Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #78 Will Ahmed

Episode Date: March 11, 2019

Will Ahmed is the Founder and CEO of WHOOP, which has developed next generation wearable technology for optimizing human performance. He was recently named to Forbes 30 Under 30 and Boston Business Journal 40 Under 40. We discuss why he started Whoop, what HRV is and how we can use data to optimize our fitness and sleep, and help us to understand what our bodies are telling us. Connect with Will Ahmed: Instagram | https://bit.ly/2FYUwDg Twitter | https://bit.ly/2RsGomS Connect with Whoop: Website | https://www.whoop.com/ Instagram | https://bit.ly/2Bc616h Twitter | https://bit.ly/2FYILwD Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/whoop/ Show Notes: Heart Rate Variability | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_rate_variability Matthew Walker on JRE | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig Sleep by Nick Littlehales | https://amzn.to/2pb2C0T Whoop and MLB | https://bit.ly/2FZHQfq The science behind wearing socks bed | https://www.tuck.com/benefits-sleeping-socks/ Ben Greenfield  | https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/ Listen to the Whoop podcast | https://bit.ly/2HH8mvJ 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 to Human Optimization Hour  iTunes | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY

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I think it's Harvard. He gets into it in the podcast. Highly intelligent. He's 29 years old, CEO of a fucking giant company that works with everyone in pro sports, elite level, military personnel, the whole nine. It's one of the coolest products I've ever been introduced to and has really helped me to redefine how I recover and pay attention to when I should push and when I should dial back.

We've got a discount for you if you go to whoop.com and use code word on it at checkout and just fucking listen to this one. Let us use code word on it at checkout and just fucking listen to this one. Let us know what you think. It's an awesome podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Will Ahmed, am I saying it right? You are. CEO of Whoop. Most importantly, we've got the man, the myth, the legend. I've listened to you both times on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, and I'm an avid Whoop user because I'm fascinated by technology. I love the fact that we can actually look and take a peek into exactly what's going on inside. And for a lot of people out there, whether they're first starting in health and wellness and they're gung

ho, like it's fucking New Year's Day, I'm going to get it. Or you're a professional athlete and you have this competition ahead of you in fighting so many of us over-trained because we have the deadline. Like I can't take a day off. My opponent's not going to do that, right? So having a coach that actually knows what's going on inside can be all the difference in the world. And it's certainly been that for me. So I want to get your background and then let's dive into the Whoop because it's an amazing device. Yeah, of course. Well, thank you for being a user and thanks for having me. I got into this space because I was an athlete. I was a college athlete. I was playing squash. I

was captain of the Harvard squash team. And generally speaking, I feel like I had no idea what I was doing to my body while I was training. And you spend three or four hours a day training. Sometimes you get there an hour before, stay an hour after. It's just a huge time commitment. And how do you really know that the time you're putting in is the right time? What are you actually doing to improve? How do you know you're improving? And I was someone who used to overtrain, so I would just fall off a cliff, right?

And I got very interested in physiology. So what could you monitor about your own body to help prevent overtraining? And I was surrounded by other athletes who would get injured or misinterpret fitness peaks. None of us, I think, really fully understood how sleep even factored into the equation. And it sounds crazy, but this is eight years ago. There was really nothing on the market then, and I would argue not that much on the market even today, that could accurately tell me what to do with my body. So I just did this huge deep dive while I was in school. I read something like 500 medical papers and I wrote a thesis around how to continuously understand the

body. And little did I know it, I was starting a company from there. Damn. So you dive in to HRV just due to figuring this shit out. Was that a metric that came up for you while you were going? I think heart rate variability was probably the most interesting metric that I was reading about. And what was also fascinating is just how small the data sets were. So you're talking about the best cardiologists in the country publishing papers with pretty swooping conclusions that are on like 20 people. We monitored 20 top cyclists for two weeks. And at that point in time, technology was getting much more mass market from the standpoint of smartphones and other things. So it seemed to me like there would be an opportunity where

instead of 14 people and, you know, getting a couple of data points a day, you could actually get 14 million people and you could do it forever or 24 seven. And so that, that was part of what was driving me at the time was this sort of general feeling that the computer was going from being on a desk to being on your lap, to being on your pocket, to being on your body. And that was the movement I wanted to be a part of and to try to shape. I like it. Well, you guys have done a fucking excellent job. Let's dive into some of the mechanics. Well, first, I mean, let me backtrack. For those of you who didn't hear my podcast with

Aura or you haven't heard me discuss this, can you explain HRV for people and why it is an important metric? And then we can talk about all the things that you're measuring. So heart rate variability is the amount of time in between successive beats of the heart. Said differently, it's really your autonomic nervous system's ability to regulate itself. So you can think of heart rate variability as consisting of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. Your body's consisting of that. And sympathetic is activation.

