WHOOP Podcast - CEO and athlete Willy Walker discusses balance, overcoming injury, and managing expectations

Episode Date: April 7, 2021

Willy Walker turned his company, Walker & Dunlop, into a force in the commercial real estate world. When he took the family business over in 2003, it was valued at $25 million. Now, Walker & Dunlop is worth well over $3 billion and has been public for over a decade. He joins the WHOOP Podcast to share his thoughts on balance, gratitude, and mental well-being. Willy is candid about his experiences and what he’s learned along the way to become the best version of himself. Willy discusses, growing his business (2:44), separating your personal life from your professional life (7:34), using WHOOP (15:20), running marathons (17:21), injuries and the toll they take on your body (22:38), measuring the impact of alcohol (27:30), the importance of family (38:33), understanding anger (40:30), accountability (43:03).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

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Amid, founder and CEO of Woop. And we are on a mission to unlock human performance. If you haven't gotten on WOOP, you can use the code Will Ahmed, W-I-L-A-H-M-E-D to get 15% off a W-WP membership. Comes with hardware, software, analytics, and it's designed to help you be healthier. Okay, we got a great guest this week. Willie Walker, businessman athlete all around Renaissance man.

Willie is one of the top CEOs in the country. He turned his company Walker and Dunlop into a force in the commercial real estate world. When he took over the family business in 2003, the company was worth $25 million. Now Walker and Dunlop is worth well over $3 billion. And Willie is the face of the public company. This episode hits on a lot of themes surrounding balance, gratitude, and mental well-being. Willie is very candid about a lot of his experiences and what he's learned along the way to become the best version of himself. We discussed the importance of separating

your personal life from your professional life, understanding expectations and how failing to manage those expectations can lead to unnecessary anger. Willie really opens up about anger management, which I found fascinating. What he learned about elite athletes while running the Boston marathon, he ran his first marathon in two hours and 45 minutes. So, that gives you a sense for Willie as an athlete. How injuries affect your body and the drastic affect surgeries and medical procedures can have on your whoop data. And why Willie never checks Walker and Dunlop's stock price? I thought that was pretty fascinating because of how it affects his mental health. So this is a great, great podcast. I really enjoyed Willie. I think

he's a terrific CEO and a terrific man. And without further ado, here is Willie Walker. Willie, welcome to the Woof podcast. It's great to be with you, Will. So congratulations on being an all-time great renaissance man, because reading through your bio is kind of a lesson in success at a lot of different things between a pretty avid fitness background and competing in all sorts of different events to building an amazing business.

I think we'll start with the business side of things. how have you managed to build this business over the last 15 years? I guess brick by brick day by day. I think that if there was, if there's one word I'd use, it's tenacity. We started, when I joined Walker and Dunlop, it was a pretty small firm. It was one office and 43 employees. And it was a great company. My dad had done really, really well and running it.

and it had been very successful, but it was small. And I'd run some pretty big companies prior to joining Walker and Delop. And so when I came back to the family company, the one thing I didn't really want to have happen was people say, you know, sort of he inherited the reins and then really didn't do anything with the company. And so I had some pretty ambitious plans about growth and what I wanted to do. But to be honest with you, we had no brand, no capital. and we were going up against, you know, real massive firms in the commercial real estate financing

space. And so it was a challenge at first. But once we sort of figured out where we were headed and how we were going to get there, we started raising capital. We started hiring people. And as you know, Will, because of your business, you know, it's the people. It's the team you put around you. When I joined Walker and Delop in 2003, Will, our estimation, because it was a private family-owned company was the company was worth $25 million. And I think I don't look at our stock price, but our market cap today is somewhere around $3.5, $3.6 billion. And so, you know, it's been an incredible growth in value and in shareholder value, which has

just been astounding. And at the same time, when I first started out, there was a lot of trepidation of, is this something I'm going to be any good at. And do I, you know, to some degree, is this where I want to be for my career? And there was a lot of speculation when I first came back, well, that I was going to turn around, kind of clean the company up and then turn around and sell it. Right. And obviously you didn't do that. You took the company public in 2010. At $3 billion, it'd be up roughly 800%. So that's been a great outcome for all of your shareholders. What was the worst memory you have of publicly traded of being a public trade company? It's a great question. 2013, I don't know the day exactly,

but I'll swag it and say September 18, 2013. And my CFO and I were at a conference in New York meeting with investors. And the FHFA, which was the regulator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who Walker and Del Lump does a ton of business with, made a rule change and basically put limitations on the amount of lending that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could do on apartment buildings. And in that one day, our stock fell 18%. But we were in these meetings with investors will. And we knew it was bad.

