Reflecting on 400 Episodes: The Lessons You Need For A Happier, Healthier Life

0:00 Okay, 400th episode. That was wild. It's super wild. I was just thinking about the fact that when we started it, I said, let's do 10 episodes and we'll see how it goes. And that was like eight years ago. Yeah. And we've been putting out a podcast every week for eight years. So pretty insane. Thank you, both of you, for all that you've done for this podcast.

0:22 Oh, this is legitimately one of the most fun parts of my job.

0:31 These conversations are such a joy.

0:34 What's a guest that immediately comes to mind or a learning? I mean, the two of you have done so many interviews now.

0:40 You know, I really loved Dr. Rangan Chatterjee. I I and I have some recency bias because I was just on his podcast and I was in his home where he hosts his podcast in, you know, north of London, two hours. And he's just, you know, with the, you know, people who are just the real deal.

0:57 Yeah.

0:58 He is just the real deal. He lives just so humbly. He's got a beautiful family. He prioritizes his downtime. He's built a life around the things that he values. He's a wonderful communicator of health and longevity and performance and just has this beautiful way of being in the world. And I really think he makes the world a better place just by existing.

1:20 So I think I I I loved interviewing him.

1:23 I I think I could give a bunch of answers that are in line with yours, but to take this in a totally different direction, one of my absolute favorite podcasts, Will, was yours with Mike White, the founder or the creator of White Lotus. Oh, yeah. And um for a couple reasons. Like when Woop first started, right, like we were building this product for athletes by athletes.

1:45 And it wasn't immediately obvious how useful Woop would be to everybody. And I think like one of the reasons why I've worked here for over 13 years and why I'm such a big believer in the product is because it turns out that the things that predict performance for athletes are the things that predict performance in every dimension of life that matters.

2:06 And his was such a fun example of like how he uses Whoop to perform in creating film, which like feels like the the furthest opposite of like playing squash, which is like what Whoop was originally built for. And it's just such a fun example of a different dimension of performance and to hear how physically intense and like athletic directing a TV show is.

2:29 And um, that episode was so wonderfully timed too, because it was right in the middle of season three, which was also so good. So I was watching the show, and then this episode pops up on my Spotify, and I was just like, this is so cool to get this behind the scenes and also to hear about this like incredibly like off-label use of Whoop that's actually become very on-label.

2:48 And I think it's just such a cool example when we think about how much Whoop has changed in the eight years of this podcast. Like the fact that we are the product that you know, the director of White Lotus needs to be successful in making White Lotus is such a cool evolution of where we've been.

3:04 Yeah, to frame eight years in Whoop terms, we had uh about 15,000 members when we started this podcast. And uh and now we're you know over three and a half million. So it's that that's pretty amazing in itself. I was thinking actually, as you were talking about the podcast that the two of you have done with each other that have been like science deep dives.

3:28 And I remember when we first did that, I think you guys did one on um on alcohol. And it was maybe in the first, I don't know, 20 or 30 episodes, but I had people come up to me and they're like, oh man, alcohol is bad. Like I listen to this, I listened to this podcast and these like super smart science women, Emily and Kristen, and they talked about alcohol and wow, I gotta like watch my drink.

3:54 Uh but that I remember that, and then that sort of developed naturally as a theme for us is to use this as a space where you all can go deeper on you know scientific matter.

4:05 Yeah, definitely. I know we were again we were talking last night, and we were both saying that I mean, I for me, like I have loved, I I love when I get to do podcasts with Emily because we get to go deep on subjects that we are inside of every single day and features that we love and use. And you know, it's a I think for us we we really love that.

4:23 And um, and Greg Rosicki has been on the podcast too, uh, my staff scientist, and you know, to talk about things like VO2 Max and yeah, I just to be able to um help our our members and our listeners just yes, understand the basic science, but but really understand how to how to think about the product in the context of their daily life.

4:41 And I and I think that these conversations they really do amplify that, and and and I and I think are really useful for that for that matter.

4:48 Do you have a favorite science deep dive podcast we've done?

4:52 You know, I I was thinking about I am there. I've I have like so many. Um but I I really loved uh Rachel Vickery. She's a breath mechanic specialist, and you know, you you think about how many times you breathe across the day, and you don't really think a whole lot about it. And ideally you don't have to, but a lot of people have poor breathing mechanics, and that impacts every aspect of their life.

5:16 And she the way she broke it down and and just the repetition she has with people has had over the course of the 20 years with the highest performers across CEOs and athletes and teams. And I loved her breakdown and how deep she went on the science.

5:31 You know, it's funny that you choose that one because one of the things that I feel like I have personally learned from the Woot podcast is the importance of learning to breathe. And like it took like 40 people saying it on the podcast, and it's like every single episode, it felt like it was coming up, like you have to learn to breathe properly, whether it's like Alex Honnell or like uh Michael Phelps or even everybody's talking about learning to breathe.