So it's what makes your heart rate go up, your blood pressure up, respiration up. It's what's happening when you're exercising or you're thinking about something stressful, right? That's sympathetic. Parasympathetic is all the opposite. So heart rate down, blood pressure down, respiration down. It's what helps you fall asleep. And you want actually for every sympathetic, for there to be a parasympathetic response. There's this incredible balance that your body's constantly doing to regulate itself.

And what that in turn does is it increases your heart rate variability. So you think about it right now, the faster that you can react to something, the faster that your body can regulate itself to speed up or to slow down, that's a sign of readiness. That's a sign of how prepared your body is to perform. And all of that shows up through the metric of heart rate variability because it's literally measuring that relationship between sympathetic and parasympathetic. So I found it totally fascinating reading about it in the medical literature. And then the other thing that was really interesting was that it could only really be measured by an electrocardiogram, which is the huge goofy, you know, machinery that you see in a hospital or during a movie scene. Someone's like, beep,

beep, beep, you know? So like, how could we make this technology that everyone could have access to? And, you know, that's kind of close to where we are today, actually. Yeah. And you guys, I mean, I bring this up because no one on the planet measures heart rate variability as often as you guys do. Can you talk about why you guys wanted to make that such a deep dive and how you vary from Fitbit and all these other really well-known wearables that are out there? Yeah. I think first and foremost,

we wanted to collect data that could give people actionable feedback. And I found that the only way to give people actionable feedback was to have really, really accurate data. And in order to have accurate data, you need to sample at this incredible rate. So we sample across five different sensors 100 times a second, which is just an enormous amount of data. We collect about 100 megabytes of data on a person per day. And one of the results of that is we measure heart rate variability as nearly as accurately as an electrocardiogram, and we measure it 24-7. Now, there's certain moments in the day where it's harder to measure it if you're moving a lot, for example. But just being able to record heart rate variability 24-7, we're already getting a deep lens into your body. So today we primarily use HRV to understand how recovered you are and

therefore how ready we think you are for the day. So should you take on a lot of stress today? Should today be an easy day? Is your body run down? What sorts of things are you putting in your body and how is that affecting how you recover? These are all the types of things are you putting in your body and how is that affecting how you recover? These are all the types of things that you can start to do when you're measuring a statistic like heart rate variability continuously. Amazing, brother. Let's talk about sleep. Sleep, I don't know if everyone's listened to this, but if you haven't, please check out Matthew Walker on the Joe Rogan Experience and we'll link to it in the show notes. He wrote the book, Why We Sleep.

I think it's not the best how-to. I like Sleep by Nick Littlehales for the how-to, sleep better, sleep hygiene, all those things. But the why, like literally why we sleep, why it's important, and what it means if we don't get good sleep. And what was great on that podcast and in his book is that he talks about the fact that sleep doesn't just impair cognitive function and cognitive energy the next day. It impairs everything if you're underslept. It impairs cardio.

And obviously we know this from our own metrics. Like if I get a shitty night's sleep, my resting heart rate's gonna be much higher. I'll be, you know, HRV score is gonna be much lower because I will be most likely in fight or flight sympathetic mode. And let's just, let's unpack some of that stuff that goes in with sleep and why it's such an important metric. Well, I've spoken to Matt a few times and I think his book to your, to your point, like does a great job emphasizing just how important sleep really is. It's not necessarily how to sleep, but it's like, this is why you need to sleep, right? And one of the big things that we focus on with Whoop is actually trying to tell you how much sleep you need before you go to bed.

So again, this idea of trying to live a step ahead of you. It's true that depending on what your goals are, you may need a different amount of sleep. So we actually created a coach that you can tell it whether you want to peak tomorrow or whether you want to just get by. It's going to start to change how much sleep we recommend. The other thing that's really fascinating about sleep is it's so important, actually, the schedule that you create around sleep. So sleep consistency is something that we've done a ton of research at Whoop about.

And recently, the NIH came out with a fascinating study. It was on 100 students, I think actually at Harvard. And it was looking at the correlation between hours of sleep and GPA, so the number of hours of sleep that you got and how high your GPA was in school. And it was also looking at how consistently you went to bed. So did you go to bed and wake up at the same times, right? Go to bed at 11 p.m., you wake up at 6 a.m. The next night you go to bed at 11.10, you wake up at 5.50. That's consistency. You're staying within the same realm. And what the study found is that actually the people who had a better sleep consistency had a higher GPA,

and it was less so the hours of sleep. So whenever you meet someone who says, oh, I only need seven hours of sleep or six hours of sleep, that's probably not true. But the thing that they're doing that gives them an advantage is that they're going to bed and waking up at a really consistent time. And so that's one of the fascinating things that we were able to look at in medical research. And then because Whoop is global and we have tons of users, we actually were able to run this type of analysis across, I think it was roughly 4 million sleep data sets. So we could look at how does sleep consistency on our population across 4 million data sets actually affect your body?