And every meeting we'd walk into, they'd be like, oh, you're just getting killed today. And oh, you're just getting killed today. And we were like, we don't want to hear about it. We just, we will, we'll, we'll take a look at what the damages at the end of the day. So we're down 18% on the day, which I felt like was the worst thing that it ever happened. And in hindsight, it was nothing. We came back nicely. But I walked out and I called up West Eden's at Fortress because Fortress had taken a lot of stock in Walker and Dunlop.

And I thought that Wes was going to kind of scream and yell at me that his holdings in Walker and Dunlop had gone down by 18% on the day. I call Wes sheepishly. He doesn't even know that our stock is moved. And I'm like, kind of tough day in the markets, he kind of goes to his Bloomberg terminal looks, says, ah, you know, you're off a bit, whatever, are you okay? I'm like, I'm great. And then immediately turns to something we could do together strategically to continue to grow the business.

And what I learned in that moment, Will, was, you know, that really good investors like West Eden's, there's no one day that's going to make or break a career or a company or an investment cycle that you take your lumps, you figure out what the opportunity is and you move forward. And Wes literally in that call asked me whether there was a way for Fortress and Walker and Delop to buy Fannie Mae, which to this day still laugh at. I still laugh at. Here I am getting beat up by the regulator of Fannie Mae cutting down on the amount of lending they could do and it impacting us. And West being like, you think there's any way for us to go buy Fannie Mae from the federal government? It was a fun conversation and made me feel a lot better about being down 18%.

Well, I respect that. I aspire to take public one day. And I have to say the, The one thing about it that I feel like I haven't fully absorbed is the idea that your stock goes down, too. You know, I'm still coming from the point of view that it seems like an impossibility that our stock could go down. You know what I mean? And that just every year we're going to keep getting better and this and that. And of course, that's the mindset of a private company entrepreneur, but that's a reality that comes with the public markets is the volatility too. Yeah, the one quick thing I'd say on that is that in 2008, 18, two years ago, I stopped looking at our stock price. And it has made a world of difference in my life as both a leader of this company as well as my own personal mental health. I used to watch our stock price hourly, minute, leave, whatever. I mean, you know, I did just, I'd watch it all the time. And I gave up on it two years ago and only look at it two days after the quarter. And it makes such a difference because, I mean, like last year, our stock went from 75 bucks a share down to $24 a share.

right now, a year ago, this week, our stock fell from 74 down to 25. I didn't watch it. I didn't even know it had gotten there. And were it not for a private equity company calling me to say, hey, if you need us to step in and help you or whatever else we will. But other than that, I had no idea that it had gone down that far. And then, you know, look, it's at 115 or 116 today is what I was told by some analysts I spoke to two days ago, may have come down from there. But the point being is that nothing in that period, from going from 75 to 24 up to 115, changed the way that I was managing the business on a day-to-day basis. And the outlook that I had as it relates to investing for the future, hiring people,

et cetera, et cetera. Now, clearly back when we were in the crisis a year ago, there were some questions as it relates to liquidity and what happens if the buildings that we have loans on are going to go bad, et cetera, et cetera. So there was the very real, we're in a pandemic, we're in a pandemic, we're a crisis, let's make sure that we're making the right moves from a liquidity standpoint, but our stock price had nothing to do with that. And so it's, you know, look, first of all, whoop is such an incredible company. I have high expectations that it's going to be all

fantastic. And when the day that you get to go to the New York Stock Exchange to ring the bell or the NASDAQ, whichever you decide to list on, is going to be a seminal day and moment in your life. I want to go back to your point about stopping looking at the price. was there like something that flipped a switch for you to make that change? Yeah. To go from looking at it hourly to not looking at it for sounds like two and a half months, three months at a time, that's a profound switch. And then how did you also, how did you communicate that that's your mindset to the rest of the company

and maybe encourage others to feel the same way? So my wife came to me at the end of 2017 and said there's something called the Hoffman process, which is a deep dive. kind of, I'd call it a psychological exam that you go through at the Hoffman Institute out in California. And I'm going to go do it. And I think you ought to go do it. And so I sort of said, well, you go do it first. And so my wife went up to Hoffman at the end of 2017. And I went to Hoffman in early 2018. And when you go to Hoffman, when you check in, you check in your cell phone. And for the entire week that you are at Hoffman, you have no connectivity with the outside world.

