My First Million - WHOOP Founder Will Ahmed: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

Episode 411: Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) speak with Will Ahmed (@willahmed), founder and CEO of WHOOP, about building a $3.6 billion company based on a personal health and fitness wearable. ----- Links: * WHOOP * Whisper * deeptomcruise * @lilmiquela * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ------ Show Notes: (00:40) - Will's background (01:54) - How he got Lebron and Michael Phelps as two of his first customers (05:35) - Big company CEO (11:05) - Biggest levers for good health (17:30) - Who are the super freaks? (35:00) - Which startups are going to take off? (48:20) - Shaan's sleep tweet (50:30) - What's the future of the company ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

How big is the business now? You guys have raised, what, like $400 million? Yeah, we've raised $400 million. We last raised capital at $3.6 billion valuation. I think there's still, you know, a lot of potential for health monitoring. I think if you fast forward 10 years, I think a large percentage of the world's population will be wearing a continuous health monitor. And it'll hook into everything that you do as it relates to the health care system and doctors and And so, yeah, I'm very bullish on the opportunity in the space.

Do you know what you're getting into or what? I've read the briefing and I'm a big fan of the podcast, so ready for you. All right. So, like, the pod, it's called My First Million. It's kind of known for Sean and I have both started a handful of companies and sold a few of them. And people like the pod because we brainstorm and we dive deep on different companies and we do like business breakdowns. things like that. But we'll spend a little bit of time kind of getting to know you because you've done a lot of amazing things. Well, I know of one huge amazing thing that you've done, but I bet you there's

a lot more amazing things that you've done. But we'll hear a little bit more about your background. And then we'll want to spend time, like, kind of diving deep on different opportunities in your industry. But first, like, do you want to, like, say, like, kind of like your 30-second spiel of, like, who you are in the story of how you got there? Yeah, absolutely. So Will Ahmed, I agree. grew up on North Shore of Long Island. As a kid, I was kind of always into the sports and exercise. I ended up going to Harvard and playing squash in school. And I was a competitive college athlete. And I felt like I didn't really know what I was doing to my body while I was training as an athlete. So that got me very interested in physiology. Did a ton of physiology research as a student.

I read something like 500 medical papers. And I started to conceive of this idea of how you could continue measure the human body. And the idea was initially around athletic performance, but broadly, I felt like there would be ways to continuously measure the human body for all sorts of health implications. And, you know, what became as sort of a curiosity ultimately turned into a very long research paper that I wrote and then ultimately founding a company. This was what would have been when I was 21, 22 years old as a senior at Harvard. And then for the the last 10 plus years or so, I've been, I've been building this business. The business WOOP builds wearable technology, really to improve people's health. We started with the best

athletes in the world and over time have grown to work with a large consumer population. And it's a really exciting time to be building that technology. Okay. So yeah, you're the CEO and founder of WOOP. If people have seen it, it's a WIP band. You've, you have to have seen it on people's wrist. But you said something like we started with high-end athletes. I think I read something like this, that is this right, that LeBron and Michael Phelps were two of the first hundred customers or users of whoop?

Is that real? And how did that happen? That is real. And this would have been around 2014, 2015. So, you know, we spent about two to three years, really, on the initial V1 of WOOP. And, you know, I wanted to start with the best athletes in the world. And really for two reasons.

The first was that we were bringing sleep and recovery technology to market for the first time. And I felt like professional athletes who, you know, have to perform on a daily basis, should really understand how they're recovering. That was one of the insights to starting the business. And then second of all, if we could get the world's best athletes to wear WOOP, and organically like it, then we could build a whole brand around performance that ultimately could scale to consumers.

And I grew up very inspired by brands like Nike and the Jordan brand and just how, like a swish on something could make the whole product feel completely different, independent from anything else about the product, just because of the storytelling behind it or the brand behind it. So I was interested in how health monitoring could have a brand to it. And so that was really the thesis for targeting professional athletes. And so in the case of getting to LeBron and Phelps, I think the key insight was finding people in their lives who had a

big influence on them who a bunch of people didn't already know. You know, if you go to their agent or their manager or their wife, like they get inundated with this stuff. So you have to find someone in their life who other people don't know. And it also turned out back then that the personal trainer was a somewhat underrated or unknown person in a professional athletes' life. And that also happened to be the right person to go to for technology like whoop. So in the case of LeBron, I got to know Mike Monseas. In the case of Phelps, we got to know Keenan Robinson, both of which were personal trainers to those athletes and got them on whoop. And then they got their athletes on whoop.

And yeah, the rest is history. How big is the business now? You guys have raised what, like $400 million? Yeah, we've raised $400 million. We last raised capital with $3.6 billion valuation. I think there's still, you know, a lot of potential for health monitoring. I think if you fast forward 10 years, I think a large percentage of the world's population will be wearing a continuous health monitor and it'll hook into everything that you do

as it relates to the health care system and doctors and. And so, yeah, I'm very bullish on the opportunity in the space. Do you like being the CEO of a big company? Or do you still wish that you're in the early days of like getting in the nitty-gritty? Because I imagine you're like kind of just making decisions now and managing people as opposed to maybe getting your hands dirty on the product. Well, I've still tried to stay close to the product because I think it's something I've had a relevant perspective on. even as a company has scaled and I've been able to see around corners in a few areas for the WOOP product.

I think that the role of being CEO is, as you guys know, changes a lot with stage and scale, right? Like 10 person versus 100 person versus 500 person, like at each of these inflections, your role is definitely changing. I think because WOOP as a technology gets increasing. interesting with scale. It's made my role increasingly interesting as well. So what do I mean by that? You know, the overall data set that you have on a larger population makes the data much more predictive and much more powerful. The coaching as a result can get much more comprehensive.

I think for other founders I've met who have been building a business for five years or 10 years, they get to a point where they're kind of like, okay, this can run itself or I'm going to bring in someone new or I've kind of reached the relative peak of the mountain. And I don't feel that way. I feel like there's still a bunch more levels to go. I feel that the insights that the technology is able to get, the number of people that it can potentially use by, all of that feels like it's amplifying, not shrinking. And so for those reasons, yeah, I'm very excited about being CEO. You know, it's also, look, it's a daily challenge growing into it. I feel like at every stage of the business, I've had to learn how to, how to be a CEO.

