WHOOP Podcast - Understanding the brain: How sleep quality affects impulse control and willpower

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

Bryan Johnson is on a mission to unlock the secrets of the human brain. Using the money he made from the sale of Venmo in 2013, Bryan launched a groundbreaking company, Kernel, that builds hardware measuring the activity of your brain. The team at Kernel recently did a study with WHOOP that showed a direct correlation between sleep quality and impulse control. Bryan joins Will Ahmed to discuss his mission (2:47), finding your purpose (5:08), the success of Venmo (9:56), making his dream a reality (11:19), building a WHOOP for the brain (13:33), Kernel’s study with WHOOP (20:00), what we can learn from neural data (25:50), the future of brain measuring technology (29:43), fasting 13 hours before bed to optimize deep sleep (37:23), why singing is his secret to high HRV (37:53).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

Hello, folks. Welcome back to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WOOP, and we are on a mission to unlock human performance. That's right. The WOOP membership includes hardware and software and analytics that's designed to help you improve your health and improve your performance. You can get on W-W-O-P if you use the code Will Amid, W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D, and that will give you 15% off a WOOP membership. All right, we got a fascinating guest this week. Brian Johnson, a famous and talented entrepreneur. He is currently the founder and CEO of Kernel.

Before that, his company Brain Tree, which you may know as the owner of Venmo, which they bought for $26 million in 2012, Brian then went on to sell Brain Tree for $800 million a year later. So obviously a very successful entrepreneur. And then he took 54 million of his own money and poured it straight into Kernel, which is a groundbreaking company that is building technology that measures the activity of your brain. As Brian puts it, it's really trying to build almost a whoop for your brain. They're developing hardware, the likes of which the consumer market really hasn't seen before. And it's all with this goal to help humanity gain a much greater understanding of the inner workings of the brain. Now, Woop and Kernel actually recently did a study

that showed a direct correlation between sleep and impulse control. So that's something that Brian and I get into on the podcast. We actually found that the more sleep people got, the more the brain was actively engaged in the participant's willpower. So that's right. This technology can measure things like willpower in your brain. We discussed Brian's beginnings in business and how his life changed overnight with the success of brain tree, his mission to discover the secrets of the human brain, what the implications of colonel's technology might be. For those of you who really are interested in sort of future tech, almost sci-fi-level tech, I think you're going to enjoy this aspect of the conversation.

Why his whoop data convinced him to start eating his last meal of the day at nine in the morning. Yeah, that's right, nine in the morning. May not be for everyone, but it was for Brian. and his simple trick for increasing his heart rate variability. I think this is a great podcast, and without further ado, here is Brian. Brian, welcome to the Woot Podcast. Thanks for having me. You've had an amazing career, which I've admired as a fellow entrepreneur. I want to start by asking you if it was always obvious to you that you were going to be an entrepreneur.

It became most obvious when I turned 21. I had just returned from Ecuador spending two years among extreme poverty there. And returning to the U.S. and the opulent lifestyle we have in comparison, I felt this burning desire to try to do something in life that would be meaningfully relevant for other people. It didn't make sense to me that I would try to get a job and work until I was 65 and then retire. What was pretty clear to me was that I would probably want to achieve a permissionless, situation. So most of the time in life, when we want to do something in life, we need to ask the permission of others, investors for money, governments for regulation, co-founders and

coworkers for them doing the same thing. And so it requires this process of getting others bought in. It's very difficult to do many things on your own. And so the plan I came up with was that basically I would become an entrepreneur. I would try to make some money. And with that with that then afford myself the chance in the future have been able to do something meaningful for a large number of people because it was difficult for me at the age of 21 to figure out the singular thing I can do with no resources. Now, that didn't stop you from trying because you launched three startups in college, if I'm not mistaken. That's correct. What did you, what did you kind of learn about yourself in those first entrepreneurial runs? From the starting point, I didn't

necessarily have any outlier abilities. For example, in school, in high school, or even in college, I hadn't been an outstanding student. I had to work extraordinarily hard to get good grades, like two or three times harder than my peers, just to achieve the same grades they did. And I wasn't a standout in any given discipline. And so I really was trying to figure out what can I do. And the first few companies I built did reveal to me that I can learn something very quickly. I can piece together multiple systems at the same time.

