WHOOP Podcast - Kevin Kit Parker, Mad Scientist of Harvard, on being in a firefight, designing the perfect dress, improving sleep, vacation optimization, plus dinner with Kanye & Larry Page.

Episode Date: December 11, 2018

WHOOP Founder & CEO Will Ahmed talks to Harvard Professor and U.S. Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonel Kit Parker about the science of counterinsurgency (5:12), creating irresistible fashion (11:15), art's impact on science (29:14), how your body reacts to being in a firefight (45:48), improving sleep in the military (1:00:06), vacation optimization (1:12:14), privacy and data security (1:30:40), travel tips and life hacks (1:37:27), and the most creative person he's ever met (1:42:50).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

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

to Navy SEALs, to fitness enthusiasts, to Fortune 500 CEOs and executives. The common thread among WOOP members is a passion to improve. What does it take to optimize performance for athletes, for humans, really anyone? We're launching a podcast today. deeper. We'll interview experts and industry leaders across sports, data, technology, physiology, athletic achievement, you name it. When I founded Whoop, I didn't know exactly where it would take me, and hosting a podcast was certainly not one of the first things on my mind. In the process, though, I've gotten to interact with amazing athletes, advisors, investors,

and had some really fascinating conversations. And that was a lot of the inspiration for starting this podcast. I think there's something about this format. this type of conversation that really allows you to delve deeper. My hope is that you'll leave these conversations with some new ideas and a greater passion for performance. With that in mind, I welcome you to the WOOP podcast. You never know who you're going to find in our lab. We've got people in there doing paintings, making dresses,

engineering meat, working on heart valves for children, working on brain injury, other kinds of pediatric diseases, you might see Lorell, Tori Birch, Adidas, Nike, Pfizer, Merck. You never know who's going to be in our lab. And the whole idea is we learn from all of them. My guest today is Kevin Kitt Parker, the Tarr family professor of bioengineering and applied physics at Harvard, and a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve. Kit served multiple combat tours in Afghanistan, as well as two missions as part of the gray team investigating traumatic brain injuries.

As an advisor to whoop since 2013, Kit was my co-founder, Arillion-Nicholize professor at Harvard. Our conversation includes a variety of amazing topics related to human performance, including how to optimize your vacation, the science of counterinsurgency, how schools can help design to prevent school shootings, how your body handles being in a firefight, designing fashion that humans are neurologically wired to enjoy, founding a barbecue company, and dinner with Kanye West and Larry Page. I expected my conversation with Kit to be very entertaining. I really think he's one of the most creative people in the world, and I hope you enjoy. Kit, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. So there's so many different things I want to talk about with you. Your involvement with WOOP, one, because you've been a great advisor to the company,

and some of the different directions that we're taking the technology together and some of your advice there. But first, I really want to start with your career at Harvard and in the military. I mean, you've had a fascinating career to date, the TAR family professor of bioengineering and applied physics at Harvard. I mean, that's a big title to carry. You actually taught... Maybe bigger than my value to the universe. And you actually taught one of my co-founders are really in Nikolai, while he was at Harvard, which is how he got introduced.

Well, maybe as some background, just describe what kind of a class, the classes you teach at Harvard. And then I'll ask you about a couple of these projects because they're pretty fun. Well, I teach a design class, a junior-level engineers. And this is undergrad at Harvard? Undergrads, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I tried to develop some new ideas. I just spent the last year on sabbatical coming up with new ideas for this class. And so the idea is, my opinion is that the students need to learn two things.

First of all, they need a transitioner from being a student to being an engineer. These are junior-level engineering students. And engineering design is very much done as a team sport, right? And so you have to teach a little bit of leadership, a little bit of teamwork, a little bit of followership when you're doing good design. But for me, I'm very interested in the whole idea of motion in the creative and innovative process. And one of the things I started trying to do is bring into the classroom experiences that were interesting to me and get young people interested in them, take them out of the typical understanding of what engineering design is and move towards other kinds of problems. So I can talk about those. Yeah, let's do it.

So after my second tour in Afghanistan, I came back and I was a bit stunned that we had never developed any science behind the idea of counterinsurgency. So traditionally the way we, the science behind the way we, our traditional model of war is basically Newtonian's mechanics. You know, kill things and break people. Kill people and break things, right? Okay. And move through it as fast as possible because we have this westernized model of war as an acute condition. But we've been fighting for the last 17 years in a situation where war is a chronic condition. And Newtonian mechanics play a role to a certain point and then it becomes very different.

No one has ever done the science of counterinsurgency. So I came back from Afghanistan 2009 and would speak at whatever venue I could come up with about the need to do some science. What would a counterinsurgency laboratory look like? What can we get a calibration from the lab on what we can expect from Afghanistan, Iraq, or wherever else we've been doing? So I had heard about the gangs and how gangs rely on the passive support. of a population you know they move into at-risk neighborhoods same way okay we'd go into Sudan rather than Switzerland and I heard about some gang activity in Salinas and how Salinas had talked to people about Salinas PD had talked to some people

about doing some work military advising them on how to go against the gangs and so I flew out to California I called my brother who used to be a writer for the boss of Globus said you know where did gangbangers hang out because I didn't know he goes Well, he goes, MS-13 owns an auto body shop over in Somerville. Why don't you go look for that? Jesus, he just went over there. So I drove around Salinas, California, going to auto body shops, and certain enough, you see, like, the signature lookouts.

And, you know, it's a, like, I think it was like a Sunday night or maybe a Sunday night, you know. And, like, every auto body shop in certain parts of the neighborhood is open for business on a Sunday evening, right? And I don't know if they thought I was crazy, you know, or not, but I'd get up there and walk around. And the idea was I was assessing Salinas as a laboratory, a counter-insurgency laboratory, the whole idea that you would work with the police to do, to develop technologies, tactics, procedures to use against gangs and use it as an experimental model of insurgents. So you were almost thinking of MS-13 as this group that you need to... I need them to be a lab rat to model the Taliban.

Right. Yeah. Yeah, that's fascinating. So I came back and I'm talking to a bunch of people. I talked to Socom, I go to all these defense conferences, and I'm up there saying, hey, listen, I don't need another widget. I need a counter-insurgency laboratory. You know, people who are looking at me like I lost my mind. And so I met my National Guard unit one weekend down in Rhode Island, the special operations you head down there.

And I'm pontificating to a bunch of guys about the counter-insurgency laboratory. My buddy Mike Coton, who was, you know, 20-something years in Army Special Forces, and Massachusetts State Trooper came out to me afterwards and said, hey, listen. You know, I work in Springfield, Massachusetts. We get a bad gang problem in North End, and we're starting to apply counter-insurgency techniques there. So I started working with them, and finally it dawned on me, this is a great problem for a class. It's at the interface of, you know, engineering and the social sciences. It's a good design problem. Will this work?

And so I taught a junior-level engineering class on it. We had Harvard students on patrol with mass state troopers and cars and helicopters on foot. We set up a command center over at Harvard, and we had a map of all the crack houses in the north end of Springfield, and we were running off. Basically, there was someone in that office about 20 hours a day. Cops going in and out. We were down there every week on the streets.

And, you know, it wound up being a pretty successful exercise. They've had double-digit decreases in crime. Now, we're almost 10 years into this down there in Springfield. We've had double-digit decreases in crime. And some of the students spun off the software company. and we came up with a totally different set of analytics for a crime. Subsequently, I taught a course on barbecue. I'd been at the Liberty Bowl before the Cincinnati Vanderbilt Liberty Bowl game in 2010.

I saw a bunch of people out there cooking barbecue in the parking lot for a barbecue contest. And there's all variations on a trash can, and I'm looking around. I was offended as an engineer. I'm like, we don't understand the fundamental laws of smoking meat to the point we're still cutting, you know, 55-gallon drums in a half to cook supper. So I spent about three years, you know, in the counterinsurgency class, I had been, you know, basically two tours in Afghanistan and years thinking about counterinsurgency. With barbecue, I'd have to go to San Diego to talk about, you know, pediatric heart disease, and I'd stay an extra day. I'd map out the local barbecue joints.

I'd roll in about 2 o'clock to a barbecue joint, you know, after the lunch rush before the supper rush, and I'd sit down to order to plate of ribs, and I'd ask, you know, hey, can the pit master talk to me? for a second, you know, big old pop belly pit master come out of the back, sauce all over his apron, and I'd say, hey, listen, I'm a professor at Harvard. I'm doing a research project on barbecue. Would you talk to me? So you can imagine the reactions I was getting from these guys. And so I'd pull up my business card, I'd slide across the table. I'm like, hey, listen, if you change your mind, I'd love to talk to you.

And they'd almost always sit down across the table from me, sit down and tell me their stories. And it was amazing. That's cool. I would hear about, you know, they lost their job. Their daddy had always done a pig pick. and so they just opened up a little barbecue stand first they were selling you know pork shoulders and pork butts and then all of a sudden they evolved into a company you know and i spent three

years traveling the country you know taking notes talking these pitmasters we designed a class we taught at harvard we spun out a class some of the students join me in the class and now we're selling smokers um i teach class and if someone wanted to buy one of those smokers where could they find it Go to Zora.co, CO. Yeah, we'll put that in the show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, tell me about the project you did with dresses and Lady Gaga was involved. Well, yeah, that didn't work out with Lady Gaga.

But I've been very interested in fashion design for a long time. And everyone goes, how did you get into couture? I mean, what was your path? I'm like, well, fashion and camouflage are kind of the exact opposite of each other. And I'm very interested in wearing camouflage. The key to camouflage is that you don't want to be seen, you don't want to be shot, right? The key to fashion is you want to be seen and you want to make a statement, right? So kind of the inverse problem of each other.

So we had this really bad camouflage pattern in Afghanistan 2009, and, you know, I was only slightly less conspicuous in the desert than if I'd had a road flare duct taped on my forehead walking around out there. It was that bad. Yeah, it was that bad, yeah. How did we fuck that up? I don't know. It was a billion-something-dollar fashion mistake that might have cost people their lives. I mean, we had these checks and snipers over there

that were like picking people off from long-distance way. So I came back and I went to DARPA. And I had also gone to DARPA about the counter-insurgency lab and they blew that off. And I tell people that a lot of the projects in my lab are based on spite and vendettas. And this was no difference. So I told DARPA, I said,

listen, before we go off to spend another billion dollars on camouflage, why don't we go up and talk to the people in the fashion industry about their lessons learned about making things, change all the signs and the equations from positives to negatives, and see if we can design the ideal camouflage that way. And, you know, they, again, looked at me like I'd lost my mind, and so I decided, okay, I'll rent a bunch of 20-year-old kids and do it better than you. So we were, we eventually worked with these designers Redarte, and we developed these dresses

that had, we sanded down on optical fibers. We made these dresses. We were inspired by the cuttlefish. The cuttlefish has adaptive camouflage, and the idea was that you could put optical fibers in a dress, I could change your body shape, I could change the appearance, you could go to a wake, and then later on you could go out to a club where the same dress, dial your pattern differently on your iPhone, and you're good to go, right? We had sensors built into these dresses if I, you know, if I'm talking to some young lady

at a bar and she's really excited to be talking to me, that doesn't really usually happen, but if I did happen, if she was wearing one of our dresses, the color code and the dress would change, I'd be able to tell I she's excited, or she's like about the fond of her. it, whatever, it was more applicable. Which would be a great party theme, by the way. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we also had these dresses that would talk to each other by radio. So two women had worn the same dress, the same optical pattern in it.

