The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 61. Unlocking Your Body’s Potential with WHOOP CEO Will Ahmed

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

Key takeaways you’ll learn in this episode: What is heart rate variability and why is it important? Top sleep hacks for the best recovery. Why WHOOP partnered with OpenAI for the future of wearable technology. Grab Your WHOOP Here: http://join.whoop.com/ultimate Get weekly tips from Gary Brecka on how to optimize your health and lifestyle routines - go to https://www.theultimatehuman.com/ For more info on Gary, please click here: ⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/thegarybrecka ECHO GO PLUS HYDROGEN WATER BOTTLE http://echowater.com BODY HEALTH - USE CODE ULTIMATE10 for 10% OFF YOUR ORDER https://bodyhealth.com/ultimate Are you looking to optimize your sleep, recovery, and performance? In this episode of The Ultimate Human Podcast, Gary Brecker sits down with Will Ahmed, CEO and Founder of WHOOP! They’re taking a deep dive into wearable technology and big data to improve health and longevity. You’ll learn about the science of heart rate variability, optimizing sleep tracking, and the predictive analytics that are being used to identify potential health issues before it’s too late. If you’ve been looking into different wearable technologies to help you improve your performance, you’re going to love this episode with Will Ahmed! 00:00 - Who is Will Ahmed, the CEO of WHOOP? 03:30 - Why did he start WHOOP? 07:00 - What is heart rate variability and why is it important? 13:00 - How does sleep impact recovery? 19:00 - Top sleep hacks for the best recovery. 27:00 - Is it bad for your recovery to sleep next to your spouse? 30:30 - Why you should wear blue-light-blocking glasses a few hours before bed. 41:00 - Gary Brecka’s morning routine with hydrogen gases. 46:30 - What does the Strain metric on WHOOP mean? 53:30 - How did WHOOP track COVID-19? 01:00:30 - Why WHOOP partnered with OpenAI. 01:03:30 - What is the future of wearable technology? 01:11:00 - Are wearable technologies the future of cardiology? 01:13:00 - How he built a multi-billion dollar business. 01:17:00 - What was Will Ahmed’s hardest moment in business? 01:23:30 - Why you need to be obsessed with the problem you are solving. 01:25:00 - Why you should always strive to live in gratitude. Connect with Will Ahmed here: @willahmed Gary Brecka: @garybrecka The Ultimate Human: @ultimatehumanpod Subscribe on YouTube: @ultimatehumanpodcast The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka Podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical advice, and no doctor/patient relationship is formed. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from this podcast is at the user’s own risk. The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their health care professionals for any such conditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The best cyclists in the world were quietly doing this as a mechanism, again, to figure out how much training they should take on. The CIA was using heart rate variability as a form of lie detection. And so I just found the statistic very intriguing, and I was shocked that I had never heard of it before. Because it was showing to be able to have predictive power for your body's status. Take something that we thought would be a metric that would only be measured in a hospital and putting it on your wrist. This is the next generation of medicine. What it was like going up against the big boys, Nike, Apple, formidable competitors that are actually trying to participate in the same space. What was this journey like for you? Welcome to another episode of the Ultimate Human Podcast.

Today, we are thrilled to have Will Ahmed, the visionary founder and CEO of Whoop. Will has been at the forefront of the wearable technology revolution, transforming how we understand and optimize human performance with large data. And today we're going to take a deep dive into the world of wearables, explore the future of health tech, and discover the stories of resilience and innovation behind Whoop. Let's get started. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist, Gary Brekker, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, longevity, biohacking, and everything in between. You know the guests that we've got on today. I'm actually super excited about this

interview because I'm so intellectually curious about the data, and rarely do I meet someone who is actually using big data to influence the health metrics of human beings, and today's guest is on the forefront of that, no question. I've had the pleasure of getting to know him over the last few days. We did some biohacking here in my unit, which we'll talk about this morning. But we share a common love for data and how it can influence the lives of human beings and how we can use this data to improve everything from sleep to recovery to performance to athleticism to just your daily life. So I'm really, really excited

about today's podcast. You know, interestingly, I never, I usually do a lot of background research on my guests. I did very little research on you because I'm already, I have a thousand questions and I know we're not going to have time to get through them all. But really pumped for today's interview. Welcome to the podcast, Will Ahmed. Thank you, Gary. CEO and founder of Whoop, which even before I was going to have him on a podcast, became a huge fan of the Whoop. So, you know, I think you and I are both data nerds. Correct. And so Nerds Unite, tell me a little bit about your journey

from, you know, being interested in the data to actually manipulating this into a functional wearable for human beings. Because at the time that you were doing this, I feel like you are a very, very early mover. I mean, just the thought that you could take something that we thought would be a metric that would only be measured in a hospital, like heart rate variability, and putting it on your wrist, to what it was like going up against the big boys like Nike, Apple, some really formidable competitors that are actually trying to participate in the same space.

What was this journey like for you? Well, I got into this space, you know, some 15 years ago. When I was growing up, I was kind of always into sports and exercise. I, you know, my parents would drop me off to a variety of different activities. And for me, that was kind of how I functioned and felt happy and felt balanced. And I ended up going to Harvard and playing squash at Harvard. And, you know, being a college athlete, you spend three or four hours a day training. And I was very go, go, go at that time in my life. I thought

more was more. And by the way, most, I think of athletics at that point in time, this is kind of around 2010, call it was more as more. And no one was really talking about recovery at that time. No one was really talking about sleep at that time. And, and so I just got interested in, well, what could I measure about my body to know if I'm training properly? I was someone who used to over-train and that's kind of the ultimate betrayal, right? As an athlete, you get fitter and fitter and fitter, and then you kind of just fall off a cliff

and you don't know why. And I wondered if there were certain things I could measure about my body to predict that I was gonna over-train. And I was shocked by how little data there was to be able to measure about your body and specifically in an athletic context. And so that led me to doing a lot of physiology research while I was a student at Harvard. And, you know, I read hundreds of medical papers over the course

of my time there. And I ended up writing a paper around what I thought you could measure to be able to tell someone what they should do to manage their performance. Wow. And so I did a lot of research on heart rate variability and resting heart rate and sleep and, you know, different measurements for exertion. And heart rate variability then was very much of a diagnostic tool for pathology, disease. Like it wasn't being used for performance.

Yeah, it was't being used for performance. Yeah. It was really pretty unknown, but the, the studies, albeit on very small sample sizes were quite intriguing. So, you know, in the eighties, there were power lifters that were using, um, heart rate variability from electrocardiograms to figure out, um, how much weight they should lift in the morning. There were, um, there were, you know, the best cyclists in the world were quietly doing this as a mechanism, again, to figure out how much training they should take on. The CIA was using heart rate variability as a form of lie detection. And so I just, I found the statistic very intriguing and I was shocked that I had never heard of it before

because it was showing to be able to have predictive power for your body status. And I said to myself, well, why isn't everyone measuring this if it's so predictive? And it just turns out it was a technology problem. You know, the electrocardiogram was, you know, $20,000 hospital equipment required nodes to be put all over your body. Right. And so, you know, very naive question of a 20-year-old was, well, why can't we put this in a better form factor? I mean, that's what's so incredible is that you're, you know, you're basically harnessing a technology that existed,

but it was too cumbersome to bring down to the masses, right? And so here's this incredible metric that could lead performance athletes and everyday laypersons to better recovery. And the secret to performance really is recovery. But, you know, in the beginning, I mean, it must have been really clunky. Like I'm envisioning like, you know, the old like Apple iPhone, this whole big clunky like shoe size thing that you put up to your head. I mean, so how did you make this transition? What were like your early prototypes? I'd love to see some of them.

I'll show them to you. Not impressive now. We had the real like garage phase where, you know, I founded the company in 2012. By that summer, I graduated from Harvard, but I was still working on campus and I was recruiting a lot of different engineering types and mathematicians and just really, really bright young people. And the goal was to develop prototypes that could measure heart rate and heart rate variability from the wrist, which just hadn't been done before. And in particular, heart rate variability hadn't been done before. And in particular, heart rate variability hadn't been done before. And in particular, measuring heart rate from the wrist during exercise hadn't been

done before. Wow. Because previously you needed the chest strap, right? Which is a pretty cumbersome, uncomfortable thing to wear. It has issues with data transfer. You know, there's many products that are just too uncomfortable, especially for women to wear. And so I asked myself, hey, how could we, you know, replace that technology too? And so we started developing prototypes. And they were really ugly, cumbersome prototypes. But under the hood, there was a ton of math and data science. Because the challenge for we measure heart rate and heart variability optically, which is the little lights you can see underneath the whoop.

