Modern Wisdom - #943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

Will Ahmed is an entrepreneur, founder, and CEO of WHOOP. Wearable fitness tech has taken over in 2025, from sleep scores to stress tracking and everything in between. So how did WHOOP grow into a $3.6 billion giant? And how do you use the data to improve your life without letting it control you? Expect to learn why CrossFit is so unpopular now and what happened to its falloff, what the broad trends of fitness are across the globe, how to get past your self-doubt and stop being so hard on yourself, how to deal with rejection better, what it is like hanging with the world’s best athletes, how to avoid being a prisoner of your wearable fitness data, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dude, how high and how hard did CrossFit drop the ball over the last few years? Wow, CrossFit. Well, CrossFit is first of all a great grassroots student. It's a great grassroots movement in the sense that like it literally began as an email list. And it's amazing to think how far they were able to go with that. And then you've got the Greg Glassman racism stuff and like the craziness during Black Lives Matter. And then you've got this whole new leadership team that comes in.

By the way, around that time, we became partners with CrossFit. And I mean, I've now been building Whoop for 13 years, without question the most dysfunctional partner we've ever worked. And we've worked with a lot of partners. And a lot of dysfunction, I imagine, as well. A lot of different partners. And then the tragedy at this recent event, I don't know.

The whole thing is so poorly run, it's hard to even talk about it. Because it's such a missed opportunity. I've never seen anybody fumble the bag so hard in like in fitness. If you'd said 10 years ago, 2015, actually probably when was peak 2017, probably 2018, something like that, like absolute peak CrossFit. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. If you'd said then what the next seven, eight years had in store, no one would have believed you.

It's, it's, it's outrageous. And I think it, a lot of people, when they look at businesses from the outside, they see sophistication, they see popularity, they see, uh, rate of adoption. The thing that nobody sees is what the internal operations of that company is like. And sometimes it can be all shiny, shiny and perfect out front and inside is just a total mess. It's just a dumpster fire.

And it feels like that might be the case. And they also had like a great community and a great brand, which are two things that are that are pretty resilient. Like when things go wrong and there's like elements of dysfunction. And even with that, I mean, it's unbelievable how yeah, how sorry of a place it is now. Turning people that whatever consume your product or are a user into an evangelist for it. I mean, everybody's new fitness pursuit is their most exciting thing.

You know, every vegan wants to tell you about veganism and every CrossFit wanted to tell you about CrossFit and every high rocks athlete wanted to tell you about high rocks. And then now every run club person is trying to get you to go to that run club on a Saturday morning and do a 5k but yeah the level of adoption that CrossFit had and the pace of change and I think I Get the sense that the only reason we're seeing high rocks and sort of hybrid training Come through is because of the hole that has been left by sort of the exiting of CrossFit. There's some new things. It's a bit...

It's a lower impact. Maybe it's a little bit more accessible to go and do a HiRox event than it would have been to have tried to go to Sectionals or do a local CrossFit comp. I'd rather do burpee broad jumps than try and do a snatch or a handstand walk. But yeah, I don't think... I think HiRox's ascendancy can be laid at the feet of what CrossFit dropped. I think there's an opportunity for a lot of these different fitness communities. I mean, you have F42, you've got berries, you've got orange theory, you've got these different types of Pilates studios. And it sort of seems like people are looking almost for the new thing.

And that in turn allows for these different, you know, micro communities to pop up around a particular activity. And at the end of the day, I think, you know, weightlifting for a lot of people is intimidating, exercise is lonely and hard. Like, you know, it makes sense that there are these boutique communities, so to speak.

And so I wouldn't actually attribute the success of these other communities solely to CrossFit's downfall. I think CrossFit in itself, it probably appeals to you and me, but, you know, it had a high injury rate before they even had dysfunction as a company. Uh, it is like a pretty intimidating workout out of the gates. Like there's a lot of people that- You don't just go in and have a gen CrossFit set up. There's a lot of people that's going to turn off like workout out of the gates. Like there's a lot of people that it's- You don't just go in and have a gen crossfit set. There's a lot of people that's going to turn off like right out of the gates.

Yeah, you can go and plod along on a 5k, but you can't do that in a crossfit class. Yeah. Yeah. What are you seeing from a fitness industry perspective at the moment? What is sort of the broad trends that you've been able to track over however long you've been watching everything? So last year, the biggest uptick was pickleball. Let's go. And then in the last, so that, so I mean, 2023 actually, and then 2024, the biggest we saw was paddle.

So two racket sports, interestingly. Pickleball grew a lot in the United States. Paddle, which people in the States call Padel, but paddle, which is what it's called internationally, has just taken off. And so that's a pretty fascinating game too. I grew up playing squash and tennis. So for me, paddle's like maybe the most fun game I've ever played because it's a sort of perfect hybrid of the two. Are you familiar with what it looks like? Yeah. So it's, you know, the whole glass courts all the way around and you're sort of in a tennis court in like, you know,

a glass cage and you can essentially play the ball off of anything and it's pretty dynamic and fun. And is this based on the number of activities tracked? Yeah, in terms of like the percentage increase of activities we've seen on Whoop. Wow. That was the biggest one last year. So you guys are kind of like a fitness trend aggregator now. Yeah, we've got a lot of data, that's for sure.

The thing that people still struggle with the most is sleep. It's amazing how, you know, like 20, I think it's 22 percent of people on Whoop get over seven hours of sleep. So you just think about that, like, you know, roughly 80 percent of people are getting less than seven hours of sleep. And I think sleep, sometime in the last like, five years became the new steps, or all of a sudden people just realized that was an important thing to care about, and steps maybe in turn was a less important thing to care about in the grand scheme of things. And yeah, we've certainly benefited from people's enthusiasm towards sleep, but it's, yeah, it's super important. It's hard to try.

I've said this for a long time, that as soon as you begin using any fitness tracker, the first thing that you learn is you're not sleeping anywhere near as much as you thought you were. Yeah. It's a very painful, you're like, no, I got eight hours. It's like, no, dude, you were in bed for seven and a half and you were asleep at 6.45.

There, there, there, yeah. That's the trap is people previously, if you ask them how much sleep did they get last night, they're like, well, I went to bed at 11, I woke up at six, I got seven hours of sleep. And then they realize after you do all the factoring of time away from this, Five and a half.

Yeah, it's five and a half hours of sleep. And yeah, so, you know, one of the things we recently did was update how we think about sleep, where it's less just the total hours that you got versus how much you needed, and it's now also looking at sleep consistency, efficiency, and stress. And so it's sort of a better,

it took us a while to get there, but we did a lot of research around what is quality sleep. And one of the biggest things that shows up in the research is the importance of consistency, which is going to bed and waking up at the same time. And you and I were just talking about how hard that is in general. I mean, you the nightclub promoter probably. You the new dad.

Yeah. So that's probably my worst metric on whoop, in part because travel just nukes it. So for people wondering how it's calculated, like for the last, you look at like for the last four nights, how similarly was your bedtime and wake time? And if you travel over time zones, that of course factors into your consistency.

And, but essentially there's all this research just showing that if you can build a sort of continuity around bed and wake times, your overall circadian rhythm, your overall performance of your body, longevity, I mean it's one of the key indicators we discovered when we built this health span score for overall health span and actually all cause mortality. I had Dr. Matthew Walker sat here and he was telling me about how for some people that are, I think they're like circadian sensitive, I actually unfortunately think that I'm one of these people, sleep consistency and regularity are more important than sleep duration. And that means that the classic, well, you know,

I get good sleep during the week, but I kind of send it on a weekend. It is actually not, you can't do that. You can't accumulate sleep debt Monday through Friday and then pay it off on Saturday or Sunday or do the reverse. And that, you know, dicking about with the time that you go to bed

and the time that you wake up is actually like pretty detrimental. Yeah, we call that social jet lag. And it's interesting for a lot of people on Whoop, it's quite common. That they lock in for a period. Yeah, they're good for five days and then on the weekend, it's like off by three hours and they're kind of back to the... What's people's worst day of sleep typically? Do you know?

It's either Friday or Saturday night in the US. Now it's interesting, now that Whoop is global, we have a lot of different perspectives on this, but the Middle East with sleep is crazy. They're like in their own world. How so? So the average bedtime in Riyadh or in Doha is like 1.55 AM. No way. Yeah. I think Doha is the latest. I think it's like a little after 2 AM. What do you attribute that to? So late night food, shisha, bars?

Yeah. So those are two countries that for the most part don't drink alcohol. And so I think in part they're substituting that with things like caffeine and nicotine. And so like those are stimulants that are going to keep you up later. So good justification for letting alcohol into your country to just bring that bedtime a little bit. Yeah, just dial that back in. Yeah. Yeah.

So I think it's entirely cultural. It's interesting. What is some other outlier countries that are interesting with some odd metrics? Uh, Ireland, uh, drinks more alcohol than everyone else. Maybe, maybe that's not too unexpected. I think Australia and the U.S. report, um report the highest rates of sex. Okay, interesting. So good for them.

Cold plunging I think is very popular in Sweden relative to other countries. Finland for saunas probably. Yeah, Finland for saunas. And then there's very activity-specific stuff, like, you know, certain countries do way more of like certain activities. Like in the U.S., the top three activities are like walking, running, and cycling. And then like after that, it's like functional fitness and weightlifting, which is, you know, kind of like the order of operations they'd expect. But then like in the UK, for example, they've got like a much higher weightlifting culture,

interestingly, so like that replaces cycling and yeah. Well, it's also freezing cold and wet, so I don't think people wanna be out on the roads. Why is there no bodybuilding on the app? I think we have power lifting and we have weight lifting. Neither of those two are functional fitness. No, neither of those are bodybuilding. Me and all my bros in the gym like, fuck, I gotta pretend that I did snatch

and fucking clean and jerk today. What do you, what do you define as power lifting? Bodybuilding? Or excuse me, bodybuilding versus powerlifting. A normal push pull like split a sort of eight to 14 rep range, not working to the goal of strength and not working to the goal of specific movements, but working to the goal of hypertrophy. It wouldn't be intense enough to be called functional fitness or varied enough to be that.

Weightlifting, the sport of Olympic weightlifting, right, It's the snatch and the clean and jerk. Powerlifting is SBD, squat bench deadlift. And if I go in and I do, you know, four by 14 on bicep curls, what do I log that as? So I mean, I put it in as weightlifting, which I assume is what most other people are doing too, because you are lifting weights. Okay, we'll add it, we'll add it. Yes.

