WHOOP Podcast - Coast Guard-WHOOP study measures fatigue, rest, and recovery in air crews

Episode Date: March 9, 2022

Robert Moeller, WHOOP Associate Vice President of Government and a former Navy SEAL, sits down with Coast Guard Commander Scott Austin for a discussion on leadership, performance, and how data can be used to help our servicemen and women. Commander Austin is a helicopter pilot who recently completed a study that evaluated how Coast Guard crew member perceptions of fatigue and alertness compared with WHOOP data on sleep and recovery. He discusses the treacherous conditions he and his crews often encounter during search and rescue missions (2:43), the danger fatigue can cause in aviation (7:54), the culture of sleeplessness in the military (11:00), his thoughts on strong leadership (14:55), the details of the study the Coast Guard conducted with WHOOP (18:43), what the study revealed (26:57), what can be learned from WHOOP (31:34), how fatigue affects your physiology (37:39), and the importance of sleep (41:32). 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

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the WOOP podcast, where we sit down with top athletes, scientists, experts, and more to learn what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak and what you can do to unlock your own best performance. I'm Robert Mueller, Associate Vice President here at Woop for government, and I'll be sitting in for Will Amid this week. On this week's episode, we're taking a look at the United States Coast Guard, more specifically how their helicopter pilots and air cruised use Woop to mitigate risk while also helping keep are service men and women safe. The Coast Guard mission is critical.

As a service member, there's no better feeling than serving the community, and the Coast Guard answers that call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So today, I'm sitting down with Coast Guard Commander Scott Austin for discussion on leadership, performance, and how whoop data can be used to help our service, women, and men. Commander Scott Austin is based in Port Angeles, Washington, and recently completed a study with Coast Guard members that evaluated how perceived levels of readiness compared to actual physiological readiness. So think, how tired do you feel versus how tired are you really from a physiological standpoint?

He talks about what he learned about his team as a commanding officer, a position of leadership, and what his crew members learned about their human systems, i.e. themselves, by learning to trust their whoop data. Commander Austin and I discuss the role the Coast Guard plays in not only search and rescue, but also other Coast Guard missions most people do not typically ever hear about. Why the sleep deprivation culture is one of our greatest threats to safety and physical and mental well-being of our service members. Scott will also tell us about the many stressors and fatigue Coast Guard aviators experience on a daily

basis. We also discuss how leadership can only smartly manage what is measured when it comes to a more ready and resilient Coast Guard force. And lastly, but very critically, why the military, More specifically, the United States Coast Guard thought WOOP would be a perfect fit for this government study. As a reminder, you can get 15% off a WOOP membership by using the code Will W-W-I-L or Whiskey, India, Lima, for all our government folks over at WOOP.com. Here is Commander Scott Austin of the United States Coast Guard. Scott, welcome to the WOOP podcast. How are you, buddy?

Hey, doing great. How about you? Good. And for everybody that's listening today, we are going to be talking about the Woop, but more importantly, WOOP within the United States Coast Guard and how Scott had a really interesting journey around trust, community, and education. So Scott, I think it'll be really good for our listeners to understand how this whole thing came about and how you ended up, you know, coming to Woop and what you wanted to see around the technology, but more importantly, what you learned from your individuals that became part of the WOOP community, but more important, started using WOOP in their daily lives. Can we start with why? What was the

driving factor around you as leadership. And maybe you want to tell people, you know, where you sit and what seat you're sitting in as far as leadership goes inside the United States Coast Guard. I was sitting in kind of two seats. One was an executive officer. So the number two guy working at a Coast Guard air station in the Pacific Northwest that primarily does search and rescue work. So for folks that aren't familiar with the Coast Guard, it's kind of a firehouse model. We have crews sitting around waiting for the alarm to go off at our particular unit. And then when the alarm does go off, they're there kind of for 24 hours. And then regardless of where they're at in that 24-hour period, they launch and go.

When you say you're on that 24-hour alert, the mission set, especially in the Pacific Northwest, it's super cold for everybody listening internationally. Some of the temperatures that you guys are getting exposed to when you guys work, has that been a factor? How have you thought about that from a leadership standpoint? Well, temperatures for, we're basically, we refer to ourselves here. We're in Port Angeles, Washington. We refer to ourselves kind of as Alaska Light.

So we're not quite up in Kodiak and the tundra. But basically, we get down into the very low, you know, near zero. Right now, I think it's four degrees outside today. We're in a bit of a cold snap. It's actually pretty temperate where we're at, but depending on our mission, one of the challenges that we see is, one, our days are very short. So there's not a lot of light for this portion of the year in the winter. And then a lot of our missions, we don't just do people think of the Coast Guard and you're going to go get out on the water and pick somebody up. Right.

But a lot of our missions are up, you know, in the mountains and the Cascades up in the Olympic Mountains having to pick up. people up that have either gotten stranded or hurt in all manner of areas, which is a very unique thing for our particular unit. It's really critical for people to know. It's not that you're just getting on a boat and going to pick up somebody that, you know, the mom and pop that are out and their boat broke down, you know, that search and rescue mission for your unit when it comes to the aviation sign and dropping individuals into the forest to go pick something up, is that part of the mission? Absolutely. Our rescue swimmers, which is another area that wearables are going to be helping us looking into our training and preparing folks.