One of the challenges for measuring this data optically is that motion can corrupt the data. And so you are combining all sorts of different sensors. So we have optical photodiodes that we're combining with accelerometers and gyroscopes to understand how much movement's happening in any different direction alongside what's an optical signal that we're getting back from your pulse wave. Wow. And it ends up just being an incredibly difficult math problem. And it turned out that I was in kind of the perfect place in the world to have a hard math problem. Yeah, yeah, it did. And for people that don't really have a fundamental understanding of what heart rate variability is, I think it's a term now you hear all over the biohacking sphere. Yeah. What is heart rate variability is not that high. Even when my sleep scores are good, recovery is good, strain is in a great place.

So give us kind of a fundamental understanding of what heart rate variability is and why is it so important? So heart rate variability is this lens into your autonomic nervous system, right? And quite literally, it's a measurement of time between successive beats of the heart. So if your heart's beating at 60 beats per minute, it's not actually beating every second. It's a little counterintuitive, but it'll be beat like 1.2 seconds,

and then 0.8 seconds, and then 0.7 seconds, and then 1.3 seconds. And it turns out that variability in the amount of time between successive beats is a good thing, because it's a sign that your autonomic nervous system is adapting to its environment. Your body is self-regulating. Your autonomic nervous system consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. So sympathetic is activation, right? Heart rate up, blood pressure up, respiration up.

If you have a stressful thought, the building is on fire. All of a sudden there might be a sympathetic response. Fight or flight. You know, exercise, right? Like these are things that cause sympathetic response. Parasympathetic is all the opposite. So heart rate down, blood pressure down, respiration down. It's what helps you fall asleep.

When you inhale, sympathetic. Exhale, parasympathetic, exhale, parasympathetic. So heart rate variability is a measurement of how balanced your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are. And you typically want to see your heart rate variability be higher, all things being equal. Heart rate variability is a very sensitive metric. In any given moment, it's changing, right? For the reasons that we just discussed and whoop in particular is measuring heart rate variability 24 7 which is quite fascinating

we have one specific use case of heart rate variability which is to understand your body's recovery so probably the single most novel thing that whoop introduced to the market now eight ten years ago was the notion of a recovery score every day. Right. So you wake up zero to 100 percent red, yellow, green. And that score is really trying to help you understand how prepared your body is for the day to take on load, to take on exertion, you know, to ultimately perform. Extremely accurate too. Yeah.

It's powerful. It really is. I mean, it never is off when my recovery is really good. My workouts are better. I noticed that obviously it's tied directly to sleep when I have, you know, those days when I have a hundred percent sleep scores, I have 96, 97% recovery. And I feel cognitively and physically the difference. And I notice it too

in my workouts. It's like in the middle of a workout, I want to push and finish the workout rather than just using my own sort of willpower, own stubborn willpower to get through a workout. Because I'll just, through discipline, kind of just push myself through. Yeah. But I noticed that, you know, that recovery metric is absolutely spot on. When it's in the green, I feel great. When it's in the yellow, I kind of don't notice. When it's in the red, I listen to it now. Yeah. It's a great mechanism for telling you when to go even harder and telling you when to

hold back a little bit. Yeah. You know, in general, I think people could modulate even more what they do to their bodies. Right. You know, you can probably push yourself even harder on days when you're green and you should actually, when your body's run down

or you're in the red on whoop, maybe do nothing at all or really just focus on recovery modalities. Yeah. So just back to heart rate variability for a second. One of the other things about heart rate variability is it's incredibly personal right you just talked a little bit about your own numbers so what we do is we we baseline you to you and the key is to understand how your heart rate variability is changing relative to your baseline if someone came up

to me and said hey i have a heart rate variability of 45 milliseconds is that good i i wouldn't know what to do with that without being able to look at some data over time. On that particular person, yeah. Yeah, and so what WHOOP is doing is it's constantly looking at seven-day and 30-day moving averages. And so the reading for this morning would be based on how your heart rate variability looks

in comparison to those readings. And in particular, that reading is a reading that we're taking during the last five minutes of slow wave sleep. I mean, right before you're getting up. Yeah. Okay. So WHOOP is incredibly accurate

at measuring sleep in general. And we can spend a while talking about sleep if you want. I definitely want to, because my audience is very interested in sleep. And I'm about to launch a sleep challenge. Okay, so we'll go right there. So if you ask a client, okay, how much sleep did you get last night? You know, they might say, okay, I went to bed at 10.

I woke up at five. I got seven hours of sleep. Well, what actually happened is they spent seven hours in bed, right? And of that time, the seven hours in bed, they were in four different stages. They were awake. They were in light sleep. They were in REM sleep. And they were in four different stages. They were awake, they were in light sleep, they were in REM sleep, and they were in slow-wave sleep. Now, awake and light aren't doing a lot for you, you know?

Whereas REM and slow-wave sleep, that's like where all the magic happens. REM sleep is when your body is restoring itself. It's when your body produces 95% of its human growth hormone. Wow. 95% of growth hormones. Just think about that. Yeah.

So people who want to get stronger in the gym, one of the best ways is try to get more REM sleep. Right. Because you're rebuilding your muscles after you've been working out. We always say that your strength is not built in the gym. Yeah. You're breaking your muscles down. Yeah.

And then, you know, slow wave sleep, that's when your mind's recovering. And so it's a really powerful combination to be getting a lot of REM and slow wave sleep. And that's when you'll find that your body's ultimately performing at a higher level. Hey guys, I think the most important website you may ever go to is the ultimate human.com that's the ultimate human.com because on this website we can directly interact with one another you can give me suggestions for podcast guests and topics that you'd like to see me cover you can ask me any question that you'd like more importantly you can sign up for my entirely free newsletter it comes out every single week i write this so I can get the information to the masses on how to live a healthier, happier, longer, chemical-free life.

You can also sign up for a pre-order of my book. And if you'd like to take the genetic test that I talk about all the time, it's available there too. And lastly, you can even see all of the products that I use in my daily life for a chemical-free, healthy living style. A lot of people ask me, you know, what do you use in your daily life, Gary? What do you brush your teeth with and clean your countertops with? Well, it's all there if you'd like to see it. And you can, again, ask me any question that you'd like and get my free newsletter. TheUltimateHuman.com. I promise you that information will help change the trajectory of your life. And now, back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. You know, we know that when the brain gets into a deep, relaxed state, you know,

it activates a system called the glymphatic system, which is like the lymphatic system in the body, the glymphatic system in the brain for eliminating waste and repairing and detoxifying and regenerating. So we want to regenerate the body um but clearly we also want to regenerate the brain so would it be a safe assumption to say that you know your REM sleep is like your body's rest and your deep sleep or slow wave sleep is the is the brain's rest yeah yeah and actually it's the opposite if I may have misspoke but it's the REM sleep is when your mind's repairing slow sleep is when your body produces 95% of its human growth hormone. Okay.

So in slow-wave sleep is when – and slow-wave on WHOOP is called deep. Yeah. Right? Okay. So the deep sleep is when you're actually – your body's repairing. You're producing that growth hormone. And I've looked at a lot of growth hormone studies, natural circadian growth hormone studies, where, you know, there's a few pulses during the day, but your biggest one is at night.

And in fact, you know, when clients, we put clients on peptides and try to enhance the amplitude of that growth hormone pulse, we always had them take the peptide late at night, right before sleep. And we also have them take it on an empty stomach at least two hours after a meal. And I noticed a lot of things that impact my sleep.

We were talking about this before. I think sleep is finally becoming something that people are developing a routine around. Because we have routines around getting our kids to school. We have routines around our exercise. You know, we have a morning routine. But the majority of people don't have good sleep hygiene and they don't have a good sleep routine. And I think a lot of it is because we don't have data, you know, on sleep.

Yeah. Most people just basically judge their sleep by how they feel in the morning. And the fact that you have this technological metric now where you can actually get non-opinionated data on what really is affecting my sleep, not what do I think is affecting my sleep, what really is affecting my sleep. And I definitely wanna spend some time talking about sleep. In fact, right before we got on the podcast,

you were showing me some of the metrics that you checked that I found pretty fascinating. I'm gonna start doing the same thing. I'm actually excited for the next 10 days because I'm gonna start tracking all of these things. And I mean, I have theories around red light therapy. I have theories around sauna, cold plunging. I have theories around PMF mats in my bed.

I recently started using something called Eight Sleep, which has had a positive impact according to Eight Sleep and Whoop on my sleep, which is just a way of cooling my body and using different temperatures throughout the night to sort of elongate these timeframes. But if we were to break sleep down and and for for my listeners and talk about what are some of the greatest hacks that we can use to enhance sleep that are supported by large data from whoop yeah totally so just for a second back to that seven the notion of someone who spent seven hours in bed getting seven hours of sleep, what you're actually going to really focus on is, well, of the seven hours, how much was REM and slow-wave sleep? So what was your total hours of REM and slow-wave sleep?