5:54 And I was like, I know how to breathe, I've been breathing since I was born, right? And then you like finally are like, okay, I'm gonna go see what this thing is about, like after the 40th person told me to like go do this, and you're like, oh, that's an unlock. And so I think like it's been really rewarding, like just to sometimes get to sit across from these people and be like, okay, like you're not like some crazy influencer or whatever, there you're the real deal, and I'm gonna finally take this advice.

6:19 And so I feel like I am healthier because I get to sit in the seat and talk to people.

6:23 Well, the on the breath work, interestingly, when I injured my back and I had this herniated disc for the past year, the first thing my PT people taught me how to do were uh was actually breath work and like figuring out how to get your breath to go into your lower back and feeling it and expanding it.

6:40 And it was actually a little bit hard, like you know, when you're consciously trying to move your breath. So anyway, that was that that was a great episode. I was thinking too about actually the first episode that we did, which was with David Stern, the late great David Stern, who became uh a friend and a mentor and an investor in Whoop, and of course created a lot of what we know today is the modern sports landscape with the success of the NBA, but I think really just how he rethought um media rights and growing these sports leagues.

7:10 And uh and I'll never forget him saying to me on the podcast, you know, Will, if you could extend the peak of every professional athlete just by a year, you would change sports. And so he was like obsessed with this idea of recovery and and to his credit, you know, as someone who who uh had been retired for a little while, he was still like so in the game.

7:34 And I think those conversations with folks who have extended their careers, like a Jose Bautista and you know LeBron James, and you know, you've had the benefit of talking to you know so many of those folks. I I think there's nothing more rewarding for us as a company to really help folks on that journey and to have a have a meaningful place in their lives that help them do the thing that they want to do longer.

7:55 Professional sports is is a totally different animal than working at McKinsey or something, but but they're related, you know, and you want to be able to engage your work and your craft with as much quality as possible. And and that requires a strategy, and whoop is a strategy.

8:11 One of my reflections from interviewing a lot of these professional athletes is you know, just being around them for an hour. There's like a there's a real intensity that comes off them energetically, but also a calm, which is a powerful combination to have this like you can tell, like really intense deep drive at the center.

8:31 But coupled with it being really centered. And so I felt I've definitely felt that with Cristiano Ronaldo, yeah, who's super intense, but also very grounded. Lewis Hamilton. Lewis Hamilton 100%. Uh Charles Leclerc, too. So I think it's a theme too for F1 drivers because they have to be so locked in, but they also have to not be nervous about what they're about to do.

8:52 But beyond sport, too, like I thought your interview with Sam Ross was such a great example where like he talks like an athlete. And I think that's what's so fun when we get the non-athletes on the podcast and we realize like they're using the exact same techniques and these in a lot of places got like evolved in sport and were like perfected in sport.

9:12 But the people who have figured out how to bring that into the rest of their life are the top performers in those other areas too.

9:18 And Sam is he's a fashion like designer. Yeah, top fashion designer. Yeah.

9:23 And the way he talks about like how you know he exercises because if he doesn't run, he's not creative and all that kind of stuff. I thought it was just like super interesting to think about, you know, fitness and athletic performance. It's not just about your competitive mile times and all those things, right?

9:39 It's like it's what gives your body the ability to show up in all these other places. And I think like hearing that message over and over again from all these incredible non-athlete top performers on the podcast has really made me rethink what the role of athletics is.

9:54 Diplo is another one. Yes. As you were talking, I was thinking about Diplo.

9:58 And Bert Kreischer.

10:00 Oh, yeah. Well, that was a lot of things. He's like, I'm just trying not to die.

10:03 Yeah. Much bosner, you know, they are. But yeah, I think that theme of you know being able to express themselves creatively while all uh but having their body be in a state in which it's easier to do that was quite fascinating.

10:21 And it's hard to get yourself into that creative state when you're under a covered and not training appropriately and have misaligned circadian rhythms. And you know, it's it's like the the relationship between your physiology and your capacity to show up and engage in your craft is massive.

10:36 Yeah. I liked Bert too, who's still like a self-admitting kind of wild man. But he's like, Yeah, I want to see if I, you know, if I'm really hungover, if I can still kind of get in the yellow.

10:52 Well, I think it's such a cool example of like off-label whoop usage because he's like, I still want to drink and do drugs, but I use whoops and I can still show up while doing those things on it.

11:01 Exactly.

11:02 Um to tell me if I'm dying. And he had this very funny take where right off the bat he's like, Well, you don't even know who whoop is for. Like when it's like the athletes are gonna do this stuff together. Yeah. And yeah, I liked that one. Yeah, it was funny.