As they moved closer together for a photo op, the dresses would start talking to each other, and they would coordinate different lighting patterns. Oh, wow. And so they'd look different when you took the photo up. But when they moved away, the radio communication would take them back to their normal pattering. And in the last fashion class, I did was on the neural science of the little black dress, with the exception of the African continent, on almost every part of the world, through much of time, there's been some version of a little black dress. And it's because it's contrast.

You know, black on white, you know, it's Cartesian angles. It's maximum contrast because of black. You don't get any weird visual psychophysical effects. A friend of mine, Tori Burch, always tell her I can make a dress that she's neurologically wired to like. She cannot not like this dress. The idea is I design the dress from the neurons out. And I think probably one of the most neurologically perfect fashion device. Fashion attire is the tuxedo. It hasn't changed since it was invented in 1816. It's

Cartesian geometry. It's straight-line edge detections. It's black and white. It just doesn't change. And it's because it's neurologically almost perfect. So, yeah, so, you know, I spent the last year doing some things, getting ready to teach some other design classes. You know, it's always up to the

Harvard as to how crazy they want to get in the classroom. But I've watched the last school shooting I'm going to watch without doing something. So I spent the last year or so thinking about schools from the perspective of someone used to carry a gun for a living and put together some concepts for shooter-proofing schools. You know, the idea that in 2017 we didn't have a single child in America died from a school fire, but we had children die from school shootings.

That's a design problem. Yeah, but think about this. So, like, in a school, we got fire extinguishers, we got fire alarm sprinklers. We put in all these redundant mechanisms. and we don't have school fire deaths anymore, but we don't have any technology in a typical school for preventing casualties where the shooter comes in. So, I mean, I can wait for the policy people

to keep screwing around on this gun control issue where I can be an engineer and develop technical solutions for policymakers to decide whether or not they want to implement or not. From a perspective of someone used to carry a gun for a living, most schools are made for killing. 30% of the volume of the school is high passageways for high volume foot traffic, right? I've got Cinder Rock Walls where I can.

and get ricochets, you can't get out unless you come to a doorway if I'm sitting there with a gun. So I started exploring redesigned schools and various technologies I could put in there. Assume the shooter's going to come, how can I disrupt the shooter and minimize casualties? So I'd like to teach a design class on that. That would be fascinating.

You can get a lot of Harvard students to take that. Yeah, I mean, I think it would. I mean, like, you know, I don't want to watch. What do you think of some of the, I don't know, political points of you just at a high level? Like, do you think that having more guns at schools is going to prevent gun shootings? I mean, you know, the idea of having an armed teacher even or an armed security guard. Well, I've been in combat and I'm going to tell you some, if someone's got a gun, I want to have a gun, right?

I mean, like, that's just a lot of jungle, right? Yeah, so it's natural for me. I don't want to make a comment about gun control because I don't want someone to think that I'm driving this class because I have a particular opinion about gun control. My opinion is this, I don't want kids getting shot in school. Totally. And so I don't care where you come down on the gun control, but if you want to the gun or if you don't want any guns, I'm going to be in the middle.

I'm going to develop a safe place for children to learn. I'm going to try my best to keep them safe. I'm going to develop systems because I'm an engineer, and that's what I do. Well, you know, you're the first person I've heard say, we have to redesign the way a school looks if we want to address this properly. Because, you know, I never actually thought about it that way, but you're right. Like all the classrooms funnel into the same hallways.

There's all these doors that everyone has to go through. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a... They're made for killing. I mean, so I've gone... I've talked to medical examers. I've read the after-action reviews from Sandy Look. I went to business school where there's a school shooting.

You know, I do the same type of approach I did with barbecue with the gangs, get out there and start talking to people, start putting down some ideas. I also spent some quite a bit of time thinking about technologies for psychological first aid. I mean, this situation with police shootings. Everyone's quick to come down to the police, but the fact of the matter is, and I've had the situation in Afghanistan. You roll up on somebody who's acting out. You don't know how they're going to behave.

You've got a gun and nothing else. You can't talk sentencing to them. They've left the realm of the rational. You're going to, like, mitigate that threat by whatever means possible. And so I take a look at my buddies of mine, army buddies of mine, that are law enforcement officers, and they're out there with, you know, very little technologies or training to help deal with someone who's in the middle of a lot of them.

psychological crisis and edging towards violence. So the idea is I can continue to, you know, people can continue to condemn the police or we can sit down and come up with some, try to help them with their important mission and develop some tools for them to use. And so I don't think that space has been completely explored yet. So I'm revisiting the technology I thought about in Afghanistan that I wanted to have. And so I'd like to teach a class on that. I mean, I think, you know, most college campuses, there's not a lot of empathy

towards law enforcement, at least certainly not on the college campus where I teach. And I learned in the gang class, but once I got, you know, Harvard students talking to law enforcement officers, it was a very deep respect for each other. That's cool. And they became professional colleagues for the project that we did in North End. And I would like to build that kind of camaraderie where a law enforcement officer says, I have a problem, maybe I should call the people at Harvard and, you know, and they will help me with this.

It's to everyone's benefit. So I'd like to teach a class on that. It's public service. Again, it's at the interface of lots of different fields. It's a very transdisciplinary problem. And then I have a 10-year-old daughter, Will. So I got very interested in ice cream. And I went to ice cream school up in Canada, in Guelph, University of Guelph.

And it's been a lot of time thinking about what's new ways to make ice cream. The whole idea, can I beat Halo? I think I can. Everyone's excited about Halo. but certainly anyone who's eating HALO knows that there's some challenges there in terms of getting the texture. I spent a lot of time. You know, the thing is, I spent a lot of time in barbecue.

People always ask me, how did you get the barbecue from tissue engineering? It's the exact opposite. In tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, where a lot of my research is at Harvard in my laboratory, I'm trying to build tissues, right? I want a matrix of exercise. I want a network of excessiator matrix proteins, and I want to build muscle cells around it, right, because I'm mostly doing cardiovascular. Right.

Well, what's meat? It's muscle on a collagen network, right? And where did smoking come from? It came from the cheapest cuts of meat when Southern poor would get a brisket. That's the meat in between the cows. The cow doesn't have collarbones, right? So it's got this really tough meat in between its front legs. And if you had to eat nothing but brisket in order to survive without smoking it,

you'd starve to death because the collagen is so tough. You want to do it is you want to change that collagen to gelton and make it juicy, you know, really flavorable. So everything I learned about tissue engineering, again, And just like in fashion design and camouflage, I just had the change of signs. It was the inverse problem. I want to take apart meat versus put it together, which is why I do in regenerative medicine. And in ice cream, a lot of the things have been learning how to do with proteins and protein networks for tissue engineering is directly applicable to how you make a smooth, creamy ice cream.

So hoping to maybe either do a class around that, maybe eventually do a company around that. One thing I love that you're describing is this idea of taking. you know, basic understanding, or I should say an advanced understanding of, you know, engineering principles and then pattern recognizing them across all these different disciplines. I mean, you effectively have just compared making ice cream to how you might, you know, target a gang. So I tell you, I mean, listen, I mean, the idea for the city as a laboratory for gangs was directly applicable to my, directly derived from my cardiac work. The entire body of cardiovascular medicine right now, everything the lab is being driven by observations from the Framingham Heart Study.

Massachusetts, they have this longitudinal study of the population of Framingham, Massachusetts for heart disease. Every time they build a gym there in Framingham, every time they build a McDonald's or fast food food place in Framingham, they're making a, that's an intervention in this experiment, right? So the city as a laboratory is not something I'm unfamiliar with because they come from cardiovascular science. So going into gangs, the whole idea of using the city as a counterinsurgency laboratory is something that is not uncomfortable at all to me.

It's something that anyone who does cardiovascular medicine is familiar with. So, you know, when you go to the, I mean, I recently, everyone was always asking me, how do you come up with all these different things you do? Mostly it's pediatric disease, traumatic brain injury, comicadic care. You have barbecue, ice cream, fashion design, gangs. You're working with whoop. Yeah, we're working with whoop. So they asked me how I did this.

So I recently developed a technique that if you take a look at LinkedIn, a typical way you do a resume, it's so antiquated and stupid. And I started another consulting company last year based around using the same time's battle field analysis techniques I used in Afghanistan, applying them to the way farming and biotech deal with the FDA. It's called after-action reviews. And during the course of engagement with a lot of these companies,

I wound up consulting quite a bit about leadership and the leadership of creative teams, which I feel very strongly about. After a quarter century in the Army and leading a team at Harvard has done so many disparate things, I've got some observations, some opinions, maybe some tools that help people. But one of the things I'm struck by with these companies I consult to is they only look at their employee in terms of what they were trained to do in terms of their degrees, not what their avocational or their passions are outside the workplace and how they can pull them in to bring value to the employer.

Smart. So I developed this creative map, and it's an interactive map that breaks down your life experiences and starts to draw the dots between them. So I did this to explain my own research because I kept using this joke that if you combine schizophrenia and tenure, that's how you do you. you get someone like me, but I went to just, but now I develop this creative map and so I go to schools, I've done this with small children, I do this with my creative, with my students at Harvard, I do this with my consulting

clients, and for me once I started watching my students do these creative maps, I learned a lot more about how to mentor them, but also about how I can help them develop very creative pass forward for their life. And I hope the dull idea that you might be able to get an employer to

get a little bit more of that employee and make that employ a little bit more vested by bringing their other passions into the workplace that's important for me i just want to say one the thing about the ice cream the barbecue was very much a southern narrative i'm from the south right but ice cream has a transcultural narrative and that you know if you go to iran or persian ice cream you know they were the first people start putting saffron and stuff like this in their ice cream there's whole cultural rituals around ice cream that you go to turkey and they get this almost taffy-like ice cream i mean one of the most interesting ice cream scenes i think in the world is cuba you know

Fidel had this whole idea that they would have better ice cream in Cuba than they would in the U.S. So, like, they had these Cuban ice cream makers sponsored by the government back in the 60s. So that was like his land on the moon. Oh, yeah, yeah, they were pumping out like 130, some different flavors of ice cream back in the 60s. Yeah, yeah, because he gave a talk of Harvard. He went across the street in Harvard Square. He had some ice cream. That's where the idea came from.

