WHOOP Podcast - Best of 2023: Reliving the Top Conversations of the Year

Episode Date: December 27, 2023

We are wrapping up the year on this week's episode and revisiting some of our favorite episodes of the year. Throughout the year we spoke to NBA Champions, Military Veterans, DJs, CEOs, and leading experts across numerous fields of research and human performance. We also had fantastic episodes around key product updates and features. Hear from Zedd on how he committed to fitness (2:30), Dr. Susanna Søberg on her principle and the power of cold therapy (5:05), James Nestor on how to get started with nasal breathing (7:57), Matt Mullenweg on biohacking and how mental clarity leads to high performance (10:40), Dr. Jessica Shepherd on being an active participant in the transition of menopause (13:33), Jason Kander on dealing with PTSD (16:06), Melissa Urban on setting boundaries and creating new habits (21:14), Ken Rideout on how running and training is an outlet to combat addiction (23:05), and Steven Bartlett on the power of absurdity in marketing (26:31).Resources:Melissa Urban - 206Dr. Susanna Søberg - 207Dr. Jessica Shepherd - 211Stress Monitor - 215Strength Trainer - 219James Nestor - 221Matt Mullenweg - 225Jason Kander - 235Ken Rideout - 236WHOOP Coach - 240Steven Bartlett - 242Zedd - 247Support 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

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast where we're on a mission to unlock human performance. I'm your host, Will Amit, founder and CEO of Woot. Okay, this is a special episode as we are wrapping up the year. See what we did there, wrapping up the year. We wanted to revisit some of our favorite episodes of the years. We're going to dive in on that, but before we do, I want to give a big thank you to Kristen Holmes, Emily Capitlupo, and Jamie Waito, who hosted shows this year. And I want to thank you our listeners. This has been our biggest year in podcast history. Thank you for listening.

We wouldn't be doing this if you didn't listen. Keep listening. We'll keep doing more. Okay, here it goes. I'm going to guide you through some of the fascinating lessons we learned from a variety of people on the Woo Podcast. Over the course of the year, we spoke to NBA champions, military vets, DJs, CEOs, and leading experts across numerous fields of research and human performance. And we had some fantastic episodes.

We had some product updates, we did features, we talked about the stress monitor, the strength trainer, the whoop coach. These were all amazing new launches. If you want to revisit those, Stress Monitor, Episode 215, Strength Trainer. episode 219 and Woop Coach episode 240. Today you're going to hear from world-renowned DJ and producer Zet, winter swimming expert and author Dr. Susanna Soberg, bestselling author James Nestor, CEO and entrepreneur Matt Mullenweg, OBGYN and women's health expert Dr. Jessica Shepard, military veteran and politician Jason Kander, CEO and nutrition expert Melissa Urban, Masters,

marathon or Ken Rideout, an entrepreneur, Stephen Bartlett. Reminder, if you have a question once he answered on the podcast, email us, podcastwoop.com. Call us 508-443-4952. We're going to do a big questions roundup early next year, so we'll have a podcast for that. And here we go. Let's kick things off with my conversation with the Platinum recording artist Zet, as he shares some personal insights on how he decided to commit more.

time and energy to his fitness and overall health. 26-27-ish is when I started gaining weight, basically, and like I got a little bit more puffy. I was like, hmm, this is strange, because I used to have to force myself to eat. I couldn't eat enough. And I was super skinny, and I started trying to eat more and trying to eat more, and then I started gaining weight, and I was like, I'm not sure if I like that. And then the reason it's so hard for me to be fit, or if I look back in my last 10 years or so, is the travel, is my schedule, is the day show at 2 p.m.,

and then the night show at 3 a.m. You know, it's so, and then you fly to, I don't know, Brazil where you can sometimes pay at 6 a.m. And you will wake up at 5, you know, and sometimes you have to stay up and play late. It's so unpredictable that it's really hard to have a good schedule. As my health, you know, naturally declines with age,

I just realized that there's something I'm going to have to actively do about it to combat all the side effects of aging, essentially. The pandemic was the first time that I didn't have to travel. I was suddenly home. That's when I got my whoop, pretty sure around then. First lesson I learned is, oh, I need to sleep more. I didn't realize that eight hours of sleep isn't eight hours of sleep. It's really like seven and a little. Yeah. I was like, oh, okay, I always thought of sleep eight hours, so I need one extra hour in bed. So one thing I learned, and the first thing I learned from whoop was,

