The Metrics That Matter: Whoop Founder Will Ahmed On Why Most People Get Fitness Wrong, Why Recovery Beats Intensity, & The Science of Human Potential

27:35And so we're quite proud of that. And I think that's been a challenge for a big company like Apple to decide what they want to be because presumably they could build great health sensing, but they're doing so many things that their health sensing is not very good. I mean, they can't really measure sleep. And so that's just sort of a kind of an obvious fork in the road. And I think if you're a consumer, you have to decide, do I want to go all in on understanding my health and have this 24-7 coach and companion and build this data of my – like a data repository of my life that I can learn from and grow from?

28:14or do I want kind of lightweight data that's sometimes accurate, sometimes not, but a bunch of other features and kind of a continuation of my iPhone? And, you know, fortunately we've seen a lot of people be focused on health. On the subject of HRV, that is the one thing that is often not intuitive for me. Like I'll be surprised, like I'll wake up feeling great and then I'll look at my whoop and, oh, wow, like my recovery score is low. What's my HRV? Oh, it doesn't feel like I would be having a subpar HRV that day. And that helps me make an informed decision about how much I'm going to exert myself that day.

28:56And I often will modify like my training or whatnot accordingly. And I think that is an important point to make because any serious athlete has a level of connection with their own body that is unusual, right? And we all kind of grew up learning how much to train, how hard to push ourselves, how much to recover based on feel. And this is something that doesn't necessarily correlate to feel. And I think the other piece there is the sort of stress score that you get, particularly overnight. Like it's amazing to me when I look at what was happening with my stress levels while I was sleeping and seeing these peaks and valleys and it being way higher and then trying to do a forensic analysis of my behavior leading up to that evening to figure out what caused that.

29:47And that's been super helpful to me and also something that my intuition wouldn't have been able to figure out. Yeah. I think that's the powerful thing about building this relationship with the data. And I think that everyone in the journey of collecting whoop data decides how much am I just going to stick to what I feel versus trust the numbers that disagree with me. The best way I think to approach it is to try to use the data to then inform your intuition and make it more of a symbiotic relationship versus who am I going to believe today? And I like the way you described it, which is, okay, I'll see some numbers that are different than I thought, and maybe then I'll modulate how much I actually do to my body.

30:30The stress before sleep thing is a very interesting metric. And I think in general, our stress monitoring, there's a lot more that we're going to be able to reveal with that and do from that. Overall, I'm really excited about the fact that we're collecting all of this data 24-7. It's really accurate. And with all of the new artificial intelligence technology out there and LLMs, we're going to be able to structure this data to sit underneath a really powerful LLM that's then in turn going to become this like 24-7 coach or doctor for you. And, you know, it will uncover like what you just said about figuring out the stress before the sleep and this and that, like that took a little bit of work.

31:16Like, you know, you had to kind of get into the data to find it. And I think what's going to be amazing is how much gets surfaced without people even needing to look for it just by having this data there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm sort of yearning for that right now because I'm, you know, I'm recovering from this surgery, right? So my stats are horrible. Yeah, it's frustrating, right? And then, but if I use the AI coach, like it'll say, well, here's what you should do today. It's like, you should do Pilates. And he's like, no, you don't understand. Like, I would like to teach it. Like, here's where I'm at.

31:51Here's the specific surgery that I underwent. Like, what are the best practices, you know, for like kind of getting my stuff in range given the constraints that I'm under at the moment? And it's not quite there yet, but it's not hard to imagine that that can be easily, you know, kind of upgraded with an LLM model. Yeah, that day is coming, and we've got a big update coming for the coach inside the app soon, too, which we're excited about. I mean, 12 years ago, it was pretty improbable that we'd be able to measure accurate heart rate from the wrist, let alone heart rate variability or sleep. And a recent version of that was blood pressure, where a few years ago, it seemed very unlikely we'd be able to measure blood pressure from the wrist, and now we can do it.

32:42And so it's like, I'm amazed by what can be done with a lot of intention and intensity from really smart people. And if I look at the rate at which this company, but I would also say technology in general, has been able to accelerate and improve, what's going to happen in the health space is going to be quite profound. I wouldn't be honest if I didn't confess to being a skeptic of wrist monitored heart rate as an athlete who's always worn a chest strap. Sure. And I know historically, you know, devices measuring on the wrist have been wildly inaccurate. How have you attempted to solve that? And do you think that you've solved it?

33:25The first thing is that you have to build a very large data set of chest strap data versus sensor data. And we had an advantage, again, in starting with athletes in that athletes are very naturally, they have very different body types. So very different muscular sizes of their wrists, obviously different skin tones. And then, of course, there's sweat, there's hairiness levels. all of the things that I'm mentioning affect the accuracy of the sensing. And because we were working with athletes, we had to start with this very diverse data set. And so just to say it, it's much harder to measure a black man playing basketball outdoors than it is to measure a white man running on a treadmill indoors.

34:23And I'll explain that for a second. So dark skin is harder than light skin. An activity like basketball has a non-periodic motion set. So it's chaotic, right? It's not like in a periodic motion. And then indoors versus outdoors, interestingly, creates challenges. So outdoors, you've got all sorts of light coming from the sun. Indoors, you have more of a controlled light setting. So those are some things that people just don't really talk about in the space. But because we had to start with athletes, we built a foundation that was looking at harder data sets versus easier. And I remember there would be like papers published from up-and-coming companies saying how accurate they were at heart rate.

35:11And they would always show people on treadmills running. And we were like always critical of that because it was sort of like the easier data set than like what I'm describing as a more diverse data set. I think that over the last 10 years, we've had Whoop Labs. We've collected hundreds of thousands of data sets alongside the sensor. I think that the heart rate monitoring is pretty great for a lot of activities under a lot of circumstances. I think that there's always that last 1 % or last 5 % that's really hard. And so that's what we spend a lot of our time on of making this a product that like essentially makes the chest strap something that you would never need.

35:54There are some individuals where they either have a certain sort of a certain bone type or a certain way that the sensor sits on their wrist or they let the sensor be too loose. Those are things that can make the data not as accurate. And so we're always trying to figure out, is that an education thing that we should be telling that person? Or is it unsolvable to have the sensor not secure, for example, in the right place? We've also put technology out that allows you to wear it in different locations. So it's often the case that if someone, for some reason, is having an issue with wrist sensing, they'll actually get a big benefit from wearing it on their bicep.

36:46Now, at this point, we're talking about sort of like this 1 in 20 or 1 in 50 type scenario, but we'll make recommendations to people to try it on their bicep, and they often find that that can improve their accuracy. In those early days where you were testing everything with athletes, How did you originally get buy-in from Michael Phelps, LeBron James? How did you convince these guys that you were for real and kind of come on board? Well, I wouldn't say we convinced them. We went to their personal trainers and we built a relationship with their personal trainers. So Mike Mencias, LeBron James' long-tenure trainer.

37:33Keenan Robinson at the time was Michael Phelps' long-tenure trainer. And we were an unknown company, but we said, hey, we want you to try this technology. And at some point, either the technology works or it doesn't. The insight that we had was to go to trainers. Because a lot of people, when they try to get to athletes or famous people, they go to the person that everyone else goes to. You can't go to LeBron's agent as an unknown company because he gets 100 calls a day. But if it turns out, if you go to his personal trainer, not that many people know the personal trainer. And in the case of a fitness technology, that's the person you want to go to.

