WHOOP Podcast - WHOOP Advanced Labs: Unlocking The New Era of Health Insights with Jim Davis

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

In this episode of the WHOOP Podcast, WHOOP Founder and CEO Will Ahmed sits down with Quest Diagnostics CEO Jim Davis to discuss the partnership behind WHOOP Advanced Labs. Will and Jim discuss how combining blood biomarkers with continuous physiological data is reshaping consumer health. Will and Jim explore how trends in metrics like cholesterol, glucose, sleep, and recovery can drive more personalized, actionable insights and help shift healthcare from reactive to preventative. Jim shares his personal approach to health tracking, Quest's vision for democratizing lab testing, and leadership lessons from running a 50,000+ employee organization. Jim gets candid about his “obsession” with his WHOOP data and his advice for managing stress and staying focused on long-term health habits.Sign up for WHOOP Advanced Labs, available now in the WHOOP app. Learn more about WHOOP Advanced Labs here.(01:12) Jim Davis on the WHOOP x Quest Diagnostics Partnership(03:06) What WHOOP Members Can Expect From WHOOP Advanced Labs(07:10) Action From Insight: Understanding Trends To Optimize Your Health(12:27) How Frequently Should You Check Your Biomarkers? (13:25) Building The Tech: The Challenges of Health Innovation(18:10) Establishing Wellness Trends: Why Annual Bloodwork Matters(20:41) Lifestyle Factors That Can Cause Issues In Health & Biomarkers(22:23) Growing The Business: Jim’s Vision For The Future of Quest(30:25) Do We Need Supplements?: What Your Bloodwork Says About Supplementation(32:37) Jim Davis on Understanding Blood Biomarkers & Using WHOOP To Form Healthy Habits(37:00) Jim’s Lessons on Operational ExcellenceSupport the showFollow WHOOP:Sign up for WHOOP Advanced LabsTrial WHOOP for Freewww.whoop.comInstagramTikTokYouTubeXFacebookLinkedInFollow Will Ahmed:InstagramXLinkedInFollow Kristen Holmes:InstagramLinkedInFollow Emily Capodilupo:LinkedIn 

The number one killer in the U.S. today is heart disease. With any disease, we always know earlier detection is better versus late stage detecting. Cancer for sure. Diabetes for sure. Our goal as a company is to get more people to do the general screening and wellness so that we're not doing all of this later stage disease. And I know that's your goal too. You've been the CEO of Quest now for over three years. We're very grateful to be partners with you.

You all have created a very seamless experience for our members to go and have access to their biomarkers. And we, of course, are excited now that this data is woven into the WOOP app and the 24-7 physiological data. This partnership is exactly what health and wellness consumers really want and need. So much of our testing today will is for sickness. What we have to do is get out in front of this and focus on basic prevention and wellness. To change the health care trends in this country, we have to have action from those insights.

And you're the guys that are going to help create the motivation. for people to take action. What's your hope for how consumers are going to be using this product integration? In order to prevent these chronic conditions, here's what you need to do. Jim, welcome to the WIPP podcast. Hey, thanks, Will. It's great to be here. Great to be back in Boston.

You've got an amazing journey. And first and foremost, I want to talk about the Woop Quest partnership because we're very grateful to be partners with you. I think historically when people think of blood tests, they're thinking of a hospital environment or a doctor's office. And in some ways, we've flipped the script together. You know, this is something that's very consumer-facing. It's designed to be friendly. You all have created a very seamless experience for our members to go and have access to their biomarkers.