I'm just going to go to bed one hour earlier than normal. And I love it. I mean, I've been doing it ever since. The other thing I learned is that I burned substantially less calories than I thought, which is the reason why I was gaining weight. Yeah. And I got really fit during the pandemic because it was the first time I just had time to wake up at the same time, go to bed at the same time, eat healthy, because when you're traveling, sometimes you only have one little time window to eat and you're at the airport and that's just what you're going to eat. It's not always great and healthy. So yeah, I've been trying to dial in my fitness, I would say, since the pandemic. I loved hearing how Zed stays so dedicated to his health, frankly, during what is a

grueling travel schedule touring. It's also fascinating just how focused he is on his health. I think there's this perception of DJs and artists as being drunk and partying all the time. But a lot of these artists are treating themselves like professional athletes, as we learned from Zed. So that's episode 247. Since Zed is a big fan of cold plunges, we're going to follow up with Dr. Susanna Soberg, as she outlines her Soberg principle and the power of cold therapy. I was so surprised. I was like, can I get a principal?

Yeah. But I kind of like just always had this idea about the brown fat metabolism that if you end on the cold, because I really needed to figure this out during my research and figure out, do I ask my participants to do a plunge? they end in the sauna? And then I was thinking about what does the body actually do in the heat and what does it do in the cold? That's why I've read all the literature and my supervisor asked me to make the book that you have been reading. Because I was told to do that at the beginning and I was like, well, I don't think I can. But I had read all the literature and found

out that or figure it out in a way that if it's increased by cold by activating the brown fat, then, and my hypothesis really is real, then you must end on the cold to force your body to heat up naturally. Because if you do that, then you force your body to spend more energy and you will burn more calories of glucose and fat from the bloodstream. So it's kind of like a long weight loss that you do after your cold exposure. So you don't have to think about your cold exposure as just happening when you are out there outside if you end on cold on the subject principle apparently. So then you will keep this activation going in the body also when you get inside. The one thing that I want to also touch upon is just if you end

on the cold and you go home, then I'll ask you to keep moving because it's also one thing that's going to help you increase your heat again in the body because the muscle will help you a bit because it's really not something that is that easy at the beginning. So you have to adapt to this and you will have muscle shivering for a couple of hours after that will happen and it's completely natural and it's not dangerous as long as you don't stay too long in the water.

So your after drop won't be too high and the after drop is when your core temperature decreases too much and you will have a vicious shivering at home, but just keep moving, and then you will be fine, and you will have an high increase in your metabolism. So end on cold to have more activation in your metabolism. I love this episode on all things cold therapy. As you heard from Dr. Sober, the benefits are outstanding. I've been doing this personally in my life for the past few years.

I think not only does it have physiological buds, but it has huge mental benefits. It just naturally gives you an endorphin rush to do this. this to yourself, and I can't recommend it enough. That's cold therapy research on episode 207. Our next guest is bestselling author and breath expert James Nestor. He joined the show to discuss the importance of nasal breathing and how you can get started on a path to better breathing. So what you need to do is to get rid of your Western mindset and not try to go out there and kick this thing's ass as you're used to doing with everything else, but go into this very, very slowly in a controlled and patient way because that's how you're going to be able to

diagnose if there's a larger structural issue in your nose that you will need to get fixed for the vast majority of people. That is not the case. What they need to do is start to use their nose more and more and breathe in and out of your nose. So what I would do as far as the step-by-step instructions is I would start off when you're walking around the neighborhood, walking your dog, walking to work, walking to an airport, breathe in for four steps, breathe out for four steps. Breathe in for four steps, out for four steps. Does that feel comfortable? Do you want to push it a little more? You can start extending it. Breathe in for four steps, breathe out for six steps. You see where I'm going with this. So you can start to extend that and to continue breathing in and out of your nose.

you get more comfortable with that, you can start to incorporate that into your jogging. Start playing around with your breath just to that level of discomfort with your jogging in and out. And it should be, if you're going to extend anything, it should be the exhale you are extending. So you don't necessarily want to be extending how many steps you take on the inhale, but the exhale, because when you exhale, you are relaxing your body. I think you will be amazed, especially if you jog a lot, what a difference the cyclical, easy breathing will make. It also makes jogging a lot more fun because it gives you something to focus on and to do. So I would start with that.