It came from Harvard Square, right? So the great thing about doing an ice cream project is I can include my daughter in the ice cream. That's cool. research. So, you know, I couldn't, I can't get a visa down to Cuba because I'm still an American soldier. I'm still in the reserve. So I needed to study ice cream. So one of my Harvard students in my lab, his cousin is Gloria Estefan, you know, the Cuban community down there in Miami. So he got me his whole list from through a glory of authentic Cuban ice cream places down in Miami. So packed up my daughter. We took the lab notebooks and we went down to Miami and ate ice cream

for a few days, right? Then we found this really cool Persian ice cream place down in Watertown mass went over there, spent a day eating Persian ice cream and talking to that man about his craft. And he'd done something very interesting. He was Persian American, but he'd gone back to Iran to learn the art of making Persian ice cream and then come back over here. So I love hearing these people's personal stories and bringing that into the research and conserving the cultural ritual when you do these kind of things. So, you know, everything I've done, you know, in the battlefield, in the lab, or, you know, as a father, a lot of times these things are connected. And I'd like to be able to help people replace the modern resume. I mean, I take a look at LinkedIn, and it's so

antiquated in terms of, like, how you hunt talent. I'm not so much interested in degrees and employers, what are the other life experiences? And I'll tell you one of the things that really was a breaking point for me when I said, there's got to be a better way. Well, I was, my parents lived down in Georgia, and I got a call from a lady who had gone to high school with my sister, said, hey, there's a young man here. He's about mid-20s. He's going to community college. He hadn't had a a lot of breaks in his life, but he's taking a biology class and he's really excited. Would you talk to him? And I'm like, hey, listen, I got to fly home the next day, but if he meets me at the Waffle House at 5 o'clock in the morning are buying breakfast and talk to him, kid shows up. We

started talking. Good young man just hadn't had a whole lot of breaks. He had one biology class at this community college. And it was kind of exciting to him. And I said, hey, listen, but there was a whole lot I could do with that, right? So I said, listen, take a couple more classes and get in contact with me. We're eating breakfast and get in contact with me. And get in contact with me. And I see, you know, if there's an opportunity to get you an internship in a lab or something like that. He said, oh, he's really excited. So we pay the bill, and we're going out to the parking lot so I can fly to, you know, drive up to Atlanta to catch my flight. As we go out there, I've got this little crappy renter car.

Right next to it, it says hot rot, right, with this amazing paint job. And the alarm goes off, you know, turns off the alarm as we're going out there. And I'm like, hey, dude, is this your ride? And he goes, yeah, I said, man, this is really nice. He goes, yeah, what I got to do this, that, and the other two it, I got to work. I got to work on this part of the engine. I got to do this part of the electrical system. I said, wait a second, you built this?

He goes, yeah. I'm like, why didn't you tell me this when I first asked you what you do? Because anybody can put this skill set to use in a laboratory. Right. But he didn't see that as part of his value to an employer. He didn't see the fact that he built this extraordinary piece of technology. He sought his only value to me as a biologist to run a lab was the fact that you've taken this biology class.

How many more people are out there with all these extraordinary talents from other parts of their life that were missing, that we're not getting the value out of? I mean, I started seeing this when I started recruiting veterans into my laboratory from Bunker Hill Community College

and Northeastern University. These veterans would come in. What they lacked for in scientific training or education, they made it for with their familiarity with equipment. Once you've had an explosives and satellite radios and firearms and stuff like this,

you're not intimidated by the half a million-dollar confocal microscope. So bring these veterans in, train them up on how to maintain this microscope. They will own it because maintenance is a core value, taking care of the equipment, is what professionals do. They will own it. Then they build relationships with other scientists in the laboratory. They develop the cells as a scientist.

So the whole idea of understanding what are these intangibles, what are these other skills, what are these other things that you do outside your professional life that can bring value to an employer. So in our group, we talked earlier about visualization. Several years ago, I was explained to one of my postdocs how I wanted to take a rat apart rebuild it as a stingray genetically modified so it could see blue light and I could lead it through an obstacle course with a laser pointer and he looked at me like I was crazy and I'm quite clearly like this guy cannot visualize this and so I had a choice will I could either hire a sports psychologist to come in and hire that teach these people how to visualize these crazy experiments

or I could do something different and what I chose was to do something different we cleared out part of the lab space we made studio space for artists and we started breeding an artist into the laboratory and with every science paper we do we try to do one piece of art and now art is supposed to communicate the emotional component of the creativity or the innovation behind this. So inspired by the stained glass in the church where the stained glass in the church is designed to teach Bible stories to people that are illiterate. I can do a painting, a digital painting of a heart valve we're making for children and you can see this child with their chest fillet open getting a heart valve and as a parent your heart just goes out to this child

And so I don't care how little scientific education you've got, you will immediately understand the importance of what we're trying to do with building these heart valves. But the artists go through a much faster creative cycle than the scientist. So now everyone's cranked up to a higher RPM when it comes to creative ideas. And the visualization through art is helping the scientists understand what we want to do. It's also helped communicating to the mass as why we're doing the science that we do. so the idea of building a big tent strategy in any company or any research and say hey i'm not just going to welcome you will as a CEO i'm going to welcome you will as an athlete as an artist as a parent sure all these other things that impact your life are bringing value to whoop uh that's very

important to us and so we've done this in our laboratory at harvard and you never know who you're going to find in our lab we got people in there doing paintings making dresses engineered meat working on heart valves for children working on brain injury other kinds of pediatric diseases you might see laurel tory birch adidas Nike um Pfizer Merck you never know who's going to be in our lab and the whole idea is we learn from all of them anyone can come to the lab and hang out for a while we've learned so much about making textile heart valves for children by talking to to troy birch's team to develop the tory birch sport line so much from talking to people at Nike and at Reebok

about their interest in making performance textiles for their athletes. We've turned it into making medical devices. And so this is really important. I've learned everything I took from tissue engineering, I took into barbecue. The more I learned about barbecue, I'm taking that back into tissue engineering. And maybe ice cream. Maybe ice cream, yeah.

And part of that was because I spent, I was a judge on a food network show and I was talking to these chefs and I was stunned by how much material science they knew. The chef had used to alginate, which is a protein It comes from seaweed to make his chocolate flexible. That's cool.

And we use allergenate as a biomaterial. And I'm talking to the chef, and I'm like, holy cow, this guy knows a lot of material science. He doesn't know the theory, but he knows it's applied. And so I started thinking about, hey, I've got to talk to people that aren't necessarily scientists and pull what they know into my portfolio of knowledge and help train my students. Have you ever read the book The Art of Learning? It's by Josh Whiteskin. Well, I don't read books.

If I need information, I just think of it. Not I've read book. Anyway, well, it sounds like you just think of it. But what's interesting is a lot of what you're describing, Whiteskin does a fascinating job describing in this book. Because he's the kid from searching for Bobby Fisher. You remember that chess player? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that kid goes on to not only be a world-class chess player, but to be the world champion jujitsu Brazilian black belt. And you would never think a chess champion would go on to be the best Brazilian fighter. in the world, right? And his whole point is I wasn't a prodigy, a prodigy at chess or a prodigy at fighting. I was just really good at learning. And he breaks down a lot of these principles that you're breaking down in your lab. And what you describe is fascinating. It's like this, you remove all ego in trying to understand a problem. You go out and you meet with the gangs. You go out and you meet with the chefs. You go out and you meet with the, even the parents to try to help understand

how to solve problems and you distill it down to the very base level problems and the concept that Josh talks about and I've met him it's a fascinating guy is you start with small circles

and then you get bigger and bigger and bigger and that's how you really learn something and then you know you solve the problem so I think the work you're doing is fascinating I mean the biggest battles I find in the classroom are against shame and pride they're the inhibitors to learn

shame and pride you know but talk about being a like a very general learner. I think specialization is the enemy of innovation. Because you take a look at the big industrialists today. They're very much generalists. They integrate over lots of information, lots of different categories. A couple of years ago, I was at Google's eye guys,

and I was having dinner with Larry Page and with Kanye, and we were having a discussion about creativity. That's a funny dinner. Let me tell you something. It was... But it was fascinating. It was really important from me. And, you know, Larry said, you know,

I didn't want to do cert. This is why we're doing all these other things at Google. And Kanye, everyone knows Kanye's creativity. Kanye was like, hey, listen, I didn't want to just do music. I moved to the fashion and basically spent his fortune to do these things. I said, hey, I didn't want to just do pediatric disease. I wanted to do these other things. And the idea is that creativity is not specialized.

And that if you're creative in one endeavor, you're probably creative in multiple endeavors. And, you know, the whole idea of how do you build a generalist who can do these things is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about in education and watching my children. child learn. My daughter carries with her a little notebook. She's seen me carry these notebooks with my scientific ideas, and she writes stuff in there. And when she was really young, she wouldn't distinguish between scientific ideas and art

ideas. She would just call it my designs. She didn't know the difference. And it dawned on me, she was right. All she knew was design. And so I've argued at the PTO of her school, and you can imagine how well this goes over. We should do away with a science fair. Do away with a science fair at K through 5. And just have a design fair where you can have science, technology, you can have art. You can talk about how you design a dress you're wearing

or how you design a meal that you're cooking for your family. The whole idea of celebrating good design and teaching regimented and disciplined design processes because if you know good design, you can do anything, right? You can do anything. I can do the BD at your company. I can design your dress. I can build a bass in that for your new baby.

I can build a heart valve to save your baby when they get sick. I can design the helmet for them to wear in a sport event. I can design your vacation when they get to be in high school and you really need to be stressed. I mean, the whole idea is good design will carry you through all these different endeavors. And it's one way of being a journalist. That's who we celebrate. We celebrate the journalist. It's not the specialist.

Elon Musk is not a specialist. Larry Page is not a specialist. Kanye is not a specialist. These are very broadly applied. creative thinkers who are journalists and that's and they're and they're leaders that's the important thing is they're leaders well i've been really impressed with some of those names that you just mentioned especially uh Kanye and uh and Elon in that on such a daily basis these guys are being written up as crazy you know and and you know they're literally being

attacked from a lot of different sides and there's a whole sorts of different reasons for that some of them are business related short sellers whatever but you know i think your point about creativity and this overlap with just thinking outside of the box the point of where a lot of your ideas literally sound crazy you know there's a balance there and i think that somehow in society we have to embrace it a little bit more listen first of all i mean one has to be very careful about reading on the press or listening to gossip about the forming opinions about people's personalities i mean And nowadays, it's so heartbreaking. But I think I thought those, yeah.

But let me take some, the conversation I had that night at the dinner table with Larry, Kanye, a couple others were around too. I came away from the conversation thinking that Kanye was probably one of the most brilliant men I've ever met in my life. My circles at MIT at Harvard at Johns Hopkins when I was there, other great thinkers I've met in the military and in my travels around the world. This is a very creative guy. He could be very reflective. I had a very different perception from him based on it. It was a very intellectually enriching conversation for me to sit down and talk with him and Larry. It was something I reflected on quite a bit afterwards.

And I think that you have to take a look at what these creative people are doing, what they're generating, not the way they're portrayed or how they behave or their conduct or whatever. There's a certain amount of showmanship. I think they're in a lot of these things, and showmanship can be very important in terms of the way. Cell product. Cell product, but you've got to make people believe. But the thing is, nowadays, I mean, I could sit here and give you all this different scientific features of our barbecue smokers from DeZora. But I can tell you the emotional story of going and talking to these pitmasters in rural Alabama and Tennessee and Arkansas.

Right. And that's what's going to make you buy my smoker is because you want to be a part of that culture around that. You're selling emotion. Emotion moves the needle. Data is extremely important. take a look at, like, two of the biggest technological developments we've seen over the years. One was the Nike Air Jordan, which was the technological advance of the Nike Air Jordan was completely lost in the marketing campaign around Michael Jordan.

But that was a huge advance for athletic footwear when the Nike Air Jordan was built. Then take a look at the original iPod, the Apple iPod, the music, digital music thing. The woman dancing. Those commercials were so iconic. Yeah, the black, the shadow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like, the fact of the matter is, were you buying a digital storage device, or were you buying a fashion accessory?