And someone who spent seven hours in bed could get 45 minutes total of REM and slow-wave sleep. And someone who spent seven hours in bed could get five and a half hours total of REM and slow wave sleep. And someone who spent seven hours in bed could get five and a half hours total of REM and slow wave sleep. So that's just, you know, an ocean of difference. And the person who's getting 45 minutes versus the person who's getting five and a half hours, I can guarantee you the person who's getting five and a half hours has a wonderful life. That person is like doing great, I can promise you. And that's on the outlier high side. And then the other is, you know, on the outlier high side. And then the other is, you know, on the outlier low side. And I imagine the person who's getting less than an hour has

all kinds of problems. So the question, you know, beneath your question around what are the hacks are, what are all the things that you can do to optimize the amount of time you spend in bed getting restorative sleep, right? And just increasing that number of restorative sleep. So one of the best things you can do, and this shows up in my data personally, but it shows up in the whole population of whoop, is going to bed and waking up at a consistent time. I hear that all the time and so true for me too.

It massively increases the quality of your sleep. There's been a number of studies that have shown that people who go to bed and wake up at the same time get a higher quality of sleep. And we've now looked at this on a pretty massive data set. And that variable is actually more important than total duration in bed. Right. Which if you think about it, it's kind of an amazing thing. Like I imagine you've spoken to people about sleep and they've said to you, you know, Gary, I just, I've got so much going on,

I didn't have time. Yes. Well, how much time do you spend in bed? Six hours, six and a half hours. Let's make that six and a half hours great. Yeah. And a lot of this also goes back to, you can only really manage what you measure.

Sleep is this, you know, sort of black box, third or quarter of everyone's lives. And so I really recommend starting out by just measuring some of it. So going to bed and waking up at the same time, that's huge. Let's talk about removing certain destructive experiences or behaviors. So, you know, alcohol is a killer. Alcohol is the worst. Yeah.

You actually showed me yours and we'll throw it up on the screen if you don't mind. I'll throw some B-roll up on the screen so they can see it. Because I'm fascinated by some of the things that actually showed no impact. Like they were neutral, right? They're not helping you or hurting you. Yep. And then some were, I mean, alcohol was this just wide red line. So I've got it here and I don't know if the screen can pick this up, but we'll share it

after. There's a page on the Whoop app, which shows you how all these different variables that Whoop is measuring or that you're inputting into the app affect your sleep or affect your recovery. So this is the impacts page where essentially I'm able to see some of the specific things that I'm tracking, how they're affecting my body's recovery. So my sleep, for example, that has a big impact on my recovery. And just getting over 68% I know is a hugely important thing.

So that's kind of like minimum viable for me. Meditating, consistent bedtime, consistent awake. So here are some things that are more neutral or I'm collecting your data on. Okay. Air travel is negative. Being in the high stress zone throughout the day, late meal, alcohol. These are some of the things that are negatively impacting me. And what's powerful is you can go into the Whoop journal and you can literally decide what you want to track against. So acupuncture, sugar, medications, air travel, alcohol, anxiety,

bloating, blood pressure meds, breath work, caffeine. I mean, this list just keeps going, right? It's about a hundred different things that you can track to understand how these different things are affecting your data or affecting your body. So for example, let's say you like doing intermittent fasting. Okay. Well report the days that you do it versus don't. And let's see how that's affecting your sleep. Let's see how that's affecting your recovery. Let's say you're trying a new supplement like magnesium or, you know, marijuana, right? Like these are different things that you can, melatonin. These are different things that you may or may not take. And you can see how they're actually affecting your body.

And so, you know, for me, meditation is really beneficial. Consistent bedtime, consistent wake time. What was the big green one at the top? So this was in terms of getting more in terms of having a higher recovery. Whenever I get over 70 percent of my sleep performance or 68% of my sleep performance, that makes a huge difference. So that's like an important tipping point for me. For some people, it might be 85%. For other people, it might be 65%.

Right. But again, that's where WHOOP will help you kind of figure out, okay, what is that minimum viable tipping point for you where all of a sudden you're going to see a big recovery impact? Air travel, very negative. High stress zone. So WHOOP also measures stress throughout the day. That's the other way that we're using heart rate variability. If you're in a high stress zone for a lot of your day, especially in a non-activity setting, so you're at work and you're tense and you're sitting and you're sympathetic dominant, that's going to affect your sleep. In a negative way. In a negative way. Late meal for me is huge. Alcohol is the biggest killer. Most people

have been on Whoop for a while, and I know that there's probably some Whoop members listening to this. Like, Whoop is something of a salt on alcohol because it shows up so vividly in your data how negative your recovery is the next day, how low your heart rate variability is the next day, how disrupted your sleep is. And for a lot of people, it can just be two drinks. And it's like, all of a sudden, you're in a completely different district. Yeah, that was the really surprising thing for me

was the relatively small amount of alcohol for demonstratively negative outcome. That's why I just cut it out completely. Yeah, it's really quite bad. Being hydrated makes a huge difference. This is also where it gets helpful to measure your data because then you can start trying different things. You've got some interesting different supplements that you take. We're drinking hydrogen water right now. You got the full hydrogen experience this morning. We got to come back to that too.

We gotta come back to that for sure. Gary put me through the ringer this morning of biohacking. And so like, I'm gonna start tracking whether if I drink this hydrogen water before bed or in the morning, if that's gonna start to have an impact on things like my stress data or my recovery data. So you can run these little a b studies on yourself uh let's talk about the bedroom environment for a second right all things being equal uh

really dark bedroom uh good air quality good humidity low noise uh temperature cold cold yeah so so those things in general most people the room's a little too bright or there's these little lights if you travel a lot like i do and you're in hotel rooms all these weird little lights yeah rooms are often a little brighter than they should be these alarm clocks they might like from 1992 yeah or like an ipad that's this big right right by your head yeah so uh so i like to wear a sleep mask in a lot of environments that aren't my home. I always wear a sleep mask. That too is one of my hats. This can be a controversial one because it goes both ways, but sharing your bed with your partner or your spouse,

you know. For some people, we see huge boosts in their data. For other people, you know, there's probably, it's not as good or it's not as effective. Well, probably I would imagine for light sleepers, you know, one of the things that we do is we do gene testing, and there's a gene mutation called COMPT, catechol-O-methyltransferase, and it's a gene that governs the downregulation of catecholamines, which are a class of neurotransmitters that create a waken state, they're linked to fight or flight. And when these rise, they create a waken state. So a lot of people are body tired, but mind awake. So they're laid down to go to

sleep at night and they're tired, but their mind is just awake. And they have a tendency to be lighter sleepers. So, you know, if their spouse is getting in and out of bed to go to the restroom or something like that, they know every time they get out of bed. My wife could get up or down three times in the night. I have no idea. Totally. You know, I'm a deep sleeper. But she's the polar opposite.

She's a very light sleeper. If I get up twice during the night, she knows I'm up and back in bed. I know she usually says something to me when I get back in bed, you know? So she's actually a light sleeper and she's awake. But you actually, I saw you on the Diary of a CEO podcast. You said that you and your wife have good cuddle hygiene, which I thought was really funny. What did you call it? Sleep. We have good sleep hygiene or something. Good sleep chemistry, which is really good. So if you're one of those couples that's got good sleep chemistry, your spouse is actually good for your health. That's great.

So that's a collection of things that can really help. The other thing is when you start measuring your sleep, you become much more accountable, I think, to your of going to bed. I think for a lot of people, there can be a sort of frantic nature to going to bed. And you start to realize too, the conversations that you have with your partner or the things you do on a phone or all these, right before you go to bed, actually meaningfully affect the quality of your sleep. You know, if you get into a little disagreement versus, you know, you're just lying there breathing happily,

like immediate effects in your first two hours of your sleep. Yeah. And so— Yeah, you don't want to be going to bed talking about your finances and— Yeah. You know. Or, yeah, you did this during the day or you didn't pick up or this and that, you know. Right.

You kind of want to stay away from that stuff right before bed. The couple other ones that come to mind, caffeine is, is highly personal in general. You know, if you want an ultimatum drinking coffee after 2 PM or caffeine after 2 PM may negatively impact your sleep that night. Right. Uh, so that's something to look out for. The half-life of it is almost 10 hours. So, so some people realize that they're you like it's a big European thing to have like a double espresso after dinner yeah and looks people metabolize caffeine differently right but yeah that I mean that would be a nightmare for me I'll be a nightmare for me too and I and I metabolize

caffeine fine but I can tell that it keeps me in a more a much lighter state another amazing hack that I'm addicted to is blue light blocking glasses. So, you know, it's just a red tinted glass and you put them on anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours before bed and immediately you just feel calmer and you'll start to even feel sleepy

if you're not used to the glasses. And what they do is they block all the blue light in your environment. You know. Highly stimulatory to cortisol. Yeah. You know, creating a waking state in the mind when you get a lot of blue light. Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm still probably optimizing a little more as being a CEO than a human.