No phone calls, no papers, no television, no outside reading materials, no cell phone. And so that was the first week, full seven days, that I had gone since we went public without looking at our stock price. I'd gone on safari and Africa. I'd gone cruising in the Galapagos. And in both of those trips, we still had Wi-Fi connectivity. And I could kind of be in touch with the office and email with people and see where our stock price was. And that week at Hoffman was, just transformative in a lot of different ways. And we can or don't need to go into that stuff. But it was very eye-opening and very helpful for me as it relates to what makes me tick and the things that I'm good at and the things that I ought to try and avoid. And at the same time, I got done

with the week and I said, man, my psychological health is so much better not having Watch Walker Nullop stock price for the week. It just, when it goes up, I feel artificially good and it goes down, I feel artificially bad. And neither of those two emotions have anything to do with what I did during the day. Totally. And so I just said, I'm going to stop. And I will tell you, Will, every day I'd like reach to say I want to look at it and I wouldn't. And once I got through that first quarter where I didn't watch it and then wait until two days after we announced earnings and then looked at it, the coolest part of it was the stock had actually gone up a lot. And I said, hey, this is actually pretty good. If I don't look at it, maybe it keeps on going up.

And what's cool about it as well is that from 2018 until a year ago now, it had pretty much just continued to go up and up and up and up as I wasn't watching it. And then the pandemic hit and it crashed down as many other stocks did. And then as I just said previously, it's built its way back up. As it relates to people around me, everybody now on my team knows that I don't watch the stock price. So it gets redacted from pretty much all the internal documents that we talk about inside of Walker and Dunlop.

And then every once in a while, as has happened. happened two days ago. I was on a call with an analyst and my IR team. And as we're sitting there talking, the analyst goes, man, $113 or $115 a share. That's awesome. And you could see on the Zoom call will, everyone's face like goes, oh my gosh, they let really know what the stock price goes and it's okay. It's a good number two. It's all good. But it's become kind of a fun little thing internally about the fact that I don't look at it. Yeah, one point you made, which I think is a good one is around this idea of if the stock goes up, you're doing well. If the stock goes down, you're not doing well. And I think at least a breakthrough for me in my earlier days of running

whoop was realizing that I had to separate the performance of the company from my kind of self-identity or my own performance. And that whether the company is going up or down, I still need to figure out a way to get better every day. And in fact, I could be performing well. And the company maybe in a static period or, you know, going through something and to not not have your identity solely tied up in the performance of the business. And I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs now, obviously, and that's one piece of feedback I try to give it because I feel like it's so important as well from a mental health standpoint of running a company. Yeah, I mean, specifically for someone like you who's the founder, chairman, CEO, and

largest shareholder. It's very difficult to think about whoop and not think about Will Ahmed in the same thought. And for me, I have the exact same thing. I'm chairman, I'm CEO, and I'm the largest individual shareholder of Walker and Dunlop. So as Walker and Elop stock price bounces around, it's very hard for me not to think that that's some kind of reflection on how I'm leading the enterprise. And what you do very much get to is as you continue to scale, and just as you're scaling whoop, there are a lot more people who have an influence on whether whoop is going to be successful or not successful than when it was an ID in your head and you launched it and you had to be involved in every single piece of it. And then as it continues to grow and

as Walker and Dunlop has more and more people who are part of it, our brand, our reputation and our investor base just continues to grow, you know, I had to figure out, you know what, it isn't all about me. And that's, you know, for hard-charging, very ambitious owner-entrepreneurs like you are, that's a tough process. And it's also, it's a maturing process that makes, at least in my experience, has been fundamental and transformative to the way that I think about my role at the company and my own emotions around what we're, trying to get accomplished. Yeah, I love the way you put that. Now, you're someone who has been on whoop for quite some time. We've met in part because of your whoop use. I'm always grateful

to meet super interesting, successful people like yourself who use the product. Tell me a little bit about how you got introduced to whoop and how you like it. So I was introduced to whoop by my brother who owns a bike store in Mill Valley, California, called Studio Velo. And he was getting me a birthday present and said, do you whoop? And I said, what in the hell is whoop? And the next thing I know, I had my whoop strap and I started wearing it. My wife, who is very into both mental health and physical health and had tracked all sorts of things as it relates to, she keeps a copious journal about how many hours she sleeps every night and where her heart rate is and all sorts of other stuff. And I started wearing the whoop and she kind of got curious about it. And so then we got her a

she was like, this thing is amazing. And the two of us sort of would sit there and compare data on whoop and heart rate variability and resting heart rate and all sorts of other different things. And, you know, to say that we both got hooked is probably an understatement. You know, I think those people who really get the data and get what the data can tell you about your own health and about recovery and about fitness and all those types of things, it's, you know, it's cutting edge. It's just fantastic. You've been a phenomenal athlete your whole life. Your wife, a former professional tennis player, if I've got that correct. How has fitness played

a role in your life? I was more an athlete than a student growing up and I was captain of most of my teams. I played college lacrosse and then have continued to play. lacrosse and hockey throughout my life, through business school, and quite honestly, hockey I still play at my advanced age of 53 years. What really changed, though, my athletic career will, was when I went to business school, one of my section mates was a very, very successful runner. He'd been Irish national cross-country champion, went to Brown University, was captain of the Brown cross-country team. And when we both found ourselves at Harvard, as first-year students in the NBA program.