And we, of course, are excited now that this data is woven into the WUP app and the 24-7 physiological data. So when you first saw, you know, this concept of Woop Advanced Labs and the partnership, what came to mind for you? Well, I was thrilled to be part of this. Number one, I'm a very active person. I run, swim, work out. It's just, it's part of my life. It's part of who I am. By the way, for our listeners, Jim's got an eight-year younger health span score on Woop. So he showed me his data. I can validate this. He is very healthy and fit. Yeah. So, you know, I've long tracked things in my body. I'm, you know, a little bit obsessive myself. I weigh myself every day, sometimes twice a day. I monitor what I eat. I monitor a lot of things. So, you know, being able to now correlate physiological measurements, you know, with my actual biomarkers, with the purpose of trying to give feedback to help me optimize those biomever. markers is what it's all about. So this partnership, I think, you know, is exactly what health and wellness consumers really want to need. What's your hope for how consumers are going to be using this product integration? Yeah. So, you know, if we think about this in like

mathematical terms, and I don't mean to be, I'm a mathematician by background, you think about this simple equation, why is a function of X, right? Why? Why? Y is an outcome, and it's a function of different variables, X1, X2, X3, X4. I went over to MIT for school, so again. And so what are we trying to do here, right? The Y variables are your actual biomarkers. Okay, it's your A1C, it's your C-reactive protein. It's your LDL, HDL, and we'll talk more about what these panels are.

And those are the things that you're trying to optimize. And your X variables are what you're measuring. It's your heart rate variability. It's your stress. It's your pulse. It's your sleep patterns. It's nutrition, absolutely. Those are all your X variables.

And so what we want to do is correlate those X variables, all the things that you're measuring with the ultimate measures on what's going on inside your human body. Now, where we want to get, and I think what's going to be great with this partnership, is to then give that consumer feedback and say this is what if you really want to drop your A1C value, if you want to optimize your LDL and HDL or whatever biomarker you're trying to optimize, here's what you need to do. You need to, you know, how do you get your heart rate variability up? What do you need to do on the sleep side, right?

So ultimately, we want to develop algorithms with you that give feedback so that the user can optimize, the X variables to get what they want from a health perspective. It makes sense. It makes perfect sense. I mean, that's part of why I'm so excited about it. You know, I think like a lot of people who care about their health, had a bunch of blood tests in my life that were sort of floating around my desk or somewhere in my inbox. And the ability to upload all of those prior tests into the WOOP app as part of this.

And then to go do a quest test. and now it's all integrated together in one place. And so I can see my trends over time. Yes. And I can also then talk to whoop in the app about, you know, to your point, how has my sleep been affecting my cholesterol level or fill in the blank and so on and so forth. Yeah. What's really important in lab testing is never just one point in time. And that's why we think your subscription makes sense.

there's certain things you're fine to check once a year, but there's certain things, especially if you're trying to improve your health, that you do perhaps want to check once a quarter or once every six months. And we talk in Quest Diagnostics a lot about the velocity or the change of your parameters. And very often, you know, when we get lab work done through a physician office, they get the results, and they're really just looking at those results at one point in time. It's static. But when you put together a history, over a year, two years, three years, four years, five years, and you start to look at the trends. It's really the velocity, the rate of change that can really give you signals about, you know what,

you're two years away from being a diabetic. You're two years away from having coronary artery disease. So important. So important. Okay. And so knowing, you know, looking at these values, you know, frequently, looking at them over time, and then again marrying those with the physiological data is what's hopefully going to give people the impetus to change.

In Quest, we have this saying we called action from insights. And what we do is, honestly, we provide the insights. What you do is you can provide the action because you can give that feedback to the user based on their lab data. Here's what you need to change in order to optimize these set of biomarkers. Well, I love what you said about the trends. because I think that's such a critical point. You know, often it takes some time to meaningfully move something that might be way out of range

to being sufficient to them being optimal. And so seeing the direction of that change is really pretty critical. And it reminds me, too, of, you know, when I was founding Woop, one of the things that we were obsessed with was this idea of continuous health data. You know, historically, medical health data would come in these little snippets. You walk into a doctor's office once a year and they take your pulse ox and your blood pressure. Like, okay, right, your heart rate data might be captured by a chest strap when you're exercising and then nothing else. Yes.

And so a big theme for whoop has been this idea of continuous data. And I hear the way you think about Quest in a similar way, which is it's not, you know, a picture. It's a movie, right. You want to see the evolution over time. It's exactly right. It is a movie. And, you know, again, whether it's A1C, LDL, HDL, you know, from NPSA, an important measure, you know, watching these things over time with AI, with intelligence, we can get to the point of predicting when, you know, something is going to happen if you don't change that trend. And again, that's where it comes back.

