Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #53 Harpreet Rai

Episode Date: October 1, 2018

CEO of Oura Ring, Harpreet Rai drops in to talk about the space of Quantified self and the measurable things we do that can be tracked to help improve performance. Oura Ring is one of the best innovations when it comes to quantified self and taking a peek into our daily routine and habits. This technology is going to help benefit people when it comes to breath work / Meditiation / guided meditation and real time tracking of HRV (heart rate variability) and maybe most important sleep. Check out Oura Ring:  Website | https://bit.ly/2OZYXhV Twitter | https://bit.ly/2NlAuCc Facebook | https://bit.ly/2NiMPXE Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on: Twitter | https://bit.ly/2DrhtKn Instagram | https://bit.ly/2DxeDrk Get 10% off at Onnit by going to https://www.onnit.com/podcast/ Connect with Onnit on: Twitter | https://twitter.com/Onnit       Instagram | https://bit.ly/2NUE7DW Subscribe on  Itunes | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp

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We've got a very special guest, the CEO of Oura Ring. You might have heard myself talking about this or Ben Greenfield or a number of other dope people that are in the space of quantified self. So what does that mean? Well, a lot of terms get thrown around here, like biohacking and technology and this and that, but quantified self really just boils down to what are the things that I'm doing and are they measurable? And can I look at those measurements to track success and gains towards a common goal? Like how do I improve my sleep quality? Well, now we take the guesswork out of it with maybe one of the best innovations when it comes to quantify itself and taking a peek into our daily routine, our habits, how long we're sitting, what our REM sleep and deep sleep

cycles look like, how many times we wake up in the night, all this stuff. And it's on a freaking ring that sits on your finger. Now I've never had a, and I don't plan on doing this often. I've never had somebody come on just to talk about a product they sell. You know, obviously people promote their books and they promote whatever their business is, but truly this, this is something that I firmly believe in and have used for the past couple of years. It has helped improve my sleep like absolutely nothing else has ever done. And the truth is there's a lot we can find from this and these guys are just beginning.

This technology is going to help benefit people when it comes to breath work, meditation, guided meditation, real-time tracking of HRV, heart rate variability, and a number of other cool things that they have along the way for us. It's an amazing podcast. I had an absolute blast. Check it out. Today, we've got Harpreet from Oura Ring. Oura Ring. Something that I think if you're in the self-quantified community is an absolute must-have, even if you're not. But I first heard about you guys from Ben Greenfield when he wrote that giant blog, One Ring to Rule Them All. He really took the deep dive into this.

When people get into these, there's a lot of terms that are kind of silly in the space of health and wellness now. People talk about biohacking, and then people will nitpick and be like, yeah, that's not a biohack unless you're actually like putting something inserted into your body. And then you actually change your physiology or whatever the case may be. But it's all semantics. It doesn't matter. Agreed. It doesn't matter.

Yeah. Self-quantification is something we should all pay attention to, right? Like how do we know exactly what we're doing, if it's working or if it isn't? A lot of people start new programs or new, whether it's a training routine or a sleep schedule or a new supplement protocol, and they throw the fucking kitchen sink in. Totally. And they're like, how does this work? I don't know. I feel a little bit better. I might not feel a little bit better. I don't know what's working and what isn't. Yeah. Right. So I think a ring like this is an absolute must have because what it helps us figure out is the most critical piece of the equation in anyone's fat loss, cognitive function, or, or, or workout routine is sleep. That's the greatest tool, right? Yeah. I

mean, you know, thanks for, thanks for obviously the compliments. Appreciate that. But yeah, I think Matt Walker said it best. He said, sleep's probably, you know, the world's best performance enhancing drug that's legal. Right. And I think, yeah, if you look at the foundation of health, you know, why, and take a step back, why do we sleep? Why do we need to do this, you know, or should be doing this eight hours a night? And you started to point to do this, you know, or should be doing this eight hours a night? And you start to point out memory consolidation, you know, things you learn in the day are played back at three times the speed. Helps you learn, right? Helps you heal.

Most testosterone release, growth hormone, all released in your sleep. You know, long-term health, look at Alzheimer's. I mean, some of the new research out there is sort of showing that deep sleep is actually where beta amyloids, right, the plaque that is associated with sort of, you know, the onset of Alzheimer's, is removed when you sleep. So, you know, we have, it's something we do every day. I think it's something that we all take for granted a little bit, not all of us, but the majority of the population. And yet it's so crucial to the other 16 hours of the day that we're awake. So yeah, it's, you know, Oura Ring, we made it for a tool to drive self-introspection, right? To look a little bit deeper and understand,

yeah, when you're making those lifestyle, you know, choices or whether they're good or bad, like what's actually happening. And it's, yeah, man, I appreciate obviously all the kind words and I'm just happy to be here. Hell yeah, brother. Well, I've had, I wanted you to have, I wanted to have you on for quite some time. Generation one was incredible. And what's funny is that we'll talk about what this does because, you know, it's very rare that I have somebody on with a product, but I think you guys, this, this, the world needs to know about this period. And so generation one, and I was talking with Aubrey about this was really good. And generation two came out and it was like, that's like jumping from the iPhone one to the iPhone

10 all in one whack with nothing in between no aura ring S model, just like model, just 10 jumps in a row. Like all the, the, the fact that I can put this on and charge it once a week for an hour, you know, instead of every couple of days. Yeah. Many, many improvements across the board. So talk about what the ring does. Sure. And let's dive into some of that, how it can be used.