We started training together running around the Charles River, a spot you know extremely well. And we signed up for the Boston Marathon, and I went out and ran my first marathon and ran a 245. And all of a sudden, I was like, hey, I'm actually... That's a hell of a first marathon. That was my first marathon, and I ran a 245. I was like, hey, that wasn't too bad. So the next year, we really trained. and I took my that was a great transition but go ahead well the next year we actually did we really

focused in and what's so interesting about it is that I took my 245 and I did a 236 and what I think is so interesting about that is that when you get to that elite level taking nine minutes off of a 245 to get to a 236 the amount of work that it took the the additional discipline from a diet standpoint from a sleep standpoint, and from a workout standpoint, was night and day. And so it gave me the real sense of what applying myself, looking at the data, training to a schedule could do. And then after running that, I gave up on marathoning mostly. I mean, I ran a 242 the following year in Boston after not really training that hard for it.

And then I got into triathlons in the early 2000s. And Adrian Fenty, who's the former mayor of Washington, got me into triathlons. And I'd never really ridden a bike before Adrian said, let's go do a triathlon. I started running with them, and then we got in the pool, and then I bought a bike and started to bike. And I really got captivated by triathlons. And I had three young kids. I was running a publicly traded company, and I was obsessed with triathlons. and that actually wasn't a very healthy thing to have happened.

Not a lot of time in the day when you're... Not a lot of time in the day and not a lot of, a little bit too much focus on Willie and not enough on the rest of the world that was going on around me. It was mostly work in triathlons. And at the same time, it was, I loved it. And it got me into biking, which right now is predominantly what I do. And I bike a ton.

And I do both races on bikes as well as just biking for fun. And it's just been in a fantastic sport for me to kind of extend my athletic career. And I bike and run at sort of a similar level. And I can't swim worth my life. So in triathlons, I would always get in the water. I'd be behind all the leaders in the water. And then I'd get out and I'd start to track them down on the bike and then I'd track them down on the run.

And so anyway, it's been great. It's fascinating to me how many successful people I've, met who've also gotten hooked on triathlons. What is it about triathlons and hard driving executive types like yourself? It's a really good question. I don't know. But you agree with that observation. Oh, totally. Look, yeah, I've met tons of, tons of them. There's something about the extremeness to it. It's like, oh, you know, what do you do? Oh, I do triathlons. They're like, what do you do? I climbed Everest, you know, it's like that, it's sort of like the ultimate physical endeavor, if you will. I did mostly Olympic length marathon, uh, triathlons. I've

never done an iron. I've done half irons, but I've never done a full iron. Um, but, uh, I think it's that. I also think there's something to the camaraderie that comes about it. I had a great training group and we would run and swim and bike together. And then I guess the final piece to it is, there's a lot of gear. And if you're fortunate enough to be able to afford the gear, it's kind of fun to buy different types of bikes and buy tri bikes and, you know, all sorts of other things. Whereas if you're a runner, you buy a pair of shoes and off you go. So I think it's probably some combination of those three elements. What have you noticed about your WOOP data since you've been on WOOP and since you've been training for things like this? And I know you got

injured too recently. Yeah, I think the injury one is the most sort of telling because I'm not since I really started using the whoop. I was getting ready to do a bunch of races last summer when the pandemic hit. So all the race season was put off. But I was last summer, I was in really, really good shape. HRV, heart rate variability was up in sort of the 140 to 170 level. I was getting fantastic recovery scores because we were in the pandemic. So I wasn't going out to parties at night and drinking a lot of alcohol. So I was getting full recovery scores. And I was probably all told in some of the best shape of my life. And my family was on vacation in northern Idaho in, in, in, in, in, in, uh, Coral Lane. And I was racing my kids on a floating dock and I tore my

hamstring off of my pelvis. I flew back to Denver and I had surgery, um, to reattach my hamstring to my pelvis the first week of August. And what was so incredible, Will, was I come from being in this great space where recovery scores were high, HRV was right up there, and then all of a sudden I had surgery and everything just collapsed. And if you look at the data that I got from my who, from the last week of July when I was healthy to the first week of August right after surgery, you literally couldn't tell it was the same person other than my resting heart rate.

And even my resting heart rate had elevated up post operation. And just because I had drugs running through me and I was nervous and not getting a lot of sleep, et cetera, et cetera. And for that two-week period of time where I could do nothing after the surgery, I couldn't, I was on crutches, I could not really move or what have you. My data was all over the place. And my HRV collapsed down to 30 to 40. Wow.