And in doing so, find original insights, things that others may not have done before. And that's true with payments. It's true with the company I built in Braintree Venmo. It's true with kernel. And so it's, I guess maybe I would say my experience in the world is I feel like I don't belong anywhere. I'm an odd duck. And I'm not easily categorizable.

I don't, I'm not a certain archetype. My story is not really easy to understand, but it really has been in this nuanced systems thinking, learning new things and finding, trying to find some valuable insight hidden that is just not part of the zeitgeist. In some ways, that's a convenient starting place for an entrepreneur because so much of starting something new is putting yourself in a position to not fit in. And it sounds like, you know, you spent a lot of, at least a lot of your adolescence or growing up with that, a little bit of that feeling. So it doesn't surprise me that you've had so much success as an entrepreneur. I remember when I first started a whoop feeling like, you know, oh, I wasn't going into consulting or banking. And like there was almost a level of like insecurity that came with that. So, okay, so founded Brain Tree, which turned out to be a massive success in 2007.

you into payments? I was in the middle of a venture that wasn't going well. And I was, I had racked up a credit card debt with multiple credit cards. I was basically living on $2,000 a month, being married and having one child. We would go on one week, one date a week and spend $7.50. That was our budget. And we were doing everything we could. I was trying to finish school and do the startup. And so basically I couldn't make ends meet and provide for the young family. I started. And how old were you at this time? 24. So it's a lot for 24 for 25 year old. Okay. It was a lot. And so reflecting that my entrepreneurial efforts were producing mixed results, I started evaluating could I potentially get a job and would that help me? And the problem

with that is, of course, I got back into the time swap occasion. if I dedicated my time, they'd pay me an hourly wage and no scenario made sense to me. I couldn't get an hourly job that paid me enough to do all the things I was trying to do. And so I found this job, this job posting for selling credit card processing door to door. It was 100% commission. And again, it was the only thing I could do of how to maximize time and still make this of the startup work. And I started doing it.

And I became the company's number one salesperson. I broke all their sales records doing a very simple strategy. I'd walk into a business and they would see me and they'd say, okay, you're the fifth person I've seen today so far. Like, I've got stuff to do, please don't bother me. So I had to figure out an entry point, something they cared about, so they listened to me. And I'd say, I'd say, the credit card processing is, it's messy, it's complicated, and it's known for some scrupulousness.

People take advantage of people's misunderstanding, the complexity of the industry. And so I said, I'll pay you $100 for three minutes of your time. and if you don't like what I say, I'll give you $100. So I sit down and I would open up my book and I'd say, here's what the industry is, here's how it works, here's what the players are,

here are the games they play. I really have nothing unique to offer you other than you're going to trust me and I'm going to give you clean statements and good customer service. That's really it. And by doing that, I think people thought,

finally someone's dealing with me in a clean fashion. I just want to settle this and be good. And so I worked basically part-time doing that and achieve that results. And then after spending... How many times did you have to pay out $100? Never. Isn't that amazing? I suspect people probably... That's the best entry point ever. So then I did it for a few months and I thought, wow, this industry is broken.

PayPal had built payments in the early days of the internet. And once they had been, once they had been acquired by eBay, their innovation had really stopped. And so there had been seven or eight years where they really hadn't stayed up to date with all the technological developments. And so I saw that opportunity and I started Braintree. And we modernized payments into making it dead simple for a developer to get payments up and going to make everything transparent and clean. I just made the experience delightful for people. You also had one of the best acquisitions I got to think in the last 20 years, which is Venmo, which you paid $26 million for, if I'm reading this correctly. That's correct.

I mean, Venmo's massive today, right? I mean, that's got to be one of the best purchases, truly. That's what many people have told me. It ranks in the top few best acquisitions ever. I haven't seen the date of a few people have mentioned that. And then you went on to sell Braintree for $800 million to PayPal, which must have been an enormous outcome for you personally as well after previously going on dates for $7 once a week. It's true. I grew up poor. My mom made my clothes for me. And when I went to a great school, we just made do with what we had. And then, of course, when I started, I'm starting businesses in my early 20s, going to school and starting businesses, I never had money. I was always in debt. So, yeah, when I sold this, it was the very first time in my life that I had money. Pretty binary. It was. It's fascinating how often that turns out to be the case for founders and entrepreneurs, like real overnight. night change like that. If you go back in time, would you have considered running it out

longer? I'm actually very happy. I mean, I think Braintree is, so I sold it in 2013. The company probably worth in the tens of billions easily now since. Totally. But the goal I had was not money in terms of like how much money can I build. The goal was to get enough money to then go after the aspiration I had at 21 years of age. Can I do something meaningful for the people on planet Earth? And the offer we got for Braintree Venmo was sufficient to give me the amount of money to basically be in a permissionless game where I can now take that capital. I could survey the world and I could choose to do almost anything. And that was the freedom that I had been looking for my entire life.

