WHOOP Podcast - Andy Puddicombe, Buddhist Monk and Headspace Co-Founder on his amazing life journey and giving people the tools to improve health and happiness through meditation.

Episode Date: February 26, 2019

Headspace Co-Founder Andy Puddicombe talks about getting into meditation at an early age (4:30), quitting school and traveling to the Himalayas (6:35), the effects meditating 14 hours a day had on his body (13:02), amazing lessons from his teachers (18:22), what it took to officially become a monk (31:49), his degree in Circus Arts (40:27), re-acclimating to the modern world (42:46), creating Headspace (46:39) and meeting his Co-Founder Rich Pierson (50:13) why he's a "massive fan" of WHOOP (56:33) and what he's learned from using it (1:00:08), how he incorporates meditation into his family life today (1:01:25), and what we can expect from Headspace in the future (1:24:17).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

We discovered that there were secrets that your body was trying to tell you that could really help you optimize performance, but no one could monitor those things. And that's when we set out to build the technology that we thought could really change the world. Welcome to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WOOP, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. At WOOP, we measure the body 24-7 and provide analytics to our members to help improve performance. This includes strain, recovery, and sleep. Our clients range for the best professional athletes in the world, to Navy SEALs, to fitness enthusiasts, to Fortune 500 CEOs and executives.

The common thread among WOOP members is a passion to improve. What does it take to optimize performance for athletes, for humans, really anyone? We're launching a podcast to dig deeper. We'll interview experts and industry leaders across sports, data, technology, physiology, athletic achievement, you name it. My hope is that you'll leave these conversations with some new ideas and a greater passion for performance. With that in mind, I welcome you to the Whoop podcast.

I just had this really strong feeling that I was never really strong feeling that I was never really going to feel that sense of peace that I was looking for, a sense of happiness that I was looking for, if I just continued to study from a book. So I put down the meditation books and the sports science books, and I quit uni and headed off to the Himalayas instead. Today I'm talking to Andy Puddacom, co-founder of the wildly popular meditation app Headspace, which has over 30 million downloads to date. Andy is just about the last thing you'd expect

from someone who started a tech company. He is a Buddhist monk with a degree in circus arts, and his life journey is just fascinating. This is a guy who, as a young man, was a little bit lost and someone who went out quite a bit. And then next thing you knew, he was spending 10 years becoming a Buddhist monk. And when he returned back to the UK,

he met his partner, Rich Pearson, and he created Headspace, which if any of you have downloaded, you're definitely going to recognize Andy's voice because he's the voice of Headspace and guided meditation. We also talk about how he uses Whoop to think about his own health and the many things he does to optimize performance every day. If you're someone who meditates, this is a must listen. If you're someone who doesn't meditate, this may convince you to give it a shot.

And I think that's a great thing for anyone. So without further ado, here's Andy. and his world cast voice. Andy, thanks for doing this. It's a pleasure. It's good to meet you well. So we are sitting here in your Venice studio. It looks like a space that you've spent a lot of time

and really refined over the years. There's so much I want to talk to you about, but I thought I would first start just by asking you, you know, how did you get into starting headspace? Yeah, when I look back at that whole journey, I kind of see that there's a few kind of points along the road, you know. there's getting introduced to meditation at a really young age sort of 10 or 11 years old and doing that kind of growing up um obviously there was going away and becoming a Buddhist monk I say obviously

but you know having having done that and training for for all those years and then I think there was the realization of there are a lot of people out there who are looking for ways to to cope in life not just cope in terms of struggling with stress and sleep and that kind of things, but also to sort of optimize life as well and not necessarily having the tools and the skills. So I think going back to the UK, meeting my co-founder, Rich Pearson, about 10, 11 years ago now, that was the significant kind of shift that ended up, us both going on this, this journey of headspace. Well, we'll come back to it. I think it's amazing what you guys have built and you should be so proud of it.

And I personally think meditation is incredibly important. Like, it's something that I've introduced in my life, really changed my life. I think it's a superpower. And for anyone who's listening who sort of isn't sure if meditations right for them, I highly, highly recommend it. And for you, you got into it at a young age. So how did that happen? Yeah, it was with my mom, you know.

Mom was, you know, she's pretty progressive. Still now, she's still kind of, she has this thing that she was always a little too early with things. and um i still think that's a case she's in a mid-70s she's still working full-time she was like therapy and stuff but even growing up we had a sensory deprivation tank in our in our garage like she was running like therapy clinics and things she started going to meditation classes when i was about 10 years old and i just went along with her and it had a real it sounds strange because it wasn't i was living a very normal 10-year-old life like We weren't, you know, like a crazy family.

It wasn't sort of the center of a cult or anything. It was, I was doing normal things, and I was playing rugby and football and tennis and basketball. And, you know, I was super sporty, but I really felt like I needed that grounding in my life, even at that age. And I found that meditation, for whatever reason, gave me that opportunity to step back from, you know, the stuff that was going on in my life and the emotional pressures of growing. up and just kind of give me a greater sense of calm and what was your meditation practice then so i started off with t m actually so i'm so i did 20 minutes in the morning 20 minutes in the evening um and that was that's what i do oh you do yeah yeah i like it yeah yeah i found it i found it really found it really helpful what i discovered kind of over time um and i think it's such a personal kind of

journey and different things different approaches are going to resonate with with different people on that journey i just discovered some other sort of techniques and uh sort of philosophies i guess some broader philosophies um that i found really sort of captivating and engaging and yeah as i say that eventually led to me going down the the path of becoming a buddhist monk now was it obvious that you were going to become a buddhist monk or did you have sort of this tipping point moment it was in no way obvious. Okay. So to give some context, I was, I was at university.

I was studying sports science. I was working as a personal trainer. I had a girlfriend that were none, there was none of the foundations. So nothing is pointing towards Buddhist Monk. At this stage, nothing is pointing towards Buddhist Monk. I was also still competing in gymnastics, so very sort of physical. And I was going out drinking a lot as well. So, yeah, you wouldn't have thought it.

And then I think I just hit, it's probably about half. halfway through my degree. It was probably about a year and a half in. Just kind of hit a real point. How old were you at this time? I was 22. Okay. So I'd gone to university a little bit late. I took three years to go traveling. Before I even thought about going back. So you were always adventurous. Let's leave it at that. Yeah, I think that's fair to say. And I just hit a point where I just felt that I was quite regularly overwhelmed in my mind. I'd gone through some stuff in my late teens. been involved in a car accident where some some people had died my step sister had died as well in yeah right about that you had this like really brutal yeah it was just a tough right a really tough

year and and i i had dealt with it to the extent of sort of getting by but i'd never really kind of sat with that stuff and got comfortable with it or as comfortable as you can and i just I just had this really strong feeling that I was never really going to feel that sense of peace that I was looking for, that sense of happiness that I was looking for, if I just continued to study from a book. And at some stage, I had to kind of take that next leap. So I put down the meditation books and the sports science books. And I quit uni and headed off to the Himalayas instead. And how did you decide the Himalayas were the right place even to go?

So, like, is there a becoming a Buddhist monk manual or? I wish there was. There should be. Maybe, maybe there's a market there. You know, I was actually heading for Thailand. And the girl that I was going out with at the time, lovely girl. And she was really into sort of Buddhism. And probably about three months before, it was clear that, obviously, we were going to break up and I was going to go away.

But we were chatting about sort of where I was going to go. And a friend of hers had just come back from. Ram Sala where the Dalai Lama lives and was saying how amazing it was and I kind of thought well at this stage I mean it was a pretty loose plan I just knew I wanted to become a monk right I was going to go to I was going to fly to Bangkok and I heard about this I was like no actually I'll go there so I flew out to India and I started my journey in in in northern India up in the foothills of the Himalayas where the Dalai Lama lives wow so you you land in India yeah and at this point do you have like a lot of possessions with you. I feel like the whole mindset is you don't need anything. You just... Yeah, I mean... You're about to become this new...