I wasn't sleeping well, everything else. And then all of a sudden, I went and got the stitches taken out. And I turned to the doc, and I said, Doc, I got to start moving again. Can I get back in the pool? And I practiced just before surgery of putting a pole buoy between my legs and seeing whether I could kind of isolate my hamstring and not hurt myself in the pool. And I could do it before the operation. He said, look, I've never had anyone ask to get back to physical activity so quickly.

But if you can get in the pool safely and put bandages over where the scar is, go ahead. So that day, literally two weeks the day after I got surgery, I got back in the pool and I swam for 45 minutes. and it was unbelievable will because the next day my whoop scores snapped right back. The moment I could get back to cardio, the moment my body started running the way that it always runs, all of my other data snapped back into line. And it was as if the old Willie was back, even though I was still at that time, still hurt. But just to have that 45 minutes of cardio in the pool changed everything, HRV jump back up, recovery score jumped back up, resting heart rate came down.

and it was just fascinating to actually have the whoop kind of show me in numbers how I'd suffered while I had surgery in the immediate recovery, and then how important it was for me to get back to cardiovascular exercise. It's so amazing injury data. I mean, we've worked with so many, especially professional athletes, through injury and recovery and rehabilitation. And I've heard that story over and over again. And most people, I think, underestimate the seriousness with which surgery,

affects their body. It seems, it seems sort of obvious to say that, but I think everyone's, you know, trained their minds sometimes to push through certain things or to think, oh, I got to get back into this faster. But you really do need your body to just rest and recover. And it was so interesting that your point about going back into the pool and all of a sudden that kind of woke your nervous system up in a way. And you got that HRV right back up. Anything that you do, you know, before, like, let's say you've got a big day. Is there such a thing as a big day in your life, or have you just kind of learned that you're always going to be as optimal as you can be? I would say the one thing that never changes is when I'm going to go do either a race or go do a very significant physical

activity, the triple bypass ride from Denver up to Avon, Colorado, which is 110 miles and 10,000 vertical feet. The morning I woke up to do the triple bypass, some before last. You know, I get butterflies. I start to think about what I'm going to do. I eat very, you know, purposefully. And I start doing that the day before. And so all of those types of things, whenever I'm doing serious athletic activity, I very much try and dial it in. The one other thing I'd say is that the whoop has made me much more conscious about how much I drink. And I have the feature on my whoop on the app to have my daily diary where it comes in and asks me whether I flew on a plane, whether I had alcohol, caffeine, etc., etc. And I fill that out pretty

religiously and then go back and look at how much alcohol I've had impacts me from a recovery standpoint. And so that's the other thing that's been really nice about the whoop is it does make me conscious of those things that are good and bad for recovery. And so quite honestly, before I had the whoop, I'd just go and have two or three, you know, beers or glass of wine before I'd go do something. And now I'm conscious in my mind of saying, you know what, you got a big day tomorrow from a work standpoint or from a workout standpoint, don't have that extra glass of wine or a beer. Yeah, it's amazing how much you can manage what you measure. Quite honestly, it was wild. I used to think that like if I really wanted to get a good night

sleep, have that extra glass of wine because I'd fall asleep quicker, right? I never would get the same sleep quality. But you think, oh, I got to bed quicker and I wasn't rolling around in bed so it's a better sleep wrong the whoop tells you uh-uh have one last glass of wine roll in bed a little bit longer and you're going to sleep deeper and better um and i think that you know will the the thing that i find to be so great about the the whoop is as an endurance athlete who has a very low resting heart rate my my resting heart rate's about 41 42 when i do EKGs it's down at like 33 34 that's um and so i have a very low resting heart rate um and so when i get my heart rate up into, you know, for me, if I'm doing really hard exercise, I'm between like

130 and 145. If I'm over 145, I'm redlining, right? And there are plenty of athletes who are 170 to 190 and that's just their range of workout. So I'm a much lower heart rate person. I do find one of the things that's very interesting about the whoop is I'll go out and ride my bike for three hours and kill myself, my wife will go play an hour of tennis and her strain score is higher than my strain score. And I think one of the things about that that tells me is that the whoop is picking up total body fitness and not just cardiovascular fitness. So it's also by her moving laterally and also getting her heart rate spiking versus my heart rate sitting in a in a very kind of zone of 130 to 145. What the whoops telling me is that that that's