And so it wasn't, can I climb the Forbes list? It was do something meaningful that matters, not only for today, but would matter at 2050, 2100, and 2,500. So it mattered 100 of the years into the future. And so that was the game I've really been wanting to play my entire life. and it became a reality after that acquisition. Well, congratulations to you, and obviously you found an amazing home for Braintree

and its employees, and it's just been a continued success. And to your point about being a missionary, as much as a visionary, you took, I think, over $50 million of your own money and rolled it straight into Kernel, which I'm excited to talk to you about. Explain what is Colonel.

It seemed to me that humanity is playing one game right now. If you look at the entire thing, it all comes down to one game, and that is of intelligence. We're building this uniquely capable intelligence in the form of artificial intelligence. Humans are, we are the co-evolutionary partner of this intelligence. And everything we're doing is a byproduct of our intelligence. And then now that we have this ability to pair humans and machines in this increasingly intertwined way, it's a question of what is this evolutionary product going to become? And I wanted to figure out a way to do this in a more methodical, structured, and accelerated way.

How could we potentially up-level humans? How could we up-level ourselves? And I'm not talking about shaving off tens of milliseconds for Olympic records or, you know, a few more points on that IQ scale. How could we reimagine ourselves of the species? So far evolved that we look back at our former selves. and we'd look painfully primitive. And the thing that I thought was most relevant in that question was we can measure and quantify pretty much everything in the known universe except for our brains.

We can't do that on a regular basis. So wearing whoop gives me a tremendous amount of insight into my overall wellness, whether my sleep, my HIV, my performance in my cardiovascular endeavors. And we don't have that for the brain. And so I wanted to figure out if we could do it. So I started the kernel to basically with the question of, could you build a measurement device for the brain that would bring brain measurement into the mainstream? And if you, once you can measure something, as you know, data is almost like driving by

a roadside accident. You can't help but look at it. And so what if you had data about your brain, about how you performed in a conversation or in a high emotional strain situation or in a creativity task? What if you could start assigning numbers to these things? What if I could quantify what a fight cost me mentally? And so the experts in the field I spoke to told me there was no viable path forward. That the technologies that existed today, for example, FMRI and MBG, they were big and expensive,

but they were very good. And then you had lower cost things like EEG, but they just weren't good enough. And so I built a team. The team's now just over 90, 36 or so have PhDs. And we basically set out and we said, is there anything here that we can do that would bring brain interfaces into the mainstream? So we start measuring our minds and brains

in the same way we measure our weight or our blood glucose levels or our heart rate or HIV. And we successfully figured out two technologies over the past three years. and both now are coming to market. It's so amazing. And the story that you described, and I think this is why I'm drawn to your company,

or at least we have a mutual respect for what each is building. It's so true that it's such a fundamental thing, brain performance and cognitive performance, and yet we can't measure it. And then sure enough, when we can measure it, how much is it going to unlock about our potential? And I think it's really exciting. So, okay, let's explain now the products that you've developed.

One is called kernel flow, and it measures the oxygenation and deoxygenation of brain activity. So neurons fire and blood and oxygen move about to supply the neurons with what they need, and we measure that. And so you can think of it like a whoop for the brain. We're basically using optical technology, the same thing as a whoop device is. And that device is the first one. It's the first time in the world, a technology could be reasonably imagined. to be in every home by 2030. It hits the performance thresholds.