And look, you know, for most of the things we're talking about, you can change all of those biomarkers. You know, when we think about what do you guys really measure, you know, the lab data that you're measuring, there's really four basic things, right? You're measuring cardiac health, lipids, okay, LDL, HDL, two very important tests, by the way, that you have added, which congratulations for doing this. LP-L-P-L-A and APO-B are two incredibly important cardiac biomarkers that, you know what, the normal world isn't, most physicians don't order those tests. Why don't they order them? Because the commercial payers don't pay for those tests. So they're largely missed, but two very important variables.

So cardiac health is always number one. Second is your metabolic health. How are your kidneys performing? How are your, is your liver performing? And then it's really the combination of cardiac liver kidney. We call it cardiometabolic. Yeah. But for you guys, two separate panels, a lipid panel, and then a complete metabolic panel. The third very important thing is then just looking at your blood, white blood cell count, red blood cell count, the components of white blood cells, the components of red blood cells. that really gives you an indication of your immune system.

How is your immune system reacting to normal bacteria, viruses, normal environmental factors, and so also, and that's also on your panel. We call it the CBC, complete blood count. And then really the last thing is then let's just look at some basic vitamin levels, you know, vitamin D, B12, folates. and maybe there's some things in those panels around thyroid, making sure the thyroid kind of regulates the body and making sure your thyroid. So you've got a great panel assemble that can really help people assess their general health and wellness. And that's, as a company,

that's what we want, right? So much of our testing today will is for sickness. And if you think about the health journey, right, there's, there's basic. prevention and wellness. We wish more people would do more of that. But there's general health and wellness. There's then why else do people go to the doctor? They go because they're sick. So then if you think about the next phase, it's diagnosis of disease. A lot of blood testing and a lot of lab work is ordered to diagnose disease. Now, once that disease is diagnosed, they're still going to be lab testing because now you have to figure out, well, what is the right therapy that we should apply to that disease? And very often lab tests are used to help the doctor determine what type of lab test.

And then there's what we call disease monitoring. You have a disease. It could be viral. It could be bacterial. It could be cancer. But you want to monitor the progression of that disease. Our goal as a company is to get more people to do the general screening and wellness so that we're not doing all of this later stage disease.

And I know that's your goal too. So we call this thing action from insight. We'll give the insights. We want you to give the actions. What's up, folks, if you are enjoying this podcast or if you care about health, performance, fitness, you may really enjoy getting a whoop. That's right. You can check out whoop at whoop.com.

It measures everything around sleep, recovery, strain, and you can now sign up for free for 30 days. So you'll literally get the high performance wearable in the mail. for free. You get to try it for 30 days, see whether you want to be a member. And that is just at whoop.com. Back to the guests. It's a really amazing vision that you have for this. For you personally, what are the specific biomarkers you like to look at? And how often are you looking at them? Well, I look at those three basic panels. Sure. I'm probably a little more overboard, but look, I work for a lab company. So it's easy enough for me to get it. tested. But I probably check those three panels at least once a quarter. And look, I'll do other

tests that Quest Diagnostics may not even offer. I just did the Grail test, which is an early cancer detection test. I did it just to try it out. We also offer the test on our menu as a company, even though it's performed by the Grail lab. And so it's really those basic panels that I do. Now, I'll interrogate certain vitamins. I'll interrogate a little more of my thyroid function. But it's those basic panels that I try to run once a quarter. What do you feel like are some of the challenges with building out this technology? I mean, you and I think agree that doing these panels out a quarterly basis or maybe twice a year, it's going to be an amazing screening tool for the entire population.

