← The Rich Roll Podcast
The Rich Roll Podcast
The Metrics That Matter: Whoop Founder Will Ahmed On Why Most People Get Fitness Wrong, Why Recovery Beats Intensity, & The Science of Human Potential
02:02:31
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- [00:01]
Rich Roll
The neurosurgeon comes in, the vascular surgeon comes in, and at the last minute I'm like, can I wear my whoop?
- [00:07]
Will Ahmed
Increasingly we get the message, like, subject line, whoop, saved my life.
- [00:11]
Rich Roll
Was that always the vision or do you look around amazed and surprised that you went from there to here?
- [00:16]
Will Ahmed
I'd played sports my whole life and I was someone who used to over train.
- [00:21]
Rich Roll
Garmin is like the 800 pound gorilla in the room. And then you have Apple and the Apple watch. It's, you know, arguably a crowded marketplace.
- [00:28]
Will Ahmed
I had an advantage in a strange way in that I didn't know anything about what I was looking at.
- [00:34]
Rich Roll
The pressure on you has to be insane with the amount of money you raised and the expectations that come with that.
- [00:40]
Will Ahmed
I was not fit to be a CEO. I woke up in the hospital with a panic attack. That was a big wake up call for me.
- [00:50]
Rich Roll
How's it going, everybody? Welcome to the podcast. So Today is day 55, 55 days post spinal fusion surgery. But I'm recording this in advance, so by the time you hear this, it will be day 66 at the earliest. And I'm beginning to turn a corner. I'm emerging out of the super acute phase of healing, which I gotta say has been more trying than I expected. Not really because of the pain that has for the most part subsided. It's more like just this general discomfort at this point. The incisions are still a bit tender and I can feel this weird intrusion along my spine. But the main thing is just how taxing it's been on my energy levels, like my ability to focus and just normally engage with life, which I thought by now would have normalized, but that really has not been my experience. I'm generally good for the first half of the day, but then around 3 o' clock or so I just get this wave of incredible fatigue. And so I've been taking these very long naps, like 4 to 6pm Most afternoons, and then still sleeping seven to eight hours a night. Meanwhile, still too soon for me to begin PT. Still wearing a back brace through day 90. I have to wear it for the first 90 days and still limited to walking as my only physical outlet, which on the one hand has been really nice. Just slowing everything down, embracing the repose, engaging with the quiet, quelling the internal noise, the dialogue, which has given me this greater sense of peace, of clarity, of groundedness, I suppose, which I know is not only exactly what I need right now to heal my physical body, but more importantly my emotional body, which is necessary to the spiritual growth that I'm seeking out of all of this. Because while my back needed to be healed, the real healing I need is a bit more abstract, but I think crucial to the growth that I'm currently seeking, which is how to better navigate the messiness of life with a little more presence, a little more joy, more intimacy and love. And there's something about just being compelled to stop. That, of course, brings up a lot of stuff, you know, stuff I'd rather not look at, that I would prefer to not engage with, but which again, of course, is exactly what I need to do if I want to continue to grow, to evolve, to live a bit more neutral about everything which has fertilized more contentedness that I'm accustomed to, that I'm now willing to admit. Anyway, like everyone, I'm a work in progress. I appreciate all the messages of support that you all have been sending me and I will continue to keep you posted. I got a couple more things I would very much like to mention before we dig into this one, but first we interrupt your programming with an important psa. Happy gut, happy body, happy life. It's important. But to get there, you need a ritual. Mine starts right here with seed DSO1 because here's the thing about probiotics and many people don't know this. Most of the products out there don't even survive your stomach acid. Which is why I was intrigued by Seed because they have this capsule in capsule system which is designed to safeguard 24 probiotic strains and actually deliver them all the way to the colon with precision where they can be released intact. Seeds DS01 Daily Symbiotic is a 2 in 1, meaning both a probiotic and a prebiotic, which was precisely formulated with these 24 strains that are not only clinically studied, but actually proven to survive the digestive journey through your GI tract and stomach acid. But DSL1 isn't just about your gut. It's about suppression, supporting your entire body, your whole body, from your immune system to your energy levels. And since starting DSO1, I actually have noticed improved digestion and steady energy. I feel lighter after meals and I really love knowing that I'm supporting my gut barrier integrity and my immune function. So go to seed.com richroll and use the code richroll25 for 25% off your first month of DSO1. If you care about your health, you care about your longevity, you gotta start with your gut. So visit seed.com richroll and use the code richroll25. Movement is so much more than just exercise or training or motion. Even movement is a language. It's a way of connecting body, mind and environment. Movement as a way of being, a way of being that brings me close to myself, closer to other people, and to what matters most in life. And for me, what we wear in that pursuit plays a crucial role. And that's what I appreciate about on they engineer apparel that supports and elevates the practice of movement itself. From running shorts with built in support to technical tees that cool you down right where it matters. This is apparel born from precision and tested by elite athletes, but made for anyone committed to the path. I've been with on since 2023 and I'm still just so impressed by how they continue to elevate and innovate in the name of purpose, not Flash. Head to on.comrichroll to explore gear that supports you every step of the way. Okay, so I just got back from Boston. I spent a week there with my youngest daughter touring some colleges, which is wild. And the overall experience just left me with this sense of gratitude that I don't usually feel for having this opportunity, this gift to spend a week one on one with one of my kids at a time in her life when these kinds of experiences are, I know, going to become more rare. And also for just being able to show up and be present and participate in her life, to help guide and support her through this important X phase, which is all about exploring who you are, what is meaningful to her and the ways in which she wants to expand her experience of life. And for being able myself to be in this place, I honestly never really thought that I would be able to. I never thought it would be possible, which is being able to provide that support, not just financially, which is still kind of shocking to me on some level, but really emotionally to just be present with her and connected. Anyway, I did need to carve out a bit of time to attend to a few podcast matters. I guessed it on Mel Robbins podcast while I was there, which was wild. I'm not sure when that comes out, but I'll let you know. And to spend some time at the WHOOP headquarters. Whoop, you guys know, longtime sponsor of the show and the headquarters. There is just this incredible building that's a stone's throw from Fenway Park. And part of this experience involved me sitting down with the founder and the CEO of whoop, Will Ahmed for the conversation you're about to hear, which, beyond being a rather amazing story of entrepreneurship, WHOOP started with a thesis Paper that Will wrote while he was still at Harvard all the way to today. This company with a multi billion dollar valuation that is providing real value to people by connecting them more intimately with their bodies to help us live more present, healthy and actualized lives. We talk about the WHOOP mission, the why behind the health metrics, their device and platform measure. But mainly we talk about matters relevant to all of us. How to better manage stress, how to prioritize self care, deal with obstacles, maintain focus on what really matters and maybe most importantly, how and when to trust your intuition. It was great getting to know Will. I think he's a powerful force for good in the world as well as many WHOOP team members who welcomed me there. Thank you for that. And this is me and Will Ahmed recorded in the WHOOP podcast studio in Boston, Massachusetts. Enjoy. There's a lot that I want to explore on the topic of your entrepreneurial journey, but I think for now I'd like to focus on the competition side of it. Because even at the inception of you creating a business around this, it's arguably a crowded marketplace you've got when it comes to tracking fitness and athletic training. Garmin is like the 800 pound gorilla in the room with this long history of dominating the space, particularly with amateur and elite endurance athletes. And then with respect to the more everyday person, you have Apple and the Apple Watch, which also has this long but very different history of keeping a close eye on up and coming fledgling technology companies and sort of biding their time watching from a distance until one day deciding, today's the day, we're just going to gobble it up. And I would imagine that that would have been, or maybe, you know, at some point in your trajectory, is sort of an existential fear that you have to harbor. So like, how did you, you know, navigate that like, and find your niche in this crowded space and differentiate yourself?
- [10:32]
Will Ahmed
Well, one thing we did right is that we were, we were pretty focused initially on an athletic market. So this is now we're talking about 10 years ago, you know, 12 years ago. And we wanted to be the best at strain and recovery for that market. What that also means is there was a lot of things we weren't doing right. We weren't building a smartwatch, we weren't going to do emails, we didn't have a screen on the product. You know, we weren't building a whole app space for a wearable product. We were incredibly specific about why we were building hardware. And a lot of technology companies, particularly companies that dare to build hardware get themselves in trouble with what's called scope creep. Scope creep is where you just start to add more and more features to something. I've talked before about why having a screen on the product would create a lot of new scope. You know, all of a sudden you say, well, it should show the time. Yes. It should show your, your heart rate data. Yes. Well, it should show your strain and recovery. Yes. Well, maybe it should give you some notifications while you're working out. Yes. Well, if it does notifications, maybe it should do email and calls. Yeah.
- [11:38]
Rich Roll
Suddenly you're reverse engineering just a smartwatch.
- [11:42]
Will Ahmed
You just built a terrible Apple watch. They're going to kill you. But it was very easy to get there. You know, like the scope creep stuff happens incredibly innocently, and when you chart it back, you're kind of like, yeah, that actually all made sense. But you end up in this completely different place. And so there was a certain rigidity I think I had in the early days around what we were building and who we were building it for. And I think that served us well now. That rigidity also made me, you know, a very difficult entrepreneur and, and I needed to overcome that rigidity with time. But the really strict point of view of we're building a super accurate wearable for health monitoring is going to focus on elite athletes. That's what we're doing. We're not doing anything else. Oh, but this could have interesting medical application. I don't care. I don't want to do that, you know. Well, what about the consumer market? You should make money soon. Nope, we're not doing that, you know, so, like, I did have a very strict point of view and, and the arc that we were trying to create again was we're going to start with athletes because that's a small market. Ironic, right? Start with athletes because it's a small market, not a big market. When you have a small market, again, you can differentiate more. And if we can get them all to wear it, then we can build this brand around performance. And the brand piece of whoop, I think, is subtly one of the things that has helped us differentiate.
- [13:02]
Rich Roll
There are models out there for an analogous version of that. Like Tesla starts with that Lotus supercar or whatever and then moves into the consumer market slowly over time. But the real key piece for me in what you just shared is this decision to focus on strain and recovery. You know, almost all other workout trackers out there are doing steps. Heart rate, of course, but, you know, it's pace, distance, time, things like that. So how did you arrive at that as your sort of secure white space that you could, you know, expand upon and create something meaningful.
- [13:42]
Will Ahmed
Strain and recovery really dates back to the very origin story of the company. Because I was a college athlete. I was playing squash at Harvard, I'd played sports my whole life. And, and, and I was someone who used to overtrain. And I'm sure you know a lot about over training given, given your background.