11:16 I think the first thing he said in this room was fuck Michael Phelps. Which is that's a great start to the episode.

11:23 Well, one of my favorite quotes, it's okay to be obsessed, it's not okay to burn out. And uh Dr. Lori Santos said that. She's a Yale uh professor and she works across neuroscience and psychology and has actually the most popular course at Yale, and has so for I think the last 15 years. But she's she's brilliant.

11:41 And I and I love I love that framing because I I always think that when we talk about recovery, you know, folks think that it's um you're being you know less obsessed or less ambition, uh less ambitious. And it's it's that's not it at all. It it's recovery's place in performance is such that it allows you to then re-engage your task with more precision, more alertness, more clarity, more focus.

12:08 And I think that's what folks get uh get wrong when they talk about, oh, I I need to be obsessed, I need to be, you know, only sleeping three hours a night in order to like prove that I can do this thing and have the level of obsession that I need. But I think we found out that that is actually not the path.

12:22 And Lori does a great job, I think, of um of of just laying that out very clearly and and showing that indeed we don't need to to burn out. We can still be obsessed, but we have to be able to manage our recovery and understand the place um that joy plays in our life and and and playfulness and creativity and and and leaving some time and space for that and certainly for other things like sleep.

12:43 But yeah, I love her.

12:45 Obsession without burnout is also a theme that I I've felt as an entrepreneur, and also I think has come up um in a number of the interviews we've done with different CEOs on this podcast where they all talk about being obviously completely obsessed with some problem that they're trying to solve, but you need to be able to to drive at that for a long time.

13:04 Yeah. And if you want to drive at it for a long time, you can't burn out. Yeah.

13:08 Yeah, and I think there's a really interesting recurring theme with a lot of these CEOs that you talk to. It's like they all like without exception are spending meaningful time every day on like their own wellness and health. Yeah, true. And like making that a priority constantly. And I think like it it's such a like I appreciate their sort of honesty and vulnerability.

13:30 It's not I wake up at 6 a.m. and I grind on my company until midnight. It's like they're getting up early, they're reading, they're running, they're like eating well. And it's expressing gratitude. It is, you know, it's a marathon, not a sprint. And I think like what I just find so fun and fascinating is like it almost doesn't matter who sits here.

13:49 Like there's always like there are certain things that come up in like every episode. And this idea that like the the biggest drivers of performance are not getting access to that cool, like trendy berry from Africa or you know, whatever, like perfect antioxidant or perfect supplement. It's like it's sleep.

14:09unknown Right.

14:09 Big drops is like sleep, nutrition, exercise, right? And then like you've kind of solved most of the problem and just how important the basics are. I think um it's like you just need to remind people because everybody's looking for the fun peptide or whatever, but it's like none of that really is going to move the needle until the basics are in place.

14:30 Yeah, 100%.

14:32 One of the big themes I've taken from the podcasts has been just around the value of consistency and consistency and hard work. But you when you go into an interview sometimes with these professional athletes or these kind of world-class performers, I find in the back of my mind, I'm always like, oh, what's their secret?

14:51 What's the hack almost? And I think even as a listener, uh you you kind of want to know like what's the hack? And in some ways it's it's uh it's disappointing and very straightforward. Yeah. Which is like you have to work really hard every day and consistently, you know, be putting in the time and hours and and a commitment to your body too, in many of these people's stories.

15:16 Yeah, definitely.

15:17 What about you, Emily? Deep insight, great quote, anything that stands out for you from 400 episodes of the Whoop podcast?

15:26 You know, I think one of the things, one of my favorite episode types, we haven't done this in a while, but for a while we were doing a lot of these listener question episodes.

15:34 Oh, yeah, those are fun. Uh we should bring that back.

15:36 We should bring those back. Because I did a lot of those, and we would just kind of sit down, solo episode, just with the list of essentially random questions as different as we could kind of get. And I think the thing that I just continue to be so inspired by is there are a thousand different uses of Whoop, and like everybody's kind of, you know, doing their create your own journey thing with it.

16:00 And, you know, I think sometimes we sit in our product, you know, meetings and and we have this vision of people are going to use this feature in this way. And then we find out that somebody's using it, you know, for mental health. And we're like, oh, that's interesting. We didn't build this for that, or you know, they're whatever strange thing they're doing, validating some trendy product and you know, how Whoop helps them realize that this thing was legit or not.

16:23 And I think like the breadth of how wearables are showing up in people's lives, you know, the fact that like Mike White finds it indispensable to making white lotus, the fact that the best athletes in the world find our recovery score useful, even when they also have access to like the best trainers in the world.

16:41 I think it's just been really motivating and inspiring to do the work that we do.