38:08And the athlete is with that person every day. Right. So that was a bit of an insight to getting to pro athletes. We went to all their personal trainers. And it turned out that these guys spent more time with their personal trainers than often their significant others. It was pretty interesting. And then at some point, the product either works or it doesn't. I mean, one of the reasons that we never did these like big equity deals with athletes or that sort of thing was that I just realized there was no amount of equity or money that I could give a pro athlete to wear a product 24-7 if they didn't want to wear it.

38:47Yeah, they have to want to wear it. And on the flip side, if they were wearing it all the time, it's because it was giving them an edge. And they were learning about their sleep and their recovery, which was the point of the product in the first place. But you did do an equity deal with Ronaldo though, right? Much later. Yeah, yeah. Just to be clear, this is in 2015 because in 2015, keep in mind, the company was unknown and we had 100 people on it. And two of them were like the greatest athletes in the world. And so it was an obvious sort of piece of recommendation. Like, hey, you should just go give LeBron 10 % of the company or something.

39:22You know, like that was just sort of a flippant thing investors would say. And I didn't think that was a good idea because of the idea that if he was wearing it, it was because he liked it. And it didn't really have anything to do with the incentive. Phelps is also the perfect case because there was such a narrative around his ability to rapidly recover. Like when he was just getting up on the blocks like every 15 minutes at one Olympiad after another and able to throw down world-class performances, the discussion was around like this superhuman ability to flush his lactate and he just has some capacity to recover that other athletes don't.

40:00So from your perspective, being so hyper-focused on recovery and strain, he's almost like the ultimate guinea pig plus ambassador for the product. And so in that process of him beginning to wear it and you getting insights and feedback from him, did you glean insights into what it is about him that made him special in that regard? Well, the first thing I'll just say is that it was unbelievable to see their actual data and the output of their scores because it was so validating to us that we were onto something. Because, you know, we had 98 other people wearing Whoop and ourselves included. And if we went out and did a hard day and had like a 19 strain or something, most of us the next day would be kind of like in the yellow or the red.

40:48And I'll never forget looking at a week from Phelps. And it was like, for those who aren't familiar, the strain scores out of 21, it was like 20.2, 20.2, 20.5. Day after day, yeah. And on the fourth day, he woke up in the green. And I remember just like seeing this graph and I was like, wow, it's measuring something that really is going on here. Like this is pretty powerful that you can actually tell that that's Michael Phelps without knowing it's Michael Phelps. just by seeing this incredible rate of recovery. And from a physiological perspective, like what is going on that has allowed him to do that other than just being highly conditioned?

41:30So there's a metric called like heart rate recovery, which essentially talks about when you get your heart rate really elevated, how quickly does it come back down? Another way to think about it in heart rate variability terms is that he could go from a sympathetic state to a parasympathetic state very quickly. and a lot of that's conditioning and fitness and probably a bunch of his recovery techniques. And I can't speak to necessarily all of those, but he was very invested in sleep. You know, he would sleep eight to 10 hours a night and when you looked at a really hard workout, it would jump off the page.

42:07And then when you looked at rest, you know, it would be like... And for a lot of people, if you do really hard exercise, you know, your heart rate's kind of still elevated for a while and your body's still under stress for a while because it's still recovering. And that's what made athletes like Phelps and LeBron so amazing, I think, is their recovery. It was so, I think, underappreciated. Even to this day, it's still, I think, underappreciated. Yeah. I mean, you become better in recovery, not during the training. You expose yourself to exercise-induced stress, and then your body has to contend with that.

42:49And it is in that intermediary period in between workouts when your body's endeavoring to repair itself that you make the gains. And to the extent that you can shrink that window or expedite your recovery, then that allows you to not only train harder, but train more frequently and be less at risk for overtraining or injury or illness, which are the things that really take the athlete out of the game. And anybody who has been an elite athlete in the game for a long period of time has had those experiences. Yeah, I think you said that really well. And it's been fascinating to get to know a lot of these athletes.

43:28And the ones who are the very, very best, like the 1 % of the 1 % of the 1%, they are as obsessed with the other 20 hours of the day as the four hours that they were during practice or game or exercise. And they use that time so intensely. And it's inspiring. And there's a cost to it. And there's a sacrifice to it. And there's just a lot that people don't see. You know, I think that world-class performers in general work insanely hard to make what they're doing look really easy. And the athletes that I've gotten the privilege to work with, they are insanely good at recovery. But you don't see how hard it is.

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47:22So as I was telling you in your office, like six weeks ago, I had spinal fusion surgery and I'm in the hospital and I have the gown on and they're getting me ready and I'm about to go under for anesthesia. The neurosurgeon comes in, the vascular surgeon comes in. And at the last minute, I'm like, can I wear my whoop? Like I really wanted to wear my whoop like during this six hour surgery so I could look back and see what was happening in my body during that very stressful six hour period of time. And they wouldn't let me because I had an IV like on my, you know, in my hand and they were like, it's gonna get in the way.

47:58You have to take everything off. So that was a bummer because I think that would have been super interesting. And I think that speaks to the kind of obsessiveness that you can have with like looking at your data and that connectivity that this device in your platform has created where you feel very connected to what's happening in your body. Not just the things that you can feel, like you know when you wake up in the morning if you had a good night of sleep or not, but those less intuitive things like how much stress was my body enduring throughout the night? And then, of course, the mysterious HRV numbers.

48:34And so I will tell you that I have put this, I can't remember how many years I've been wearing this, probably six or seven at some point, but I just never take it off. I have to imagine that you experience that all the time. Like there's a deep level of loyalty that your customer base has with this product. Yeah, it's a pretty amazing relationship that you build with the product, you know, as a member or someone who's wearing it all the time. obviously you become in a relationship with the data itself but and in some ways the product kind of disappears you know you almost forget that you're wearing it over time but you build rituals like you know i have rituals around looking at sleep or recovery every morning and like checking how closely that aligns with my intuition and looking at stress monitoring and being in a moment and being like i felt nervous there was my body nervous and i mean the biggest thing it's done for me of late is like it gives you permission when your body is is run down so to speak to not go into overdrive i think the challenge of being a an entrepreneur or ceo is your mind can push your body further than at times it should go or that's productive for an organization by the way yeah if you're making important decisions so like i just had a newborn in surgery and stuff so it was and we launched a product and so it was a good time to be able to check in with my data and be like, okay, you know, give myself a little bit more rest or a little more permission at times.

50:01But it's amazing. You know, I get messages every day now from Whoop members who the products changed their life in one way or another or improved it. And increasingly we get the message like subject line, Whoop saved my life. And that's, you know, very surreal and humbling. When you first imagined a company out of this idea that you had in college, did you envision like what when you look around here that it would that it could one day be this multi-billion dollar you know valuated company was that always the vision or or do you look around amazed and surprised that you went from there to here i think it's a balance of both honestly i mean the truth is when i was coming up with this idea in college i i mean i still have the original business plan that i wrote in 2012 and and there was a notion in it of we're going going to start with the world's best athletes.

50:55Over time, we're going to go to consumers, and then we're going to go into medicine. And if you chart the arc of Whoop, it's been pretty accurate to that. Now, there's been a lot of zigs and zags along the way, figuring out the business model, needing to raise capital, almost running out of money multiple times, finding product market fit, dealing with this insane number of competitors that we've had and big companies in the space, for me personally, learning how to develop as a manager or as a CEO. But I do think that that sort of arc was something that I envisioned early on. And if there's things that Whoop got right, it was around why we were going to build the technology, who we were going to build it for initially, and how we were going to expand into these new markets.