- [13:59]
Rich Roll
15 years over is crazy. Like my entire swimming career I was overtrained like, and there was no kind of intentionality around recovery whatsoever. It's just go in and kill yourself for, you know, two hours in the morning and two hours at night and go as hard as you can, as often as you can and then spin the roulette wheel on a two week taper and like, see how it goes. And I just walked around all of high school and college like a complete zombie totally.
- [14:26]
Will Ahmed
And, and so I had this exact experience. And I remember kind of waking up one day my, my freshman year just exhausted after what had been a great stretch of training and feeling like I was doing the right things and just having no idea why. And by the way, it wasn't, I was exhausted that day. I felt exhausted for the next two weeks. And over training, it turns out, happens to 70% of athletes. And it's really, at least again back to 12 years ago, it really wasn't understood. I also think 2010 to like 2015 was this sort of strange period where we got to like the ultimate more is more in, in sports and, and training. Like it was not can you do a two a day, but can you do a three a day? And, and the whole word recovery didn't even exist. And so I just got interested in, well, what could I measure about my body to understand over training? It was that simple of a question. And then when I really unpacked over training, I realized that it was just this relationship between how recovered is your body and what are you then doing to your body. Or said differently, how recovered are you and what strain are you putting on your body? And so I was likely in college, someone who was run down a lot, but putting a ton of strain on my body. Not to mention I was a dumb college kid who was going out drinking, staying up all the time and had other, you know, lifestyle issues. But it would have shown up very clearly in my data if I had had whoop back then. And, and so the physiology research that I started doing was then around what metrics would you need to create a notion of recovery? What metrics would you need to create a notion of strain? Because it was obvious that there wasn't just one number for recovery, otherwise it probably would have existed, or there wasn't one number for strain. But I realized if you could piece together things like heart rate variability and resting heart rate and respiratory rate and sleep, all of a sudden you could create a picture of recovery. And the physiological papers that I was reading were 15 athletes over a year wearing different things and kind of hacking together data. But there were still signs that there was something powerful there. And that's what got me excited. I believed, like, okay, if we could get rid of this antiquated technology and have it be continuous data, and if we could then structure that data to summarize it in scores like strain and recovery, we could tell, at least in those days, an athlete how to train.
- [16:58]
Rich Roll
So how did you go from there to drilling down on what the most important variables are from obviously top level like sleep to sleep quality, sleep efficiency, and then hrv? I mean, no one was talking about HRV until whoop. You kind of like launch that into the mainstream lexicon. And I would imagine, like when you're sifting through all of these papers, most of sports science, like you said, small sample sizes, it's really hard to kind of determine what's real, what's not. And it seems like it's kind of all over the place. I mean, was this like a thesis project or like how you know, or did you just have this obsession in solving this problem?
- [17:38]
Will Ahmed
I mean, it essentially became a thesis project. It was like an unofficial thesis. I ended up writing like a 75 page physiology paper for a class. And the, the way I got to that was by doing a lot of research. Now I had an advantage in a strange way in that I didn't know anything about what I was looking at. And I mean, it was an advantage because I went in with really no bias. I was like, let me just see what's out there. I had no preconceived notion of what the data should be, of what the metrics should be. I was just looking for something that was pulling me in that could get me excited. And heart rate variability is the metric that led me to found whoop. Like if you wanted to draw a straight line, it would come from that metric. And it's because there were these papers dating back to the 80s that were so powerful. You know, Olympic lifters using heart rate variability in the morning to determine how much weight they should lift. Professional cyclists using heart rate variability again in the morning. We'll come back to that. To determine how hard they should ride that day, the CIA used heart rate variability to determine lie detection tests. Cardiologists were using heart rate variability on former heart failure patients to determine if someone was going to have another heart attack. And so I'm sitting there in a library at Harvard, and I'm wondering, why have I never even heard of this statistic? And then I started to ask myself, well, how do you measure heart rate variability? And when you peel that back, then you realize why no one's measured it. It's because it requires essentially an electrocardiogram and being hooked up to all this stuff. And that's expensive, antiquated, cumbersome equipment. And again, this is. We're talking about 12 years ago or 15 years ago. And so it struck me that if you could build technology that could measure this metric heart rate variability, let alone anything else, and it could measure it at the same time every day. I also realized that was important about heart rate variability because it was a sensitive metric, which is to say that it's constantly changing. You are going to need to develop a baseline for an individual, and then you're going to need to compare everything to that baseline. And so I realized that it wasn't just that you needed to measure this thing. You needed to be able to measure it continuously. And that was another breakthrough, in hindsight, of the whole idea for Whoop was this idea of continuous data. Continuous data is the reason that this doesn't have a screen. It's the reason we invented a modular battery pack. It's the reason that the bands have all sorts of different looks and feels and colors. It's the reason we're not a watch, because we don't want to compete with other watches. Like, we wanted to develop everything about the product such that you would never take it off.
- [20:20]
Rich Roll
Maybe it would be worthwhile to explain what heart rate variability is and why this is an important thing to track.
- [20:27]
Will Ahmed
Okay, so what it tells us, we'll geek out on it for a second. So heart rate variability is the amount of time between successive beats of the heart. If your heart is beating at 60 beats per minute, it's literally not beating every second. This is very counterintuitive, but it might beat at, say, 1.2 seconds and then 0.8 seconds and then 0.7 seconds and then 1.3 seconds. And that difference in time between successive beats of the heart is a good thing. And the reason for this is hurry. Variability is looking at your autonomic nervous system. Your autonomic nervous system consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. Activity. So sympathetic activity is activation. So that's like heart rate up, blood pressure up, respiration up. When you're stressed, when you're starting to exercise, when you think about a fire in the corner of the room, that's all sympathetic. Parasympathetic is all the opposite. Heart rate down, blood pressure down, respiration down, helps you fall asleep when you inhale, that's sympathetic. Heart rate goes up when you exhale, that's parasympathetic, heart rate goes down. And the more balanced sympathetic and parasympathetic activity are, the higher your heart rate variability. And therefore a higher heart rate variability in comparison to a baseline of a heart rate variability is typically indicating that your body is in a state of rest or it's more balanced. When it's out of balance, that's a sign that your body might be run down, might be under stress. And if you extrapolate on what I just said and you're able to capture heart rate variability in a very specific control, which is how whoop measures heart rate variability. We measure it while you're sleeping, and in particular during slow wave sleep, when your body's restoring itself, then you're able to look at that metric every day and have a real sense for the state of someone's body. And so we use heart rate variability as one of a few metrics, but a very important metric to determine if your body's peaking physically, if it's run down, if you're getting sick. It's got all these other fascinating indicators that we can go into, but it is a beautiful metric and one day I imagine every human being will be measuring it.
- [22:49]
Rich Roll
What do people not understand about heart rate variability? Because I do know that we all have our baseline and that baseline can, can vary wildly. I have friends that have a very low heart rate variability baseline, and then other friends who just have an insanely high one. And the people that are on the low end of that are sort of freaked out. You know, they're like, how come? So I thought I was really fit, so and so is really high. What can you say about how people should think about that if their, if their baseline is on that lower end?
- [23:20]
Will Ahmed
It's worth saying that heart rate variability is in part genetic. So your baseline out of the Gates is going to start from a genetic place. It's also going to be based on your fitness, it's going to be based on your state. So you know, if your body's super run down for a month or you're overtrained or you've got Lyme disease, it's going to be crushed relative to what otherwise would be its baseline. I think what's important about heart rate variability is mostly comparing your heart rate variability to yourself. Yes, we share a public sort of aggregate analysis of heart rate variability, which looks something like 20 year olds at 80ms, 30 year olds at 70ms. And then it starts to drop quite quickly. 40, 50 year olds, now you're at 40 and 30ms. And so you kind of see this slope of it declining dramatically with age. And one great thing to look at if you've been on whoop for a while is just, can you keep your heart rate variability flat as you age? And I mean this just looking at an average of a year, over a year, over a year, that's a good indicator that your body is getting fitter or you're staying healthy because with age it will decline. And it's a very sensitive metric.
- [24:42]
Rich Roll
How malleable is it? Like, if you are very intent on elevating your baseline hrv, like what is your sense with all this data that you have of what's a reasonable kind of aim in terms of trying to elevate it?
- [24:55]
Will Ahmed
Well, you can move it enormously. Obviously it starts from what place you're in. If you're someone who's out of shape and you've got a lot of bad habits, you drink a lot of alcohol, you smoke, you don't sleep very much, you're stressed all the time, someone like that could triple their heart rate variability. You know, they could dramatically move it. I think for the average person who's pretty healthy or weekend warrior, that kind of thing, if you can move your HRV 5 to 10% over the course of a year upwards, that's a big win. And if you can do that for a couple years, you're going to be a totally different person in two years.
- [25:33]
Rich Roll
One of the questions I get most frequently from people who are like, what's that on your wrist? Which happens like all the time. I thought everybody knew what this was at this point. But when you're out in the world you realize like, oh, there's still a lot of people that don't. And I explained to them what it is. The common kind of refrain from that is, well, I have an Apple watch and you know, it has a sensor on it and it's doing all of these things, so why would I need that? Don't I already have that? Like, so what is the misconception that people have in terms of the difference between what they're going to get with a smartwatch product versus what you guys are doing with your sensor and platform.
- [26:13]
Will Ahmed
Well, I think the first core thing to understand is that if a product has a screen, it's dedicating a lot of resources to that screen. So if there's a whole app interface and things of that nature, that's just more resourcing that's going towards an interface that could otherwise go towards health monitoring or go towards battery life. And the notion of continuous. Something to understand in technology general is that it's like the size of the product, the product's battery life, the number of features that it has, and the quality of the data. You don't get all of those things. In fact, they tend to trade off from one another. You know, for example, you could have a really big product with a really long battery life and probably a lot of features and a lot of data, but it might look like you've got a missile on your arm. Right. Whereas a lot of the sensors are about the same size. So let's put that aside. You know, one obvious fork is a lot of the smartwatches have 24 hours or less battery life. The latest Whoop has 14 days. Okay, so that's kind of a fork right there. That sort of shows you the difference in how we've thought about the product. Another is, of course, the data and the sophistication of the data. There's plenty of studies out there that show how WHOOP is better than competitors at measuring things like sleep and heart rate and heart rate variability and so on and so forth. And so we're quite proud of that. And I think that's been a challenge for a big company like Apple to decide what they want to be, because presumably they could build great health sensing, but they're doing so many things that their health sensing is not very good. I mean, they can't really measure sleep. And so that's just sort of an obvious fork in the road. And I think if you're a consumer, you have to decide, do I want to go all in on understanding my health and have this 247 coach and companion and build this data of my, like a data repository of my life that I can learn from and grow from, or do I want kind of lightweight data that's sometimes accurate, sometimes not, but a bunch of other features and kind of a continuation of my iPhone? And, you know, fortunately we've seen a lot, a lot of people be Focused on health.