It hits the cost thresholds. And so we need to develop the markets, but it's not unreasonable to imagine. It can be in every home by 2030, just like computers, PCs or the offspring of mainframes. The other one is kernel flux, which measures, it's a magnetic measurement tool. And you're looking at neurons firing. And we reference it as, it's like a supercomputer of a brain interface. or it's like one of the most powerful brain interfaces in the world because you can acquire entire cortical activity at the speed of neurons firing, and you can do so with a person

in a naturalistic environment and they're moving around. So basically things you can't do today. For example, if you want to get a high-quality brain scan, you go to an MRI, this multimillion dollar machine, you sit in this very small cavity, you have to stay perfectly still. You have 120 decibel sounds ringing in your ear if you've had one. It's extremely uncomfortable and unnaturalistic to do any kind of serious neuroscience. And so with our system, we'll be able to capture real-time entire cortical activity of the brain. And so what we think we've done is we think that we've created the most powerful brain interfaces ever built in terms of how they score of accessibility, quality of neural data, the ability to combine both datasets for insights of the brain.

We think that we will create the largest neural data sets in history at the fastest possible speed in history, which will lead to hopefully what we hope will come from this is a new era of neural science and insight for people where just like I now based my lifestyle on my whoop device, people would begin changing their lifestyle based upon their brain data, including the news they consume, the friends they have, the work schedule they have, the diet they have, everything would be an input for them to. manage the wellness and performance of their mind with these devices. You're going to be able to quantify how, I mean, you're going to be able to quantify everything, but you're going to be able to quantify whether certain people should be in your life or not, like whether you should watch television or not or what you should read or not, how you're actually performing in every single meeting. You're exactly right. Were you processing the information properly?

You know, were you reacting to it properly? I mean, it's really profound to think of. about and and I'm smiling because I know it's it's kind of inevitable yeah yeah will you your intuitions are spot on and you know this because you've been building woo but once you have the ability to measure something you can run an infinite number of experiments to see what happens like what if I eat this kind of food at this time of day what if I drink coffee at this time of day you all have the measurement on your sleep and your HIV and your heart rate so you can actually quantify everything in your life just from your ROOP device.

So you make many, many things. And so the same thing is true with interface. So you nailed it is that you basically can begin the scientific method of measuring everything. And so what's fun to me is we largely just have inputs in the world come to us today. News and images and colors and certain emotions. and it just all comes in, and it's at a dizzying pace, but we really don't know what's happening because of it. And we can't track it.

Our conscious mind only captures a sliver of what is really going on in our brains. And so, yeah, it does. It opens up a whole new frontier of basically how is society going to operate when we can measure what effect certain things have on each of us. Now, explain the study that we did together. I've been working on my sleep very hard for the past couple years. And I had built a fine-tuned intuitions because of my WOOP device, of diet, of routine, etc. And so I had the question of what effects does, would my sleep have on my cognition?

So when I perform the next day, in my reaction time, in my emotional control, et cetera, and we set up a study with our prototype system. And so we did, we had a WOOP device, we measured our natural sleep every night, And then we did up to 18 sessions over 13 weeks measuring, we did resting state, impulse control, like whether I could stop myself from doing something, like willpower, memory task. And what was interesting when we looked at the data was that my deep sleep, total sleep and sleep latency with whoop was correlated with my basically my willpower, my impulse control. And so in this scenario, for example, where it's 7 o'clock at night, I'm looking at a delicious sugar cookie that a friend just brought to my house, and I think, ah, do I do it? And so is there enough willpower in me to say no? Because I know if I eat that, it's going to decimate my deep sleep and I'm going to feel awful the next day.

And what our study showed is that I not only performed better on the task in terms of go-no-go, which was, can I not push a button when I see a red, flower versus green flower. But the neural data showed independent correlations with my sleep. And so neural data was showing a unique insight about my brain that behavioral data alone wasn't whether or not I pushed the button. And so that was a big question for us is what value can we glean from neural data in the situation? And the first, even with this prototype device, we found there was compelling data for it. Yeah, I just want to underscore that. point because it's so interesting, right? You found that it's not, like, obviously there's a binary decision in the study write-up, which I encourage people to read. You talk about this idea of eating

a cookie late at night or not, right? So obviously that's a binary. What the neural data is actually able to show you is also the degree to which your willpower was prepared for that moment, right? And it's on a spectrum all of a sudden because the binary is interesting, but it's not enough, right? If you can actually understand the degree to which someone was prepared or not prepared to make a decision, that's such a wealth of information. Exactly right. And so this, again, it was a pilot study. Our intent was not to produce a peer review study of the paper of the results.