51:43And I think those things we did very intentionally. A lot of other things we screwed up along the way, but that sort of overall arc and vision, I think was pretty accurate. Yeah. From your perspective as a young entrepreneur and finding yourself in a very, you know, high performance, high pressure environment, are you learning from that? Are you making mistakes? Like how are you approaching being the shepherd of, of whoop while not, you know, kind of falling prey to some of the mistakes that can take you out of the game? How are you walking your walk? It's like a wellness company, but too much wellness can make you unwell when you're just focused on building the brand, right?

52:25The pressure on you has to be insane with the amount of money you raised and the expectations that come with that. I certainly feel a lot of responsibility. I feel a lot of gratitude for getting to work on this mission. I think anchoring back in those things is important and actually helps you take on stress. I think another important framework, because a lot of it's frameworks and just the way you think about your life or your purpose or your job, one is to think of stress as a tool. And stress is an opportunity essentially to get better and to improve. And if you're sitting in the middle of a crisis and you're saying, why did this happen to me?

53:06Versus you're sitting in a crisis and you're saying this is an opportunity to grow. it just you chart two completely different paths and look it took a long time for me to get to that mental framework and like anyone else there's times where i'm like oh man we better deal with this now but if you can keep coming back to the harder it is the more i'm going to learn from it the the better i'm going to grow the more resilient i'm going to become that puts you on a on kind of a growth path. And I realized early on in building Whoop that one of the most likely reasons for the company to fail was not the idea or the product or the team, the market opportunity.

53:54It was me. Like, I was not fit to be a CEO. I was strung out, stressed out, drinking too much coffee, drinking too much alcohol. I mean, I was a kid, but I had a lot of responsibility and that's not an excuse. And I needed to figure out how to be a great CEO. And if I didn't figure out how to be a great CEO, it was likely the company was going to fail. And so that internalizing that and owning that, I think put me on a growth path. Did you have a moment of reckoning with that, like a sort of hitting bottom kind of thing, or was it a gradual realization? And once you had that realization, how did you put in motion, you know, some set of tools to rectify it?

54:38Yeah. Yeah. I did have a moment. I woke up in the hospital with a panic attack. You know, it didn't even occur to me that you could end up in the hospital from like stress and a lack of managing it or your lifestyle, but - Well, you're building a company that's all about like how you manage stress. Oh yeah. The irony - And how important it is. The irony is amazing. Yeah. Yeah, I was 24 years old. And I remember I was like driving in the car and it had been a really stressful few weeks. I was struggling with a variety of things, team, capital raising, whatever. I had a few drinks the night before.

55:18And all of a sudden I just started to feel my hands go numb. I felt my peripheral vision kind of narrow. and I drove myself to the hospital and I, you know, I didn't know what was happening. I thought I had food poisoning because I felt so weird, but it turned out that I was just having a panic attack. And that was a big wake up call for me. And it was, it was, I think the culmination of just a very painful two years of trying to get the company off the ground and going from being a kid to being an adult in what felt like a light switch moment. And so I Googled ways to cope with stress from a lifestyle standpoint, ironically.

56:04This is actually... You're the guy who's supposed to know that. Yeah. I mean, you're 24. I was 24. And I discovered transcendental meditation. And so I took a four day course and, uh, it really worked. It really worked. And I've been doing it every day since. You got the mantra, you're doing it twice a day. Yeah. Well, the practice has evolved for me. I think in a lot of ways, I've moved away from the mantra, but I still credit TM for essentially the gateway to this idea of sitting with yourself and sitting with your thoughts and reflecting and breathing. And I've gotten fascinated by how much breath can control your state.

56:49And I've gotten very introspective from the process of meditating. I think initially meditation for me was a tool to feel more relaxed in the moment. Or I knew I had to go into an investor pitch, so right beforehand I'm going to meditate and it's going to make me feel more calm. I think the beauty of the practice is that it evolves a lot and what you get from it evolves a lot. And so over time, it started to be much more about not just the period in which I was meditating, but how it made me feel outside of meditation. You know, one theme with meditation and especially a mantra-based meditation, but I think you develop this over time even without a mantra, is that you let thoughts drift in.

57:38and you get to decide essentially with a mantra whether you want to repeat the mantra and push the thoughts along or whether you want to pause and absorb the thoughts and engage with them. And so in many ways, you're kind of screening your thoughts as you sit there. And what I found is that this started to happen outside of meditating, like just in my day-to-day life of running a company or being a partner or whatnot. And I'd be in a meeting, you know, premeditation, let's say I'd be in a meeting and next thing you know, everyone's yelling and I'm yelling and you're kind of like catching up to the situation.

58:18You're like, whoa, that escalated quickly. Right. In sort of the, the post meditation state, I found, I found that I would hear a voice in my head that was like, oh, Will's about to get angry before it happened. And so it, it would then became more of a decision like, well, is that what this moment needs? Should I get angry? And that whole idea of being able to sort of see yourself in the third person in chaotic environments, that's been a life changer. Yeah. I'm a longtime meditator, so you don't have to sell me on this idea. Even if all it does for you is give you that extra moment of pause to respond rather than react or to make a more conscious decision about how you want to show up and comport yourself, particularly in a stressful situation.

59:10I mean, that is a modern day superpower that most people don't have. But the more you invest in it, the more expansive it becomes. Like it is truly like the answer to so many things. And I haven't done a TM course, but I did have Bob Roth on my show very recently for the second time actually, who runs the David Lynch Foundation and has been teaching TM for like, he's been doing and TM like every day for like 50 years or whatever. And by the end of that, I was like, I'm sold. So next time I'm in New York, I'm going to have him teach me, I think. But it really is, I think, an essential tool, if not the most important tool in the toolbox of just trying to be a conscious person in the world who is endeavoring to show up with the best possible version of themselves.

1:00:00I 100 % agree. I think it's a superpower. And it's the gateway to so many other offshoots within that practice. Like if you can just start closing your eyes and breathing and seeing where that ends up taking you over a long period of time. I mean, for me, some of the best ideas I've gotten have come from meditating just in the practice of meditating. uh it's become an incredibly powerful tool for manifestation and visualization i've had i've had moments where i've i felt like i saw everything happen before it happened and i can't explain that other than that that was my experience like i meditated on something saw the whole thing happen and then it happened exactly like i saw it what do you make of that like from a, from like a mystical perspective.

1:00:51Well, I mean, that's wild. We could take a very, you know, sort of trippy, trippy route down this, but my belief from my experience meditating is that the past, the present and the future are much more related than they may seem. And that's a fairly trippy concept. And it's not something I've really ever talked about, But it's just this feeling that I have that you can remember something that's happened in the past and visualize something strongly enough that's going to happen in the future, and they can actually feel identical. And that is a really, really powerful concept when you absorb it.

1:01:35The deeper my meditation practice gets, the more the notion of linear time collapses. Like it really is – it is a mental construct that we filter through perception in order to kind of survive in the world. But I think reality is a very different picture indeed. Okay. So you're on this train too. Completely. We could like do a whole other thing. I don't want to get too distracted by this. But like there's a lot there. And I think to bring it back to just the simple benefits of practicing meditation, we're all walking around with these looping, cluttered thoughts that are just interfering with the way that we make decisions in our best interest.