Yeah. Just a new person, right? Yeah, it's a very strange thing because obviously this is before... And it's really hard now, isn't it, to even remember that time? This was before sort of the internet and being able to just Google, what do I need to become a Buddhist monk? And do I need to take anything? And there was the Lonely Planet kind of guidebook, but that was about it. So I took...

I probably went off with fairly... standard sort of backpacking kind of gear. Nothing there that was particularly valuable and everything that I was happy to kind of give up. But it was probably a little bit later kind of on my journey. So you train to become a monk. Right. First as a lay person and as a novice monk.

And there's a stage in which you kind of give up your worldly belongings, as they say. So there was a time where I kind of had to give up every, or I chose to give up everything. Right. um sort of clothes and yeah everywhere all all my possessions so what is that first week or first month like and at any point during that where you're like okay i may have i may have over yeah that's like i may have gone too far yeah most days um yeah i bet it's really hard yeah well it's it's interesting there's definitely it's uh i and i get the impression from other people i've spoken to friends um who've gone down this route there's a kind of there is an initial kind of high which is

It's essentially the honeymoon period. You've arrived there. You feel like you shed all the kind of stuff from your past. And, oh, it's so nice. Just to be able to sit in silence. And then it's kind of like, this is actually pretty hard. And my knees hurt. And I don't know if I really, it's a bit boring sometimes.

And I think inevitably sitting with oneself is quite challenging. And what were you doing on a daily basis? So at that stage, I was just doing retreat. So I was meditating from morning till evening. It's amazing. It was probably, I could have probably found a slightly less steep on-ramp. I think in retrospect, I would have gone into it slightly differently. Yeah.

But I was, yeah, it was a little gung-ho, and I kind of was all in right from the beginning. And I... Good for you. I mean, that's amazing, really. had you ever done one of those meditation retreats where at that stage i hadn't okay so this was really yeah yeah and people ask me kind of often now sort of you know they want to do retreats or they want to you know sometimes even they want to become monks and nuns you know what should i do and and i say well first kind of establish a daily practice maybe just sort of you know even if it is

just 10 or people want to become monks before they got a meditation for sure you know people get excited about stuff you know and um and then i'm pretty gung-ho yeah it's pretty go-ho and then people like oh should i should i do one of those 10-day retreats i'm like well maybe just start with a weekend you know and see how that goes and then maybe do a five-day and then do a 10 day and build up slowly i feel like that's the same way to to approach it now as you're going from meditating because before you became you went down the process of becoming a monk you're meditating in the morning in the evening primarily Yeah, when I was a late. So maybe 40 minutes a day.

Yeah, I was probably doing somewhere between half an hour and an hour a day, yeah. And now you're at this period in your life, you're doing what call it 14 hours, 18 hours as much? Yeah, it really varied. And I would never suggest that I was doing that for the whole 10 years I was away. So sometimes in the monastery, you're in retreat and sometimes you're not. When you're not, you could be doing anything like sort of four to, eight hours a day maybe it depends on the monastery and the focus of the monastery but when you're in retreat when you're in sort of if you go into like a year long retreat or something then yeah you're

doing anything between 14 and 18 hours of meditation a day so did you start in the retreat yeah so i first went i did some short retreat so i started off with a month and then i did three months um and then i realized that actually i needed to dial that back a little bit and i went to a monastery where i was more involved in the community and learning the philosophy and psychology and not doing quite as much meditation and then slowly I built back up to a place where I was comfortable being in longer term retreat and sitting for sort of more more time. So that transition for your body I find kind of fascinating, right? Because you go from 40 to 60 minutes of meditation a day to almost, you know, at least 50%

of the day you're in some kind of meditative state. What did you start to notice about the way your brain was behaving, the way your body was behaving the way you looked at the world yeah i mean it's it's it's kind of hard to to capture in a way it was it was it was quite a tough transit i think it was the reason it was tough is so i'd gone from being you're you're a sporty person yeah obviously and and there's someone who you know when i left university i was probably i was training at least twice a day um once in the gym once in the gymnastics kind of hall and so i was probably training like four hours a day okay and and eating maybe you know like five six meals a day something like that right and immediately that got shut off

so there's no no physical exercise you must have lost a ton of weight at all i lost a ton of weight but it was more the energetic system i feel like we all become habituated to condition to the way we live sure and so suddenly kind of sitting there i felt like i might sort of explode you know because i was so used to expending that energy and all of a sudden I was just sitting there on the floor with my eyes closed completely still and so I actually found that that was the the hardest kind of part of the transition I probably took a few months I would say for the body really to sort of let go of that and to sort of be comfortable and not expending that energy so to not feel that need to exercise exactly expend an enormous amount of energy exactly so I really feel that it took a long time

to sort of regulate. And again, I was still like, what, 22, 23 years old. So at that age, the body doesn't necessarily kind of enjoy just sitting still all day long. There's, there's a bit of kind of, yeah, transition to happen. But as that became more comfortable, definitely things started to settle down. I started to experience, I think a calm that I'd never experienced in my life. definitely a little more clarity and I think most important of all just a greater willingness to sit with the mind

as it is we have a tendency as humans to move away from the mind whenever it gets uncomfortable so we move to distraction in the monastery there is no distraction you can't turn around and pick up a magazine or flick through your emails or phone someone

you just have to kind of sit with the mind as it is and that over time creates It's a confidence in just being with oneself as one is in each and every moment. Yeah, there's something really powerful about what you just said. One of the things that I've found so valuable about meditation is that, at least in the first few months when I started doing it, so I've been meditating probably for over four years now. Yeah. I started to see myself in the third person from time to time throughout the day. Yeah.

Where, you know, instead of feeling like you couldn't. you are a step late realizing the state of your emotion you are a step early yeah so you know all of a sudden I'd hear this little voice in my head say oh will's about to get angry let's see what happens here

you know and you know it's sort of teasing myself in a way or and it just made me feel so much more aware of myself and and that to me feels like a superpower and so I've always like thought about it personally how much deeper does this go right like how much further could I could I take this and

that's why I find what you went through so fascinating I mean it sounds like you're asking for an introduction to the monastery if you are no I'm not there yet but but I think that like that's why I have an enormous amount of respect for what you went through and I feel on some level like you're you're operating at a much more powerful level because you've been through this experience. Or I'm just a very slow learner and it took me that long. You know, it's a funny thing. It's all relative. I understand kind of when people are sort of why they might think I have a lot of experience, but I look at my teachers and I feel like a complete novice. Like alongside them, like many of them have spent sort of 10, 20 years plus in retreat. Not just living in

the monastery but in retreat meditating kind of i mean it's mind boggling they don't even lie down at night time they sit in in lotus at night time and maybe sleep for a couple of hours i mean for me that is mind-boggling those those are the people worthy of respect the whoop mindset in me is so interested in what's happening to their body physiologically because they've they've trained their bodies in a way that's so special i think it's just completely unique it'd be amazing to get whoops on them yeah i mean i genuinely be fascinated to see what i love looking at populations that are a little extreme a lot of the um i don't know if you've come across it well but a lot of the early fmri studies that were done around sort of meditation were actually done with we're fairly

experienced monks um people spent long time in retreat and they were they were looking obviously more at sort of brain brain activity and and the neuroplasticity and the way in which the sort of brain brain changes through that training i think that was one of the is one of the things that has changed the perception of meditation and mindfulness is that it's not just a psychological sort of shift but there's a physiological shift and not just in the chemical markers in our body but the brain itself is is experiencing change in the same way as when we go to the gym and train the muscle the brain itself is receiving more blood flow the cortex is getting thicker it's getting stronger in the