And look, stop me if I'm getting too technical. So, you know, I am an electrical engineer when it comes to, you know, circuits and all stuff like that. So if I go too deep, please stop me. But I know your audience loves it. So at the same time, if we riff, let's riff. So as far as what we do, I think if you look at us as wearable, we sort of chose the finger for two reasons. It's the intersection of sort of comfort, something you actually don't mind wearing every day. Most people who are married actually wear some type of ring, but it's probably the oldest wearable known to man,

if you think about that ring as a form factor. And then accuracy. If I were to sort of take a cross section of your hand, right, and your wrist, it's these, you know, these arteries that we know on the inside of our wrist that have a ton of blood flow that flow into the fingers. If you look at, you know, even though I'm darker skin than you, right, I have probably, actually, we probably have- I'm trying to gain on you right now. You're trying to gain on me. I'm trying to get like you this summer. Nice. You're getting close, man. You're getting close. But if we look at our palms, they look the same,

right? We got that blood flow. It's close to the surface of the skin. You know, and if you look at it from sort of a signal perspective, turns out that that pulse signal on your finger is about a hundred times stronger than sort of where the average wearable sits on your wrist. Right. So we sort of started that cross section of, OK, where can we get the most accurate and best signal? Right. And then also, what is something, you know, that's easy to wear that people don't mind wearing a bed? Right. And so, yeah, we made a huge leap from Gen 1 to Gen 2. You know, Gen 1, for example, we got some customer feedback. It was big. We knew it was big. You know, the battery was bigger in it. You know, signal quality wasn't as good. New tech, always working on it. And then, you know, we jumped to Gen 2, where it's titanium. It weighs a lot less. The battery life is way longer. And it's just super

easy to wear. That's what most of our customers tell us. That and they feel like the accuracy is just, you know, really up in the upper, you know, right quadrant of whatever you want to look at. In terms of what we're measuring, so we got that pulse signal I talked about. We're actually sampling that 250 times a second. The average Fitbit is sort of, you know, sampling or shining a green LED most of the time about 12 to 20 times a second. I would say we're able to do that and maintain that long battery life because that pulse signal is so much stronger. So, you know, what we actually see is something called a blood volume pulse waveform. But it looks like an EKG would on your chest, but it's actually just coming from actual,

the amount of volume of blood that's coming through here. From that, we can drive all types of things. So, you know, we see actually, you know, the shape of that curve, you know, but we also see the space between each heartbeat, you know, HRV or inner beat interval, as they call it, that actual space in between. We know there's a lot of cool things that we can derive from that. The different aspects of the wave help us with sleep staging.

So we're seeing sort of, if you think about it, not just when that heartbeat's happening, but sort of how high is that peak on that waveform. Some of the other things we see are movement. We have an accelerometer and also a gyroscope now in Gen 2. We also have three temperature sensors in there. You know, temperature and the correlations with sleep are pretty interesting. There's a bunch of new work being done out there in circadian rhythm and temperature in general. So those are all the sensors we see and sort of, you know, like I said, we drive sleep stages, heart rate, heart rate variability. Actually, we'll put in the link in the show notes. We got HRV at 98% accuracy compared to an EKG overnight.

We just published that in Sleep, a medical journal. Stanford did that? No, actually, that was done actually by ourselves, and we submitted it to a medical journal and got accepted. SRI, Stanford Research Institute, did our Gen 1 sleep staging. Okay. And we will be publishing, you know, a Gen 2 sleep staging eventually, too, with a pretty good, reputable, I would say, academic sleep professor. Very cool. So, yeah, a bunch of stuff we measure. And, you know, respiratory rate, that's another important one.

Changes in temperature. A ton of stuff you can see if you're getting sick. For women, you can actually see changes, you know, sort of when estrogen and progesterone is released and, you know, sort of when you might be ovulating. So there's some interesting data for women out there. And then just general sleep stages, when you're awake, when you're in bed, deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep. So a bunch of different things. Yeah. Many, many factors to look at. And, you know, we can start with a lot of things. First, I just want to say

for people that are listening to this that are like, well, what about, you know, Dr. Andy Galpin, you guys had on, you know, the author of Unplugged. Most people would agree that a lot of trackers on the market are somewhat inaccurate, right? what's, what's funny to me is that you guys are so much better than the competition. It really, it's, it, it's kind of hard to believe for the cost because it's still affordable. Right. So that, that's, that's what I, what I don't understand necessarily why so many companies, not to blow smoke up your ass, but like so many companies are failing miserably when they have third-party testing done. They're not even close to 90%, let alone 98% with HRV or 99% with heart rate. So that's kudos there for that, for sure. We got a great team that made

that happen. I think the way I use this ring, because people are like, what am I going to use it for? The way I use this ring, I leave it on all day long. Aubrey just uses it for sleep at night, but I leave mine on all day long because I want to know how much is being taken out of me. Sure. And I want it to register to the app. And then I can correlate that with my sleep. And then the next day, it's all there. So if I really bust my ass and I have very high output and my resting heart rate is 10 beats per minute higher. Yeah. I know that's what it's from. It's not from a late meal. It's not from alcohol or any of these other factors that could be it. Right. But these are all ways we fine tune. Right. So dive into some of the ways that people look at,

you know, what are, what are some of the parameters we see that get messed up in our sleep when we're doing wrong things? Yeah. No, I think, you know, there's, I'll just go off the first example you laid out. So I myself have been out of shape, you know, startups are busy. You get sort of, you know, sidetracked from, you know, the gym and things like that. But I did my first probably five by five deadlift workout, you know, yesterday for a long time. You know, one interesting thing to look at from that was generally my HRV will sort of be in the fifties or 60 milliseconds, but you know, I busted my ass yesterday at the gym. You know, I, I, you know, I was sweating probably by the third set, you know, I was really, you know, catching my breath by the fifth set and

saw a huge decrease in HRV that night. Right. And that's cool because that sort of shows me, okay, you know, I, I definitely loaded my nervous system, right. And that's cool because that sort of shows me, okay, you know, I definitely loaded my nervous system, right? You know, it's lower reps, higher weight tend to do that. And okay, so the next two days I'm going to go in the gym, you know, I want to get that HRV back up before I go into a heavy compound lift for that. So we're seeing all types of people look at that data. We're seeing pro athletes look at that data. You know, people who are just in Spartan races, we have some ultra runners using an Olympia, Olympians using it. And they're, they're using that HRV data to train. Um, I think some of the other use cases, frankly, that we're seeing is just general things you do every day in

life. Um, another example, uh, I was out at a party two weekends ago, you know, I've been, I've been going keto. So really not drinking much at all. Right. But had one drink, right. Had one drink, uh, you know, white wine. My resting heart was 10 beats higher from that one drink. And you know, I'm doing it right now. Was it late? Was it late? It was probably nine o'clock. So, and I probably was in bed by 11. So yeah. Yeah, it was close to a few hours of bedtime. Yeah, close to a few hours of bedtime. But it's cool to see that quantification because now I'm