1:02:18And meditation is a way of creating clarity of truly getting out of the way so that that inspiration can come into us and we can have the peace of mind and the quality of mind to make decisions based on it and turn those things into reality, like on a very practical level. There's a whole mystical aspect of that as well. But it is waking up, like what we think of reality and what reality actually is, I think are two different things. and meditation allows you to awaken to an experience or a sense of that, that I think is very powerful. It's amazing. And look, I think that the headline here is, to anyone listening this, try to learn how to meditate because it changed my life.

1:03:07I mean, I wouldn't be sitting here across with you. This company probably wouldn't exist. When I went into your office, I had seen videos of you in your office and photos of that and stuff like that. But what I didn't expect when I experienced it in person was the fact that I didn't see a single piece of paper on your desk. Well, like uncluttered mind, uncluttered, you know, sort of physical space. Like, is that an intentional thing? Well, you caught me on a good day in part because we had a film crew in here. Oh, okay. So it's not normally. So it's not normally that clean, but I do like the absence of things, which is to say I find that if you're in a room with less things versus a room with more things, if you're in a room with more light, those are things that give me energy and give me spaciousness.

1:03:57I don't like clutter very much. I find it kind of can constrain you. I mean, that's another interesting thing that I would probably attribute to meditation in part is it turns up your sensitivities in, I think, a really productive way. And I have a thesis that in order to be a great entrepreneur, you need to be sensitive. You need to feel problems. When you touch a product or you interact with something, you want to have a strong reaction to it positively or negatively. and you want to be able to play with that dial. And those are things that have helped me more on the creative side of building this company.

1:04:38You also have to be able to, on some level, foretell the future. Like you have to have a sense or a feeling, a spidey sense of like what's around the bend in terms of obstacles and problems that your company might perhaps face. But also like, where is like all of this going? You know, like what are we not seeing right now that is going to be very real five years from now? And what am I doing about that now? And that's not something I think that necessarily – I mean you can look at a lot of data and read research or whatever and develop a thesis around that. But I think the best entrepreneurs or just high performers in general, like there's an intuition.

1:05:20There's some kind of like heart brain going on that allows you to like tap into that and make decisions in the present that will have those like large impacts down the line and then make you look like a genius because you had a sense of it in the present. I think that's right. And there's a question in my mind of how much intuition is informed, like is intuition essentially informed by all of these different things, data being one of them, or is it sort of a separate category of information? And I've generally come to believe it's just, it's a separate category. And most people would say, okay, the decision you make is based on the data and what you felt and this, that, and the other thing.

1:06:07But I find more often than not, I'm kind of either choosing between what the data says or what I feel. And what do you do when those two things are contradicting each other? Depends a lot on what we're talking about. So maybe there's a focus group on a band and the focus group sort of leans one way versus another on which direction the band should go, and I feel an incredibly strong pull towards the other direction, I might just do the other direction. That, though, is a very sort of trivial example, I think. What's been more interesting for me in my life is these moments where I've felt a deep sense of knowing something, and a lot of people have disagreed with it.

1:06:57and those are hard moments because you you find yourself trying to wrestle am i going to believe myself or am i going to believe all these people that i trust and all these people around me i had a big version of this during covid where because we were talking about the office right and during covid there was this like immediate tech reaction that was universal echo chamber stuff that the future was remote. Human beings weren't going to live in cities. We were going to be on Zoom for the rest of our lives. And it just so happened around that time period that I had seen the footprint for what was going to become this building.

1:07:42It was a hole in the ground at the time. And I knew in my gut that that was not the future that we were going to live in, And I, nor was it the future I wanted to live in. And you could argue maybe it was more that it was the future I didn't want to live in. But I was totally sold that we should build this office, that we should get people to come back to the office. This is pre-vaccine. This is my board of directors telling me, you don't understand, Will, the world's really changing. This could be a one-way door, you know. And I just didn't believe any of it. And I was very stubborn about it.

1:08:20And I had this feeling and I trusted it. And so, you know, we got this very cool office, which now has the largest sign in Boston overlooking Fenway Park and the heart of the city. And now it looks great and smart. And, of course, we're sitting here and there's an office that's filled with 500 employees and everyone's smiling. But I remember the time when all the data and all the sort of points of view ran completely contrary to something that turned out right. And I think there's an element for every individual in their lives where they can have that intuition. And it could be intuition about a person they've just met and whether it's a relationship they should have or not have or what job they should take or not take.

1:09:03and you have to build this relationship with yourself to be able to trust that voice. And it's even worth keeping tabs on that voice. How often was that voice right? How strong or how loud does that voice have to be for you to listen to it? Are there certain categories where it's really good and other categories where it's a little more unknown? And so again, back to meditation in part, I do think it's a practice that helps you develop this relationship with that voice. Yeah, the credibility of your intuition is really a function of your investment in your interior self. And I think where people get confused is they mistake what is really kind of like impulse or craving or desire or the grasp of the ego for intuition because they're disconnected from themselves and they don't have the level of self-awareness or are not committed to doing that kind of personal inventory to parse the two.

1:10:13And so it becomes easy to say, well, my intuition is saying this. Well, is it really or is it something else? And I think the commitment to like trying to figure out the difference between the two is really important. And when you've invested in your own personal development, then over time, your intuition becomes much more reliable. But intuition is real. We're down like another rabbit hole on this, I think. The reason it's such an important rabbit hole is because I think for the last like 10 or 15 years, particularly in the technology industry, it seemed smarter, so to speak, to do all this data analysis and come down to a conclusion based on the data.

1:10:54And if you do that and you make the database decision, you're really smart. This has also been pioneered in what's called the lean startup methodology, which is you have a very weak hypothesis that you go test. And then if it's, if it doesn't prove right, you, you, you shift quickly and do a different hypothesis and it's called, you know, you know, test, fail, learn, you know, pivot. Right. And, and so like, there's been this huge push in technology for the last 15 years around AB testing and around lean startup methodology. And, and I think what got lost in And that whole conversation was intuition and a really strong point of view on what the world looks like in the future when you're right.

1:11:44And that's not to say you are right, but it's to say that you have a really strong point of view of what the world looks like in the future. And I think the best entrepreneurs do that. Yeah, I agree. I think that's well said. I think the dark side of that or the flip side of that is when you are, to kind of extend the Silicon Valley startup example, let's say you're a startup founder and you shepherd your company into this like unicorn, right? Because you had an intuition about a problem that needed to be solved or whatever and you do it. what often happens is that that individual then over-indexes on their intuition and kind of descends into galaxy brain and thinks that they can like solve every problem, all these problems that are kind of outside their lane of expertise.

1:12:31And I think we're seeing a little bit too much of that writ large culturally right now. Well, that's because they're not actually listening to their intuition. They're listening to their ego. Yeah, that's the point I'm trying to make. It's that difference between ego and intuition. And I actually think they're pretty clear. Like how often do you find that you're debating whether you feel something strongly based on your ego versus your intuition, particularly if it was someone to ask, you know, someone asked you an important question, like, do you feel like you'd be able to decipher that? Meaning when I answer it, am I answering it from a place of ego versus intuition?