areas where where we want it to so we tend to experience kind of more focus or happiness whatever it might be well i want to come back to that because we have seen actually a lot of fascinating data on people on woup who meditate i'd love to that yeah it's really amazing uh so just back to this this period of your life where you're becoming monk i'd find it so fascinating what was something or what were things that you learned from these teachers that you feel like were otherworldly like these guys were doing things that you know just said sounds on some level almost impossible like to be in retreat for 30 years right yeah i mean what was it yeah i that you felt around them or when i met people like that i i just

experienced an incredible sense of warmth right and kindness and acceptance i just it's really rare in this world to to be in the presence of people where you feel no sense of judgment where you feel they're unconditionally loving and kind and it's amazing isn't it as much interested in your welfare arguably more interested in your welfare than you are yourself you know like they're able to kind of see life in a in a very very different way so i think from them a sense of i learned a sense of humility um and perhaps it reorientated what i thought meditation was about when i when i set off it was like enlightenment or bust you know it was that kind of mindset you know which is insane but it's quite typical as well um and then over time it was kind of like well actually maybe it's more

about stability of awareness and stability of compassion having an open and a curious mind not being too sort of fixated in one thing or one goal and just being more present moment to moment and and that I think once if you have that as the context and the approach for meditation then all of a sudden there is no pressure there's no kind of trying to to grasp or attain something a particular mind state instead again it's just being at ease with the mind as it is and in understanding one's own mind a little better hopefully understanding the minds of others and being able to empathize and feel compassion in a way ordinarily we might not always be able to so interesting if you were at a social gathering and there was a monk there just dressed in normal clothes like you wouldn't know from appearances that it was a monk would you be able to recognize that person just by the feel of them so this is the interesting interesting thing you know you don't need to be a monk or a nun to have stability of awareness or compassion I think it's really important so I know I know people as you know some people who just

naturally they seem to exude these qualities, which is amazing, which is amazing. Like some of us have to go away for many years and train in them, but some people just seem to have it. Other people, kind of, they train on a regular basis and they seem to have it. And others have obviously trained to a much greater extent. I often think about one of my teachers. So he was, he did, he did three, four year retreats on the spin. So he did 12 years in retreat. He wasn't a monk. He decided not to be a monk, but he was in the retreat for the whole time. So when you're in retreat, you live as a monk regardless of whether you've ordained or not.

But it means that now kind of he's out and about in the world and he still teaches. But when you walk down the street, there's no way that you'd kind of go, oh, look, that guy over there, yeah, he spent 12 years in retreat. For me, that's one of the almost one of the drawers, But I feel like those people have transcended the idea of what it means to be a monk or a yogi. Like they've gone, they've gone so far beyond it that they are now completely and fully back in the world. And unless you know it, you don't know it. You know it?

For me, that's a real superpower. Yeah. For people who kind of walk around in, you know, I meditate T-shirts or whatever it might be, kind of, it's a bit like, well, okay. that's a that's a label that's an identity and that's a bit of a trip um but i feel those people who've kind of trained so extensively that they've almost worked their way back into the world they've almost gone full circle right yeah where they've completely gone to sort of come away from the world and then kind of reintegrated that for me is the real kind of magic well in a lot of ways you've just described your journey too right i mean you've done exactly that without without without the

the wisdom of those teachers but yeah i mean i i i went in and i trained as a you know i did the training and then i've in some ways i've come full circle it's just some people come out the other end you know a little wiser than others what was the experience of being a pupil versus being a teacher because yeah you ultimately became a monk yeah i feel like i learn it's a journey of a lifetime i still think of myself as a student of mindfulness i don't think of myself as a that seems almost like the mindset that everyone takes on some level right because i think so i think it's a healthy yeah otherwise how do 30 years of retreat you're still searching for something right there's actually uh and you might be familiar with this well there's an

expression in um in buddhism especially in zen it's called beginner's mind yeah and there's that idea of just keeping alive this sort of freshness this idea you know when we sit to meditate it's as though we've we've never done it before right we're curious we're interested it's like that first time again and it's not always easy by the way it's tricky yeah it's really difficult and and but it's interesting when i speak to people so obviously working now a lot with you know sort of sports people and elite athletes it's it's exactly the same thing you know if i speak to elite runners you think kind of wow just going out and running for miles and miles every day like for decades don't you sort of get bored of it

And it's that same thing. They still go out there every day thinking that there are incremental changes or differences or improvements that they can kind of make in their practice. Yeah, I think in sports, that's always a fascinating lens because you look at a guy like Tom Brady who's now going to his ninth Super Bowl and he keeps talking about how he feels like he's getting better in certain aspects of the game. There might be aspects that only he even realizes that he's getting better at and no one else can even see.

But I think that touches on what you're describing with mindfulness in this beginner's mind. Yeah, I saw Federer interviewed not that long ago. And he was talking about shifts in his game. And the journalists were all just sort of staring at him like, what? But you're the best tennis player in the world. And I feel like there is, there's a level where you kind of go beyond

most people's understanding of what it means to participate in that sport. or you're just mostly in your own head too like it's how you're thinking about certain situations yeah that for me is the tie back to meditation because i've i've found since i started meditating it's changed the way i think about the environment that i'm in yeah and uh but again more from the third person yeah i may or may not be behaving differently yeah but it's my acceptance or understanding of the environment that i'm in and it's an awareness too that i think is quite interesting like you just become more aware of how what you're doing is affecting people around you yeah and even like the energies that people are giving off yeah it's interesting so awareness is often

sort of talked about as a as a benefit or an outcome of meditation we often forget i think what the alternative is so if we're not aware we're unaware and unaware is really ignorance not in a i don't mean that in a sort of a negative sure kind of sense of ignorance but in the sense of not knowing so if we're not aware we simply don't know what's going on and most of the time we don't know what's going on in our own mind which is yeah kind of insane because we spend all day with ourselves but we're so busy kind of caught up in this maelstrom of thought that we don't see our minds clearly so having that awareness being able to sort of pull back and see the mind more clearly allows us to not only think differently or have the opportunity to choose to think differently it also

allows us sort of transcend thought altogether where we're not even involved in the thinking I think which is yeah sort of the experience you were just talking about yeah it's so interesting and and by the way that awareness that you're describing it can also be distracting too which is which is what makes it you know fun on some level right like you just realize that there's more going on than you previously conceived and you know you'll notice that something that you said may have upset someone in the room that you otherwise previously might not have even noticed right yeah but the the beautiful thing about that is it gives us the opportunity right yeah to then kind of act upon it yeah as as as as when appropriate so it can be i see it as uh if it is a distraction

it's a very healthy distraction oh i totally agree it's just you realize that there's these different levels of playing right do you know the i don't know if you experienced this well i remember sort of starting out with meditation and going to my teacher and saying oh my god this meditation is crazy it's just making me think all the time you know i never experienced this many thoughts before i started meditating and clearly like the meditation wasn't making me think i was just becoming more aware of how many thoughts were in my mind and i would say over over the years it was it's almost like layers of an onion you know at first you experience all the everyday kind of thinking and you tend to get involved in thinking about the exercise, thinking about the meditation. It's still thinking,

but because it's about the exercise, somehow you justify it in your own mind and you think, oh, well, you know, it's still meditation. And you kind of let go of that. And then there's this kind of, you start to experience an undercurrent of thoughts and memories, you know, really kind of, you didn't even know. Yeah. Kind of still existed in your mind. And there's this, yeah, sort of increasingly sort of subtle layers of thought, I would say. So you're describing effectively these different layers that you were able to uncover through the process. And it sounds like the memory piece of it is the deepest layer. Yeah, I think I would say that once the mind has experienced its entire kind of past,

then there is a different level of letting go. So there's letting go of everyday kind of life. Right. But then there's still a sense of kind of holding on to ones like. identity, everything that we've lived in our life and that makes us who we think we are. And in order to sort of let go of that, we kind of, to some extent, need to experience all those things, not get bored of them, but almost they no longer kind of fascinate in the same way. So we're not so attached to them.