You were buying a fashion accessory and this carefree lifestyle that you wanted to feel like you could be dancing, listen to your own music. But the fact of the matter is there was some extraordinary technology in that little iPod. I actually bought Apple's stock after they came out with that product. Yeah, sure. So it was a great technology, but it sold the fashion accessory. I mean, yeah, any company that can introduce a technology that innovative with that good of marketing can. And you can bet on that.

Sure, sure, sure. I mean, I think that that's, um, look at, I mean, in both of those situations, what you were doing was you were selling people themselves, the image of themselves. I mean, I think at whoop, what you're doing is you're selling people the key to own themselves. I mean, your biggest asset is your body, your health. It literally is. And for a professional athlete, a tactical athlete, it's how they make a living.

they put the beans on the table. And we all are very interested in ourselves, right? We want to understand how we work, how we live, and how we survive. And so, I mean, that's, I think, one of the big consumer lessons here is you want to be smarter about yourself. I think your technology does that, certainly does that, and hopefully you prolong your customers. Well, I appreciate that, Kit. So take me back in time. You know, 2003, you joined the faculty at Harvard as a biophysicist with a focus on cardiac cell biology.

How did you get into this? So I had done an undergraduate at Boston University and then did a master's and a PhD in physics at Vanderbilt. But I'd gotten very interested. I've always been interested in biology, always been very interested in also in human performance. But I was interested in cardiovascular performance was my first scientific interest. And after I finished at Vanderbilt, I did some postdocs up here at Children's Hospital looking at tumor biology. I did another postdoc down at Johns Hopkins. But I had joined the reserves while I was in graduate school.

And so I'd had these two parallel careers. And then at 9-11, they kind of collided. So when I was at Hopkins, I got deployed to Afghanistan for a year early in the war, 2002, 2003. And Harvard held my position until I landed in August, 2000. I came right off the battlefield, out-processed at Fort Bragg, left there on a Saturday night, flew up to Boston, and my first meeting at Harvard was on Sunday morning to go over the plants for my new lab space, and I was just roughly maybe 72 hours off the Pakistani border. And just for our audience's sake, talk about what was ultimately the mission from your standpoint?

It was about chasing down terrorists. It was all about disrupting. Full stop. Yeah, hunt down al-Qaeda. hunt down Taliban, you know, obviously we're Americans, right? So you're not going to walk past a starving kid and not do something. So at that time, we didn't have, there wasn't a whole lot of U.S. money coming in for aid for Afghanistan. So I was writing letters to every old girlfriend, every mother of an old girlfriend that would still speak to me.

Church group, school classes, ask them to send hygiene packets over for the kids. You know, the infant mortality rate was, as they were reported, by the United Nations was about one in four. Oh, my God. But that was probably, it was probably higher than that, because if you asked that typical Afghan down there in the south where I was in Kandar province, you know, how many kids do you have here say four? It turns out he's got eight, but it doesn't count the little girls.

So the question is, those epidemiological statistics on infant deaths include little girls. Oh, wow. So, you know, the children starving to death, hygiene conditions were terrible. They lived in mud huts, you know, and there were no toys in these villages. kids would play with like cow patties. I mean, it was, it was heartbreaking. And so I think that, you know, besides the physical beating you take and then the excitement of a, you know, a firefighter or something, it just takes a toll on the soul. You know, you can only see so much violence. You can

only see so many children starving to death suffering. You know, you have these emotional and cognitive ups and downs. You know, someday you go into a village and, you know, you know, there's a little girl going to school and you're coming out of there and you're pumped and you're thinking wow this is awesome this is a big step you know one little girl's going to school you think about the courage of that family and then the next day they cut some woman right around in a taxi with a man who's not you know a member of her family they're cut her arms off i mean like so it's like you go up and down like this and um that's afghanistan you know it's as savage as you know we have a lot more news reports coming out about the savagery of isis daish over in syria with taliban

I've been doing, cutting people's arms off, cut people's heads off, you know, hanging people up for a long time. And that's just, that's the brand of violence you saw over there. And it wears on you. And then, in a lot of it, you see these things, you feel these things emotionally, and you carry it in your body. And I think it adds to the wear and tear on your physique while you're over there. You're so stressed. You're so guarded.

You're so tight about these things. I've read a little bit about the psychics. psychology of competition, you know, just broadly speaking. And one of the concepts that comes up is this idea that you want to try to embody the mindset of the person or the group or whatever that you're competing against. And in your case, like, you're talking about just a pure evil, like a pure cancer. I mean, ISIS, Taliban. It's so hard to wrap your head around what their mission is or what they stand for.

like how would you go about that and just thinking about okay I try to I want to try to get into the mindset of these guys and what they're actually trying to do because in some ways like that will make you more effective in combating them but it's also just seems impossible to try to get in that mindset well I mean going back to this competitive mindset I mean I think the ultimate competition is good versus evil but I would say you know number two would be a firefight it's an extraordinary It's the most competitive, you know, of all the things I've done, playing sports, rowing, things like that I did over years, when you were in a firefight, it absolutely maxes you on every scale. Spiritually, morally and certainly, physically, cognitively, and I was never scared in a firefight. I was always just trying to get on top of the situation. How can I dominate this? How can me and my guys dominate the situation? So, and it's, it's thrilling. right it's hard for people to imagine but it's absolutely thrilling it's not thrilling when you know the

people you're shooting at run into a house and throw the children on top of the roof so you can't shoot at them and that's happened to it all happens yeah yeah oh my god i mean and there that's where you're you're you're challenged morally you know are you what are you going to do are you going to you're going to risk getting killed because you're not going to shoot a kid who's running around screaming and crying on top of roof in the middle of the firefighter so what did you do in that situation Americans don't shoot at kids. Right. Like go back in time to the first firefight you were in.

Do you remember it? Yeah. What was special about it? I see you smirking. There was a couple of things that were special about it. I mean, first of all, we all got out of it alive, so that's a great thing. No one got wounded. But I don't know if this is my first one, but this is the first one I remember.

Okay. We're going through the Tangi Valley down in Logar province, and let me, give the background. This is on my second tour, and I was going through Fort Benning to get in-processed and get all my gear because I was deploying over there and linking up with a unit in theaters, going over the 3rd Brigade, 10th Mount Division. And so you go through all these physical stations, you know, to get equipment. And when I got the optician, I said, you know, there's an army optician there, and there was, I think it was an NCO that was recording my vision. I said, hey, dude, I need you to hook me up. I want you to tune my script.

my glasses for 2010, because I knew that whenever I engaged somebody... So performance enhancement, I mean, I wanted to see him before he saw me, right? Right, yeah. And he said, like, no problem, sir, you know, I was a major. He, maybe he was a little bit intimidated, but he wrote my script for 2010. And so I had my glasses. And did that work, by the way? Well, I'll tell you the story now, it's firefight.

So we're coming through the Tangie Valley. We've been out, I was on a route clearance patrol. I was doing a study at the time on improvise explosive devices and our tactics for this. I'm sitting in the back of the vehicle, and there's these two benches. There's an RG31, it was the nomeniclature of the vehicle, had a robotic arm. And in the back of the truck with me was a dog handler with a dog, a working dog. It wasn't a military working dog because we were shorting this. This was a contractor dog, and it's important to note this in just a second.

So he'd been trained to smell explosives, but not how to behave in a firefight. So we're driving in an S-curve, and all of a sudden, all the people on the side of the road just disappeared. It was twilight in the Tengue Valley. And I said, we're going to get hit. And about 10 minutes later, we're in this S-curve, this RPG sails out of the valley over the hood of the vehicle. And the T-C of the vehicle yells, you know, RPG. And I was looking out the window down the floor of the valley, and there's like this little blue, smoke cloud which is one of the signature events of an RPG launch I said I got them

and they have these little firing portals in the wall in the glass windows of this vehicles so I opened up the vehicle that you're in that I'm in so I opened up the portal it's about you know yay big a little bit bigger than say like a the diameter of a coke can and so I bring my M4 up go through there and start engaging this dude the whole valley lights up I mean they were all over there in a linear ambush so this stuff So you started it. Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, I think, I mean, I saw it got first. I got first rounds, but I was so focused on my target.

I was not aware of was anybody else engaging down there. Do you eliminate the target? Well, let me just get that point. So, like, then it lit up, and it was a target-riched environment, so there were a lot of people. The guy was about 250 meters from me. And for our audience, like, how far is that? Is that typical distance? No, 200, 250 meters.

I mean, I would imagine, and he was, I don't know, maybe two football fields away or something. like that it was kind of linear down into the floor of the valley we were kind of up but is that a far shot or is that yeah it's a far shot i mean like i'd rather like engage at like you know a hundred meters but um yeah so i started engaging him and all of a sudden everything lit up and so there was lots of folks to shoot at so as i'm fine that was great because you know and you've got a barricade in front of you i've got some glass you know it's like a whole back r pg round uh bulletproof is relative of, you know, small bullets, yeah, I mean, RPGs, no. So I'm firing rounds, and so now everything's lightened up.

And I'm, like, pumping as much lead as I can because we had some guys that had dismounted from the vehicle from us, and they got pinned down behind a rock. So, like, we had to, like, put as much lead into the valley as we could to, like, relieve the pressure on them. So remember that dog? So all of a sudden, all the volume of that, all those gunshots going off inside the vehicle,

the dog just snapped. And then my hot brass, because from my rounds, is coming down on top of this dog. So this dog just snaps and screaming out. So the dog handler is fighting the dog the whole time I'm engaged. I mean, he's in a knock-down dragout. I wouldn't say a fist fight, but maybe a paw and fist fight with this big German shepherd. Oh, my gosh. And this thing was a beast, too.

So, and, of course, I was over 40 when I was engaging this. So whenever you can engage in a firefight from a seated position, it's kind of nice, you know. I didn't want to leave my firing portal because, yeah, I could see all my targets because that guy at Fort Benny gave me 2010 vision, right? So I'm like completely comfortable. So that worked, the 2010. Oh, yeah, I saw the guy right away. I mean, I saw the blue smoke.

If I hadn't had my, my specs turned up, I wouldn't have seen this guy. So do you just always have the same size now. I do now. Why not? Yeah, yeah, I do now, yeah. So then after the firefight is over, you know, I'm dripping sweat, you know, I'd like been changing magazines inside the vehicle there's like it's like smoky from all the gun smoke and there's these tufts of fur from this big german shepherd floating around the air and and i look down

at the floor next to me and this the dog handler is looking up at me and there's a sweat just pouring down his face and he's got his head his hand on the german shepherd's snout and he's like all of them's on top of this german shepherd all known and the german shepherds trying to pant too, you know. And me and the dog handler just kind of exchanged, you know, glances, look at each other's eyes. It's like, I had my fight. He had his fight. I mean, I don't think he got a single roundoff the whole time.

And he had a much harder fight than I did fighting that dog because that thing snapped. And not as good of a story. No, I got a good story out of it because no one got wounded, right? Yeah, right. But, yeah, but anyway, that was, you know, funny things happened during a firefight. And we were down there in a Tengue Valley, another firefight one time. time and we had like a rolling gun medal since about 8 o'clock in the morning. And, you know, at the end of the day, it got really gnarly.

We were pinned against a cliff, lead vehicle hit an IED, flipped sideways. We had some casualties in the first vehicle. They were on top of the cliff over us, and then they started to surround us, and we were getting ricocheted off the cliff. And that's a huge disadvantage, right? Yeah, yeah. So we were literally getting shot it from five different directions because we were getting hit by ricochet.