It was to build intuitions, it was to build our tools out. But yeah, I mean, if we were to take this more seriously with our now production device, then we might be able to start saying things such as, you know, when I get this kind of deep sleep, this kind of total sleep and this kind of sleep latency, and I presented with a willpower task. Maybe my brain only needs to spend 20% of the energy that otherwise need to in order to accomplish the same thing. Or maybe certain regions of the brain fire

in certain patterns, which is just a better overall outcome for me. So we don't know if those things are true yet, but we've given more time, and now that we have this device and the system set up, we can start making those kinds of observations, which will again, we'll then build our intuitions of what really happens in our brain

and our well-being in the following day. days based upon our lifestyles. It's so powerful. I mean, intuitively, of course, the more sleep you get, the higher your willpower. But to actually be able to show that and then to measure the degree to which it's the case for different individuals, it's just going to unlock such unbelievable insights. For example, you're going to find out that there are certain people who are more resilient under less sleep or less, or less resilient.

It's going to be the degree to which it affects people more profoundly as well. Like, for example, we see this with alcohol and whoop data, whether some people, if they have a glass of red wine, it doesn't even matter if it's within three hours of bed or not. Their data the next day is just profoundly out of whack. And then there's some people who can get up to two drinks or so. And it doesn't have nearly as big of an effect. That's just alcohol. But imagine you can extrapolate that kind of insight into every decision that you make or every way that you are reasoning with the world around you. I find that quite profound. Yeah, you're exactly right. In the same way, you couldn't take all whoop user data and make then a individualized suggestion protocol because really the science is n of one. It's the person that you really want to measure and they want to get the data on that person. The same thing is true with brain interfaces is that I think the current, if I'm not mistaken, the current world record is something like 20 hours in a MRI scanner is the most anyone's

ever done. And so by having that limited amount of data, you just can't form conclusions on lifestyles. You can't measure what happens to my brain performance if I have a glass of red wine before bed. And so, yeah, the colonel's interface and whoop are identical in that regards that we enable an N of one, but also N of many. You can look at the population scale data, but also what exactly this individual optimizes for this individual's performance. You know, who's going to be obsessed with this data as traders, like stock traders and stuff who are trying to figure out why they made a good decision or why they made a bad decision. It's going to be so interesting. I was going to say we've done a little bit of analysis there as well on things like sleep and hurry variability and how they affect cognitive performance when you like, you know, say you extrapolate how much, you know, what someone's trading performance was in a month or something like that or their SAT scores.

Like we're very early on that stuff, but, you know, there's some correlations emerging. I mean, you guys are going to be all over it. That's right. And there's an interesting study I like to reference frequently. It was, I think, in Emory in 2013, where there's. the researcher was trying to, he had hypothesized, or he asked a question, could you determine the future popularity of a song based upon recording of neural data? So he had teens, listened to songs in an MRI, fMRI, and then ask them questions afterwards.

And then three years later, he went back and analyzed the data, and he found out that there was meaningful correlation between the person's brain data in the future success of the song and less so for their opinions. So in other words, the person's opinion didn't really matter a whole lot. Their brain data was a more accurate predictor. And so right now, we kind of have this default mode in society where we think or we imagine our conscious selves are, is the authority. Like we, when I speak on the authority for Brian and what I say is fully the truth of Brian,

but as we get more and more data, it's going to change where we're going to understand that there's other stuff going on in our minds that we're unaware of, that it's potentially more accurate, potentially more authoritative, potentially just different versions of ourselves, and that's going to be a fundamental shift in society where, imagine the playful state, Will, you and I are talking, and we both have our brains in real time adjacent to us. And so we're having a four-person conversation between us instead of you and me only, because we're looking at this other perspective that we have that we just don't have access to. Yeah, it's like an introspective person's dream of having all this data.

I think what's challenging is that there's a lot of people who will be really kind of scared by what the data can reveal about themselves, that maybe they didn't even know about themselves. And it's going to tell us a lot, too, about genes. You know, how much is born versus made, right, about human beings? I'm personally quite fascinated by that question. Obviously, system level, like just a base level of intelligence will be one major thing. But there's a whole question around, you know, building resilience for people. And is that something that you can really train yourself through your environment or your circumstances?