What are some of the challenges for you as a business like scaling that and maintaining that? We were talking about the sophistication of your labs. Yeah. Well, there's really not that many challenges. You know, we didn't discuss too much about who Quest is. Look, we're a national company. We've got, first of all, we've been around Will for 60 years. We started as a little lab in New York City, became a bigger lab in the Northeast.

and then over time, we built out laboratories across the United States. The other thing I want Woop users to know, you're not dealing with some fly-by-night medical laboratory, medical technology company. This is a company with over 750 MD PhDs in the company. We develop our own tests. And, you know, on an annual basis in 2025, we will do, we did upwards of 200. 125 million requisitions. Each requisition represents a human life. Now, we didn't do 225 unique people in the U.S. and Canada. We have repeat users, obviously, but we tested over one-third of the U.S. adult population

last year. That's amazing, isn't it? It is amazing. And so... Now we've got to get the other two-thirds, by the way. Exactly. We'll work on that this year. And so many of your WOOP users, I'm sure are already Quest Diagnostics customers, which is great because now they have, you know, serial comparisons. They have that data over time. But you're dealing with a trusted medical provider. The reality is, 95% of our business comes from physicians and comes from hospitals. And the specimens we collect in our patient service centers, they are tested at the exact same

time, same locations across the U.S. as every other physician order or hospital order. So there really hasn't been many, I wouldn't say there's any technical issues in terms of collecting the blood. There's over 2,000 patient service centers where you go. We collect the blood. I don't think there's any technical challenges there. I think what's going to be exciting in the future is when you and I and our teams build out these algorithms, what I call these feedback loops. You know, really specifically giving people advice on movement, sleep, stress. The things that can impact your heart rate variability, your stress, your recovery, we want to give people feedback on what they need to do in order to, again, optimize those biomarkers.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And it's an amazing company. I mean, 60 years old lab tests for a third of Americans. And, you know, my hunch is that'll grow to be at least two thirds in the, you know, the coming years or decade. We hope. Yeah. And then obviously, Obviously, you're working with innovative partners like Whoop, who, you know, are very consumer-facing. And I think we represent this kind of new age of medicine or what it can be, which is putting everyone's health data in one place and then giving them the tools and the AI or the coaching to understand all of that data to know what to do with it. Yeah. You are on the leading headshare. What's really exciting about this space is, as a company, how old are you?

Well, you're 13 years. 13 years. Okay. Yeah. Going on 14. Believe it or not, a consumer could not get lab testing in this country until 2014 or 2015. It was regulated by the government, federal government and by the states. And so the only way you could look at what's going on inside your human body was to go to a physician and to get an order for that lab work. Now, we still think physicians and hospitals are an incredibly important aspect. There's some lab tests, by the way, that you should show to your physician and you should get physician input. But for some things like A1C, LDL, you know, CRP, blood chemistry, why should that be difficult?

And you're making it easy, which is what we love about this partnership, right? We want people to interrogate and look inside their human body. As I said, I get on a scale every single day. I don't need a doctor's order for that. Right. I don't need a doctor's order to check my pulse. I don't need a doctor's order to check my blood pressure. So why do I have to go to a doctor to check my A1C level or my LDL?

And now, again, you marry your physiological data with these biomarkers, and it's just going to open up a revolution here. And what we hope is that all these sickness trends, you know, it's going to become wellness trends. It has to. It has to. It doesn't make any sense how sick. the American population is. There was an announcement just yesterday around wearable data and using wearables to have more access to health data. And before the regulatory environment for whoop was pretty, it was pretty complicated for us working with the FDA. And they've come out with,

I think, some really useful new guidance, which allows this data to be more accessible. So that's, in some ways, our version of the 2014 thing that you just mentioned where, hey, this wasn't easily available to consumers before. And so government regulation does play an important role in what you call the revolution, and I agree with. Yeah, I think there's a recognition at the federal level now that we need to empower consumers to take charge of their own health care. With the technology that exists, with AI coaches that exist, again, we're not suggesting replace doctors, replace hospitals. They're an absolutely needed important resource in our health care system. But look, at the end of the day, if we don't do anything as a country, what we're seeing right now is that baby boomer