like, oh man, that's going to make that next day so much harder. Whether I'm trying to get work done in the office, you know, doing calls with potential partners, stuff like that. Or even if I'm trying to get my butt to the gym, it's going to make it that much harder. So I think what we see is just people are starting to look in more, looking at their lifestyle actions and start to see some of the effects. You know, I sort of look at it like our cell phone. You know, we touch our cell phone 150 times a day. You know, if you think about that, that's like nine times an hour. What if we checked in with ourselves nine times an hour? What if we looked inward? And look, reality is you're not going to do that. We're all busy now. We're working,

you know, we're working around the clock. We got emails, texts, right? You know, whatever it may be, Slack. But we want to show you some data so it makes it easier to look inward, right? It makes you think about what did you do and what effect might that have had. And, you know, we start to see people that start looking at this data and they start to realize, oh man, yeah, I had a late meal. My HRV was lower. My deep sleep was lower. And what did I do? Oh, I ate a slice of pizza or five, you know, at nine o'clock and I still went to bed at 11. Or vice versa. Hey, I ate a clean salad, right? Got to bed pretty early, actually at, you know, 10, let's say nine or 10 o'clock. And all of a sudden my deep sleep went off the roof. Or if, you know, in this case,

I like a blue light blocking glasses. I'm super sensitive to light, man. If I travel without blue light blocking glasses, you know, cause you're, you're, you know, your circadian rhythms messed up when you travel hotels, all that shit too. Exactly, all the lights in the rooms, all the LEDs, forget it. I do not get melatonin release. I do not get to sleep. Even if I'm taking three pills, four pills in you mood, I'm that sensitive to light. So I think it's a tool that we made to help people focus on

improving their lifestyle actions and choices or even just learning from the bad ones, frankly, and then being able to take action the next day. Hell yeah. It's so empowering. I mean, that's truly what it is. When I first had the Gen 1, I was living in Cali and had a medical card for marijuana. Okay. And I was using cannabis at night and, you know, it knocks you out. So like it works, right? Totally. And so I was like, oh, let me see what's up with this aura ring. Let me see if my REM sleep is affected by this or not. And I realized if I got super baked, I was actually awake for the first four hours of the night. I'd be awake until like midnight, just stoned in dreamland, but not dreaming. Right. And then I would fall asleep

and actually get a shorter night's rest from that. Right. With less REM, obviously. Totally. But if I titrated that down to whatever, like the lowest feelable dose would be, which is now around one to three milligrams, I got a, I got a spray. Um, then I, my REM sleep stays high. I'm not, I fall asleep on time. Like it actually improves. So it can be performance enhancing totally or it can't be right but it was it was such a cool interesting way for me to be like oh okay this is affecting me negatively just to get blasted off in outer space yeah still cool to do every now and then yeah definitely pick my timing right exactly nightly thing yeah and um you know I wanted to talk with people about my sleep cocktail that I really came to get from using the Oura Ring and seeing REM sleep goes through the roof almost triple on some nights.

Wow. Go from about 55 minutes to an hour to two and a half to three hours. Yeah. And what I do, and I take a little bit more because I'm a bigger guy, but I'll have two AlphaBrain, three New Mood, the standard dose, six sprays of the melatonin spray, we have it on it. And then four of the key minerals with the magnesium. So magnesium, critical to take at night. If you dig it during the day, you might shit yourself. So great for night. I've done that. I'm not going to lie. I've had those issues.

New mood is incredibly good at keeping you asleep. So melatonin will tell your body it's time to sleep. Sure. And then new mood is very good at keeping you relaxed so you can stay in that deeper sleep. Also has 5-HTP and a number of chemicals that help with creating more melatonin and serotonin and different neurotransmitters we need to be boosted up during the night. Right. So excellent source. And then for whatever reason, the alpha brain, as they talk about, really works on increasing

REM sleep. Yeah. You know, I don't have lucid dreams like people talk about on the Rogan experience, but I have a shit ton of dreams. So, I mean, like it's cool to see like, and that'll be different for everybody. I'm not saying take my exact dosage. It's going to work for you the same way it worked for me, but it's the fact that you can experiment and see exactly what changes are going on.

Totally. You know, and even something as simple as like, oh, I don't want to buy all these supplements, turning your wifi router off at night or making sure there's no TV in your room or wearing, you know, like either using like flux on your screen or wearing blue, blue light blockers before you go to bed. So those last few hours, if the sun's down, you're not seeing blue light. Yeah. Right. Your screen should be on night shift mode, you know, put your ducks in a row and then see how that affects sleep because it makes a big difference. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, frankly, like one of the things we're going to be moving to and you'll start seeing this more in the app for Aura is the ability to start tracking all those different things you do, let's say in your stack. Right. And being able to correlate that with the quality of your sleep. So we're going to make that easier. So that self quantification and sort of tagging and correlation discovery. So you'll see that coming. I mean, honestly, the things that we find, it's almost endless. Right. I'll just throw out some cool ones that, you know, we're going to start studying.

So definitely on the supplement side, you know, I think New Mood is something I actually take all the time when I travel. I take it during the week as well, not every day, but every other day. And, you know, melatonin spray as well, like the Onnit stuff when I'm traveling. I'm a smaller guy, probably like half your size. You know, I'm 5'5 on a good day and 150 pounds. But, you know, so I'm taking three sprays and I just find that works for me. And it is really cool to see that, you know, sort of effect, cause and effect. You know, some of the other ones we've seen is, dude, ice cream.