1:13:08Yeah. I think, I mean, it's a great question. Let me think about that. I think that, it's impossible to completely remove your ego from that. But I think a good indicator is, A, like if I feel like somehow provoked where my ego is being threatened and then I want to compensate with some answer that casts me in a better light than I actually am. Or am I taking the question from a more open-hearted place where I'm trying to answer from curiosity or like a really good faith? Like, what do I think about that? Like, I think it's hard. I think it's hard. We're all victims of our ego on some level. I find that there's a real difference in saying something that you think in order to provoke discussion or disagreement.

1:14:11I mean, there's oftentimes where I'm in a meeting and someone puts forth a case and my immediate reaction is just to sort of put forth the opposite case to almost just create a sense of disagreement. And in some ways, like that's just coming from a place of curiosity or engagement. But if you're in that moment to say, no, that's a bad idea, well, then that is either coming from a place of intuition or ego. And I find that you can parse those apart. Yeah. I think the better response in that situation, like if you're reactively saying that's a bad idea, then what is it that's being threatened that you're trying to protect?

1:14:53Is there some ego piece to that? But if instead you say, oh, that's interesting, tell me more about that. Why do you think that's a good idea? Yes, that would be a better way to have the discourse. I mean, it's interesting to ask the question of like, when we're talking about intuition in this context, are we talking about the feelings that you have on a minute by minute basis? Or are we talking about these big moment decisions where you have to go left or right and they're like one way doors? and just to zoom out for a second i think that it's more useful to think about intuition in the context of those big decisions in your life because those are the ones you really have to get right and you want to create a sort of set of processes for which you're really examining how am i making this decision am i making it because it's the mean of what everyone just told me?

1:15:50Am I making it because that's what I feel on the inside? Can I even feel on the inside? Can I even ask myself? And I meet a lot of young people who are trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives when they're 22 years old or whatnot. And I have a lot of sympathy for that crowd because when I was 22 years old, I was starting Whoop and I felt so insecure about it. but I knew deep down it was the right thing for me to do. But there were so many, like my universe all of a sudden collapsed on me where friends and adults I knew and teachers, and they kind of mostly just told me it was a bad idea.

1:16:32And so I really was faced with this question of like, am I going to trust my intuition or am I going to trust what all the data says, so to speak, or what everyone around me says? and one framework i've tried to give younger people but i think it applies to all of us is this idea of um a lot of circumstances can come down to knowing what you want and then trying to get what you want and the first piece of that equation knowing what you want requires an inwards process the mistake a lot of people make about knowing what you want is they go outwards They ask everyone else what they should want or what they should do, but they struggle asking themselves.

1:17:19And then the process of trying to get what you want is one in which you should definitely go outwards. And then a lot of people get frustrated when they're trying to get what they want, but they're isolating themselves. And so there's this sort of irony that knowing what you want is a process of going inwards, but most people go outwards. And getting what you want is this process of going outwards, but a lot of people go inwards. That's fascinating.

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1:21:12As a young person who had this intuition, this idea that you felt had value and you had passion for, yet all the external inputs were negative. How did you have the sense of self amidst the self-doubt to lean into your intuition when everybody was pushing you in the other direction? If you're nervous, be prepared. I did a lot of work. I think that was one thing. When people asked me why I believed in it, I could talk for two hours about it. I did all this work on the physiology side. I did all this work on what a business plan could be. I really believed in it. And the more work I did on it, the more I believed in it.

1:22:02And the more I talked to other people, the more discouraged I got. And that was just this inner turmoil that I had to confront. And I think the lesson in it is just that if you're going to create something that doesn't exist or you're going to become someone that you aren't yet, which those were two things that I was trying to do, right? You're going to face a lot of opposition and rejection. The most rejection I faced in my entire life was from the ages of like 22 to 25, because everyone's like, who's this kid who thinks he's going to compete with Nike and Apple? And by the way, I was starting a company at the intersection of engineering and computer science and design and medicine.

1:22:46And I wasn't a computer scientist or an engineer or a doctor or a designer. Like, I get it. I get why that I came across that way. And that's where you have to build a belief system. I mean, I did crazy things too. When I was in a lot of doubt, I would write affirmations. I'd go back to visualization. I would keep telling myself that this was real. Wow. Do you think that being at Harvard even heightened it more because you're at this prestigious university where where you have so many opportunities and options that for you to go down this entrepreneurial path, you were sacrificing, you know, so many other things that you, you know, quote unquote, like, should be doing.

1:23:35Like, there's a lot more to lose than if you had emerged from a junior college or, you know, some other kind of place, right? Like, it casts like an added layer of intensity over the whole thing because, you know, Harvard is Harvard is Harvard. Yeah. I mean, I felt like kind of a loser graduating and doing this thing. It wasn't popular to start a company. And I was one of the only people I knew doing it. And all my friends were getting, you know, six figure jobs in Manhattan and finance or consulting or whatever. And so I felt like a lot, like I was on an island, but I don't think it's a Harvard thing.

1:24:14I think it's a young person trying to figure out what they want to do with their life thing, you know, and it's easy to just compare yourself to others and take comfort in the fact that you're doing something similar to what everyone else is doing and not wrestle with this hard, hard question of who you are and what you want to do and how that bumps up into the world and getting on the stage and being told you're, you're bad. And I mean, just if I think back on it, it's so easy for me to remember the pain of, you know, pitching 20 people in a row and having 20 people in a row say no. Like, it was just so painful.

1:24:54But at some level, you learn to detach your identity from those sorts of scenarios, right? Like, not to not self-identify with the kind of outcomes of those situations. And I found that incredibly challenging. I mean, for a long time, in those early years especially, my identity was very tied to the company's identity. So, you know, if Whoop was having a great day, I was having a great day. And if Whoop was failing, I was failing. And the other element to that is, I mean, the first thing to understand about that is it's literally not true. Like you could be performing well in a certain situation.

1:25:34and based on circumstances out of your control, the thing that you're developing may struggle. I've actually seen the flip side of this now, having been around a lot of successful entrepreneurs, where someone's created an amazing rocket ship business. And by the way, the person running it has spun completely out of control. So just to state the obvious, it's very much the case that your own performance and the company's performance are somewhat or very clearly different entities and different things. The other piece, though, is that you have to figure out how you're going to get a little bit better every day.

1:26:13And I made the mistake, again, that I think a lot of other people make too, which is I was comparing myself to the greatest entrepreneurs of all time in my head, you know? And so I'm 22 years old and I'm having trouble raising$300 ,000 and I'm saying to myself, well, I bet Elon Musk never had trouble raising this much money or Steve Jobs or this, that, and the other. And of course, totally unproductive way of thinking about the world. You shouldn't compare yourself to these greats. You should just compare yourself to yourself. And again, if you keep getting a little better every day, you may wake up one day and be in quite a place.

1:26:48And I do believe that most successful entrepreneurs, when they first were getting started, had no idea what they were doing either. But you need to have those benchmarks, you know, those people that inspire you. Totally. Because they, they kind of like underscore, you know, the vision that you create around that, that helps you, you know, kind of imagine, you know, the, the road, the path that you're going to travel and the people who have traveled it before you, but it's about being like right-sized about that. But I think this, I want to go back to this idea of, of knowing yourself and how important that is.