So I'm on my phone a lot, you know, in the evening. Sometimes my wife and I'll watch TV or something. So like all of that light is stimulating your brain and saying, stay awake, stay awake, stay awake. Right. And so when you wear these glasses, it's like your get out of jail free card, you know? Right.

All of a sudden you, you know, you're much sleepier. It's an inexpensive life hack. You know, I feel the same way. I mean, I have the red light filter on my phone, you know, triple click. And I'm going to send you our new Whoop blue light, black and glasses. I'm pumped about that. You told me that before. I'm holding you to that.

We spent a long time actually researching the right tint to ultimately create the best filter for the blue light. Right. And you have data on that. Now, see, what I'm fascinated about by WHOOP is that I come from a healthspan because, you know, lifespan was essentially what we were trying to predict for the maturity of a life insurance policy or an annuity or a reverse mortgage. But I think in a lot of ways, accurate large data is even more actionable than things like, you know, clinical trials, randomized clinical trials that are only looking at one metric and isolating one metric, because you can take large pools of data on large pools of human beings across multiple ages, across, you know, sexes, and you can get very accurate information about what is having the biggest effect on sleep, on recovery, on strain.

And this data is – it's constantly educating itself. You know, I mean, like the amount of data that you probably gather now versus even two years ago. It's exponential. There's got to be some exponential difference. And the thing is it's actionable, right? So when you get back to some of these sleep hacks, so consistency in bedtime, cool environment, dark environment, have you actually gotten people to opt into using the red light and glasses and saying, oh, yeah.

Okay. So we have this capability in the Whoop journal, which I'll bring up here for a second yeah and we're gonna show this on the on the screen for you guys too yeah so when i go in the whoop journal i can hit settings and i'm just gonna look at it so i can remember all like we have about a hundred different things that you can track so acupuncture uh sugar adhd meds uh ag1s on here, air travel, alcohol, anti-anxiety meds, artificial light, bloating, blood pressure meds, blue light blocking glasses. And I'm like, I just got into B, but you know.

So blue light blocking glasses are on there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I can opt in and say, click, I wore those tonight. Yeah, so what you can do is you can first say you want to start tracking it. And so you opt into tracking it. And then what you do is every morning, it'll ask you certain characteristics about the thing that you chose.

So like caffeine, it'll ask you, okay, how many cups of coffee did you have? And when was your last one? Calcium might ask you, okay, you know, how many milligrams or whatever did you take of a specific supplement? You know, we've got cat in bedroom on here. Cat in the bedroom.

I mean, chemotherapy, clean eating, cold shower, compression therapy. So there's just an enormous number of, you know, creatines on here, cupping, obviously all sorts of massage things. Certain diets are on here, dairy-free diet, your device in bed, you know, dim lights. Now, are these your metrics or are you able to see Whoop's metrics and suggestions? Will it push me suggestions saying red light glasses have? Oh, totally. So you can actually go into some of these different things and look at, okay, from a population standpoint, how is this affecting Whoop members?

Wow. So that is really good data. So it's pretty fascinating. And we publish data on it too. So we'll show, because we're looking at it on a pretty large data set. So we'll be able to show, here are some of the different behaviors that were positive or negative for WHOOP members. dark, cold, consistent bedtime, blue light glasses. You can actually record whether or not you slept with your partner or didn't, your partner wasn't in the bed and you can actually see what kind of effect that's having. I think probably the notion of what kinds of conversations

you're having going into bed, those are huge. I mean, I know my wife in particular is very sensitive to that. I mean, she'll shut me down when I actually try to have an intense conversation and not a confrontational one, but when we're talking, we're building a business together. And when I talk about business deals

that we have on the table, she's like, I'm not having that discussion right before sleep because I'll go straight to sleep and then she'll lay up all night just thinking about what we just talked about. Those squirrels will start running. Yeah. I mean, you know, do you want to look at your email right before bed or not? Right. And so there's certain things it's like just being a little more intentional. And I do think that when you start measuring it, it just, it just dials up your awareness so high. Yeah. What I'm most excited

about is what we talked about earlier was, you know, measuring some of the modalities, you know, that I'm doing because, you know, when you start doing red light and cold plunging and, you know, and breathwork and sunlight exposure and grounding, PEMF and all of these different things, you sort of, you know, assume that they're all cumulatively having a good effect, but it'd be really nice to understand, which I'm going to start tracking and publishing, you know, which of these is having for the time spent the greatest impact. Yeah. We were looking at your, your restorative sleep a little earlier, and I think you were around like three hours. And then there was one night you had like four to five hours of restorative sleep. And so we were talking about, okay, well the day before that, or the night leading into that sleep, what were some of the things you were doing? Right. And so whenever you have these sort of like great outlier moments of positive data, it's interesting to try to unpack, well, what did I do to create that result? Yeah. And for, and for me, it was,

I remember the day before that was a Sunday that I had that sleep, but the day before, um, I had gotten up and gotten morning sunlight exposure. I'd done my breath work. I had, you know, some sun exposure on my skin. Um, and then that night I, and it was actually kind of a stressful day in terms of, uh, you know, I had a big speaking engagement. Anytime that I speak, I of, you know, I had a big speaking engagement. Sure. Anytime that I speak, I always, you always get the butterflies and then you're up on stage and you're sort of amped up on adrenaline, especially when it's a large crowd. So it wasn't stressful,

but I was very in a heightened state of awareness. And then that night I used the PMF mat. Um, I actually use mouth tape, um, which I'm intermittent about, but I used mouth tape that night. And I also use the, the, uh, you know, my, my little goggles, I use a soft mask now. And so I sleep in the complete abyss, you know, darkness and, and the room was very cold. So, um, so that might be your formula, right? Yeah. I think that's dialing into my, my formula and, you know, I have this sleep challenge coming up in another week and I really want to give people good data. Um, you know, basics that they can measure inexpensive basics that they can measure. Everybody can make the room darker. Everybody can chill their room down a little bit more. Everybody can try to be consistent about

sleep. And I think be consistent about sleep. And I think being consistent about sleep is also being consistent about making small promises to yourself. Like I noticed you kind of cut dinner off last night. You didn't cut it off. You were done, but you were like, hey, I'm the same way. Not trying to be rude, but I'm like, you know, I try to. That's why I set our dinner so early. Right. Because I knew you give it a few hours.

I didn't want it to be 1230 in the morning when everybody was going home. And then come run a podcast on deep sleep. Right, exactly. It's kind of oxymoronic. Hey guys, if you've been watching the Ultimate Human Podcast for any length of time, you know that one thing I do not do is push products. I do not just let any advertiser into this space because I believe that the products that appear on the ultimate human podcast should be things that I

use every day in my life to improve my own physiology one of them is something called the echo go plus the echo go plus is a hydrogen water generator that you can take on the go you essentially take the top off of this bottle you pour bottled water in this and repeatedly it will make high part per million hydrogen water you press this little button you'll see these bubbles going up in the water that's hydrogen being created in the water there are all kinds of peer-reviewed published clinical studies on the benefits of hydrogen water including reduced inflammation better absorption of your supplements better absorption of your foods better balance of the stomach acid and it feeds an entire class

of bacteria in your gut hydrogen water in my opinion is the most beneficial water that you can drink and now you can take it wherever you go you can go to echo echoh2C-H-O, H2O.com. That's echo, E-C-H-O, H2O.com. Enter the code ULTIMATE10 for a discount. Echo H2O. Enter the code ULTIMATE10 for a discount. And now back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. Well, we had quite the biohacking morning this morning. Yeah, for sure.

I mean, my big takeaway was hydrogen, hydrogen, hydrogen. Yeah. So why don't you explain to your audience some of the things you took me through? Well, you know, first, I'm a huge believer in hydrogen, not just hydrogen water. And, you know, for those of you that are science geeks like myself, you can go to a website called hydrogenstudies.com, about 1,300 studies on that site. You can actually select out the animal studies. You can look just at human trials and probably 300, 400 human trials on that site, looking at everything from pathologies like the use of hydrogen gas and hydrogen water on Alzheimer's, dementia, you know, Parkinson's, autoimmune, autism, Asperger's, all kinds of neuroinflammatory conditions in the body and autoimmune conditions

in the body. But also there's some interesting studies on there just about basic health biometrics, reduction of inflammation, improving the absorption of supplements and nutrients, improving the absorption of our, you know, our food and our vitamins and minerals, and then also helping to heal the gut by restoring a natural state of having hydrogen gas in the gut. So we ran you through the hydrogen garden today. So I think we started with, when you showed up this morning, we did a nice, I have a four-stage RO filtered steam room here. And the reason why I'm just so obsessive about filtering the steam is a lot of times, if you're going into a municipal steam room, you know, they're just vaporizing the chlorine gas, the microplastics, the pharmaceuticals, the fluoride.