You know, this is going to sound crazy, but the average American, guess how many pounds of ice cream the average American has in a year? I don't know. Take a guess. 10? 23. In a year? In a year. In a year. Holy shit. In a year, right? But we've totally seen this with some people who've just reached out to us and be like, look, I cut out desserts. I cut out sort of that half a pint or pint of ice cream before bed. And oh my God, you know, my HRV,

my deep sleep totally improved. So it may just be as simple as like, stop doing the wrong things. And then you're going to be more motivated to start doing all the right things and doing the additional things, right? Like taking the right supplements, et cetera. Some of the other stuff that we're starting to experiment, yeah, you know, cannabis is pretty interesting as legalization starts to improve. I think, you know, we've seen it sort of used in functional medicine doctors. There's some data we're gathering there. PTSD victims. Actually, you know, I think some of the interesting work that's being done by, you know, organizations like MAPS and sort of the victims. Actually, you know, I think some of the interesting work that's being done by, you know, organizations like MAPS and sort of the effect on all, you know,

different types of things and PTSD, right? I think we're going to see more and more of that. And it's going to help people solve their problems. I think that's, you know, that's, again, the spirit of why we created this and, frankly, why we focused on sleep. I think, you know, we have sort of the daytime tracking, you know, all the steps and some of the estimated calorie burn in there. But I think the use case of sleep ends up being so helpful to optimize every day because you spend eight hours or you should spend eight hours doing it. Right. And it affects everything you do the next day. Mental, emotional, right. Physical. So I think there's so many different things you can start to play with and, you know, and use Aura as a tool.

And, yeah, I don't I don't know if I'm going to call it biohacking, you know, it's obviously something that sure, you know, I think the movement towards that has been great for us, but really just self-introspection, just learning how your body works and learning sort of, you know, what you're doing every day and every night has a huge impact on the next day. Yeah. 1000%. And there's things we can do throughout the day.

And that's obviously you started touching a little bit about stuff you have in the works coming up. I want to talk about what we can look at with meditation and things like that with you and breath work. But I also want to, let's rewind because you heard me on Rogan's talking about Osho and Wild Wild Country. It's such a good one. It's such a good one, It's like one of the best, best shows I've ever seen on Netflix. I think it is. I think as far as like, you know, I almost look at it as a drama documentary, right? I don't know if that exists as a category, but it's, it's pretty bomb. Um, I just think it's nuts. Like how someone from India or a group from India, um, just cultivated this movement and up and moved to like sort of middle of nowhere out in Portland. Right. And this was a while ago, right? But, you know, we were, we were just being born,

right? When this kind of stuff happened or being not even born yet. Right. So, um, it is, you know, I thought what's interesting though, is when you look at it, some of those things that, you know, Osho does, or you'll see them doing, you know, when you guys watch, you know, if you haven't watched it yet, but things like priming, things like breath work, you see them doing, you know, you see them doing this. And this is something that's been, you know, studied in the Vedic scriptures and going back, you know, hundreds of years. Thousands. Thousands. Thousands of years. Sorry. Yeah. Thank you. And I think, you know, as we start to learn more with science, more with technology and be able to quantify some of those effects of things like breath work, right, the

more and more we're going to see people doing it. And I think having access to information, like what we found is just like, oh, you see a cause and effect, it makes you more likely to do that. I think before you could check in with yourself more. We didn't have all these distractions thousands of years ago, right? So it was easier to see that cause and effect or actually feel it. But nowadays, frankly, man, it's even hard. It's hard for guys like us, you know, hard for people in this audience who are dialed in because of all these distractions. So I think, you know, data is going to start bringing people back and like starting to use technology for good. Right. And so, yeah, meditation is something that we're working on, you know, and doing some work with a bunch of different partners, like, you know, people like yourself. And we are going to,

you know, incorporate sort of HR, HRV, you know, in a meditation mode. So you can see that move from sort of, you know, sympathetic to parasympathetic. And then there's different types of breath work, right. That you can experiment with, right. Changing sort of the exhale length versus the inhale, you know, all this stuff that Wim Hof and a bunch of other people and that people have been doing for thousands of years. Yeah. Yeah. It's important that we like, I think back in the day, pre-technology and back when a lot of this stuff was going around, people were thinking about that. Like, if you think of ancient India or in ancient Greece, where there's a ton of philosophers and people that are writing shit down and they're handing this information from one person to the next. Yeah.

Like, you were checking in constantly. And if you felt a certain way and you went to your friend and said, man, I feel like shit or I feel anxious about this all the time or whatever that is. Yeah. There was tools for that. Yeah. Like, hey, I know a way you can get rid of some of that stress. Let's shake. Let's shake it out. Let's fucking jump up and down. Let's scream for a little bit. Loud, audible exhales, loud, audible ohms. Let that go, right? And then take some deep breaths and then calm it down. Now, slow it back. Now, pinch the throat a little tighter and let it out nice and slow. All these things in order to feel right.

The practice of physical yoga that we know in the West is one part of four pieces to yoga. And it's ultimately there to move stress throughout the body to get rid of it so you can sit still quietly and meditate. Most people that are like, I can't fucking sit still and meditate. It's like, yeah, dude, you got pent-up energy. That's what yoga was fucking created. What we know is yoga. Move that through the body. Open up the body.

Stretch. Get rid of that. Sweat. And then you can sit in stillness and find deep inner peace. Totally. Right? And so there are, I've recommended this many times, but the Science of Mindfulness by Dr. Ronald Siegel out of Harvard is one of the great courses on Audible, one of my favorite

books on meditation. He talks about a boatload of science, and he also dives into some of the spiritual practices that have been using this for a very long time. And he ties it all together. But if we think of the brain as trainable, as a muscle, then when we get into that fight or flight response or that stress response that's largely become automated from our lifestyle now in the West, we can start to change that back to where we have far more control over our emotions and our body. And they can look at that in a lab, right? Which is so crazy, right? Yeah, it's crazy.

But many things they can look at in a lab, we can now look at it from our phone, thanks to your ring. Thank you. Yeah. So like this is the future, us being able to see a shift in a parasympathetic state, non-fight or flight, more rest and digest, calmer, see the HRV go up. Like this is all on the way. Yeah. It's fucking super exciting. It's super exciting. I think, look, it's, we're creating community just like Osho created community of, you know, things to do, things that you can learn from someone else. Right. And use to see that improvement in yourself. Right. So I think this is all just, you know, there's this great saying, right. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, right?