Not only do we take them out into the, you know, sub-freezing ocean, but we take them off in some instances we have to leave them up on a mountaintop or just, you know, conduct an extremely high hoist. It could be from a cliffside, places like that. And then search and rescue is just kind of one of the missions. It's just where I'm at right now. We also do very unique from what people might think of when they think of the Coast Guard the unit I was at prior to here, a helicopter interdiction unit.

So we go off to the south of the United States. go fast vessels that are trying to bring drugs that through transit zone. So we'll fly off in the middle of the night and shoot some of those guys' engines so that we can stop them. Yeah, very important to clarify what we're shooting that. So we're just disabling the vessels so that our guys on the ground and girls on the ground can hop on and interdict that contraband that's trying to make us way northern. And then we also do a mission in D.C. where we protect the national airspace 24-7. And so all those things kind of say like, hey, you've got to be ready anytime day or night in Coast Guard aviation in different formats. So there's definitely a need there.

It's inherent to kind of figure out. And we've been looking at it as long as aviation exists. That was a big part of my study. Sure. Hey, how can we figure out how to make sure that people that are doing these types of missions are the most ready when it comes to fatigue to be able to do this dangerous stuff as safely as possible? Yeah, and that's one of those things, Scott. When you first came to us on the Woop Tactical side, I was super excited to hear that a group like

yours, Coast Guard aviation, especially with such a dynamic, set. You know, you're doing the counter-narco stuff right off the coast of Florida and some other places. But then at the same time, you know, somebody in your group is doing, you know, high-angle rescue hoists in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Super dynamic. And like you mentioned before, what does readiness look like, whether it's in the Pacific Northwest? But more importantly, what does readiness look like if it's going to be a jack of all trades and a master of none? Meaning, you know, these people in the United States are relying on the Coast Guard, not because, you know, they know they're going to get themselves into a situation where they're going to need help.

This mission is a little bit more advanced than your local, let's say, fire and rescue from the local fire department or police department. I mean, this is highly trained. They're flying at night with night vision on. And we're talking about most all weather conditions. I mean, these guys and girls are doing something extremely dynamic, extremely dangerous, and they really don't have much room to make mistakes. That all said, when Scott came to us at Woop Tactical and said, hey, we think we can learn a lot by putting this technology on our aviators. We were absolutely thrilled and we were all in. Scott, focusing on that, you as as leadership, sitting in the exosite that you're in right now, when you first came to us and really wanted to pull apart how we could

better learn, you know, the individual aviator, but more importantly, how you could take that information and start making smarter decisions from the leadership perspective. What drove that thought for you? And how did you end up coming to whoop? Why? whoop, more importantly, and what were you trying to get from the individual data that you were trying to get from the study that you ended up doing? We've been, fatigue is nothing new to aviation, right? So we've known that this is a thing since the beginning. First planes that go back to the, you know, just after the Wright brothers.

I mean, we started flying planes. We said, hey, you should probably be awake when you're doing this. You know, some of that's common sense. Sometimes. In academia, right. But the thing we have in policy, basically because we didn't have the ability until fairly recently, actually track this type of. data. We have multiple sensors, redundant sensors on every portion of the aircraft that we fly,

except the aircrew. And just to stop on the floor, get to the top of the mountain and highlight what Scott is saying, is that we have these highly, highly trained helicopter pilots, male and female, doing their job every day, and there's checks and balances for them to take off, land, and everything else in between. For the individual to stand up in a room inside of that organization and say, hey, everybody, the dogs were up last night. my infant was crying. My wife is sick. I can fly today, but I just want to let you know that my self-assessment is here, here, and here. Scott, can you pull that apart a little bit more and talk about generally the aviation community and how the technology has now caught up with the aviation

community to where you can actually make smarter decisions on the individual basis using something like whoop or also allow leadership to make smarter decisions based off of the technology that you're employing now. When I was thinking about how I wanted to study this, so you go to a pre-flight brief. So in Coast Guard aviation in particular, in aviation in general, but in Coast Guard aviation in particular, we have a pretty fantastic culture whenever it comes to aviation safety, operate ORM, we call it operational risk management. So that process that we go through, a very standardized discussion before any time you get in the aircraft. Right. And you have that, you talk about every aspect of the mission and the risk that applies to it and

And one of the specific things is both, you know, the pilots and the air crew. And you talk about, hey, how are you functioning? Like, how did you sleep? Did you get enough sleep? And our policy, like I was talking about earlier, in our doctrine, it basically says every person that gets the aircraft has a moral responsibility to make sure that they show up rested. And can we talk about that real quick, not to interrupt your flow here.