1:27:24Like if you're at Harvard, you're there because you have figured out how to game the racket. You know how to play the – you know how to get good grades. You know how to take the test and do well. And you get funneled on this sort of certain upwardly mobile track that's a bit of a hamster wheel, right? And I think with that, it becomes very difficult to not be myopic. Like, here I am and the next step is this and the next step is this and not be able to like see a broader picture for yourself. Like everyone around you is kind of moving in that direction. And so that's a lot of noise to identify the signal that is like the true self and the intuition.

1:28:10And, you know, the thing inside of you that wants to be born can get kind of snuffed out, right? Yeah. If you've been on the default path. And that path has been a really good one, which is like, for this example, let's say - It's working. Getting into Harvard and then getting an investment banking internship and then going through the final review process and getting the full-time job offer, investment banking, and then knowing that after a few years of investment banking, you're going to compete to go to the private equity firm for two years. And then after that, you're going to compete to go to the business school for two years, and then you're going to get the offer at a higher level at the private equity firm.

1:28:50You can be on that path, that sort of elite Ivy League school path, let's call it, until you're 40 years old without asking the question of, this is the path I want to be on. And I credit the institutions a little bit because they play into that quiet ego that wants to compete for something without asking for whether or not it's what you even want. You know, if you're a student at Harvard, you've gotten good at winning these competitions. Like a bunch of people want to go to this thing. And so, you know, the banks and the consulting firms, they do a smart job in that they create a very competitive process.

1:29:32And so you feel like it's another thing that you're supposed to go into. And so I've seen a lot of friends go down that path for two years, four years, 12 years. And one day I'll get a phone call like, how do I get off this path? Yeah, there's an existential reckoning. I think there's a certain violence to the fact that society is set up such that it is this competitive race that begins the moment you enter elementary school where you're being judged and compared to your peers. And you have to keep track, right? And people who end up at Harvard are, like I said, are really good at that. And there's no incentive or importance placed upon like, hey man, like, who are you?

1:30:19You know, like, what do you want to, like, what do you really want to do? Like, what are we doing here? You know what I mean? I think it's sort of like, let's ameliorate uncertainty. Let's take the path of least resistance. Let's try to, you know, game as much security into our life that we can, avoid pain. But ultimately, these things are unavoidable. Uncertainty is a fact of life. You're going to have pain. You're always going to have to do more work. There is no retirement from the relationship that you have with yourself. And it catches up to you. And it certainly caught up to me. I was 40.

1:30:54I was one of those people. And if you can go on that path and be happy and have a purpose-driven, meaningful life that's satisfying, more power to you. But I just think for more people than others, that's not the path. And they're a victim of that because they weren't in a situation where anybody said, hey, let's take a beat here and reassess. I completely agree. I mean, I'm 35, so I've had probably 20 years of seeing people graduating from college, so to speak, or being 20 years out from college. And so I've seen enough versions of what you just described where, yes, there's some percentage of the people who just followed that path forever are perfectly content with it.

1:31:46But there's a lot of people who have been on it for a while who kind of wake up realizing that they're 40 years old and they don't even know if they're doing what they want to do with their life. are you engaged in some practice of like continual personal inventory to make sure that you are on track when it comes to those things that matter? That's a great question. I've started doing some work with an executive coach. And one of the things we do every year is like a retreat for two days where we just hang out and do a lot of exploration of my life and like, you know, look at how are things going professionally and personally and from a community sense and a spirituality sense and a giving back sense and a health sense.

1:32:36And like, you kind of look at this, you know, butterfly of your life, so to speak. And if you do that practice enough times or enough years in a row, you start to realize that it's hard to have all of the, you know, again, if you think of it as a butterfly and those different things are sort of the size depending on how well they're going or how much you're investing in them. It's hard to have all of those things as one equal blossom. Like one year you'll have something that's totally outweighed versus the others. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but I think an awareness of it will help you shape it so that it's much closer to who you want to be.

1:33:16What can you share about what you imagined your life would be like if you succeeded to the extent that you have versus like the lived reality of it that you can kind of report back. Like when you were at the beginning of this journey and you're like, one day I'm going to have this incredible office across from Fenway and I'm going to employ all these people and millions of people all over the world are going to be wearing whoops. It's going to be amazing. And you're like, and this is how I'm going to feel about myself. I'm going to be happy. I'm going to be this and that. Now you're here. You've done that.

1:33:49You're young. You're 35 years old. Like, what do you want to tell the young version of yourself? Like, here's what it's really like. It's better than I ever imagined? Or like, here's the ways in which, you know, I still feel like I'm myself. Well, I do think the process of building a company and creating a product that people use to improve their health and their performance has made me more who I am, so to speak, which is like I've had to do a lot of work on myself to get in this position to lead this company, to create a product that is intentionally of service, so to speak, to the world's population.

1:34:31And so that I'm very grateful for, you know, put aside the success, just the fact that this incredibly hard, beautiful, chaotic thing that I've built with really smart people has molded me. And so I love that. I love that being on that hard path and figuring out how to climb this mountain, so to speak, has shaped me in certain ways. And in certain ways, I'm still trying to mold myself and keep growing, so to speak. I think that the biggest surprise so to speak, is that I don't feel like a deep, deep sense of I've arrived, I've made it. I mean, even the notion of being quote unquote successful, that's not a word I spend a lot of time anchoring to.

1:35:23I know it to be true, but it's not like a feeling that I have deep down. More what I have is this sense of responsibility and privilege that I get to go fight every day for this company. And that is, I'm using that word accurately. Like I do feel like building a business like this is a fight. It's hard. And it comes with amazing privileges and amazing moments. And it also comes with really challenging, hard, difficult situations that test you as a man, that tests you as a leader, that tests your whole value system. And so the role of CEO often is dealing with the crisis of the day. And that too can create its own glasses, so to speak, or can create its own sort of fogginess of the beauty that you've created.

1:36:27And so it is important that I zoom in and out constantly. I think that's something that good leaders do really well where they can be talking about a design detail that's on this desk right now. And why is that this round? And is it 0.1 millimeters or 0.2? And then they can zoom way out and be like, wow, look at all these people here. And I just got an email from someone and the product helped them lose 40 pounds. And this is gonna work out. Like, this is pretty great. So it's everything I just said. and I'm incredibly grateful to be doing it.

1:37:04And that I think is the key. You have to balance drive with gratitude. They're like two different engines that you need to be running at the same time. You know, the dopamine system of building a company works, but you end up miserable if it's just a dopamine system. If you tell yourself, I'm going to be happy when, when we get to be a$10 million company, when we get to be a$100 million company, when we have a million people on whoop, when we have, you know, like you can keep, you can keep doing that game. Well, every time you achieve one of those benchmarks, the, the, it just, you know, the goalposts move anyway.

1:37:44Exactly. Because you used all your dopamine up telling yourself how happy you were going to be when you got there. And then you're not. So it must be because there's this other thing that you haven't gotten yet. You're just continually outsourcing. Yeah, no, it's because you didn't have another zero. You know what I mean? It's like, it is like - It's absurd, but like - It's toxic. The human animal is crazy that way. So that's the drive piece. And then, and that's the dopamine system. But if you pair it with gratitude and appreciating it along the way, you can be pretty happy while you're still struggling and driving.

1:38:20Right, but the trick there, of course, is that the dopamine cycle can run on autopilot mindlessly, because that's what your ego and subconscious wants you to do. But the gratitude piece requires conscious effort. That's a practice. A good way to still create the drive, but I've found sort of heightens your feeling of purpose and maybe also quiets the ego is this concept of your of service. So I'm of service to all the members who wear Whoop. I'm of service to this team that I've built. I'm of service to the billions of dollars of shareholder value that I need to return. return. And when you frame it that way, then it doesn't feel like you're doing anything for yourself, right?