generation that's aging into Medicare, that's turning 65. They're coming in with two chronic conditions, three chronic conditions, four chronic conditions. And the reality is we as a country have developed some amazing technology to keep people alive and to treat these chronic conditions, but it's just costing more and more money. And we will ultimately bankrupt Medicare if we don't do anything about it. So what do you do about it is do we develop better technologies, better drugs, better things to take care of all these chronic conditions? No, that's not the answer. That's not going to fix the problem. What we have to do is get out in front of this and focus on things like nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress, mental illness. Those are the things

that we have to focus on so that we prevent these chronic conditions. And the people, again, hopefully in the next generation, you know, in 25 years, those aging into Medicare are going to be a much healthier a lot of people. You mentioned a few different categories like, you know, sleep and recovery and exercise, diet. You've also talked about some of the most relevant, you know, biomarkers that everyone should understand. What are some very simple equations, you know, if this, than that, you've seen. were one's causing another.

Yeah, I think, you know, let's start with sleep. And, you know, you and I can use our own. Yeah. I had a good sleep night last night, by the way. I saw that. Very good. 87%. So, you know, look, I know when I don't sleep well, I may not exercise in the morning

because I didn't sleep well, you know, for whatever reason I don't eat as well on days where I'm stressed or when I didn't sleep well. So we know that lack of sleep over, literally it could be a one week period of time. It's going to change your glucose levels in your blood. One, we do know that when people don't sleep well, they tend not to eat as well. Okay. So that obviously influences glucose and insulin levels and things like that. But the big thing, you know, lack of sleep, lack of exercise, poor nutrition, it's going to lead to inflammation in the human body. Okay. Now, inflammation, by the way, is not always a bad thing. Inflammation,

serves a, it's a very natural process in the body to fight off bacterial infections, fight off viral infections. But chronic low levels of inflammation are generally a signal that there's something with those things I just said, nutrition, sleep, stress, that need to get corrected. Yeah. And so that's how these things are all tied together. If you think about where Quest is going and your vision for the future of the business, what are a few things that come to mind? If we look at our business mix, I would tell you that well more than 50% of our testing volume and revenue is tied to categories of sickness. So diagnosis, disease monitoring, and therapy selection, let's just call it, to treat the disease. Our goal as a company is let's get more of our testing in your job.

general health and wellness so that we're not dealing with all this sickness. So number one, that's a big goal. Second, I would tell you is we want to make lab testing ubiquitous. We want to democratize lab testing. There are certain things that everyone should have a right to just look at. And, you know, some tests we do think require a doctor interpretation, but there's a set of tests, much of which are on your panel that ought to just be routinely available to consumers. So that's a goal. The third thing I would tell you as a company is that there's certain diseases that we are highly focused on that today blood testing or laboratory testing is not the first thing physicians turn to in order to either screen or diagnose. Okay, I'll give you a couple examples, Alzheimer's.

Today, the diagnosis of Alzheimer's is generally done through something called a PET-CT. It's a big piece of imaging equipment. It's a $1,500 to $2,000 test over at the Mass General. And they look at the brain and they're looking for the development of amyloid plaque or these tau bundles that exist on the brain, which ultimately is what leads to Alzheimer's. That same amyloid plaque in those same tau bundles that form on the brain, they emit proteins. And when they emit proteins, the proteins are in the blood. And now if we interrogate the blood, we're going to find those proteins.

at a much earlier stage than you'll see it in a PETCT or an MRI scan. And so that's an example. We recently launched a test that should give individuals a much earlier idea that, hey, you know, we're seeing the development of this amyloid plaque. And by the way, that's when these new novel therapies work better. At that earlier stage, too. At that earlier stage. Totally.

So very, very exciting. That seems like such a no-brainer, doesn't it? It does. So we as a company take a look and ask ourselves, where is laboratory science, not the first, sort of the first line of defense for a physician to diagnose? And Alzheimer's is surely one of those things. In many cases, there's still cancers that are first detected. I mean, think about breast cancer, right?

The routine screening for breast cancer is something called mammography. Okay. Now, look, mammography, it's x-ray, right? A woman comes in, they put her breasts on a plate, they clamp them down, and they shoot an x-ray beam through it. I think in 20, 25 years, Will, we're going to wake up and say, my gosh, that was barbaric to think that that's how we diagnose breast cancer. Now, look, mammography is still a wonderful modality.