Yeah, not. But moral responsibility, you know, I think all of us that have served or are serving currently right now, that term, moral responsibility resonates deeply. deeply because again it's about the men and women to the left and right of you at least you know during my time and service and scott i'm sure you feel the same way is you truly have that moral responsibility to raise your hand and say hey i'm not okay and this is what i think is best for the mission again against that operational risk management piece so i appreciate you saying that i think we should highlight that more especially in the different communities that are always like hey

we're going to we're going to go no matter what but making smart decisions whether it's subjective self-reporting or using technology, that's where they really come together because that moral responsibility is a big deal. It's a huge deal. And as an ex-o, that's one of the points that I got to is we tell people that they have this moral responsibility, but science has shown that you don't necessarily know when you're that fatigued. So we put these people in a really frustrating position, and we can kind of create a culture that's really, that really sets people up a little bit for failure. So you look at other studies, you see that the vast majority of people in our culture, just American culture, go there first. You see the vast majority of people are

sleep deprived. Right. And then, you know, we're, we're not that special. We love to think that we're special. We're not. We're not special. We're still, you know, a subset of that culture, right? Right. And so you look, there was a tough study, a small thesis that came out a few years ago. They surveyed postcard air crews. I think 70% of the air crews had said that they had flown fatigued in like more than 10 times, like 99, some 90% had said that they had flown fatigued within like the last 10 days or six months. Now let me ask you this as an aviator and I know you're sitting in the XO role, but you obviously spent time, you know, getting in the helicopter, not fatigued and fatigue. When you're at that moment where you know you're a little tired or

where you feel, hey, you know, I feel okay. And this is with no technology. in place. What was your true north as far as looking at your teammates in the moment? I have this more responsibility. What's that conversation like? Because you mentioned that you have a really good community of folks willing to talk about that. And that's massive. Some communities are not because a lot of communities do not stand up and say, hey, I'm, I'm tired today. Oh, 100%. And that's where the crew endurance program at NPS has been great because I may be biased coming from the aviation world. But I think aviation, again, somewhat because of the stakes that are at play. Hey, you know, if you're sleeping you bump something with a boat, some things can go bad. If you're sleeping, you bump something

in an airplane, it's usually the ground. That's kind of it for you. Within our community, like those conversations, they start one, it's, it's a, like you said, it's community. It's about building culture, right? So culturally, we have a very no-fault realm and crew resource management is a is a thing that gets talked about. A lot of buzzwords get thrown out. But the bottom line is we've created a culture where people can be honest and vulnerable enough that the most junior person in any air crew that I've been on could call me out at any point, whether I was the lieutenant junior pilot or if I'm flying now. And I, we have the culture where I will say, hey, guys, like you said earlier, hey, the kids kept me up. I'm a little bit tired. And the key there

is that accountability that goes into the culture of saying like, hey, you know what, if you think I'm tired, then I'm tired. Right. If I'm doing something that makes you think because you know you're the one that's strapped in in the back or in the other seat you know what i do is going to immediately impact your life in a monumental way right scott's job function for you know the civilians listening to this is he's the one piloting the helicopter however scott how many people at any given time do you have in the back who are entrusting their lives to you to make the right decisions every second of the mission uh usually two to four on a two on an operational flight, it could be up to four on some sort of training mission, plus

anybody that we've rescued at that point that is not there voluntarily. Right. Just to pull apart a little bit, what Scott is saying here is that there are at least at a minimum of four other people, five other people, relying on his ability to have that moral fortitude to stand up in the pre-mission brief during the ORMs and say, hey, listen, I'm a little fatigued. I, you know, feel this way. However, this is what I'm recommending. and there's checks and balances in place. What also highlighting, and this is amazing that you have, I didn't know that a lot of military organizations

or a lot of service-oriented organizations, you are not allowed to call out leadership because they have the experience, they have the hours, the flight hours, whatever it may be, and a true, and this is a testament to you, Scott, not to blow smoke here, but, you know, when leadership allows anybody

from the most junior grade officer or enlisted individual to say, hey, I feel this is unsafe, I'm calling it out, and it is actually taken on board and listen to. That drives culture, and it drives safety, and it drives trust. And that's what we're really focusing on here. And like we said earlier in the podcast, you know, that community trust and education around being able to stand up and say, hey, we all have this moral obligation to each other to ensure that we're ready. And what does readiness really feel like for the individual, but also as a team. I was saying the teams call it a teams guys call it

situational subordination whenever I used to be able to work with them. And it, like, you're smiling. It goes along, like, that's what builds the trust. When you're tapped, you're going to tell me. And not until then. You're not going to use that card lightly. And that is one of those things that truly does gain the trust of the individuals around you, because at the end of the day, if, even if you're out on a training mission, Scott,

and I don't know if this has ever happened you, and it turns into a real world mission because you got the call or something's just going wrong in the aircraft. now this is potentially a seriously dangerous training initiative. You never know is my point. And you always have to have a certain amount in the tank in order to perform the job. It's very clear that you knew that you had to further the technology around the ORM, so the operational risk management, enhance the culture that you currently already have within your aviation community.