We'll have an activity for bodybuilding. My Jim bros, I've done it. God, it's only lifting weights. Okay, we'll add it. We'll add it. Yes. We'll have an activity for bodybuilding. My Jim bros, I've done it. God, it's only taken me five or six years to do it. I found out something during my research. I found out that you're an only child too. And this is going to be kind of like a immovable object and an unstoppable fucking force to only children meet. Have you ever reflected or do you reflect much on how that influenced you? Sort of how it shaped your personality, the things that you expect, the way that you were socialized,

how you showed up as a young man and now an older man? Is a great question. I mean, I think the first obvious thing is that, I do think only children are more self-centered. Like, I think that there's an element of, if there's things that you want in life, there's sort of an element that you believe you can go get them. And I think that that's probably something that only children have a stronger gravitation to or comes more naturally.

There's also another element which is that, at least for me, I found I spent a lot of time with adults when I was a kid and I would travel with my parents to different countries and so I also got comfortable around being people, like sitting at a dining room table with like seven other adults and me. And strangely, the two things that I just described actually boded well for being a young entrepreneur because I think so much

of building anything, it's probably even so much of like, what do you want to do in life, is knowing what you want and figuring out how to get what you want. And I think that knowing what you want is like a deeply, it requires a deep sort of inwards reflection. I think the mistake that a lot of people make, particularly when they're young, like I started WUPE when I was 22 years old, the mistake that a lot of people make when they're that age is they ask everyone else what they should do and they don't ask themselves. And so I think that the best path of trying to figure out what you want, like knowing what you want, is to look inwards.

And as an only child, you also spend a lot of time alone. And so looking inwards is sort of a natural thing. Sex and nature. Yeah. And then there's, of course, practices that you can develop to look inwards. I got into meditating, and we could talk about that. So looking inwards was something I became comfortable with.

And then the process of getting what you want, I think, is actually it's really important to get outwards, like to go be around a lot of people and, you know, essentially try to ask for what you want in the world and get rejected a lot and sort of deal with that. And again, the mistake that a lot of people make when they're trying to get what they want is they actually become isolationist. And so there's an interesting irony to this whole concept of get what you want or discover what you want and get what you want. But then I think there's also an element with being an only child where you can build up, you potentially can build up more self-esteem because your parents have more time to sort

of pay attention to you, right? you can build up, you potentially can build up more self-esteem because your parents have more time to sort of you know, pay attention to you, right? And I, you know, I have great parents and they loved me considerably and I think that helped with self-esteem, you know, probably throughout my childhood and growing up which probably in turn when I was starting a company made me more resilient in the face of rejection. You believe that you can do things that other people might have had second thoughts about? Yeah. Yeah.

Now, I also had a lot of conviction in what I was building, more conviction in the thing than I had in myself, which is an interesting concept in itself. But like, I believed that what I was building should exist in the world and would exist in the world and would exist in the world. And what I struggled with for years in building it was, can I do this? Am I capable of this? Oh gosh, I feel like I'm under a lot of stress or I feel like I'm under a lot of pressure or I don't know the answers to these things or how do I hire someone or how do I fire someone or how do I raise money? For me, it was dealing with that sort of trauma of building the company.

How did you learn to get past your self-doubt? Have you got past your self-doubt? How much is it still creeping? I don't have a lot of self-doubt now. I think that I don't have a lot of self-doubt now. I think that I've gotten good at questioning why I have conviction in things and then examining that through other people's perspectives or through sort of deeper examination, if you will. I don't think that you ever stop entirely having self-doubt and you probably shouldn't, you know, because then I think you get a little unhinged, so to speak. But I do think that confidence and self-belief is sort of a prerequisite for doing anything really hard. Traveling should be about the journey, not the chaos of packing, which is why I am such a huge fan of Nomadic.

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back. Plus they ship internationally. Right now you can get a 20% discount and see everything I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. It's an interesting one. So I resonate with a lot of the points you made to certainly the spending much time on your own. The uncertainty, the self-doubt, there's something I want to do, but I don't know if I can do it. Am I the person to do it? I think it should be here. I think this is something that's important,

but is it my role? Do I have the capacity to bring this thing into existence? I certainly feel that. And I think this is a, regardless of how many brothers or sisters you had, I think this is a pretty perennial problem. People who are growth minded and have high standards, insecure overachievers, they position an ideal and then they compare themselves to the ideal and they find themselves falling short by design because that's what an ideal is. Or you set big goals or you have a dream or you have whatever, whatever it is that you want to do. And it also sort of programmed into just the typical cadence of how this stuff works,

is you have something you're chasing toward and you're uncertain about whether or not you're going to get there, right up until basically the moment you get there. And then the second you get there, you move the goalpost again. So there's no point at which you feel like you've arrived. So you very rarely actually sit in accomplishment and gratitude. So if you're permanently doing this iterative sort of, I get close and I move away and I get close and I move away and I get close and I move away. If you're permanently doing that, at what point are you not

going to feel like you're lacking? You're permanently in lack because you continue to push it further away, continue to push it. I think all of this sort of combined together creates this soup that's probably pretty fertile to grow self-doubt out of. But at least for me, I realized this last year, I did this live show in London. It was kind of a formative, a little bit of a formative moment. It was three and a half thousand people at this big theater. And I was like, holy fuck, like I formative moment. It was three and a half thousand people at this big theater.

And I was like, holy fuck, like I'm on stage in front of three and a half thousand people, this is insane. And someone asked me, we do these, people can come and watch the sound check that are in the first few rows. And someone asked me a question and I said, sort of, did you think, is this part of the plan? Did you think you were going to get here? I was like, I'm the poster child for imposter syndrome in a lot of ways,

chronic self doubt, a lot of uncertainty. But I think kind of in the same way that you said, which is if you believe that this thing is supposed to exist in the world, and if you really like the thing, and you kind of, you almost outsource your own self doubt to, well, this has got rocket fuel behind it. And I'm just going to keep seeing if that thing can come. And you kind of, you almost outsource your own self-doubt to, well, this has got rocket fuel behind it. And I'm just going to keep seeing if that thing can come. And I can't tell anybody else to bring it into existence.

So I might as well have a crack at it myself. And if you're sufficiently stubborn, kind of before you know it, you don't fake it until you make it. You sort of make it until you believe it. And then you go, oh, this is a thing. This is a company. Like there's a tracker and it until you make it, you sort of make it until you believe it. And then you go, Oh, I got, this is a thing. This is a company. Like there's a tracker and it actually tells people that, all right, this is a podcast and oh my God, I'm on stage in front of all of these people.

Or, you know, this is, I've managed to get the degree or I managed to move out of the town that I hated, or I managed to find a partner, I managed to build a fat, whatever it is that you thought, like this thing is supposed to exist. I don't know if I'm a person that can do it, but I'm just gonna keep sort of grinding away until it happens. And then when you actually turn around and look, you go, oh, I guess this is what arriving is. Yeah, that's really well said.

I mean, for me in building WOOP, it was helpful to sort of disassociate building the company and building myself as a CEO or an entrepreneur. And I think in the, for years, like, I had kind of wrapped those two things up as one. And so if, you know, if whoop had a good day, I had a good day. If whoop had a bad day, I had a bad day. If whoop was failing, I was failing. And it's not a particularly productive sort of framing, if you will, for actually growing

either yourself or the business. And the reality is that, you know, the business could be doing great and you could be spiraling out of control or vice versa, you know, how many businesses suffered during COVID to no fault of their management team, right? And so there's, it just, it's quite important to separate those two things, I think literally.

And then I realized also that if I didn't start growing better, I was going to be the detriment to whoop growing because as the CEO- Lame duck in your own company. Yeah. Because as the CEO, if you're projecting all sorts of stresses and you're not managing the company properly and you're kind of spinning out of control yourself. Uh, well, the businesses think it's very difficult to have an orderly company and a chaotic founder.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, and, and so I felt, yeah, I felt especially early on. I was very much that chaotic founder. Now it's hard to, it's hard to go back and say, well, I wish I could change the way I behaved for the first few years of the company's history, because there is an element of, and I think I believe this, there's an element of you change one thing and, you know, everything else changes going forward. Big butterfly effect going on.

Yeah. And of course, I'm super grateful with where I sit today and, you know, what we've been able to build. But yeah, I put up real walls in those, so that the period of like 22, probably to 24, 25, of just like real walls to anyone's feedback. And I was so certain about things and I was so stubborn. And I think it's in a way, it's a good, it's a helpful mechanism to get something off the ground because there's no ambiguity, but you're very hard to work with. I hear the same thing from the people that I work with. Yeah. Maybe a little bit of only child syndrome is showing through that.

Yeah, there you go. Yeah. From both of us, our business partners would agree. Um, I really resonate with, and this is something, you know, no matter what your pursuit is, if you're scrabbling a little bit for meaning, uh, in life, which almost everybody who's a bit sensitive and introspective is when they're young, because who the fuck are you? Like how many people arrive at 20 or 23 and like, yeah, I know who I am. I've got a good, strong sense of self.

You know, things don't sway me. Shut up, dude. Of course stuff does. You get, you get the weather's bad and you feel bad about yourself because you just haven't had enough time to get those sort of stabilizers down. And I ran nightclubs for all this time and, and exactly the same, the weird thing about running events, it's kind of like being a baseball player. It's iterative, right?

You have, especially for us, we had this big Saturday and that was our big event from the age of 22 until 28. It was the Saturday that was our big money maker. It's the big game, so to speak. Yeah, that was the big one. And if the event had been successful, I was worthy. I was, I was good. Um, I was validated and if it was bad, then that was a reflection on me.

But then I managed to get it to this much more pernicious place, which was. I dissociated working hard and pain and difficulty with good outcomes. Because typically when you worked a little bit harder, there was some pain that came along with it, but when you worked harder, the outcomes were better. But my brain, you're already grinning, my brain had shortcutted the link. And it ended up being if we had an event that went well, but I hadn't suffered that I didn't feel good. And I started to make a direct link between Chris suffered, Chris is good and worthy.

So the event had to go well first, but I also had to have suffered. So if it went well and I hadn't suffered, that wasn't good. If it went badly, whether I'd suffered or not, that didn't matter. So the only key that unlocked my self-worth for like a good bit of time was success objectively and pain subjectively. And if I'd done that, then hooray, maybe that's okay. So it's just, it's a really interesting twist, I guess, on the Puritan work ethic. It's like a capitalist Puritan work ethic where you know that you should be grinding and you are just so driven by dopamine and chaos and

caffeine and in the nightlife industry other substances too that you end up in a place where you signal off of how hard this thing was and then you get into your 30s and you go Hey, I want to have a family or I want to chill out I want to be able to go to bed on a nighttime and my thoughts be a good quality. You go, Oh, you need to let go of the entire pathway catalyst fuel that you were using previously. Good luck trying to unwind that.