And what we found is, sure enough, the people who go to bed and wake up at a similar time had higher heart rate variabilities the next day, lower resting heart rates, and they got more slow-wave sleep and REM sleep while they were actually in bed. Yeah, higher quality of sleep. So I think bottom line is you can only really manage what you measure. And everyone knows sleep's important, but often people don't really think about how to measure it. And you just can't figure out what you're doing if you're not measuring it. Like that's how you're going to be able to improve it. And for me personally, like I've

learned a lot about my own body just by wearing Whoop for the last six years. And, you know, I started wearing an eye mask, which I found really interesting. I'm sure you've got interesting things that you do around sleep. I found being in a much colder room was better for me. Massive. You know, we work with professional athletes, some of which are from the South. And, you know, they'll get to their hotel room and they'll be in like 78 degree weather in their room. And so that's one of the first things we tell them to do is right when you get in your hotel room, drop that thing down to 68, 65, because it dramatically improves sleep. It's so fascinating.

Yeah. My wife and I have improved our sleep score just from dropping it from 68 to 65. There you go. And that was something we were uncertain of. We got a three and a half year old. Like, is this cold going to be too much for him? Is he going to get, you know, is it going to be hard on his immune system? And it's not the case at all. Like we all sleep better from that.

Our son has a little bit of a pain in the ass when it comes to waking up because he could wake up at 5.30, wake up at 7.30. But I think the general idea that I'm getting right now is just to get up at five. That's the earliest he gets up. So get up at 5.30 every day, regardless if I could sleep in or not, because I think then that will help to reframe at what time that I actually go to bed. Yeah. I would just encourage anyone who's listening to this to like, if you care about your performance or your life in any real substantial way, you should be measuring sleep. And you don't necessarily have to change anything about what you're doing initially, but just having that information is going to start forcing you to think about it. And inevitably what's going to happen if you stay committed to measuring it is you're going to start tweaking things about your life. You can't help but do it,

right? Because no one wants to see bad data every day. So it's one of the best things that we see about our Whoop population is if you've been on Whoop for four months, on average, you're getting 41 minutes more sleep per night just by being on the platform. And I think some of that's the coaching and the recovery analysis that we do, but it's pretty fundamental that if you measure it, you can manage it. Yeah. So let's talk a bit about, we talked about HRV. Let's talk a bit about how you guys factor in readiness and what your recommendations are. Because I like the fact that it'll take into account how much I've been sleeping and not just my previous night, but for the previous week and looking at all these

things, how hard I've been training the previous week and factoring all that. What are the factors that lead you guys to fucking make the recommendations that you do? Well, just to summarize for people who know a little less about Whoop, the way that the system effectively works is you wake up in the morning with a recovery score, which is red, yellow, green, zero to 100%. And that's effectively telling you how prepared we think you are for the day. So if you've got a high recovery, we recommend that you take on more strain, more stress, more daily activity, more exercise, whatever that may mean for you. And if you're less recovered, we may even tell you to rest, right? I think we're the first fitness wearable to tell someone to do less, which I think is an important point of view, right? Then over the

course of the day, you accumulate strain and we measure that. So that's a whole nother pillar within WHOOP, this concept of strain. You and I were talking about that earlier. And that's going to encompass everything from daily activity, stress, especially exercise. And what you'll try to do, ideally, is match that level of strain with your recovery. Back to me, the college athlete, I was playing blind. I didn't really know whether I should put a lot of strain on my body or dial it back. And so I just put a lot of strain on my body every day. But now when I see that I'm run down, I do less.

It holds me back in a really healthy way. At the end of the day, we look at the strain that's accumulated on your body. We look at who you are. We look at sleep debt that's accumulated over the previous few days. And we actually tell you how much sleep we think you need for tonight to recover for tomorrow. And then you go to bed and you wake up and the hours of sleep that you got in relationship to the sleep that you needed is this concept of sleep performance. And then the whole

thing restarts. So that is how you, the user, are interacting with Whoop. I know we're talking a lot about data and really in-depth things, and it's super important to understand those things, but you also need to be able to know what to do with the information. And so I like to say the more data you collect, the less you want to show to a user. That's why if you look at those few screens, they're really simple, right? You've got a recovery score. It's a big color. You've got a sleep score. It's a percentage. You've got a strain dial. Is it full or is it halfway full? Where is it? So we try to keep it simple from that regard. Now in the background, so back to your question, there's a lot of analysis going on. And one of the most important things that we do is in those first three, four days that

