Show Notes:

Will Ahmed
The origins of WHOOP. “My experience of being a college athlete showed me that athletes, myself included, really didn’t know all that much about what they were doing to their bodies while they were training. There was sort of just this perception that if you trained a lot, eventually you could get fit. For me, I used to overtrain as a result of that because I used to kind of push, push, push — and then all of a sudden, you fall off a cliff. Other athletes would get injured or misinterpret fitness peaks or not necessarily understand the importance of recovery or sleep. So for me it was really trying to understand everything I could about the human body. I did a lot of physiology research while I was in school. I read something like 500 medical papers, and I wrote a thesis around how to continuously understand the human body. I would say that ultimately became the business plan for starting WHOOP.”

The first breakthrough. “If we can measure [heart rate variability], we would have this unbelievable lens into your body status and how rested or recovered your body was. For me that was quite exciting. So a lot of the first 12 months of the business — ‘business’ really in quotes because we weren’t selling anything — really the first 12 months of technology development were spent figuring out if we could measure heart rate variability accurately from the wrist, and that I would say was our first breakthrough as a company.”

It’s not just for athletes. “If you go back to the origin story for WHOOP, it was really feeling like I didn’t know how much I should train on a given day. And so my assumption was that I should just train a lot — and that’s how you burn out. That’s how you get run down, and we’re seeing this now outside of sports and exercise, all across society. How do you prevent burnout? How do you become more optimal as a human being in your daily life? And so that’s where the origin for this idea of recovery came from: to be able to give someone a statistic every day that told them not just what had happened, but what they should do next.”

Adding balance to your life. “There are two ways to think about adding more balance to your life. The first way — and this is the way that most people recommend — is, ‘Well, you’ve just been putting too much stress on your body so you need to take on less stress.’ And that’s fine. I mean, we do that with consumers every day. We show them you didn’t sleep well. Your body’s run down. Do a little less today. But the other way that’s actually less talked about, that’s more important for entrepreneurs, is how can you actually take on the same level of stress, but be more recovered and be more rested so that you can keep taking it on. And so, what I encourage entrepreneurs to think about is all the habits that they can embody that actually allow them to maintain a high output for a long time.”

Matteo Franceschetti
The stages of sleep. “Sleep is a foundational piece of our health. At Eight Sleep, we call it sleep fitness because it’s important to think of sleep as a workout that will translate to a positive outcome for your health. There are two major phases: deep sleep and REM. Deep sleep is when your physical body is recovering, and REM is when your brain is cleaning and processing the information from the day. You need all of this to make sure that you live a healthy life because sleep has an impact on your daily biometrics and so much more.”

How to add an extra good night’s sleep. “A way I can find out if people are sleep deprived is by asking them to try to sleep one hour longer every day for a week. At the end of the week, they’ll have gained an extra entire night of sleep by sleeping seven additional hours. Then I want to know how they feel after getting all of that extra sleep — because I guarantee they’ll feel more alert, have more clarity, and will be a sharper individual.”

Sleep is more important than you think. “There’s evidence that you will die sooner from sleep deprivation instead of food deprivation. In general, everyday life, the impacts are pretty substantial. We’re quite mentally impaired after not getting enough sleep. You’re also more prone to injuries since you’re less aware of what’s going on. You will start craving junk foods or things that will give you quick bursts of energy.”

Get a good night’s sleep wherever you are. “The biggest request is to make Eight Sleep pods portable. It becomes so natural that once you get used to sleeping on it, you don’t want to travel without it. The big ‘aha’ moment for people is when they finally do go somewhere else and sleep on a normal bed, they feel hot, cold, and all different temperatures during the night and are generally more uncomfortable. We’re working with hotel chains to continue expanding our business.”

Dave Asprey
Hacking his own biology. “I realized that if we can troubleshoot the internet, maybe I can turn that knowledge around on myself. I started measuring what worked, and I realized a lot of the stuff that I’ve been told was just BS. It was dogma. It was a belief system, but it was not based on science. It was not based on our understanding now of how biology works. It took a lot of studying, but I eventually spent more than a million dollars on hacking my own biology, and I’ve lost the weight. I’ve gotten younger. My brain has the response time of a 20-year-old. I have the visceral fat levels of a 20-year-old, and I am 48. So something here is working.”

Lofty but attainable goals. “I want to live to be at least 180 years old because I think that’s a conservative number. People tell me all the time that they think that’s total BS, but here’s the logic: There are a very small number of people today who are 120 years old. 120 years ago, it was 1900 — no airplanes, no cars, and we were getting ready to fight World War I, still on horseback for a lot of it. We didn’t understand bacteria, antibiotics, or DNA. Look what’s happened in that one lifetime. If the best we can do today is 120, and if we can’t do 50 percent better in the next 100 years, it’s because a comet hit the planet.”

The key to a long life. “You must start intermittent fasting. It’s easier than having breakfast, but the anti-aging and cognitive benefits are so strong that if you do it now, it will add years to your life. It means that the last 20-30 years of your life, you won’t wear diapers, you won’t have hoses where you don’t want them, and you’ll remember your own name.”

Better than optimization. “So how do you do the fasting thing? How do you do the other things that make you younger and stronger and faster and smarter and still do what you’re here to do? That’s the challenge, and that’s why it’s different from human performance optimization. Screw optimization. I just want more. I want better. I want faster, stronger, longer life, more energy, and I don’t want to give anything up to do it. And if I want to optimize I have to say, ‘I just gave up dinner with friends every night because I had to go to the gym for two hours’ or whatever — that’s an optimization. No, I don’t want to do that. I simply want better.”

RESOURCES & REFERENCES
WHOOP
Eight Sleep
LeBron James
Michael Phelps
Intermittent fasting
Bulletproof
World War I