And that's been a task of basically best part of a decade now for me to try and unwind that, that little linkage. me to try and unwind that little linkage. Yeah. The unlock for me in that category has been to be driven and grateful. And I feel like it's easy to get stuck on just the drive train and the dopamine system of, you know, when the company's worth a hundred million dollars or a billion dollars or $10 billion, you sort of keep telling yourself when I get to X I'm gonna be happy and What's good about that from a drive standpoint is it it drives you there

but of course when you get there, there's sort of enormous letdown and it's also You have to you have to balance it with being grateful for the moment that you're in. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs worry that or sort of misinterpret gratitude as complacency. But I think they are fundamentally different things. And they work different aspects of your brain. Like the drive system is dopamine and the gratitude system is serotonin. And both of those have a, you know, a way of making you happier. How have you learned to navigate those two things given that there's still things you

want to achieve and you still do want to be driven? Yeah. But you don't want to look back on a series of miserable successes as a career? No, I mean, so I would say my sort of broad operating principle is that I want to be of service. And that's a helpful framing because just out of the gates, it makes it less about what you accumulate and more about what you do for your company or society or your customers or fill in the blank. And beyond that, I also get to work in unlocking human performance and health span and this sort of like what I would call noble mission, which is around making people perform better

and live longer. And so by not having my sole mission be around, you know, revenue numbers or company valuation or those sorts of things, like I think that alone helps you get a little bit outside of the miserable successes, so to speak. And so like it's very easy to just gloss over numbers that get bigger and not really associate any meaning with them. But when you go from getting one testimonial every six months to getting hundreds a week from people that are like, your product changed by life, and you get to stand in front of your company and read that to 500 people who are, you know, blood, sweat, and tears trying to make this product great, you feel something.

I mean, there's a lot of gratitude for me that comes from that experience. And so, I can still want to push for the company to be bigger and more successful and be affecting more people but I can also at the same time I think appreciate the impact that it's having and and that's I would say will the entrepreneur or CEO right we all have these different identities and You know, I've sort of looked at hard things that happen in your life as a path to growth. We talked about early on when I was 22, not really knowing what I was doing running a company and just having to go through that sort of painful period of becoming a better

CEO or becoming a better human. I think that in general, pain know, pain in some form leads to growth. And so if you kind of adopt a growth mindset, it makes you much more comfortable with being in that painful state. Now you don't want to be in sort of a masochistic way where you're, yeah, like what you just described where you're like, you want to force yourself to be in pain, but more just in the sense that like, wow,

a bunch of things just went wrong in a row for me. And this is very painful. Like, my best friend committed suicide a little over a year ago. And that, like, in my personal life, that was the most pain that I'd ever felt in my life. I'd never lost anyone, let alone someone who I had seen a week earlier. And I think when you're first going through the trauma of an experience like that, it's hard to find perspective in it.

But if my emotional range at that point in my life was like from a six to a ten, or like zero is like the worst thing in your life and ten is like you feel great euphoria. In hindsight, my emotional range was actually kind of narrow, right? And so being able to go down to a one or a two for some period of time actually opened me up in a really healthy way in the months later and in a way that I never would have anticipated from having this terrible thing happen in my life. And so, you know, some of it's a little bit of just how you reframe everything, but I have found that in whatever category of your life that you're feeling some kind of enormous

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Modern wisdom at us.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom, a checkout. How do you keep operating a fast growing business when personally you've gone through something like that? I think a lot of people have to show up to whatever their job is, whether they're the founder of a big company or they've just got a normal position or they've got to be there for the kids or they've got to be there for their partner or whatever it is, uh, when they're kind of going through it. Hmm.

Uh, how did you come to, I'm sure that you've reflected on this. How'd you come to split brain yourself into actually being a functional human? Well, your first reaction is, uh, to try to go numb because that is a coping mechanism, if you don't feel the pain, you can kind of still get through the day. And you have to process the emotion, you have to feel it. And so I think in the first 10 days of it, I was sort of white knuckling through it and especially kind of day to day-day and running the company.

Now, fortunately, the company's also at a stage where I've got an executive team that's pretty functional, and they knew what I was going through. It wasn't like it was a secret. And then at least in this specific case for me, I delivered the eulogy, and it was, I mean, he was a very popular young man and it was in front of 800 or 1,000 people in this massive church. And so that, and that was one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life, was having to talk about his life and someone I loved and cared about.

And just a whole wave of emotions went through me doing that. And so that, one, I felt enormous relief from doing it. And then two, in the aftermath of it, I was proud of being able to celebrate his life. And so there was sort of a weight that was taken off from that experience. And then, of course, you deal with these other stages of grief, which is around like, you know, I would play squash with them every week. And so now every time I go to the squash courts, I could think about them. Or I go to the steam room and I would sit with them.

So you have these different stages of grief, but I think in those first 30 days, the best thing that I could have done was to go through that huge wave of painful release of emotion. Yeah, it's the classic male denial of any emotional issue. I'm just going to lean into knowing myself to how I can keep moving. This is what they would have wanted in any case from me, logically, emotionally, psychologically, however you want to try and rationalize. This kind of sucks and I don't want to feel it. I think that's sort of a natural thing that anyone can do.

Because it's scary how your body feels. Like it's a physical overwhelming state. And it's distracting. Like you're in the middle of a conversation, next thing you're crying. So I understand that. But if anyone's listening to Sue's Going Through Grief, I would encourage them to take whatever time or whatever process they need to release what they're feeling in that period. Interesting that doing a eulogy is in itself a form of a therapeutic release in some ways for you.

Oh, it was huge. And I think it was an exaggerated experience because I had to write down everything I felt about him. I had to deliver that in front of actually a large number of people that happened to also be all of my closest friends. The most hardcore type of public journal entry that you're ever going to do. Yeah. And it was a large public speaking event too, which is its own form of whatever. And I had never experienced death like that. And I wanted to celebrate someone who was a really important person in a lot of people's lives.

So yeah, I think that it was a very exaggerated experience and I'm grateful that I got to do that aspect of it. Yeah. I think just going back to the two points that you raised earlier on, sort of working out what you want and then working out how to get it. Um, I would hazard a guess that most people get stuck.

Think they get stuck in problem two, but are actually stuck in problem one. Yeah. That's a great way to describe it. They're, they're kind of out and about trying to chase a bunch of things, and they're upset they're not getting what they want, but they've never actually declared what they want. How did you investigate what it was that you wanted? What's some advice that you have for how people can better define that?

Well, I think the first thing to know is that it's an inwards examination. You have to ask yourself what you want. You can't go asking everyone in your life what you want. You'll never figure out what you want. You can't go asking everyone in your life what you want. You'll never figure out what you want. And so that's a very internal and introspective pursuit. And I do think that it's hard when you're young because you haven't quite figured out how to talk to yourself yet, at least I hadn't when I was 18 or 19 years old. But you can be sort of self-aware of things that you're drawn to.

So let's start with things that you're not drawn to. Well, you know, I did a bunch of internships, so to speak, when I was like 18, 19, and 20 or whatever. And I worked in finance, which sort of seemed like what I should do because other people I knew were going to go into finance. And I just didn't enjoy it. And by the way, in my free time, I was doing research on the fitness industry or the wearables industry or these sorts of things. And then when I would go play squash practice at Harvard or whatever, I would love working out and love pushing myself. And through that, I also was somebody who used to over train.

So I got interested in how you can figure, you know, how can you understand over training? And through that, I found myself doing physiology research on things that in the past, I wouldn't have been interested in or not drawn to. And I think the things that you think about in a shower or in the back of a cab, like when your mind is quiet, so to speak. I think those things really matter. Like what are you actually drawn to? Like pay attention to that.

Probably the biggest curse of cell phones and smartphones is that people aren't bored anymore. And so they actually lose some of that inner dialogue. Yeah, I did a lot of therapy last year. And one of the best things that my therapist reminded me to do was pay attention to fleeting thoughts. Yeah, that's well said. Specifically it was when I was on the cushion, but also throughout the rest of life and fleeting

thoughts are quiet. You know, they sort of appear and they come and go and quite easily ignore them. And if you have some distraction in your pocket, if the volume that you need the rest of the world to be able to hear fleeting thoughts is so low. And the volume that kind of comes out of your phone proportionally or mentally, whatever, cognitively is so high, it's so loud that it just, you're right, it doesn't have any room, doesn't have any space to appear. And yeah, that the ability to pay attention to fleeting thoughts and to

think, huh, but then you need to be careful, right? Because the mind's slippery and sometimes it'll say stuff to you. You go, yeah, that's bullshit. That's bullshit. Uh, so that's a fleeting thought that's bullshit. Sometimes they are, but sometimes it's a fleeting thought that's bullshit. Sometimes they are. But sometimes it's a, I don't know what it is. I don't know where it comes from. I don't know. Well, I would say it's recurring fleeting thoughts because the things that matter

to you keep coming back. At least I've found. And then I think the other thing that everyone should learn in some form is the ability to close their eyes and breathe. And whether you call that meditation or mindfulness or fill in the blank, develop some process to sit with yourself. And what about getting what you want? Let's say that somebody's managed to sit, they've developed the ability to pay attention to fleeting thoughts. They're actually working in that way. Where have you noticed with the people that are around you, your team, yourself, what are the pitfalls that people find when it comes to actually getting what they want,

assuming that they've managed to define it? Well, one step is to state it. I mean, don't be coy about it. I want to build this company. I want to be a musician. I, you know, fill in the blank. Like, what do you want and state it to the world? And then you cannot underestimate hard work and consistency. If you are hard charging and consistently hard charging, that is such a differentiator on sort of everyone else. And that's in turn what creates luck. You know, like if you keep showing up and you keep getting rejected and all of a sudden you meet this person

and they introduce you to that person and next thing you know you're on a plane and you showed up to the city and it didn't quite make sense and now you're meeting the person who all of a sudden you meet this person and they introduce you to that person. And next thing you know, you're on a plane and you showed up to the city and it didn't quite make sense. And now you're meeting the person who all of a sudden has the answer to that thing you wanted to that break that you needed. And so, you know, I think getting what you want is some carbon combination of hardware consistency and luck. And you could probably bolt onto that, like a comfort with rejection. Cause you're going to get rejected enormously. And the more ambitious what you want is, the more you're going to be rejected.