1:39:17You're doing it because you want to lift everyone else up. And I think that in a way can quiet your ego in the process. Yeah. I mean, service is the antidote to self-obsession. Well, sure. Yeah. And, you know, this is like, I've been sober a long time. This is like a core tenet of like 12-step recovery, you know what I mean? And I can fall prey to my ego in any given moment. And really, that's the best and easiest way to snap out of it and kind of disabuse yourself of all the nonsense that's going on and tap into that gratitude. And when you're on a mission that is service-based and to approach it in that way is such a beautiful thing.

1:39:59And with that comes this realization that you spoke to so elegantly, which is your ability to steward this mission-based affair is very much a function of the extent to which you are living the principles upon which the company is based. You cannot be out of balance and stressed out and have terrible recovery scores and sleep scores and effectively shepherd this thing forward and realize its greatest potential. The capacity to serve is so deeply related to you living the principles upon which WHOOP is founded and this message that you're trying to put out in the world until realize that and understand that that's a core.

1:40:50You lose your ballast if you're not doing that. And that why, so to speak, not only can it sort of reorient your mission, but it can do the same for teams and organizations. And it's a very useful framework, I think, in a lot of contexts. There was a powerful story I read about a bank that, you know, their sort of mission, so to speak, was to produce as many mortgages as they possibly could. And a new leader came in and changed the why from being about how many mortgages they could produce to how many people they could put in their first home. And just that framework shift. In a year, the bank went from being seventh to second in the mortgages that they put out.

1:41:44I think there's a big lesson in something like that. Like, it doesn't surprise me that creating a motivation that is so, like, inherently positive versus one that's just mostly financial or sort of self-motivated can dramatically shift your performance. And fortunately, we have a really easy mission to anchor on here around unlocking human performance and health span. And when we're pushing ourselves, it's because we want to create a product that's going to make someone live longer or save someone's life or tell them something they've never known before about their bodies. It's easy to be able to push harder when that is the goal.

1:42:25The other conundrum that comes up with that is the conflict between using this as a tool to improve your IRL experience, like to create the richest experience and most vital and connected experience with life that you possibly can through a device and a technology within a culture that has an unhealthy experience. healthy relationship with optimization, right? And so with that, I'm sure you have people out there who are overly attached to the data and are allowing the data to be kind of predictive of how they feel about themselves and live their lives. Obviously, you don't have a screen on here.

1:43:15You've thought about this. You're doing what you can within the context of what you do to ameliorate that, but it is a thing. So how do you think about how someone should relate to the data, to the product, and also sort of take autonomy over themselves so that they're not being held captive by it? I mean, it's a really important question. I think we've pretty intentionally tried to design technology to improve your life, not invade it. And the screen thing is a real thing. It would have been very easy to put a screen on it and have it buzzing and push notifications and all sorts of things. My critique of the world 10 years ago, but I think it's probably even more true today, was there was just too many things fighting for your attention.

1:44:11Creating technology that lived in the background of your life and was there when you needed it. That to me felt like the right relationship with technology. And so that's been at the core of the way that we've developed a lot. I mean, even the product itself is designed to not necessarily even look like a piece of technology. Most of the wearables that came before Whoop had very clear kind of like plastic and glass identities and ours is mostly material and it feels like it's blending more into fashion even than technology. so those are some of like the principles let's just say behind how we've how we've built the product i mean in terms of how people want to use it i think that they should be comfortable wearing the product without feeling like they need to check in on the data and again this is more we're speaking more to the person who is struggling with the concept that you just described which is like, are they trying to over-optimize?

1:45:10Are they too reliant on data? So on and so forth. I think that having the data is unquestionably going to be something that is rewarding in your life. And we're just on the cusp of what artificial intelligence is going to be able to do with all this data and what it's going to unlock about the human body. So I think that people will be deeply rewarded for having collected this information about themselves. The idea of, okay I didn't get enough sleep and WHOOP says I didn't get enough sleep and so now I'm going to tell myself I'm not well rested all day I think that there are ways to manage that I think that at the end of the day WHOOP is a tool and like any other tool you have to learn how to use it and I actually didn't sleep particularly well last night but as a consequence that also made me take a cold plunge this morning take a sauna this morning, meditate for longer, have a great breakfast.

1:46:11So like it shifted my behaviors a little bit because, you know, I knew I'd be sitting down with you and I want to have a, you know, a good time with you or I run a company and I got to run a company. So I really view information as power and how you choose to use it is what comes out of it. I think that's well said. Is it a tool or is it a driver? You know, and I think if somebody has an anxious response to this, it's worth recalibrating your relationship with it. But anybody who uses it has that experience of waking up after, like I didn't sleep so great last night either. And you're like, oh man, I'm gonna meet Will.

1:46:54We're gonna do back-to-back pot. He's like, am I gonna be up for it? And the last thing I wanna do is like open my Whoop app and see a bunch of red. It's like, I already, I'm not gonna cancel. Like we're doing this, right? So when the message is like danger, danger, or like you're not, you know, at peak performance or you're less than today, like what is that doing mentally to you? And I think you do need to have – if you feel like that is something that dysregulates you, then you have to create healthy boundaries around it and perhaps use it for, you know, larger trends rather than the day-to-day.

1:47:32But to the extent that it can then instruct and inform decisions that you can make that morning to course correct like you did, like with the plunge and nutrition habits, et cetera, it is very helpful in that regard. So it does – it's a little bit of a catch-22 I think in that situation. Yeah. I mean like most days I wouldn't want to drink two cups of coffee before noon or something. But like, because I know I didn't sleep as well, I like give myself permission to do this. Or it's like, you just create certain frameworks around it. But there is an aspect of on this day, I have to do this thing, period.

1:48:10It doesn't matter what the state of my body is, I have to do it. And again, that goes back to a mindset thing, which is like day to be damned, I'm going to do this thing. And I'm going to figure out how to do it. And I do believe you can push your body through anything in a given day. And depending on what that thing is, if it's a 250-mile race, well, there might be consequences on the other side. But if it's a meeting or a podcast or a pitch or an interview, like, you can get yourself there. And on the other side of what we're talking about is actually a very positive reinforcing tool, which is my whoop said I was run down, but I had to do this thing.

1:48:47I had to perform. And you figure out a way how you do it. And that actually builds resilience. There's resilience. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting lens on it. You mentioned AI and where this is kind of all quickly heading. Like what is your intuition, spidey sense, about what's around the bend in terms of wearables and preventative health technology at this point? Like what do you imagine we can expect to see in the next five years? I mean, I think on an order of magnitude that's meaningfully shorter than that, maybe even like in the two to three year range, a lot about your relationship with your health, your doctor's office will change pretty profoundly from continuous wearable data and, mind you, other data sets.

1:49:41so you're you wear whoop but you probably also do blood tests somewhere maybe you've worn a cgm before you've got a scale somewhere you've seen a doctor twice in the last 12 months uh maybe you did a dna test once like all this stuff just sort of like lives in the ether and is not talking to each other is not connected all of that information is going to be under one roof and there's going to be a very powerful ai that sits on top of it that explains a lot of it And there's going to be discoveries from that. And there's going to be a preventative health side to that, which should really start to change the healthcare industry at large.