And when you were looking around and trying to see how you would enable the trust, not only of the individuals that you fly with, but also amongst each other, you decided to turn to the technology, but more importantly, Whoop. What was it about the Woop ecosystem that attracted you as leadership, but more importantly as an individual that just wants to know how they're doing? Well, one of the challenges that you face, when you're trying to find something for a military organization, is there's a lot of devices out there that do a lot of things. And one of the things that was useful about the product that we ended up with with yours for this study is the things that it doesn't do. So operational security is a big issue, probably the biggest, and our study

found basically the biggest barrier to acceptance of the technology with our folks is trust. And twofold trust. One, do they trust the civilian company that's created the device that's running the software? And then do they trust the organizational leadership to have access to this data because this is, this is an expansive, big jump from the realm as far as privacy goes for our folks. Right. It's something that fits within our safety parameters. Listen, mission first. Always. Yeah. And the other was from the organizational op-sac perspective is, you know, it's not tracking a lot of other things that we don't need information about. I don't need to necessarily know where you are. I don't need GPS associated with what you're doing. I don't need

I just need the information that's coming basically through those physiological parameters. Right, right. And it also gives me the ability to de-identify that if, if and when I need to. So particularly for my study, we were able to disassociate who was wearing white band so that I could just look at them as, you know, not the actual people that were doing. So partially from an academic sense, but again, from building that trust, that first step of like, hey, you're going to be wearing this thing 24-7 when you're with your wife and your kids and your, you know, or if you're, you know, one of your hearing folks, whatever you're doing on a

weekend, you can trust me to have access to that data and not read into it for anything that doesn't apply to work, right? This is, like you said, this is all business and that's where we can start. Well, let's talk about that first because people keep hearing us say this study. Can you just highlight, can you highlight the study and talk about what it was? Oh, sure. So it was pretty straightforward. We took 20 folks. We only. We only give them a month with a whoop. They had no previous experience of it. It was 20 pilots and air crew. So that's pilots, rescue swimmers, and flight mechanics. So everybody in that ecosystem that we talked about as far as going out doing the mission, whether it was the aviators, the rescue guys

and the back and girls in the back, and any subset of the crew, all of them, all 20 of them in some capacity, were doing that one job function. And that's the group that you were looking at. Yes, sir. Okay. They're all stationed down in Mobile Alabama, so same place. We basically led with pre and post surveys and then we monitored their data over the course of just the first month of wearing a wearable device. And the couple of key questions we wanted to look at in addition to just how did their physiological data change over the course of the month was through that survey information was even over just that first month. Did they have a shift in whether they trusted their intuition whenever they show up to that ORM session, whether they just say, hey, how do I feel? how did I feel when I woke up this morning before my first cup of coffee versus what did the numbers on my on my device tell me right um we wanted to know hey is there a shift in that trust even during that first period because we'd seen some studies on that you know in broader communities but we wanted to know specific we're an odd idios synchronous group you know a bunch of military aviators right we have our own you know quirks uh so we wanted to know a little bit hey would this subgroup of society be any different would they would they trust this would there be a shift in trust from myself to the device over just that first period because there's been a lot

of studies that look at hey we've put a wearable on these people over a prolonged period and they got more sleep and they got more you know and it's good information but they're that first step so you can correlate all that yes you can say hey they're wearing a device this must be why they're sleeping like a rock star now and you know their you know their mild time is down to six It's got to be because they wore this, right? But we're trying to get to that first step on the stairwell here and look at the acceptance point like... Such a big one.

Is it because there's a shift in trust from myself to this device? Right. What the study was was a policy study. It's if there's wearable devices and we can, if we think we should be using them, how do we use them smartly? How do we put them out there with policy smartly so that people will actually use them in a that helps them instead of just the military way of being like, hey, there's a new technology. Everybody gets it on Tuesday.

You better strap this thing on or you're fired. Figure it out, right? Yeah, figure it out. So thank you for that because there's a lot of threads in there that I'm going to pull on here. I'm going to start with the acceptance piece. What was it about Woop that they were able to accept and they felt like this is something that is enhancing and enabling and not collecting and monitoring? The performance expectation.

So do they trust that the numbers that are coming off of there are actually actually accurate. That was the first one that they reported back, or that was the... That was actually number two. Number two, so the second priority for the users were, can they trust the data or the device telling them, hey, you're in the green, you're in the red, you're in the yellow. Yeah. Interesting. But the leading, when we've already touched on it, maybe even too much, is privacy concerns. Right. It edged out, barely edged out performance expectation. Whenever we looked at what was important for leading toward acceptance. Right.

Like you just asked earlier, this isn't a monitoring device. This isn't an empowering device, right? And so that's a fine line there. We are still a military aviation organization. So aviators do have a love-hate relationship with flight surgeons. Can we pull us apart? Because there's going to be civilians that are listening to this. Yeah, absolutely.