People were getting hit by ricochets. You have been shot? No. Thank goodness. Yeah, yeah, yeah, really good for me. So anyway. And you're a big guy. I mean, our audience is a lot to shoot at.

I tell you. I'm a big and I'm slow. I'm almost 6'6, right? And you look every bit of it. Yeah, well, I guess so. So anyway, at the end of this battle, we've been taking casualties. I mean, like Air Weapons team, we had medevacs coming in. There had been artillery strikes.

I mean, like, the whole place has just exploded. And the quick reaction force had been launched from a forward operating base, some miles away, showed up. And all of us, they showed up at the front of our convoy, which was trapped because the first vehicle was blown sideways on this mountain road. Yeah, right. And this lieutenant comes running up, and his, when he's running up, his pants were ripped from about his right hip through the crotch all the way down to his left ankle. So he was effectively naked from the waist down in front. And he comes running up. There's like gun smoke and everything around.

And he's naked from the waist down. He yells something like, where are they? And we all turn to look at him, and we just burst out laugh. This guy had no shame, no pride. He's knicking from the waist down, you know, with like these rags hanging off the back of his waist, you know. But, you know, in a way, he'd never met us. We never met him before. But he wasn't going to let a brother get hurt.

Yeah, he didn't care. I mean, it was the most important thing was saving us. And he can't try it. But I tell you something, we left our butts off about that one. That was hilarious. And in the moment you were laughing. Oh, yeah. Like, they're in the firefighter.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you don't surrender your humanity. No, I know. But it's a fascinating concept, right? Like that, you know, you hear these guys in war. All of a sudden just start cracking up because a guy's not wearing his pants, you know. Yeah, well, I mean, like these things. And it shows on some level, I guess, that becomes your new baseline, right?

Oh, yeah. Being in that situation is your new baseline. It does. I mean, if you just dropped me out of this office into that situation, I would not be laughing in there. I mean, yeah, I know, I think that's... Because you had gotten so comfortable, right, in that environment? No, I mean, I think that's why combat can be addictive. I mean, it is, you redefine a baseline.

I mean, look, you're talking to a guy who's never tasted a beer before. I've never done narcotics, I've never done anything. No, I've never, never, never, I don't drink. I mean, I've never had beer, never had hard liquor. But the adrenaline pump from a firefight, I mean, your senses are completely tuned up. You're completely in the zone. Totally. I mean, it's, it's, you're tracking, you're solving data fusion problems like you've never

solved before. Radios are barking at you. You're trying to maneuver people. You've got bullets coming by. You're trying to lead people in, and you're going to work. And you're well trained for this. The military does a great job of training you for this. But I think at some level, though, it's more than training.

You've got to want it. You know, you got to have been born and envisioned, just like any athlete. And so you envisioned this at a younger age? Oh, yeah, whatever. I mean, for years, I mean, the subject of every jogs daydreaming was me performing in a firefight. I mean, it was... It's fascinating. Look, I mean, like, remember Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, 10,000 hours of practice.

Sure. I mean, I think that every minute you spend playing an army as a child, every minute you daydream about combat, you visualize this stuff. So much of sports performance is visualization. And I think, and we're talking more about that in a moment when we talk about science. But visualizing how to perform in a firefighter, I think, is an important part of it. You can train somebody to do this over and over and over again. You might never play the Army growing up. You might never have daydream about these kind of things.

But I can train you over and over and over again in the shoot house at Fort Irwin, California, until you understand, you can visualize yourself and you understand how a firefight is going to flow. Because a firefight has a very unique rhythm to it. and sometimes it's different, sometimes it's not. Would you ever meditate or do visualization exercises? About combat? I mean, I never did. Some people might, I mean, but when I'd go jogging at night

and didn't have to worry about traffic, it was always about daydream, about, you know, how I would I perform in a firefighter? So that's visualization in a way. Yeah, oh, yeah, sure. I mean, before my first firefighted, I mean, I probably had hundreds of hours of visualization. Oh, wow.

Because it was, you know, I used to run quite a bit. and, I mean, I was out there doing it and thinking about it. Now, the funny thing is when I go jogging. I've got so much experience in firefights. I don't dayduring about it anymore. Right. Yeah, I don't. Because now it's a little bit of thought.

Now I've done it. Yeah, yeah, it's no longer, I mean, I hate to say it sounds weird. It's no longer a fantasy. I mean, it's, it happens. You've checked that box. Yeah, checked the box, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it's, it's kind of hard.

I'm in a middle-aged man. You start thinking about different things, right? You worry about different things. But, yeah, I think every minute I spent daydreaming or fantasizing about how performing combat prepared me well for, I was never scared. I was never scared until I became a parent. Being a parent is terrifying. I've had been shot at, been shot from five different directions. I've had parachutes fail, but I got a 10-year-old little girl, and that's terrifying.

I mean, being a parent because your whole heart is very important. wrapped around this little kid. Totally. And you're so vulnerable about that. So parenting can be very, it's rewarding, but it can be terrifying because you've just got so much emotionally invested in. But firefight, piece of cake. Well, look, thank you for your service, first of all.

Those are fascinating stories, and we're all lucky as citizens to have people like you out there. So thank you. I've been a part of some really good teams. There's some good guys, I guess some good brothers, some good sisters in the military. And, you know, I've always been successful. successful when I've been part of a good team, and military was certainly part of that. So let's talk about the other half of your brain, or the other half of your life, I should say,

which has been amazing research at Harvard and really how we got to know one another. You know, I think alongside your bravery, you've had a remarkably creative career at Harvard, and it's definitely how we got to know one another. We came to, I think, in early 2013, we had been working at the Harvard Innovation Lab, for maybe three or four months. And, you know, we said, hey, Kit, this is the idea for the company, and this is where we're going. What got you excited about WOOP at that time?

So this was 2013. This war had been raging for about 12 years, and I had been on a advisory panel to a government agency called DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. And this advisory panel was Defense Science Research Council. and by the time I engaged with you guys had already been over to Afghanistan four times and we had been talking about soldier performance and we've been talking about resilience

by this time we were knee-deep in the TBI problem we were struggling with lots of folks with post-combat stress whatever you want to call that PTSD or whatever else I mean you can only go that well so many times before you just get to the point where it's hard to deal with that and over these years I had you know got very interested in human performance but one of the things we got interested in this was what our first conversation was about will was sleep

totally sleep and um you know sleep is so important i mean i was so struck by that study that came up 2012 that talked about how most families that are experiencing some kind of dysfunction they look at the sleep patterns of the mother and if the mother's not get enough sleep it puts a family at very high risk for uh for for dysfunction and that was a study that came out in 2012, but the military had been grappling with people who were sleep deprived. That was a fascinating study, by the way. I think they went so far as to say that if you could only cure one thing in a family,

it was having the mother of the family get enough sleep. Right, yeah. And then everything else would fall into place. Yeah, I mean, it's so important. I mean, I do believe what we learned quite a bit in the military is mind, body, soul, axis, and you got to develop all three at that triad. you get to develop them equally. I think certainly if you're deprived of sleep,

you're starting to see breakdowns in the other parts of that triad. But also as a person who's trained in bioengineering spent a lot of time to understand how muscle builds itself. I know that you need sleep because you're building muscle bundles. That's how you're building sarcomeres. It's a very elegant choreography required

for those proteins that come together and form sarcomeres. That's the contractile unit within a muscle bundle. When you work out, you're doing damage to muscle you need to flesh out the waste products. And then also, you've got to form all those neural networks. That's why those children, you know, little babies get, are sleeping like 12 hours a night because those brains are like wiring up to recognize mama, recognize daddy. And it's important.

And as a classroom teacher, I understand that sleep is so important in just in terms of processing and learning. So our first conversation, if you recall, I started talking about the other half of wellness. or fitness, which is sleep, recovery. And then you guys went off and hired a great team and started building tech along those lines. It's been a lot of fun to watch y'all. Really develop into an industry leader in terms of empowering athletes and performers

to be able to understand the balance between their exertion and their recovery. Yeah, that was really, I would say, the thing from the earliest days of WOOP that I was willing to bet the farm on. It was like, there were a lot of things that we needed to figure out at Woop, but the one thing that I was certain is we got to be able to measure strain, we got to be able to measure recovery, and a big piece of recovery

sleep. And, you know, I think you were very helpful in sort of confirming that as a point of view. And by the way, at that time, there weren't actually a lot of coaches confirming that point of view. No. You know, recovery is very in today, but we're talking now, you know, five, six years later. At the time when I would go talk to coaches, there was this big point of view, like, I need to know more about exercise.

or speed or, you know, all these very granular things that were very practice-centric. And my point of view is like, look, there's a whole other 20 hours of the day where we can be better understanding what people are doing to their bodies. And that totally resonated for you. Well, I'll tell you when one of the things really came up with sleep, I was, you know, a cardiovascular researcher. A buddy of mine was wounded in Iraq. He got hit by a TBI.

He was really jacked up. This was early in the war. when we really didn't understand what traumatic brain injury was. Early in the war being like mid-2000? Yeah, yeah, probably in the war, something like that, was when he got hit. And so I decided I'm at a turning some kind of a halfway neuroscientist and me and my friends are going to survive this war, so I started looking at traumatic brain injury and working with DARPA on traumatic brain injury

at the cellular level to understand exactly what the mechanism was. but after my second combat tour I got named to a team called the Gray Team and that team supported the chair of the Joint Chiefs to understand it provides explosive devices and obviously the casualties result from them primarily TBI and so I went back into Afghanistan with the grade team now as a scientist who just understood the battlefield and we talked to the people run these concussion care clinics where the first one had been stood up by an Army doc Jennifer Bell in a forward operating base shank in 2009. Now they'd spread across the country.

Later it got on when we took some civilian docks over there to Afghanistan. They said the best place to really get treated for a concussion. It was actually not the U.S. It was probably Afghanistan because these concussion care clinics. The military really led the way in terms of concussion care. But here's what was happening. You had these young guys that would patrol and fight all day long, sitting there drinking sports drinks, getting over-caffeinated,

then they'd come back from patrol and they'd be all amped up and they'd play a video game and they'd game all night maybe get a couple hours of sleep and they'd roll out and go fight the whole day so they were fighting in the biospace

and the geospice all day long and then they'd be fighting in cyberspace with these computer games for hours afterwards so they were chronically so then all of a sudden they hit an IED and they got a cussed on their patrol and what they started noticing was these guys that they really weren't injured except for the concussion.

They'd bring back to a concussion care clinic. It used to be back when I was a child, if you got a concussion, they'd say, don't let them sleep. Don't let them sleep. I mean, I guess they were afraid we'd never wake up. Meltta, we learned, let them sleep. And they put these kids down. Sometimes you had kids that were sleeping 17 straight hours. They'd wet their pants.