And it's not like this is the first, just the first company I started. It's my first full-time job. So, you know, I'm figuring a lot of this out as I go. Sam always asked that question, and I'm just waiting for the one person who's like, I hate being CEO. I hate my job. I hate all these people that are in this office. This is terrible. there's certain things that change a lot, right?

Like you're, the percent of time in which you think of yourself as an individual contributor versus a manager has to shift very dramatically. I think probably around the size of 50 people it has to shift like that, like it's about 500 people. But that's probably one of the most painful things that if a founder doesn't fully appreciate or recognize, they can screw the business up a lot. you have to recognize that you need to be shifting almost entirely towards manager and not being an individual contributor. Well, you know what it is is we talk to a lot of interesting people here. And the CEO of like a 500 person plus company usually looks like shit. Not always, but usually.

Like they look tired and there's rings under their eyes and they're usually a little chubby. And it takes a huge swig of coffee. Well, no, they look like crap. But you're a, you're like the CEO of a fitness brand. You were a highly competitive athlete. And so you look great. And so it's like you're kind of like skewing the average here. But like, I mean, you look pretty fit.

Are you like, how are you balancing like being healthy and putting your, but also putting your company first? Because when I was really in the think of it, I was like, dude, I don't have. have time to work out like screw it i'm just going to eat this crap but at uh well you don't know this but one of your competitors was my neighbor and we used to work out together in my garage every day and then uh and then he got promoted to CEO he was like he was like a different exec got promoted to the CEO and then uh stopped having time to work out like he just kept coming by while i was that's what i'm saying and he was like i got to get back in here and we're like dude you're the boss you know you could just like rearrange your schedule right he's like i got

crazy. It's crazy right now. Oh, it's crazy right now. And for like nine months straight, it was crazy right now. And he just stopped working out. And I was like, bro, you run a health company. Like you got to if you don't sleep or work out or make time for this stuff, like, you know, what's going on here? And I just thought that was so funny. Like the fact that he was like, you know, I know, we have to make this successful in order to do that. I'm going to make these health sacrifices as I go. Well, super nice guy. I mean, dude, Will's got like a chisel, jaw you got a nice head of hair you're wearing a like a like a vest you look all you look all spiffy and you look nice and shit uh what what are you what are you doing to exercise right now and how are you

balancing that with the work i think it look i think it's part of the the job for me that that i'm going to be in in good shape and healthy and uh i spend a lot of time around people that are super into their health and fitness whether it's professional athletes or scientists or even thinking about product features that are designed to improve your health. So as a business, like just thinking about the product and technology that we build every day, that kind of orientes me at least to be healthy. And not to mention I'm using a product that is all about health improvement. So, you know, for a variety of reasons, it feels like it'd be super off brand if I was really out of shape or what's your like sleep score when you're

you sleep or you give us your, give us your stats. And also what are some things that, you know, a lot of this audience who listens to this, I would say probably, I would guess the majority don't regularly wear a continuous health monitor, but also the majority care about performing well, peak performance and as an entrepreneur typically who's listening to this. So what are some things that they, that you've learned that, you know, they maybe should be doing or, you know, some of the biggest levers that you've seen when it comes to, you know, kind of health and performance. Well, I wouldn't be clear that I do believe building a successful company requires overcoming some level of stress that would break most people. So I do think you have

to really push above and beyond what is comfortable. I think the technical term is man up, well. Yeah, okay, man up. But what? What? What? Like within that, I think there's a lot, I think there's a lot of techniques that you can develop for yourself that allow you to run at a breakneck pace for a long, long time. You know, people always talk about this analogy of, okay, it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. But if you actually look at like world class marathoners, they're running like four minute mile, four third mile. That's kind of a sprint. Yeah. So, you know, and how do you run a mile that path? So I think for the entrepreneur or the, you know, the business leader listening to this, you want to figure out a way that you can be sprinting a marathon for a long time. And one of the ways I view that is taking care of myself and being in good shape. I think we can start with sleep, which is, I think a topic that's not talked about. in the right framework.

Most people, when you talk to them about their sleep, they're like, oh, I don't have enough time. I'm working on your blah, blah. The thing to understand about sleep is it's all about the percentage of time that you spend in bed getting high quality sleep. So if you ask your audience or you ask a friend who's never worn a health monitor and you say, how much tips you get last night, he'll be like, oh, well, I went to bed at 11, or woke up at 6, I got seven hours of sleep.

Pretty good. Okay. The reality has been seven hours in bed. So of those seven hours, you are in a period of awake, a period of light sleep, a period of REM and a period of slow wave sleep. Awake and light are pretty much irrelevant. You're not getting any physiological benefit from being in awake or light stage sleep. Rem and slow wave, that's where all the magic happens. So REM sleep is and your mind is. And your mind is, is repairing. So like real cognitive repair. It's when you have deep dreams. So if you're someone who can't remember dreams or you don't seem to have dreams, you're definitely not getting enough REM sleep. Any high-performing exec entrepreneur, you need REM sleep. Slow wave sleep is when your body produces 95% of its human growth hormone. So just think about that for a second. Ninety-five percent of your human growth hormone gets produced during this stage of sleep. You're not getting stronger in the gym.

or working out, you're breaking muscles down. You get stronger during slow-wave sleep. So the more you get to that, the better, okay? And let's take the person who spent seven hours in bed. That person could have gotten a total of 30 minutes of REM and slow-wave sleep, or they could have gotten a total of five and a half hours of REM and slow-wave sleep. Like that's a massive, massive difference. That's a huge spectrum.

The person with 30 minutes, I guarantee you has all kinds of problems in their lives. The person with five and a half hours, I guarantee you is very happy, very high functioning. And what's like really strong? If an eight hour block was, you know, I'm in bed for eight hours, what would be like a good level of REM and slow wave sleep? If you can get over 50% of the time you're spending in bed to be REM and slow wave sleep, like you're doing pretty well. And so I'm in that camp and I'm also still optimizing my life more to be a CEO or an entrepreneur than a human. If I was just fully focused on being a great human, I would probably spend eight to nine hours in bed, right? And I wouldn't look at my phone before bed and things like this, right?

But because I'm still optimizing for being an entrepreneur, I, you know, I spend more like seven hours in bed or, you know, know, seven and a half, maybe if I get a little extra sleep. But I've managed to make that time, you know, like the three to four hours, sometimes even four and a half hours of REM and slow wave sleep. So I'm getting the REM and slow wave sleep that like a person who might be spending eight or nine hours in bed is getting because I've figured some stuff out that makes me sleep better. So that's sort of one whole category right there, which is sleep.