really good for long-term endurance work, but I'm not getting the same type of overall body workout that my wife does on the tennis court. And we talk about that back and forth as it relates to what our strain scores are. And then I also, you know, I just, I've told you this, I bike with a lot of professional bikers. And it's super fun for me to be able to stay with those types of bikers and then show them the type of effort levels that we've done. We all have computers that tell us what our speed is and what our, you know, cadences, but to be able to actually look at the strain score and heart rate variability and heart rate during the workout is also fantastic data. Yeah, it's really interesting, especially for endurance athletes, because if you think

about just the output of the workout, right? So to keep it simple, you know, you run four miles in 25 minutes or something, right? And you do that time over time. And you do that. And you do that week over week or whatever. If you look at the strain of that workout each time, it's actually a sign that you're getting fitter if your strain is decreasing each time you do it. Because the output was the same, right, you're able to travel the same distance in the same amount of time, but it put less stress on your body in the process. Sort of an interesting irony to the system, which is that you can get fit and therefore it actually gets harder to accumulate strain. On the flip side of that, there's people who aren't fit enough to get their strain up because they'll

exhaust their body too quickly to even be able to put the same cardiovascular load on their body that someone of your caliber as an endurance athlete could, where I'm sure if you wanted to get an 18 strain or a 20 strain, you could go out and do it. There's some people on who haven't been able to do that yet because they aren't fit enough to be able to sustain that cardiovascular load. fitness as a measurement is a very interesting thing and it often requires an additional level of information i remember when we first started working with lebron james in 2015 this was kind of like peak of his powers and he was doing two a days and three a days and so he was able to log a strain i remember it was like 19 and a half 20.0 20.5 and then on the fourth morning

he woke up with a green recovery. And that to me was like the ultimate, one of the ultimate signs of fitness that he could take this sort of enormous levels of strain day over day or day and then wake up green, right? That's another interesting way to think about fitness is how much strain can you put on your body that you then immediately bounce back from.

A lot of people could potentially put that kind of strain on their bodies day over day, but then at some point they're going to redline. It's fascinating. And all the data is, I mean, it does take time to kind of digest it and understand how you're going to integrate it into your workout patterns, your sleep patterns, your, you know, because of the whoop, I go to sleep much earlier than I ever did.

I go to sleep now between 9 and 9.30 at night and wake up much earlier just because the whoop has gotten me conditioned to really focusing on how long I'm sleeping. And that's when my body wants to sleep. I used to stay up to 11 o'clock at night and then wake up at 7 o'clock in the morning. I now go to bed at 9, 9.30 and I wake up at 5. And I'm quite honestly, I find that that time that I found in the morning is super productive time versus the nine to 11 o'clock at night was typically just sitting around watching TV and to some degree just kind of wasting time. And so the whoop very much has helped me kind of recalibrate my schedule and sort of change my lifestyle. I think the pandemic has also had a big impact on that in the sense that there was no social activity going on to keep me up until 11 o'clock at night.

So I've just by nature gone to bed earlier. We've seen that across the whole Wu population that in general, most people have substituted commuting of some kind for more time in bed. So, you know, that's in itself a sign of health improvement if you're able to get a little bit more quality sleep every day. And obviously, we're looking at this across a pretty large data set now. So it's quite interesting to see the effect or the benefit of that. Now, you strike me as someone who's also developed some mental strategies, mindsets, to make you successful, whether it's as a businessman, whether it does, you know, a talented athlete. Talk a little bit about your overall mindset and how how it's changed over the years.

I grew up with a with a dad whom I love dearly and will probably listen to this. So I want to be very mindful to what I say here. But my, I grew up with a dad who sort of had a glass half empty view about a lot of the things that I did. And that was both. a little difficult for me in the sense that it made it that I'd get accomplished with something and always feel like I had to go accomplish something else. In hindsight, now as a 53 year, although I look back on it and also say it's a huge gift because it's one of the big drivers that made me constantly want to continue to exceed and excel and keep moving forward and never sort of say, okay, that's great. Now I can just kind of stop. But that, a little bit of the neuroses

around that, Will, was what drove me to, you know, running a 236 Boston Marathon, to being fourth at the 51-50 triathlon championships and a bunch of other things. And so, you know, having pushed my body in endurance athletics to the level that I have taught me a lot about just getting in the zone and psychologically being able to endure and push through a lot of pain in pursuit of these sort of lofty goals, which I've been fortunate to be able to achieve. As it relates to work, I think very similarly, I told you at the beginning that when I joined Walker and Dunlop, I didn't sort of want to be accused of just kind of going back to the family company because it was the easier, soft thing to do. And so, you know, I couldn't have been a million years thought that I'd take a $25 million company and turn it into a $3.5 billion company.