I mean, like, they were so sleep deprived. And the doctor said, let them sleep, let them sleep. And this was really important. So then the concussion care clinics really got focused on sleep hygiene. Take out the fluorescent lights, doing subdued lighting, no TV, no video games, no sport drinks, which are just like poison. Just the whole idea of focus on sleep hygiene as one of the most important steps of recovering from concussion, let these people get sleep. So you go into the concussion care clinics in Afghanistan, and they would have this Christmas lighting spread all around inside the clinic,

and there was no other fluorescent lighting. They kept the lighting down as low as they possibly could. And then later we started to realize, hey, there seems to be a correlation between sleep and post-combat stress. And we were, look, I mean, in post-combat stress, and I've walked this mile before, I mean, the daydreams are tough, you know,

about decisions you made, things that happened, and it can really disrupt your sleep. and I wonder sometimes if post-combat stress is really not just a factor of being sleep-deprived on top of everything else you've dealt with for so long. A lot of this post-combat stress isn't happening until well after the event. But we just realized in the military that sleep hygiene is really important. And we train as leaders to challenge to fight through sleep deprivation to continue to maintain our standards of leadership and performance through sleep deprivation.

but every once in a while you've got to just take a knee, you've got to take a nap, you've got to sleep. And so we've learned in the military the hard way over the course of this war. And by 2011, when I was back in Afghanistan, we were about 10-year anniversary into the war. I was there in the 10-year anniversary of 9-11, that you've got to have sleep if you're going to make it through this war. And we started looking at sleep as a commodity. usually we talked about this that usually when you call a unit you call them you ask for an ace report or what we call a lace report and the lace stands for liquid ammo casualties and equipment right and you want green green green green green green green on all of these green green green green green on all

of these to give an update across those different yeah yeah yeah so then we start talking about laces where we would make the combat leaders say hey are you green yellow or red on sleep. Do you need to sleep? How many hours of sleep have you had in the last 96? If it's less than 12, this your unit is, you know, I'm just, this is just arbitrary, it's not combat effective right now. You're going to sit down there and you're going to sleep. It's like you lost three guys and you're a nine-man squad, right? I mean, you're not.

It makes a lot of sense. By the way, 12 hours in 96 also isn't a ton of sleep. No, it's not at all. So the fact that that's the baseline, yeah, but that can happen. It just shows you. It can happen. Yeah. I mean, when you're out there on an op, you know, where they were, you know, we would air assault into the mountains and walk from mountain to mountain to village to village for a week at a time. I mean, you might only be getting three or four hours of sleep at night because, you know, even once you pull into a night position, a patrol base, you know, you're pulling watch, you're pulling security, so you're not going to sleep for like eight hours. I mean, you might get three or four hours of sleep and that's it.

And you're hump at 120, 30 pounds of stuff. You're at 8,000 feet and occasionally you're in a firefight. So, or what can be even more stressful is you're doing a cordon search and ability. and you're searching through these people's home who might not be bad people and you feel weird about it and it's very stressful doing that. So a lot of challenges and you're doing it all in a sleep-deprived situation and you've got predominantly young men out there 18 to 25 years of age and we know the brain is still developing up to in the males until 25 years of age. So these are immature and still developing brains that are being soaked in and cortisol, testosterone,

also some oxytocin because you trust your buddies you're with and you're sleep deprived them, all this adrenaline, and then you come back from combat and you pull out all those neurochemicals that you've grown addicted to. It can be very stressful. And we see a lot of problems with post-combat adaptation where soldiers are getting bar fights, car accidents, I mean sexual promiscuity. All these things are associated with acting out and trying to achieve that same level of neurochemistry.

And you saw that at the end of combat tour, usually when you see soldiers taking chances at the end of a combat tour that they never would have done at the beginning of the combat tour. I think, and this is Parker speaking, I think it's completely addiction, physiology. They're looking for a high and they're going to raise the bar.

They're going to do stuff that's a little bit more on edge while they're out there. And it's all about achieving a certain high. and the highest combat. Well, let's talk about that. You touched on a really interesting concept, which is when folks come back from combat, right? Today, there are these, I think, somewhat arbitrary periods of time

in which you're out of combat before you go back in, right? There isn't necessarily a variable protocol that determines whether someone's ready to go back. And this was something that we talked about a lot in 2013. and at Whoop, it's something that we're excited to be doing now where we can actually start to look at from a physiological standpoint when someone comes back from warfare, are they responding the way they did before warfare? No, I look at, I mean, you know, I talked about this.

I several years ago tried to get dark but interested in the whole idea of vacation science. You know, everyone understands, they have scientifically designed preparation, quantitative, all kinds of analytics as to how you prepare for war, how you prepare for an athletic event but no one has done scientifically designed rest what are your physiological rest goals I mean what should your resting heart rate be your cholesterol level

I mean hurry variability yeah yeah heart rate variability stress yeah all these things no one ever looks at the scientific design of vacation and I guarantee you that if I went to Wall Street and said hey listen let's scientifically design your vacation

there'd be a lot of takers any type of a high-stressed job where, hey, we're going to go someplace. And I've done a little bit of research. I've gone through the scientific literature on this kind of thing. There's not a whole lot out there. You can start to string pieces of it together, and you start to see some emergent trends.

So if you want a good vacation, stay in your time zone and go someplace sunny. I mean, that's one of the main things. So you should start changing time zones. You're going to disrupt your sleep pattern. Also, there's three things. Stay in your time zone. Go where it's warm,

and your vacation needs to be a minimum of 72 hours. And I think the upper limit is something like about five days. After five days you don't see a whole lot of recovery. Diminishing marginal returns. Yeah, yeah, correct. Well, my business development team might get angry at me for revealing this, so maybe we'll have to cut it. But we are working on an interesting project with literally a travel company to help analyze data on people who go to a certain vacation spot. And it's smart, right? The vacation spot wants to be able to advertise that if you travel to their vacation destination, this is the results. Like,

here's your sleep baseline and this is how much it's going up your recovery stats are rising we're going to help you get some exercise makes a lot of sense right go away the cell phone the TV and the computer and just leave it to you and either some and maybe you read a book and I think in many ways and this won't go over so well is family vacations can be stressful sometimes right and one of the things might be is do you need a vacation away from your family. You need 96 hours on a beach in the keys. Right. Without your cell phone, without your computer, without the television, without Bloomberg and the feeds of the stuff. And without your teenage kids, you know, without your teenage kids, without your spouse or your partner, you know,

it might just be that you got to focus on just you. And I think that that's one of the, removing those stressors, but it's remarkable to me that no one has done a deep dive on the science behind vacation. When I propose this at DARPA, no one wanted to have to defend this on the hill. You know, hey, you're doing a project on vacation science, and then when I try to bring it up down there at Socom, because you know, the special operator community has really been just beat down after 17 years of war. No one really wanted to do it there. But listen, there's, we understand all the physiological metrics required to understand if you are truly rested. Not all of them, but we don't have a lot of.

Yeah, and that's obviously a big focus. We can give rest analytics that go all the way down into your blood chemistry. I mean, you might be that you need certain sleep, you need certain diet. You might need one of the big things. Obviously, what we've learned from WIP is how alcohol can disrupt your sleep patterns. I mean, that's one of the most, I think, important things that's come from some of the data that you guys have gathered. That, hey, go on the vacation, you hang out the beach, take a book. Don't drink, eat salad, eat some fish, get some omega-3 fatty acids, go for a walk every day, and don't call your kids.

Right. Don't let them call you, you know. Teenage, they can be stressful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is controversial, but, yeah, families can be stressful. Families are complicated, you know, and just. We see this a lot with professional athletes where we had a goalie in the NHL who was, his statistics were by far the best in the NHL. for away games and you look at his performance at home and it just wasn't as good at home games

and you know the team's trying to figure out what's going on da-da-da and our woo point of view was just looking at the data and it was like well this guy's something's going on I know the story about an HL player he was not a goalie but this was made aware to me a few years back that he did a lot better on the road than he did at home at home he lived pretty close to to the hockey rink but at home they had a brand new baby that wasn't sleeping through the nights right so the only time he was getting any sleep was when he was at a hotel and so these kinds of things can happen and it's important to understand it I mean I be aware of it

right yeah sure I mean I think it's very interesting that the Red Sox finally put a sleep station over there in Fenway Park there was an article about recently in the Boston Globe we're just down the street from Brigham Women's Hospital with a Harvard affiliated hospitals where all this big work on sleep and wellness has been done. And I think actually you hired some of their people for your team. Yeah, we did. And the Red Sox have now put a, and they just won the World Series last night,

and they put a sleep station in there for their players. And a lot of teams are doing this now. It's so important. I mean, like, you take a look at the beating and the professional athlete takes going up on planes, coming back down, sleep deprived. I mean, some of these guys are big guys. They're trying to sit into an airbus.

airplane seat, you know, they're traveling at different schedules. There'd be West Coast, there'd be East Coast. They'd be catching flights at 3 o'clock in the morning, fly on someplace else, and then get checking into a hotel at 9 o'clock in the morning. Got to get a few hours sleep and then go to the ballpark for bad practice. I mean, it's an endurance event. Major League Baseball, when you take a look at this schedule, it is an endurance event. Well, the travel piece of it, too, gets totally overlooked, you know.

And we've seen that in the Woop data as well. where when you're going over one hour, two hour, three hour time zones, it's messing with your body and your circadian rhythm. Yeah. And it affects your sleep and it affects your recovery. And the teams that actually invest on the data side of understanding that, I think are emerging as teams that are doing slightly better than their team's talent level. At the end of the day, you still have to be a good team.

You still have to have talented players. But you can maximize their potential so much more by understanding this stuff. Will, I'm going to tell you the next thing you need to start asking, your athletes is when they fly on these planes, you need to ask them what was the airframe. Because the pressurization inside the aircraft is going to have an impact on how they feel when they land. That's fascinating. And the new trend in airline manufacturing is they're going to make these aircraft where they can maintain a higher atmosphere, a higher pressure inside the cabin so that people will feel better, more fresh when they get to wherever they're going.

So that's a good thing you think. So yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So one of the things I would correlate and make sure these teams know when they, when they sign these contracts with whatever airline they're doing is they should request a certain airframe. But I would be willing to bet that you can find also a correlation, not just with their sleep pattern, but also the type of airframe and the atmospheric pressure inside that airframe while they were flying. You know, that's fascinating. And it actually ties to another project that we're working on with an airline where we're going to start monitoring pilots and stewardesses to analyze. how they're adapting to the travel schedule

because you know that's a crazy schedule as well and the pilots we've talked about pilots in the military how much they need to be monitored yeah I mean crew rest I mean listen I'm a I'm a soldier and I'm a business traveler and crew rest are two of the most obscene words I ever hear

because they pull pilots off my plane when I'm delayed I got I got rotary wing aircraft that can't fly certain missions because they got to have crew rest the whole idea of I mean I want to be able to call these pilots on this stuff so Will if you can give me data

and a lot of business travelers and a lot of soldiers a little bit more information in terms of how to fight for our rights what we've got to do with air crews. No you put air crews down they can only work for so many hours in the 24 hour period or whatever it is you know I know where this military civilian the fact of the matter is that

25 year old pilot is probably a little bit different than that 55 year old pilot and what are the numbers that support that? Do you mean? If you're flying, your crew rest requirement is the same if you're flying domestic versus if you're flying trans-Pacific, probably not. So taking a look at those numbers with some real data, I think is probably important. So one of the things that we've been working on together is just big picture, how can technology that WOOP is developing help the military, help armed forces, help tactical athletes.