you're on WHOOP, we're baselining you. So we're hesitant to tell you too much right when you join the platform because we want to really understand your body. And when it comes to readiness or recovery that you and I were talking about, we're going to look at your heart rate variability every morning, but we're also going to compare that to the last three days and even the last 30-day moving averages. Because we understand the local score, but we also understand the context around that score, right? And that's really fundamental. We do the same thing with resting heart rate. It's a little bit more of a binary because if your resting heart rate's two beats lower, two beats higher, it's not really as

important if it's in an outlier state. So if your resting heart rate's two beats lower, two beats higher, it's not really as important if it's in an outlier state. So if your resting heart rate's dramatically lower, like 10% lower or 15% higher, that's when it will start to trigger things in the score. And then we do a lot around sleep. So we're also factoring how much sleep you got last night, slow-wave sleep, REM sleep, being a big contributor to that. And it's fascinating creating a recovery score because it's part science, part art. You have to make sure you don't overweight certain things. So for example, if a college student is really hungover, he may spend 10 hours in bed and get nine hours of sleep,

but his heart rate variability is really low and his resting heart rate's really high. So we have to make sure that sleep isn't overweighted and telling this guy that he's ready to go crush a workout, right? Same with sickness. We see this all the time with sickness. And we've even had people on Whoop who get things like Lyme disease, mono. And it's pretty fascinating what you'll see in that data because you'll see these steady declines in their physiology, even though their sleep is maybe even increasing. So that's where I think this balance between understanding rest, but also understanding what your body is telling you that you can't feel, right? You can't feel what we're talking about. It's where it's really powerful.

Yeah. Talk a bit about the machine learning aspects because there's nothing I've ever tried before that has this much integration where I wake up, tells me it's calculated my sleep score, and then boom, I get the notification. All right, time to enter in. How do I feel?

Am I rested? Am I tired? Am I exhausted? Am I feeling sick? Am I injured? All these things go through there. Then it goes through the sleep. Did I share my bed? That's a huge one for me because oftentimes my son will climb into the room with me or I get to sleep in the guest room and I don't have to worry about it. So,

there's no shared bed there. All these things are huge factors. What do you guys do with that information and how are you using it? Well, again, a lot of it just comes back to learning about each person, right? So, understanding all the things that you're telling us in the context of your data. So, you know, every day we'll be asking you questions. You don't have to answer them, but understanding things like, was someone else in your bed last night? Did you drink alcohol last night? Are you trying new sleeping meds, right? All those things will help us inform whether the data set that we're looking at is a normal data set or whether we have to categorize it over here. Because it's apples to apples if we're looking at all the sleep data sets where you slept with someone versus the sleep data sets where you didn't, right? And that's how you can start to really understand an individual and give them feedback. Over time, I think a lot of those questions will actually be customizable. So if you're trying a new diet or you're trying a different supplement or you're trying, I don't know, fill in the blank, right?

Your body on blank. Like, how does your body respond to that? And so you'll be able to tell Whoop, hey, I'm doing this thing. I'm trying this thing. And then you'll see the physiological response to it. And that goes back to your question on learning, right? Machine learning is really clustering different data sets and trying to extract insights from them. And that's what we do all day. Yeah. You guys do a great job of it. Who do you guys work with in terms of like professional

athletes and military personnel? Because it seems like everyone and their mom that's anybody in the military or in professional sports is using this? And what are you gathering from these elite level people? Well, the most interesting thing is how I think physiology correlates with actual performance, right? Like that's one of the fundamental things I believed in founding Whoop was that we would not just be able to help improve performance. Over time, we'd get smart enough to be able to predict it. And so right now we're starting to see those correlations where... So I'll give you an example. We have a point guard in the NBA, NBA All-Star. When he's got a low recovery on whoop, so a red recovery on whoop, his stat average is 18 points per night, 35% field goal percentage, and eight turnovers.

Okay? When he has a green... By the way, it doesn't sound like an all-star. When he has a green recovery, a high recovery on whoop, his stat line is 22 points per night, 52% field goal percentage, one turnover. So you're talking about a max contract guy versus a guy who's coming off the bench on a mediocre team, right? Same individual, just different recoveries. That's a pretty fascinating phenomenon. And we've seen this now across probably 10, 12 different sports. And what I love about sports is it's so measurable. Like performance is so measurable. If you were to ask me how I perform today, it'd be super qualitative. Like, oh, you know, I answered emails effectively. I how I perform today, it'd be super qualitative. Like, oh, I answered emails effectively. I spoke well, da-da-da-da. But we can literally say,

hey, this guy's batting average was 312 today. And this guy had a free throw percentage of 75%, da-da-da-da-da. It's so quantitative. And we were really fortunate. We did a cool study with Major League Baseball. It ended up being the largest performance study ever conducted in professional sports. So we partnered with Major League Baseball. We had 260 Major League Baseball players wearing WHOOP. This was in the minor leagues because they were testing it out. And we saw that a few things were quite fascinating. So if you had a higher recovery on WHOOP, you were throwing faster fastballs as a pitcher. If you had a higher recovery on whoop, you were throwing faster fastballs as a pitcher. If you had a higher recovery on whoop, you had better exit ball velocity. So you were hitting the ball faster off the bat, which by the way is actually a more important measure than batting average I learned.

