towards the idea that, hey, this young kid who doesn't have an engineering degree or isn't a doctor is going to build this company that's based on the best tech in medicine. Like, I just got a lot of negative feed. And it was a period of time when I was facing more rejection than I had ever really faced before. And that was an unfamiliar feeling. And so one of the defense mechanisms I had for it was just to put up a bunch of walls around me and get defensive. Yeah. And we're just not even try to not even acknowledge negative feedback. Like, it was like ultimate blinders. And, and that's a coping mechanism that can work for a period of time, but as you grow an organization and as you have a lot of people working closely, you really need to be able to absorb lots of different points of view and engage with them and dismiss them and, and accept them. And. And I was at a, you know, at that stage in building a company, I wasn't able to do any of that.

Right.

And. And I learned how to bring it back.

And, and there's, and there's a. There's an enormous amount of stress, too, in, in just having to keep the game face on because, you know, everybody's on the deck of your ship and they're sort of looking at the captain going, you know, how confident is he? Or how. How stressed out is he? And basically, based on your confidence level, so goes the organization. And you've got that stress on you. On you too.

Yeah. I think one. One thing that helped me a lot throughout the last 12 years was always believing really deeply in the problem we were solving. And I think if you have a problem that you're obsessed with, that can help pull you through a lot. So there were questions whether the technology was going to be able to solve the problem. And, and existential questions around that. There was tech, there's questions around whether we could sell the technology for the right price points to generate the right business. There was questions around that. There was questions around whether we could raise the capital to attack this problem. You know, so forth, so forth, so forth. But at the end of the day, I had this incredibly deep conviction that this problem needed to be solved.

Right.

And that I was going to be part of that.

That.

And so by just continuing to come back to that, it helped me overcome some of the other, you know, details along the way. And look, as an entrepreneur, you're not entitled to build a good business. No. You know, 90% of the businesses fail. So you have to develop some sort of resilience. You have to learn how to take on enormous amounts of stress and persevere through it.

Right. Or it's never going to last. Well, this has been Amazing, man. I 100% I want to have you back as this journey with whoop continues to grow, because I just think you're so ahead of the curve. And technology, artificial intelligence, large data on real human beings in real time, in my opinion is the greatest frontier of modern medicine right now. Bio optimization, longevity, aging, whatever you want to call it. I always try to wind my podcast down by asking my guests the same question. If you've seen us, you know, this question has come in. There's no right or wrong answer to it, but what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

I think to be able to meet the stresses and demands on my life and persevere through them. And to be happy.

To be happy. That's a great one. And happiness is a choice. I mean, it's a very personal choice. It's not. It's not up to somebody else.

Yeah, it's. I mean, it's a hard. It's actually another ingredient in the entrepreneur's, you know, diary, so to speak, that I think gets overlooked.

Yeah.

You know, there's a lot of hard charging people I've met. I'm sure you've met that on paper. You read all the successes. Right. The wealth, whatever, and then you can tell they're just not very happy.

Right.

Like they're kind of miserable, actually.

Maybe not purpose driven, you know.

Yeah. And so. And so for me, I think being able to balance success in sort of a material sense, but like with meaning and purpose and, you know, gratitude really is, I think, the word I'm looking for.

Yeah.

By being grateful, I've been able To, I think, stay much more present and, and process driven, you know, on this journey to building a company.

Yeah.

I think that a lot of entrepreneurs, and I was again, this was me at one point. You're kind of on this dopamine journey where you keep telling yourself, well, when you get to this stage, that's when the magic happens. Oh, when WHOOP is worth a hundred million, I'm going to be happy. Or when it's worth 250, or when it's one worth a billion and a half, or when we have these many customers, or when we have this much revenue, or when I have this many employees. And you kind of keep setting these goalposts. And the thing about dopamine is just telling yourself you're going to be happy at a certain destination actually is motivating. Yeah, it does. It's a mechanism. It works. But you've, you know, when you put that in overdrive, what inevitably happens is when you get to that destination, it's not what you told yourself it would be. And of course, you're not. Not. You're not fulfilled yet. And so the, the key along the way, I believe, is you balance all of it with gratitude, and that produces serotonin. And so now you've got a dopamine and serotonin system working together.

Yeah. Wow. I've never heard it explained that way. It makes a lot of sense.

Yeah.

Well, thanks for coming on today, man. I mean, this has just been a fascinating journey and I'm. I'm excited about our. Our next chapter together and Sleep challenge and everything you're doing at whoops. I'm sure my audience has a million questions. How do they find out more about whoop? Where can they see some of your research? How do they find out more about you? Where can my audience find you?

Yeah, I mean, if you're interested in Whoop, I think Whoop.com is a good place to start. Whoop.com. we also now are offering a free trial as part of your sleep program.

Awesome.

So people should check that out, but they can essentially try WHOOP for free for 30 days. So if you're questioning whether it's right for you. So, you know, now all you have to do is just try it.

Yeah.

And you can send it back if you don't like it and you don't get charged. So that's kind of an amazing opportunity right now to get on the. On the product. And yeah, I'm on social media. My handles just Il Ahmed.

Okay.

And so that's. That's a good place to find me. And, and look, I'll just add, you know, Gary, it's been great spending time with you. I've, I have a lot of admiration for the community that you're speaking to.

You're.

You just seem to have a very positive and very science based message. And it's been, it's been pretty awesome to see your, what I think has been kind of a meteoric rise in the last couple years.

It really has. Yeah.

And so I'm sure it's going to keep going and, and look forward to doing more together.

Thank you, brother. And as always, that's just science.