Most people aren't that bothered by rejection. I think most people are bothered by the fear of rejection. The idea of failure or rejection hurts so much more, I think, than actually being rejected. And that goes back to my point about people when they're trying to get what they want, actually get insular, rather than going out, right? You want to be introspective about what you want, and then you want to be extroverted about getting what you want. And I think people get stuck sort of going out and about because they're afraid of what someone's gonna think if they know I want this thing or, you know,

what if they say no to me? So we outsource to our family or our friends, what is it that I should want? And then when it comes to trying to go and get it, we don't go and ask for it because that insulates us from failure. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting.

I hadn't thought about framing it that way, but I think it's, I certainly think it's correct. I mean, cynicism, I think a lot of the cynicism that we see in the modern world is people assuring failure privately so they don't need to face the risk of failure publicly. If I don't, basically, if I don't try, then I can't fail. And yeah, that's true. There's always sort of one foot, a lot of the time when people commit, not going 100% in to a relationship.

If I don't give everything to this, if I don't fully open myself up, if I sort of keep my eye wandering a little bit more, if I convince myself that this person isn't quite my person or whatever. That's a good point. Then if this doesn't go well, then, you know, like it's not a comment on me because I wasn't in it.

I wasn't fully in it. It's like most of me or a bit of me, but the bit of me that I care about gets saved over here. I think commitment is another criteria to get what you want, like being deeply committed to it. Whether that's a relationship or a pursuit that you're after in your career, staying committed to it is huge.

I meet a lot of young founders who are in school, they're sort of in school, they sort of have a job, they're sort of starting something. And there's a safety in that. Because if any one of those things sort of blows up, they've still got the other two and you'll still sound good at a dinner table. I will say though, getting over fear of rejection is part one, but getting over rejection is part two. Like I struggled with that.

And how did you get rejected? Well from the age of 21 to, I mean, look, I've now dealt with rejection throughout every phase of building this company, but I would say it was most painful from the ages of like 21 to 24 because I hadn't experienced actually a lot of rejection in hindsight up to that point in my life and everyone I was telling this idea to about like hey I want to start this company this is the thing I'm gonna do a lot of people I respected like they were all kind of telling me like this is a bad idea dude like you should not do this and and then

of course you go try to raise capital and investors tell you no, and you try to hire people and they tell you no. And looking back on it, I think there was good reason for that, like I was a kid, I was starting something that is big in engineering and medicine and computer science and math. And I'm not an engineer

or a computer scientist or a doctor or a mathematician and like and so there's just like that and I was super young and naive and so like I understand why I faced all that rejection but it still was very painful and and then that's where the conviction piece waivers, like your commitment and your conviction. I stayed very committed to the idea again because I believed it was going to exist in the world, and I had like deep conviction around that, but my self-belief, that's what wavered. Because when you get told no enough times, you're kind of like, Because when you get told no enough times, you're kind of like, well, either they're all crazy or I'm crazy.

And, you know, at some point, you're looking at like numbers like 50 to 100 to one, you're like, well, okay. Before we continue, if you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start, which is why I partnered with Function because they run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that take the data, put it in a simple dashboard and give you actionable insights and recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything from your heart health to your hormone levels, your thyroid function and nutrient deficiencies. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at

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I went to them. So they're not total idiots. Total. Maybe they are. Or maybe they just don't see it. Or maybe, yeah, I think. I think one reflection is that I just hadn't proven enough at that point in time to, uh, to make it more obvious or to make it a more acceptable idea.

And that was both in the form of the idea and the maturation around the idea and the capability of the tech, as much as it was also sitting there like a future CEO and entrepreneur. To do 23. Yeah. You know? So I remember, again, to use my equivalent, the world of nightlife, I would have been 19 or 20, so I would have been in my second or third year of university. We would sit down with these grizzled old leisure company owners who've got portfolios

of many nightclubs and they've been in the industry since the 90s or the 80s. Some of them, and me and my business partner are there. It's 2008 or 2009. And we're saying, well, look, you have a fantastic venue and the way that you stock and staff the bar is great and your contact with breweries are fantastic. You know, your service, your ingress and egress are fantastic. A doors team, solid needs a little bit of work. Sometimes they get a bit heavy handed with the, but you know, all in all, we

think it's a really, really good place. And DJ Boo's in good position. We can move people around quickly. You don't know anybody that wants to party. What the fuck are you doing with this empty venue? And we needed to say that to someone that was going, you're one third of my age. I don't need you. And I always remember thinking, you can't see perspective in problems while you're in them.

Right. It's only in retrospect that you're able to go, Oh, that's the lesson that I was, you don't learn the lesson while it's happening. It's one of the sort of ruthless things about people saying, well, you know, it's either a blessing or a lesson. You go, yeah, but the lesson comes down the line. So it's kind of like either a blessing or a curse that has delayed onset to become a lesson in future.

And yeah, I'd sit with these guys, these grizzled old Northern club promoter, gateway keepers between us and the venue. It's like, look, I don't own a venue. You're right. I don't own a nightclub. I don't want to tie up half a million or a million or five million pounds of capital in bricks and mortar and stock and staff and bars and licenses and stuff like that. So I don't have, I have lots of people that want to go and party and I don't have anywhere

to put them, but you have a big fucking building and it's really expensive and you don't know anyone that wants to go and drink that. And that was a, to just have someone who was so much younger. You know, if you're a 60 year old leisure company owner and you've got a 20 year old sat in front of you going, you need me. It's like, go fuck yourself. I don't need you. Go, so, and I always felt indignant.

I felt very indignant about the fact that I knew that what I was saying was right. And I had belief in the product. Maybe even if I didn't have belief in myself, I had belief in what we could achieve. I knew what our track record was like and yeah, maybe the same with you. You, and this is kind of, I guess, an insight for anyone who is performing or shooting for goals that are kind of beyond their age a little bit. That we talk about ageism as, you know, discriminating against Joe Biden being old and like, you know, Nancy Pelosi and stuff like that. But ageism happens in reversing the world of business too.

There is a, you know, if you're too young, if you're 38, no one's really got a problem with you doing anything. It's like you're slapped back until you probably get to like top, top level VC shit where you maybe need to be a little bit older or you start getting into government stuff. Like really if you're mid to late thirties to probably what? Sixties? Everyone's just like, oh, he's just, he's just in the mix, right? He's in the mixer.

But before that, there's just this sense of, yeah, all right, that's nice, but you really, uh, skepticism, like maybe undue skepticism that people have around this. I remember being so pissed off by it. Didn't want to be treated like a kid, uh, because you know what you can achieve, but sometimes people can't quite see past the, uh, like what's in front of them, the age of what's in front of them, the age of what's in front of them. And if you're trying to build a orthogonal wearable company with tech that as yet doesn't exist,

like there's gonna be some hurdles for you to get over there. Yeah, and I didn't have great answers to the competition either. And that was the sort of other variable in building the business that was quite complicated. It was just Any sensible person was going to ask the 22 year old or the 25 year old like well How are you going to beat Nike? How are you going to beat Apple?

How are you going to beat Adidas and Under Armour and Microsoft and all these sort of big gargantuan companies? So that probably played a role in an appropriate level of skepticism. Yeah, it was fair. Yeah. Well, that's a special type of pain, right? To look back in retrospect and realize that this thing that you felt really aggrieved by was actually maybe justified a little bit. Yeah. I mean, there's an element of, I think, building anything where Yeah.

I mean, there's an element of, I think, building anything where you have to see a version of the future that other people don't see, and then at some point you either need to be right or you're not. And you don't know until you get there. Yeah, that's, that's kind of interesting. I think we, because of the ability of people to use leverage, we maybe because of the ability of people to use leverage, we may be over index, over glorify the solo lone wolf, crazy genius entrepreneur. And obviously you end up with a ton of survivorship bias because you don't hear about all of the people that tried their crazy new idea and yeah, you remortgaged

your mom and dad's house and didn't work. Yeah. That's that. and didn't work. Yeah. Those aren't newsworthy stories. What's your take on failure? Because I feel like failure has gotten very romanticized. I fucking hate failing. Yeah. I hate failing so much.

And I don't have a particularly good relationship with the idea of it. I failed very few times across my entire professional career, which suggests that I'm moving too slowly. And I would tell somebody else, if they're like, hey man, I've basically never failed at anything I've tried professionally. Go, that's just an indication that you're playing within the bounds. Your safety tolerance comfort is too much. You need to push further. Yes, exactly. Because you're waiting until you've got basically 100% confidence in whatever it is that you're going to do.

The confidence interval has collapsed so much that there's no chance it's not going to work, essentially no chance it's not going to work. Which means that you could iterate more quickly, maybe break a few things, but move significantly faster. That's me. I knew I wanted to move to America three or four years before I actually finally made it. I probably should have left the world of nightlife at least a couple of years before that. No, we're talking not huge amounts of time, but when you're 28, three years is

fucking 10% of your life. It's, you know, 30% of your adult life. Sure. So it's, the failure porn thing, I get where it comes from. And it comes from a place of wanting to reassure people that if stuff doesn't go badly, if stuff doesn't go well, if it does go badly, you'll be okay. I understand. I think that's a noble place to put it in.

And I'd go a step further. I think it's actually in part to get people over the fear of failure. Sort of get them out of the blocks, right? Take the leap. Stop being paralyzed. Don't be paralyzed. Yeah. I think that's where, to your point, the failure porn's coming from is trying to convince people

that it's okay to put themselves out there. That's a much more noble way to think about it if it's... Because yeah, my reflection is that I've learned more from successful endeavors than I have from ones that have failed and I think failure is largely overrated. That's interesting. Why? So sometimes, I think this is particularly true of startups. I think that a lot of startups all kind of fail for the same reasons. They didn't find product market fit or they burned cash too fast or ultimately the product

or service was something that another competitor did faster than them or they got undercut on price. There's like five things that most of the co-founders got angry at each other. There's like five things that like all startups essentially fail from. But the companies that really make it, they all kind of have some kind of like secret in a way. Like they have some magic. And I think that there's probably more that's unique about each of those than it is the same. And so for people who have been on that sort of one in a hundred rocket ship,

I think that you're learning some special sauce. And in the future, you're going to look for, hey, what is the special sauce? Like we actually have to, we have to create something here. We have to spark something that otherwise we're not going to have. That's such a good point. That if people were to learn more from failures than they were from successes, they still don't know what they're looking for.