And as we become less attached to them, we're kind of free of them. That's so interesting. So the moment you officially become a monk. is that from a process standpoint is that like a bit of a surprise where they just tap you one day and now you're a monk or or is it like you passed it you know the big test and yeah there's a ceremony and everything it does vary tradition to tradition and monastery to monastery for me it was quite a you know I spoke to my teacher and said you know this is this is what I'd like to do and he said okay we should go and see this teacher and ask him for ordination and I went and you make a commitment for a certain number of number of years um and then at the end of that commitment so it's quite different i think in the west people often have that idea of maybe it's through catholicism things so once you become a monk or a nun that's it for life you kind of it's a bit different in the buddhist tradition you can Thailand you can go in and out of the monastery eight times in your lifetime in the Tibetan tradition

you normally commit for i think it's one year three years or life um and so at the end of that commitment you either stop being a monk that day um or you you reordain for another kind of period of time so it was um it's quite a sort of an official you know some ritual around it and a small sort of ceremony and and all of that stuff just kind of help strengthen the resolve and the commitment that you're making and what does that ceremony look like um so the night before um i mean most people by that stage in novice monks and they've got their head shaved anywhere But if you got a little bit of hair there, they'll kind of shave your head for you the night before and leave just a tiny, tiny little bit on the top for the final shape. For the teacher. They're like cut it off in a pair of scissors in the in the ceremony. And you make some, yeah, you just make some commitments. You're essentially signing up to some values and some guidelines in which, you know, you're going to, they're guidelines to create a framework that will allow you to find that stability of awareness and compassion.

in your life. So less like rules. I mean, there's a rule book, but they're not really rules. They're more sort of guidelines on how to live a healthy and happy life. At least that's my understanding of them. And I would think that in becoming a monk, you kind of already know what those rules are well before that ceremony, right? You've already proven to follow these guidelines. Yeah. So these days, I think back in the 60s, you can pretty much just rock up. And yeah, sure, you can be a monk. Come on in. And then they experience sort of the challenge and difficulties of Westerners just showing up and doing that. So, especially at that time. So, yeah, I think now sort of you're a lay person and then once, you know, they're happy with you and you're happy with them, kind of then you train as a novice monk.

And then once you train as a novice and you take full ordination. So it does allow everybody involved to be sort of fully on board with the, with the journey. you've chosen. Wow. And so at that point you're you're now a monk. Now how long did you stay as a monk before returning to the UK? Yeah. So all in all I was away for for 10 years. At the end of my last kind of commitment as a as a monk was in the Tibetan tradition. It was for three years. At that point I actually thought that I was going to do it for life. And I remember sitting down with my direct teacher, not the teacher who I was going to ordain with the next day. I sat down on a, sounds very romantic, but on a, on a rock kind of overlooking these,

these trees up in the Himalayas. It was a big moment, you know. Yeah, sure. You know, he said, you know, what do you think you're going to do? Are you going to go for sort of three years or for life? And I don't really know. What do you think? And he said, well, it's for you to decide, you know, not for me to decide. What a healthy response. Yeah. That's the perfect munker's spots. And then, and he said, but if you're really not sure, you know, maybe, maybe leave it up to this teacher, you know, who's ordained me. And I had a phenomenal amount of trust in this guy, you know, I, for whatever reason, I just, I was happy for him to decide.

So in the end, I went into that room the next day and I said, I don't know, but I'm happy for you to decide if you think I should take vow for life. I'll do it for life. Wow, isn't that an amazing amount of power to put in someone else's hands? Retrospectively, yeah. But I felt it. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's something so healthy about what you just said to be at a place in life where you have so much peace that, yeah, I could do this for the next three years or forever. Yeah.

You know, it sounds amazing to say that. I'm not sure if I'd have been quite so cool with it, you know, down the road. But at that time, it just felt like the right thing to do. do and and look retrospectively i may be grateful that he said well maybe look just another three years and then let's reassess and then sort of see see how see how you go then wow so okay so so then after three years how did you know it was time to come back so at that stage so i'd gone into retreat i've gone into sort of longer longer term retreat and then i was in moscow so I was teaching, they had gone to one of their centers, one of their meditation centers to teach in Moscow.

And it was living there in Russia that I found that there were, it wasn't, I wasn't in a monastery anymore. I was in a meditation center. So I was the only monk there. So I was essentially kind of living as a monk, but in a city, you know. And a lot of people would come along in the evenings, they're just regular people coming from their jobs, some Russian, some expats. And more and more, I could see there was a real demand for people who wanted to meditate, but who didn't necessarily want or weren't comfortable necessarily with me dressed in the, you know, the robes of a Tibetan Buddhist monk. And at that point, you'd been wearing those robes for 10 years?

Yeah, not for 10 years. Oh, okay. In different monasteries, you wear different kind of outfits. Oh, sure. But yeah, yeah, I've been wearing kind of different clothes for a long time. And did the outfits at all signify your stage of? of being a monk or do you get certain garments like as you become more experience or anything like that no mostly mostly they're the same it's a okay just different traditions have different

different different sort of colors sure well as sort of sports teams or something like that yeah okay got it and um and and i there were some expats in particular one in particular who came along and he was he's just he's dear friend kind of now but his take on it was you know look even at his office there were people really sort of struggling and he'd love to have me in to do some work with them but it's really difficult dressed as a monk and it was an oil company it was in russia kind of you know and um and it really it really kind of just got me thinking about you know what i was most passionate about and what i felt most passionate about whilst had a huge amount of respect for the tradition and the the cultural kind of lineage of

meditation it was it was giving people the tools that would make a difference in in their life so that sort of that tilted the decision I guess and at that point you moved back to the UK I did so I moved back to the UK for a number of a number of reasons I stayed living in Russia for six months or so and then i then i moved back to back to the uk and you were having to like some health challenges at that point is it yeah i mean i think talking about cancer well not yet right okay you i was going to say that was that was a little bit later yeah it was before it was before you had cancer i think it was well i'm just reading this from yeah the internet so you never know about these things this is just research but um the challenges of you know the lifestyle effectively at

some point taking its toll and wanting to feel healthier yes i think um and if that's not true we can just forget this moment in time look i i think what it's fair to say is that uh going back to england that's where kind of my resume takes a slightly more sort of unusual sort of twist most most most would think that I went I was a monk I came back I set up headspace and kind of here we are I wish I was that young um when I went back to the UK as a monk I'd given away everything so I didn't have like anything you know and I was thinking I am I going to go back to kind of UK I didn't have any money and and also as a monk I spent a lot of time kind of you know not being physical and I felt felt really different, you know.

Oh, gosh. And I really wanted to get back into my body. And it was a very sort of strange sort of feeling. And so when I was living in Russia, a friend of mine was training at Moscow State Circus. And he was doing a four-year degree there. He said, look, come along, meet some of my teachers. You know, I know you used to do a lot of acrobatics,

maybe, you know, you just find it interesting. And I hadn't done it for a long time. And so I was keen to go. And I enjoyed it so much. I decided to send in an audition tape cassette as they were back in those days to a university in London where you could do a degree in circus arts. And what year are we talking roughly? So this was in 2002 I think.

Okay. And I went, I was at 32 at the time. So I was thinking like there's no way that they're going to... Because you thought you were probably too old even? I thought it was too old. So everyone going there was sort of 17, 18 years old. Right, right. So I made this audition tape.