1:50:23I mean, the cost of a wearable device or some of these other tests that we just talked about is so much lower than the cost of having to deal with someone who's now diabetic or cardiovascular disease or hypertension, which, by the way, is not like a small problem. It's the problem, right? And so, I'm a big believer that wearable technology coupled with AI and other data sets is not just going to dramatically improve behavior from a lifestyle coaching standpoint, but it's going to change medicine. And it's going to change that relationship with your doctor's office. And in many ways, it's going to feel like maybe more of a continuation of your doctor's office.

1:51:11In the ongoing discussion around artificial intelligence, I mean, there's certainly rational reasons to fear this dystopic future. But to my mind, the most optimistic and most obvious best use cases for this are in medicine and particularly preventative health because of its ability to crunch massive amounts of data and make sense of it, because of the ways in which scanning technology is leading to early detection. All of these things are going to make us able to short circuit particularly lifestyle disease well in advance of it taking root and becoming problematic. And all of these tools, WHOOP included, of course, are pieces of that puzzle.

1:52:02And I think that's super exciting. It's also interesting to see people sort of threatened by this. The conversation around CGMs is wild. You know, like how there's a lot of people that don't like the fact that consumers are using that. But it's just another tool from my perspective. It requires some education in order to interpret it correctly so that you're making wise decisions based upon it. But I think once these things begin to cohere and share information and you're able to get a comprehensive like real-time picture of what's going on with you, And that is communicating in real time with your primary care physician or the specialist.

1:52:42The implications of that, I think, are astounding. Quite profound. I mean, I think the overall life expectancy of human beings is going to go up by a dramatic amount when this technology all kind of comes together. And so that's a really exciting artifact of artificial intelligence. In some ways, I feel grateful that I'm working in a category where it feels like near 100 % likelihood that this is just going to be a good thing for this vertical, which is like AI for health.

1:53:20And I have some, you know, I have a lot of societal concerns about AI in other places. And so it's like refreshing in some ways to just get to focus on the health side of it. And I have this selfish concern, though, or fear being on the elder side of Gen X that I'm going to just miss it. It's like all this lifespan extension is all going to kick in right when I either pass away or I'm past that point of no return. I think you got plenty of time. So I just think my kids will get it. But I was born a little bit too early for this. I think the biggest trip is going to be the robots. That's going to be a trip.

1:54:05Tell me more. There's a world that's two to three years away where you walk down Fifth Avenue and you see thousands of robots. And that's just going to feel very different than people going from using Google search to ChetGPT because it's going to be so physical. I mean, it's going to be just such a different relationship with your world. and instead of getting greeted at a department store by a human, maybe you're going to be greeted by a robot. And over the next 10 years, I think that human beings are going to spend increasingly less time with one another. And I think that the relationships they're going to build with AIs are going to be very real and displace relationships with human beings.

1:54:52That's the part where I feel like I'm not sure I want to have my life extended. You know, like, is that the world I really want to live in? Like, I don't disagree with you. But when I look at my kids and think about the world that they're inheriting and the world in which I grew up, you know, I have real concerns about that. What does that mean? It's certainly, you know, the direction that we're headed in. And it will just be another version of the human experience, I suppose. But, you know, I can't help but lament what gets lost in that amidst the benefits that will occur also with that, I guess.

1:55:30It's hard to know. Yeah, and I'm not – I don't like that concept at all. You know, I think that there's something inherently beautiful about human beings being with human beings and the relationships and the teams. And it's so amazing when you really think about it that we're these animals that can work in systems of hundreds of millions of people. I mean you can't put 100 gorillas in a stadium and have it be a sane environment. But you can have a country with a billion people and somehow they organize and coexist. I mean that's a very fascinating concept. Well, it's refreshing to come to your headquarters and see so many people here.

1:56:13And that's your ability to foretell the return to the workplace and that being something that people are going to want to do I think is proven correct. But you do it through building a culture and an aspirational environment for people wanting to do that, right? I've been to extraordinary offices in New York and in Los Angeles where you would imagine every young 20-something person would want to show up at every day and they're empty and everyone's working from home. So it's not just about like the way the world is moving. It's about the intentional culture that you're creating to make sure that people are nourished in that way.

1:56:59I'm very honored to spend this time with you and also to be an ambassador of the product. Thank you. I appreciate you being such a longtime great partner of the podcast as a sponsor of the podcast. It just feels really good to work with people who are on this kind of mission-based path to improve the health and well-being of people all over the world. So it's been a real treat to spend time with you today. And I want to end this just by giving you the opportunity to share what you think is the main or biggest thing that you want people to understand about this mission that you're on and what you've learned about human health and potential that they could take away and think about and perhaps use in their lives.

1:57:56I think the amazing thing about the human body is how much it can change or adapt to new circumstances. And I think that there's a lot of people probably listening to this who are in a state of their life where they feel like not as good as they probably could. And they kind of know that. Maybe they're a little overweight or maybe they don't exercise as much or maybe they wake up tired or maybe they're stressed all the time or maybe they've got a lot of fights going on in their personal life. And, you know, by the way, everyone struggles with that stuff. But if you're listening to that and you're sort of saying, like, I want to do a little more about it, I do believe that a self-awareness of your body can make a big difference.

1:58:40And being able to measure the human body and create that relationship with yourself and understand what your baselines are. Maybe you're fitter than you think you are. Maybe your VO2 max is a little higher than you thought. Maybe your resting heart rate is a little lower, but maybe your sleep is really bad. Maybe it's all the opposite things. I'm often amazed how many people tell me they got a Whoop and actually thought they were better at something than they thought or much worse at something than they thought. But it was different than what they expected they were going to learn when they put this product on.

1:59:11And I think there's kind of a beauty in that. Like a lot of the theme of this podcast outside of Whoop has been this concept of self-awareness and looking inwards. And I think that as a product, WHOOP is one that can help you do that. And then the question becomes, well, what do you do about it? And that's also up to you to decide. But I often find that you can only really manage what you measure. And if you think it's important to wake up well-rested, if you think it's important to be fit, if you think it's important to, you know, have a normal blood pressure or a low resting heart rate, When you start measuring these things, you're going to quickly identify behaviors and lifestyle decisions that can help you shape them.

1:59:52And so that's what gets me and hundreds of other people at WHOOP excited to wake up every morning and push this mission to unlock human performance and healthspin. I love it, man. Yeah, the idea that you can't improve what you're not measuring. Like if you're afraid to step on the scale because you don't want to see what that number is, I can understand that same fear applies to the fear around like, well, set aside weight like all these other numbers. Like, oh, my God, what's it going to say? It's just going to tell me all these ways in which I'm off base or I'm headed in the wrong direction.

2:00:32And if you're feeling that way, you probably already know that maybe you're not, you know, you're not, you don't have everything dialed in, but you have more agency than ever to make these choices. There are resources available that didn't exist, you know, even years prior. And to kind of rip the Band-Aid off and look at that stuff is really empowering. So I encourage anybody who feels that sense of fear to walk through it and take that leap because on the other side of it, there's so much value and you're worth it. And I thank you for taking the time today. That was really fun, dude. Thanks, brother.

2:01:10I really enjoyed it. Yeah, cool.

2:01:15That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful.

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2:02:35And of course, our theme music was created all the way back in 2012 by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.

2:03:00Thank you.