And anyone listening to this should try to figure that out for themselves because it'll just dramatically change the quality of your life. I'll give you another hack. I wear these blue light blocking glasses before bed, and they've got a red, like kind of a red tint to them. And if you think about laptops, iPhones, whatever, all of them are emitting this light that is telling your eyes and your brain to stay awake. And if you're like me and you're using your phone or reading an email,

you know, closely before bed, because, you know, you're doing work or you're staying on top of things, it's going to affect the way you sleep. But if you wear these glasses, it's like a get agile free card and you can look at all that stuff right up until the moment you go to bed and it won't affect your sleep. So, so that's like one example of how you can hack both sides of it. Have you, you said you've been around all these interesting athletes and you also have access now to like millions of pieces of data. Who are some of the biggest freaks in nature that you've been around?

Is there like Judy in Iowa that's getting like nine and a half hours of slow wave sleep and she's your hero? You got like a picture of her on your wall? Yeah, or like all these athletes that you've been around. Like is there anyone who you're just like, you've seen them in real life? It's like, DeKemen and Matambo. Incredible.

Yeah, well, you're like. When we first started looking at, we first started working with LeBron James. This would have been 2015 and 2016. his sleep data, I could probably point to the one that was LeBron's, which is kind of amazing. And it makes a lot of sense that he was so good at and has been so good at recovering in his career because he's taking care of that third of his life and sleeping great. I think it's maybe the most REM and slow wave sleep of anyone I've talked to named Alex Honnold.

Do you guys know that name? So Alex Honnold is from Free Solo. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the climber. The climber, right? So this is a guy who, you know, climbs mountains without a rope, essentially. And does these insane feats that are extremely dangerous. So the interesting thing about REM sleep is researchers were able to find the more REM sleep you get, the less heightened your amygdala response.

So your amygdala response is fight or flight. You know, it's what signals to your body to be nervous or to get animated. So it makes a lot of sense that the guy who's capable of climbing, you know, rock climbing these environments that no one's done before without a rope has this insane ability to sleep because that's probably in part what makes him so calm as he's doing these activities. Dude, I just googled Alex's name and then REM sleep. I think we just gave you the promo of the century, man. Like this is the marketing. This is like it should be, it comes up. The first thing that comes up is like a TED talk.

Now your company talking about how you sleep more, you get more REM sleep, then you're able to like take a little bit more wrist and be calm. I mean, that's like a really, that's like a really interesting play here. What a, on those athletes, do you think it's a sort of like, intentional thing? Like you think that they, you know, like is LeBron or Alex, are they doing something that's making their sleep that much better? Or do you think because they happen to be great sleepers, that is what allowed them to

become such great athletes or such great performers? I mean, there's certainly genetic things that make people better or worse at sleeping. But there's also so many things that you, the individual, can do to enhance your sleep. sleeping at a very consistent time. So going to bed and waking up at a very similar time. We'll just unusually elevate the quality of your sleep. Often sleeping in a very cold room, a very dark room, a very quiet room, a room of high air quality.

Athletes who are serious about this stuff will measure all of that and dial it in. I still think athletes aren't sophisticated enough about sleep and recovery. given how important it is to their overall performance. But those are a variety of things you can do. We talked about blue light. There's certain supplements that work better or worse for people, magnesium, melaton. Interestingly, harder sleep drugs like the ambians of the world,

they knock you out. So your sleep latency is short. But the quality of the sleep is never that high. So again, back to that percentage of time that you're in REM and slow-wave, it is rarely, you know, maybe if you're someone who normally be at 30%, you're going to be at 20%. Dude, I've, I was a 400 meter runner, Division 1 400 meter runner in college, so I used to be fairly competitive, and I knew a bunch of basketball players. Yeah, and I knew a bunch of basketball players who ended up going to the NBA because I was friends with them in college. And, uh, dude,

it's shocking how bad, myself included, how bad most competitive athletes are when it comes to, like, diet and recovery. Like, I didn't know anything. I just, like, I would eat, like, ranch and pizza every day. And a couple of my friends who went and went on to play in the NBA, like, we're just eating McDonald's, like, on a regular basis. It's pretty amazing how, like, some people are still freaks, even though they don't do any of that nonsense, you know?

It's pretty wild. And we've worked a lot of athletes, like, who, yeah, they used to play video games from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. you know, you got a game the next day in front of a million people, you know, and it doesn't occur to them that that actually is going to affect their performance. And then you look at the data and it's like, okay, you're, you've got a red recovery, even though you didn't even drink alcohol because you stayed up late staring at a screen. Whereas if you, you know, had gone to bed at the same time that you started playing video games,

here's the difference in what your, your performance is. Sean, you going to make fun of me or something? No, I don't know. I was going to ask, actually. this is a personal question. Naps. What's the word on naps? Because I am a prolific napper.

In fact, one of my life goals is to be able to take a guilt-free nap every single day. And I know athletes are pretty big on naps as well. But I don't know if you could get to those deeper stages in a quick, you know, in a one-and-half-hour nap. What's the word on naps? I mean, Winston Churchill,

if you'd have a daily nap, that would be pretty good. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like he's the coolest. He's the coolest person I can think of who really pioneered the daily nap as a hardcore. Yeah, it's a hardcore nap. I like that.

I think that sounds better because my nap marketing is pretty soft right now. I need to up it. I need to have a Churchill nap. In fact, I'm going to brand it as I'm going to brand it as a Churchill nap. Dude, I do it every day as well. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, about two o'clock for about, 30 or 40 minutes every single day.

And do you get in bed or you just lie on a couch kind of thing? No, I only go, Sean, do you go to bed? I only go to bed for nighttime sleeping and then I refuse to lay in the bed. I go to a different bedroom. I have a nap bedroom and I have a master bedroom. Really? Yeah. Interesting.

And do you wear a sleep mask or anything? You just close your eyes. I wear a sleep mask, but I get knocked out. Like, I wake up two hours later and I'm like, I'm a whole different human being. I feel like. And you could sleep at night after two hours. I can't do two hours. Two hours is a real nap.