Or is it something that's also just innately given? And I'm really interested to see what you guys end up learning about. that. Agreed. And building on that, if you think about the advanced stages of this, of what happens, especially when you pair your brain with machine learning, AI, in real time. So currently, the closest thing we have to that is like Alexa, and having a conversation, you know, in these voice assistants of speaking back and forth, there's this conversation. And these voice assistants have information on you in terms of the voice intonations. And they may have other contextual data of your location, et cetera, but they don't have full access to what

is going on. And it's interesting as we think about how we might improve ourselves at a faster rate than we ever have before. But let's just say I have a phobia of a given thing that I want to overcome, and I pair myself with a machine learning agent, and I say, please, let's think, this is going to be therapy for me. I want to work through my phobia. Like, I have a phobia of sharks.

And it'd be interesting to say, all right, algorithm, you can use these thousand images, this number of audio recordings, and whatever, you give me a dataset, and then you let it run an algorithm to present things to you in a way that re-create your relationship with this, with sharks. Now, this is, I'm hypothesizing, but this is the kinds of things that will become available where we'll start reimagining how we go about improving the things we find, undesirable about ourselves and amplifying the things we find desirable and leveraging the most robust tools we have.

And so I think it really, if you start looking at layer one and two and three and four of how this technology moves throughout society, it really does create an opportunity set that we've never had before of reimagining what we can each individually become. Here's something that we have to work through or avoid. Let's say I'm one of the first people to buy this thing, and I've been using it for five years by the time, you know, most people have heard of it or whatever, 7 billion people get it, let's hope. There is this notion of you've become almost a superhuman before anyone else has caught up. How do you think about that? Because that is kind of the brave new world that we're entering, where when a human being has that sort of additional layer of artificial intelligence,

or algorithms, you all of a sudden could create this sort of two-tiered form of species. What I find promising about this is in the same way we discussed that you can't take all of whoop data and give an individual their specific personalized optimized plan. What you can do is you can give them more general recommendations, for example, this amount of time between your last meal the day and going to sleep tends to produce highest, you know, sleep scores, blank, blank. And so you can give these general guidelines. And so these insights scale far beyond people who wear a who wear a whoop device.

You can share your knowledge with billions of people. And that there's still a difference between a person wearing that, you know, a kernel device doing measure in the brain and someone up. But what I am encouraged by is insights scale. you could generate an insight about a certain thing about when I consume news of a certain type, what can I expect about my emotional reaction, about how it affects my concentration, how it might affect my sleep, et cetera. These insights can be shared with billions of people.

Now, they're less precise than a person actually wearing a device, but that's why I think that this information could level up everybody in society because we would be generally more aware of these interactions. I don't think it's a scenario where people really get left behind in meaningful ways. I think it actually could be a society scale level up because we remake society knowing this information. I think that's generally optimistic and I think it's probably the right, I think it's the right framework to approach it.

But you would, like, you know, if Elon Musk were on this call right now, the two of you would now be arguing about this sort of potential of super humans because he has gone on record saying that if you aren't getting these things implanted in your brains in the long run, you're going to have a disadvantage to the people who do. What would you say to that? You have to think about this through the time scale someone is speaking about. And so we're in the earliest of days of brain interfaces, but certainly with the technology we've built, we could have it in the hands of millions of people in a few years' time. And by doing that, you start the process of creating the insights, the ecosystem around it.

And so it's a faster way to get this ecosystem started. And it's also the case that it allows for the experimentation of intervention modalities. For example, what can I do from a non-invasive perspective? If, again, if I'm training with an AI agent every day and it's doing so, via my five senses, instead of a stimulation protocol, instead of like an implantable chip, can that be equally or comparably effective? And so I think it's really out to, it's not known yet, which modalities are the most effective and why. I think for certain disease states, I think an implantable technology will certainly be superior. For people who don't have a disease

to fix, and they're trying for other objectives, we may find non-invasive modalities to be equally, if not more effective. And if you look at the invasive approach, you have a pretty limited area of the brain you can deal with. Like you're having, I think, just, you know, tens of thousands of neurons where if you look at what we're trying to do is the entire cortical surface. Now, there's a trade-off of every technology of what information you can truly get out. But I think it really is the earliest todays of brain interfaces and I think the story will roll out over the next decade or so. There's also a lot of work being done on next generation technology of invasive, semi-invasive, non-invasive. And so it's, I think it's too early to make

prognostications on exactly what's going to be ideal until we get our feet wet. Well, it's an exciting time for sure. And I ask because I'm sure many, many listeners are thinking it themselves. Now, to underscore a point as well, You're saying that the kernel technology is non-invasive in the sense that a future form factor could be a hat even, right, or something of that nature. That's right. Right now, the form factor would flow. It's a bicycle helmet. So what early, I mean, obviously we talked about your ability to have willpower if you get more sleep. What are some early other things that you've learned about the brain or the measurement of the brain that people may generally find interesting or useful in their lives? we're very early on. We've spent most of our efforts building the technology and bringing it up.