If you think about just where all this is going, you know, paint a picture. five, ten years from now, in your mind, what is like an optimal end-to-end monitoring program, advisory service, you name it, where we can make our special forces as effective as possible? You know, we can make these people have healthier lives and perform optimally and, you know, do the right thing. That's the bottom line. I think special operates, but I also think there's a big market for conventional forces. Yeah, excuse me, I think I was mislabeling that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I certainly understand it because the Central Operations Committee has been so much more progressive when it comes to human performance. I mean, though the first people you think of when the folks are just demanding more and more and more from themselves and from the programs that they used to prepare themselves for their match. Yeah, talk big picture tactical athlete. Yeah, so, look, I mean, like, I can go through a unit's training records and I can see, okay, what are they doing in the shoot house? I mean, have they learned how to do this task, that task, this other task? I could take a look at their crude PT scores. This is today? Today, today.

Okay. And I can make a very uninformed decision about the readiness of my unit. But I don't know how comfortable they are within those performance specs. I need a calibration on mind, body, and soul. I need that. And I need to get as much data about these guys before I ask them to do something. Herculean task, quite literally. I mean literally, yeah.

I need to understand as much about where they are, not just their body, but where their head is. I need to know what their stress levels are. I need to know if they're comfortable and how much depth I've got in terms of that performance. And right now I don't have that. I need more physiological data for that. I think that's the opportunity for the technology there.

I think that technology is going to continue to improve. We have more and more data, more and more parameters, more and more analytics. I think at some point in time, the data that you collect, you've got to have a theoretical framework to put it all in in terms of the warfighter, the athlete, the weekend warrior, whatever. You've got to have some type of theoretical framework. I think the science is pushing hard to develop these models. I see different, you know, we've always used these models trying to do drug discovery. computational models of organ performance. It's very hard for us to start developing computational models of the tactical athlete.

It's very challenging to do. And I don't see where there has been a major push to do that kind of thing. I mean, the thing I'll say just from seeing this now with pro sports teams, is you need like a massive amount of buy-in to really be able to understand anything end-to-end. You know, because we're providing the physiological information. So we can tell you whether someone's putting stress on their body or they're recovered or they're sleeping properly or not across those metrics. But what becomes really fascinating, and this is what we've been able to do at the professional sports level, is we're now able to pull in travel schedule logs when their flight took off, where it landed, what the time difference was.

We're able to look at the players by positions, so knowing all the different positions of an individual on a baseball team or anything else. We're able to know food information about their nutrition. We're able to know exactly what's going on from a supplement standpoint or anything else. So you have all these extra data points. And then, by the way, on the other side of it, you also have performance outcomes, wins, losses, field goal percentage, batting average, you name it. And so you all of a sudden can connect the dots, right? I would say all of a sudden, because that kind of modeling is actually very complicated. I mean, like, you can eyeball it, and I'm sure that will, I mean, you've been looking.

at this kind of data for several years now. I mean, Connect All the Dots is my wife saying, you can start to tell a story. Yeah, you're right. And I think you're going to go from blind to storytelling. No, I mean, I think that that's why the company here has a kind of a unique perspective because you take a look across all of your different clients. You have a much broader understanding of human performance, probably than other companies because of the very, the varied number of people that you have and the athletes.

Right, I know. That's why it's unique. So there's probably a whole science into going through the WOOP data archives and start to try to develop mathematical models of these kinds of things. I mean, I think there's a lot there to do with. I mean, like, the question is, you know, how do you get the best team of modelers to come in? Well, I think the harder part, just as it relates back to the military and the tactical athlete, is how do you get all that information end to end, right?

Like, we can hire brilliant people out of Harvard, MIT, you name it. And we have, and that's why we've been able to start, again, telling a story. I think in terms of the future on the military side, there has to be a pretty big buy-in to, you know, revealing a lot of different information and a lot of data sets that, by the way, might be a little spooky looking. You know, you might reveal some things that you're uncomfortable with. Data can be a little bit scary.

The NFL, for example, they measure impact of every play, right? Every single hit. There is a zebra monitor inside every player's pads that is literally measuring impact, you know, 24-7 of the game or for the entire game. And that information is not public. Researchers aren't doing work with that data. Yeah, we've had that military. We've had that military.

Right, because they don't, you don't want to know. blast, yeah. So that's where I think I think there's potential, but there's also, there's going to be like a lift, so to speak, and it's maybe the political lift, but there needs to be a buy-in where everyone says, okay, we're going to peel back the onion here, we're going to look

at some stuff, and it's only going to be revealed to a small set of people. But that's, I think, how you can make a huge leap. But this is a dark or hard project, and I think that if you take it behind the curtain of the classified

early on, you're going to prevent some of the talent from coming in and working the data. You're going to have to accept a certain risk to bringing people in and taking a look at data and maybe revealing things, you don't know, because you've got to have a big-tint strategy. These are not just multidisciplinary problems. These are transdisciplinary problems because you've got human behavior, you've got travel logistics, you've got sports, you got... Absolutely. I mean, you want to say, hey, how many phone calls did this guy get from his wife?

How many did he get from his parents that's stressed about? Massive data stuff. I mean, is this guy dragging three or four of his high school buddies with him on every road trip? I mean, are they sucking him dry because he's putting him up with the writs? You know, what kind of financial duress of these guys? There's a lot of data. Now, for the professional athlete, their body is their asset. But it goes beyond their body.

Their lifestyle is their asset. And anything that's a part of their lifestyle is a part of this asset. It could be adaptive or it could be massive. or it could be maladaptive. And so if I was a sports agent, I would want all this kind of data from whoop, but I would also want so much more about the lifestyle of this athlete to understand,

hey, can I project what the career trajectory this person is going to be? Is this person going to flame out in two years because of the way they party or the stressors they have in their family or from folks at home? Or is this person have the emotional resilience to get through, you know,

a season like what the Red Sox just went through. I mean, what kind of lunacy is that in Boston where you live under a microscope? I mean, if I was the Red Sox, and I think about how much money we're spending to pay athletes to play baseball for other teams where they came here to Boston and they couldn't, you know, whatever reason it was tough to, it's tough to play baseball here in Boston. And, you know, Fenway Park is Boston's Cathedral. You live under a microscope there. There's absolutely no mercy. And the city like Boston, the one thing that Boston respects is toughness, and you've got to earn it every single day in this city.

That's one of the biggest adaptations to come into this city. That potentiates a stress on these athletes that can degrade and shorten their careers. Certainly degrade their performance, shorten their careers. And all this data can be managed. It can be collected now. And the question is, can it be synthesized? into tools that the athlete can use to better manage their asset, their lifestyle, that the team can use to assess value on free agent signings that they want to do

or draft picks that they want to have. And that has a sticky area in itself because it involves, it starts to involve the Players Association and the league and, you know, it varies by, we can spend a while talking about that. But if you think big picture, you know, there's a lot right now. being talked about with Russia and China and, you know, other global leaders that, at least from my vantage point, seem to be really, really heavily investing in data. They seem to be heavily investing in their software capabilities. They're sure as hell hacking our shit, you know?

Yeah, yeah. Like, do you worry at all about the next 20, 50 years from the standpoint of, are we going to be able to to keep up from an artificial intelligence standpoint when it comes to warfare yeah i mean i see it's in a scientific community i mean the quality of the science coming out of china is as good as it's ever it's never been this good it seems good it's extremely good yeah trained a lot of scientists over there they're going back and they're built great universities right there's great scientists if this gets turned in directions that are probably you know without the same type of oh values compass that we try to used for our science development here in the U.S., we could face some challenges, and it's

starting to look like we're going to face some there in the Pacific Rim. You know, very concerned about what Putin's doing. I mean, like, I mean, this is the Russians, Putin, there's a lot of violence that's been potentiated by Putin, and Russian nationalism is as high as it's ever bent. So, at least since the fall of the Soviet Union. So, yeah, I do worry about those things. worry about them quite a bit. I think data security is something that everyone needs to be concerned about. And, you know, so all of these stakeholders, the Players Association, you know,

the unions, the agents, the athletes, certainly, the teams, the U.S. military, has to be aware of the fact that there's a risk when you start collecting all this data. Now, you might collect data, and you might have your own models. The St. Louis Cardinals might have a set of models where they had to Boston Red Sox data where they would come up with something very different. You know, one of the really interesting things in government is I think the only government employees

who get a quantitative review of their job performance in any given year are the meteorologist that's the National Weather Service. Because they all have their own mathematical models and they get a quantitative grade as to how well they did it predicting the weather. Right. because all their mathematical models are different, right?

So every team's models might be somewhat different because they make different assumptions, they have different conditions under which they model this data. So with the same data set, you could get, you know, if you have five or six mathematical models, you could have five or six different predictions. So it's not just about protecting the data. It's about understanding your model

and understanding other people's models and how they're going to process that data. Yeah, and you're thinking about the question from a very, you know, almost whoop-centric, point of view, which is like physiological-based, I'm even saying broadly speaking, you know, I was reading this article, and I will include this in the show notes because it's crazy, and maybe you saw it. By like 2022, China is going to have a program where they're monitoring everything about their citizens and creating effectively a reputation score based on everything that a

citizen does in his or her life. If you go through a traffic light, that deducts it. if you help an older lady walk across the street that increases it if you tweet positive things about the government that increases it if you say bad things about the government that decreases it um you know i'm sure it's reading emails and all these other things right and it's i mean i mean it's beyond a black mirror episode it's like this is full on uh you know the invasion of privacy is probably even right the way but you know ultimately that will be to demise of their civilization because they will have homogenous the population to the point where there's no creative friction that will basically disintegrate any type of creativity because you basically develop a mindset of defect-free you have to live defect-free or something might happen to you a huge fear of failure yeah of course yeah yeah or it not even failure just variation from the norm and I mean I think that I several years ago I got contacted by the New York Times about some big study

they were about doing AI, and I don't think they ever ran the story, but they did this interview, and they asked me, they said, do you think that AI will ever out-design humans? And I said, with great confidence, no, I don't think they, it will. And they said, why not? And I can't remember what the answer was, but I'm going to give you an even more clever answer than I probably have given them. And that is that an important, but to the left of innovation is creativity. And if you want to be an innovator, which is very much a team sport, you have to first,

be a creative individual. Now, there's a big difference between being a good idea and an innovator, and that's usually leadership that moves the needle. Execution. Yeah, yeah. But in the sanitized work environments we have, where no one wants to get their feelings hurt, and everyone wants to be valued in all these psychological safe spaces, we sanitize the workplace of the kind of emotion that drives creativity. And I don't care. what type of AI system you have. No one will come up, will develop an AI system that has both the serendipity, the situational awareness, and the emotional response that humans have

to the things that they observe quite accidentally and connect them these dots that drives that whole innovation process. And AI won't do that. AI will do what I tell it to do. Maybe it might eventually develop some autonomy, but it won't feel, observe and in the same way and experience serendipity in the same way that I do in my

daily life. So I think that's important. But it breaks my heart to think that the Chinese might collect that kind of data on their citizens because it's just... Well, that's happening. I mean, they even announced it. Really? Yeah, I'll send you the article. Yeah, I mean, imagine the amount of talent that they're putting into a program like that could be better spent doing something else. I mean, that's a tremendous waste of talent to do this stuff.

And the end result is you're homogenize your population. Right. I want to do a couple, you know, quick-fire questions, and then I'll let you get out of here. One is, you know, you travel a lot, right? And you've also been super experienced with how to think about your body and your health and your mind. Do you have any tricks, techniques, life hacks that you use? to make yourself optimal? It's kind of a whoop-centric question.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Listen, travel sucks. As I get older, as I get older, it sucks. I mean, look, I mean, like, you can give me extended leg room. You can put me first class. I'm 6'6. I'm a big dude, right? And it sucks, right?