Yeah. Churchill. Is that really what you do? You do two hours in the middle. But that's my goal. My goal is to get that to be an everyday thing. Right now it's in every third day. John's like, here's my life advice, young man.

You got to get a solid 16 every day and life's cream cheese. I'm not a big nap person personally. I almost rarely ever take naps. But I think that there's certainly. plenty of research that shows that for most people, getting an app versus not is going to make them feel better and perform better. I certainly think a lot of athletes take them in the afternoon or even some will take them almost right up to the time before tip-off

or when they have their event. And because I think one of the reasons for them is they also need to peak in their performance much later in the day than most people, right? So like an NBA game might start at 730 or 8, and they're playing until 9 or 10 or whatever. And so, but whereas most people are winding down at that time, so they kind of need to shift their peak performance later in the day, whereas most entrepreneurs are trying to be, you know, tip top at 9 a.m. or whatever. Yeah, I think that's right.

The challenge with naps is that the percentage of time that you spend in in trying to sleep is often lower as a quality standpoint. So that's why I was kind of interested in whether you guys get in bed or whether it's more casual because you might up the intensity of the setup of your nap to really maximize the quality of the sleep. So try things like a sleep mask or try, you know, a couple little things and you might all of a sudden feel even better after your nap. Are you the only founder? Are you a solo founder? Well, I was fortunate in that. I met two really talented engineers when I was graduating from Harvard.

So one is John Capilupo, who for 10 years was our chief technology officer. And the other is Eurean Nikola, who's still with me. And he's our chief mechanical engineer. And the combination of the three of us really built, really built the company. Now, a lot of it was algorithms development, you know, computer science, data science, having the right prototypes. And yeah, so it was it was very technical out of the gates. Well, what, but you're, you're, you're, you were the, the, do you consider them co-founders or just, uh, meaningful, uh, contributors? I consider them co-founders. I mean, I, I came up with the, the idea for the, the, idea for the

company, you know, years before I met them. But they've been an amazing, I mean, an amazing piece of the whoop story and critical. What do you, so you're the CEO, you're a founder of a multi-billion dollar startup. What do you do with, I assume, I don't know if you're liquid or not, or if you have a lot of your equity so tied up. What are you going to do with all your money when you eventually do get liquid?

do you have like any big aspirations? Are you just like a boring guy who just like what I am? Have you taken secondary along the way? Any secondary? Yeah, I have. I have. It's, well,

look, it doesn't, it doesn't actually change your, your motivation all that much in building the business. That was something that I remember someone's saying to me, uh, at various points when I had the option to sell some shares. And,

uh, I think it's really just made the quality of my life higher. You should post your sleep before and after the secondary. Be like, do I sleep easier at night now that I got 50 million in the bank? Yeah, it turns out I do actually. I do sleep a little easier at night. Taking secondary, I remember when I was first getting going in my career and I heard about these secondaries and I was like, that's bullshit.

I think it was rooted a little bit in envy. But I also was like, you've got to be all in. And now that I've like done a little bit of stuff, I realize having a safety net. And this is like a very obvious thing to say. So I sound like an idiot here. But having a safety net, particularly like a meaningful safety net of liquid net worth, I think 100% makes you better at building your company. And I think taking secondaries, it changes on a scale.

Sometimes it's too much. But taking secondary, I think we'll make you a better company builder. Do you agree with that? I do. Especially if you're like a growth stage of a company. I don't think I ever sold shares until WIP was worth at least a billion dollars. and they were for rounds that were super oversubscribed. So, but I do think that's a fair,

I think that's a fair lens to look at it from, I've read about people taking secondaries at the, you know, series A stage or something and I don't know, everyone's, I get look, everyone's circumstances are different, so you don't want to, you don't want to judge,

but I do think for a company that's at a later stage where you're trying to, you're making this calculus, is this a company that's going to be acquired in a short period of time or is this a company that we're trying to build to be a standalone business? And I think if it's more the latter, you want your founders or your key, you know, your CEO, you want you want folks like that to be not sort of looking at their bank account wondering when they're going to cash out on this thing. You want them in a mode of, hey, I can keep going for a while and, you know, really optimize the

business. So, yeah, I agree. I agree with you. what do you do with your money? Do you just do like boring vanguard or like index funds or or or do you do something a little more risky? And what do you like to spend spend your money on? I wouldn't say I'm the biggest spender of money. But I mean, I've enjoyed investing in stuff, investing in startups, meeting founders. I've enjoyed backing stuff that my friends do or start.

I If you go out to dinner with your friends Do they just Bill comes Do they just sort of look at you in wait now Or Yeah they got T-Rex arms They can't reach out

Suddenly that wingspan Shortened up Big time Couldn't even get to the pocket anymore No I mean look I think it's It's great of course To be able to be generous too

And And take care of people Or cover bills or whatever I think it just sort of creates a peace of mind for you in an important way if you're going to be trying to do something for the next 10 years. What companies did you want to start before that? Because I'm looking at your background. So you said you're from Long Island. You live in Boston and went to Harvard, so that's amazing.

But you studied economics. It didn't look like you had. And then you worked at a bank, right? Or you were just like an intern at a bank. You were, I know my wife's from a Long Island. look, you're going down this very typical path of just being some like banker type in, in the city, but you kind of like took a left somewhere. What other companies were you thinking about starting?

I wasn't thinking about starting companies at all, actually. And your observation's right. I sort of, I thought in the back of my mind I would go work in finance after I graduated because that's what a lot of people seemed to do. And I had some background in finance because my dad had worked in finance. but, you know, internships are a great thing to figure out what you don't want to do. So I worked at a hedge fund after my freshman year. I worked in an investment bank after my sophomore year and I worked at a private equity firm after my junior year.

And the question I asked myself at each of those places is, you know, did I want to be my boss's boss or boss's boss's boss or, you know, if I could be one day. And I just didn't, I didn't feel that pull. I didn't feel this like gravitational pull towards it. And at the same time, I was becoming sort of obsessed with this idea. And I think I ultimately became an entrepreneur before I really knew what an entrepreneur was. It wasn't like I was choosing between three or four different ideas. It was just this one idea that I became obsessed with. Well, in the last decade that you've been doing this, you know, any entrepreneur, I think,

sees other opportunities. You see things that are pain points for your business that you're like, man, somebody should make this easier. Or you meet a bunch of other entrepreneurs and you, you realize, oh, wow, there's like a whole universe of potential businesses that can be started and be successful. A lot of people listen to this podcast to try to get ideas to think about, oh, what's possible? What's possible?