- [28:30]
Rich Roll
On the subject of hrv, that is the one thing that is often not intuitive for me. Like, I'll be surprised. Like, I'll wake up feeling great, and then I'll look at my whoop and oh, wow, like, my recovery score is low. What's my hrv? Oh, it doesn't feel like I would be having a subpar HRV that day. And that helps me make an informed decision about how much I'm going to exert myself that day. And I often will modify, like my training or whatnot accordingly. And I think that is an important point to make because any serious athlete has a level of connection with their own body that is unusual. Right. And we all kind of grew up learning how much to train, how hard to push ourselves, how much to recover based on feel. And this is something that doesn't necessarily correlate to feel. And I think the other piece there is the sort of stress score that you get, particularly overnight. Like, it's amazing to me when I look at what was happening with my stress levels while I was sleeping and seeing these peaks and valleys and it being way higher and then trying to do a forensic analysis of my behavior leading up to that evening to figure out what caused that. And that's been super helpful to me. And also something that my intuition wouldn't have been able to figure out.
- [29:56]
Will Ahmed
Yeah, I think that's the powerful thing about building this relationship with the data. And I think that everyone in the journey of collecting whoop data decides how much am I just going to stick to what I feel versus trust the numbers that disagree with me. The best way I think to approach it is to try to use the data to then inform your intuition and make it more of a symbiotic relationship versus who am I going to believe today? And I like the way you described it, which is, okay, I'll see some numbers that are different than I thought and maybe then I'll modulate how much I actually do to my body. The stress before sleep thing is a very interesting metric. And I think in general, our stress monitoring, there's a lot more that we're going to be able to reveal with that and do from that. Overall, I'm really excited about the fact that we're collecting all of this data 24 7. It's really accurate. And with all of the new artificial intelligence technology out there and LLMs, we're going to be able to structure this data to sit underneath a really powerful LLM that's then in turn gonna become this, like, 247 coach or doctor for you. And, you know, it will uncover, like, what you just said about figuring out the stress before the sleep and this and that. Like, that took a little bit of work. Like, you know, you had to kind of get into the data to find it. And I think what's gonna be amazing is how much gets surfaced without people even needing to look for it just by having this data there.
- [31:31]
Rich Roll
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm. I'm sort of yearning for that right now because I'm, you know, I'm recovering from this surgery. Right. So my stats are horrible.
- [31:40]
Will Ahmed
Yeah. Frustrating. Right.
- [31:42]
Rich Roll
And then. And then. But if I use the AI coach, like, it'll say, well, here's what you should do today. It's like, you should do Pilates. Like, no, you don't understand. Like, I would like to teach it. Like, here's where I'm at. Here's the specific surgery that I underwent. Like, what is. What are the best practices, you know, for, like, kind of getting my stuff in range, given the constraints that I'm under at the moment. And it's not quite there yet, but it's not hard to imagine that that can be easily, you know, kind of upgraded with an LLM model.
- [32:13]
Will Ahmed
Yeah, that day is coming. And we've got a big update coming for the coach inside the app soon too, which we're excited about. I mean, 12 years ago, it was pretty improbable that we'd be able to measure accurate heart rate from the wrist, let alone heart rate variability or sleep. And a recent version of that was blood pressure, where a few years ago it seemed very unlikely we'd be able to measure blood pressure from the wrist. And now we can do it. And so it's like, I'm amazed by what can be done with a lot of intention and intensity from really smart people. And if I look at the rate at which this company. But I would also say technology in general has been able to accelerate and improve, what's going to happen in the health space is going to be quite profound.
- [33:03]
Rich Roll
I wouldn't be honest if I didn't confess to being a skeptic of wrist monitored heart rate. As an athlete who's always worn a chest strap.
- [33:15]
Will Ahmed
Sure.
- [33:15]
Rich Roll
And I know historically devices measuring on the wrist have been wildly inaccurate. How have you attempted to solve that? And do you think that you've solved it?
- [33:26]
Will Ahmed
The first thing is that you have to build a very large data set of chest strap data versus sensor data. And we had an advantage again in starting with athletes in that athletes are very naturally. They have very different body types. So very different muscular sizes of their wrists, obviously different skin tones. And then of course, there's sweat, there's hairiness levels. All the things that I'm mentioning affect the accuracy of the sensing. And because we were working with athletes, we had to start with this very diverse data set. And so just to say it like, it's much harder to measure a black man playing basketball outdoors than it is to measure a white man running on a treadmill indoors. And like, I'll explain that for a second. So dark skin's harder than light skin. An activity like basketball has a non periodic motion set. So it's chaotic, right? It's not like in a periodic motion. And then indoors versus outdoors interestingly creates challenges. So outdoors you've got all sorts of light coming from the sun. Indoors you have more of a controlled light setting. So those are some things that people just don't really talk about in the space. But because we had to start with athletes, we built a foundation that was looking at harder data sets versus easier. And I remember there would be papers published from up and coming companies saying how accurate they were at heart rate, and they would always show people on treadmills running. And we were like always critical of that because it was sort of like the easier data set than what I'm describing as a more diverse data set. I think that over the last 10 years we've had whoop labs, we've collect hundreds of thousands of data sets alongside the sensor. I think that the heart rate monitoring is pretty great for a lot of activities under a lot of circumstances. I think that. But there's always that last like 1% or last 5%. That's really hard. And so that's what we spend a lot of our time on, of making this a product that like essentially makes the chest strap something that you would never need. There are some individuals where they either have a certain sort of a certain bone type or a certain way that the sensor sits on their wrist, or they let the sensor be too loose. Like, those are things that can make the data not as accurate. And so we're always trying to figure out, is that an education thing that we should be telling that person, or is it unsolvable to have the sensor, like not secure, for example, in the right place? We've also put technology out that allows you to wear it in different locations. So it's often the case that if someone for some reason is having an issue with wrist sensing, they'll actually get a Big benefit from wearing it on their bicep. Now at this point, we're talking about sort of like this 1 in 20 or, you know, 1 in 50 type scenario. But we'll make recommendations to people to try it on their bicep and they often find that that can improve their accuracy.
- [37:03]
Rich Roll
In those early days where you were testing everything with athletes, how did you originally get buy in from Michael Phelps, LeBron James? How did you convince these guys that you were for real and kind of come on board?
- [37:21]
Will Ahmed
Well, I wouldn't say we convinced them. We went to their personal trainers and we built a relationship with their personal trainers. So Mike Mencias, LeBron James, long tenured trainer, Keenan Robinson at the time was Michael Phelps's long tenure trainer. And we were an unknown company, but we said, hey, we want you to try this technology. And at some point, either the technology works or it doesn't. The insight that we had was to go to trainers because a lot of people, when they try to get to athletes or famous people, they go to the person that everyone else goes to. You know, you can't go to LeBron's agent as an unknown company because he gets 100 calls a day. But if it turns out, if you go to his personal trainer, not that many people know the personal trainer. And in the case of a fitness technology, that's the person you want to.
- [38:08]
Rich Roll
Go to and the athlete is with that person every day.
- [38:11]
Will Ahmed
Right. So that was a bit of an insight to getting to pro athletes. We went to all their personal trainers and it turned out that these guys spent more time with their personal trainers than often their significant others. It was pretty interesting. And then at some point, the product either works or it doesn't. I mean, one of the reasons that we never did these, like, big equity deals with athletes or that sort of thing was that I just realized there was no amount of equity or money that I could give a pro athlete to wear a product 24 7. If they didn't want to wear it.
- [38:47]
Rich Roll
Yeah, they have to want to wear it.
- [38:49]
Will Ahmed
And on the flip side, if they were wearing it all the time, it's because it was giving them an edge and they were learning about their sleep and their recovery, which was the point of the product in the first place.
- [38:59]
Rich Roll
But you did do an equity deal with Ronaldo though, right? Much later.
- [39:04]
Will Ahmed
Much later, yeah. Just to be clear, this is in 2015. Because in 2015, keep in mind, the company was unknown and we had a hundred people on it, and two of them were like the greatest athletes in the world. And so it was an obvious sort of piece of recommendation, like, hey, you should just go give LeBron 10% of the company or something. That was just sort of a flippant thing investors would say. And I didn't think that was a good idea because of the idea that if he was wearing it was because he liked it and it didn't really have anything to do with the incentive.
- [39:35]
Rich Roll
Phelps is also the perfect case because there was such a narrative around his ability to rapidly recover. Like when he was just getting up on the blocks, like every 15 minutes at one Olympiad after another and able to throw down world class performances, the discussion was around like this superhuman ability to flush his lactate. And he just has some capacity to recover that other athletes don't. So from your perspective being so hyper focused on recovery and strain, he's almost like the ultimate guinea pig plus ambassador for the product. And so in that process of him beginning to wear it and you getting insights and feedback from him, like, did you glean insights into what it is about him that made him special in that regard?
- [40:26]
Will Ahmed
Well, the first thing I'll just say is that it was unbelievable to see their actual data and the output of their scores because it was so validating to us that we were onto something because we had 98 other people wearing Whoop and ourselves included. And if we went out and did a hard day and had like a 19 strain or something, most of us, the next day would be kind of like in the yellow or the red. And I'll never forget looking at, at a data, you know, like a week from Phelps, and it was like, for those who aren't familiar, the strain scores out of 21, it was like 20.2, 20.2, 20.5.
- [41:02]
Rich Roll
And then on the day after day, yeah.
- [41:04]
Will Ahmed
And on the fourth day, he woke up in the green. And I remember just like seeing this graph and I was like, wow, it's measuring something that really is going on here. Like, this is pretty powerful that you can actually tell that that's Michael Phelps without knowing it's Michael Phelps just by seeing this incredible rate of recovery.
- [41:22]
Rich Roll
And from a physiological perspective, like, what is going on that has allowed him to do that other than just being highly conditioned?
- [41:30]
Will Ahmed
So there's a metric called heart rate recovery, which essentially talks about when you get your heart rate really elevated, how quickly does it come back down? Another way to think about it in hurry variability terms is that he could go from a sympathetic state to a parasympathetic state very quickly. And a lot of that's conditioning and fitness and probably a bunch of his recovery techniques, and I can't speak to necessarily all of those, but he was very invested in sleep. He would sleep eight to 10 hours a night, and when you looked at a really hard workout, it would jump off the page. And then when you looked at rest, it'd be like. And for a lot of people, if you do really hard exercise, you know, your heart rate's kind of still elevated for a while and your body's still under stress for a while because it's still recovering. And that's what made athletes like Phelps and LeBron so amazing, I think, is their recovery. It was so, I think, underappreciated. Even to this day, it's still, I think, underappreciated.