And if you were still having issues, if there is just an incredible amount of congestion in your nose after a few weeks of doing this, that's right, a few weeks of doing this, then there could be a structural problem. You may want to see an E&T and see if there's something that, could be done about that. But otherwise, for most people, just using the nose and using it more often can help to open up all of those tissues and make you an obligate nasal breathing. James's book, Rath, is truly a must read. And you can listen to the rest of this conversation with James Nester by checking out episode 221. Next up, Automatic CEO and WordPress founder, Matt

Mullenwick, to discuss how he uses biohacking to improve his and physical performance. It's interesting. I've always been really into biohacking or sort of like a, what's the word for something self, like quantified self? Yeah. Yeah. You know, in engineering, we say you have to profile before you can optimize,

meaning like you have to analyze the code and see where actually the bottlenecks are, where things aren't working, before you make optimizations, because you've, If you make a, it's called a premature optimization based on what you think, it might not be the real thing. So our bodies are machines, beautiful machines, like the most amazing machines ever created. God's gift, you know, that we have this. And so I started to find, like, originally, like, I was very much, like, just, again, my school had no gym. I had no physical activity. I was kind of like a, my mind isn't a bat, you know, like my body doesn't matter.

And I had no exercise, no physical, but I was young, so I could kind of get by for a few years. And as I started to approach 30, and I read a really amazing book called Brain Rules by a neuroscientist named John Medina. And the first rule was exercise. And he talked about how when your body's moving, your brain works better. I was like, okay, well, my brain is pretty much all I got. My brain and my hands are my moneymakers. So if I want my brain to work better, maybe I need to exercise. And I was very lucky that one of my early friends, like as he was just getting started, was Tim Ferriss.

And so, you know, as he did the four-hour work week, like the four-hour body, he was always talking about optimization and health and everything like that. And so, you know, he would test stuff out on me. He would tell me to, like, go do kettlebells or whatever it is. And like, so I was always just kind of like trying to be personally experimenting with myself, but really for a purpose, you know, like I don't need to look a certain way or anything like that. It's really like, how do I accomplish this mission in the world? My life purpose is the democratized publishing commerce. So I want to create the open source standard that, you know,

hopefully 100% of the web runs out someday that humanity can build on and then we can build stuff on top of that. So how do I serve that best? And my mental clarity, how I show up, everything like that is really, really important. I always enjoy talking to other CEOs, founders, and Matt was no different. I think his commitment to health and wellness and how he used his whoop was pretty fascinating. And so if you want to go deep on this episode, that is 225. Next up, we have OBGYN and women's health expert Dr. Jessica Shepard, who shared a great deal on how women can best prepare themselves from menopause and how that will have massive benefits later in life.

What I deal with, in my practice, I deal with mostly menopausal and sexual health is this change or this time frame in a woman's life is so detrimental to how it plays out in your 60s, 70s, and 80s. And that's why I really focus on the 40s and 50s because we really have the ability to change the trajectory at this point. I think that has a lot to do with mindset. One of the things that I'm like an advocate for and I preach it to all my patients. And that's what we offer here at my practice is trauma recovery. We do sex and intimacy coaching because there's such a big shift in mindset of how we may need to take on new new habits, how we think of ourselves, how we show up in life. And how we're treated, quite frankly, from society. Like, you mean, you hear this all the

time is that after a certain time frame, women just kind of are not given the respect or the time or the luxury of having power. And I think mindset and being able to give yourself back that power and empowering ourselves is such a big part of taking on these new, and I don't want to call it challenges. Because physiologically, everything that happens during perimenopause and menopause is going to happen, but how do we change the ability for women to understand this in a way where it's not negative? We've put such a negative connotation on menopause. And I'm really, like my passion over these next few years and maybe for the rest of my life is to change. Like, how do we change that conversation? How do we identify some of the things that are taking away

the ability for women to say, this should not change my value or my attitude or my behavior and wanting to take it active, be an active participant in this transition. It's a very powerful message, this idea of being an active participant and taking charge of your body. Plenty more insights and information from Dr. Shepard. That is episode 211. Now he turned to former Missouri Secretary of State and veteran Jason Kander. Jason joined me in Boston to share his incredible story around his battle with PTSD and how he turned to therapy to help him through difficult times.