What could I be doing right now? And so do you have any business ideas that have come to you, you know, as you've been running whoop that you're not going to go do because you're running whoop, but like, you know, maybe somebody else could go. I have a lot of sort of funny tangents, like business ideas that are sort of silly business ideas that you, you know, think up in the shower or whatnot. And so we can, we can riff on some of those. And then I have, you know, I have some that are more. Don't, don't tell us which ones are the serious or the silly. We probably will get them all mixed up ourselves anyway.

So take one off your list and let's, let's hear it. Okay, this is a very funny one. So the idea for the company is car pipes and it's vocalist lessons while you're commuting in the morning. So you're in your car and you've got someone who's teaching you how to sing and, you know, you're car pipe. Yeah, you're in a safe space. So you can belt it out. Exactly. Those are the types. Those are the types of ideas I feel like that I think of a lot.

I'll give that one a, I'll give that one a B, Sam. Uh, F. I think I always wanted to sing. Look, dude, you, you have so much, listen, you have so much data. So I both. I'm like car pipes. No, it's stupid. You're, you're, you're a brilliant man and you just had one dumb idea.

I'm allowed to say that. You, both Sean and I have both invested in continuous glucose monitor companies. I don't know, I don't know if you. you ever, I, I think I had an opportunity to pass on your company, Will, or somehow a deck made it my way and I, and I was a fool and I didn't do it. Or maybe I just didn't have any money. I think that's what it was. I think, I think I just didn't have any money. I think I was just, I just didn't have enough cash. I mean, I want to know, like, which of these wearables do you think are going to be awesome and which wearables in the future are going to be, uh, are going to be a thing. You know,

on the pod what we've talked about, I don't have a background like you. So I'm just kind of riffing here. But I've always thought it was ridiculous how you can have like a cancer or something bad inside of your body growing. And, you know, I've had family members who have passed away. And it was like, you know, had we just gotten this MRI or cat scan like six months ago, you would have been fine. And I've always thought it's very strange that something can be in your body. And it's just a matter of you just didn't get it measured. otherwise you could have been fine. I've always thought that to be quite strange. And Whoop actually told me one time when I had COVID. And I thought that was sick.

And I'm like, well, sick, you should tell me if I have, like, cancer as well. You know what I mean? That's something that's always fascinated me. Yeah, and I would put all that sort of in the category of, like, obvious innovation that's coming. The combination of body scans, blood work, and continuous monitoring through a non-involvement. wearable, will ultimately be able to predict a lot of things that, that, you know, are disease states or leading indicators for death. And so I'm very optimistic about how profoundly the health care space, the relationship with your doctor, I mean, all of that will change.

It's so obvious. And then the other thing is, and, and, And artificial intelligence is a very popular expression these days, but AI will be enormously valuable for analyzing a lot of these somewhat complicated scans to look for things inside your body that might be off, which otherwise required an expensive radiologist to look at or something. Which startups do you think that are at like the sub 100 or sub 50? employee count and maybe sub 300-ish million market cap or valued, like below that, do you see in the health and wellness and anything related to that category that you think is going to have a similar trajectory as you guys and has a bunch of meat on the bone for

growth and upside? You know, it's funny because I think I've spent so long thinking about health and wellness, it's almost like the bar to invest in a health and wellness thing is too high. So I actually find that I don't invest in all that much related to health and wellness. Like I'm racking my brain right now. I think of something that I'm involved in that's directly health and wellness. A related company that I think is quite powerful is called Whisper, which I am an investor in. And it is, they've essentially built technology that allows you that can transcribe your thoughts,

which is pretty powerful technology, if you think about it, the ability to sort of think something and it gets written out. So I really like deep tech stuff like that that feels like magic, feels like the future. And how does it do that? You're wearing a brain scanner device type thing, and then you literally think something and it writes it? What happens?

I don't want to butcher this, but the short of it is it looks like, you know, an old jawbone might have one of those Bluetooth sets. And that's, you know, that's what the technology's form factor looks like. You literally just think something and it writes it or you have to like sort of whisper it. I believe it's using your brainwaves. What's the URL of this? It's whisper.a.ai.

Okay, I just saw it. It looks like a little, it looks like a hearing aid. Yep. Oh, that's cool. How much money have they raised? Do you know? I want to say something in like the 15, 20 million range. Wow, that's pretty fascinating. This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

Whoa, I can see the client's whole history. Call, support tickets, emails, and here's a test from three days ago I totally missed. So here's a category of work that's a little more serious. Obviously, you guys have seen everything that's come out in terms of deep fakes and this ability to create videos of people that are almost indistinguishable from a real video, right? I think that there's going to be like a talent agency of sorts that's for non-living people. So, you know, imagine if you're Tom Cruise towards the end of your career, the same way Justin Bieber just sold like the rights to his songs, maybe Tom Cruise sells the rights to Tom Cruise and you can keep making movies with Tom Cruise for the next hundred years.

Or another version of that is you can have an actor like Tom Cruise who's completely artificial. Have you seen the Tom Cruise deep fake on TikTok? Totally. It's incredible. Sam, have you seen this thing? Yeah, it's amazing. You know who did that, Sean? We talked about it.

Fucking the South Park guys. Is that Deep Voodoo or that's somebody else? I thought Deep Voodoo did the Tom Cruise one. Am I wrong? Miles Fisher. Miles Fisher. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's the one who doesn't.

I think it's him and this other guy. Because he kind of looks like Tom Cruise, but there's a whole technology, I think, that doesn't even need a human involved, which would just essentially take the fact that Tom Cruise has made 50 movies and be able to... Yeah, but that's interesting. You're like, instead of selling your back catalog,

sell your future catalog, basically. You can sell your likeness to your light you could create an AI likeness and just license it out to whoever wants to you kind of use it, which is obviously has some, you know, some potential like, you know, ways it can be misused, but seems valuable enough where people would figure that out. Have you guys heard of Michaela? I think her name is, uh, is it named Michaela, the Instagram influencer who doesn't exist. You don't talk about? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a model that is completely made up, right? Yeah. Yeah. But now, but now she's got like a boyfriend.