You don't actually know what it is you're looking for. You just have a series of things you know you're not looking for. And I agree with what you said earlier on, which is that avoiding pitfalls can sometimes be more useful than expediting success. If you learn a really, really important lesson about not reducing down your fucking cash flow to the point where one bad week kicks you out the bottom of your business. Like, yeah, that's a lesson you're only ever gonna, hopefully only ever gonna learn once.

But that still doesn't actually tell you the lesson that you're trying to get toward. Just tells you some of the ones that you're trying to get away from. And I wonder whether this is why we see consistent winners in the world of startups and in the world of business and in some ways maybe in the world of life too. You end up with, you know, the Matthew principle, to those who have everything more will be given to those who have nothing more will be taken, the Bible. And it's true in everything. It's true in compounding and wealth.

It's true in astrophysics, and the size of stars and black holes. You know, almost all of the gains, almost all of the mass accrues to a very small number. It's the same in rivers, in geology. It's the same in, in business, right? Like the, being number one is 10 times better than being number two, which is 10 times better than being number three and being number 100 is basically, unless the market's insanely huge, but it's like dead.

So yeah, I think understanding what is it that I'm actually trying to get toward. A perfect example of this, I've been through 15 failed relationships so far. I really know what I don't want. It's like, great. What about what you do want? What do you want? Yeah. Because it is important to know what the red flags are, but the only reason for

avoiding red flags, whether it's in business or in your personal life, the only reason for avoiding red flags is to expedite you getting green flags. Like don't make the gain be avoiding red flags. Yeah. And I think, I think what's happening a little bit with people that say they've learned so much from failure is it goes back to the pain thing. It's like they realized how much they can sort of personally overcome the suffering of a failure. One takes away, I think, the fear of future failures. It's like, okay, like I know what that is. I've been through that.

And, um, and it sort of broadens that, that emotional tolerance going forwards and, you know, ultimately probably makes you more resilient in a way. But it also dampens down the pain of having to deal with the failure. Yeah. Right. You're like, oh, fuck, I had to eat shit there, but I learned a lesson. Right. You know, at least I learned a lesson.

Yeah, right. You try to take that positive from it. Yes. But the same, my, my, my friend passed and that sucked and, and I had to do this eulogy and that also sucked and it was in front of loads of people and that made it even harder and I was struggling and that made it, but I learned a lot about myself and I got to expand my, you know, there's ways that we try and alchemize

even the most difficult situations to become that. Yeah, that's well said. The, yeah, I mean, look, I think whatever can be done to make people have like a lower fear of failures is probably good. So I'm not out here like, you know, bashing the failure energy. But I do think you learn more from these unique successes than, and the one thing I reflect on is whoop almost failed a lot of times. Like we really almost ran out of money a few times in the history of the company.

And in particular about six years into the company, like we were right on the verge of bankruptcy. And I think a lot about if the company had failed then, like what would have my lesson been? And it almost certainly would have been to have been less ambitious with the technology, to have gone to market sooner with something that was like less cutting edge,

to be mass market faster rather than working with athletes. A lot of sort of, to be honest, the feedback that I got from people who rejected the business, I would have taken those as the lessons. But in turn actually, when we did ultimately become successful, those were the reasons we were successful. But the line is so tight, right? I mean, I guess another 5% of cash flow, another 10% of cashflow, maybe even less. Yeah.

And you'd have eaten shit and that would have been the takeaway. This is such a good point. Retrospectively trying to take lessons from someone who had a close to a victory that was at least in part dependent on something like timing, on something like luck, on something like first mover or early mover advantage, on the stars aligning. I mean, of the four traits that you said earlier on, luck was one of them, which you can largely with consistency and like a high work rate can, you can almost create your own luck in, in many ways, but the external, you know, circumstances, uh, largely out of

your control, you can just sort of be in the best position possible, but it ends up with people post hoc rationalizing loads of shit and you go, I don't know if this is an evergreen lesson or if this is just a quirk of the specific time and space that you were in when this thing happened. I don't know what to make of this. And everybody only experiences life the way that they experienced it. They don't get to go back and see the other ways

that only has hair's width left or right could have happened, would have been different. So how universal are the lessons that you took away from this? If it was so close to not being the thing that happened, how can you say that the lesson that you took away from that was a universal rule? Because it was almost not. It was almost not by design. It was so close to it being a completely different outcome. Especially if it's something existential,

like the end of a relationship or a friendship or a life or a business or a trajectory that you are following on. It's really hard even for us. Well, I think one takeaway is that it's helpful for us in general to take meaning from experiences. And so whether it's a success or a failure, taking something from that is in turn a path towards growth. And so you can question whether or not the lesson could have been actually the exact opposite or completely different.

But by taking a lesson, you are in turn feeling like you're growing. We also training yourself to be the sort of person who reflects on their experiences. Yeah. And reflecting and having a growth mindset, like these are things that are just enormously useful in your life. I mean, one other way to look at everything we started with is through the lens of sports. There's so many examples of what you were describing in sports of like this. The most recent example is with Rory McElroy winning the Masters.

And Rory's been a friend now for like, you know, seven or eight years. He was one of the first big golfers to wear a whoop. And so I got to know him well. And that final round at the Masters was like every version of like a human experiencing, you know, like this emotional roller coaster and such highs and lows. I mean, he hit shots in that round that he's the only person on the planet that can hit. On the 15th hole, he hits this sweeping seven iron, 200 yards to five feet. And then on the 13th hole, he hit a shot from 80 yards

that an amateur golfer would put on the green. And so at moments during that round, not just the tournament, just that one round, he was the very best golfer in the world by far, and he was a complete amateur and the, and, and he had to go through these huge ups and downs to like, you know, overcome what was this painful 14 year trauma that he essentially was experiencing of, of winning the career grand slam and winning one more major.

And, uh, and there's this amazing photo at the end of the moment he's won and he's sort of released his putter. And his putter is like, because it's a photo just sort of frozen above him. And what it looks like is gravity has just flipped and you can just feel the weight that's come off of this man for having to deal with this, you know, essential, essentially like trauma for 11 years. A quick aside, you've probably heard me talk about element before and that's because

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genuinely feel the difference when I take it versus when I don't. Best of all they've got a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration so you can buy it and try it for as long as you want and if you don't like it for any reason they give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box. Plus they offer free shipping within the US. Right now you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to www.drinklmnt.com. That's www.drinklmnt.com. Who else? Rory is one of them but who else are some of the athletes that you've got to spend time with and you just think, holy shit, this person's mindset, their approach to the game is a different level?

There's a lot of common themes amongst the world's best athletes. So, you know, Michael Phelps and Cristiano Ronaldo and Patrick Mahomes and Rory. And like, I've spent a lot of time around these guys and there's a certain intensity that burns inside them that is hard to fake. Like you can kind of feel it even when you're chilling. Ronaldo is probably the most exaggerated example of that that I've ever felt. How so? Just you can feel a drive, like you can feel a certain energy. You know, people, everyone kind of gives off an energy

and depending on how healthy you are in a given day or how good you're feeling, maybe your energy is stronger or less strong. But like, the energy that he gives off is one of real drive and there's like an intensity burning there that you can't fake, like you can just feel it. And I think for a lot of these guys, there's a cost that comes with that, that we the fans don't see. Like you don't see the cost of having to be the first person at the practice facility every single day and cold plunging for hours afterwards, and the time away from the family,

and the sacrifices in all these other areas of life. I mean, it is very inspiring when you really get a close-up look at it and you realize just like what a grind it is. Like it is such a grind. You see the goals and you see the master's jacket, but you don't see the grind and the pain and the injuries and like the time that they're not on camera. And there's something about it that's both inspiring and also you're like, yeah, maybe I wouldn't want to do that.

Intimidating. I mean, this is, you've activated one of my trap cards. And the question of what is the price that people pay to be someone that you admire has been to your question one of the most compelling ever since I started since I grew out of being an adult infant started to be a little bit more of a grown up I guess intellectually. It's one of the questions I've been fascinated with to look at. What's it like to be that person? You want to be that person? You want to be Rory McIlroy, do you?

Okay. Let me explain all of the prices that he's had to pay to be Rory McIlroy. You like the look of Patrick Mahomes or Michael Jordan. Perfect example. Like, fuck the, you know, uh, the last dance, um, still now. Uh, what is he? Probably 50, something like that. I don't know how old he is. Sorry if he's in his forties, but yeah, like 50 at, what is he probably 50, something like that. I don't know how old he is.

Sorry if he's in his forties, but yeah, like 50s, 50s. Doesn't look happy. A man who is tormented by drive and perfection and obsession. He was the greatest. Okay. But that's the, that's the price that you need to pay. Elon was asked on Lex's show three years ago, said, uh, he says something like, how are you doing?

And he takes a little moment and he goes, most people think they would want to be me. They don't want to be me. They don't know. They don't understand. My mind is a storm. This is the richest guy on the planet. Send him rockets to space, building world changing cars. He's on stage in Japan doing robot dances and shared fathering a million children.

He's actually easier to compare to some professional athletes than any other business leader. How so? In just that it's clear that he's got a drive that he's tormented by and he's willing to sacrifice everything else for it. And you see that with the world's best athletes. Well, the thing with at least the problem with looking at anybody through the lens of

a narrow pursuit, like the success in business or the success in the sport is that you only see the one vector that they've channeled their outputs into and you don't see any of the other fissures that their costs leaked out of, right? Well, what if this guy hasn't had sex with his wife in like two years? What if they're drugging themselves to go to sleep and stimulating themselves to wake up in the morning? What if their relationship with their father or their mother is just non-existent? What if they hate themselves? What if they can't bear to look at their body in the mirror?