And I sent it in and thought, well, look, maybe, maybe one, it provides me with a way to go back to the UK kind of and get some help from the government because there's financing and stuff for all the students. And also, more importantly, so just to get back into my body and just kind of reassimilate a little bit because, you know, I didn't feel like I was that sort of connected, maybe. And amazingly, I got in to this university degree. So I moved back to London, and during the day, I trained in the circus, and in the evenings, at weekends, I wrote the content that's now, now people listen to on Headspace. Oh, my gosh. And so there's a couple other things that are fascinating to me. What was it like reacclimating yourself to even paying for things and, like, wearing normal clothes? And also being around people that, by the way, we're not exuding the same energy, probably. as the all the monks you probably walked around and just pitied everyone because they you know like I can't imagine if if I was around monks all the time like that and just experiencing that kind of an energy of positivity that you described it'd probably be weird to I mean it's it's different

at the same time you know the human mind is the human mind wherever wherever you are in in the world yeah and I think in a way there's definitely not a sense of pity because I think once once you've seen your own mind really clearly and you've seen the craziness and the neurosis there's no way you could ever pity anyone because you kind of know we're all we're all there you know we all share that and yes through meditation we can have sort of greater awareness of that but um it definitely took some it took a little bit of time to kind of settle into that paying for things wasn't so much fun i was like yeah right you're paid unfortunately no the one of the one of the you're not the one of the It's incredible.

The countries, the Buddhist countries that support that kind of training. It's remarkable. The communities, kind of, they give to the monasteries, and that allows the monks and the nuns to train in that way. It's an astonishing thing. Okay, so you're practicing in the circus. You're starting to build back up muscles. Yeah. Did you feel that sort of youthful energy come back to you quickly?

I did. It was this, it was the strangest thing because there was, one, you're surrounded by, by youth. I mean, I was literally, I was like a grandpa at the place, you know. Yeah. They were all so young, and they all seem to sort of tumble around and flip so easily. And in my mind, kind of my body could still do that. And although there was, you know, everyone talks about sort of muscle memory, in terms of soft tissue, sure. That comes back really, really quickly, and I think the body does have that memory. but the tendons the ligaments the cartilage the the connective tissue is less forgiving kind of 10 years 10 years on

so i i did start over you know during that course i i spent a lot of time in the in the physio in the physio room and um had to work really hard to to be able to sort of train in in that way at that age and they even made me sign a contract saying I'm really old if I get injured it's my fault yeah yeah yeah you know so it is it's a young it's a young person's game that is for certain now I imagine one of the interesting transitions is how your body would feel at the end of the day because as a monk right especially in retreat you're only sleeping three or four hours a day yeah about like four four hours a night something like that now you're you're in the UK and you're training like an athlete again were all of a sudden you sleeping eight hours a night or were you

still like did your body still not need as much sleep no it needed it needed more sleep that's what i would think yeah it's no no question and i would always you know encourage people to to you know sometimes when people start meditating they're like they look at those stories of retreat and monastery and oh great i don't have to sleep so much anymore but the reality is if we're living in the world if we're living in the busyness of the world our brains are quite active our bodies are often quite active it simply requires more sleep so the monastery is a very particular type of environment and that's why why we need less so yeah i was i was sleeping as much as anyone else i was sleeping sort of a good sort of seven seven eight hours a night and on the side you're you're writing up

different concepts for headspace yeah i mean i didn't really know even what i was writing for I would just get up very early in the morning. I'd go to bed very early at night as well, but I'd get up very early in the morning, and I would just write, and I would try and kind of give a direction or context to some of the techniques and the teachings that I'd learned. And I just kept writing, and I probably wrote for a couple of years, you know, until it started to sort of make sense, and I had a sense, okay, this is the direction I'd like to take it in. you know that's a really interesting background because i think that i meet a lot of founders a lot of

entrepreneurs and i think a lot of people are just they're trying to have this eureka moment right where an idea comes to them and they start a company the next day you know and i think that i think a lot of the most um interesting companies or you know breakthrough companies come from just wrestling with problems for a long time in someone's mind, you know. And so maybe to the outside world, it looks like Headspace was this flash of success overnight. But the reality was that you were sitting on this thing for, you know, decades almost in your mind. And just the image of you spending two years writing your thoughts down, I mean, that really resonates for me. I remember how much time I spent just at Harvard doing research on physiology.

having really no idea what I was doing it for, but I was just really passionate about it. Yeah. And I think there's just a lot to learn from what you just said. I think you're right. I know a lot of people who are waiting for that eureka moment. And when I look back at the headspace, you know, for anyone who's thinking about starting a company. Yeah, right.

You know, to give it some context, you know, yes, there was a training kind of as a monk. And then there was a couple of years of writing. then there was a couple of years in a clinic just doing one to one testing out some of these things these theories what worked what didn't what people liked what they didn't then there was a couple of years of doing events kind of in rooms of testing out those same things

but now we're sort of three or four hundred people at a time to see what worked what didn't what people liked what they didn't like and then seven eight years ago there was a shift to the app so I mean it's very organic it's happened very organically but it's over a really long period of time. Yeah, and I think that's why you've built something that now hopefully will stand a long

period of time, right? It's because you put so much refinement into that, you know, initial launch and that concept of what you were really trying to do. Well, hopefully, I know, look, we were chatting prior to coming, coming into studio that's similar, similar story for you, right? Like this, whoop didn't happen overnight? No, yeah, it takes time. It really does.

And you have to, I think you have to wrestle with, I think, in a lot of ways, the problems that you're trying to solve and the customers that you want to use. And on some level, I think even starting with smaller markets is helpful. Like, for us, it was very helpful to be focused on professional athletes, college athletes, teams. Yeah. Because that in itself refined what we were doing for an initial audience. And even listening to you, the way you're describing about one-on-one sessions, how can I have a breakthrough with one person when I'm just sitting in a room with that person? Right.

you know okay what did I learn from that now how can I think about scaling that so at what point along this journey of one-on-one sessions and then events and you had been writing before that at what point did you say okay there's a there's a product to build here so when I was doing one-to-one I already realized okay there was I wasn't sure which direction take it in I started up writing manuals for for sort of corporate work and kind of is it was there something that I could take into workplaces and again this was this was more like 12 years ago um and I also started writing up manuals that it was almost like teacher training how could I train people to teach meditation in in that environment um at that time neither really kind of excited me they seemed like

kind of the most obvious sort of routes to go and then I met my co-founder um rich um and rich we were introduced by mutual friend the mutual friend said look and he's looking for ways to take his uh experience and practice outside of the the clinic and uh rich had come out he was a bit bruised from uh an early starting advertising and marketing uh that whole world of agency which is exhausting he wanted to learn meditation we did a skill swap and after three months of chatting to each other about the potential of it. It's like, I'll do this. Let's work together.

It's awesome. We were both equally excited, very different skill sets, but very complementary skill sets. And it just made, it just made sense. Which I think is another thing that when you look at successful founding teams tends to be, tends to be the case. Like John Capilupo, my co-founder, our chief technology officer, like had such a deeper technical expertise than I did. And our real overlap was around physiology because his father's a professor of physiology. But I think the, you know, if I tried to find someone who was, you know, another former athlete who believed in the market and that sort of thing, the company wouldn't have gotten off the ground. You know, I needed that other half to my brain and the same way it sounds like you found with Rich, someone who could help take this to market.

There's no way that I would have or could have done this on my own. you know rich came not he wasn't just from advertising that um it used from creative brand development so how do you how do you create a new brand in areas where there's no pre-existing brand and that basically summed up the situation we were in there were meditation being around for thousands of years but most people saw it in a very particular way there was no real sort of consumer brand in that space that people could relate to or feel passionate about so it's going to okay well how do we how do we go about creating that and you know that's all down to rich and and the team obviously and did you always know it's going to be an app no because there are other distribution methods i mean i think you're

completely right that you built an app but we didn't know it's going to be at we didn't know it's going to be sort of a membership or anything like that we first time i met ritt he knew it's going be an app. First time we ever met, we went out for dinner and he said it should be the Nike Plus of meditation. I had no idea what he was talking about. And I didn't know what an app was and I said it won't work. Let's do events. So I wrote a few books. We got a book deal. We did events for a few years. And then eventually people coming to the event said, well, it's great. It's inspiring. But what do I do when I go home? So Rich was like, well, why don't you just record a few things, you know? We'll give them a little disc. It'll take it home and, you know, give them something to do. And once I was

in the recording studio, it started to kind of, you know, we saw that it was working for people. We decided to make the leap. Well, good for you. And I, I know that there's millions of people out there who are happy that you did. For our audience who may not be that familiar with Headspace, I'll talk about this in the intro just to kind of set this up, but, you know, give them a little background on what headspace does and why it's important. Yes, our vision of our headspace is to improve the health and happiness of the world. And my hope is that's what the app does. We try to give people the tools they need to do that.