And I don't know if you would attribute or kind of relate flight surgeons to kind of HR for civilians. Yeah, there's a good way to put it. Maybe. So can you just talk about that so people understand what the relationship is with a flight doc and then potentially doing your mission. Oh, yeah, absolutely. So a flight surgeon is periodically, at least every year. So any aviator that wants to operate in an aircraft has to basically pass the poking and prodding to make sure that you're, you past an annual physical. And even before you

get into military aviation, there's a, there's a big filter there at the beginning where they basically look at you, you know, like your livestock and, hey, do your eyes work. And there's a myriad of things that if, you know, they're not right on you for good reason, right? Because we talked about earlier, hey, if I have a heart condition that I don't even know about, that could be an issue. And I'm the single pilot of a helicopter or a jet or anything else, you know, it's not just me in the aircraft. If that thing goes down, that's going to go down somewhere. Right, right? Right. Flight surgeons have the unhappy task of being that filter of basically saying, like, hey, I know you love this. I know you want to do it. I know you think you're ready. But there is

some sort of underlying condition there that makes it so that you're not safe to be that limiting factored in the aircraft. Right, right. You're not that weak link in the aircraft, and I'm the one that's going to determine that this is something or you have anything going on that potentially could leave to that moral obligation of standing up and saying, I'm not good today. Exactly. And the challenge with that is, you know, again, a lot of those things that can take you

out either temporarily or permanently from flying, because, again, not only is this something people do for service, this is their livelihood, right? Even after the fact that they leave the Coast Guard, they could be flying helicopters for whoever. Yep. So it is truly, it could be detrimental to earning a living, and it's a big deal. So just for everybody listening, the flight surgeon is there to help, not hinder. However, they take their jobs very seriously. So it's a big deal.

And so with that, so the idea of telling, hey, you know, an air crew, hey, now potentially give the flight surgeon access to your physiological data 24-7, And you don't even have to go down to the clinic and have them, you know, put an EKG or a stethoscope on you. Right. You've got some folks that put some pretty colorful comments in their surveys that said, yeah, you think I'm actually going to trust that guy or that girl? Like, no. But if you can imagine waking up and just loving what you do, a lot of individuals, especially in the aviation community, love to fly. That flight surgeon has a duty to make sure everyone is safe. But Scott, to your point, acceptance of, am I going to let somebody that could take this away from you?

my dream job, my dream outcome away from me is a massive leap of faith and trust. Now, for everybody listening, let me just talk about a few things that Scott was able to leverage. You know, Woop Tactical has a very different approach. The enterprise solution for Woop has the ability to de-identify or anonymize the data for leadership. And so what Scott is referring to is myself or Scott being on the strap, he's able to see our trending data. so think HRV, amount of sleep, resting heart rate, truly see if we are ready as a collective,

not as an individual, because when Scott as the XO or leadership views the team dashboard or the data, it's anonymized. He doesn't know who is doing what, who is sleeping three hours versus five hours, but he knows that the 20 individuals on this particular team, how they're trending on a daily basis, whether it's for night operations or daily operations or whatever that may be. Scott, from that perspective, when you were able to, and when you learned that we were able to anonymize the data, I think that was one of those moments where it was like, okay, this study is really possible. Well, I think, one, it was a little easier through the course of the study, right?

Because I had all volunteers. So nobody's going to show up and say, hey, I volunteered for this thing, and I'm not wearing it. Right. So I already had a bit of a biased group. I think really the key there was once we looked at the data afterward, and once we saw some of these perspectives, and we started to look at, you know, some of the previous research about like, hey, well, one, we saw the shift. We did actually see, go ahead and reference, we did see that shift. What did you see? And you're saying you saw the shift. What was that shift? The trust shift

over that 30 days, slightly people are mean, basically, people were slightly more prone to trust their intuition at the beginning of the study. And over just 30 days, by the end of this very, you know, pretty short period, we had shifted to the point where the majority are mean shifted over to the other side, people were more so trusting the data that came from the device as far as making their ORM decision. So we were asking them, hey, day one, I wake up how I feel is how I feel. I don't care what this thing says. By day 30, they were like, hey, I might feel a little tired. I at least want to validate that with some numbers. You said something really critical that I want to come back to. You said that within a very short period of time from day

one to day 30. There was this shift. Hey, subjectively, self-reporting, this is how I feel day one. And by day 30, they were very much trusting and accepting of the fact they would wake up in the morning, look at the whoop dashboard on the phone, and be able to know within five minutes how ready they were for the day. Did you actually see the cultural shift of, I'm not really sure if I trust this device. And did you see the acceptance happening in the four weeks that you were running the study? Physically, again, we tried not to interact too much because the last thing I wanted to do was, you know, taint the study with, you know, I didn't want to be a wearable hype man.

This was one of the unique things was like, it was really fire and forget. So it was, hey, here's your thing. There's no instructions. There's no mandate. You don't even have to wear the thing. Like we didn't tell people, hey, you have to wear it 24, 7. We just said, hey, here's a device. see if it works for you.

Okay. And that was the interesting thing was by and large, with the exception of one person that I think just had a battery issue that they created for themselves for a couple of days. Right. Everybody wrote out 30 days because they wanted, you know, you know it. Aircrew are, like you said, people are people, right? This may be a device that was originally made for athletes, but in the tactical application, it's the same thing.