I don't actually know if they're together or not anymore, but she's got like a whole cast of characters now, and I've been getting into it. And they raised a bunch of money, and like she's getting ad deals. It's super fascinating, dude. It's super fascinating. And what's more fascinating is I think that if I had to guess,

the way that they're making the way that she looks, they're using AI to come up with like the ideal, like the ideal person that both men and women are attracted to or like want to like follow and be into. And I follow her. boyfriend and he's super skinny and he's little and drag like indragous and i'm like fuck they don't like yoke boys anymore like you know these and so it's kind of funny to see like what they're like making is like the ideal person it's very fascinating but the business is making a lot

of money i believe well on this pod a while back i had said uh somebody needs to create a deep fake only fans model because i was like oh you could just have a virtual only fans model that even kind it looks a little virtual, that's okay. And now this is just a moneymaker for you, right? You're like basically like some sort of virtual pimp if you created these AI only fans characters. And a guy did it. So a guy reached out.

And so he created it. He's like he basically used his girlfriend who's like a model or whatever as the model for it. And then created a AI clone of her. And now we're like setting it up and we're going to see how it goes. So I'm really curious to see if this thing like takes off or not. So are you actually interested in this business? Are you going to be... How am I not interested in this business?

This is so interesting to see if this works or not. Yeah, but like, how do you work with like softcore porn all day? I'm not doing anything. I'm just like getting the update. He just DMs me and says, check this out. And he'll be like, you know, we got the account made or we're going to, you know, and he'll start sending me updates on how much money they're making, right? I just want to see how the experiment turns out.

I don't have to sit there and train her. think about the investor updates that will sends he's like you know here's like screenshots of our new prototype you know like we've effectively we've we've gotten people's REM sleep to improve by 5% by just adding this little feature here's a mock up and they're like what's it going to look like to you it's going to look great I don't know I don't see what the problem is well that's that's actually so a theme that I think about is like okay 50 years from now what are things that the future generation will look back at our generation and say, oh, that was so crazy that that was happening then. Like there's a lot of easy versions of that for us today, right? Where it's, you know,

you can say smoking on, smoking on airplanes or, you know, the number of people that died giving birth or, you know, people. dying from just traveling across the country, right? Like, so there's all these examples of that. And then if you try to pull it forwards, what would they say about things that feel sort of a little too normalized today? And, yeah, what are things that your grandkids will say like, really, grandpa? Like, you know, slavery?

And you're like, I don't know. It was just the norm back then, right? Like, what are those, what are those things today that 50 years from now will seem either like crude or rude or whatever? in some way, right? Like, I think the health monitoring is an obvious one. It's like, you just didn't know how you were doing? And it's like, yeah, we just didn't know.

You go to the doctor once a year, maybe. And like, yeah, they just randomly measured my blood pressure once a year. Right. That was my checkup. That's, that's to me the most obvious one that will seem like, wow, you guys were really cable. You just rolled the dice with that one, huh? Your whole health thing.

And that's just going to be so different in the future. The number of people that die from car accidents. Seems like it would be on that list. Dude, I was driving last night on a late night, like, one-lane road, and a huge truck went by me. And it shook my car, and we were both going 80 miles an hour, like, you know, passing each other. And it does seem, in about 20 years, it's going to be so archaic.

We're like, can you believe that we are basically one sneeze away from, like, an 80 miles an hour, like car crash all the time? Like, you just literally 10 feet of. way, five feet away sometimes. That's going to be, that's going to be our generation's smoking section and restaurant. That cars, two cars go. That's really, it's going to be like smoking or not smoking. Like, you used to drive these cars going an opposite directions and you were 10 feet away

from each other. That's what it's going to be like, I think. And like, my wife is vegan and she's like, yeah, like that, the thing that's going to be, you know, the 50 years from now is like, you just killed animals and ate them? like what why why like you that you just thought that was okay i bet it's like dude i bet dude i bet will's got the total opposite take on yes that's what i wanted to hear what's your take on uh sort of like vegan carnivore plant based you know all these different you know more extreme versions of diets have you seen anything or where's your head out it was the

data say around that the data says it's highly personal uh so you could put two people on identical diets and they could have literally the exact opposite effects on those on those people i remember uh i mean take professional athletes for example that you guys remember when lebron got really skinny it was like around the olympics yeah and he was he had been playing with ray allen so ray allen got him to go on the paleo diet and because ray allen was obsessed with the paleo diet and again it's an example it was amazing for a terrible for lebron like terrible uh and so there's every version of of that for the rest of us. For me personally, I eat, I eat three meals a day. I try not to eat crap. I eat carbs. I, you know, I would have like a Mediterranean-type diet, a lot of meats and

fishes and vegetables. I don't really drink that many calories, mostly drink water and coffee. So, so that's my diet. I also think diet is easier if you like the right things and then you can kind of eat as much as you'd like or as much as fills you up versus having to count calories in part because a lot of the calories you consume are really bad calories. So those are my quick perspectives on diet. Dude, have you seen, well, have you seen Brian Johnson? Do you know who that is? Yeah, he created a really cool, or is creating a very cool company that measures brainwaves. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But have you seen Blueprint? Well, that's his whole age reversal. He's like a human, he's like a human whoop band. Yeah, well, he wears whoop. And so that's how I know him. And he's come on the Whoop podcast before. I think he's coming on actually soon. Is he like in the top, is he in the top like 1% of,

of data because if not, he's doing a hell of a lot of shit with his lifestyle. If that doesn't work, if that doesn't give him some off the charts readings on his, on his sleep and his strain, then I don't know. Well, I want to be clear that I don't have access to every single person on whoop's data, but I think some of the stuff we went over, because he was on a WOOP podcast maybe a year or two years ago, and he was telling me some pretty good stats then. And it sounds like he's dialed it in even more since. So I'll definitely listen to the podcast you guys did with him.

Well, so listen to this, Sean. This just happened. I think this morning it was released. So basically he was on our pod and he looks like a freak, you know, like he's like chiseled. He looks awesome. And I don't know how old he is actually. He's like 46 or something. Yeah.

Yeah. But he like he looks great. And but you know, he does all this insane stuff that you'd expect a billionaire to be able to do. He's got like 30 doctors like helping him do all this. He, he, you know, whatever. Well, it just released that. or it was just released that you can spend, I think, like, a lot, like, $1.5 or $2 million a year. And you basically can, he's going to, like, anyone can use his doctors and go through his system in order to, what he's trying to do for the listeners is he's basically, it's kind of like this thought exercise, but he's taking it seriously, which is he's trying to reverse his age, which you can do through, like, improving your blood and losing weight, things like that.