So for people who aren't familiar with meditation and mindfulness, he shows you, you know, in a really clear, easy, down-to-earth way, how to kind of learn those skills. And then how to sort of tackle different areas of life that might be more challenging or areas that, as I say, you want to sort of optimize. So we have specific packs within the app that focus on stress and sleep and anxiety, as well as productivity and focus. It's like 50 packs in there now. There's lots of one-off kind of content.

And more recently, we've added a sleep channel as well. So very specific exercises for falling asleep at night. And it's your voice, by the way. And you've got a world-class voice. I'm enjoying listening to you through these headphones. I don't know about that. just recently so we're going through it's a really interesting time so in doing sleep what we didn't want was people to associate my voice with falling asleep so for some of the sleep cast we've actually bought in other other voices sure um for that but for all the meditation stuff at the moment it's it's still it's still my voice but this year we go international we launch in a number of foreign languages so that's been really interesting experience for me listening. Obviously, I couldn't learn all those languages. So, yeah, listening to the same

content but delivered by other people in other languages. Well, we'll include something in the show notes about how people can find Headspace and, you know, some kind of code for them to use. And I'm a huge believer in Headspace. I love what you guys have built. And I just think meditation is so important. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking about whether or not meditation's right for you, I'd say give it a try. um one of the coolest things for me about uh about founding whoop is now getting to discover whoop users who have gotten value out of the product and i was really blown away one day to be reading the wall street journal of all things and it's an interview with you know the founder

of headspace and uh and i'm i'm looking through and it's a screenshot of your of your phone and it's you know what what's on the buddhist monks uh iPhone which in itself is a funny concept the Vooda Smok, the iPhone and what do I see? But a Whoop logo sitting there and you said very flattering things about about Whoop in that article.

So I've been really excited to meet you ever since and I'd love to hear, you know, how you've used the product and gotten value out of it. Yeah, no, and look, I'm really not just saying this because you're sat here, you know, both myself and my wife, you know, we are just massive fans of it. We were introduced to it probably about, I became aware of it, probably about three years ago,

but got it on my wrist, probably about a year and a half, maybe two years ago. One of, it was one of your team, actually, had reached out to Headspace. They'd done some initial research on how meditation, mindfulness was impacting HRV. Yep. And we started the kind of conversations,

which have now led to sort of some research collaboration. and as part of that conversation they said you know would you like to try it and i've always been really skeptical of wearables i've tried some in the past many actually and never really stuck with any of them so but i said yeah look you know i'll give it a go and it coincided with that we've obviously headspace has been growing like crazy over the last few years the team's been growing i've been increasingly busy we've had two two children in the last four years And other than some surfing, I had really just stopped training. And I'd got to a stage where I wasn't necessarily kind of happy with how I felt in myself physically.

And I was really missing that physicality. So Woop actually became sort of my partner on that journey. I made a couple of sort of commitments to myself for 2018, which is really unlike me. I don't kind of normally make resolutions or anything like that. and um and it was it not only held me accountable it taught me a lot about how i trained how i could train better how i could recover better taught me a lot about my sleep as well uh so genuinely thank you i love it oh that's amazing so for you i i would imagine that you're someone who naturally sleeps well and someone who's you know i would just think i mean i haven't looked at you

data obviously because we don't we don't just dive into users data but you know i would think that your your body is is very adapted so to speak because of all the training that you've done with meditation is that accurate i i think it makes a difference yeah yeah you know it's difficult right because i don't have a a benchmarker before and after sure um which by the way is something we love at whoop when we can see that too yeah like you you you take someone this is what back to the the monk practice like it'd be so interesting to have seen your data as a 22 year old who you know had a bit of a party lifestyle yeah time to time yeah and then you go you know become a monk and then in the monarchy and then back again yeah so i'd love i'd love to have that data so sadly don't but um

i think yeah as i look at my my data there's there's a few things there's um definitely sort of you know we sit around with there's a bunch as a group of us kind of that all have them yeah right every now and again we'll sit around not comparing in the sense of you know who's got the better kind of results but just looking at that individuality help understand it too right and how how we're all sort of different and look i think definitely sort of night times for me the really interesting thing is more sleep doesn't equal better rest right necessarily yeah i would always encourage people to get more sleep because I think there's more chance of having better rest in that time period but I will quite often have shorter nights where I experience kind of

better rest and I might have a longer night where I don't necessarily have the same quality of rest. I think REM sort of for me is it tends to be fairly kind of good if good's the right word. Elevated. I tend to experience sort of you know a reasonable amount of REM and deep sleep in those sleep cycles which are the most important periods of sleep right um obviously having young kids and a baby in the house that that's not always the case but um yeah mostly i i tend to sort of sleep sort of pretty pretty well um what does your routine look like over the course of the day so what time do you wake up roughly so i i um i get up just before five so i i start um i do an hour of cardio in the morning at five o'clock um and you haven't meditated at that point at that time no

So before having kids, meditation was the first thing I do every day. Now I know if I don't get out and do that exercise. Meditation I can get in now other times in the day. That aerocardio, if it doesn't happen then, it ain't happening. So I get up, I do that. And then I'll come into the studio normally and I'll do my meditation. So you'll do meditation in this room even? Yeah, occasionally normally in my office.

stairs but um and then i'll be and how long will you meditate for it varies um anything between half an hour and an hour depends what i have have time and i bet your resting heart rate um woup gets quite low during that it it does it does what what has surprised me and you know maybe this this is maybe going into too much detail um but what surprised me about um it's just the genetic predispositions of some of this data. Yeah, true. So, for example, my, I mean, my wife is a crazy athlete. I mean, so she's, like, super fit.

And, you know, her resting heart rate will be really, really low. It doesn't matter how hard I train or how long I train for. My resting heart rate will never get close to hers. Sure. Even after lifetime meditation, even after doing all the cardio, I just cannot get it kind of close. to hers to her daily kind of and then when I look at HRV you'd think kind of my HRV would you know be sort of at a reasonable kind of level it's very consistent but it's actually quite consistently kind of low so I still score in the a lot of green yeah kind of

in terms of recovery but it's not that my HRV you know when I look at other people people's HRVs. I'm like, wow, how am I even living? You know, by comparison, mine's kind of quite low, but it's consistently low. And it's been interesting that even in training, even in having done the meditation and even in training that regularly, it doesn't necessarily shift. I haven't seen HRV kind of go up. But what it's shown me is that, okay, this is the range in which my body kind of works.

operates and and operates and if I can if I can ensure that I'm well recovered each day and operating in that green zone then I don't really kind of think too much about it well you're touching on an important phenomenon about who those is always important to me which is that we need to understand you specifically right not necessarily how uh like the raw data right is not as important as the as the feedback so to speak yeah so you need to understand your baselines versus what we see today, right? So today's information versus the last three days, the last 30 days moving averages. That's how Whoop looks at data.