You know, all of these things that happen and you go, okay, but they're the great, the greatest, they're the best. Yeah. Would you want that? Is that what you want? Because you don't, as you said earlier on, it's kind of stupid to just look at one element, either of a business or of a person and say, I want, I really want Rory McElroy's master's thing. The not being able to sleep on a nighttime because he's obsessing about that shot he missed. I don't

really like the idea of that so much, but the green jacket, that sounds great. It's like, you don't get to piece this person together. Someone is a whole, right? His level of obsession, totally like just throwing shade at Rory's like mental state, but I imagine his level of obsession, inability to let go of things and, you know, is the reason that he's got to that. It's not some weird bug on the side of the code that makes him Rory McElroy. It's a feature that is a part of his performance. And yeah, this question of what is the price people pay to be someone that you admire

is fucking endlessly interesting to me. Yeah, and I think athletes have gotten more introspective. Like I, actually Rory is extremely thoughtful and he's gone through phases of reading books on the stoics and meditating and all sorts of things. I think a lot of athletes end up being more introspective because they get into visualization, which becomes sort of the gateway to meditation and tuition, these sorts of different levels of self-. And then I think there's, there's plenty of really capable athletes who

don't actually go that deep in words and they don't really analyze the, how it works as much as know that it works. And they just go, I had, was I talking to this? I can't remember who it was. Uh, cultivated stupidity. We called it, uh, that Matt Fraser, good example of this, I think actually. Um, so Matt in Ben Bergeron's book, Chasing Excellence, he tells this story

about Matt was an engineering student, I think, and he would make himself wrote, memorize entire textbooks word for word, and he would then sort of play them back in his head. Or maybe he was writing them out. If he missed one word, he would just make himself go back to the start. So this guy was very, very smart and very, very driven and very, very obsessed. But there is a kind of boneheadedness and almost simplicity that you need to turn up and do 90 minutes of zone two work because you thought there's got to be a better way.

I go, I just need to sit on the rowing machine for 90 minutes zone two. I'm not going to go that hard. You just want me to 135 BPM. Really? That's where you, that's, that's what I'm supposed to. Yeah, it is. You need to go in and have this just follow the plan. Don't overthink it.

Don't spend too much time ruminating. Can you chill out? What's your recovery like? Are you able to sit on the couch and play Xbox after a big training session? And yeah, we often celebrate a really good work ethic and very rarely celebrate a good rest ethic. And both of those are a skill.

The rest thing was kind of the unlock for WUIP getting into all these pro athletes and building those relationships was this idea that you can now measure recovery. And one thing that I was really surprised by, but now makes sense kind of knowing the cast of characters is like amongst the very best athletes, they're actually willing to experiment a lot. Like they're kind of always looking for what is that additional way. I can get a little edge. And, and that's one of the things that separates, I think the very best from, from just like a great professional athlete is this like drive towards experimentation. And it's part of the reason that in the early days of building this company, like someone like LeBron James or Michael Phelps

was willing to wear a whoop. Let's see if it gave them an edge. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that you were talking about earlier on, this sort of fear of failure, this, you know, obsession with detail, but not beyond a point. I'm sure this is something that you consider the sort of health anxiety that's downstream from the perils of over optimization. Being able to see why, you know, I didn't sleep very well last night, say is my woop, I feel kind of okay, but then I get in my head about that and I didn't hit my 10,000 steps today as a fucking step tracker on there now. Um, how do you come to think about, uh, using data to assist, to improve people, but not to be an object

like a taskmaster or a prison that people can get trapped in? I think first and foremost, we view Whoop as a tool that anyone can use. You know, we don't view it as your master. We view it as a tool that can make you healthier or live longer or perform better. And the general sort of broad critique of is more knowledge better? I've always rejected.

I mean, you can go back to the printing press and people being like, oh, we can't have the printing press, God forbid so many people have access to information. So I think in almost every stage of human history this rejection of people having more knowledge is sort of a lazy analysis. Now there's certain things from a technology design standpoint that we've done with that in mind. So I've never believed that having a screen on the product actually made it a better tool. And I've always thought that there's plenty of screens in the world. And do we really need one more screen that's giving you numbers that you're obsessing over

and looking at and they're vibrating and alerting you? And so in many ways, we designed the product to disappear into the background and to be there when you needed it and to look at it when you need it. And for a product that people wear 24-7, it's actually remarkably unobtrusive. You know, it's not talking to you, it's not beeping at you, it's only going to vibrate if you want it to vibrate. You want it to vibrate. Yeah, if you want it to vibrate. You want it to vibrate. Yeah.

If you want it to wake you up. So yeah, we've done, we've done, I think a lot of things around the concept of have this be a tool that's in the background versus having it being a master that's trying to control you. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Alas, I know that some people do struggle with that. Actually, there's a, uh, I can give you an idea for my friend George.

Um, and this is, uh, specifically from when he was wearing whoop and, uh, focusing on improving his sleep. He wished that there was a way that you could set. And I know that you guys do a weekly review, a monthly review end of your review as well, but that, uh, all notifications could be turned off except for a check-in on a weekly basis or that you could hide your data from yourself until a particular day of the week to sort of interrupt your ability to be able to see, I'm aware that journal, like you need to do that on a daily basis. It restricts a lot of the intern activity on like how are we going to do that?

But I do think, you know, the general position he's trying to get himself to is to focus on signal, not noise and a daily check in on daily metrics. A lot of the time is there's a lot of noise in that if you just look at your week long trend, the bad Monday doesn't look so bad because it's spread across seven days. If it's Tuesday and you look at your Monday, you might as well kill myself. Like this is horrendous. Yeah. And look, I think you, well, first of all, the concept of, um, hiding data, that is actually

one thing that we did develop against because we have to have these really exaggerated examples. Like imagine you're an Olympian and you're training for four years for one day. It turned out for the most part, the Olympians wanted to know how recovered they were, but they didn't necessarily want to see how recovered they were. So we would, we created a, a toggle. This actually exists in the app today where you can literally have your data collect, but it'll hide your recovery score in your sleep score. And so, um, in a sense, we built the George feature for Olympians a long time ago. Now the point about it being

for a week, I mean, what I would just say is just don't open the app for a week, right? And keep the thing charged because it's going to store data. Now that whoop has 14 day battery life too, like you can. How long can it store stuff without being connected through Bluetooth? 30 days. Oh, wow. Okay. So you could actually just run the sucker for ages and not even

have it connected to your phone. Yeah. Oh, that would be a solution. That's a slightly more low tech solution. Like just disconnect. Now, you know, if you're uploading a week of data, it might take a couple hours to upload, but yeah. Sick.

What's the Hertz frequency now on a nighttime? It's a little variable, but it's anywhere between probably 25 and 50. So in terms of the number of times we're sampling a second. Yeah, it's interesting. I've been digging into sleep stuff. I did an at-home sleep study, which was pretty interesting. Gnarly, I had the tube, the diodes on the face. I had the tubes coming out.

I had this thing. This was pretty interesting. It's a real getup. Oh, yeah, I look great. They put a sensor on your soleus on the outside of your leg, outside of your calf. And this is super interesting. People who got restless leg syndrome, move their legs a lot when they sleep. But you can have restless leg syndrome and not move your legs.

So what this sensor does is it detects whether or not your brain is sending a signal to your legs, but below the threshold that moves them, but above the threshold that it's nothing. And that's still classed as a minor form of restless leg syndrome, even if you're not moving your legs, because your brain is still saying, maybe we should do this, but it doesn't breach whatever particular line there is where you would, you would start moving around. Uh, don't have restless leg syndrome. That was pretty interesting.

Um, so you don't have that. No, I don't. I have REM induced sleep apnea, which fucking sucks dick. So you bounce yourself in and out of REM a lot. You go REM to wake to wake to REM to wake. So I need to work on that. And then as soon as you learn about any apnic events, you then go down the rabbit hole of dentistry

and biological dentistry. And you start to think about palate size and airway opening. And then you learn about how wind instrument players have no sleep apnea. So the new device, it seems, that one of the new devices that are good for apnea events, eight to 14 weeks of 15 minutes a day, it sets a five by five,

which to me, like given a sort of heavy weight lifting background, yeah, five by five to me, slap bang in the middle of what I'm used to. And, um, it's kind of like the read from a saxophone, but without the saxophone attached to it, and it's got a lot of resistance in it when you do a special, um, exercise blowing very hard through this thing. Uh, the original study was done on marching band performers. And they found that none of the horn or wind players had sleep apnea.

And a lot of the others did. I said, well, there's got to be something to do with the way that they play. The only difference between these people is the way they play the instruments. And yeah, I think it was a, not an oboe. What's the other thing that's like an oboe, a didgeridoo. The original study was done on a fucking didgeridoo sleep study. Um, that seems like kind of a breakthrough study. Yeah, it was dude. Uh, so, uh, I think this is going to be,

this is real frontline stuff from Andy Galpin and Matthew Walker and that that's really cool. Some guys I'm working with. So you're now going to start doing this. Yes. So I've got, it should be in the air. I should be arriving this week. And, uh, between, uh, mouth tape and nasal dilators and not sleeping on my back and using tracking and all this other stuff.

But one of the big things is gonna be this. So yeah, I should just learn to play the saxophone. That'd be way easier and I'd be functionally, you know. Music- Saxophone's cool. I played sax when I was in like fifth grade, not particularly well, but. Well, maybe your lack of sleep apnea is contributed to by a

brief stint as a saxophonist. I do think there's an element of. If you can't be great at something, it's kind of like dangerous to be okay at it. Like there's part of me that feels like if I was even a mediocre musician, like I'd be playing at the local bar and that local bar and that would, like, I would have, yeah, I'd have no entrepreneurial anything. It just sort of been this like, you know, dude, you certainly want to pick your pursuit playing a bad saxophone. You do want to pick your pursuits, but that's also, you know, the drive that

you were talking about from Rory and from other guys that you've worked with. And also, uh, the one that you see in yourself, uh, very much doesn't allow you to do things that you're not particularly good at. At least I find this, he's talking to a friend who was working with a coach and the coach said, I need you to take up a pursuit. What would you, what would you like to do? Just anything, pick, pick something that you think would be, be cool for you to, to do any sort of, um, watercolors, watercolors would be cool for you to do. And he said, Oh, um, watercolors. Watercolors sounds like a cool thing to do.

He wanted to outside of his high powered degenerate business, like a pursuit that he could do watercolors. She goes, okay. I mean, you get yourself some watercolors stuff, but there's one stipulation about your pursuit of watercolors. You can't try to get better. And he was like, Oh, fuck. Like she just wanted him to just play, to just like be in the joy of doing water

colors, she's like, cause I know what you're going to do, you're going to go on YouTube and you can start watching videos and you're going to start refining your technique and then you're going to find the person that made the YouTube videos and find out they've got a course online. Then you're going to see they've got a retreat in Costa Rica. And before I know it, you have another business that is about yourself or another aggressive pursuit. I know it, you have another business that is about yourself or another aggressive pursuit. Sure, yeah, yeah.