And the first thing you said to me this morning, we were in the steam room, and we also have Ryan in there from the plunge, was, man, I can tell this is really clean steam. Yeah. And so we steamed for about 15, 20 minutes, and then we did a five minute cold plunge. And then we got out of the cold plunge and I put you in a hydrogen bath, which is just 102 degree bath, nice warm water. And we ran hydrogen gas into, into the bath. And that's why you felt so amazing when you get out of that. I mean, I've personally seen miracles with people getting in and out of these baths that have any kind of joint pain,

joint or muscle pain, scleroderma, eczema, psoriasis. Again, don't take my word for it. Go to hydrogenstudies.com and just read the studies on the impact of hydrogen gas on bathing in hydrogen gas and its effect on inflammation, joint pain, all those things. Well, one thing that was fascinating

getting in the hydrogen bath is it's a very cloudy looking liquid when you get in. Yeah, looks like milk. I mean, it's like white. Yeah, it's really white and kind of gray and cloudy. And plus you had the hose running on it the whole time. Which you kept throwing on the floor of my bathroom. I appreciate that. And so, but when I got out and I looked back in the,

in the tub, the water was clear. And so it just shows you the absorption that must've happened. Well, we could see it, you know, you can see the gas going into the water and it just going right transdermal. And that's why you feel so good. I mean, so for people that have any kind of joint pain, it's, it's pain, it's a miracle. Yeah, I hadn't done it before, but I can feel the benefits now. Your body just feels a little looser and your muscles feel relaxed, but also stimulated.

Yeah. You know, it's a weird state to kind of feel like you could both lie down and do a deadlift. Right. You know? Yeah. Normally my muscles feel like they're more primed for one or the other. Yeah. It puts you in a state of just being very calm, very cognizant, very clear, kind of awake. And then we moved you into a red light bed. And I biostacked this red light bed too. So it has PMF and it has this pulse electromagnetic field, which is just a low Gauss magnetic current. And, um,

I put the hydrogen goggles on you. So we, we ran hydrogen gas into the eyes. We, we actually had, um, earbuds that actually run hydrogen right, right in against the tympanic membrane,

you know, the eardrum. And then we ran a nasal cannulas in. So you got hydrogen gas, you know, intranasally. People are listening to this and they're either like, wow, this is epic, or this is like a hazing mechanism.

Dude, this is like, these people are nuts. But I am such a believer in hydrogen gas, hydrogen bathing, hydrogen water. And then, of course, now you're drinking a hydrogen water bottle. So, you know, you're getting the full monty this morning. But you did say that, you know, it felt like it made you more clear and more cognizant, you know. For sure. Yeah. I would say I feel clearer.

The only challenge now is it's hard for me now to pinpoint which of the things, right? Yeah, right. My guess is all of them have a variety of benefits. Well, that's what I'm excited about with Whoop. Exactly. We should have tagged it and seen. Yeah. But I'm going to go back and figure out the times

that I was in theirs and then add them on my whoop app. And I'll see what my body was doing during some of them. I have a feeling that the period in the bath was very parasympathetic. And I wanted to kind of check that, whether that's the case. Definitely. I mean, it's definitely shifting you

from that sympathetic fight or flight ish to, into that Paris. Cause we had also just gone from a cold plunge. Yeah. Which depending on how good you are at breathing and how often you do, it can be sympathetic or parasympathetic depending on how you feel. Yeah. I want to get back into the whoop for a minute because there's,

you know, you could get paralysis of analysis also, you know, with data. That's the Achilles heel of data. But if you're tracking your sleep and you're sort of hacking your way into better sleep, you're looking at your deep and your REM, and then that's directly going to correspond to some of the other metrics on WHOOP like strain and recovery so talk a little bit about what the strain metric does because um you know when you look in the literature there's not a lot of you know strain is not a category of thing that is that is highly studied um so i feel like it's a whoop thing so what what makes up the strain and how is it yeah so if you just go back a little bit to

our earlier conversation which was around this idea of how do you tell someone what to do or how do you balance someone's body all the research i had done you know 15 years ago even was well really you want to balance someone's recovery with the strain or the stress they put on their body right so if your body is well recovered you take on a lot of strain. And if your body's run down, you take on less strain and, you know, medium and medium and so forth. Which obviously sleep plays a major part in that, but it's not the only part. Yeah.

Sleep is a major driver of recovery, but you can actually find on WHOOP, there'll be some nights where you don't get that much sleep, but you have a high recovery. And there may be other physiological things that are going on. So maybe your heart rate variability was higher. Maybe your resting heart rate was lower. Maybe your respiratory rate was declining. Your pulse ox was high. These are all other metrics that WHOOP is looking at to make sure your body's recovered. And strain is really a measurement of cardiovascular or muscular load. So the primary metric that people will be observing throughout the day is related to their heart rates.

And so if your heart rate is spending more time in an elevated percentage of your max heart rate, you're gonna have a higher number on WHOOP. And it's a zero to 21 point scale. It gets actually harder to go up the scale. Oh, it does. So you really have to have a lot of improvement. So going from zero to 10 is much easier than from 10 to 15. It's much easier than 15 to 21. So people will notice that as well. And so it's really looking at cardiovascular exertion. But

however, in the last year, we added muscular load as well. So if you do a weightlifting workout and you want to add what your weights were and your reps and all of that, Whoop will now be able to calculate the effective tonnage on your body and it will include that in the strain score. When you say calculate the effective tonnage, like the total amount of load strain that you put on the body over that period of workout time? Yeah. So we acquired a company two and a half years ago that had developed some pretty sophisticated algorithms for understanding the velocity of all sorts of different reps and weights. So essentially how your body was moving weight and how that then directly correlated to the muscular strain that was happening to your body. So we acquired that hardware and then we actually were able to take a lot of the algorithms and

produce the same results from our smaller form factor, which had, again, similar capabilities around accelerometry or gyroscopes. So a lot of it's using movement to understand what was the actual rep that you did yeah so when you input that you were doing um say bicep curls or a squat or something whoop will identify that rep in the in the workout that you did it'll look at the the velocity at which you did it it'll then take the uh number of reps and the weight that you told us that you did and it'll use that to spit back out a muscular load score wow which is pretty powerful that is amazing yeah so whoops the first wearable to incorporate muscular load alongside cardiovascular load so this is giving you a real indication of

not only how ready you are to potentially take on intense, intense workouts, but the effectiveness of that workout on. Yeah, so for example, if you wake up on WHOOP and you have like an 80% recovery, WHOOP will recommend, okay, you should do between a 15 and a 17 strain today. And depending on how long you've been on WHOOP, it might even tell you, and you can do these different types of activities.

So for me, that would be, I've got a bunch of different weightlifting workouts in the app that I do. So it might recommend those, or it might say, go play squash for 50 minutes or go for a run for 90 minutes at this heart rate. So each of these different activities, you can tell that the amount of time is changing depending on which the activity is, and even, you know, the specification for what the activity would be. Yeah, it's so fascinating. You know, my son is kind of an extreme athlete. He does these ultra Spartans. He also trains MMA and he's 23 years old, so you're pretty headstrong at 23 and you don't think you can be killed by a bullet.

But what was really interesting was for several weeks, his strain was very, very high, and his recovery was dropping. And Whoop was sort of warning him about this. Yeah. And whoop was sort of warning him about this. And he's so headstrong and he had, he was training MMA and he wanted to start training for this like extreme Spartan race. And he didn't wanna give either one of them up. So he was over-training and the lights were flashing on whoop and one day he woke up and he had something

called rhabdomyolytis and rhabdo if you're an athlete is is a can be a serious condition you know it's a muscle wasting issue where you know the body starts to break down muscle from over training from training and it can really put a lot of strain on your kidneys it could potentially be be be fatal, I mean, he had to go into a month of just complete neutral, focusing on hydration, remineralizing, not even putting his body under strain and like cold plunges and saunas. We were using basics like red light, PMF, you know, just breath work, walking. And, you know, he came out of it just, just fine. But what, what the fascinating thing to me was that, you know, here's a young conditioned,

you know, highly conditioned athlete. And, and we started giving him the warnings weeks before this happened, that you really need to take a break. You really need to focus on recovery. Your strain is very high. Now your strain's high again, it's high again. Recovery is actually getting worse. And then bang, this hit. And I remember last night, so these are sort of some of the predictive analytics.

And this is, again, what's so exciting to me about big data, because when you look at testing, know, testing, for example, like we're getting very good at early detection of certain diseases and pathologies, like early, early detection of cancer, early detection of autoimmune disease, you know, early detection, but with big data, you actually get predictive analytics.