- [42:38]
Rich Roll
Yeah, I mean, you become better in recovery, not during the training. You expose yourself to exercise induced stress, and then your body has to contend with that. And it is in that intermediary period in between workouts when your body's endeavoring to repair itself, that you make the gains. And to the extent that you can shrink that window or expedite your recovery, then that allows you to not only train harder, but train more frequently and be less at risk for overtraining or injury or illness, which are the things that really take the athlete out of the game. And anybody who has been an elite athlete in the game for a long period of time has had those experiences.
- [43:22]
Will Ahmed
Yeah, I think you said that really well. And, and it's been fascinating to get to know a lot of these athletes and, and the ones who are the very, very best, like the 1% of the 1% of the 1%, they are as obsessed with the other 20 hours of the day as the four hours that they were during practice or game or exercise. And they use that time so intensely. And it's inspiring. And there's a cost to it and there's a sacrifice to it, and there's just a lot that people don't see. You know, I think that world class performers in general work insanely hard to make what they're doing look really easy. And the athletes that I've gotten the privilege to work with, they are insanely good at recovery, but you don't see how hard it is or the cost.
- [44:18]
Rich Roll
That they're incurring in the rest of the other areas of their life to be very good at that one thing. What if we've all been thinking about our future wrong? What if there is no finish line? What if there's only a through line? Well, that's the idea behind a special project I've been working on with Lincoln Financial, a four part series of mini documentaries in which each episode features me spending the better part of a day with a remarkable human to understand what it really takes to evolve with intention over the long haul, and how to sustain what you love across the physical, mental and financial dimensions of life. My guests include something for everyone. Andre Agassi, tennis legend Olympian Sarah True, musician Walker Hayes. And Morgan Housel, an expert in personal finance. So if you're drawn to the kind of depth that we explore on this show, I think you're going to really connect with this program. It's called the Action Plan and you can check it out now@lincolnfinancial.com RichRolla this podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. I cannot tell you how frequently I meet people who have incredible ideas, valuable skills, things the world desperately needs. But they get stuck on the tech side of sharing it. Either they are aren't conversant in technology, they're allergic to it, or some of them even think they just don't need it. But there are a couple things these people are missing, which is that no matter how good your idea or offering may be, you still need to make people aware of it if you want anybody to care about it. And second, the tech side of it all is just no longer complex, thanks to Squarespace, which has created this hyper intuitive, incredibly easy to use, all in one frictionless solution to take that idea, that offering, and present it to the world. Squarespace handles everything, website building, domains, payments, the whole deal. So you can focus on what you're actually good at. And now they've got this thing called blueprint AI and you literally just tell it what you do, what you're about, your vibe, and it builds you a custom website that actually reflects, reflects who you are. Not some cookie cutter template that screams I used a template, but the real deal. And here's the game changer. They've made it stupidly simple to turn your expertise into income. Whether you're offering coaching sessions, online courses, consultations, whatever, you can showcase it, schedule it, invoice for it, get paid for it all through one platform. Because here's the truth. Your ideas sitting in your head, head help nobody. But when you make it easy for people to find you and work with you, that changes everything. So head on over to squarespace.com rich roll for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use code RICH ROLL to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or Domain. So as I was telling you in your office, like six weeks ago I had spinal fusion surgery. And I'm in the hospital and I have the gown on and they're getting me ready and I'm about to go under for anesthesia. The neurosurgeon comes in, the vascular surgeon comes in and at the last minute I'm like, can I wear my whoop? Like I really wanted to wear my whoop, like during this six hour surgery so I could look back and see what was happening in my body during that very stressful, you know, six hour period of time. And they wouldn't let me because I had an IV like on my, you know, in my hand. And they were like, it's going to get in the way, you know, have to take everything off. So that was a bummer because I think that would have been super interesting. And I think that speaks to the kind of obsessiveness that you can have with like looking at your data and that connectivity that, that this device and your platform has created where you feel very connected to what's happening in your body. Not just the things that you can feel like, you know, when you wake up in the morning, if you had a good night of sleep or not, but those less intuitive things like how much stress was my body enduring throughout the night. And then of course, the mysterious HRV numbers. And so I will tell you that I have put this. I can't remember how many years I've been wearing this, probably six or seven at some point, but I just never take it off. I have to imagine that you experience that all the time. Like there's a deep level of loyalty that your customer base has with this product.
- [48:51]
Will Ahmed
Yeah, it's a pretty amazing relationship that, that you build with the product. You know, as a, as a WHOOP member or someone who's wearing it all the time. Obviously you become in a relationship with the data itself and in some ways the product kind of disappears. You know, you almost forget that you're wearing it over time. But you build rituals. Like, you know, I have rituals around looking at sleep or recovery every morning and like checking how closely that aligns with my intuition and looking at stress monitoring and being in a moment and being like, I felt nervous there was my body nervous. And I mean, the biggest thing it's done for me of late is like, it gives you permission when your body is run down, so to speak, to not go into overdrive. I think the challenge of being an entrepreneur or CEO is your mind can push your body further than at times it should go or that's productive for an organization, by the way, if you're making important decisions. So I just had a newborn in surgery and stuff. So it was. And we launched a product and so it was a good time to be able to check in with my data and be like, okay, you know, give myself a little bit more rest or a little more permission at times.
- [50:02]
Rich Roll
Sure.
- [50:02]
Will Ahmed
But it's amazing, you know, I get messages every day now from WHOOP members who the products changed their life in one way or another or improved it. And increasingly we get the message like subject line, whoop saved my life. And that's, you know, very surreal and humbling.
- [50:18]
Rich Roll
When you first imagined a company out of this idea that you had in college, did you envision like what when you look around here that it would, that it could one day be this multi billion dollar value added company? Was that always the vision or do you look around amazed and surprised that you went from there to here?
- [50:40]
Will Ahmed
I think it's a balance of both, honestly. I mean, the truth is, when I was coming up with this idea in college, I mean I still have the original business plan that I wrote in 2012 and there was a notion in it of we're going to start with the world's best athletes. Over time we're going to go to consumers and then we're going to go into medicine. And if you chart the arc of whoop, it's been pretty accurate to that now. There's been a lot of zigs and zags along the way, figuring out the business model, needing to raise capital, almost running out of money multiple times, finding product market fit, dealing with this insane number of competitors that we've had and big companies in the space. For me personally, learning how to develop as a manager or as a CEO, but I do think that sort of ARC was something that I envisioned early on. And if there's things that Woop got right, it was around why we were going to build the technology, who we were going to build it for initially and how we were going to expand into these new markets. And I think those things we did very intentionally. A lot of other things we screwed up along the way. But that sort of overall ARC and vision I think was pretty accurate.
- [51:52]
Rich Roll
Yeah. From your perspective as a young entrepreneur and finding yourself in a very high performance, high pressure environment, are you learning from that? Are you making mistakes like how are you approaching being the shepherd of woop? While not not, you know, kind of falling prey to some of the mistakes that can take you out of the game? Like, how are you walking your walk? Like, you know, you know, it's like a wellness company, but, like, too much wellness can make you unwell. When you're just focused on, like, building the brand, right? Like, the pressure on you has to be insane with the amount of money you raised and the expectations that come.
- [52:31]
Will Ahmed
With that, I certainly feel a lot of responsibility. I feel a lot of gratitude for, like, getting to work on this mission. I think anchoring back in those things is important and actually helps you take on stress. I think another important framework, because a lot of its frameworks and just in the way you think about your life or your purpose or your job, one is to think of stress as a tool. And stress is an opportunity essentially to get better and to improve. And if you're sitting in the middle of a crisis and you're saying, why did this happen to me? Versus you're sitting in a crisis and you're saying, this is an opportunity to grow, it just. You chart two completely different paths. And look, it took a long time for me to get to that mental framework. And like anyone else, there's times where I'm like, oh, man, we've got to deal with this now. But if you can keep coming back to, the harder it is, the more I'm going to learn from it, the better I'm going to grow, the more resilient I'm going to become. That puts you on kind of a growth path. And I realized early on in building Whoop. That one of the most likely reasons for the company to fail was not the idea or the product or the team, the market opportunity. It was me. I was not fit to be a CEO. I was strung out, stressed out, drinking too much coffee, drinking too much alcohol. I mean, I was a kid, but I had a lot of responsibility, and that's not an excuse. And I needed to figure out how to be a great CEO. And if I didn't figure out how to be a great CEO, it was likely the company was going to fail. And so that internalizing that and owning that, I think, put me on a growth path.
- [54:24]
Rich Roll
Did you have a moment of reckoning with that? Like a sort of hitting bottom kind of thing, or was it a gradual realization? And once you had that realization, how did you put in motion some set of tools to rectify it?
- [54:39]
Will Ahmed
Yeah. Yeah, I did have a moment. I woke up in the hospital with a panic attack. You know, it didn't even occur to me that you could end up in the hospital from, like, stress and A lack of managing it or your lifestyle.
- [54:53]
Rich Roll
But while you're building a company that's all about, like, how you manage stress.
- [54:57]
Will Ahmed
Oh, yeah.
- [54:57]
Rich Roll
And how important it is.
- [54:58]
Will Ahmed
The irony is amazing.
- [54:59]
Rich Roll
Yeah.
- [55:00]
Will Ahmed
Yeah. I was 24 years old and I remember I was like driving in the car and it had been a really stressful few weeks. I was struggling with a variety of things, team capital, raising, whatever. I had a few drinks the night before and. And all of a sudden I just started to feel my hands go numb. I felt my peripheral vision kind of narrow and I drove myself to the hospital and I, you know, I didn't know what was happening. I thought I had food poisoning because I felt so weird. But it turned out that I was just having a panic attack and that was a big wake up call for me. And it was, it was, I think, the culmination of just a very painful two years of trying to get the company off the ground and going from being a kid to being an adult in what felt like, you know, a light switch moment. And so I googled, like, ways to cope with stress, you know, from a lifestyle standpoint, ironically.
- [56:07]
Rich Roll
Like, you're the guy who's supposed to know that.
- [56:08]
Will Ahmed
Yeah.
- [56:09]
Rich Roll
I mean, you're 24.
- [56:10]
Will Ahmed
I was 24 and. And I discovered transcendental meditation. And so I took a four day course and it really worked. It really worked. And I've been doing it every, every.
- [56:27]
Rich Roll
Day since you got the mantra, you're doing it twice a day.