So that idea of you're going to try to do a thing, but you're not going to try to be the best at it. In many ways, your progress towards becoming better in it is only ever going to be emergent. It's only ever going to be bottom-up, not top- You're sort of not going to dictate yourself into betterness. You're just going to practice yourself into enjoyment. And, uh, I may try and use this as an excuse for why I have a woefully low pickleball rating, um, I don't know. Did you, you don't understand? I'm, I'm trying to, I'm just in the flow, dude. You may be a better pickleball player, but I'm actually more flowy than you are.

Uh, but yeah, I thought that was, I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I remember him telling me and thinking it was interesting as a framing. That is interesting. Although it had me thinking that there are things in my life that I like to do or have liked to do just because I was getting a little better, but I wasn't obsessed with, you know what I mean?

Like I played in a soccer league from the ages of like 25 to 32. And I was, you know, there were some sports I was athletically, I would say more gifted at. I wouldn't say soccer was ever one of them, but I just enjoyed it so much. Like running around like a total, you know, goof kid with refs and 90 minute games and whatever.

You know, I'm, I would say an okay cook and I like to cook steaks and stuff from time to time. But it doesn't, I don't necessarily feel bothered that I'm not making a better steak than, you know, filling the blank down the road here in Austin. Like you can, I think you can pursue some of these things with just an eye towards getting better. And I actually think there are, I think there's something for people older in life picking up, particularly activities that they can get better at.

Because there's sort of this comfort with doing the thing that you did in college or you did on some high school team and you do like a bad version of it as you're older and you always think about, oh, I wish I was this young. But if you can get into lifting weights, for example, and all of a sudden you see the numbers going up a little bit over time or, uh, you know, yoga or Pilates, like I think that's great. And you don't need to become a yoga instructor, but like progress, I think progress matters. It, it does.

And I wonder, you know, this sort of balance between yoga is a really, really good example because there is no such thing as winning, right? There is no such thing as winning at yoga. There is getting better and there is, there is pro. It's hard to keep score too. Yes. Yes. So for the perennially metric obsessed.

How golf, golf, you can keep score. Baseball, pickleball, you know, there's a literal rating next to your fucking podcasting YouTube. You know, you know, where you're ranked, you know, business. Oh, well, you know how you're on your quarter on quarter, where we, you know. But I do believe that you can't, you can't, you have to be careful how many desires you have at the same time, because that's essentially this contract with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want and you want to pick a couple lanes, ideally only one or two

lanes where you're really all in. Because if you try to do too many things at once that to be great at, you know, it's, you're not, you're not going to be great at all. James Clear's got this new fucking slamming insight, which is if you desire the life, but not the lifestyle, you guarantee disappointment. So you want the outcome, but you're not prepared to do the things that get you toward the outcome. I love the idea.

That's been a theme of this conversation with the athletes and all of it. I want to be in a band. Love the idea of playing on stage in front of thousands of people. Okay, you need to be in a van, a very small van, playing butt-fuck-nowhere shows for a decade. That is the lifestyle to get you to life. Do you want to do that? Yeah.

You go to the Taylor Swift concert, but you don't see her training at 8 a.m. singing her entire set list on a treadmill. I have seen videos of not Taylor Swift, who is Miley Cyrus before the Super Bowl. Have you seen this video? No. Epic, epic video. So I think Miley Cyrus performed at the half time in the Super Bowl not have you seen this video? No. Epic, epic video. So I think Miley Cyrus performed at the half time in the Super Bowl not long ago.

Or maybe it's, I'm pretty sure it was Miley Cyrus. And she's on a treadmill singing. And it's the sort of buildup and she's just, you know, heart rate's gonna be through, that should have won a whip, heart rate's gonna be through the roof. And she's like belting this thing out. And she's obviously trying to work out this energy, this sort of nervous, anxious

energy is warming her body up. She's warming and, uh, yeah, it's crazy, you know, not too dissimilar way. My equivalent, the only equivalent I've got, uh, going to do Rogan. Like as you're on your way, you're driving from my house to Rogan studio. It's 12 minutes. Should be longer. It'd be better if it was longer. I should drive further away and then loop back around.

That would make my life easier. And, uh, it very much does feel a little bit like sort of going through the players tunnel toward like a pretty big match. Yeah. You're a little stressed out. Yeah. And there's, you know, you need solutions from that. So I've got a, and this is now the same thing I've used for every big episode.

Peterson, Naval, Sam Harris, Rogan, whoever. Um, you have a pre-match ritual in that way. Uh, so, uh, wake up on time, regardless of how tired I am. So I don't let myself sleep in. I would rather be up and in a good mood. It's sleeping intends to put me in a bit of a bad mood. Makes me feel like my day started off on the back foot. So I want to kind of win the pillow.

I think about winning, like owning the pillow. It's a good name for a book. Win the pillow. Yeah. I feel like I've, it's a big predictor for me of how well the rest of the day goes. So get up, do my usual morning routine, walk, journal, breathwork, meditate, read, go to the gym, train. I'd like moderately hard. I've done it too hard previously and I ended up crashing partway through the episode.

So that was a lesson from failure that I only ever needed moderately hard. I've done it too hard previously and I ended up crashing part way through the episode. So that was a lesson from failure that I only ever needed to learn once. One coffee, one coffee, no more than one coffee. One coffee max. Breakfast, but no carbs. So typically eggs, bacon, sausage, something like that. Then go back, any notes, whatever it is that I'm reviewing.

And then the sort of final hour is just listen to really great music, have a little sing along if I'm going to have a shave, I'm going to have a shower. If I'm going to like, you know, whatever it's up, whatever I'm going to wear out. Uh, do that and then get in the car and then on the way there, more good music to having a little sing along. So maybe Miley Cyrus had it right all along. I don't know. I should get on a treadmill and start belting out Miley Cyrus songs.

Um, it's relatively stripped back. What it, at least my sort of current working theory is it's a combination of all of the things that feel like home to me that are very comfortable. The things that I do on a daily basis. It's the perfect morning when chaos doesn't occur. And that happens maybe only once every week to me, where I get the full run of all of them perfectly done without, I'm going to take phone call in the middle of this, oh shit, what's happened with the most recent upload? Whatever it is that goes on.

But it's not so novel that it's sort of disquieting to your systems. This is comfortable and this is comfortable and this is normal. And this is whatever. There's, there's stresses in that experience that you walk through. I mean, that sounds like a great routine in general. It's awesome. It's awesome. And I get to midday and I'm just locked in.

I'll usually have my optimal and new tonic, uh, consumption is like one can on routine one is I'm starting. And then I'm like, fucking I'm at 30,000 feet just locked in. Yeah, that's it, dude. I can, if I go more than about one an hour for three hours, I start to. Fucking hear colors and see sounds. It ends up being a good, but a little bit activating and the mindfulness that you want to just be able to sit back and give things a little bit of room to breathe.

Yeah, it's interesting that I love learning about people's pregame rituals as well. You know, baseball, one of the most superstitious ritualistic sports, maybe the most, I would guess, in perhaps all of sports, because it's so iterative, right, and it's so replicable. So you see players that will tap the bat on both feet, undo and redo each glove. Like why? They haven't come undone, but it's all just part of this, you know, very, very consistent schedule of how they...

What about you? What's a morning look like? I guess you've got a six week old, so fucking chaos, I imagine. Yeah. I mean, one thing I was just reflecting on and listening to your very healthy day is like, I realized there aren't that many days in my life over the course of a year where I'm like, oh, today I have a big blank. You know, it's almost like it feels like every day I go into it, trying to have a similar output and a similar sort of, you know, game plan, you know, avoiding that rollercoaster. Yeah.

And so in terms of my morning routine, wake up, shower, workout with a trainer, sauna, cold plunge, meditate, breakfast, off to work. I mean, that's kind of like the perfect morning for me. And that's three days a week when I'm in Boston. And then, you know, the Tuesday and the Thursday, I'll try to work out. So that Monday, that's Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and then like the Tuesday and the Thursday, I'll try to do something on my own in the morning. Um, or for the last six weeks, it's been more like family time in the morning.

So I'll have like breakfast with little, little Tommy and my wife and, um, hang out with the little guy, which is pretty incredible. And in a way, it's interesting, spending time with your newborn has a similar physiological effect to meditating, at least it does for me. And I meditate every day, so that's become a huge part of my life, and just being able to manage everything that comes at you. But I find if you have a great first couple hours of the day, it just makes the rest of the day and everything that gets thrown at you so much more manageable.

Like most of my professional work life is just things coming at me. Like I don't know what problem's gonna walk into my door that day, but it is a lot of sort of managing problems. Very much think about starting the day on the front foot. Yeah. And I think that's a good way to think about it. Yeah, and in a way, I've also kind of started to think of the day starting at,

you know, 9 p.m. the day before, which is like, what's your sleep routine? And I wear blue light blocking glasses, which I love, you know, you don't want to get into a fight with your wife before bed. You want to have like, you know. You look like a nerd. Shut up, wife. Well, I've gotten her to wear them too.

She unfortunately lately is a team player in all of my health optimizations. Uh, I haven't gotten off of the devices. I would say that's probably, I don't know if that's a frontier actually I'm ever going to conquer because I'm still optimizing so much around being like a productive entrepreneur and CEO and you kind of, you know, it's such a global world. We're on a solution, only trade-offs. Yeah. And so I will look at my phone kind of up until I go to bed. But you know, things like red light in your bedroom and warm shower before bed some nights,

little magnesium. If I feel a little tense, maybe I'll have some melatonin, read a book. You know, those things, that's a good way to start tomorrow. One of the worst things, and this was a lesson learned from going to bed at four in the morning a couple of times a week for a decade and a half, was realizing that tomorrow is ruined before tomorrow has even begun. There's a special kind of hell there where you go, fuck, it's 5 a.m., I haven't slept. Like this morning, thankfully today hasn't been ruined

and I had a really great day. But my body just decided to wake me up at three in the morning. Fuck you, dude. Got up and I read, okay, I'm gonna do all of the things that CBT-I tells you to do so I'm not gonna stay in bed. All right, you wanna be awake? Be awake.

You're gonna have to walk around, you're gonna have to, you're going to have to keep your eyes open, but your body doesn't want to do that either. I'm like, well, pick, right. Do you want to be asleep? No. Okay. Would you want to be awake? No, I don't want that either.