So reverse his biological age faster than his chronological, chronological. age goes up because in theory if you do that you live forever obviously that won't happen but it's like an interesting like thought exercise but now anyone can sign up and apply to use like all the crazy shit that he's doing you're gonna do it sam it's like two million dollars a year no um also like i have a here i have a thing with all the fitness people and brian i called brian out for this and he actually answered it well but i'm like do you ever experience joy like like like like so i don't drink alcohol And a lot of people will say, like, oh, I've been wanting to do that? And I'm like, well, do you have a problem?

And they go, no, it just thought. But I'm like, then, like, it sounds dope then. Just get drunk every once in a while. That, like, you know, that's like a life worth living is like when you have things to celebrate and like, like, you can build camaraderie with your friends. Like, yeah, just do it? You might live a little shorter. You might be sick for a few days. But like, you know, like, experience joy.

That's good. And so with Brian, I was like, do you ever like had birthday cake for your kid's birthday? Like, do it? He's like, no, I've only cheated like one meal over like two years. or something like that. And I was like, well, are you happy? And he said, I'm happy. So my opinion of that is, okay, great, you're winning.

But for most people, I don't know, experience joy a little bit. Like, be healthy and also, like, get effed up every once in a while. I think that's good advice. Will, I have a similar thing that you'll hate slash disagree with, which is on my Twitter, I have this tweet that's pinned that just says, here's some semi-controversial things that I believe. And one of them is you don't need a sleep tracker. great sleep is obvious. And I think you would probably disagree

because it's kind of the premise of your life right now. But you got to admit, pretty catchy. And there's some nugget of wisdom in there. There's some nugget of truth in that belief. Just because it sounds good doesn't mean it's true. Yeah, I mean, I think that might be true in like extremely binary terms. You know, oh, I had to wake up for a 4 a.m. flight or, you know, the alarm kept going off last night.

Like, yeah, okay, those are bad nights of sleep. But I think it's a profound lie in the sense of if you're actually trying to understand your nightly sleep and routine. Like, I think there's just a lot. Think about it this way. It's a third of your life that is a complete black box. You have no idea what's happening during that third of your life. And science has proven that that's a third of your life that dramatically affects the other two thirds.

And if you're good at sleeping, it decreases every form of potential disease that you can have. Like, it is the magic pill. So I don't agree with your tweet, but I respect that. I probably have a lot of retweets. Tons of retweets, right? We do it for the retweets around here. And I do think that Sam's point is a good one, good one though, as it applies to a tweet,

which is if you make all these things seem, you know, like discipline in spite of joy or sort of soulless, then, of course, there's some kind of a rebellion against it, right? And so I've heard people talk about sleep tracking in a way that makes sleep tracking seem profoundly not cool. And so I understand it through that lens. But I think the reality is you can measure things about your body passively that give you a great insight into your life

and can make your life better. Right. Yeah, okay. So what do you think is going to happen, Will, 10 years? What's the vision here? You're going to go public? You're going to sell this for $10 billion? What do you think is going to happen?

I think Woop will ultimately go public. I think that it'll probably be sooner than that. time frame that you gave. And I think we're going to build technology that's able to predict a lot of massive life events as they pertains to your health and along the way provide a 24-7 coach that helps people meet their goals well beyond health, you know, psychological goals, professional goals, just because of the value that understanding your body can provide. Dude, you've stuck it in the face of all the finance bros. You're saying, I didn't have to go that route and I still crushed it. I think that's awesome. I've got so many New York friends and

they just, and Long Island friends and they do the same thing over and over and over again. I'm like, you're selling your soul, man. This is the worst. And it's so cool that you kind of saw that route is not maybe for you and you're going to just crush it. We're big fans of WOP. I've never tested the ORA ring. So I've been loyal to my WOP. I've been calling it, I call it Woop and WOOP. So my apologies. I didn't know the right way to pronounce it. Yeah, what is the right way? Whoop. Oob.

I can lie, I kind of like whoop, too. Like, I would never say I'm whooping ass, but I would say I'm a whoop-ass to this. So, you know, like, I kind of, I don't know. Yeah, that's going to be your next son-on-smit.

The founder of it or Sam. Yeah, what do you know? If you wear it inside out, it's whoop. Yeah. I never knew how you pronounced it, but my wife and I have our paid subscribers. How much should we? I think we pay you $300 a year.

I don't even remember. Dude, I paid you for two years and I just didn't have my band. I lost my band. And then I just kept the subscription going. So, you know, you're welcome on that one. But now I got my band back and now I'm getting the value. Yeah, yeah. If you reach out to membership services, they'll send you a band, no problem.

If you're a subscriber, the hardware is included. I mean, that was one of the more. That was like, more release. It's now in hindsight, but in 2018, we changed the whole business model to being a subscription where the hardware was included. How much, was that like a huge, I mean, did your economics drastically change? Totally. I mean, we used to sell the product for $500, one-time fee, everything included.

Then we went to, you can sign up for as little as $30. Like, picture the, just all the cash implications, gross margin implications, everything that happens, overnight when you do that. And it was also about the business moment because, okay, companies founded in 2012, if you're changing your business model that profoundly six or seven years later, you're also admitting you haven't figured out the right business model six or seven years into building company. So, yeah, that was all quite painful and concerning.

But we created a really cool business model that now has been amazing. Yeah, now you're going to get, maybe you're going to make an argument. I don't know if you're going to get it, but you're going to make an argument that you get those SaaS multiples. Yeah, and I think there's a fair case for that. Yeah, I don't know what your churn is, but that'd be badass because, I mean,

that's a, you know, five times more valuable company. Well, dude, this is awesome. Yeah, thanks for coming on. We took you a little overtime. Sorry about that. But thanks for coming on, Will, this is fun. And, yeah, everybody, go get some sleep. And by the way, Sean,

From you, that's a big pivot. Well, I said great sleep is important. I just said great sleep is obvious. You know, directionally, you know which way you're going, whether you track it or not. And then once you get going on the right direction, then start measuring it and optimizing it. Did you have a Twitter thread that was killing Clubhouse? That blood is on my hands, yes. Wow, that's, yeah.