So I think we're going through this evolution again and now using technology for good, right, for self-introspection. And we're just going to continue to see more and more of it, right? So yeah, it's just amazing to be able to have that ability and frankly, just be part of, you know, part of this movement, just, you know, with you guys, with others out there. Like, I think we're all creating that community, those tools, those resources for people to actually look in further, right? To ask them, like, why am I having these pains in my life? Man, it's insane, right? Like, you know, I got really into lifting in college. I was, you know, I was a skinny kid who just played soccer, never saw the weight room in high school, right? I

started, it was like, I want to get big, right? And I was like 130 when I came into college. I started learning about powerlifting, right? Started working out with some other guys, teaching me the ropes. You know, I went from 130 to 180 and I was deadlifting quite a bit, squatting quite a bit, but man, I started to realize like, wasn't breathing properly. I was always holding my butt tight. You know, I think Aaron Alexander talked about that, not letting that go, you know, cause I'm getting ready for that hard squat. Right. Um, and I think, you know, you start to realize like, Oh, we've done all these things to maybe optimize one part of our life, right? Something that we want to work on. But, you know, the body is complex, right? And you do have to self-check

in because otherwise, you know, it will take over, right? Based on all types of external stress. But I think the more you start to do that, the more you start to look inwards, right? And, you know, using different experiences that might be out there, right? I think some of the stuff that's obviously going on, right, with ayahuasca is great because of that, right? But also, yeah, let's use technology too, right? Let's make this more accessible. Let's make that inner work more accessible and, you know, start to dive deeper and deeper and put it into your daily life. And that's, you know, again, why we made it easy. Just put this thing on, let it collect some data, you know, and, you know, one of the other things we focused on is, yeah, technology, there are some bad parts. Like we know we see it with

certain amount of our users, the effect of EMF, you know, so we put a Bluetooth, you know, turn off the Bluetooth in this thing, or you put on an airplane mode. Most other wearables don't have that. They don't have airplane mode. Another thing we did, infrared light, you know, most other wearables use green, right? A lot of stuff is off the shelf for green LEDs. But, you know, infrared, we've seen from a bunch of other technology out there and use cases is that it's a positive effect for a body, not a negative, right? And it doesn't disturb you when you sleep. But, yeah, man, it's exciting to be part of this. I think, you know, people will use this tool in all types of way.

I think at first you'll start to realize people are competitive. So the first question people come in asking is like, oh, where should I be? Um, and I sort of put it like, put it like the gym, man, you come in like the first time I tried benching, I think I tried putting 25s on the bar, you know, and I couldn't get like three reps up. Right. I was weak and never done, never did pushups. All I did was run right for soccer, but then it's, it's not where sort of where you start, it's where you go. Right. And so it's the same thing with HRV, with your resting heart rate, with your deep sleep. You'll start to experiment and see what works for you and what doesn't. But it's all about empowerment. Yeah. And balance, right? So we create, you know, whatever we're, whatever we focus on, you talked about that

with powerlifting. And I got into powerlifting with Jesse Burdick for probably a year and a half and absolutely loved it. I noticed my resting heart rate go up, you know, just from being bigger and, and not an issue cause I wasn't fighting anymore. But when I wanted to start doing more jujitsu, it became an issue. So I needed to cut weight. Now it's funny is like, as I'm cutting more weight, my resting heart rate continues to drop and I haven't been doing a ton of cardio, but I'm already down into the high thirties, low forties again. So it's like, all right, I'm on track here. You know, that's, that's a quantifiable measurement of what it feels like to be big and strong versus what it feels like to be a little bit lighter and have

a little bit more balance. Totally. Right. Yeah. And, and balance and how we train, right. There should be, there's a time and a place to absolutely crush it. And whether that's, you know, power lifting or, you know, doing an ultra marathon or whatever the case may be, but that can't be the meat and potatoes. That can't be the daily practice. Sure. Right.

So seeing what that looks like, how that affects our sleep, and then how we recover in the days that follow, doing things like active recovery. Yeah. You know, because what's cool about the app is that it'll tell you like, hey, take it easy today, but it doesn't tell you to fucking sit on your ass the whole day. Totally. Yeah. Right. Like you have to be active. You still have to move in order to flush that metabolic waste through the system. Exactly. And that's how you increase recovery. Yeah. I mean, you know, again, we'll start publishing more and more of this data. So, you know, you guys will start to see more in the app. But one thing we see is actually the beneficial, you know, the beneficial effects of light activity, right? So just movement, mobility, you know, even things like simple cardio, right? Like, okay, let me get two, three minutes, you know, low intensity, maybe a 15, 30 second sprint. We're seeing that really, depending on where you are in your fitness, improve heart rate variability,

right? So something you might think like, oh, I don't want to go to the gym and get on the bike for 20 minutes and do some foam rolling. Like I'm used to coming in and crushing the weights. That might actually help you perform better over the long run. So we're seeing a lot, you know, a lot of interesting data from that. You know, some of the other things, how we're seeing people do it is just simple, like honestly, pre-bedtime rituals, meditation. You know, I think there's a lot of research coming out on this can be beneficial for sleep, can help put you quicker into that parasympathetic state. So some type of meditation before bed. And again, this has been going on for thousands of years, right?

You know, sort of in the morning and when you go to bed. You know, again, these probably happen at certain times or have, you know, historically for certain reasons. But we're seeing that to start to benefit some of our users. Simple things like foam rolling and stretching before bed. A lot of people, we have a lot of tightness. We're sitting at desks all the time, right? Being able to just like get up and loosen up a little bit before bed, open up your psoas. You know, I use one of those gorgeous balls. I just lay on it. I didn't even know what my psoas was. I got an orb. Yeah. And that's a gnarly thing for anybody who hasn't done that.

It's crazy. But it's essential, right? We had Rob Wilson out from Art of Breath, who was a co-founder with Brian McKenzie. And they did a seminar here on it, jumped on the podcast. And I was blown away. It made sense while we were doing it. But I was blown away by how much mobility work is implemented into the psoas and the diaphragm prior to fucking breath work. Yeah.

Like, let's open all this up. So you actually can take a deep breath. Totally. Let's improve the thoracic mobility. Yep. Let's get you hanging, get the subscap to open up now. You're able to go deep. I actually have my full use of my lungs. You have space, right? There's not tightness and congestion and ribs are locked down from, from chronic stress or sitting, chronic stress or sitting at the desk, sitting at the computer, sitting in the car, sitting at home at the dinner table, sitting on the couch watching TV. And then finally we lay down for bed. That's the only time we're actually straight. You know, it's like, that's not a good look. No, it's not. I mean, yeah, it's crazy, right? Again,

we didn't, if you look back hundreds of years, right, even tens of years, right, we weren't sitting that much, right? And just the effect of that and our whole breath and our posture. I mean, I think orthopedic surgeons are just going to continue to skyrocket because of, unfortunately, all this, you know, time we're spending sitting, you know, texting. I mean, I feel like just the position that you're at when you're looking down at your phone texting. I mean, your mind is focused on one certain thing. You totally forget the world around you.