Because batting average depends a lot on the defense, whereas exit ball velocity is actually how well you're getting around and hitting the ball. So that was pretty interesting. We saw 15 players get injured over the course of the study and all 15 had declining recoveries for two weeks leading up to their injury. Now, these were injuries that were related to overstress of some sort. So we're not talking about someone who got hit by a pitch and broke their elbow, right? This is more like, you know, it would make sense that there would be some correlation there. And then one thing that I loved is that we saw that the home teams on average were getting an hour more sleep than the away teams. So the assumption in sports is that the home team wins because they've got their home crowd behind them. It's a familiar territory. It's convenient. Maybe it's just the home team gets more sleep, right? So those are the kinds of things that we see in professional sports. I mean, we work with thousands of the

best athletes in the world. It's really a pleasure. It's really interesting. You learn a lot from them too, because some of them will really open up. I mean, and you know, we have diaries from well-known professional athletes and they'll talk about their sex lives or everything they ate for the past month. And, you know, because you're trying to figure out what's that perfect recipe to perform. And I think you can learn a lot about that at the professional level and then try to bring it to the consumer level. You know, it was really only what, 20, 30 years ago that people started lifting weights. Like, I mean, professional athletes started lifting weights in like the nineties, like Jordan was one of the first, and then it kind of went from there, you know, and now you can't go to a hotel in America that doesn't have a gym. Right. So that story was told through pro sports in a lot of ways. It was told through athletes like yourself who, you know who have demonstrated the value of lifting

weights, right? And so now everyone thinks lifting weights is good for you. I think that there's going to be a second story that could be told through, again, pro sports, which is around sleep and recovery. Because we all need it in our daily lives, and they're trying to master it all the time, right? They're traveling a ton. They're putting a lot of stress on their bodies. They're doing weird things, cryotherapies and ice baths and acupuncture, right?

All these things start at the fringe pro sports level. And so what lessons can we as a large consumer audience learn from that? And for Whoop, we're trying to create that bridge. Oh, yeah. Well, it's much appreciated because we're all, I mean, for those of us that are in, we're benefiting from that. I appreciate that. I heard you talking with Ben also about some of the different things that you guys are

going to be testing for and looking at people in the float tank. And I'm huge in a flotation, looking at people in meditation practices and like, what are the ways we can alter and shift from a sympathetic state into a parasympathetic state? How do we manage that in real time as opposed to just hoping for the best night of sleep that we have and not aiding in our recovery? I think overall, there's just so many different areas where understanding, again, things like sleep and recovery and stress and how they relate and what other influences you're adding to the equation, there's just a lot to learn there. I was yesterday with a top trauma surgeon in the United States, And her and her partner are going to put

whoop on all these different trauma surgeons, right? And they're going to look at how these guys are able to perform at a high level while they're also pretty much sleep exhausted all the time, right? And you can't really think of something that's a higher stakes than trauma surgery. Someone comes in with a gunshot wound or a stab to their back and you got to operate on them like that, right? And sometimes you're up for 24 hours, 36 hours. So we're going to look at a lot of different populations like that. Trauma surgery is really interesting. We're doing studies in diabetes right now. So how can you manage insulin levels alongside understanding things like sleep and recovery? We're doing a lot with concussions, which I think is really important,

especially for, well, martial arts, obviously super important, but also we have a lot of, we're partners with the NFL Players Association. We're the official wearable of the NFLPA. So we've got a ton of NFL players on WHOOP. We're doing studies at the collegiate level that are looking at injuries. You mentioned meditation. We're doing studies at the collegiate level that are looking at injuries. You mentioned meditation. We're actually doing studies with professional sports teams looking at meditation and how that can improve you. I mean, I think generally speaking, it's pretty clear meditation can improve you. You just have to figure out what's right for you. We're doing some pretty interesting efficacy tests.

These are a little bit more confidential where we're actually involved with different drug trials to understand if certain drugs actually are doing what they're supposed to be doing. Wow. Okay. Yeah, that was a question I had. I wonder, you guys have a technology that can really peak into our sleep better than

most. And with that, you know, as Matthew Walker states, like you take fucking Ambien, you might think you're sleeping well, but it's kind of like being drunk and going to bed. It's not the same quality of sleep, right? So I wonder, yeah, obviously that's confidential, but I wonder which, if any of these sleep medications is doing harm or doing good for us. Yeah, and that's one of the things we're looking at. I think that's just really interesting. Now, I want to caution that it's very rare that it's one size fits all. Okay, I can generally tell you alcohol for everyone's not good for your recovery.