How's that? What are you to say? On point. And all the clubhouse investors who blocked me because they thought I was just being a hater, you know, my door has a little mail slot for apologies. And they're welcome to go ahead and slip the apology back in. Yeah. I know I'm connecting the dots on some tweets of yours that I've read now because I also

remember that sleep one how I think about it. That was my version of the clubhouse thread for you. I don't know that business very well, but it certainly seems like it's not doing as well as it was in the middle of COVID. Well, I think what a hypocrite Sean is, by the way. He's got, he owns a whoop. Yeah. Whoop. He owns a whoop.

And he's still saying you don't need a sleep tracker. That's bullshit, man. Call him out, Will. Yeah. Well, I definitely will now. Well, I'm waiting for the version that like just auto charges or just like, like stays charged for like two years so I can just leave it on because I'm a notorious lose shit guy. So, you know, I'm on my 18th AirPods. I, you know, I've gone through three whoop bands and it's the

charging that gets me every single time. Same. What's the plan, dude? Is a 30-day charge going to happen anytime soon? Or is it for a guy to get an infinite battery around here? Yeah, just do better. And by the way, the modular battery back, I think was a good innovation at least so you don't have to take it off. But, you know, originally, I was hoping we'd be able to do it like watches, or there's certain watches versus movement. Yeah. Keep it alive. The reality is that because we collect so much health data,

we're driving the battery pretty hard and the sensor's pretty hard. So in some ways, it's great that we've gotten to four or five days, but customer feedback heard, okay? We'll work on the two-year model for both of you. No, that's been my same thing. thing, which is that's why I don't wear an Apple watch is I think it's so stupid that you have to charge those things all the time. I think,

dude, I lost my wedding ring on my honeymoon because I just lose everything. Same. I got mine tattooed on my hand because I lost it so much. Same. I think I, but the charging thing. Like,

I'm not smart enough to get away with this absent-minded professor shit where it's like, oh, he's so messy, but he's brilliant. It's like, well, he's, you know, above average.

It's like it doesn't have the same, doesn't have the same, you know, excuse power for me. that's all right you're you're you're good enough that you can screw up every once in a while but uh yeah the battery thing man you guys got to figure that out but we have i think we have will's email in the calendar invite so sean you're just got to you're just going to message him hey will lost my ban please hook up thanks right i will delete mail i'll delete tweet fair

we don't have that many people losing it because they wear it all the time so you must be taking it off too. I also got little kids and my little kids are like, oh, bracelet, toy, you know, they just think it's theirs. And so they just steal it when it's charging on the counter and they, now I lose it. So, you know, whatever. Well, dude, thanks for doing this. Thanks for having you guys. Your, your PR guy, John is my good buddy. John hooked us up with Ariel Hawani. You like UFC. Ariel and John are good buddies and Ariel's like the face of like UFC journalism. He hooked us up at that. He made the introduction to you. So we owe him a shout-up. But I appreciate you coming on. This is awesome. Are you a big UFC fan? Oh yeah. We both are. Yeah, we're both huge into it.

Are you? I'm not a huge fan, but I mean, I observe it from a distance. I think athletes are like, you know, some of the more impressive physical specimens in the world. Yeah, besides the whole brain thing, besides that. Yeah, and the slap league thing, they got to put that away. That's the stupidest fucking thing on earth. I hate the slap league. What?

I hate the slap. Dude, that is the dumbest thing. I made on the slap league. What? That is so stupid. I watched three minutes of the preview, and I was like,

just when I thought I was out, Dana White, you got me back in. It's so crazy. Dude, that is the dumbest thing ever. Are you really are a fan of that? No one's saying it's not dumb. You know.

And they get knocked out. So for those listening who don't know what we're talking about, it's basically, I think they have weight classes, but it's usually always like big old fat guys looking like they're supposed to be strong, but they look huge. And they just stand in front of each other and they smack each other five times, right? Is that the rule? It's five slaps. But they almost always get knocked out, it looks like.

Yeah, you just take turns open hand slapping each other. But the slap is like a thud. It's not like a slap. It's basically a punch. And, yeah, it basically results in a brutal. knockout, like every single match, which is pretty crazy.

And their faces are so swollen. Have you seen that, like, with their jaws are so swollen? And they wear earplugs because they will rupture your ear drum. You know, if you ever gotten hit in the ear, it looks horrible. Sam, did you see the trailer for it? Like, they released the preview that was like supposed to hype you up, introduce the league, and they're like,

these people come from, you know, everywhere. They come from nothing. This guy was doing this. Now, this is giving him this opportunity. And he's the bad guy. And then one guy goes, I just want to change the world, man. And I lost it. I was like, this is your plan to change the world? One slap at a time.

Brother, what are you doing? We're democratizing slap. Chris Nowitzky, who's done all this concussion research at Boston University is one of the key guys for doing concussion research in the NFL. He was in the, he was in the WWF, wasn't he? He was like a professional wrestler. Yeah. And he had a bunch of concussions. And he was like, it's, it's just half a step from having people just stab each other on live TV and then saying who makes it.

Yeah, we should also get ratings. There's this idea of painfotainment. You heard this term? I get the idea of it from. Yeah, it's a great name for that reason, right? Which is we love entertainment of people suffering, you know? And so, like, whether this is TV shows like Survivor or Naked and Afraid or. whatever, where they have to suffer in that way, or it's somebody suffering in an emotional way

when you're watching Dr. Phil or Jerry Springer and somebody finds out they got cheated on or their Mori tells them they are not the father, whatever. There is a, you know, they used to have executions publicly and people would come and watch the execution, literally like, you know, whatever, in France and the old days. And so there's this long history of people enjoying watching suffering as a form of entertainment. And it's this crazy thing, but it's, it's something that that does exist. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but like I do think it's a,

I do think it's going to work for that reason. There's some darkness there. Yeah. Well, thanks for making this happen, dude. We appreciate it. Yeah, it's just fun. Thanks for having me, guys. Yeah, we'll be in touch because, you know,

I'm going to be emailing you all my complaints about my WOP, but maybe I'll be one of your investors whenever you IPO, but this is awesome and we appreciate it. Do you, you can give a shout up, by the way, what your, do you use social media at all? At Will Ahmed are my handles. Well, thanks for making this happen. We really appreciate it.

We'll talk soon. See, Will. Talk soon, guys. Cool.