People will get, I don't want to say addicted, but people really want to know more of what there is to know. They want to turn, they want to turn, you know, known unknowns into known right. Once the acceptance piece happens, the value that the whoop strap provides on a daily basis is critical to the individuals knowing. I would rather know than not know. I would rather know if I'm correct thinking about the past, present, and future correctly, or if I'm thinking about it incorrectly, past, present, and future. And I want everybody to hear this because this is something that we really need to start talking more about, and Scott, I'm interested in your thoughts here and how you've digested this, is when they started interacting with the red,

yellows, and greens, did they give you feedback on, oh, this is what green feels like? This is what true readiness feels like from a physiological standpoint. Not only am I having this life-saving piece of equipment track this, but I'm actually feeling it now, and I'm correlating what subjectively, what I'm self-reporting as, I'm ready today, versus I'm not as ready or I'm not ready at all. Did you guys talk about that at all? And how was that talked about, you know, within within the group of 20? The interesting thing, within our risk management realm, we do a lot of, you know, the

gar model, the green, amber, red. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, sure. So basically, any aspect of that, that pre-mission discussions, you have to frame it somehow. Right. And so a lot of those things will be, hey, you know, are we in the green, which is low risk? Are we in the amber, which is some moderate risk? or are we in the red, which is high risk.

Right, right. So there was some cultural shift there for folks that are like, well, does this green, amber, and red on the device mean like if I'm in the red, I'm high risk? Right. And like you just said, like the goal isn't to judge it's to know, right? This is just objective data. You have to take, just like we do with the rest of risk management.

And I think our folks were kind of preloaded and understood how to do that is you take the emotion out of. Yes. I'm not sad because, or I'm not disappointed in myself because I didn't get enough sleep last night. I just didn't get enough sleep last night. Right. That doesn't make me a bad person. It just means I'm tired today, right?

If I'm not recovered, you know, it doesn't mean, you know, it might mean that I just trained really hard yesterday. Like you said, that could be a good thing. Right. It just, it's more information to feed. And the thing that we kept coming back to, and then I kept coming back to even post-study with discussions, both with the folks in the field and some of the folks that, participate in the study is that it's easy to get upset, I don't want to say obsessed, but it's easy to over-focus on the information. It's, you know, do I need to set parameters on a 20% recovery? Where should we draw a line? Right. People not allowed to fly at night

below 20. And you can get overly focused on the data and make that seem like the end. Right. Whereas it's really just, I mean, because the goal, in all of this is behavior change, you know, wait, is my recovery score? Is that just my HRV, you know, is one, why does HRV? Why do I care? Right. You know, but does this affect how tired I am? Like, oh, wait, what is this mean? How do these things actually play? You know, things that, you know, people tend to think about. But once they realize, like you said, the value, then they start to think, man, is this glass of wine before dinner really affecting my recovery school.

100%. Once you start having something where you can look at the performance of the machine, right. You want to fine tune it. The human machine and you want to fine tune it. That is when you know you've had that positive behavioral cultural shift of maybe not many, but even if you did that year over year with just 10% of your organization, three years in, and again, we're just talking about 30 days here, not even, oh, you know, six months,

12 months, which we usually do, you have a different organization. And that is critical to readiness, preparedness, and willingness. On that, as leadership, how did you start looking at the data from an educational aspect from a leadership standpoint? The real aha moment wasn't, so it wasn't necessarily the education, what are the specifics, what's the difference between heart rate variability and, you know, what are my sleep phases, things like that. Those are the discussions that were really kind of going on internally within the group.

Sure. And that's the next phase of study for us, right? So if we look at the policy-wise, how do we borrow some terms? That's the gardening, right? Right. One of the things we looked at as far as that acceptance piece was a unique thing within aviation safety culture. One thing that was interesting was people were more concerned with the organization having

access to their data than they were the civilian company. The company. So just to highlight that, right, just to highlight that the individuals in this Coast Guard study were not as concerned as whoop the organization or the company. company having the data. It was Scott as leadership or the boss, if you will, having that data. The way that we get around that is anonymizing the data to ensure that, you know, individual data is protected, but at the same time, somebody like Scott can use that trend analysis to drive better decision making. Was it for you, was that that aha moment is they were okay with

whoop having the information because they trusted the brand. They've, they understand the value at that point, but they were still like, ah, Scott, we don't know. Well, it was, it was because it paralleled so well, and there's a thing in aviation safety called privilege. So similar where people think of it as a legal term, right? So anytime there's a mishap in aviation, there's two investigations. There's two things that go on. One is the safety professionals want to find out what happened down to the root cause so we can stop it from happening again. Lawyers and administrative people will want to find out what happened for other reasons, right? And so there's protections in place so that safety folks can actually get to the root cause and get people,

able to feel safe and open up and talk to them and trust them and that information can't be used on that other side. So you can really silo that information. And so one of the policy things we looked at was, hey, within the organization, not just by anonymizing it within the civilian company, but within to help people be willing to open up to the benefit that this can provide as simple, seemingly simple until, you know, lawyers will obviously be involved. Thing, a tool that already exists is could we pre-apply the concept of privilege to this information and say, hey, if you are willing to use this device to get this information, because we know this is going to make people safer, could we basically, this information

can't be used administratively or anything. So, you know, had a late night last night, something completely unrelated happens during a flight, you don't have to worry about the fact that, you know, your two-year-old waking you up, even though it was unrelated, is somehow going to administratively get you in trouble, you know, when an aircraft breaks. And, Scott, you're highlighting something that most organizations on the DOD and federal side do is say, listen, this piece of equipment, it's not going to be used against you because you're trusting the data and it's making you a better human.