So rather than actually catching something early, you catch it before it starts. And I think this is the real fascinating thing about the convergence of artificial intelligence and big data. And you told me a story about during, and it was probably a pivotal moment for Woot, but during COVID, how you were tracking

respiratory rate and it became a leading indicator, very accurate leading indicator for COVID. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. So in January of 2020, a board member of ours came to me and he said, hey, I think this virus is going to be a global pandemic and i said why is that he said well if you just look at the r not of how fast it's growing it's going to be everywhere he had a background in growth because he worked at facebook during the boom years and he worked at uber during the boom years funny he's not a virologist but he's like he was a growth expert and he just said based on the way it's growing it's gonna be everywhere and so i said you know to to my team like, let's assume for a second this is true.

What would we have wanted to do? What would we have wanted to have done now before this happens? And we agreed we'd want to be able to track COVID. And we'd want to be able to know that someone gets COVID-19. And so we just started building a very simple thing in the Whoop app, which was the ability for someone to log that they tested positive for COVID-19. And so we just started building a very simple thing in the Whoop app, which was the ability for someone to log that they tested positive for COVID-19. And we rolled that out in March of 2020. And by the end of March of 2020, we had 2000 people who had reported testing positive for COVID. Now, if you go back in time and just think March of 2020, like most people were just

waking up to the idea that there was a virus floating around. Oh, this is super early. Yeah, we had a massive data set relative to anyone else in the world. And so we partnered with CQU and Cleveland Clinic, who are two different leading research institutions, and we said, hey, let's look at this data together. And over the course of the next few months, we found what was a smoking gun in the data. Now, when you get sick, whoop will often

be able to tell very easily. There's a lot of things about your body that change when you get sick. So let's just talk about, for example, a cold versus the flu versus COVID-19. All of those, you'll find that your resting heart rate goes up, your heart rate variability goes down. You'll likely have, you know, these low recoveries on whoop. You'll likely get more sleep disturbances throughout the night. Your quality of sleep will probably be down. So, you know, whoop will be flagging for you, hey, something's up here. The interesting thing though, is the difference between the cold, the flu, and COVID-19 was one more metric, and it only showed up for COVID.

And that was an extremely elevated respiratory rate. Your respiratory rate really doesn't change that much when you have the cold or the flu. And in fact, your respiratory rate really doesn't change at all. Like when you look at people's respiratory rates, they are very steady. We measure it to the 10th. change at all. Like when you look at people's respiratory rates, they are very steady. We measure it to the 10th. And, you know, if I looked at my last month of respiratory rate, it'd probably be between, you know, 12.7 and 13.0. Like it's just like a very tight band does not change. What we saw for the people who had reported having COVID is they had a jump of 20 to 30%

in their respiratory rate wow i mean you don't need any data science to be able to see this in a graph like it just went like this and then like this wow and so someone who had a respiratory rate was this prior to the symptoms hitting yes so in many cases it was two to three days before symptoms wow and. And so we, we published this research in June of 2020 and, and it went on to be peer reviewed and, and all the like. And so it was a kind of a big moment of us saying, Hey, everyone watch out for your respiratory rate. At that time, a lot of sports were coming back, right. Or they were trying to come back and they were trying to figure out, Hey, what is, what is the protocol going to be for be for us to return to play? And, you know, this is a time when people were wearing hazmat suits and

it was a pretty crazy time to go back. And so the PGA Tour was the first sport back. And in June of 2020, there was a golf tournament and the protocol was you would get tested on a Tuesday. And if you tested negative, you were cleared to play the rest of the week. And golf tournaments go from Thursday through Sunday. And there was a guy named Nick Watney who had been wearing Whoop for a long time because he really liked Whoop. And so he tested negative on a Tuesday.

And then on Thursday, he woke up and he saw on Whoop all of the things that we had written about, in particular, the huge spike in respiratory rate. So he saw this in his Whoop data. He saw it in his Whoop data. And again, it's not subtle. We wanted to make it very obvious that someone had an elevated respiratory rate.

And so he went to the doctors and he said, hey, look, I've identified this in my Whoop data, and I think I should get tested again they're like what is whoop and you know you can imagine but anyway they you know they they originally told me you're cleared to play and he said no I want to get one more test and so he got one more test and sure enough it came back positive Wow and he you know didn't even have symptoms and so he he dropped out of the tournament and later that day you know we get a call from from the pga tour saying hey we need to procure a thousand whoop straps to put on everyone on

you're like we we can accommodate that yeah yeah they put on all the uh the players and the media members and the caddies and whatnot and and so we became part of the bubble of the pga tour that's and we had probably you know five staff traveling from all these, you know, all these different places. And that's one of those sort of moments in time I realize you'll never, you'll probably never repeat where I would go to a golf tournament and, you know, it's like joining a, you know, a country club with 150 of the best golfers in the world because you're kind of just sitting in the locker room. And there's no one else around. Yeah. And it's like you have lunch with Rory and Tony Finau and John Rahm, and everyone's looking at their WHOOP data.

And it was just, it was a, it was a crazy moment in time. That's awesome. But, uh, but you know, we, we had a bunch of other examples like that and throughout really the whole COVID, uh, you know, period, we were getting messages every day about people realizing they had COVID from the WHOOP app. Yeah. And, and I mean, even today, if you're looking at your respiratory rate

and you see that spike, it might be indicative that you've got COVID coming around the corner. If you see the respiratory rate alert and you tap on it, it'll say something to the effect of, this could be caused by a massive change in altitude, heavy smoking, or COVID-19. Or COVID-19. And so it's easy to narrow down.

So people will figure that out for themselves. Yeah. And, you know, and again, I think that this lends itself to the big predictive analytics of big data. And I think therein lies, when we talk about longevity, anti-aging, bio-optimization, when you combine, you know, the technologies for early detection, you combine large pools of data, but now with AI, you can actually get predictive analytics like this. This is the next generation of medicine, I feel like, because people can make behavioral modifications that will have demonstrative impact on their lifespan, on their healthspan. We knew in the mortality space that the reason why most people were not living healthier, happier, longer lives were what we called back then modifiable risk factors. You know, if they changed a few things about diet, lifestyle, supplementation,

it had credible impacts on healthspan and lifespan. But now it's reaching the masses through things like WHOOP, where I can sort of take this into my own hands, become my own citizen scientist. Totally. Run my own experiments and really feel, really figure out what's working for me, not just what I think is working for me. Totally. And we recently announced and launched a partnership with OpenAI where you can really get very exploratory about your data inside the Whoop app.

So there's an interface inside the Whoop app where you can talk directly to Whoop. And this is powered by OpenAI. It has completely non-retentive data permissions. So your data is completely secure. And you get to ask, you know, Whoop essentially, how does my HRV compare to, you know, 50 year old men? Or what are they doing that I'm not doing? Or how's my training compared to-

This is available now? Yeah. And I can speak it into the app? You can tap it into the app. Dude, I'm loving this thing. Like, I'm so geeked out. I want to get over this podcast so I can go do this right now.

Like, I'm so excited. So I'll show you this off air, but you literally can go into the app and start talking to Whoop. And this is a capability that is only going to get better in the coming months and years. And our aspiration is to have WHOOP be able to function as your 24-7 coach or your trainer or your nutritionist

and eventually, you know, continuation of the doctor's office where you can ask WHOOP questions about your data or it'll prompt you and say, hey, we're seeing these different variables, what's going on? And you all of a sudden just feel like you've got this coaching interface that sits on top of all your data. Yeah. Oh my God, that's so awesome. What is that you can talk about that you're comfortable talking about? Where is Whoop going in the future? I mean, what are some of the

things that are inspiring you right now about all of this data and all of these metrics and the impact that you can make um because clearly it's become sort of morphed right from from from being this data analytics tool with some some basic features to now combining all of this data with more intrinsic features about the person themselves and you know i feel like you could get a phd and going down the rabbit hole of what this this could do but what's really inspiring you about where whoop's going and what are some maybe some things on the horizon we could expect to see from you guys yeah Yeah. If you think about the last 12 years of building this company, our mission has always been to unlock human performance. And I think what's powerful is

our definition of human performance has changed throughout the company's growth. You know, in the earlier years, we were working entirely with professional athletes. Two of our first hundred users were people like LeBron James and Michael Phelps. Like we just started at the tip of the pyramid. And so human performance then meant winning an NBA championship or a gold medal, right? And they were really the only area of society probably at that time that was that focused on those kinds of things. And recovery even was still a new concept for pro athletes as a metric. And then from there, it was fitness enthusiasts and it was, you know, people who are kind of hardcore in their own right, but, you know, have day jobs. And in part from COVID and in part from

our expanding health capabilities, now today we have a pretty wide ranging consumer on Whoop. And it's everyone from people who wanna get fitter to people who wanna get healthier to people who are just aspirational in their daily lives and wanna think about how measuring their bodies can increase their awareness or increase their performance a little bit. And if you think about that sort of next chapter for WHOOP,