- [56:29]
Will Ahmed
Yeah, well, it's. The practice has evolved for me, I think in a lot of ways I've moved away from the mantra, but I still credit TM for essentially the gateway to this idea of sitting with yourself and sitting with your thoughts and reflecting and breathing. And I've gotten fascinated by how much breath can control your state. And I've gotten very introspective from the process of meditating. I think initially meditation for me was a tool to feel more relaxed in the moment or I knew I had to go into an investor pitch. So right beforehand I'm going to meditate and it's going to make me feel more calm. I think the beauty of the practice is that it evolves a lot and what you get from it evolves a lot. And so over time, it started to be much more about not just the period in which I was meditating, but how it made me feel outside of meditation. You know, one theme with meditation and especially a mantra based meditation, but I think you develop this over time, even without a mantra, is that you let thoughts Drift in. And you get to decide essentially with a mantra whether you want to repeat the mantra and push the thoughts along, or whether you want to pause and absorb the thoughts and engage with them. And so in many ways, you're kind of screening your thoughts as you sit there. And what I found is that this started to happen outside of meditating, like just in my day to day life of running a company or being a, you know, a partner or whatnot. And I'd be in a meeting, you know, premeditation, let's say I'd be in a meeting and next thing you know, everyone's yelling and I'm yelling. And you're kind of like catching up to the situation. You're like, whoa, that escalated quickly, right? In sort of the, the post meditation state. I found, I found that I would hear a voice in my head that was like, oh, Will's about to get angry before it happened. And so it then became more of a decision like, well, is that what this moment needs? Should I get angry? And that whole idea of being able to sort of see yourself in the third person in chaotic environments, that's been a life changer.
- [58:47]
Rich Roll
Yeah. I'm a longtime meditator, so you don't have to sell me on this idea. Even if all it does for you is give you that, that extra moment of pause to respond rather than react, or to make a more conscious decision about how you want to show up and comport yourself, particularly in a stressful situation. I mean, that is a modern day superpower that most people don't have. But the more you invest in it, the more expansive it becomes like, it, it is truly like the answer to so many things. And I, I haven't done a TM course, but I did, did have Bob Roth on my show very recently for the second time, actually, who runs the David lynch foundation and has been teaching TM for like, he's been doing TM like every day for like 50 years or whatever. And by the end of that, I was like, I'm sold. So next time I'm in New York, I'm gonna have him, I'm gonna have him teach me, I think. But it really is, I think, an essential tool, if not the most important tool in the toolbox of, of just trying to be a conscious person in the world who is endeavoring to show up with the best possible version of themselves.
- [60:00]
Will Ahmed
I 100% agree. I think it's a superpower. And it's the gateway too, to so many other offshoots within that practice, like if you can just start closing your eyes and breathing and seeing where that ends up taking you over a long period of time. I mean, for me, some of the best ideas I've gotten have come from meditating. Just in the practice of meditating. It's become an incredibly powerful tool for manifestation and visualization. I've had moments where I felt like I saw everything happen before it happened. And I can't explain that other than that that was my experience. I meditated on something, saw the whole thing happen, and then it happened exactly like I saw.
- [60:47]
Rich Roll
What do you make of that, like, from a. From like a mystical perspective? Well, I mean, that's wild.
- [60:53]
Will Ahmed
We could take a very, you know, sort of trippy, trippy route down this. But my belief, from my experience meditating is that the past, the present, and the future are much more related than they may seem. And that's a fairly trippy concept. And it's not something I've really ever talked about, but it's just this feeling that I have that you can remember something that's happened in the past and visualize something strongly enough that's going to happen in the future, and they can actually feel identical. And that is a really, really powerful concept when you absorb it.
- [61:36]
Rich Roll
The deeper my meditation practice gets, the more the notion of linear time collapses. Like, it really is. It is a mental construct that we filter through perception in order to kind of survive in the world. But I think reality is a very different picture indeed. You know, okay, completely, like, we're gonna go. We could, like, do a whole other thing. I don't want to get too distracted by this, but, like, there's a lot there. And I think to bring it back to just the simple benefits of practicing meditation, we're all walking around with these looping, cluttered thoughts that are just interfering with the way that we make decisions in our best interest. And meditation is a way of creating clarity, of truly getting out of the way so that that inspiration can come into us and we can have the peace of mind and the quality of mind to make decisions based on it and turn those things into reality. Like, on a very practical level, there's a whole mystical aspect of that as well. But it is waking up, like, what we think of reality and what reality actually is, I think are two different things. And meditation allows you to awaken to an experience or a sense of that that I think is very powerful.
- [62:58]
Will Ahmed
It's amazing. And. And look, I think that the headline here is, to anyone listening this, try to learn how to meditate. Because it changed my life. I mean, I wouldn't be sitting here across with you. This company probably wouldn't exist.
- [63:13]
Rich Roll
When I went into your office, I had seen videos of you in your office and photos of that and stuff like that. But what I didn't expect when I experienced it in person was the fact that I didn't see a single piece of paper on your desk. Well, like uncluttered mind, uncluttered, you know, sort of physical space. Like, is that an intentional thing?
- [63:34]
Will Ahmed
Well, you caught me on a good day in part because we had a film crew in here. Okay.
- [63:39]
Rich Roll
This is not normally so.
- [63:40]
Will Ahmed
It's not. It's not normally that clean. But I do like the absence of things, which is to say, I find that if you're in a room with less things versus a room with more things, if you're in a room with more light, those are things that give me energy and give me spaciousness. I don't like clutter very much. I find it kind of can constrain you. I mean, that's another interesting thing that I would probably attribute to meditation in part is it turns up your sensitivities and I think a really productive way. And I have a thesis that in order to be a great entrepreneur, you need to be sensitive, you need to feel problems. You know, when you touch a product or you interact with something, you want to have a strong reaction to it positively or negatively, and you want to be able to play with that dial. And those are things that have. That have helped me more on the creative side of building this company.
- [64:39]
Rich Roll
You also have to be able to, on some level, foretell the future. Like, you have to have a sense or a feeling, a Spidey sense of, like, what's around the bend in terms of. Of obstacles and problems that your company might perhaps face. But also, like, where is all of this going? What are we not seeing right now that is going to be very real five years from now, and what am I doing about that now? And that's not something I think that necessarily. I mean, you can look at a lot of data and read research or whatever and develop a thesis around that. But I think the best entrepreneurs, or just high performers in general, like, it's. There's an intuition, there's. There's some kind of like, heart brain going on that allows you to, like, tap into that and make decisions in the present that will have the. Those like, large impacts down the line and then, you know, make you look like a genius, you know, because you knew you had a sense of it, you know, in the present, I think that's right.
- [65:39]
Will Ahmed
And there, there's a question in my mind of how much intuition is informed. Like, is intuition essentially informed by all of these different, different things, data being one of them, or is it sort of a separate category of information? And I've generally come to believe it's just. It's a separate category. Most people would say, okay, the decision you make is based on the data and what you felt and this, that and the other thing. But I find more often than not, I'm kind of either choosing between what the data says or what I feel.
- [66:14]
Rich Roll
And what do you do when those two things are contradicting each other?
- [66:19]
Will Ahmed
Depends a lot on what we're talking about. So maybe there's a focus group on a band and the focus group sort of leans one way versus another on which direction the band should go. And I feel an incredibly strong pull towards the other direction. I might just do the other direction. That though, is a very sort of trivial example. I think what's been more interesting for me in my life is these moments where I've felt a deep sense of knowing something and a lot of people have disagreed with it. And those are hard moments because you find yourself trying to wrestle am I gonna believe myself or am I gonna believe all these people that I trust and all these people around me? I had a big version of this during COVID where. Because we were talking about the Office, right? And during COVID there was this like immediate tech reaction that was universal echo chamber stuff that the future was remote. Human beings weren't going to live in cities. We were going to be on Zoom for the rest of our lives. And it just so happened around that time period that I had seen the footprint for what was going to become this building. It was a hole in the ground at the time. And I knew in my gut that that was not the future that we were going to live in. And I. Nor was it the future I wanted to live in. And you could argue maybe it was more. It was the future I didn't want to live in. But I was totally sold that we should build this office, that we should get people to come back to the office. This is pre vaccine. This is my board of directors telling me, you don't understand, Will. The world's really changing. This could be a one way door. And I just didn't believe any of it. And I was very stubborn about it. And I had this feeling and I trusted it. And so we got this very cool office which now has the largest sign in Boston, overlooking Fenway park and the heart of the city. And now it looks great and smart. And of course, we're sitting here and there's an office that's filled with. With 500 employees, and everyone's smiling. But I remember the time when all the data and all the sort of points of view ran completely contrary to something that turned out right. And I think there's an element for every individual in their lives where they can have that intuition. And it could be intuition about a person they've just met and whether it's a relationship they should have or not have or what job they should take or not take. And you have to build this relationship with yourself to be able to trust that voice. And it's even worth, you know, keeping tabs on that voice. How often was that voice right? How strong or how loud does that voice have to be for you to listen to it? Are there certain categories where it's really good and other categories where it's a little more unknown, you know? And so again, back to meditation. In part, I do think it's a practice that helps you develop this relationship with that voice.
- [69:38]
Rich Roll
Yeah, the credibility of your intuition is really a function of your investment in your interior self. And I think where people get confused is they mistake what is really kind of like impulse or craving or desire or the grasp of the ego for intuition because they're disconnected from themselves and they don't have the level of self awareness or are not committed to doing that kind of personal inventory to parse the two. And so it becomes easy to say, well, my intuition is saying this. Well, is it really or is it something else? And I think the commitment to trying to figure out the difference between the two is really important. And when you've invested in your own personal development, then over time, your intuition becomes much more reliable. But intuition is real. We're down like another rabbit hole on this.
- [70:34]
Will Ahmed
I think the reason it's such an important rabbit hole is because I think for the last, like, 10 or 15 years, particularly in the technology industry, it seemed smarter, so to speak, to do all this data analysis and come down to a conclusion based on the data. And if you do that and you make the database decision like you're really smart. This has also been pioneered in what's called the Lean startup methodology, which is you have a very weak hypothesis that you go test, and then if it doesn't prove right, you shift quickly and do a different hypothesis. And it's called test fail, learn, pivot. Right. And so there's been this huge push in technology for the last 15 years around a B testing and around lean startup methodology. And I think what got lost in that whole conversation was intuition and a really strong point of view on what the world looks like in the future when you're right. And that's not to say you are right, but it's to say that you have a really strong point of view of what the world looks like in the future. And I think the best entrepreneurs do that.
