Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WHOOP, on Brave New World (Preview)

0:04Hi, you're listening to The Standard Podcast. and today we're doing something a little different. We're sharing a preview from our sister podcast, Brave New World, which has just released a new episode in its latest series. Host Yevgeny Lebedev is joined by Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Whoop, to explore recovery, sleep, and why you can't manage what you don't measure. Will shares how overtraining as a Harvard athlete led him to build a wearable focused not on steps, but on the missing piece of performance, how ready your body actually is. He also explains what Whoop tracks, sleep quality, strain, heart rate variability, recovery, and stress.

1:02Dives into why seven hours in bed can still mean poor sleep and why consistency of bedtime and wake time often matters more than raw hours. Here's your special preview. To hear the full episode, just search Brave New World Evening Standard on your podcast app. I can almost guarantee you the person who's getting 30 minutes of restorative sleep has a whole host of challenges in their life and problems. And I can almost promise that the person who's getting over five hours of sleep, of restorative sleep, is having a phenomenal time and is generally pretty positive.

1:40Welcome back to Brave New World, the standards podcast where we explore the cutting edge of science, medicine, and the future of humankind. I'm your host, Evgeny Lebedev. And in this series, with entering into the realms of neuroscience, longevity, consciousness, and the extraordinary breakthroughs reshaping the human experience. Today's guest is Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Whoop, the wearable technology that has redefined how we think about fitness, health, and human performance. Will started Whoop straight out of Harvard, where as captain of the squash team, he became fascinated by the science of recovery, a piece of the performance puzzle that has largely been ignored.

2:25While other devices were counting steps and calories, Whoop went deeper, measuring sleep quality, heart rate variability, strain and recovery. Ahmed is at the forefront of a movement that says you can't manage what you don't measure and your body's data is the key to unlocking peak performance. Will Ahmed, it's great to have you on Brave New World. I'm really excited to talk to you about Whoop. which is something that more and more people are talking about, more and more people are wearing. But first I wanted to ask you, you've launched Whoop just as you left Harvard. How did that come about? What's your background?

3:03What's your story? Well, thank you for having me. So I founded Whoop in 2012. I was 22 years old. I was a senior at Harvard, and I had been studying physiology for the last couple of years. I was always into sports and exercise. I was someone who used to overtrain, where you get kind of fitter and fitter as an athlete. And then one day you kind of wake up and sort of fall off a cliff and you don't know why. Your body feels very run down, sort of inexplicably. And so I got interested in what I could measure about the body in order to understand that phenomenon. Embedded in this question of what is overtraining is this question of what is recovery.

3:40And I got very interested in recovery when I was a student. And I was surprised that there weren't any tools on the market to measure recovery. And so I got interested in what you could measure to understand it. And that led me down rabbit holes around heart rate variability and resting heart rate and respiratory rate and a variety of metrics that I thought were really important, not to mention, of course, sleep. And when I looked at the technology that could measure these underlying physiological metrics, I was surprised how antiquated the technology was. What was the technology at the time? So the initial technology that I was hoping to replace, I would say it was really three technologies.

4:21The first was the PSG machine, which was really the gold standard for measuring sleep. So if you thought you had sleep apnea, they might send you to a sleep laboratory where you get hooked up to a PSG machine. They put all these nodes all over your body. You try to sleep in a bedroom environment with two human beings watching you sleep and a bunch of things are connected to you. And it's a bizarre experience. Heart rate variability at the time was best measured by something called an electrocardiogram. The ECG was kind of like$20 ,000 hospital equipment. And again, you have to stick a bunch of nodes on your body.

5:00And so I asked, could we measure heart rate variability from the wrist? And then the last question was actually more just around traditional heart rate monitoring, because up until that point, it was really only done with chest straps. Also, again, obtrusive, antiquated. The chest strap dates back to the early 1980s. And so I wanted to see if we could take those technologies and put them into a much smaller form factor. And in turn, if we could measure those things, I thought we could create a real platform around sleep and recovery and strain. Was yours the first? Because there are other wearables.

5:31There's lots of wearables around now, but Aura is the other big one that everyone knows about. Dating back to 2012, actually, there weren't many wrist-based wearables, but there were a lot of companies that were rumored to come to the market. Now, over the last decade, they've come to the market, and many have struggled. But Apple and Nike and Under Armour and Adidas and Puma and Microsoft and Amazon and Intel, And then there was a bunch of startups like Fitbit and Jawbone and Basis and Qantas and so on and so forth. So the space has had a lot of players come to the market, some of which are the biggest and best companies in the world.

6:15I think where Whoop has been able to be successful is we innovated a lot on the technology. So we figured out how to really measure deeply important data points about the human body. We created a form factor that people were willing to wear 24-7, which turned out to be something that a lot of companies couldn't do. We got endorsement and were able to build a brand positioning really amongst the world's best athletes and performers. So Whoop has a certain, I think, status symbol that comes with it. It says something about you when you're wearing a Whoop in a good way. And we also came up with a pretty unique business model, which is that Whoop is a subscription.

6:53and that means a consumer can sign up for Whoop for much less than they may go buy the hardware somewhere else. I'm usually a Whoop wearer, but I do like to take breaks. At the moment, I'm on a break. I've got this Apollo Neuro device, which is more for the vagus nerve. But it's great. Whoop, I can vouch for that. And I've seen myself just since I've been using it probably for the last, I guess, five years, how it's evolved and how much more. you can get from it? What's been the first one and what can we see in it now? Well, in 2013, we built our first prototype. It was like this big, bulky, goofy instrument that could actually measure heart rate variability from the wrist, which at the time we were really the first wearable to be able to do.