And the sleep on cognition was our inaugural study, which is our very first one to build up the systems to do it. We have three others we're doing in the coming months, which we will be sharing more about the summer. But we really, our focus has been on the technology and enabling others to explore these things. So, for example, we currently have some of the best academic institutions in the world, who are receiving their device and they're looking at things like a TBI, concussion, stroke, aging of the brain,

lucid dreaming, meditation, meditation assistance. So about 20 or so different areas. Psychedelics, one of our partners is looking at psychedelic interventions. And so this year, we will have our technology being used in,

I'd say, 20 plus areas of interest. It's awesome. And I would imagine next year it's probably going to grow double or triple in terms of the exploration path. That's what I'm saying, that the earliest of days here, we don't know exactly where this technology is going to thrive yet. And so the focus has really been on getting the device out. And I just know from my personal experience of having built intuitions because of the technology you've built in a wearable device. But I know that I and I started doing that with the kernel device of looking at my point.

performance next day with my willpower. I know that these insights will probably start coming pretty quickly in various domains. Now, you mentioned being a WOOP member. Thank you for being on WOOP. What are some things that you've learned about your body through using the product? The biggest, the most valuable insights, my last middle of the day is the most consequential factor for my sleep quality. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, so I tested all the way from two hours before bed and now I have my final meal by about 9 a.m. or so it's about before I go to bed, I have about a 13 hour fast going on. And that produces optimal. And then I've been able to systematically work on my HRV. And so I'm able to test intervention modality. It's like,

funny enough, I find that when I sing before I go to bed, my HRV improves. Isn't that interesting? And so all these small little things I do, it's like, last night, I was singing with a group of friends for 30 minutes, and my HRV increased by 17%. And what kind of singing? Are you in a band, or this is just like some kind of an opera or acapello group? No, it's just, it's a bunch of people, it's just sitting around choosing songs and singing along, just messing around. But these are the kinds of unexpected of things, I wouldn't have thought that HRV training, because I've approached HRV training and saying, look at the time domain, the frequency domain analysis and optimize these

parameters and do this brief exercise 5.5 seconds in and 8 seconds out. So there's really a lot of ways to methodically approach it. And then there's like, let's sing. And that has its effect. And so I'd say that that's the fun of having measurement is I get to try something new every single day, and I get to fine-tune myself every single day, whoop has allowed me to improve myself at a speed I've never been able to do before, which is, again, why I'm happy about this coupling of kernel and whoop is, you know, like, now you add another measurement data. What other insights am I going to be able to achieve? And then how am I going to change my lifestyle accordingly? And then how are others also going to do it? Yeah, it's really cool. And thank you for saying that.

And so in terms of singing, you know, I wonder, like, we see people, obviously if you're in a better mood versus a worse mood, that's going to trigger a higher HRV and better sleep quality. We also see people who practice different types of mindfulness or breathing exercises that triggers typically better HRVs and better sleep quality. And I wonder if singing is an interesting sweet spot of like better mood and some form of. breathing. Yeah, and it's funny because I've worked very hard at my HRV doing, again, breathing exercises, mindfulness. I've taken all the traditional paths. And so I guess I mentioned the singing because it was totally unexpected.

And I don't know what the effect is of why exactly in my HRV increased. Maybe it was my mood. Maybe I was doing some type of vagus nerve stimulation by getting low notes. I don't know. But by having data, I now have the opportunity to further pursue the question. but I just wouldn't probably have found that. I wouldn't have known my HRV increased now that I started singing. It makes life pretty entertaining to be able to understand close-loop nature of everything we do.