- [71:53]
Rich Roll
Yeah, I agree. I think that's well said. I think the dark side of that or the flip side of that is when you are to kind of extend the Silicon Valley startup example, let's say you're a startup founder and you shepherd your company into this like unicorn, right? Because you had an intuition about a problem that needed to be solved or whatever and you do it. What often happens is that that individual then over indexes on their intuition and kind of descends into Galaxy brain and thinks that they can solve every problem. All these problems that are kind of outside their lane of expertise and I think we're seeing a little bit too much of that writ large culturally right now.
- [72:35]
Will Ahmed
Well, that's because they're not actually listening to their intuition, they're listening to their ego.
- [72:39]
Rich Roll
Yeah, that's the point I'm trying to make. It's that difference between ego and intuition.
- [72:44]
Will Ahmed
And I actually think they're pretty clear. Like how often do you find that you're debating whether you feel something strongly based on your ego versus your intuition, Particularly if it was someone to ask, you know, someone asked you an important question, like do you feel like you'd be able to decipher that meaning?
- [73:04]
Rich Roll
When I answer it, am I answering it from a place of ego versus intuition? Yeah, I think, I mean it's a great question. Let me think about that. I think that it's impossible to completely remove your ego from that. But I think a good indicator is a, like if I feel like somehow provoked where my ego's being threatened and then I want to compensate with some answer that casts me in a better light than I actually am, or am I taking the question from a more open hearted place where I'm trying to answer from curiosity or like a really good faith, what do I think about that? I think it's hard. I think it's hard. We're all victims of our ego on some level.
- [74:00]
Will Ahmed
I find that there's a real difference in saying something that you think in order to provoke discussion or disagreement. I mean there's often times Where I'm in a meeting and someone puts forth a case and my immediate reaction is just to sort of put forth the opposite case, to almost just create a sense of disagreement. And in some ways, like that's just coming from a place of curiosity or engagement. But if you're in that moment to say, no, that's a bad idea, well then that is either coming from a place of intuition or ego. And I find that you can parse those apart.
- [74:43]
Rich Roll
Yeah, I think the better response in that situation, like if you're reactively saying that's a bad idea, then what is it that's being threatened that you're trying to protect? Is there some ego piece to that? But if instead you say, oh, that's interesting, tell me more about that, like why do you think that's a good idea?
- [75:02]
Will Ahmed
Yes, that would be a better way to have the discourse. I mean, it's interesting to ask the question of like when we're talking about intuition in this context, are we talking about the feelings that you have on a minute by minute basis or are we talking about these big moment decisions where you have to go left or right and they're like one way doors and, and just to zoom out for a second, I think that it's more useful to think about intuition in the context of those big decisions in your life because those are the ones you really have to get right. And you want to create a sort of set of processes for which you're really examining how am I making this decision? Am I making it because it's the mean of what everyone just told me. Am I making it because that's what I feel on the inside, Can I even feel on the inside? Can I even ask myself, you know, and I meet a lot of young people and who are trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives when they're, you know, 22 years old or whatnot. And I have a lot of sympathy for that crowd because when I was 22 years old, I was starting woohp and I felt so insecure about it, but I knew deep down it was the right thing for me to do. But there were so many, like my universe all of a sudden collapsed on me were friends and adults I knew and teachers and they kind of mostly just told me it was a bad idea. And so I really was faced with this question of like, am I going to trust my intuition or am I going to trust what all the data says, so to speak, or what everyone around me says. And one framework I've tried to Give younger people, but I think it applies to all of us, is this idea of a lot of circumstances can come down to knowing what you want and then trying to get what you want. And the first piece of that equation, knowing what you want requires an inwards process. The mistake a lot of people make about knowing what you want is they go outwards. They ask everyone else what they should want or what they should do, but they struggle asking themselves. And then the process of trying to get what you want is one in which you should definitely go outwards. And then a lot of people get frustrated when they're trying to get what they want, but they're isolating themselves. And so there's this sort of irony that knowing what you want is a process of going inwards, but most people go outwards. And getting what you want is this process of going outwards, but a lot of people go inwards.
- [77:42]
Rich Roll
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- [79:29]
Will Ahmed
Go.
- [79:34]
Rich Roll
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- [81:38]
Will Ahmed
If you're nervous, be prepared. You know, I did a lot of work. I think that was one thing. When people asked me why I believed in it, I had, you know, I could talk for two hours about it. I did all this work on the physiology side. I did all this work on what a business plan could be. I really believed in it. And the more work I did on it, the more I believed in it. And the more I talked to other people, the more discouraged I got. And that was just this, you know, inner turmoil that I had to confront. And I think the lesson in it is just that if you're gonna create something that doesn't exist or you're gonna become someone that you aren't yet, which, those were two things. That I was trying to do. Right? You're gonna face a lot of opposition and rejection. The most rejection I faced in my entire life was from the ages of like, 22 to 25, because everyone's like, who's this kid who thinks he's gonna compete with Nike and Apple? And by the way, I was starting a company at the intersection of engineering and computer science and design and medicine. And I wasn't a computer scientist or an engineer or a doctor or a designer. Like, I get it, you know, I get why that I came across that way. And that's where you have to, you know, build a belief system. I mean, I did crazy things too. Like, when I was in a lot of doubt, I would write affirmations. I'd go back to visualization. I would keep telling myself, myself that this was real.
- [83:10]
Rich Roll
Wow. Do you think that being at Harvard even heightened it more? Because you're at this prestigious university where you have so many opportunities and options that for you to go down this entrepreneurial path, you were sacrificing, you know, so many other things that you, you know, quote unquote, like, should be doing. Like, there's a lot more to lose than if you had emerged from a junior college, you know, some other kind of place, right? Like, it. It casts, like an added layer of intensity over the whole thing because, you know, Harvard is Harvard is Harvard.
- [83:49]
Will Ahmed
Yeah. I mean, I felt like kind of a loser graduating and doing this thing. It wasn't popular to start a company, and I was one of the only people I knew doing it. And all my friends were getting six figure jobs in Manhattan and finance or consulting or whatever. And so I felt a lot like I was on an island. But I don't think it's a Harvard thing. I think it's a young person trying to figure out what they want to do with their life thing. And it's easy to just compare yourself to others and take comfort in the fact that you're doing something similar to what everyone else is doing and not wrestle with this hard, hard question of who you are and what you want to do and how that bumps up into the world and getting on the stage and being told you're bad. And I mean, just, if I think back on it, it's so easy for me to remember the pain of pitching 20 people in a row and having 20 people in a row say no. It was just so painful.
- [84:54]
Rich Roll
But at some level, you learn to detach your identity from those sorts of scenarios, right? Like, not to self identify with the kind of outcomes of those situations.
- [85:07]
Will Ahmed
And I found that incredibly challenging. I mean, for a long time, in those early years especially, my identity was very tied to the company's identity. So, you know, if Whoop was having a great day, I was having a great day. And if Whoop was failing, I was failing. And the other element to that is, I mean, the first thing to understand about that is it's literally not true. Like, you could be performing well in a certain situation and based on circumstances out of your control, the thing that you're developing may struggle. I've actually seen the flip side of this now, having been around a lot of successful entrepreneurs where someone's created an amazing rocket ship business and by the way, the person running it has spun completely out of control. So just to state the obvious, it's very much the case that your own performance and the company's performance are somewhat or very clearly different entities and different things. The other piece, though is that you have to figure out how you're going to get a little bit better every day. And I made the mistake again that I think a lot of other people make too, which is I was comparing myself to the greatest entrepreneurs of all time in my head. And so I'm 22 years old and I'm having trouble raising $300,000. And I'm saying to myself, well, I bet Elon Musk never had trouble raising this money, much money, or Steve Jobs or this, that, and the other, and of course, totally unproductive way of thinking about the world. You shouldn't compare yourself to these greats. You should just compare yourself to yourself. And again, if you keep getting a little better every day, you may wake up one day and, and be in quite a place. And I, I do believe that most successful entrepreneurs, when they first were getting started, had no idea what they were doing either.
- [86:57]
Rich Roll
But you need to, you have those benchmarks, you know, those people that inspire you totally because they, they kind of like underscore, you know, the vision that you create around that, that helps you, you know, kind of imagine, you know, the, the road, the path that you're going to travel and the people who have traveled it before you. But it's about being like right sized about that. But I think this, I want to go back to this idea of, of knowing yourself and how important that is. Like, if you're at Harvard, you're there because you have figured out how to game the racket, you know how to play the, you know how to get good grades, you know how to like, take the test and do well and you get funneled on this sort of certain upwardly mobile track that's a bit of a hamster wheel. Right. And I think with that it becomes very difficult to not be myopic, like, here I am, and the next step is this, and the next step is this. And not be able to like see a broader picture for yourself. Like everyone around you is kind of moving in that direction. And so that's a lot of noise to identify the signal that is like the true self and the intuition and you know, the thing inside of you that, that wants to be born can get kind of snuffed out, right?
- [88:16]
Will Ahmed
Yeah, yeah. If you've been on the default path and that path has been a really good one, which is like for this example, let's say it's working getting into Harvard and then getting an investment banking internship and then going through the final review process and getting the full time job offer, investment banking. And then knowing that after a few years of investment banking, you're going to compete to go to the private equity firm for two years and then after that you're going to compete to go to the business school for two years and then you're going to get, get the offer at higher level at the private equity firm. Like you can be on that path, that like sort of elite Ivy League school path, let's call it, until you're 40 years old without asking the question of this is the path I want to be on. And I credit the institutions a little bit because they play into that. They play into that quiet ego that wants to compete for something without asking for whether or not it's what you even want. You know, if you're a student at Harvard, you've gotten good at winning these competitions. Like a bunch of people want to go to this thing. And so the banks and the consulting firms, they do a smart job in that they create a very competitive process. And so you feel like it's another thing that you're supposed to go into. And so I've seen a lot of friends go down that path for 2 years, 4 years, 12 years, and 1 day I'll get a phone call like, how do I get off this path?
- [89:48]
Rich Roll
Yeah, there's an existential reckoning. I think there's a certain violence to the fact that society is set up such that it is this competitive race that begins the moment you enter elementary school where you're being judged and compared to your peers and you have to keep track. Right. And people who end up at Harvard, like I said, are really Good at that. And there's no incentive or importance placed upon like, hey man, who are you? What do you want to, like, what do you really want to do? What are we doing here? You know what I mean? I think it's sort of like, let's ameliorate uncertainty, let's take the path of least resistance. Let's try to game as much security into our life that we can avoid pain. But ultimately life is, these things are unavoidable. Uncertainty is a fact of life. Life, you're going to have pain, you're always going to have to do more work. There is no retirement from the relationship that you have with yourself. And it catches up to you. And it certainly caught up to me. I was 40, I was one of those people. And if you can go on that path and be happy and have a purpose driven, meaningful life, that's satisfying more power to you. But I just think for more people than others, like, that's, that's not the path. And they're a victim of that because they weren't in a situation where anybody said, hey, like, let's take a beat here and reassess.