That doesn't mean I don't drink, but I'm just saying across the board, if you have alcohol versus don't, it's probably going to decrease your recovery, right? So there's certain things like that that are just kind of across the board bad. But especially supplements and medications, it really varies on a personal level. And I think generally speaking, Ambien's over-prescribed and does not give you the same kind of sleep quality that you think you're getting. I can kind of say that as a blanket statement. But it's interesting to look at people who take magnesium versus melatonin. There's some other ones that are... So you guys are looking into that.

I have a little sleep cocktail that I like to give people. What's your sleep cocktail? I do natural calm magnesium or the key minerals from on it, which is loaded with magnesium. So you drink that? Uh-huh. And then we'll have that with some green vibrance or some type of greens powder. And then we'll have new mood from on it and the melatonin spray pretty much nightly. Wow.

And as we do that, I think that really- And the melatonin spray, what's it on your tongue? Yeah. Yeah. It's a sublingual. I mean, you can just swallow it, but we leave it under the tongue for a minute and then- Now what happens if you don't have any of it? Have you ever compared that? Yes. It takes me a lot longer to fall asleep and my REM sleep drops. So I also take AlphaBrain before bed and that's one of the things that helps my REM. It's doubled my REM score. Wow. I mean, my REM average is around an hour and then I have a couple alpha brain and

it's at two hours. And two hours is a ton of REM. That's awesome. Yeah. And it's very vivid dreams. So it's like, I mean, I remember Rogan back in the day before I started working on it, was talking about alpha brain for luc Dreaming and taking it right before he goes to bed and before he gets in the float tank as well. So I was like, I'll give that a shot, you know, and I can play with it. Obviously it's free for us now. So let me experiment a little bit here. And yeah, like nothing across the board, even on the Oura Ring, same thing, you know, it's the same results. Yeah. I mean, like I would encourage any listener to try the stuff that you're talking about or just

try stuff like in general and it doesn't have to be as dramatic as taking a ton of supplements it could just be making your room colder or you know sleeping naked or putting on an eye mask just mix it up and again look at how your body's responding to that because inevitably you're going to find little

things that work for you we've got like a growing movement within the Whoop office to wear socks when you go to bed, which I think is kind of goofy, but apparently it helps you fall asleep faster. Really? I think that would make me too hot. I sleep naked. I sleep naked too, but yeah, I've heard from people that socks is a thing. Socks is a thing. Like it helps. I'll say this. There's another good hack that I like. Earplugs. Socks is a thing. Yeah. Like it helps. I'll say this.

There's another good hack that I like. Earplugs. So I used to have an English Mastiff in college. It was 170 pounds. And she'd get up with ear mites in the middle of the night and shake ridiculously loud. So I had to start wearing earplugs. And once I got used to them, now it's hard for me to sleep without them. But it's great because if we're by a noisy street or I'm in a hotel room, it doesn't matter because it really drowns out the noise.

And that's helped improve my sleep. Yeah, I think quiet and dark is pretty fundamental to sleep. Quiet, dark, and cold. Quiet, dark, cold, yeah. And a lot of people I don't think are focused enough on that. No, we just, I mean, we assume that watching TV right before we go to bed is no big deal. And we assume that watching TV with bright lights is no big deal. And we assume that watching a fucking horror flick or some suspense thing isn't a big deal. That's another thing I've

fine-tuned with that. And oftentimes my wife and I only get to watch a movie when our son goes to bed, especially if it's something rated R. But there's a clear-cut difference between us reading Mastery of Love together before we go to sleep with a low-blue light-emitting bulb versus watching fucking True Detective and then trying to crash right after. Right. Right. Totally. Yeah. I think, I mean, well, the fact that you're measuring all these things is, I think, the first step, right? You have to measure it to be able to change it or manage it. That's been probably the most fascinating thing also we've seen with pro athletes who are making a ton of money a year. Their livelihood for at least the foreseeable future depends on how well they can perform. And they're realizing how have I gone this far in my life without measuring sleep? It seems like pure insanity. I think we'll look back on this moment in time when at least professional athletes didn't monitor sleep as kind of like when professional athletes smoked

cigarettes in the dugout. It'll just seem that dumb, right? It's so obvious that if your livelihood depends on performance from a physical standpoint, you need to measure sleep. And by the way, we've had players who realize they spend nine hours in bed and get like four hours of sleep. Like that person doesn't need to go to the dugout and like hit more at bats. That person is like a phenom. They're playing drunk every day. The fact that they're professional athletes, absurd. All they need to do is figure out how to sleep because they're going to be way better. And so when people talk too about how they think this data can be used against you and