Yeah, it's very cool. What else have you discovered about yourself or what else is part of your routine, your bedtime routine perhaps? I mean, I know, for example, when my resting heart rate is 46 beats per minute, right before I go to bed, I'm going to get near perfect sleep. And so modulating where my resting heart rate is according to my state of emotional stress, my food intake, my exercise routines, all the above. Being able to identify what my resting heart rate needs to be allows me to then build back

through the entire day. And so the sleep thing is like a discovery afterwards. We're identifying the resting heart rate that's something that I can now work towards the entire day. And so I work at forwards and backwards for the insights. So that's interesting. So you're thinking over the course of the day, how can I get my heart rate to be at 46 before I go to bed? That's exactly right. And what are you doing for exercise or breathing that is helping to get to that level? I use metabolic equivalency task metts to quantify my exercise. And so according to how vigorous exercise is and what type. But I basically try to hit certain levels of exertion over

the week. And I typically work out for about an hour every day. And I try to hit these thresholds for optimal help protocol. But it's a combination of rowing, weight lifting, elliptical, stretching, running, or walking. Is it somewhat dependent on how well you slept or how recovered you are, what you'll do? Or do you have some preset routine over the course of a week that you're going to do no matter what? It is preset with what I have. That's actually been something I've been wanting to do, of course, because, you know, Woop renders a readiness score. Like, you know, you're ready to take on this amount of strain. And it's been interesting to play with in terms of do I keep the fixed schedule? If I did 40, then I before, do I overexert myself? I haven't figured

that one out yet. And so given that I do work out with others, that and like the value of having a workout partner is that you help that person be their best. And so I guess I've opted for my relationship with the other person of I'm going to show up and be my very best, even if I feel terrible or whoop is telling me that I'm going to overstrain today. I've prioritized that social relationship. But yeah, I'd say I don't have a good answer for this other than I keep my exercise very consistent. I just tried to push through independent of how I feel. Well, it's so funny. So much of life is like what do you want like what are your goals and i think if your goal is you know happiness general health good sleep i wouldn't necessarily change anything about what

you're doing yeah i mean will you um you've changed my life oh thanks man yeah i mean really it uh it was the critical thing that enabled me to get my shit together well that means a lot and i i've experienced that firsthand as well it's funny you build the technology then the technology builds you but yeah it is quite powerful when you see when you see it in the data what you can do and change i think that if we really pull ourselves zoom ourselves out and we try to with the greatest level of soberness possible to muster and we try to identify how might we be as primitive as homorectus was a million years ago to our future selves in 50 years from now like how might we look back and say hey man like you have

an innovator on your axe design for a million years, you've got to get to work. I don't think the future of being human is deducible from first principles alone. I don't think the future is me better, smarter, faster, or my kids better, smarter, faster. Certainly, we're going to make improvements. If we really look at the future of being human, the future of intelligent and conscious existence, I think we have to incorporate what I call zero principles thinking. It's things that are beyond our awareness. They're discoveries that exist. So, for example, when Deep Go, DeepMinds, AlphaGo beat the world best Go player,

one of the observers said it was like watching Go from an alternate dimension. It wasn't that AlphaGo was faster at making moves. It was that it was an entirely foreign form of intelligence and that made moves from some other dimension. I think the future of being human is from another dimension. and you can't get from the other dimension from first principles thinking of what we know today. And if we accept that, that we may not even be able to describe, imagine, articulate in any way what the future of human existence may be. It inspires a different approach in how we go about our lives.

And so as we think about, for example, building on what you were saying of, what does a person do on a daily basis and how they might imagine themselves in the future, it's an imagination set of both, becoming better, faster, smarter, also knowing that this zero principal endpoint is equally worthy. So I guess in that sense, it's like, don't work to be number one, be a zero. It's very counterintuitive. Well, that's beautiful and existential all at the same time and exciting. Brian, this has been a lot of fun, and we're definitely going to have to have you back on the podcast as Colonel does more and more things.

and as Whoop and Kernel continue to work together. Where can people learn more about you or learn more about what you're building? Kernel.com, K-E-R-N-E-L.com, and then I'm on Twitter. Brian, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, and we'll get you back soon. Thank you, Will. I really enjoyed the conversation with you. Thank you to Brian for coming on the Whoop podcast.

You can learn more about the study between Whoop and Kernel at Woop. Goop.com slash locker. A reminder, you can use the code Will Ahmed to get 15% off a W-WP membership. That's W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D. You can check us out on social at WOOP at Will Ahmed. Stay healthy, folks. Stay in the green. Thank you. You know,