- [91:20]
Will Ahmed
I completely agree. I mean, I, I'm 35, so I've had, you know, probably 20 years of seeing people graduating from college, so to speak, and, and, and, or being 20 years out from college. And so I've seen enough versions of what you just described where, yes, there's some percentage of the people who just followed that path forever are perfectly content with it. But there's a lot of people who have been on it for a while who kind of wake up realizing that they're 40 years old and they don't even know if they're doing what they want to do with their life.
- [91:57]
Rich Roll
Are you engaged in some practice of continual personal inventory to make sure that you are on track when it comes to those things that matter.
- [92:10]
Will Ahmed
That's a great question. I've started doing some work with an executive coach. And one of the things we do every year is a retreat for two days where we just hang out and do a lot of exploration of my life and look at how are things going professionally and personally and from a community sense and a spirituality sense and giving back sense and a health sense. And you kind of look at this butterfly of your life, so to speak, and if you do that practice enough times or enough years in a row, you start to realize that it's hard to have all of the. Again, if you think of it as a butterfly and those different things are sort of the size, depending on how well they're going or how much you're investing in them. It's hard to have all of those things as one equal blossom. Like, you'll. One year, you'll have something that's totally outweighed versus the others. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. But I think an awareness of it will help you shape it so that it's much closer to who you want to be.
- [93:17]
Rich Roll
What can you share about what you imagined your life would be like if you succeeded to the extent that you have, versus the lived reality of it. Habit that you can kind of report back, like when you were at the beginning of this journey and you're like, one day I'm going to have this incredible office across from Fenway and I'm going to employ all these people, and millions of people all over the world are going to be wearing, whoop. It's going to be amazing.
- [93:40]
Will Ahmed
Right?
- [93:40]
Rich Roll
Like, and you're like, and this is how I'm going to feel right about myself. I'm going to be happy. I'm going to be this and that. Now you're here, you've done that. You're young, you're 35 years old. Like, what do you want to tell the young version of yourself? Like, here's what it's really like it's better than I ever imagined. Or like, here's the ways in which I still feel like I'm myself.
- [94:06]
Will Ahmed
Well, I do think the process of building a company and creating a product that people use to improve their healths and their performance has made me more who I am, so to speak, which is, like, I've had to do a lot of work on myself to get in this position, to lead this company. Company to create a product that is intentionally of service, so to speak, to the world's population. And so that I'm very grateful for, put aside the success, just the fact that this incredibly hard, beautiful, chaotic thing that I've built with really smart people has molded me. And so I love that. I love that. Being on that hard path and figuring out how to climb this mountain, so to speak, has shaped me in certain ways. And in certain ways, I'm still trying to, you know, mold myself and keep growing, so to speak. I think that the biggest surprise, so to speak, is that I don't feel like a deep, deep sense of, I've arrived, I've made it. I mean, even the notion of being, quote, unquote, successful, that's not a word. I spend a lot of time anchoring to. I know it to be true, but it's not like a feeling that I have deep down. More. What I have is this sense of responsibility and privilege that I get to go fight every day for this company. And that is. I'm using that word accurately. I do feel like building a business like this is a fight. It's hard and it comes with amazing privileges and amazing moments. And it also comes with really challenging, hard, difficult situations that test you as a man, that test you as a leader, that test your whole value system. And so the role of CEO often is dealing with the crisis of the day. And that too can create its own glasses, so to speak, or can create its own sort of fogginess of the beauty that you've created. And so it is important that I zoom in and out constantly. I think that's something that good leaders do really well, where they can be talking about a design detail that's on this desk right now. And why is that this round and is it 0.1 millimeters or 0.2? And then they can zoom way out and be like, wow, look at all these people here. And, and I just got an email from someone and the product helped them lose £40. And this is going to work out like, this is pretty great, you know, so it's everything I just said and I'm incredibly grateful to be doing it. And that, I think, is the key. You have to balance drive with gratitude. They're like two different engines that you need to be running at the same time. You know, the dopamine system of building a company works, but you end up miserable if it's just a dopamine system. If you tell yourself, I'm going to be happy when, when we get to be a $10 million company, when we get to be a hundred million dollar company, when we have a million people on whoop. When we have, you know, like, you can keep, you can keep doing that game.
- [97:38]
Rich Roll
Well, every time you achieve one of those benchmarks, it just, just, you know, the goalpost move anyway.
- [97:44]
Will Ahmed
Exactly. Because you used all your dopamine up, telling yourself how happy you were going.
- [97:49]
Rich Roll
To be when you got there, and then you're not. So it must be because there's this other thing that you haven't gotten yet. Well, just continually outsourcing.
- [97:57]
Will Ahmed
Yeah, no, it's because you didn't have another zero. You know what I mean? It's like, it is like, it's absurd.
- [98:02]
Rich Roll
But like the human animal is crazy that way.
- [98:05]
Will Ahmed
So that's the drive piece. And then. And that's the dopamine system. But if you pair it with gratitude and appreciating it along the way, you can be pretty happy while you're still struggling and driving.
- [98:20]
Rich Roll
Right. But the trick there, of course, is that the dopamine cycle can run on autopilot, like mindlessly, because that's what your kind of ego and subconscious wants you to do. But the gratitude piece requires conscious effort. Like, that's a, that's a practice, a.
- [98:39]
Will Ahmed
Good way to still create the drive, but I've found sort of heightens your feeling of purpose and maybe also quiets the ego. Is this concept of you're of service. So I'm of service to all the members who wear whoop. I'm of service to this team that I've built. I'm of service to the billions of dollars of shareholder value that I need to return. And when you frame it that way, then it doesn't feel like you're doing anything for yourself. You're doing it because you want to lift everyone else up. And I think that in a way can quiet your ego in the process.
- [99:26]
Rich Roll
Yeah, I mean, service is the antidote to self obsession.
- [99:30]
Will Ahmed
Well, for sure.
- [99:31]
Rich Roll
And, you know, this is like, I've been sober a long time. This is like a core tenet. Okay, here we go. Like 12 step recovery, you know what I mean? And I can fall prey to, you know, my ego in any given moment. And really that's the best and easiest way to snap out of it and kind of disabuse yourself of all the nonsense that's going on and tap into that gratitude. And when you're on a mission that is service based and to approach it in that way is such a beautiful thing. And with that comes this realization that you spoke to so elegantly, which is your ability to steward this mission based affair is very much a function of the extent to which you are living the principles upon which the company is based. You cannot be out of balance and stressed out and have terrible, you know, recovery scores and sleep scores and effectively, you know, shepherd this thing forward totally to and realize its greatest potential. Like the capacity to serve is so deeply related to you. Living the principles upon which WHOOP is founded. And this message that you're trying to put out in the world until, like, realize that and understand that that's a core, like, that's. You lose your ballast if you're not.
- [100:52]
Will Ahmed
Doing that, that and that why, so to speak, not only can it sort of reorient your mission, but it can do the same for teams and organizations. And it's a very useful framework, I think in a lot of contexts. There was a powerful story I read about a bank that their sort of mission, so to speak, was to produce as many mortgages as they possibly could. And a new leader came in and changed the why from being about how many mortgages they could produce to how many people they could put in their first home. And just that framework shift in a year, the bank went from being seventh to second in the mortgages that they put out. I think there's a big lesson in something like that. It doesn't surprise me that creating a motivation that is so inherently positive versus one that's just mostly financial or sort of self motivated can dramatically shift your performance. And fortunately, we have a really easy mission to anchor on here around unlocking human performance and health span. And when we're pushing ourselves, it's because we want to create a product that's going to make someone live longer or save someone's life, or tell them something they've never known before about their bodies. It's easy to be able to push harder when that is the goal.
- [102:26]
Rich Roll
The other conundrum that comes up with that is the conflict between using this as a tool to improve your IRL experience, to create the richest experience and most vital and connected experience with life that you possibly can through a device and a technology within a culture that has an unhealthy relationship with optimization. Right. And so with that, I'm sure you have people out there who are overly attached to the data and are allowing the data to be kind of predictive of how they feel about themselves and live their lives. Obviously you don't have a screen on here. You've thought about this like you're doing what you can within the context of what you do to ameliorate that. But it is a thing. So how do you think about how someone should relate to the data, to the product, and also sort of take autonomy over themselves so that they're not being held captive by it?
- [103:40]
Will Ahmed
I mean, it's a really important question. I think we've pretty intentionally tried to design technology to improve your life, not invade it. And the screen thing is a real thing. It would have been very easy to put a screen on it and have it buzzing and push notifications and all sorts of things. And my critique of the world 10 years ago, but I think it's probably even more true today, was there was just too many things fighting for your attention and creating technology that lived in the background of your life and was There when you needed it. That, to me felt like the right relationship with technology. And so that's been at the core of the way that we've developed a lot. I mean, even the product itself is designed to not necessarily even look like a piece of technology. Most of the wearables that came before Whoop had very clear kind of like plastic and glass identities. And ours is mostly material, and it feels like it's blending more into fabric passion even, than technology. So those are some of like the principles, let's just say, behind how we've built the product. I mean, in terms of how people want to use it, I think that they should be comfortable wearing the product without feeling like they need to check in on the data. And again, this is more. We're speaking more to the person who is struggling with the concept that you just described, which is like, are they trying to over optimize? Are they too reliant on data? So on and so forth, forth. I think that having the data is unquestionably going to be something that is rewarding in your life. And we're just on the cusp of what artificial intelligence is going to be able to do with all this data and what it's going to unlock about the human body. So I think that people will be deeply rewarded for having collected this information about themselves. The idea of, okay, I didn't get enough sleep, and Whoop says I didn't get enough sleep and so now I'm going to tell myself I'm not well rested all day. I think that there are ways to manage that. I think that at the end of the day, Whoop is a tool. And like any other tool, you have to learn how to use it. And I actually didn't sleep particularly well last night. But as a consequence, that also made me take a cold plunge this morning, Take a sauna this morning, meditate for longer, have a great breakfast. So like, it shifted my behaviors a little bit because, you know, I knew I'd be sitting down with you and I want to have a, you know, a good time with you. Or I run a company and I gotta run a company. So I really view information as power and how you choose to use it is what comes out of it.