Heads cocked forward. Heads cocked forward. If it's a stressful thing, you're reading like an email. There's been plenty of times where I made the mistake of checking my email before bed. And my wife came in the room and she's super tuned into me. And she's just like, what are you doing on your phone? Please tell me you're not looking at emails. And I'm like, fuck. This thing just, this thing just came in and it's, you know, I'm super stressed about it. And

then we'll fucking have to talk about it for 30, 40 minutes, just decompressing that shit. Let it go. Breathes, breath, work, shake, roll. And then, all right, now I can sleep and have a quiet mind. Yeah. You know, but I think people run into this issue of you sit down, you've been busy the entire fucking day from start to finish. From the first moment you get out of bed, you're looking at your phone, you're checking the news, you're doing whatever you do. You go to work, you work, you come home, you have family time if you have a family or you watch TV, whatever. But there's always stuff coming inward. Totally. There's always the external coming in through

your eyes and your ears. And then you finally lay down at night. That's the first time you've had alone time or quiet time to be with your thoughts. Yeah. That's a fucking bad time for that to be the first time in a whole 24 hour cycle. Totally. For you to be able to manage that. Right. That's why so many people lie in bed awake. Yep. You know, I mean, the numbers are shocking. Yeah. It's like, you know, I heard this from, you know, a medical company that makes an over-the-counter pain supplement. Not going to say who it is, but you'd all know it. And what they saw was actually the PM version. Oh my God, it is outselling like the regular daytime version of this painkiller, right? Over-the-counter painkiller by like 2x. And it's just because if you look at the numbers now, insomnia is affecting over 10% of Americans, right? Over 150 million Americans are not getting

enough sleep each night. And then you do that continuously and you practice these bad habits, you know, unknowingly. And yeah, they're going to have long-term effects, right? And that makes it harder because like, like just as the brain is trainable to get into this meditative state and to know peace. Yeah. Right. It's also trainable in reverse. If you're fucking constantly stressed.

Totally. You're going to have a much easier time getting into your stress response. Yeah. Because your body thinks that's the world you live in. Yep. Right. So the brain will train itself. Neurons that fire together, wire together. Yeah.

To associate all the shit as like, this is the end of the world. It's fucking your brain. What was that line? Neurons that fire together. Wire together. Nice. I like that. I'm going to definitely use that. To associate all the shit as like, this is the end of the world. It's fucking, your brain's like chicken little. Neurons are fired together. Wired together. Nice. I like that. I'm going to definitely use that from now on.

Yeah, fuck yeah. It's one of my favorites. But like, it's so true, right? And so like, we have this response where, you know, it's greasing the groove. We talk about that in fitness. If I don't have an hour to work out, I can do pushups, you know, every hour on the hour throughout the day. Sure.

That trains the central nervous system, trains my body. And I may even have better results from that than just doing one workout in a day. Right. So, but the same thing goes for stress. If I'm chronically stressed, like we talk about acute stress versus chronic. And I just spoke about this in the last guy I had on, um, uh, Nicholas Pino who, who wrote the non-tinfoil guide to emf yeah right but if we have if we have acute stress that we willingly choose to bring in that's a good thing right it's when it's chronic chronic that it's an issue right and some people train they over train they're chronically over trained and that's what another thing i think that's beautiful about this app is

that you know in the ring is that you can see if you're not fucking recovered totally like fighters when i used to fight we would have you have a fight scheduled you're not taking a day off you might go slightly lighter on that day but you're never taking a day off because you got the fight lined up and then over time you're like fuck i might need a day off during the week totally you know i see chuck liddell do it. I'm like, all right, maybe this makes sense. Maybe it's okay to rest more. And in that, be better. Yep. Right?

There's cool instances we've seen. So I'll talk about a few. Tour de France. Tour de France just happened. We were able to get a couple of ORA rings on some of the riders just to start collecting data. Crazy, crazy stuff we've seen. I think some of the best riders we saw, you know, that actually performed, you know, people are wearing the yellow Jersey for a bit, um, in the race, you know, consistently great coming in great data coming into the race. HRV was high resting. Heart rate

was extremely low and they were able to keep that up throughout, you know, I forget what it is almost three weeks, right. When they're running, you know, they're riding a hundred miles a day. So it was very cool to be able to see that. And then there was other people who, um, other riders, unfortunately, who were probably over-trained, right. Which happens to a lot of it. Cause to your point, you've got a competition, you know, you got to get your butt in shape. And unfortunately it's like, you know, you're going to do what you got to do to feel like you've got to be able to ride, but that you end up hurting yourself. And so unfortunately, like it was, it was, it was really cool to see. And at some point, if we get permission, you know, we'll publish some of this data, but be, you know, be able to see some of the people that are really well rested, come in,

do well, sort of throughout, and then sort of the vice versa with people who are overtrained. We've seen that with ultra runners, uh, raise a hob. Um, he was in the documentary on Netflix with Matt Damon. Um, he's now 50 years old. He just ran across, across Namibia and Africa, you know, the whole desert, I forget 1200 kilometers in 10 days. Some crazy, crazy stuff. Bro, he clocked his best time as a 50-year-old because he's been using Aura over the last year to train. So he's just like, I never used to take the days off and now I can see that response.