It's important to talk about it and I appreciate the question because I find that the more I talk about this, the more people who might be experiencing it, whether it's from the military or something else, can hear it and go, oh, that actually sounds familiar. Yeah. And like, and so like when I wrote the book, it was about, I kind of wrote it for me many years earlier, right? So when I first came home, it started with small stuff. It was like I had like a twitch in my, in my eyelid that like didn't go away for six months, right? And then I started to get nightmares.

And at first, actually even before the nightmares, it was little stuff like I would get in a vehicle and my heart would race. But that one I understood right away because I was like, okay, it just came from a place where every time I got in a vehicle to go outside the wire. adrenaline kicks in. Yeah, because you're like, you're preparing your mind and your body to take a life if necessary, right? Which thankfully I never had to do, but like just, it's not a natural act to prepare yourself to take human life. That much I understood. And then over time, that gradually went away. Now, I learned years later in therapy that that's called prolonged exposure therapy. You just go make yourself do something that you didn't want to do and eventually you become accustomed to doing it, which I ended up doing with lots of other things. But at that time, I didn't

know that. I just knew, oh, I'm getting better. So that made me think, I must be fine. I'm getting better. Then the nightmares started. And the nightmares were basically everything that I feared happening in Afghanistan and was protecting against what happened in the nightmares. So the Taliban would rush in and throw a bag over my head and take me away, that kind of thing. It was a lot of kidnapping-centric nightmares. And then I always had a reason to try to tell myself, oh, I must be getting better, right? Which was based in nothing other than I had just decided that was important. So then over time, the nightmares evolved. And now eventually they were rarely set in Afghanistan. They were often even not a military setting at all. They would be like

my house in the middle of the night. And sometimes it wouldn't be the Taliban, it'd just be some stranger, and they'd be coming after my family. Now, I told myself, look, it's clearly not PTSD. Does nothing to do with my service. I learned later in therapy. That's actually really bad when that happens because when your modern environs become the subject of your nightmares, then what happens is it contributes to this other symptom I had called hypervigilance, which was like the way I was describing earlier, always knowing where the doors are, that never stopped when I came home. My brain didn't accept the idea that now I was home and I was safe. And so I was constantly, I wouldn't ever let my back face the door, stuff like that. And my subconscious was reminding me

every night that, oh, you're in this incredible danger, and so is your family. And then that graduated to something called night terrors with sleep paralysis, which I really don't recommend. That was terrible. And then eventually, after years and years of this, what happened was, is I became emotionally numb because, and I can explain all this in this really clinical way now because I had the therapy. At the time, I didn't talk about any of this.

I just secretly thought I was losing my mind. Emotional numbness came from, I had all these negative emotions and intrusions. thoughts. And so it was like my brain would deploy countermeasures against them, right, to just suppress the emotions. But the countermeasures, they're not like smart bombs, right? They're like area bombs. So they just suppress all the emotions. So eventually, you have experiences that you know, like at one point my son was potty training and he peed in the toilet and it was a big deal and he came out and he raised his hands in the air to celebrate it and he pooped on the floor. Obviously, this was hilarious. And I could kind of feel that this was really fun.