There has to be that give and take, and I'm not a policy guy, and I think, you know, it's way above both of our pay grades, even though I'm. I don't have one anymore. However, it's nothing that we don't know. It's, I love my dream job. I want to protect my dream job, but I want to know and be empowered to make the right decisions because we're trying to drive positive behavioral change. And I think that's really, really critical, especially from somebody like you in the exo seat

saying, I'm completely okay with that because, again, I would rather my people have access to know than not know without judgment. Red, green, or yellow isn't a judgment thing. It is just truly is. This is where you sit for a readiness standpoint. And you know what? If something goes sideways, whether it's in training or real world, we're not going to use that against you. I think that's a strong statement. And I'm hoping that, you know, whether it's privilege or any other type of something similar to that, wearable technology will not be used against the service member or federal employee because it is a piece of equipment that is enhancing, enabling, and hopefully saving the individual's life on a daily basis. 100%. It's just finding any barrier that you can to remove. Let's just figure out how to get rid of it. When you saw the acceptance and the value, now you have 20 folks, you know, probably talking about,

you know, HRV or REM. For you from a cultural aspect, what has WOOP done just for you in these 20 individuals post-study? What this does is pre-wearable. We have briefings, you know, we probably know more about fatigue as it affects human physiology than your average pair, right? So, so aviators sit through, you know, your annual PowerPoint. They're going to tell you about, hey, if you're, if you're on six hours of sleep, you might as well be drunk. Right. If you, you know, and you learn all of these, all these things, you know, whether, you know,

that gets into the culture, whether people internalize that and really use it is one thing. But whenever, whenever the numbers are coming to you and they're personal every day, it creates a personal investment. I love that. I see folks that are asking me. and they go, well, that's interesting. You know, what does, what does that mean, right? Right.

And so it opens another door toward education where people actually kind of care. Yes. Yes. Yes. People want to invest in that versus, hey, I'm sitting through another, another PowerPoint during my annual training. And you're telling me at the same time, you know, get plenty of sleep, wear protective equipment, run over the lawn, you know,

add or subtract to the population, all that stuff. Right. it creates some personal investment. So I don't want to speak for you, but I would imagine you're driving towards a more resilient force. Would you say that's accurate? Well, absolutely. If you take any group, right, and you can force feed them information or you can have them seeking it, which one would you really have, right?

Seeking 100% all day long. Exactly, right? You actually, people are going to become better at what they do. Right. And becoming better isn't just learning the aircraft. learning the rules or learning things like like we said if you can that weakest link if you can improve that for very little financial investment compared to upgrading an aircraft you can really move well that weapon system the people machine right everything that's connected to the whole ecosystem

and that is and i i really i love the fact that you recognize that because you have to enable the individual and get them exactly to the point where they are continually ready and that's going have to throttle up and throttle down based on the mission. Sometimes you have to be very soft and strategic and slow versus being aggressive, fast and loud. And that is a part of your mission set, especially with, you know, the aviation community within the Coast Guard that you guys are doing. It's all. It's everything. You have to be a jack of all trades. And I wouldn't say a master of none. But even worse, you have to, you can't miss because people are relying on you on a daily basis to get it done, whether it's in training or real world. So I appreciate you seeing the value there and

highlighting that, what would you like to see from you as leadership as an ex-o? But more importantly, for you talking to young aviators out there, what would you say? Because again, the aviator community, just like a bunch of others, kind of pride themselves on lack of sleep, the ability to callous themselves and be like, I'm ready to push. Really, I guess I'm asking you, you know, if the knowledgeable you now could go back and talk to yourself 10 years ago, what would that sound like now? I got there eventually. I found, I got there. Well, I think. Well, I think. the thing that I would need, and I think the next step that we really recommended out of the study was we got a little bit of a, we got a snapshot of the fact that even though we have policy in

place, even though we say this is a priority, when we looked at the sleep data of the 20 people, we weren't sleeping as much as we should. Okay. So just stop there. You weren't sleeping as much as you should. Was that acknowledged, and I don't know if you know this from the subjective standpoint because of the questionnaires was that acknowledged by the folks in in the study now we we wanted to keep that objective okay so so we kept that as hey we don't ask you because if I ask you how much are you sleeping you might sleep more just so that just so you skew got it just so you skew it right right so we didn't we didn't tell them that we were necessarily going to fairly intuitive if you thought about the fact that you're wearing something but but most of our people were sleeping six

hours and change the mean for the study whereas you know scientifically that's a little light. That's a little light, especially for somebody that has a moral obligation to be rested, right? And then some of our folks, some of them had three folks average less than six hours for 30 days. And so what that says is, hey, we have policies in place. We stay sleep as a priority, not to just focus too much on sleep. We could really stand to do this on a much larger scale and say, you know, with just another voluntary program, let's get some good numbers on our whole aviation community. How well is the current policy working? Was that a shock to you around the numbers of around the sleep? Um, sadly no. Yeah. Fair enough. I mean, I would have poked. Right. I would have been excited if the numbers were higher.