It's always what happened today or what are we seeing today versus your recent averages. And that's how we give you a recovery score in the morning that says, hey, you're ready to go or your body's run down. And it's far less important how that heart rate. variability compares to your co-worker or your teammate or you know other people your age now it's interesting to look at people get competitive about it but you're right like a lot of it is genetics and the one of the most important things is can you keep it in that range for a long time yeah because these things often get worse with age yeah so if you're you know if you're fighting aging you'll you'll stay within that range so it sounds like very diplomatic well very

No, no, it's true, though, but it is true. It's both diplomatic and true. I'm in the passage of aging. I'm not really fighting it, but I, yeah, I think, you know, most of, most of that group that we all, you know, they're, they're 10 years younger than me. Yeah, there you go. And there is, there's some real kind of significant, significant differences. So, so you wake up in the more you do cardio, you'll meditate, and then you're kind of diving into work. Yeah, and then I'm into work. It might be writing. It could be emails, could be recording. I travel a lot to give sort of, you know, whether it's talks and press and things like that. I normally try three days a week at lunchtime. So I try and get in a strength training kind of physio type session as well. And then, yeah, in the afternoon, I'm back into either recording or writing or one day a week. I'm just meeting.

kind of at Headspace HQ, so meeting with the different teams on the various projects we're working on. Will you meditate before bed? Occasionally, so this really depends on the rhythm of family life. And this is one of, for me, one of the biggest takeaways of the monastery is that as much as I encourage people to meditate, also to be flexible in the way that, that meditation kind of comes into your life and the situation in which you live, in which one lives. So I know some people who kind of say to their kids and their partners when they get home, no, don't talk to me. I'm going to meditate. So, okay, that's one way. And it works for,

works for them. For me personally, I've chosen to have a family. I chose to get married. And because of that when I go home, I not only want to, but I feel like it's my responsibility as well to to be with my children, be with my wife, and to allow the meditation that I've done that day and to allow that any stability of awareness that I might have to inform and infuse the life in which I'm living. So rather than having kind of rigid parameters of, nope, this is my meditation time. Nobody speak to me. Right, right, right. It's kind of okay, this is my life, you know, and kind of maybe it's okay just to be present being with the people that we love. Do your kids meditate or does your wife?

My wife does. She didn't for many years. People were really confused. They're like, but she doesn't, why did you go? I'm not, it's amazing. I go home, I don't have to talk about meditation. It's so nice, kind of if we just kind of hang out. Right, right.

But she does meditate. She started when she was pregnant with our first child. Kids are one and a half. He's definitely too early. And four and a half. So the four and a half is just learning some sort of basic stuff now. We have so many members who write in and say they're doing it with their three-year-olds. I'm a little envious because I would love Harley to be doing it.

I think again there's a his character, I would say. he's very lively quite energetic and and i have to do it in person with him i tried it once with the app and i put it on one night time he was struggling to go to sleep and i said well just give you a little kind of exercise to do and um and and i put it on he was like but he said but daddy that's that's you and i'm like yeah and he said but can i not listen to pepper pig i'd like to listen to pepper pig like some of a kid's cartoon and so for him like the voice he can't disassociate it's just his dad right and so kind of when we do it we have to do it sort of lying on the floor side by side together and we kind of have it as a as a game rather

than using the using the app you know I'm trying to balance in my mind right now the fact that I think it's phenomenal that a five-year-old could learn meditation and carry that with them for their whole life and then I'm also thinking about how much I value now meditating having not done it for such a long period of time yeah because again you have this contrast moment where i can even see whoop data for example before i meditated and after and you you know our companies are doing some research together around this which is super exciting yeah but my whoop data is significantly better from meditation yeah and my mind feels better and everything feels better and so it makes me super appreciative yeah of meditation and you know it's like do you need bad to

appreciate good i don't know but but it's like it's a it's a yeah it makes me so appreciative of meditation i feel like it's a little bit like brushing one's teeth or having a shower and maybe you can go like a few days without doing either but it's so much nicer for oneself and for everyone around us if we brush our teeth and shower on a regular basis kind of feel like it's the same thing kind of we've never really thought about that very much because we just grew up brushing our teeth and having a shower. We just, we got the idea very early on that it's important to be clean and like look after the health of our body. We didn't necessarily get the message. It was important to look after health of our mind. So I feel like with kids growing up, that will just become part. I really

believe it's already part of curriculums and schools and stuff. I really believe it will just become part of how we, how we grow up. Well, I like that association that you created. It's, you know, meditating is fundamental as taking a shower yeah yeah that's awesome and so one of the one of the things that we're working on uh as companies together is is looking at professional sports teams who introduce headspace um and then seeing the response on whoop and we won't go specifically into to the teams that we're working with right now and stuff because we haven't we haven't announced all that but i think it's fascinating just the research that we've seen at Woop on people who meditate.

And you look at, we've now done, you know, little white papers and studies on populations where you look at someone who didn't meditate and then introduces any form of mindfulness. And this could be transcendental meditation. It could even be, you know, taking three to five minutes a day a few times throughout the day and just breathing properly. And, you know, you guys have a lot of different content on headspace. but it's unbelievable just to see how black and white it is. Yeah.

You know, their resting heart rates are lower. Their rate variability are higher. They're getting more slow wave sleep. They're falling asleep faster. Yeah. You know, for you and in, you know, becoming the person carrying meditation through and I think making it a lot more popular, is that just so exciting? It is.

And it's doubly exciting as someone who grew up passionate about sport and who is still to this day passionate about sport. It's an amazing coming together of all the things that I love in life. So it's been a dream. We actually started working with professional athletes with Olympic athletes. Before we even had an app, they were sort of coming along to the events prior to London 2012. So we got some really early sort of feedback.

And I was genuine, I had no idea kind of the image. impact that it would have on professional athletes. And I was, even if I'm honest, a little surprised at how much sort of impact it was having. Wow. So to see that kind of evolve over the years and now, you know, whether it's partnering with, you know, in Nike and the NBA and these different working with different teams, it's blown me away. That one, that these teams and leagues are open to the idea. And more importantly, that they're experiencing these, you know,

really positive results. Yeah, I mean, I think it's, I think it's really fundamental in a lot of ways. I feel like thinking back on my athletic career that I was such a novice for not having at that point incorporated some kind of a meditation or, you know, we did things briefly around visualization, but I don't think I really understood it because I hadn't also learned how to meditate. Yeah. I think that's a very healthy bridge into visualization as meditation.

Yeah, very much, right? it's really hard to visualize without having that foundation of... Yeah, you need your mind to be clear in order to create this world that you're now in, right? Yeah, I feel like otherwise it's a bit like looking at an old-fashioned TV set, which isn't fully kind of tuned, you know, it's all just flickering. Yeah, that's actually a great way to think about it. But it's just a little bit sort of fuzzy. So do you visualize it all in your daily life or even, you know,

when you're competing in the circus? I imagine that. So I could have been quite valuable. I visualise as part of my, I do visualization as part of my practice, my meditation practice, and definitely when I was working through routines and things in my mind,

sort of acrobatics and that kind of thing, I would definitely use visualization. And now, even now, I might sort of use it for surfing and things like that. Oh, cool. I feel like it's not a very, I don't sort of sit down and think right now I'm going to visualize about you know it's not like a formal kind of exercise I think I find myself quite naturally now visualizing those types of things it just drifts in and then you latch on to it yeah that makes sense and do you see yourself in the third person or the first person when you're visualizing um so in the traditions that that I trained in we're encouraged to see ourselves um so you're visualizing um so you're vision visualizing as though not watching yourself outside of yourself.