And at the same time, that was the kind of core engine that was there when I joined Walker and Dunlop that quite honestly still exists today. I think the other piece to it is that my personality is such, and I think you share this, that you constantly reset. There's no, I had an idea of how much money I wanted to make and then I wanted to turn my life to either doing something in public service or go ski and bike a lot, right? And so I had this number of, okay, if I make that much money, then I can think about doing something else. And I got to that number and I said, okay, reset.

Now let's go to the next number. And I got to that next number and then I said, okay, reset, let's go to the next number. And I think now it's not a numbers-based thing. It's just that I love what I do. I really, really enjoy what I do. I enjoy the team that I work with and the success that we've been able to achieve at Walker and Dunlop is like a flywheel that just kind of keeps spinning faster and faster. And you're seeing the exact same thing at whoop.

You get the brand, you get the people, you get the subscriber base. And all of a sudden, everything's just kind of added. and it just starts to run. And so I think then the big issue there, and it's back to something we discussed previously, is making sure you understand what your role is in that flywheel, you know, making sure that you're not on there feeling like you've got to continue to push every single watt that goes into that flywheel to make it run. And you realize that you've got a great team around you and that your role really is to make

sure that everyone can get on that flywheel and help contribute it going faster and faster. and that there really isn't a need for you to be on there showing everyone that you're the fastest or the strongest or the smartest or whatever else the case might be. And that's a maturation process that, to be honest with you, I've probably messed up pretty terrifically at certain times, feel pretty good about right now. But it's an evolution. Yeah, you strike me as someone who carries a lot of gratitude in your life. To me, at least in my limited experience, that's been the most.

helpful thing for me to balance being hard driving with being happy. Because I think if you're just stuck on the dopamine wheel of getting to that next number, whether that's a valuation of a business or a sales number or your net worth or whatever, it does help you actually get there. Because if you tell yourself, everything's going to be great when I get to this thing, like you are creating dopamine thinking about getting to that thing. But what happens when you get to it is it's like what's called the dopamine deficit. it, right, where you arrive at the place and it's not as great as you thought it would be. So there's this sort of inherent letdown.

I feel like I've seen this happen to other entrepreneurs and it's often associated with burnout too. If you can maintain some of that but also be grateful for everything along the way, it seems to be a pretty good way to be happy and hard driving. And I think it took me years at least to appreciate that. Yeah, and I'm looked by the fact that you're seeing it and thinking about it and talking about it and understanding it is, you know, sort of step one, right? And that you've got to be able to recognize that or else you're going to run into a wall. And to be honest with you, I ran into a wall where back in 2015, my wife asked to get separated and we were going to get divorced.

And the most important thing in my life, my nuclear family, was basically walking out the door. And it wasn't until I had that wake-up call. and I count my lucky stars and plenty of blessings that Sheila and I were able to put our relationship back together. But it wasn't until I'd A. come to grips with some of my own shortcomings, the way I had acted in our relationship. I had some real anger issues that I had to work through and remove from my personality, both inside of my family and more broadly. And it wasn't until I was honest about that will and able to talk about it, that I became a much better person, my relationship with Sheila fundamentally changed, which is the most important and greatest

blessing I have in my life. And all of that has cascaded into a very different view about work and pleasure and workouts and exercise and all the other things that I've been able to do. But it wasn't until I got that wake-up call. And I very nearly lost the most important thing in my life, which was my relationship with Sheila and my nuclear family and my kids. I wasn't going to lose my kids. We were going to get divorced.

and we had, we were going to, kids were going to go back and forth. But it wasn't until that wake up call came that I really realized that all of things that I was focused on were pretty misguided. And I was focused on kind of Willie and Willie being faster and stronger and richer and better and everything, Er. It was like an er life. Yeah. And what I realized then was the ear life was not the life I needed to be living.

And so I got out of the er life and into something that's far more grounded and focused on others and my relationships with others, and it's been just fundamentally different ever since then. Well, it sounds pretty transformative, and thanks for sharing that. Now, you mentioned overcoming anger issues. What are good strategies for overcoming anger? Cool. Expectations. It's all about from the way that I got over it. I'm sure there are many, many ways that people can be consulted to deal with it. But I read a book, Sheila actually gave it to me. written by a doctor named Dr. Robert Ney and Sheila handed it to me years before we split

and I kind of looked at it and said, you know, this hard charging kind of a little bit edgy, angry CEO athlete is what makes me what I am. So don't think about me getting rid of that. That's like, that's the special sauce, which was completely erroneous. And so when Sheila and I were splitting, she handed me the book back again. So, you know, this might have something in there for you. And what basically Dr. Ney's book talks about is that anger is all about expectation