I got a two year old man. Like, I know, I know how things work. If I could go back and get data, the data I would get is what I think we should get next is, is a good next step would be a some sort of voluntary program where we can track this over a prolonged period, not just 30 days, but something longer with a much larger sample across the service and kind of just get that snapshot. because one, that will get that information out there that lets your early folks try this out and see if it provides them value. And two, it answers some of that. Remember, like you said at the beginning, right? Some Simon Seneck stuff that gets back to why.

Like, why do I even need it or I get plenty of sleep? No, you don't, dude. Right. Man, I love how you're thinking about that. I agree. I think there's so many other things that you can look at when it comes to performance, both mentally and physically. However, everybody sleeps, everybody understands sleep, and it's a really great place to start for anybody coming into the WOOP ecosystem to just understand, okay, everything

happens when I am sleeping, whether I'd like it or not, I'm recovering or I'm not recovering, this is where it happens. To that, you're driving a really great point is if we knew, and the Coast Guard knew how people were really sleeping, just the amount of sleep that was being had, I think that would be so eye-opening to understand, okay, even if we added a half an hour to those numbers, it would completely change. I suspect performance outputs, injuries, paperwork around, you know, just the silly things people slip and fall. Now you're pandering to me as an ex-up. If I can get rid of paperwork, I'm in, right? Right. Well, the short answer is absolutely. And I think, if nothing else, I think the pandemic's

helped that, right? I agree. There's silver linings from that. People want to know now. People want to know more about themselves. They wonder how they can protect themselves, being the best, set themselves up in the best situation, especially folks that are in, especially in the tactical world, right, your military law enforcement, folks like that. They're, they're personally invested in making sure, you know, organizational and culturally, we're, we're looking around every corner for where can we get information to make our crews that much safer. I think culturally in aviation, we've been there for a long time. Like I said, we knew, we know fatigue is a thing. You know, you want to be ready, we were in our culture, I think we were really just waiting for the technology.

Once this became available and more mainstream and more accessible, I think that was really the limiting factor in our world. And then culturally outside, it was actually interesting to see. We were a little bit divided on some of those privacy issues whenever we broke it over age demographics. So our younger folks, our 20 to 29 year olds, were significantly less concerned on both the military and civilian side of who necessarily had access to that information. Now, some of that might be, you know, you got your gruffled, you know, 40-some, you know, has bred enough cynicism into the shows to know, hey, I need to, you know, I need to guard every bit of information I can. But also, you know, that's a generation line right there. So these are some

folks that grew up, you know, sharing a lot of information about, you know, they were Instagramming every meal they've had since they were like 16, probably, right? There's some cultural generational ships there that are just going to happen over time as well, and we're already seeing them as the younger part of our workforce, you know, makes its way in. And the rest of us old folks find our way on to greener pastures. So we've seen that across the board, especially inside of the Department of Defense, is once leadership sees the capabilities of anonymizing data and seeing trend analysis and actually understanding what night flights for a week does to their crews, and then they switch back to days and how, you know, recovery may go down or sleep quality

may go down and how to mitigate that over the long term is extremely valuable to them. So that's how we usually get the older folks because of how we can carve up the data for their better decision-making process. And like you said, as an XO, if that's less paperwork for you, we made your life a little bit easier, which is the end goal, obviously. Well, Scott, as we get ready to wrap things up here, I wanted to say thank you for coming to WOOP. You're the first DOD-type study to really focus on technology and the acceptance of the use of it. the only limiting factor was the ease and use of the technology now that it's in place let's learn and understand and make smarter decisions so i appreciate you pioneering that especially in the

coast guard because you were the first one in the coast guard to reach out to whoop and say hey this is something that we want to pull apart and you did it we get contacted all the time that the follow-through is not easy as you know so thank you for that because we're excited to highlight this and we'll be talking about this throughout 2022 because the study that you did was truly insightful around trust community but most importantly you know the self-education on both the leadership side and individual side so super exciting and we we appreciate that so thank you no thank you guys for for one being easy to work with uh being patient with the government process it helps that you come from that world yeah it's definitely you know a collective effort here and we're all pushing

and rowing in the same direction and we're just trying to you know better the force so I appreciate that thank you again we don't take that lightly so we appreciate no no like I said thank you guys for finding the time and for working with us. Absolutely. It definitely wasn't something we could do on our own without some good guidance and folks that we're easy to work with. All right. A big thank you to Scott Austin of the United States Coast Guard for joining me this week

on the WOOP podcast. If your organization is a federal or Department of Defense entity and you're interested in performance, optimization, or resilience, please visit Woop.com forward slash government. And if you enjoyed this episode of the Woop podcast, be sure to leave a rating or review. It's a great way to share your feedback and to help others find out about the WOOP podcast. Also on social. If you're using social platforms, check out the handle at Woop and also at Will Ahmed. That's WI-L-L-A-H-M-E-D. And of course, don't forget to get 15% off a WOOP membership by using the code Will. That's WI-L-L over at Woop.com.

I'm Robert Mueller. Thanks so much for listening. See you guys next week. Thank you.