So what I've learned is, you know, when I go to get on a plane, I don't eat. The last thing I wanted to use the airplane food to grade my sleep on a red eye, you know? I try not to eat before I get it on there, wait until I get to wherever I'm going when I'll get there going. If I got to perform, give a talk, or do whatever.

You don't drink alcohol, which is a good start. Yeah, I don't drink alcohol. That's a big thing. That's a big leg up because a lot of people drink with the trap. Try not to eat on the airplane. Try not to eat on the airplane. Try not to eat maybe even before I get on the airplane. That's actually one of the best things I've done recently,

stop eating on planes. Yeah, yeah. I don't think the food's that great. And then also, if I'm going to sleep, I want to sleep. Your body doesn't metabolize it properly either. Yeah, yeah, because the thing is, It's like you go up there. I'm always concerned about what's the oxygen levels in here?

You know, I mean, like, is my gut epithelium hypoxic? What does salt taste so good? What is this stuff sitting in my belly the whole time? You know, they don't feel healthy. I can't really move there. I'm on these life long flights. But, you know, I don't drink. I've never drank, so that's like a big deal in terms of, like, not feeling.

But I like to, when I go to a city, I either like to jog or walk the whole city to kind of do my exploring, trying to have to do taxes and stuff like that. But, you know, I don't take ambience. and things like that. I mean, I take a melatonin if I got asleep, you know? I take melatonin, yeah, if I have to deal with a time zone that I'm adapting to. Well, I think, listen, I think what you want to do is you want to try to exercise before and after you get off the plane.

Totally great. Even if it's just walking up and down the terminal, I think you want to minimize what you consume on the plane. And you're really got to, like, try to relax while you're on the plane. I mean, a lot of times, I mean, if I find a red eye in somewhere, the first thing I want to do is, like, listen, I'm, you know, I really try to minimize my travel because of my, my, my, daughter, right? So, like, I do 36-hour trips everywhere. Like, I'm flying to Zurich, I'm there, 36 hours

on the ground, boom, I'm coming back, right? So that means I get off the red eye, I got to perform. I've got to take a shower at the airport, get changed. You drink coffee? Yeah, yeah, yeah, because... You say that with a nod that makes me think you're guzzle coffee. That's why you're all safe is because I drink coffee. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I drink coffee. I mean, like,

but I only drink coffee in the morning. I don't drink it in the... So you don't guzzle it all day. I've been drinking coffee in the... in the afternoons, because of this deadgum Red Sox World Series thing. What the October is the only time? By the way, we're about to publish something on sleep in Boston versus the rest of the country. No, listen, let me tell you, every October, like this whole city just grinds to a halt.

We get nothing done because, first of all, we're watching these Red Sox games, and then we're spending the whole next day raging about decisions that were made and listen to WEEI and all the sports talk radio. But, yeah, October is the only time of year. where I drink coffee after about 11 o'clock in the morning. And I don't drink that much. Maybe I have a might have a cup, a cup or two in the morning. But I get up pretty early.

I mean, I'm up at 4 or 5 to start getting some work done and try to get a little bit of work done before I take my daughter to school. So, yeah, I limited to campus. Four or five is early. What time you go to bed? Well, you know, if I'm putting her down between 8 and 9, you know, I might be going to bed shortly thereafter. So this Red Sox series screwed you up.

It jacked me all up. Yeah. Listen, last night was tough. And by the time, the game was over. I lived in Fenway, man. It was chaos here. Yeah, listen, I overlook Fenway. I mean, I live down there in a Cambridge Watertown line looking down over those things.

So, you know, last night, after one, I was so amped. You know, I decided to clean the kitchen and stuff like this. So I'm, like, trying to scrub the new ceramic stove top. And I just couldn't calm down. I was so fired up for these guys. I mean, they just busted their hump. So, yeah, you know, I minimize the caffeine. But, like, you know, the fact of the matter is, is I don't do a whole lot of lifestyle changes

other than just minimizing the amount of carbs they eat when I'm traveling, too. You know, I want to eat light meals, meat, and vegetables. But you just got to exercise, and that's the hard thing about it, because when I do it 36 hours on the ground in Zurich or someplace of Seoul, you know, or, I mean, I used to do these nasty trips to Singapore, I was there less than 48 hours. You know, that's like a, even when they had the nonstop 18-hour from Newark, it was still brutal travel. You just have all kinds of challenges

with, like, digesting food. So your food intake is so important when you travel. You've just got to be very careful. And part of the traveling, fun is the culture. You want to be able to eat while you're there because the food is culture, right? That's how you build friendships and relationships, these social rituals we have around meals.

So the last thing I want to do is, you eat these wasted calories on an aircraft flight, you know, I want to, like, eat the local stuff. But even then, that can be toxic. If I've had some meals and some crazy places, got on a plane and realized I'd made, you know, a serious tactical mistake. All right, next question for you. Who is the most creative person that you've met?

You've talked a lot about creativity. Oh, it's Kanye, no doubt about that. And what stood out for you? Although I think that Larry is probably a pretty creative person. I would say that my thesis advisor, John Wickslow, Vanderbilt. was an extremely creative person. It is extremely creative. But, yeah, I would, all of them, yeah.

And what stood out for you about Kanye's creativity? I mean, it's, it's transdisciplinary. I mean, the guy's doing fashion, the guy's doing music. I mean, he's hiring engineers. So you can relate to that. Yeah, I mean, like I'm not working at the scale of Kanye, you know, but, I mean, you know, we're trying to trim the edge. out some problems. I mean, he spent a lot of resources pursuing some of these ideas. And

the great thing about listening to him to describe stuff is he wasn't afraid if it crashed and burned. And, I mean, look, if you want to be out there at the cutting edge in any field, it takes some balls. It really does. I mean, figuratively. I mean, you've got to get used to being shamed to people making fun of you to being wrong risking everything being at the cutting edge any field is about embracing a chronic discomfort you've got to so true you've got to have a competitiveness that you want you got to have a will to win to persevere because it's it's going to suck if you're afraid of being wrong you're never going to be an innovator you are not i think it's also why you know the most creative people are also, at times, paired with depression, you know,

or you're cycling between the sort of bipolar feeling of euphoria and just being really down. Because the nature of pushing through anything that's super creative or cutting edge that people tell you is wrong, is that your mind's constantly oscillating between these two feelings of, I've got it right, and I'm crazy. I completely agree. I completely agree. I mean, like, it's, you know, you hear about the artists or the scientist or the surgeon who's, like, yelling and throwing things in the OR or the conductor. Giving birth to an idea is very violent. I mean, you can take a look at the birth of a new idea is intellectual violence. Ideas coming together, smash together, boom.

And giving birth to a idea, you know, birth in an idea is really brutal. A lot of times the ideas are not completely formed. You're trying to communicate them. You're trying to get them out of your head. They're really tough. We don't really have appreciation for that process in a lot of companies these days. I mean, we sanitize these things because we don't want anyone to have their feelings hurt. I don't know if anyone who's doing anything, Korea, who doesn't get their feelings hurt.

I don't know anyone who ventures into that space of the unknown going where there's nothing and making something that doesn't get their feelings hurt sometimes. You just got to, like, build some resilience and endure that. But so, I mean, I think one of the things that struck me about some of these people that I've engaged with is they were not afraid to fail. And that is, it's awesome to see that. I mean, like, you know, I mean, like, my risk tolerance. probably went up because I used to get shot at for a living, you know? I mean, so I'm just about a frayed in the lab.

I mean, like, but maintain, I don't think there's too much serendipity when it comes to discovery. But I don't call that serendipity. I call that situational awareness, and that's a leadership trait. That's an innovator trait. Hey, and that's a trait of a winner.

Hey, I'm going to find a way to make this thing work. I'm going to find a way to win. I'm going to find a way to prevail. Athletes do this. Good coaches do this. Good scientists. do this. Good artists do this kind of thing. And so putting yourself in a situation

where you're bordering a completely collapse and trying to find a way to pull out a victory. It's like Cora the other night going to 18 innings. I mean, like, I think everyone in a city like Boston, one of the most creative places in the world where you've got to earn your toughness every day, where you've got to create things.

When we have academics, we have artists, we have performers, we have athletes. And in Boston, everyone understands going all out. We are all in. That's what this city is about. Cora was throwing Avaldi in there for six innings in relief. He's starting to pitch it for the next night.

Hey, baby, you might not like that anywhere else in the world, but in Boston, baby. That's the way this city rolls. I love that. All in all the time. Belichick, no days off. That's what it takes to achieve. That's what it takes to be creative. And I'm very honored to be a part of this city and that culture,

or trying to be a part of it, trying to be a contributor to that. And so when I see these people that just aren't afraid to make a mistake, they will go all out, like, you know, whether it's Elon or Kanye or some of these other people I've seen do this kind of thing, I'm down with that. I think that's, I'm trying to be a part of that effort. Well, look, thank you for everything that you've done for this town. And I'm sure all the Harvard students that you've influenced possibly, you've certainly had a great influence on my life. and the way you've approached, I think, leadership and creativity for WOOP has been amazing. Well, thanks, I appreciate that. Yeah, thank you for being so engaged.

And if people want to find you, how can people, you know, reach out to you? I'm sure a lot of people are going to be true. Just Google me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm all over the place. You'll be able to find me. I'm over at Harvard. Okay. Or contact a barbecue company.

We can leave your email or something in the show notes if people are comfortable with that. But anyway, this has been an awesome kit. Thank you so much for sitting down with me. My pleasure. Thanks, Will. and you've had a world of experience, so thank you. Thank you for listening to our second episode of the WOOP podcast. I thought Kit would be an amazing guest, and of course he came through.

You can start to get a feel for the type of guests we're having on, super dynamic people with really wide-ranging points of view across all things, sports, data, analytics, you name it. You can visit Woop.com. The Locker for show notes and for links to the relevant topics of what we talked about. Make sure to subscribe, rate, and review the Whoop Podcast on iTunes, Google, Spotify, or wherever across the internet that this podcast exists. You can find me online at Will Ahmed.

I'd love to answer any questions that you have about this podcast or listen to your suggestions regarding whoop, questions about whoop, you name it. That's at Will Ahmed. We'd also love to hear your feedback generally. So check out at Whoop on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, email the locker at Whoop.com with any thoughts or ideas you may have. You can join the Whoop community for $30 a month and get 24-7 access on your biometric data as well as analytics across strain, sleep, recovery, and more. The membership comes with a free Whoop strap 2.0. Our members include some of the best performance on the planet.

I've been so grateful to see the growth on the consumer side. And so to all of you loyal members out there, we love you. Thank you for listening, and we wouldn't be here without you. We've got some great holiday promotions. We're now offering an annual membership where you can get 20% off the regular monthly rate. That's a great deal. And for our current members, visit our new holiday shop at whoop.com. We've got gift cards to extend your membership at a discounted rate, premium gold and silver clasps.

We've gotten amazing feedback on those. gold and silver clasps, seasonal bands, and a lot more. So if you're looking for some bling or you want an ugly sweater band for your ugly sweater office party, yes, check out the holiday shop at whoop.com. That's all I've got for you, folks. Thanks again for listening to the Whoop podcast. We'll have another episode for you next week.