And I'll realize like, dude, I really kicked my butt and it might not have been from training. It might've been because I got in a fight with my wife or because, you know, I miss my kids' recital, right? And I feel really bad. And that's been affecting his sleep. And he's like, I don't want to train the next day now. And he's been able to set his best times doing that. We've seen just some average guys, you know, like not average, but still, you know, probably much like this audience, like, you know, very pushing

themselves physically and mentally, you know, and we found a guy who just won. Actually, he qualified for Kona. Right. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. And he was like, dude, I've never done it. I'm the oldest I've ever been and the best shape I've ever been. And the only thing that changed was I got your ring and I started listening to it. So we're starting to see more and more of this kind of data. And we want to start publishing this kind of data for our users to be able to see like, hey, actually taking a step back, you know, sometimes is really, really helpful. I mean, this is how I got involved in this space. I used to work on Wall Street. You know, I was working at a hedge fund, you know, and I was, you know, working really hard. Cause I thought that's what I need for social acceptance, right. When I was younger in my life and I was burning the candle on both ends, right. I was going to bed at 11,

waking up at 5.00 AM and trying to do my, you know, for, for every single day. And then, you know, on the weekends, I want to get out my friends. I'm young. I'm in my twenties. Tons of cocaine, Wolf of Wall Street. Fucking phone rails. Luckily, I stayed away from that. But obviously, observed a ton. But, you know, tons of late nights, drinking bad food. But, you know, I was one of those people.

I, you know, tore my labrum and rotator cuff because I was, you know, stupid on five hours of sleep three days in a row, right? Trying to get out there and actually do overhead presses, you know, for time. Probably not the best thing to do when I'm chronically stressed, right? And so I think, you know, most people of us unfortunately are. It's sort of sad to see that's the state that we've become in. But I think as you start to find these things, look at this data, see where you are, see where you should be, right? And do some introspection work, change some of these lifestyle habits, and then see how you perform, right? See how you feel. And we saw this, I just saw this from someone, one of our users posted us the story. He went vegan, right? A lot of big changes in his life. Broke up with his girlfriend, right? Went vegan, and he started running. He went from

sort of HRV and sort of the 30 millisecond range. And he's, you know, in his early 30s, which is still a little bit below average. I'd say actually below average. Dude, turned a bunch of things around in his life. His HRV is in the 80s. Consistently, he's getting the best sleep he ever has. He looks more tan. I don't know if he's just getting out from the running, but he just started to look like a model. And, you know, and now he's like, dude, I'm obsessed. I know that this is what's helping me. I feel better. But I also know that from the data. Yeah. Right. He's like, you know, and he works, you know, he works at a startup. So he's a busy guy, doesn't have time to check in, unfortunately, as much as he wants. He's like, but but now I know, OK, I have a late night at

the office. Right. I was out too late with some friends. Take it a step back. Do some, you know, do some breath work. I started doing some Wim Hof breathing. It's, you know, so we're starting to see more and more of our users start to look inward when they're exposed to this data and they see that change. So yeah, it's, it's really cool to be able to help empower people. You know, we, we like to think about it, you know, it was like, we want to empower the potential of a well rested world, right? If you're well rested, you're in that alpha state, you're in that flow state, right? Like you can do, you can do a lot, man. You can do, you know,

that's when you're starting to achieve your life goals, right? And you're your best version of yourself. Self, yeah. And it's not about the other person. It's you. Best interactions with, because there's no limit to the amount of shit that we'll come across in a single day

or in our lives, right? Yeah. There's always challenges. There's always stressors in life. But ultimately, it's how we look at these things that affects us. Yeah. Right? So if we come from that place of calm, quiet, peace, it's a lot easier to deal with the

hecticness of life as opposed to I'm already triggered. I'm already charged. I feel like shit. I'm in pain. Yeah. I'm on a lack of sleep. My brain's not working right. Where's the fucking word I'm thinking of right now?

You know what I'm saying? All the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Then, then it's just easier to get triggered and get into that really, uh, you know, the bad, I wouldn't even want to call it bad, but just, you know, you're not your best self then. Yeah. I mean, how much this happens to me on a daily basis. I'm trying to get better at it, but yeah, I'm trying to answer six emails. Someone's calling. And then, you know, my girlfriend's asking, Hey, what time do you think we should try to do dinner? And I'm like, I'll snap. I'll be like, can't talk right now. You know, I can't even, I can't even form a sentence, right? Because I have five things

going on, you know, I'm trying to actually focus and get one done at a time. And yet I end up being a jerk to the people that I love around me, right? And you end up being, you're doing a disservice to yourself, right? So it's, it's cool that I feel like, you know, when you start to do some of these things that you guys have all the right network, you know, the right type of guests that are teaching breathwork, teaching movement, right, on the podcast that you're doing here, you're teaching in person on it, and start to see some of those, you know, the cause and the effect, right? And be able to look inward and realize that all these things are interconnected. Sleep, you know, I do believe that sleep is a foundation. If you're not sleeping well, right? You know,

your diet and your exercise will fail, but you know, it's, it's a good foundation. And then they all start to stack on top of each other, diet activity, you know, mental work, inner work, right? And so I think what we start to see is all these things start to work together. It's, um, you know, it's, I got injured, you know, doing overhead presses with too much weight, but I didn't know this before. It's like, if you get five hours of sleep a night for three nights, you know, and there's a great study on this, your, you know, likelihood of injury goes up by 60%, 60, right? If you think about ghrelin and leptin, two hormones actually control our hunger and our satiety or fullness, right? If you get six hours of sleep, they end up going in the complete,

for three nights in a row, they end up going in the complete opposite direction. So it's like, yeah, that's what happens to me when I travel. I travel, don't get enough sleep, right? Or why am I craving something sort of, you know, totally, totally terrible for me, you know, a bomb of both carbs and fat at the same time, right? Exactly what we want, cheat food, right? And then, oh, you have that and you're not full. Well, it's because those hormones are already working against you, right? And so, you know, look, I think it's no accident when you start to look at the lack of sleep in our society and you look at sort of long-term health effects. Unfortunately, more diabetics, pre-diabetics than ever. I mean, I think in the next two years, we'll hit a hundred million pre-diabetics.