I'm not here to say anything bad about you. We should still have mammography. But hopefully in the next, and some of these tests are coming along, we'll be able to detect cancers at the earliest stages. With blood tests. Grail is one of those tests that I mentioned. Well, the other thing is if you just compare early detection of cancer to late detection of cancer, the cost profile is so profoundly different, not to mention, of course, it being life-saving versus not, right?

That, like, if you could do any of these things with a blood test as a screen, oh, my gosh. Yeah, I think with any disease, we always know earlier detection is better versus late-stage detection. cancer for sure, diabetes for sure. We have a partnership with a company called Fresenius. Friesenius does dialysis work on people that are end-stage renal disease. What we have come to find out about people with end-stage renal disease is over 30% of the people that have end-stage renal disease discover it when they make a trip to the emergency room because they're so sick. And you should never, ever determine that you have end-stage renal disease, meaning you now have to be in dialysis.

Finding that out in an ER is crazy, right? But we know with just checking your A1C levels, glucose tests, insulin resistance, all of those things could have been discovered years in advance, and that is the goal. Look, I think other exciting tests, you know, autoimmune disorders are just growing at very fast rates. Do we understand why? Probably, I'm sure much of it is tied back to nutrition trends, exercise, sleep, stress and things like that. But there's some novel new tests out there to, you know, help distinguish autoimmune disorders. It's a wide range of categories, right? You know,

simple ones from rheumatoid arthritis to Crohn's disease. Well, helping physicians discern what type of autoimmune disorder it really is so that the patient can get the quickest treatment. These are some of the tests that we're rolling out. I mean, in some sense, we've been touching on this throughout the whole podcast, but what do you feel like are some of the biggest opportunities for blood tests to extend longevity? Again, I think I come back, the number one killer in the U.S. today is heart disease, heart attacks. I think just, you know, doing the basic cardiac markers. You know, we all know the LDL, HDL, lipid profiles, but I can't stress enough these other two tests. L.P. Little A, by the way, is, it should be, it's really

one and done. You just need to check it once in your lifetime. Either you have the genetic risk or you don't. But the other very important one is APOB. I think the other important test still not ordered frequently enough is this insulin resistance. A1C is very important. It's very informative. But knowing that your body is resisting the uptake of insulin is really important. Because if your cells aren't absorbing that insulin, if you're becoming resistant, what it's going to mean is your pancreas is going to start working harder and harder and harder. And ultimately, you know, it can't keep up in which, you know, ultimately it leads to diabetes. So I would say those three tests you've put on your panel. So you've gotten great medical advice. I know we've worked together on this.

For sure. Your medical advisory board is terrific, by the way. Thank you. And having those three tests, I think, are really, really important from a cardiac standpoint. The others, the metabolic function of the kidney and liver, again, also very important, informative. And then just the complete the CBC tests, which again, are interrogating your white blood cells, interrogating your red blood cells. You're really looking, is your immune system? Because you and I, every single day, there's viruses that we encounter, bacteria that we encounter, other environmental factors that we encounter, we have to know that our immune system is solid and working hard on our behalf to fight off those things that we encounter.

If you've been following our conversations around WOOP Advanced Labs, we're excited to introduce specialized panels, an all new way to dial deeper into your health. Through our partnership with Quest, you can now schedule an appointment at a location near you. Whether you're looking to understand your cardiovascular risk, get to the root of low energy, or make sense of hormonal changes. Specialized panels help you see what's driving how you feel and how to improve. Schedule your test at your nearest quest location. Visit whoop.com to learn more. For people who take supplements, how should they think about the relationship between blood

testing and supplements? Before you take supplements, you know, do some baseline testing. Yeah. Okay. Now, I would say there's a set of supplements. One should take. if your diet is slanted in a certain direction. So vegans, vegetarians, there's big debates on this. And I'm not the guru on this, but big debates on do you get enough folate, you get enough vitamin B12? And are there certain amino acids present in meat that may not be present in protein sources associated with a vegan or vegetarian diet?