16:45unknown Yeah.

16:45 I I was reminded as you were talking about listeners writing in of the COVID podcasts that we did. And and especially the COVID podcast where I interviewed, this was maybe like April of 2020, where I interviewed people who had gotten COVID. And it was like this, you know, like journalistic research podcast.

17:07 Yeah, yeah.

17:08 And they're talking about how my respiratory was so elevated.

17:12 Yeah, yeah.

17:12 But there's something fun about that. That might be another thing we bring back where we interview different WHO members.

17:18 Yeah, that was a fun episode. Yeah. Yeah. And I know um Vanessa, our new vice president of uh communications, she is doing a lot of this member experience. So experiences. Yeah, it'd be interesting to see how those show up. But yeah, I mean, I love I love talking to members. I think to Emily's point, like you find out these just such cool use cases.

17:38 You're like, God, I didn't even think about using Moop for that. But yeah, kind of the off-label.

17:42 Well, and it's fun because that's inspired a lot of features for us. For sure. We take that stuff and we're like, okay, can we make this on label? Um, is there, there, there. Um and I don't think people realize how much of our roadmap comes from wild questions that our members ask.

17:57 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: What can uh listeners expect in the next 400 episodes? Gosh. Maybe just even in the next 50. Like, what are some things we should be doing for the next year?

18:08 Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I kind of have like the three buckets, the science of happiness, performance, and longevity. You know, I feel like those are kind of the three that we play in. And and I I think just based on the data and the science, you know, all of these buckets are constantly evolving and changing as we we gain more research, we gain more insights, we we realize what matters to folks, and and we're able to distill, you know, down to a finer point what actually does move these metrics that we say are important to track and really giving folks the insights to spend less time on their health.

18:46 You know, I think that's where we we all kind of want to get to, is we want to free up more time to do the other stuff. And and I think when we can make this experience on our platform so seamless that we can just really direct you in ways that feel frictionless, you know, and and then you know, complement that with, you know, the expertise and the the energy of our guests.

19:09 I I feel like that creates this really beautiful moment um that is clarifying, you know, not um not confusing. And and I and I I love that's really why where I want this whole field to go is is um reducing the noise and and elevating really what matters. And and that's what I hope we can do in the next 400 episodes.

19:30 Yeah, that'd be great.

19:31 To get specific on some of that, I think one of the interesting trends outside of Whoop that's going on is AI has made it the barrier to for new companies to enter the market way lower. And so we're seeing like an explosion of products and services and things, a lot of which are junk, but a lot of which have compelling AI-generated value propositions around them.

19:53 And I think like um some of the more fun episodes that we've done in the past have been kind of like myth busting and kind of debunking. And I think um there's going to be a lot more stuff swirling around. We're also seeing not just more products, but we're seeing a rapid introduction of new medications because and new supplements and different things like that as AI has accelerated drug discovery and product development and some of these things.

20:18 And you know, we've recorded a couple episodes that haven't come out yet around you know, some of these like peptides, you know, what do we really actually know and not know and um you know, different things. And I think like Whoop is a really powerful tool in understanding if something is actually driving your personal health or not, and similar to the kind of story you were talking about around like COVID, like what's it really like?

20:41 You know, can we kind of talk to some of these people, understand these products, and help our members see through some of that noise? Because you know, longevity I think is only going to get trendier as more things are being sold to us with the promise of extending longevity. And I think some of it will be great and some of it will not be great.

20:58 Um, and there are gonna be some interesting stories to be able to do that.

21:00 And we are so uniquely positioned to investigate what is working, where is what is the there? Is there a there there? You know, and I think peptides is a really good example. We are launching a survey to all of our members to really get the nitty-gritty of we've enlisted preeminent thought leader in the area of peptides.

21:18 She's joining us on. Um she's actually gonna be on the podcast in November. Uh that's gonna be released soon. And um and we also are doing this research to to try to understand, you know, where where is the what is noise here and and what can we actually learn from from peptide use um and how it impacts physiology, and we have lots of subjective questions as well.

21:37 Um, but this will be the first study of its kind, you know. So I I think I want to continue to innovate and lead you know the followership.

21:44 I'm also so incredibly excited about some of the research that's ongoing right now. I'm very excited to bring that to the page. Yeah, we have some big things coming.

21:52 We'll have some big product deep dive soon. We've got um we're gonna do more of the member stories, maybe we'll do more uh listener questions. So if you're listening to this and you want to help affect the future of the Woop Podcast, please email us podcast at Whoop.com. We do read these emails, we will listen to them.

22:11 And Emily, Kristen, and I are very grateful to all of our listeners, such that we've done 400 Whoop podcast episodes, and uh remarkably we keep going.

22:22 Amazing. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.