it's pulling that continuation of performance even further. And that's where WHOOP will be obviously playing in the medical space very directly. We'll have capabilities that are medically approved. We will have information that I think interacts very closely with the healthcare system. I truly believe the potential of 24-7 health monitoring is to be able to predict or diagnose things before they happen. You know, the healthcare system's messed up, especially in the United States, because it's all curative costs. Like something bad has happened, let's fix it. And if you can shift curative costs to being preventative costs, you can really turn the industry on its head, not to mention improve people's lives considerably. So I'm very excited about the work that we're doing to develop this technology to, you know,

provide a much wider range of capabilities and play a role in preventative care. Yeah. I mean, I think that too, when you start taking, because you have more voluminous data and more accurate real-time data, then, you know, your trips to the doctor's office are very point in time, you know? Like your toothache that you've had for three weeks never hurts when you go to see the dentist, right? And so they're very point in time. And I think as such, we also, medicine, in my opinion, historically, is also a very point in time, meaning it's about the acute event that's going on at the moment that you're interfacing with your

doctor. And I think if you look at most medical research, you know, a lot of the research that's out there right now is we study a single metric at a time, right? We don't study the human being. We don't study the sphere of how we live our lives. You know, we talked about this last night, how I feel like some of the worst research we do in medicine is when we study things in isolation, right? You take a cell out of the human body, you put it in a petri dish and you introduce toxins or beneficial compounds and you look at how the cell behaves. But the truth is that that cell's behaving in a community

and it's normal environment, it's not isolation. It's normal environment, it's a communal environment. And there's all kinds of interactions going on. And I think that when you start studying human beings like that, when you look at behavioral patterns, sleep patterns, recovery patterns, strain patterns, and then you start to get big data on what's influencing this, you know, some of the sleep hacks you're talking about or nutritional impacts, you know, now we're able to slice this down to not only predicting early on where the accident could be down the road,

but really feeding data real time into a medical system instead of just taking a snapshot of when I show up in front of my doctor. Because the doctor doesn't know what I've been doing for the three months prior to this? Oh, totally. The goofiest day of the year is when you show up for your annual checkup and like they're taking your pulse reading and your blood pressure. It's like, look, I can show you this continuously

for the last 10 years if you'd like. Right, and I can show you an average. And I can show you what makes it better and what makes it worse. You know, maybe I had just a little bit of white coat syndrome that day and they're like, Oh, you got high blood pressure. Yeah. I think what we'll ultimately get to is you're not going to go see your doctor on a random day of the year. You're going to go see the 30 minutes before

something's about to happen. Yeah. Yeah. That is, that is really just fascinating. Most of us have a very difficult time meeting our protein needs and certain protein sources like whey protein and others can be as little as 20% absorbable. This is 99% absorbable and it has all of the essential amino acids that the body needs to build lean muscle, to recover, to improve our exercise performance, and most importantly to repair after we have intense exercise so this is called perfect amino by body health it's like i said 99 absorbable it only has two calories eventually the caloric intake has virtually no caloric intake it will not break a fast it tastes amazing you mix it in water i take this literally every single morning if you're working out in a fasted state you have to take a full spectrum amino acid

prior to your workout to preserve your lean muscle and make sure that you're recovering properly and again it will not break your fast so the caloric impact is virtually zero you get all the full spectrum amino acids it tastes wonderful i use it every single day you can go to bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate that's bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate and look for the perfect aminos they actually come in capsules if you're on the go or it becomes in several flavors that they make in a powder which i love it's flavored with natural um uh means of flavoring so there's no artificial sweeteners in here so this is one of my absolute favorite products give it a try if you're working out at all you need a full spectrum amino acid go to bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate that's bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate

i love their lab tested products you can actually see the absorption rate for all of their products they've got great electrolyte protein combinations my favorite is the perfect aminos bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate and now back to the ultimate human podcast so um i'm also fascinated by like the cardiac metrics that you're taking like the accuracy that you have with heart rate variability and some of the other cardiac metrics, because I have a very close friend who's a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai. And one of the things that he told me was that he believes that, you know, wearables are the future of cardiovascular medication, cardiovascular medicine, because we do have these like long histories of warnings, usually before there's some kind of catastrophic event.

In advanced cardiovascular disease, one of the first symptoms is sudden death. And that's a tragic symptom, right? So if you can have... That's high stakes. That's high stakes. I mean, so if you can have some kind of predictive analytics that's like feed something to you or even to your cardiologist to say, hey, these are some anomalies that are creeping up, like the respiratory rate increasing before you actually are symptomatic. I mean, it's just fascinating to me that we're going actually beyond early detection, that we're going to predictive analytics.

I think it's really exciting. I think also having so many people now starting to collect data on their bodies, you build population-level data sets. We're starting to observe things about different countries and different cultures and, you know, how, uh, different behaviors are affecting a wide range of people. You know, I, I, I also want to, um, my, you know, my audience is really fascinated by all the talks that we just covered, but, um, I also have a large entrepreneurial audience and, and before we wind down the podcast, I'd be doing everybody a disservice if I didn't But I also have a large entrepreneurial audience. And before we wind down the podcast, I'd be doing everybody a disservice if I didn't talk a little bit more about your entrepreneurial journey.

Because I think it's fascinating any time you see somebody with a dream go against the grain and build a multibillion-dollar company. The last valuation that I read about your company, I don't know if it's accurate or not, was about three and a half billion dollars, 3.6 billion dollars. It's accurate. You recently raised $400 million at that valuation. Did you ever actually see yourself in the seat of a multi-billion dollar company?

And if you did, that's great. But when you were starting this out, were you like a data nerd with a dream or did you say this is going to change the world? I think I had a belief system that health monitoring was going to change the world and that I was going to build a team that was going to build that health monitor.

And so, you know, a step further than that is saying you're going to change the world or a step further than that is acknowledging that you believe you're going to run a multi-billion dollar company. But I never was driven by the financial impact that it could have. I was always extremely focused on the technology piece of it and the metrics that our customers were getting, our members were getting, and whether that was actually helping them. And it's worth noting that there were a lot of kind of contrarian decisions along the way.

If you think about the wearables industry, there's actually been an enormous number of companies that have entered the space and failed. And some of the biggest, most powerful companies in the world. You take your sports apparel brands, you know, there was Nike and Under Armour and Adidas and Puma and, you know, all these companies came to market with wearable products. And then on the technology side, you had, you know, starts and stops from Google and Amazon just exited. And, you know, Microsoft's had a lot of challenges. Samsung's had a lot of challenges. Samsung's had a lot of challenges.

They exited the wearable space. I didn't know they were even in it. Yeah. Well. Maybe that's why they exited. There you go. It's a bad sign if you don't know if they're there. So we saw a lot of companies fail and in a way a lot of companies sort of mimicking each other.

You know, the sports apparel brands tried to have a little bit of, you know, sizzle and branding on their stuff, but they lacked the tech and the substance. Right. And the tech companies, I think, lost sight of the fact that it wasn't just good enough that it measured stuff. You know, what was the identity behind it? Why does someone want to wear it on their body? You know, how does it feel? How does it look? Right. And so we tried to thread this needle of borrowing from, you know, brands like Nike and tech companies like Apple and to be able to build a technology that people get real data and value from but also feel good about wearing.

When you're going to wear something on your body 24-7, it starts to say a lot about who you are and you want that to be a positive connotation. And there's a, um, I mean, it's almost a cultish, uh, following and, and, and, and whoop, if you will. And, um, you know, I've, I've been blessed to work with some very prominent, you know, athletes, paylisters, celebrities, what have you. And, and the majority of them use whoop. Um, you know, athletes, paylisters, celebrities, what have you. And the majority of them use Whoop. Yeah. Yeah. They really do. I mean, I was just, you know, visiting one very prominent athlete, you know, recently, and I walked in with a Whoop and he was wearing a Whoop and it was initially how we started the conversation and we actually went into strain and sleep and recovery and it led into our whole biohacking discussion and our whole discussion on genetics and targeted

supplementation and everything but it was like an instant an instant common bond um and we talked about some of the other wearables we tried to use we didn't like our you know on our hands because we you know we were working out and that um i actually never take this thing off i mean i cold punch with a sauna, with a steam, with it, a shower with it. I basically don't even know that it's there. I think my body's just desensitized to it. Um, but there also had to be some, you know, points along the way, some, some, some tipping points where you were looking in the mirror and either going, this is not going to make it, or, you know, I've, we've grown too fast and now we're,

we're not making enough revenue to sustain our operations. But talk about just some of those tipping points for you on your, your entrepreneurial journey, where maybe it was a real alone time where maybe you were only admitting it to yourself and not your staff, or did you ever have any of those tipping points where you almost threw in the towel or thought the towel was coming over the ring? Yeah, I mean, I think there were a number

of periods of time like that. And I would also think about it through two lenses. One is the, I'm not going to make it feeling. And the other is the company's not going to make it feeling. And sometimes those overlapped and sometimes they didn't. And in the early days of building Whoop, you know, I think I was maybe 24 years old at that point. I was two years into it.