7:42Do you mind explaining heart rate variability? Heart rate variability, also known as HRV, is the amount of time between successive beats of the heart. Now, if your heart's beating at 60 beats per minute, it doesn't mean that it's beating every second. It's a little counterintuitive, but it might be beating at 0.8 seconds and then 1.2 seconds and then 0.6 seconds and then 1.4 seconds. And the differing times between successive beats of the heart is a good sign. It's a sign that your body is adapting to its environment. I would like you to explain exactly how a Whoop works for those who don't know anything about it.

8:25So we talked about some aspects, but just the basics. What happens and what does it do and how could it possibly change your life? So Whoop starts with the wearable. And so this is a small sensor that you wear on your wrist or you can wear in actually other locations of the body. And there's all sorts of different bands. I'm wearing a sporty one today. This is a sport flex, but there's leather bands and all sorts of different materials depending on your preference. And it's collecting health data 24-7. It doesn't have a screen on it. It sends all that data to your phone, and there's an app on your phone where you go in and you get to understand what's going on with your health.

9:06Whoop summarizes your overall day through this lens of sleep and recovery and strain. We talked a little bit about that relationship. But sleep being how many hours of sleep did you get? What was the quality of that sleep? Recovery being how prepared is your body for the day? Red, yellow, green. How much strain should you take on? And then strain, of course, looking at that physical load that you put on your body. There's other things like a health monitor that will tell you, it'll give you alerts if one of your physiological metrics is out of range. So for example, if you're getting sick, you might get an alert through the health monitor that something's off.

9:43There's a stress monitor that looks at your stress over the course of the day. One of people's favorite new features is called HealthSpan. And so this gives you your whoop age, and it tells you essentially how old you are in physiological terms. We worked very closely with the Buck Institute, which is the leading institute for longevity in the United States. And a guy named Dr. Eric Verden helped us work on this. And we researched all of these different physiological metrics and behavior decisions. And we found the nine most important for ultimately predicting all-cause mortality. So it's broken up across sleep, strain, and fitness.

10:25So within sleep, you've got your hours of sleep and your sleep consistency. So hours of sleep being total sleep that you're getting, your sleep consistency being are you going to bed and waking up at the same time. within fitness there's resting heart rate vo2 max so that's the amount of oxygen that your body can consume while you're you're exercising and strength training time so the amount of time that you spend a week strength training is really important this will depend on your age but you want to you know typically get over an hour of strength training a week lean body mass so that's uh But looking at whether or not your body is carrying a lot of fat or how much muscle it's carrying, that's also a really strong predictor of all-cause mortality.

11:17It's amazing all that just from one bracelet. I know this has been talked about for a while, but it really is coming because in the past, you used to have to have a lot of equipment. and as you'll explain better than me just thinking you've got 7-8 hours sleep isn't what it's about so if you ask someone how many hours of sleep they got last night the math they typically do is well I got into bed at 11 and I woke up at 6 so I got 7 hours of sleep the reality is they probably spent about 7 hours trying to sleep and within those 7 hours There was time they spent in light sleep There was time they spent in REM and slow wave sleep And there was time they spent awake REM and slow wave sleep are kind of where all the magic happens That's your restorative sleep REM sleep is when your mind is repairing itself So it's cognitive repair Really any human being with any executive function needs REM sleep That's also when you do your deepest dreaming Is that when the detoxification happens?

12:27with the glymphatic system? I think that would occur during slow-wave sleep because slow-wave sleep is when your body produces 95 % of its human growth hormone. So people think they get stronger in the gym. They're actually breaking their muscles down in the gym. They get stronger during slow-wave sleep when they're rebuilding those muscles. So again, back to this person who spent seven hours in bed. That person might have gotten 30 minutes of REM and slow-wave sleep total, and the rest was light sleep or awake. On the flip side, that person might have gotten over five hours of REM and slow-wave sleep.

13:07And the contrast in the quality of someone's life, if they were on the 30-minute spectrum versus the five-hour spectrum, is profound. I can almost guarantee you the person who's getting 30 minutes of restorative sleep has a whole host of challenges in their life and problems. And I can almost promise that the person who's getting over five hours of sleep, of restorative sleep, is having a phenomenal time and is generally pretty positive. And then, of course, there's a massive spectrum in between. And so what WHOOP does is it really breaks down your sleep in a great degree of detail. It'll show you how much time you spend in bed.

13:42It'll show you how many hours of sleep you got, what the quality of that sleep really was, how stressed you were while you were sleeping. So we measure something called sleep stress, which of course you want to be incredibly low. When your body is sick, for example, you'll notice you have an elevated sleep stress. If you consume a lot of alcohol or really any alcohol, you'll notice that you have an elevated sleep stress. And then depending on things that you did throughout the day or the state of your body, you might find that you have an elevated sleep stress. Was it a stressful day? Did you drink caffeine late in the day?

14:16Did you have a late meal before you went to sleep? Are you dehydrated? All of these things are the types of things that could affect your sleep stress. Did you have some kind of a conflict with your partner right before bed? All of these things will affect your sleep stress. So we try to really help people understand these different layers of sleep. And as you can probably tell from this conversation, there's a lot of nuance to sleep. And to me, it's kind of fascinating that people will just spend a third or a quarter of their lives sleeping and have really no idea what happened while they were doing it.

14:56Remember, to hear the full episode, search for Brave New World Evening Standard. For all the latest news, visit standard.co.uk.