me, but it was like the joy and the emotions of it were like just behind a thin wall. Yeah, you're numb to a lot of it. That was the numbness. And so it kind of robbed me of the good emotions too. And then, you know, after about a decade of not being able to get a full night's sleep ever, hardly ever, and then the numbness and all that, eventually you get depressed. And then if you're depressed long enough, you get suicidal ideation. And I explain all of it that way because I thought, before I ever learned anything about PTSD

that it was like, why would I want to be diagnosed with PTSD? It's like it seemed like a terminal diagnosis to me. You get PTSD and either your career ends at the least or your life ends at the most. But what I learned through therapy and getting sort of a master's degree in my own brain is that, no, I became depressed because I had untreated PTSD for so long. And I became suicidal because I was depressed for so long. And so that meant that those two things were really the first things. to lift after a couple months of therapy, because once I started to address the underlying trauma,

those symptoms that grew out of the original symptoms subsided first. You can tell Jason really takes pride in helping veterans and others who may be suffering from traumatic experiences. You can listen to our full conversation on episode 235 with Jason Andrew. Next guest is nutrition expert and Whole 30 CEO, Melissa Urban, to discuss the importance of setting boundaries and how to be respectful of others as you create new healthier habits. You know, in the earliest days of my recovery, I realized I didn't know what the concept of boundaries were. But I found myself, you know, after my second go around, after a relapse, back with a friend group and a party I didn't belong at with people I didn't know doing God

knows what in the bathroom, feeling incredibly unsafe. I had put myself in a position once again where my recovery was at risk. And out of sheer desperation, and honest to God boundary just tumbled out of my mouth. I said to my friend that I was there with, I don't feel safe here. This is not good for me. I need to leave. And in that moment, he was very gracious about it, asked me some questions. And he was like, yeah, okay, we can go. And he drove me home. But I realized in that moment that if he hadn't been like that, if he had said no, or if he had laughed at me, I needed to be responsible for my own health and safety. And I would have left on my own. And that was the moment I think that I realized that boundaries were going to be not only the key

to my recovery, but the key to expanding my life beyond what I had imagined. I had been living so small in my recovery, so afraid to talk about my feelings or express my needs or let people know what I needed in the moment. And the minute I realized that I could advocate for myself and keep myself safe and healthy was the moment I realized that I had control over, you know, how I wanted my recovery to look. And it really did change everything. And then that practice continued with me into all of my habits going forward. Boutaries are crucial in any aspect of life. Tune in for more of Melissa's tips. Episode 206. Up next, we have Masters Marathon and Recovering Addict, Ken Rideout. Ken has an amazing story of how he turned to running and trading to help him stay sober and has now become the

best marathon are over the age of 50. Yeah, that's right. The training and the racing provides for me a distraction and a purpose. But I will say that the joy I get from winning a race does not outweigh the disappointment that I feel when I don't do well. And if I do have a good race, like my wife teases me because I won the Myrtle Beach Marathon two years ago. And I won, she didn't, I go to all these races by myself just because it's like, it's business for me. Like, I'm serious about it. I take it serious. I don't expect others to share my view, but I view it.

I take it very seriously. And so I called her. I said, yeah, I won. And she's like, you don't sound that happy. I was like, I was like, there wasn't anyone really good here. I just kind of like, I don't know, I'm like the best weekend warrior. And she's like, if you didn't win, you'd be complaining that you should have won. Now you do win.

And then the competition wasn't good enough. She goes, how much did you win by? I said, one minute. But that's just kind of an example of. the mindset that I have when it comes to this. It's like not about what you come to realize when you do this kind of training is the destination isn't winning a race. The destination is the actual journey. It's the suffering. It's like I just did a workout three by two miles at like a 530 pace. So like just on the marathon pace. And when you're doing that by yourself in Nashville in

August and it's like the kids just left for school, I got them up with school. No one's out. There's a few bus drivers drive by. The same people see me every day. enable it. They think I'm crazy. I know that they beep and, you know, wave. And I always think about it when I'm doing the workout. I'm like, no one would do this. Like, this is where race is a won and lost. This is the victory being out here and putting in the work and suffering in silence and in solitude, you know. And so it's the suffering and the journey that is what's fulfilling to me. And I think it serves two purposes. Yes, it. fulfills like a serotonin or dopamine release that I get from the work,

even though the work is so grueling, like when I'm sitting there thinking about going out and doing it, I'm like, oh my God, this is so insurmountable. How am I going to get through this workout? I'm dreading it. And the race is almost like a secondary. But the other thing that the workouts provide for me is a distraction for myself. If I just sat here and instead of running for 90 minutes a day, I thought about how I felt and just about my feelings, I would have no.