The research shows that actually sleeping six hours every night raises your fasting glucose levels by over 20%, right? And over half of America is sleeping six hours a night, right? And I definitely am one of them time to time, right? You know, your ability to do memory recall, this one blows my mind. Six hours versus eight hours, you end up having a 50% decrease in memory recall. Wow. Right? And so your body, your brain is trying to consolidate all those new things you learned that day, right? All the new information now, you know, we're releasing a new product here, some of the hardware specs that we have to tweak before, you know, we're doing these changes in the algorithm. Well, if you don't get that extra hour or two of sleep, not extra, that, you know, necessary hour or two of sleep, the crucial sleep, you know, necessary hour, the crucial sleep that goes out

the door, right? Your productivity goes down. Um, so I think as we learn more and more about, you know, the importance of health, you know, sleeping one of that in our society, we're going to just see people, you know, finally taking more and more of a focus on it. Uh, and I think it's going to have, you know, long-term positive impacts. Hell yeah, brother. Yeah. Yeah. I'm pumped. You guys are doing what you're doing, man. I really am. Appreciate that. Is there anything else you want to add talking about stuff you guys got coming up for the ring? Anything new? I think, you know, one of the probably two things you're going to see a lot more from us is, you know, gathering more of these, this data

amongst our audience, you know, sort of doing almost like labs experiments and having people volunteer to, you know, things who are doing a fasting diet for three days and seeing sort of the cause and effect. People going keto, knowing what that should look like or not look like the first few days. So we'll start to publish some of these, you know, studies, I guess. I can tell you right now from the time I was using the Gen 2 when I did my five-day water fast in Sedona. And my first night of sleep fasted was great. I slept 10 hours. It was like a 95 sleep score.

Crushed it. Crushed it. And then every night after that was horrendous. Because my body was like, you're not going to fucking sleep. Go out and look for food. Go forage. Go look in the middle of the night, right? If you haven't eaten, you need to eat.

And so that makes sense. I just want to mention that because people will be like, and Greenfield's even said why I don't sleep or why I don't fast for more than 24 hours. But there's a lot of science that shows the benefits of fasting. Sure. Water only for three to four days. Yeah. A lot of science. Yeah.

So with that, I'll encourage you, even if you're getting the lack of sleep, you will rebound. Yeah. You'll get more sleep after that. No, I mean the long-term effects on fasting, I think, you know, Walter Longo and even some of the work that's just being done in the blue zones, right. Uh, showing people that one of the things that happens all the time is food restriction, you know, over not just one day, but multiple days and coincidence or not, we'll find out, but yeah. Timing too, right. You do intermittent fasting. I mean, don't eat around the fucking clock. Yeah. Right. Sachin Panda out of the Salk Institute.

Some great work out there. I don't know if they think they published this. I hope they have. But it's important to know. Basically, what they showed is eating at night, you end up having very, very different glucose responses to food. Yeah. They did publish that. Rhonda Patrick-

That's right. Rhonda Patrick-Adaman. Yeah. So melatonin's released. As melatonin starts to get released, your liver and your pancreas shut down, right? And they're thinking, hey, it's nighttime. I should be going to bed, right? But then you vomit with food, and it's going to sort of go haywire.

There's a shift in microbiome activity as well. So, like, your gut bacteria knows the sleep-wake cycle. It's tuned in to the timing of the day. Like, it knows, like, all right, time to, you know, kick back, put our feet up, relax. Yeah. You know, mind-body connection, mind-stomach connection, right? But so I think you'll start to see as far as what we're working on, more and more of these, call it citizen science studies. You know, just making it easy to gather data and seeing what people have done and what's helping them, what's not.

And we'll throw some fun ones out there. What drink's the best for you? You know, we found our users react differently. I happen to do better on a light beer. One or two light beers. Really? Have you tried the Dry Farm wines? I have tried the better on a light beer. One or two light beers. Really? Have you tried the Dry Farm wines? I have tried the Dry Farm.

Same thing. Dope, man. I can have a whole bottle of that and still sleep all right. I haven't tried a whole bottle yet. But I know Todd, he does, right? And no hangover? Yeah, we actually got to get an Oura ring on him just to see. But tequila, I love tequila.

I was doing keto for a long, long time. And I was like, oh, plant-based, right? Minimal calories. Dude, completely jacks up my sleep. Resting heart rate 10 to 20 beats higher. No deep sleep. And it's an upper, not a downer. So I guess somewhat makes sense. So you'll start to see us publish more and more of some of these studies, citizen science studies, just to get the data out there. And then the other thing is you will start to see us do more and more things during the day, right? Breath work. you know, we haven't done it yet, but seeing some patterns, you know, in your daytime HR and HRV

and maybe making a call to action that, hey, we see a break in your calendar. You know, this is the future that I dream of that I would love. Hey, let's take five minutes to, you know, 10 minutes to sort of let do quick meditation, breath work exercise and see that, right? So causing more and more introspection again. So I think those are two things you'll start to see

from us. Over time, we'll do more stuff on activity, but we want to get the basics set up first, right? So I think sleep's our first basic, and then you'll start to, you know, see us expand to some of these other areas, right? Tie in some of these correlations with food, diet, movement, and then eventually start to do more and more of this stuff, you know, during the day, including breath work. I think that's a really interesting one and one that we've had multiple requests from our user base and our fans as well.

Yeah, brother. Yeah. Hell yeah. But before I forget, I do want to give the shout out for the coupon code. Yes, please. So for everyone listening, we talked, we're going to give a coupon.

Heartbreed is going to give a coupon code so everybody can get a discount on an aura ring. Yep. I think they're, they're absolutely fucking phenomenal. I've been using it since generation one. I use it every day.

You know, I'm looking at it every day. Yeah. And it's really helped me fine tune the best sleep, the best everything, the best amount of activity, all that. And it's already great product and you guys are doing nothing but making it even better. Thank you. So yeah. So yeah, the coupon code we're going to

give, uh, we haven't done this before, but a hundred bucks off our matte black or stealth. Um, so, and 50 bucks off everything else. So, uh, go to aura ring.com and use coupon code on it. When you check out. Awesome brother. Yeah. And where can people find you online? Uh, or ring.com or if you're on Instagram, hit us up there and we'll get back to you. We've been overloaded. We just started shipping this Gen 2 pre-order. By the time this airs, all of those will be out. So we'll be able to respond a lot quicker and get back to all of our fans and all of

our users to make sure that we're making the best product we can. Fuck yeah. Awesome, brother. Thanks for having me on. Hell yeah, brother. Thank you. Thank you guys for tuning in to the Human Optimization Hour with Kyle Kingsbury and my man Harpreet from Oura Ring. Make sure you guys check out the link so you can get

yourselves a fat discount on the Oura Ring. And thank you for tuning in.