Okay. So, but all of those things you can check in, in your blood work to know, should I be taking a B12 supplement? Should I be taking? Vitamin D is pretty clear. You check in if you're deficient or you're just not getting enough, what I would say, environmental exposure to, you know, to the sun and things like that. Just on that point, you know, I obviously I live in Boston. And so I would see my vitamin D levels are low, start taking my vitamin D supplement, gets within. range. Then all of a sudden, I'm spending a lot of time in the sun or I'm traveling in the summer. And recently, I actually had really high levels of vitamin D, like, you know, almost toxic levels of vitamin D because it was like I was still taking the supplement and I was in a lot of sun. Yeah. And so then obviously I stopped taking it. But it just shows you a little bit of like the simple seasonality to these things. Exactly. Look, I personally, I take a B12 supplement

because most of my protein comes from plants, legumes, beans, and things like that. And so I know there's probably one or two essential amino acids that I may not be getting. So I take a B12 supplement. I do take a vitamin D supplement for the same reason. I'm mostly in New Jersey and unfortunately spend too much time in office settings and not enough time outdoors. Those are the two that I take religiously. I may take vitamin C more in the winter months.

But that's pretty much it. You've got a whoop on. How do you use your whoop? Look, I'm obsessive about it. My wife actually thinks I'm a bit crazy. Look, I look at it every morning. It obviously prompts you. It knows when you wake up based on movement.

And I do look at my sleep. That's the one area of my life that I'm highly focused on and trying to improve. I look at my stress. I look at the recovery. And I like the sleep calculations. You know, how much time did I really sleep? how much stress did I have. I liked looking at the wake events during the night. What I did find initially when I was using it is if my recovery scores weren't that good, but I still wanted to go out

and exercise and run, it was almost like, well, it said your recovery wasn't good, so therefore I'm not going to run as well. It was almost self-fulfilling. It was almost self-fulfilling. And I said, okay, I'm going to test this thing. So I wouldn't look at it. And I would go out and do my runs or do whatever I was going to do. And, you know, I remember there was a certain Saturday back in the fall, and I went out to do somewhere between 8 and 10 miles. And I got to like mile six. I said, you know, I just don't feel good.

I'm not, and maybe I thought something, I'm coming down with something, but I just didn't have that, you know. And so I then went home. I looked at my recovery score from the night before, and sure not. So I've played around with that a few times just to see how real it is. And I've become a belief. Oh, we appreciate that. Now, you know, look, there's some Saturdays regardless.

I need to get it run it. Yeah, you want to exercise? Because it's my free time, right? And so should I run that hard? And so sometimes I try to power through it. But more and more, I am trying to use the data to sort of modify my workouts to, you know, to reflect, is this a good day or a bad day or should I take it a little easier? because look, you know if you continuously push your workouts despite what the recovery is saying,

you're just going to do damage to your body and create inflammation and, you know, all the bad things that can go wrong from overstressing your body. You've been the CEO of Quest now for over three years. You know, you've got a huge employee base. You've got lots of customers. It's a publicly traded company. What are ways that you've been able to manage maybe the stress that comes with that leadership? Yeah, great question. You know, I first I'm a believer in, I work out every, in the morning. It's the first thing I do when I get out of bed, have some water, maybe a little cup of coffee, stretch, read a little, and then get onto my workout. And what I find is that I'm a gentler, nicer person in the morning. My team can probably attest that after I've had a good run or a good workout. It has a way of calming me down.