problem convincing myself that I deserve a couple hours of relief. I can get high one time. It'll just give me some peace. I can watch TV. I can do something. I have a hard time like just sitting and quietly and relaxing. But that would allow me to do that. And I start to justify this in my head. And it's like a, you know, like a cycle. So if nothing else, the 90 minutes I'm all suffering on the road is 90 minutes. I'm not sitting by myself thinking about how much better my life could be how much happier I could be if I would just get high. I love that line Ken used to describe the journey to success. It really is all about training and putting in the time ahead of events and games and meetings,

whatever it may be. You can hear more about Ken's story in episode 236. Last but not least, the great Stephen Bartlett, Stephen is one of the world's most disruptive and innovative entrepreneurs out there and a host of a top business podcast. here's Stephen The absurdity was what I wanted to teach you about because it was something that once I'd realized

I couldn't unrealize comes from my girlfriend going to a gym and then coming home and saying Dave I've just been to this gym called Bird Space and Canary Wharf It's incredible, so big They even have a 100 foot climbing wall And then it's amazing

I joined the gym I was going there for two years And then when I spoke to my friend about it I said to him, it's an amazing gym to carry off it's massive but she even have a 100 foot climbing walk in the entrance I've never seen anybody use the climbing wall.

I've been there for two years. I've never seen anybody go near it. I actually don't even think they use it. But the fact that I'm using the most absurd thing about the experience to tell the story of the values, but also the entire experience, I think is something that has found is we can be intentional about in the design of our products. The most absurd, inefficient, costly thing that you do

says the most about everything you do. By my girlfriend telling me they had a hundred foot climb of all in the entrance, she's actually saying, imagine how many running machines they must have. And to Generations Z you care about social media and building their brand of that, it also says, damn, that's going to be great for my Instagram stories. Right.

It's a great picture to take. And I case study these brands like Brew Dog, who are now a billion-dollar underdog brand, who took on the whole drink industry. And the founder does crazy things. He put a beer fridge in all of their showers in their new hotel chain. Nobody's talking on Google about the mattresses and pillows.

They're not talking about useful, practical things. Every article is about a beer fridge in the shower No one's drinking beer in a shower. We all know that. But it's driving the brand. Tesla, the Easter eggs in the car, but you can make the ludicrous mode and absurd mode and you can make the back seats.

Whoopee cushions. No one's talking about the, well, people talk about some of the fundamentals, but really the thing that's saying the most about the brand is the most absurd thing about the brand, regardless of anyone who uses it. And the story of my company going back seven years was the blue slide in the office.

We were young kids, we took a 300K investment when the company started taking off. Before we got desks, I spent 13,000 pounds on a big blue slide, and I built a gaming room with a big blue slide that came into a ball pool. Ridiculous, stupid decision. I was an idiot. Thinking forward now, I probably wouldn't have made that if I was experienced. I wasn't. It became the single biggest driver of our PR was the big blue slide.

Every TV company, the BBC, Channel 5, The Gadget Show, Channel 4, BuzzFeed Vice documentary, all centred on this big blue slide because it said, young, innovative, disruptive, they think. think different. The best $13,000. No marketing campaign we could have done could have spoke more clearly about who we were. So I think that with businesses. I think how can you build absurdity into the office, the experience. You can hear the full conversation with Stephen Bartlett on episode 242. Okay, that's a wrap. Thanks again to all of our amazing guests who joined this year on The Woop Podcast. I'm a big thank you to you. Thank you for listening to the Wood Podcast. I'm extremely grateful that we have a podcast and we get to use this format. I remember five years ago saying, okay, we'll do 10 of these and we'll see how it goes.

And here we are, five years later, 250 plus podcasts. We do one every week and we'll keep doing it for as long as you all listen. A reminder if you enjoyed this episode of the Woo Podcast, please leave your rating or view. Please subscribe to the podcast. You can check us out on social. WOOP at Will Ahmed. If you have a question, was he answered on the podcast, email us, podcast to Woop.com. Call us 508, 443, 4952.

And if you're thinking about joining WOOP, now's a great time. We've got a free 30 days on Woop. You really have no reason not to try it. You know, it's a free 30 days. That's all at Woop.com. Okay, folks, that's a wrap. Have an amazing and happy new year. We'll see you again in 2024.

As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.