like there's some privacy concerns out there, right? Privacy is a big theme in technology. We think a lot about privacy at Whoop because the data we collect is really important. One of the things that often comes up in dealing with players associations and leagues is what's going to happen if this data is out there? Is it going to be used against me in a contract negotiation? And I generally think that's a very overstated point of view versus like you need to have this information in order to perform. Right. And at the end of the day, privacy isn't binary either. It's not like I'm sharing everything about my body with you or I'm sharing nothing. There's a lot of middle ground that you can find. So we've set up different teams that have all kinds of different configurations at

the professional level. And I think it's one of the reasons we've had success in that market. So it's more, how should I put this? It's dialed in for their own specific needs and what they want to see. Yeah. I mean, it's flexible and it's, again, it goes back to market focus, right? So one thing you realize, okay, say you're the all-star point guard, right? And you know, if you have a red recovery versus a green recovery, there's a different athlete showing up on the court. You now believe that, right? You actually don't want to know what your recovery is before the game anymore, but you still want the data. So we actually built a feature that allows athletes and coaches to hide certain scores before a game or an event so that you can still collect the information, but then see it after the fact.

Damn. That's pretty cool. So that's one of those things that's like, okay, we're going to own this market. This is a feature that's perfect for this market, right? Coach is putting my backup in a lot today. There might be something up. I don't know what the fuck's wrong. Yeah. And I get it. I mean, you don't want to have a psychological effect, but you also need to know that information for later because maybe you learned that you shouldn't have ate that thing for dinner or the massage therapy you got went wrong or whatever, right? And then it helps you learn going forwards. I like that. Talk a little bit about EMF. We had Nick Pino on the show who wrote the

non-tinfoil guide to EMF. Obviously, it's a huge concern for Greenfield and different people that are in the health and wellness space. I think you spoke beautifully about the difference between Wi-Fi. Obviously, we want to unplug Wi-Fi versus the Bluetooth that's in your technology. Can you unpack that a little bit in case there's some people that get a little wonky and weird about this? Yeah. I think the important thing to understand is that if you turn your phone off or you go into airplane mode or whatever, Whoop can't transmit data to your phone. So that's a pretty fundamental, like, okay, you don't have to worry about Bluetooth in that case. I would also just say for the people who really believe that Bluetooth is this

dangerous thing, you're surrounded by much more powerful frequencies all the time. Wi-Fi being one of the strongest. 5G towers coming in. Cellular being extremely strong. Yeah. Bluetooth is called Bluetooth low energy and is able to transmit a lot of data because it has such a low frequency. And so one, I would say that for the person who's nervous about Bluetooth and Whoop, there's ways to work around that. And then two, because Whoop stores up to three days of data. So if you're not within a phone for three days, if you want Bluetooth off for three days, fine. Like we'll store your data, get it when you need it, right? But the second thing I would say is I would be less concerned about that than other things.

Yeah. Yeah. And your fucking phone should be on airplane mode when you go to bed at night. If it's in the same room in your bedroom, it should be on airplane mode. That's a given. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Well, what else do you guys have coming up?

You guys have anything that you're trying to look into and accomplish when it comes to different metrics and things that you're getting into? Well, we're starting to do a lot more around community. So we're looking at what are different ways to motivate you by virtue of other people on the platform. So we've started creating teams on Whoop right now that are by state or by city or by activity. And you can actually join a group of Boston cyclists on Whoop and compete with those people. And today I would say the community

elements in the app are pretty subtle. And soon it's going to be, I think, a pretty vibrant piece of the overall product. I think in a lot of ways, it's going to be, I think, a pretty vibrant piece of the overall product. I think in a lot of ways, it's easier to understand your body also, excuse me, through the lens of other people, right? You and someone you train with are buddies. You've got similar body types. You guys beat each other to a pulp when you're sparring. I don't know, right? Okay. Understanding how he sleeps versus how you sleep, looking at some of that data kind of helps you start to get a sense for, okay, how do I compare with other people my age or people that I'm trying to level up against? For the high school athlete, how do they look like against college or professional athletes in the same sport, right? We've got a lot of interesting

data sets that we can completely anonymize, but allow someone to understand from a comparative standpoint. So those are some of the things that we're looking at right now that I think should make the experience really powerful. And then you can just do a deep dive on someone and comp them head to head and look at that side by side information. Hell yeah. I love it. Let's talk one last thing before we jam. This used to be fairly expensive and you guys have dropped the price significantly. Yeah, thank you. There's a monthly fee now, but I mean, it's a no brainer. I want to recommend things to people,

but there's always that knee jerk reaction, kind of like when Greenfield wrote his book and they're like, oh, this guy telling you to buy a $4,000 altitude machine and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, well, I mean, yeah, he'll also tell you how to do breath holds and, you know, CO2 resistance and things like that. Tolerance tests where you can actually do it for free, but in case you have the cheese and you want to do this, like, yeah, you should do it. I still get some shit from people for recommending really expensive products, but this has really changed how you guys model your company and the technology getting better, but cheaper at the same time. Can you talk about why you guys switched from the model of everything up front to a lower entry fee and then the month to month?