- [106:30]
Rich Roll
I think that's well said. Is it a tool or is it a driver? You know, And I think if somebody has an anxious response to this, it's worth recalibrating your relationship with it. But anybody who uses it has that experience of waking up after, like, I didn't sleep so great Last night either. And you're like, oh, man, you know, I'm. I gotta, I'm gonna do. I'm gonna meet Will. We're gonna do back to back. He's like, am I gonna be up for it? And the last thing I want to do is like open my Whoop app and see a bunch of red. You know, it's like, I already. I'm not gonna cancel. Like, we're doing this right. So when the message is like, danger, danger, or like you're, you're not at peak performance or you're less than today, what is that doing mentally to you? And I think you do need to. If you feel like that is something that dysregulates you, then you have to create healthy boundaries around it and perhaps use it for larger trends rather than the day to day. But to the extent that it can then instruct and inform decisions that you can make that morning to course correct like you did like with the plunge and, you know, nutrition habits, et cetera, it is very helpful in that regard. So it does. It's a little bit of a catch 22, I think, in that situation.
- [107:52]
Will Ahmed
Yeah, I mean, like, you know, most days I wouldn't want to drink two cups of coffee before noon or something. But, like, because I know I didn't sleep as well, I, like give myself permission to do this. Or, you know, it's like you just create certain frameworks around it. But there is an aspect of on this day, I have to do this thing, period. Doesn't matter what the state of my body is, I have to do it. And again, that goes back to a mindset thing, which is like, day to be damned. I'm going to do this thing and I'm going to figure out how to do it. And I do believe you can push your body through anything in a given day. And depending on what that thing is, if it's a 250 mile race, well, there might be consequences on the other side, but if it's a meeting or a, a podcast or a pitch or an interview, like, you can get yourself there. And on the other side of what we're talking about is actually a very positive reinforcing tool, which is my whoop said I was run down, but I had to do this thing, I had to perform. And you figure out a way how you do it, and that actually builds resilience.
- [108:52]
Rich Roll
There's resilience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a, that's an interesting lens on it. You mentioned AI and where this is kind of all Quickly heading, like what is your intuition, spidey sense about what's around the bend in terms of wearables and preventative health technology at this point? What do you imagine we can expect to see in the next five years?
- [109:22]
Will Ahmed
I mean, I think on an order of magnitude this, that's meaningfully shorter than that, maybe even like in the two to three year range. A lot about your relationship with your health. Your doctor's office will change pretty profoundly from continuous wearable data and mind you, other data sets. So you wear whoop, but you probably also do blood tests somewhere. Maybe you've worn a CGM before, you've got a scale somewhere. You've seen a doctor 20 twice in the last 12 months. Maybe you did a DNA test once. Like all this stuff just sort of like lives in the ether and is not talking to each other and it's unconnected. All of that information is going to be under one roof and there's going to be a very powerful AI that sits on top of it, that explains a lot of it and there's going to be discoveries from that and there's going to be a preventative health side to that, which should really start to change the healthcare industry at large. I mean, the cost of a, a wearable device or some of these other tests that we just talked about is so much lower than the cost of having to deal with someone who's now diabetic or cardiovascular disease or hypertension, which by the way is not like a small problem, like it's the problem. Right. And so I'm a big believer that wearable technology coupled with AI and other data sets is not just going to dramatically improve behavior from sort of a lifestyle coaching standpoint, but it's going to change medicine and it's going to change that relationship with your doctor's office. And in many ways it's going to feel like maybe more of a continuation of your doctor's office office.
- [111:12]
Rich Roll
In the ongoing discussion around artificial intelligence. I mean there's certainly rational reasons to, you know, fear this dystopic future. But to my mind, the most optimistic and most obvious best use cases for this are in medicine and particularly preventative health because of its ability to crunch massive amounts of data and make sense of it, because of the ways in which scanning technology is leading to early detection. Like all of these things are going to make us able to short circuit, particularly lifestyle disease well in advance of it taking root and becoming problematic. And all of these tools, whoop included of course, are pieces of that puzzle and, and I think that's super exciting. It's also interesting to see people sort of threatened by this. Like the conversation around CGMS is like wild, you know, like how there's a lot of people that don't like the fact that consumers are using that. But it's just another tool. From my perspective, it requires some education in order to interpret it correctly so that you're making wise decisions based upon it. But I think once these things begin to cohere and share information and you're able to get a comprehensive like real time picture of what's going on with you and that is communicating in real time with your primary care physician or the specialist. The implications of that I think are astounding, quite profound.
- [112:47]
Will Ahmed
I mean, I think the overall life expectancy of human beings is going to go up by a dramatic amount when this technology all kind of comes together. And so that's a really exciting artifact of artificial intelligence. In some ways I feel grateful that I'm working in a category where it feels like near 100% likelihood that this is just going to be a good thing for this vertical, which is like AI for health. And I have a lot of societal concerns about AI in other places. And so it's like, like refreshing in some ways to just get to focus on the health side of it.
- [113:32]
Rich Roll
I have this like selfish concern though, or fear being on the elder side of Gen X that I was, that I'm gonna just miss it. It's like I'm gonna like all this lifestyle lifespan extension is all gonna kick in like, right. You know, when I either pass away or like it's, I'm past that point.
- [113:51]
Will Ahmed
Of no return, you know, I think you got point.
- [113:54]
Rich Roll
So I just leave. I think my kids will get it, but I was born a little bit too early for this.
- [114:01]
Will Ahmed
I think the biggest trip is gonna be the robots. That's gonna be a trip.
- [114:06]
Rich Roll
Tell me more.
- [114:07]
Will Ahmed
There's a world that's two to three years away where you walk down fifth Avenue and you see thousands of robots. And that's just gonna feel very different than people going from using Google search to ChatGPT because it's going to be so physical. I mean it's going to be just such a different relationship with your world. And instead of getting greeted at a department store by a human, maybe you're going to be greeted by a robot. And over the next 10 years, I think that human beings are going to spend increasingly less time with one another. And I think that the relationships they're going to build with AIs are going to be very real and displace relationships with human beings.
- [114:53]
Rich Roll
That's the part where I feel like I'm not sure I want to have my life extended. Is that the world I really want to live in? I don't disagree with you, but when I look at my kids and think about the world that they're inheriting and the world in which I grew up, I have real concerns about that. What does that mean? It's certainly the direction that we're headed in. It will just be another version of the human experience, I suppose. But you know, I can't help but lament what gets lost in that amidst the, you know, the benefits that will occur also with that. I guess it's hard to know.
- [115:32]
Will Ahmed
Yeah. And I'm not, I don't like that concept at all. You know, I think that there's something inherently beautiful about human beings being with human beings and the relationships and the teams. And it's so amazing when you really think about it, that we're these animals that can work in systems of hundreds of millions of people. I mean, you can't put 100 gorillas in a stadium and have it be a sane environment, but you can have a country with a billion people and somehow they organize and coexist. I mean, that's a very fascinating concept.
- [116:09]
Rich Roll
Well, it's refreshing to come to your headquarters and see so many people here, you know, like, and that's, you know, your, your ability to foretell the return to, you know, the workplace and, and that being something that people are going to want to do, I think is proven correct. But you do it through building a culture and an aspirational environment for people wanting to do that. Right. I've been to extraordinary offices in New York and in Los Angeles where you would imagine, you know, every young 20 something person would, would want to, you know, would want to show up at every day and they're empty and everyone's working from home. So I, it's not just about like the way the world is moving. It's about the intentional culture that you're creating, you know, to, to make sure that people are nourished in that way. I'm, you know, very honored to spend this time with you and also, you know, to be an ambassador of the product. I appreciate you being such a long time, great partner of the podcast. As a sponsor of the podcast. It just feels really good to work with people who are on this kind of mission based path to improve the health and well being of people all over the world. So it's been a real treat to spend time with you today. And I want to end this just by giving you the opportunity to share like what, what you, what you think is the main or, or biggest thing that you want to, that you want people to understand about this mission that you're on and what you've learned about human health and potential that they could take away and think about and perhaps use in their lives.
- [117:57]
Will Ahmed
I think the amazing thing about the human body is how much it can change or adapt to new circumstances. And I think that there's a lot of people probably listening to this who are in a state of their life where they feel like not as good as they probably could. And they kind of know that maybe they're a little overweight, or maybe they don't exercise as much, or maybe they wake up tired or maybe they're stressed all the time, or maybe they've got a lot of fights going, going on in their personal life. And by the way, everyone struggles with that stuff. But if you're listening to that and you're sort of saying like, I want to do a little more about it, I do believe that a self awareness of your body can make a big difference. And being able to measure the human body and create that relationship with yourself and understand what your baselines are, are. Maybe you're fitter than you think you are. Maybe your VO2 max is a little higher than you thought. Maybe your resting heart rate's a little lower, but maybe your sleep's really bad. Maybe it's all the opposite things. I'm often amazed how many people tell me they got a WHOOP and actually thought they were better at something than they thought or much worse at something than they thought. But it was different than what they expected they were going to learn when they put this product on. And I think there's a kind of a beauty in that. A lot of the theme of, of this podcast outside of Whoop has been this concept of self awareness and looking inwards. And I think that as a product, WHOOP is one that can help you do that. And then the question becomes, well, what do you do about it? And that's also up to you to decide. But I often find that you can only really manage what you measure. And if you think it's important to wake up well rested, if you think it's important to be fit, if you think it's important to, to have a normal blood pressure or a low resting heart rate, when you start measuring these things, you're gonna quickly identify behaviors and lifestyle decisions that can help you shape them. And so that's what gets me and hundreds of other people at Woop excited to wake up every morning and push this mission to unlock human performance. And Hellspin, I love it, man.
- [120:06]
Rich Roll
Yeah, the idea that you can't, you can't improve what you're not measuring. Like, if you're afraid to step on the scale because you don't want to see what that number is, I can understand that same fear applies to the fear around, like, well, set aside weight, like all these other numbers, like, oh my God, what's it going to say? It's just going to tell me all these, these ways in which I'm off base or I'm headed in the wrong direction. And if you're feeling that way, you probably already know that maybe you're not, you know, you're not not. You don't have everything dialed in, but you have more agency than ever to make these choices. There are resources available that didn't exist, you know, even years prior. And to kind of rip the band aid off and look at that stuff is really empowering. So I encourage anybody who feels that, that sense of fear to walk through it and take that leap because on the other side of it, you know, there's, there's, there's so much value and, you know, you're worth it. And I thank you for taking the time today. That was really fun, dude.
- [121:09]
Will Ahmed
Thanks, brother. I really enjoyed it.
- [121:11]
Rich Roll
Yeah, cool. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the Episode episode page@richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra Voicing Change and the Plant Power Way. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, is of course awesome and very helpful. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com sponsors and finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at Rich Roll. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Cameolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae, with assistance from our creative director, Dan Drake, content management by Shayna Savoy, copywriting by Ben Prior, and of course, our theme music was created all the way back in 2012 by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace plants. Namaste.