It was, yeah, exactly, through one's own eyes, through one's own body. And that creates a very particular type of connection between the mind and the body. Because all of a sudden then, you're actually, you're living it in your own body rather than simply mentally seeing yourself as another person doing the activity. Yeah, I like asking that question because, first of all, it often is something that I've found that athletes who visualize don't actually think about whether or not they're in the first person or the third person. I've realized that I see myself in the third person, but now listening to what you just said, I feel like I've got a new challenge, which is how to bring that through your own eyes, because it's probably, I would imagine it's harder. I think I think it is but I think the benefits sort of are worth the additional effort I feel like they're slightly different so the third person so for someone who was running a race and they were imaged picturing themselves running through the finishing line that kind of thing that will probably work better in the third person but I feel like in the first person there's something but it's a different kind of quality where you're less. concerned with the end goal and more focused on the present moment. And I believe that if we

focus wholeheartedly to the best of our ability on each and every moment, then the outcome will take care of itself. So we can almost let go of seeing ourselves run through the finishing line. We simply execute to our best ability in each and every single moment through our first person. Right. And the result will be the result. Right. So the third person is almost the celebratory moment it's almost like a story that we're telling ourselves yeah we're kind of playing out a story and the risk there are benefits to it but the risk of it is that we become attached to the storyline and we become attached to the outcome of the story and in doing that we then start to focus on the future rather than focusing on the present moment wow yeah that makes a lot

of sense and I guess the methods for getting better at looking at it through the first person what are those yeah so we i mean even on the headspace app i i would say visualization is probably about 25 30 percent of the content and i would say that's amazing i didn't actually realize it was that high yeah that if you can if you can train and familiarize yourself in what it means to visualize within the context of meditation it then becomes that much easy when you try and apply it to to everyday life so i would say to anyone start visualization in a very formal way sort of within a meditation or something like that get comfortable with it get familiar with it and then you'll find it much easier to to apply to everyday situations like sport and exercise

wow that's so fascinating um all right i want to ask you a couple uh quick questions and then we'll let you get out of here i can i can talk to you forever so uh you're someone who uh travels a lot do you have any tips for how to you know feel better when you travel and i mean how do you improve your recovery on whoop as an example yes so um i know there are a lot of different theories around jet lag and everything else i can only say what works for yeah just what works for you so to um maintain my same daily routine wherever i go so to still regardless of the hit i take on the sleep or anything else that first day to get up at five o'clock to do cardio to do my meditation to have the same sort of breakfast that I normally would and everything else. All those things kind of help set me up

and settle into that new, new time zone. As soon as I arrive in a new place, in a new time zone, I find the best thing I can do is sit to meditate. I feel there is something very grounding. It's almost that in taking that time out, you almost sort of let go of where you've come from. You let go of the time zone. You're not caught up in that all. It's seven o'clock, but it's really 12 o'clock and you're kind of a storyline in the mind that just kind of gets in the way of everything. I feel like it just grounds you and allows you to let go. So that's one thing that I'll always do. And then, yeah, nutrition for me is massive. It's trying to maintain kind of those regular, you know, fairly regular meal times and similar kind of diet. I feel like if I'm looking

after my mind with meditation, my body with some exercise and healthy nutrition, and I'm going to bed at a sensible time. And if those things were in place, then I'm pretty happy wherever I go in the world. What are you doing from a nutrition standpoint? What's your diet look like? So we are in our house, including the boys. We're like 95% vegan, I'd say.

And have been for the last sort of five or six years, vegetarian before that. And that for us, kind of as a family, works really well and and that for me personally has been been really helpful um about five six years ago i got cancer and off the back of that we did me and my wife together we did one year of just raw wow completely raw and um vegan raw and um yeah it was it was an experience i imagine you also have to get somewhat comfortable with fasting in that process right because there's going to be a lot of times you're not going to have access to the food exactly exactly um fortunately i had a bit of

of experience a lot of practice so that was that was fine but I really enjoy I feel like now we've found something that works for the whole family that is an extreme that allows us to to travel and eat out and to be kind of comfortable

wherever we are what's the lowest recovery you've gotten on whoop and why did that come about um be either it's probably like an 18 percent something like that um i don't know if that's especially low it's in the red yeah you're in the red i i know that um and

it would have probably just been kind of it would have been early into last year where i was still working out what the load was so you know look there's nine sessions of exercise a week with one day off right and i was trying to kind of find the balance of you know how much was was too much. And to begin with, I did a little bit too much. And I found where that, where that line was and was able to kind of. So it's mostly from over training probably, over stress. Exactly. That's, that seems pretty healthy. Are you someone who drinks alcohol still or no, no longer after? I'm so rock and roll. Well, um, yeah, I'm out. No, I don't, um, we, we, we, we, we drink, when I say we drink, we'll probably have about a half a dozen glasses of wine a year. Okay. I mean,

We don't drink on a regular base. If we go to a party or something, we'll have a glass of wine. But beyond that, yeah, I just don't really find it that enjoyable. I ask because those are the, those tend to be the lowest recoveries we ever see. Oh, really? It's people who have a big night of binge drinking. Oh, interesting. Yeah, and then, because it's interesting, a hangover looks almost indistinguishable from sickness, just from a physiological data set.

The sleep doesn't look good. Yeah. Your heart rate's really elevated. It's like, it's interesting. you can actually see the alcohol trying to come out of your system because, you know, someone who normally has a resting heart rate of 45 will fall asleep with a resting heart rate of 80. Right.

And then over the course of the night, maybe it gets to 65. Right. But you're still 50% elevated, you know. Yeah. And which is actually quite similar to what it looks like if you've got a cold or, you know. And so because you may still spend nine hours in bed, you know, if you're trying to recover from something like that. But the sleep will be so in.

efficient and your heart rate variability will be totally out of life but that's where it's you know it's interesting how you think about weighting these different uh statistics yeah yeah alcohol's a massive disruptor to sleep yeah i still remember the days what are some things that we can expect for headspace coming out soon so i think moving into areas beyond beyond meditation you know as i say we've already gone into sleep there'll be there'll be other areas that we that we move into too. International this year is really big for us. So there'll be half a dozen kind of countries around the world where we'll be launching in foreign languages. And so those are going to have different voices? Exactly. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It's going to be hard to scale your voice. My Japanese

was just not strong enough. So yeah, we've got we've got other other voices. And then I think the other other two big areas, science, we have an entire science research team. We're working towards FDA approval for Headspace Health and working currently on about 65 different trials around the world. So I think the science kind of thing for us is really important that we have both authenticity and also kind of science, that it's evidence-backed. It's not us just saying, hey, try. any old kind of relaxation or meditation it's kind of like these techniques that have been

passed down over this many thousands of years they're still around because they work right and we through science we want to show you how they work and why they work I mean isn't it so awesome to build a business that also you know along with being a good business and profitable and or whatever to to be able to hire brilliant people but it's just good for the world you know That's one thing that I try to never take for granted. This is just how cool it is to build something that can also have a positive impact. Yeah, I feel really, I know I speak for rich as well. We both feel incredibly fortunate.

Yeah. To be working on something that we're passionate about that delivers on a social impact, but that also allows us to grow a healthy business and hire amazing people from around the world. Where can people find you online or if they want to interact at all with? with me personally or with headspace well either yeah i mean look if headspace you'll find on on on twitter and instagram sure sure facebook and everywhere else and you've written a few books as well yeah a good way to get introduced to some of your thoughts yeah so i i wrote uh three three books um one kind of the headspace guide to meditation and mindfulness was the the first one um that one i

think is is the best place to start yeah um talks a lot about the the jubes journey that I went on, but I think so much of it applies to how people kind of use the app and how they get introduced to meditation. There's a second one on food and the third one on pregnancy, all kind of how you can apply mindfulness to these different areas or periods of life. But yeah, if you can go to headspace.com is probably a good place. Or you can just download the app from iTunes store, you know, app store. Totally. Well, we'll include that in the show notes. And Andy, this has been so much fun. Congratulations on what you've built.

Pleasure. Thank you. Pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you. All right. Cheers, man. Cheers. Thank you to Andy for coming on the podcast. I could have chatted with him for hours. And I hope you found the conversation as enlightening as I did. And I'm sure there's more to do with Head to Space in the future. If you're not already a member, you can join the whoop community now for as low as $18 a month. We'll provide you with 24-7 access to your

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