Yeah. I mean, ultimately we wanted Whoop to be more accessible to a much larger audience. We found that the technology was serving not just professional athletes, not just college athletes, but executives, people who want to understand their body, fitness enthusiasts, endurance competitors, all sorts of different individuals who want to better understand their bodies. And because our technology was appealing to a much larger audience, we wanted to find a way to make that work economically. So we used to sell Whoop for $500 as the hardware, and it was one time and up front. We now have packages that are as low as $18 a month, and you literally get the hardware for free. So you buy a package, could be six months, 12 months, 18 months. You're now a Whoop member,

which also puts a responsibility on us, by the way, to continue giving you new features, new analytics. There's a whole support staff. If you have any issues with your product or you have any issues with your data, you reach out to the membership services team. They'll get back to you. They'll answer your questions. So we wanted to make it feel more like a club, more like a membership. And we wanted the hardware to be free. And we ultimately wanted to tie what we feel is our responsibility as a business with the value that the customer gets. And that is really fundamentally, what do we know about you that you don't know about

yourself, right? And how can we just keep learning and learning and learning and helping you on that journey? Because that answer isn't just a one-time thing, right? That answer is an evolution. And we're going to grow with you, hopefully, and deliver that value. And by the way, if we don't, you should cancel, right? So that's why we think it's the right business model. We've worked really hard to get our cost of goods to come down so that we can afford to

do this. We are a startup. But it's been phenomenal. Yeah, the reception's been can afford to do this. We are a startup, but it's been phenomenal. Yeah, the reception's been amazing to your point. And I think people who wear a whoop for a few weeks realize that it's something they don't want to take off. Yeah, it's funny because a lot of people in health and wellness, they want you to learn.

And this is a good practice for anybody, but let's learn how to go based on feel. Like, let me figure this shit out. Like, okay, but let's, let's learn how to go based on feel. Like, let me, let me figure this shit out. Like, okay, I'll wear that for a while and then I won't need it anymore. And then I'll go without it. And it's like, yeah, that's cool. But I'm a fucking numbers guy. Like, I like seeing this stuff in front of me. And there's times where I won't, I will be, you know, moderately recovered and I'm going to push it that day just because that's what's on the fucking schedule. Right. And there's other times where, you know, I have really high recovery, but I don't get a chance to work out that day, you know, and that's okay. Right. But I like knowing those things and I, I fucking love what you guys are doing. And I would say that the,

I mean, there's like this old school kind of point of view, right. That's like, oh, I'm going to try something for a little bit. I'm going to learn it and then I don't need it, right? And actually that also reflects like old technology, right? You think about step counters. The reality is if you wear a step counter for two weeks and you don't wear it on the 15th day, you can probably guess how many steps you went. Like it actually is a learned behavior. Whereas more advanced technology, whoop, for example, we're able to measure things that you literally cannot feel. And so that's where there's a huge value add. And I would encourage people to be open-minded about it. Try it and see what you get out of it because you're

going to find these moments in time where you don't feel great, but Whoop tells you that you're ready to go and you go crush a workout or the opposite. You feel good. Whoop says you're run down. You don't know why you try to do something and you just weren't the man you thought you were going to be for that moment. And so that's the moment where you start to build trust, I think, in this different engine for you, this coach for you. Yeah, I love it. You guys have an excellent app, excellent interface and an excellent product. I want to promote it with you for sure.

Thank you. Thank you for coming on. I appreciate it, brother. Where can people find you online? Is it whoop.com? Yeah. And how about you personally on social? Yeah, you can find us at whoop.com.

That's just W-H-O-O-P.com. You can read about the product and everything else there. You can find me online at Will Ahmed, Will, A-H-M-E-D, and happy to answer any questions or talk to the users. Awesome, brother. It's been a pleasure having you. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for having me, man. This was fun. Hell yeah. Yeah. Thank you guys for listening to the show. Remember, if you're digging this and you really do want to get yourself a Whoop watch, go to whoop.com, use code word Onnit at checkout, and you'll receive a discount.

Appreciate you guys tuning in. And as always, 10% off all supplements and food products at onnit.com slash podcast.