and expectation management. If your expectation is that your child is going to come home and sit at the dinner table perfectly and never make a noise and act properly and thank you for the dinner, well, when they come home and they throw their book bag on the ground and they don't clean up their dishes and they don't thank you for dinner, you're going to be pissed off and you're going to get angry about it. And so the real issue is trying to, if you will, monitor and understand where your expectations are for behavior and performance and then making sure that you're not out of line on that, which then drives anger. And so, you know,

there was this one, I'll give you a quick anecdote will in the book where it says, you know, if you're driving down the road and somebody cuts you off, do you pull up next to them and flipping the bird, do you pull up next to them and roll down the window and start screaming at them, or do you pull up next to them, go in front of them and cut them off? And I'm sitting here reading this and I'm like, is there all of the above on the answers to this thing? And what, and what Dr. Ney basically said was, if your mindset is that everyone needs to be a great driver, you're always going to be pissed off that there's some jerk on the road who cuts you off. But if your mindset is that they're crappy drivers all over the place and that you just have to protect yourself and

drive well, when someone cuts you off, you're not going to all of a sudden get all inflamed and pull up next to them and scream and yell like I used to do. And so honestly, now, you know, I drive down the road and just try and mind my own business. And if someone acts like a jerk, I just let them go. But that's all expectation management, right? I used to show up to TSA lines on airplanes. And I'd show up late and it was my fault. But I'd somehow think that they'd screwed up at the airport from their. staffing model of not allowing me to get through TSA quickly. So when I'd get to the TSA guy, I'd give him a piece of my mind saying, God, you guys are so incompetent. But the person who made

the problem happen was me. I showed up late. And so you reframe it. And now if I show up in a TSA line and it's a long line, and we all haven't been in TSA lines for a year. So I know this is sort of a foreign concept these days. But you know, you show up in the TSA line. You see me? I'm cool as a cucumber if I've shown up late because I know it's my fault. I'm the I'm the dumbass who left home too late. I used to not think that way. I used to be like, the world ought to like revolve around me. And now I'm like, no, you want to make sure that you're not pissed off at the TSA line?

Show up at the airport two hours early. You won't have any problem with the TSA line. None. So. Yeah. No, that seems like a very healthy and highly applicable mindset strategy. Although I'm curious, like how has that transferred over to your management of the business? Did you find that you didn't get as angry?

in business? Do you find that you're lowering your expectations in business? I mean, often what makes a business great is that everyone has high expectations for themselves. Yeah, I think the biggest issue there is I've never lowered my expectations for the business and for the performance of the business. What I have done is figured out how to allow people to take full responsibility for things and giving them the adequate amount of time to either succeed or fail. So I used to, if there was a problem in our business, I used to put that business and that manager under my thumb. And I would never let him or her out from underneath my thumb because I thought that my management, my active management, my riding herd on him or her was what was going to make them

successful. And through this whole process, what I realized was I had some unrealistic expectations for some of the people and some of the businesses that weren't doing that well. So what I did was backed up, took a look at the business and what I needed it to get to. I established really clear goals. And I would say to him or her, you've got this amount of time to get to that. Is that a fair expectation? They'd say, yep, perfectly fair. And I'd say, great, let's check back in in six months or a year from now.

If you've gotten there, we're good. If you haven't, we got a problem. And by pulling back and letting them take responsibility and not constantly have me on top of them, it allowed them to spread their wings, take some risk, and drive their businesses forward. And in some instances, it worked beautifully, and in some instances, it didn't work out, and we made changes. But it was a much healthier way of managing the day-to-day, rather than thinking that the only way to get results was for me to be on someone's ass. That's such good advice. I mean, that's such good advice. It's also something I've struggled with,

too, is like, when do you insert yourself and one do you adopt more of a sink or swim at for the person managing it or running it or, you know, responsible for it. But the way you described it is, I think, incredibly productive. I think one of the main reasons that drives that type of behavior was my fear that some business wouldn't produce those results we needed and that that would then go into our quarterly results and then we'd have a bad quarter and then I'd look like, you know, I'd look bad on our earnings call because we missed earnings. And the bottom line is that that kind of thinking is so short-sighted, it's so fearful, and it doesn't get you to where you need to be long-term.

Well, I think that's, I mean, it's really cool for me to just listen to how you've been such a successful businessman, and you've balanced that with having a family and admit to the challenges that come with all of it. And so super appreciative of you spending time with me on the podcast, Willie, and I can't wait to see you in person hopefully soon. I look forward to it, Will. Great luck with everything with the WOOP. I love the product. I love your vision for where you're taking it. And thanks for having me on. Thanks to Willie for coming on the WOOP podcast. A reminder you can use the code Will Ahmed, W-I-L-H-M-E-D to get 15% off a W-W-P membership. You can follow us on social

at WOOP at Will Ahmed. Stay healthy, folks. Stay in the green. You know, I'm going to be.