It's also reflection time. I don't put on ear pods if I go out and run. I just, it's my time in the morning to think, you know, stay off the, stay off my phone. And so I really do try to start my day with that. I watch what I eat during the day. My team laughs at me because I walk into a meeting. I always carry a piece of fruit with me. And I bring my fruit to work every day because the minute I start to get hungry. I'd rather have a piece of fruit sitting there than a chocolate chip cookie. I watch what I eat during the day. And then, you know, I'm targeting trying to get seven to seven and half hours asleep a night to the point where, you know, you send this indication, hey, time to go to bed. You know, you should be thinking about winding down here. And again, you know, I joke with my

life. Hey, sorry, honey, whoops, says I got to go to bed now. But so I am paying attention to those markers. But that's sort of a day in the life. After dinner. night, I'm pretty religious about just taking a 15 to 20 minute walk. That's good. Outdoors. So even if it's cold, rainy, a little snowy, just get outdoors, get comfortable with the temperature. So at a minimum, you have two, like, deeply reflective periods of your day, right, between

the morning workout and that walk. And that walk at night. That's healthy. Which, again, no ear pods, no phone, just. And will you walk alone or you walk with your wife? I'll walk with my wife. If she's with me, if I'm traveling or somewhere, then, you know, I go it alone. What's the worst leadership advice you've ever been given?

The worst leadership advice. It's probably, there's always this fine balance of micromanaging versus staying out of the details. Yeah. And probably the worst advice is, you know, 80% of your time in the micro and 20%. You can't do that because, you know, running a company of this size, running a company of your size, someone has to think about the future. And if you're not thinking about the future, if I'm not thinking about the future, no one else is.

You got to stay out. You know, there's a fine line of managing the details and setting the strategy for the company. I refer to it, I call it the dolphin model of leadership, where sometimes you've got to go deep in the water, you got to get into the details, you got to get down at the ground level, but then there's other times you've got to soar above the water and stay the hell out of the details. Quest has a culture of operational excellence, and obviously you have to to do all the lab testing you all do. What drives that? How do you maintain that? You know, as the business continues to scale, how do you not lose that quality bar?

Yeah, you know, what we try to instill in this culture is this philosophy of continuous improvement in this philosophy of curiosity. And the continuous improvement philosophy, which is embedded in this simple statement, you know, when I wake up today, I'm going to commit to doing something better today than I did yesterday. And then when I'm out at that walk at night, you know, I'm going to reflect and say, well, what can I do better tomorrow than I'm. I did today. So I want to do something better today than I did yesterday and I want to do something better tomorrow than I did today. And then combine that with curiosity, right, always searching for better ways to do something, always looking outside the four walls of Quest Diagnostics, to look at other industries, other businesses that are doing something better than us and shamelessly steal those ideas and try to bring those back to us. You know, the reality is we're accompanied.

I said we did 225 million-ish transactions last year. On average, it's a $50 transaction. And on average, the costs are $43. So there's a $7 spread between the revenue we take in on a requisition and the cost of doing that work. It's very, very small. And so when you think about it, if we can improve a process and save one cent, we've just made $2.25 million, right, that we can reinvest. in our employees, reinvest, reinvest back in the business. So this is a game of inches. It's high transactions. And so, you know, we work hard to bring AI to this business, automation to this business. We're going to get you out to one of our labs here locally in Marlboro. You'd be amazed at the level of automation and the level of artificial intelligence that we use to help us be better

from a quality standpoint and from an efficiency standpoint. Well, you got a great business, Jim, and you're doing a hell of a job managing it. So I just want to say on behalf of Woove, you know, we're really grateful for this partnership. We're excited to see where we're going to take it together. But what's clear from this conversation is just the shared vision, I think that we both have for how consumers, how Americans can take better control of their health and, you know, put the data in their hands. Yeah. Well, we're absolutely thrilled as well.

again, our belief in making laboratory testing ubiquitous, democratizing lab testing. We're great at giving the insights. That's what we do. But ultimately, to change the health care trends in this country, we have to have action from those insights. And you're the guys that are going to help create the motivation for people to take action. So thank you for what you're doing. Thank you, man. All right.

Great to be here. If you enjoyed this episode of the Woot Podcast, please leave a rating or review. check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question was answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at Woop.com. Call us 508-44349.52. If you think about joining Woop, you can visit Woop.com. Sign up for a free 30-day trial membership. New members can use the code Will W-I-L to get a $60 credit on W-W-A accessories

when you enter the code at checkout. That's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the WOOP podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green. Thank you.