Like you are a petulant child, sleep brain. Anyway, that is actually hell. Yeah. It fucking sucks. It fucking sucks. And, uh, get back to bed at 4 30 AM for 45 AM. Oh my God. Do I, do I try and drug myself into sleep? Cause I could, but that means that when I get up to train at seven, I'm going to

be pressing the brake and the accelerator at the same time. I'm like, okay. So let's say I took an ambient three hours ago. I'm like, right. Okay. So I've just, I'm ambient three hours ago. Yeah. That's going to affect your workout. Yeah. Yeah. I felt great this morning, dude. I maybe the ambient, the ambient and utonic combo. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I felt, and then I went and did this photo shoot with your guys. Uh, so I trained twice before midday, I think had

probably less than five hours of sleep. I feel fantastic. Have you seen that meme? I post this meme all the time. The meme of the different, uh, different, different hours of sleep and the way that this guy looks and one hour of sleep is just like a shadow with his face falling off and it goes all the way up to eight hours where he sort of feels like a God and then, but for some reason, six and seven hours of sleep, the guy's face is falling off too, but two hours of sleep, the guys like transcendent. There's something about two hours of sleep.

I get the sense that it's one full sleep cycle. That is one full 90 minutes. You're still in a nap. Yeah. There's one full 90 minute cycle and you you're going to eat shit at 3 PM that day. But up until midday or so you're like, dude, I fluked it last night. Like I done through that minefield.

I'm going to, and then it gets to 2 PM and you go, Oh no, Oh, it's hitting me. Uh, do you, do you travel overseas a lot or over time since it was last year? A lot. I do it all the time and I've, I find I've, I've gotten pretty good at it. One, um, two, two great hacks for it are one, not eating at all on planes. I never eat on a plane. Even if you take your own food. Yeah.

I'm not going to eat period. Like 14 hours to Dubai or something. Not, not eating. Yep. That's painful. And, uh, and I drink a ton of hydrogen water. What's your hydrogen water of choice? I use this bottle called echo go.

That's fucking go dude. Is that your thing? That fire. Have you got the new one, the square one, or have you got the old slightly older one that's a cylindrical? Uh, I think I have the older one. The new echo flask is set. It's got this, this new one's got a screen on the side and there's an app

that comes with it, Everything needs an app apparently Yeah, mine doesn't have an app. You go this new one So the new one is is fucking sick. But yeah, dude hydrogen water is I so if I could I was saying this I picked that up from Gary Brekker and he's like all about hydrogen water and Turns out he's totally right electrolytes to a pound electrolyte, but I won't do it in my hydrogen water Echo Go. Yeah, no, I mean that circulating that through would be a bad idea.

Yeah, I was with Gary, I was at the health optimization summit here in Austin this weekend. And I went to, there was a dinner for the speakers and it was like a meetup or whatever for the speakers. And it was Mark Sisson, Gary Brecker, Ben Greenfield, Max Lugavere, Dr. Dom, the world's leading biological dentist, like every different, uh, unspared Dr.

Steven Gundry, like some very forward thinking. Yeah, it was, it was fun. And I'm the absolutely the token stupid person in the room. And I'm just sort of listening to stuff that I'm like, that sounds, maybe that's true, that sounds plausible, that sounds plausible, that sounds like it might be fun, but one of the things that pretty much everybody zeroed in on was hydrogen water. And, um, if I was saying this at the start of the year, or if I could make some bets

sort of on the roulette chip table of health, um, I would have done three or four years ago, I would have said four stage reverse osmosis water filtration for drinking. Um, I think everyone's really worried about the municipal water standards and water quality and what's in your drinking water. Um, I would have said, uh, sleep trackers and liquid cooled mattress toppers, probably six or seven years ago, I would have said that those would be. And now I think hydrogen water, including hydrogen baths and breathing, molecular hydrogen, that's a little bit more like a flask that's 200 bucks and

will last you until you break it. Pretty good investments, like pretty accessible to most, most people, uh, redoing your entire bath so that you can have hydrogen water pumped in and dermally absorb it through your skin. That's like a higher, higher barrier. so that you can have hydrogen water pumped in and dermally absorb it through your skin. That's like a higher barrier to it. And that machine, I think, is like 100 grand or something. But I actually shout out again to Gary Brackeye.

Like I did one of his hydrogen baths at his place in Miami. And I felt incredible the next day. I mean, it's a very, uh, it's a very unique, uh, mechanism for improving health and I'm surprised that it's not more mainstream. So I think, but when something's that effective and expensive, it just requires a little bit of like technology, so to speak to enable it. Well, you've got to the problem with hydrogen. I think I got me talking about fucking high. I spent half an afternoon with Gary Brecker and I talked about hydrogen.

That's actually a meme. Yeah. The, uh, I think the problem, but this is a commercial insight is at the bottom end, there's no way, except Echo actually have patented their bottle and their technology, but you can get hydrogen into water relatively inexpensively and it's not patented. No one can patent putting hydrogen into water. The levels that you do it to and the functionality and the durability and the battery life of the device, all of that stuff is. So at the bottom end it's unprotectable largely and at the top end it's not accessible. So I think you have this weird market where you go well,

what's the incentive to push on the bottom end given that anybody anybody can do this and there's no protection not anybody can build the device that's on your wrist but pretty much anybody can make a comparable device at the bottom end and then at the top end it's just so fucking expensive and hard to get and what you don't want to do the other thing is even if you had a hundred grand, I think you can get like a equivalent one for maybe 20 or something from Echo, but you also need to have water filtration in your house.

Because if the water's not of good quality, you're pushing Austin municipal, I had an email this morning from Echo cause they're going to send out some sort of a unit to do hydrogen baths in my house. And I was like, Oh, I've heard about worries to do with water quality. And he said, Oh, give us your postcode. We'll area code. We'll tell you, uh, whether your water's up to scratch and said, Oh no, I've heard about worries to do with water quality. He's like, oh, give us your postcode. Area code will tell you whether your water's up to scratch. And said, oh no, you've got 17 markers that are outside the advisory.

Oh wow. For whatever it is that we would do. And they've just been a ding, ding, ding, just searched it online. Like, oh fuck. So yeah, a lot. It should be a little service too, they provide. Oh, we'll do a survey?

Yeah, that'd be sick. Or like have that be built into their app. It's like, you know, check out your water. Well, I with a slight disadvantage there is you're just going to create a number of reasons for people not to buy your product. Although for the drinking stuff, I would go as I mean, everybody knows this, but you need to watch your water quality. It's pointless hydrogenating your water if it's full of all sorts of bullshit.

So I think four stage reverse osmosis, something or any kind of Berkey filtration, Amatru, something similar, or plummet in underneath is like, that's the first step. I think there's still probably an opportunity to create that high-end experience at a more accessible price point. Even if it's not highly patentable, I'm surprised that there isn't a brand around it.

What was the second thing? So you said, don't eat on planes, drink lots of hydrogen water, pound the electrolytes. Was there a second hack for travel? No, the two that I've found were on locks were don't eat on planes and drink hydrogen water. Okay. Yeah. And you could add this as a third, which is when you get into the right time zone, go to bed on the right time zone.

I also try to avoid naps at all costs. Cause I feel like naps when you're jet lagged are a trap. Next thing you know, you're asleep for four and a half hours and you're like, Oh, am I waking up? Is this a new day? He's got a white knuckle. White knuckle. Yeah, I did Australia toward the back end of last year

and that was 14 hour time. I think you're supposed to have one, supposed to. Whoever came up with the one day for one hour time change thing, dude, that's bullshit. No one has that much time to do stuff. I was in Australia for two weeks. Oh, yes, so the idea is you're gonna be gel-like for two weeks?

Basically that you should give yourself, you should account for one day per hour of time change. I remember reading this online. I have no idea. Well, this is actually a very unwooted point of view, but I think a lot of jet lag is psychological in that people start telling themselves they're jet lagged and they get kind of into this downward cycle and then they start drinking alcohol and napping and they just sort of Do all these sort of things that are on a negative spiral Whereas if you go in with a real positive attitude of like I'm gonna defeat jet lag out of the gates Make it my bitch. Yeah. Yeah, but Australia Australia hurt that was

Yeah, that's hard. That was a real real painful one What should people expect from you over the next, apart from new child dad life, presumably a change of wardrobe and body composition over the next couple of months? What else is coming up? Well, we recently launched the Whoop 5.0 and the MG. So that's all of our new hardware with Whoop. It's got a much longer battery life and new features like around healthspan. So it'll tell you how old you are in your Whoop age and what you can do to get younger. There's a whole feature that's around heart

screening. So if you're someone who's worried about having AFib or you're talking to a cardiologist or you might need to talk to a cardiologist, there's a whole feature for that that's now medically cleared. We came out with blood pressure monitoring, which is pretty badass. We were the first wearable to do that on a large scale. Yeah, I mean, a lot of new technology that we just launched, which I'm pretty stoked about. In some ways, it's been, you know, 13 years in the making. And in terms of me, I think it's, you know,

I'm trying to get a little better every day, to try to keep building the business. At some point, this is probably a company we'll take public, which is in itself another chapter, another challenge, another growth opportunity. Yeah, I mentioned, I was with your guys earlier on today, and I just had to bring up the fact that Steven Bartlett got an advisory position, but he's got smaller forearms than me.

And I thought that that was not necessarily relevant or important, but something of note, and I just, you know, I'm going to sort of leave that to, to linger in the air, but dude, congratulations, you know, launching a human and a new product in the space of a couple of weeks is no, is no small feat. So, um, yeah, it's awesome. I've been a, you know, a huge fan of the product for forever. I was grandfathered into the monthly from the buy it once. Oh, so you're a founding member.

Yeah, dude. And then also a part of us have a lot of recoveries. Uh, yeah, like that with thousands, thousands and thousands. Um, which is fun. And before that, I actually totally forgot about this, but I use sleep cycle. Uh, you know, that app. It's an alarm. It's kind of like,

so one of those things you stuck on your bed and like, it was a, just a phone app. Then you put your phone near your bed. Yeah. Um, I use it as an alarm, but it also does a little bit of tracking stuff too. It uses the mic. So it's like rustling around, I guess it's real raw, like rough stuff.

But yeah, I've been in one form or another, I've been tracking sleep for a decade now, which is pretty crazy. I think that I've got that much data, but yeah, dude, I really appreciate what you do. I think it's awesome. The fact you're enabling these athletes and helping everyone to realize

just how much little sleep they're getting is cool. And I appreciate your mind as well. I think it's nice to see somebody that's committed to one thing and yeah, limiting desires, whether they're personal or corporate is, is pretty sick. So really glad to meet you today. Thanks brother. I really enjoyed this.