I managed to raise maybe 10, $20 million, which felt like an enormous amount of money. I had a staff of 25 people. Our technology was just starting to work. And yet I personally was strung out of my mind. Like it was really the first time in my life where I felt so overwhelmed and so under pressure. And I felt an enormous accountability for all the capital we had raised and the shareholders and, you know, these new customers who were trying it. And, uh, and I was, you know, drinking kind of an unlimited amount of coffee, which had no effect on my body. I was drinking too much alcohol. Like it was just a period of building a wearables company too. Yeah. All around health. Right. Yeah. And so it was a, it was a period of time where I was just, um, kind of spinning out of control.

And, uh, and so that was a time when I was able to reset personally. I got really into meditating. I met my now wife. I really focused on what's my identity in building this company and how do I take care of myself first? I think there was a period of time where I really thought of my performance and the company's performance as one in the same. And I think that's a dangerous thing that a lot of entrepreneurs can do where, you know, your company's doing great, so you're doing great. Your company's doing poorly, so you're doing poorly. Your company's failing, you're failing. And the reality is you can actually be taking a lot of great shots on goal.

You can be showing up for work every day and doing a better version of yourself. And the business could be having all sorts of issues for maybe things that are out of your control. I find it very, very hard to separate from that. I think 99% of entrepreneurs and anybody that's built a business with their spouse knows that it's very difficult to say,

if you have a great day at the office, you're going to have a great day at home. If you have a really shitty day at the office, you're going to have a really shitty day at home. Yeah. And you're saying you learned to create some separation. And I learned, yeah, I learned to separate them and just get into a mindset of, well, how can I be a little bit better every day? How can I control the things that I do and focus on that? You know, at the end of the day, if you're pitching an investor, the only thing you can do is make a great pitch, right? You can't, you know, reach into their pockets and have them invest in your company. Like, you know, you know what I mean? Like there's only so many things you can control.

And so when you get into a mindset like that, it becomes much healthier and you start to really focus on your own growth and independent from the performance of the business. Right. And then often what happens is the business follows along as you're getting a little bit better. Or what happens is you just get better at dealing with the highs and the lows where you no longer feel like you're on a roller coaster. Like I felt like I was on a yo-yo. And for you, a lot of this was the discovery of meditation. I've actually heard you talk openly,

I think it was on Diary of a CEO podcast about your very first panic attack and about how your field of vision narrowed and how scary that was, the tingling and numbness and driving yourself to the ER. I mean, that had to be one of those Perry Mason to da moments. Like, okay, I need to dial in this. I need to reevaluate.

Yeah, reevaluate. Yeah, I had a panic attack when I was 24, you know, right around the company period that I just described. And I was so oblivious to the idea that I could even have a panic attack that I assumed I had had like food poisoning or something. Right, right. So I'm like racing to the ER thinking I've been poisoned. And of course it was just my, my own body saying, Hey, enough is enough. Nervous system fried. Yeah. Nervous system was fried. And

so that's when I discovered transcendental meditation. I started doing that, you know, twice a day for 20 minutes each, each session. And it just helped. It helped me in a lot of different ways in the context of being a businessman, but also being a person and just being like a present human and, you know, having my senses more aware, being much calmer, being more comfortable with negative feedback. You know, I was at a stage early on in building Whoop where there was a lot of negative sentiment towards the idea that, hey, this young kid who doesn't have an engineering degree or isn't a doctor is going to build this company that's based on the best tech and medicine. Like I just got a lot of negative feedback. And there was a period of time when I was facing more rejection than I had ever really faced before.

And that was an unfamiliar feeling. And so one of the defense mechanisms I had for it was just to put up a bunch of walls around me and- Get defensive? Yeah. And we're just not even, try to not even acknowledge negative feedback. Like it was like ultimate blinders. And that's a coping mechanism that can work for a period of time. But as you grow an organization and as you have a lot of people working closely with you, you really need to be able to absorb lots of different points of view and engage with them and dismiss them and, and accept them. And, and I was at a, you know, at that stage in building a company, I wasn't able to do any of that. Right. And, and I learned how to bring it back and and there's and

there's a there's an enormous amount of stress too and and just having to keep the game face on because you know everybody's on the deck of your ship and they're sort of looking at the captain going you know how confident is he or how um how stressed out is he and basically based on your confidence level so goes the organization and And you've got that stress on you too. Yeah. I think one thing that helped me a lot throughout the last 12 years was always believing really deeply in the problem we were solving. And I think if you have a problem that you're obsessed with, that can help pull you through a lot. So there were questions whether the technology was going to be able to solve the problem and existential questions around that. There were

questions around whether we could sell the technology for the right price points to generate the right business. There was questions around that. There was questions around whether we could raise the capital to attack this problem, you know, so forth, so forth, so forth. But at the end of the day, I had this incredibly deep conviction that this problem needed to be solved and that I was going to be part of that. And so by just continuing to come back to that, it helped me overcome some of the other, you know, details along the way. And look, as an entrepreneur, you're not entitled to build a good business. No, you know, 90% of the businesses fail. So you have to develop some sort of resilience. You have to learn how to

take on enormous amounts of stress and persevere through it. Right. Or it's never going to last. Well, this has been amazing, man. Um, I've, I've a hundred percent. I want to have you back as this journey with, you know, whoop continues to grow because I, I just think you're so ahead of the curve and, and technology, artificial intelligence, large data on real human beings in real time, in my opinion, is the greatest frontier of, of modern medicine right now.. Biooptimization, longevity, aging, whatever you want to call it. I always try to wind my podcast down by asking my guests the same question. If you've seen this, you know this question is coming. There's no right or wrong answer to it.

But what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? I think to be able to meet the stresses and demands on my life and persevere through them and to be happy. To be happy. That's a great one. And happiness is a choice. I mean, it's a very personal choice. It's not, it's not up to somebody else. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's a hard, it's actually another ingredient in the entrepreneur's, you know, uh, diary, so to speak that I think it's overlooked. You know, there's a lot of hard charging people I've met. I'm sure you've met on paper, you read all the successes, right? The wealth, whatever. And then you can tell they're just not very happy right like they're kind of miserable actually yeah maybe not purpose driven you know yeah yeah and so uh and so for me i think being able to balance uh

success in sort of a material sense but like with meaning and purpose and uh you know gratitude really is i think the word I'm looking for. By being grateful, I've been able to, I think stay much more present and process driven on this journey to building a company. I think that a lot of entrepreneurs, and I was, again, this was me at one point, you're kind of on this dopamine journey where

you keep telling yourself, well, when you get to this stage, that's when the magic happens. Oh, when Whoop is worth a hundred million, I'm going to be happier when it's worth 250 or when it's worth a billion and a half, or when we have these many customers or when we have this much revenue or when I have this many employees and you kind of keep setting these goalposts. And the thing about dopamine is just telling yourself you're going to be happy at a certain destination actually is motivating. Yeah.

It does. It's a mechanism. It works. Yeah. But you've, you know, when you put that in overdrive, what inevitably happens is when you get to that destination, it's not what you told yourself it would be. And of course you're not, you're not fulfilled yet. And so the, the, the key along the way, I believe is you balance all of it with gratitude and that produces serotonin. And so now you've got a dopamine and serotonin system working together. Yeah. Wow. I've never heard it explained that way. It makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming on today, man. I mean, this has just been a fascinating journey and I'm, I'm excited about

our, our next chapter together and the sleep challenge and everything you're doing at Whoop. I'm sure my audience has a million questions. How do they find out more about Whoop? Where can they see some of your research? How do they find out more about you? Where can my audience find you? Yeah. I mean, if you're interested in Whoop, I think whoop.com is a good place to start,

w-h-o-o-p.com. We also now are offering a uh a free trial as part of your your sleep program awesome so people should check that out but they can essentially try whoop for free for 30 days so uh you know if you're questioning whether it's right for you you know now all you have to do is just try it yeah and you can send it back if you don't like it and you don't get charged. So that's kind of an amazing opportunity right now to get on the product. And yeah, I'm on social media.

My handle's just at Will Ahmed. Okay. And so that's a good place to find me. And look, I'll just add, you know, Gary, it's been great spending time with you. I have a lot of admiration for the community that you're speaking to. You just seem to have a very positive and very

science-based message. And it's been pretty awesome to see what I think has been kind of a meteoric rise in the last couple of years. It really has, yeah. And so I'm sure it's going to keep going and look forward to doing more together. Thank you, brother. And as always, that's just science.