Whoop is the world’s most advanced fitness wearable and may save your life

 You're listening to The Radcast. If it's radical, we cover it. Here's your host, Ryan
 Alford. Hey guys, what's up? It's Ryan Alford. Welcome to the latest edition of The Radcast.
 It is the middle of the week here. We're on a Wednesday recording this. You'll hear
 this on a Tuesday, but I'm really excited to be joined today by Will Ahmed, the founder
 and CEO of Whoop. What's up Will? How are we doing, Ryan? Thanks for having me. Yeah, man,
 my pleasure. I really appreciate you getting on. I know you're a busy man. And I definitely
 want to get into it. I know we talked a little bit pre-upsoared. You're in the lovely
 Boston area. We keeping warm there and you snow on the ground. No snow right this minute,
 but I'm sure it's coming. Oh, yeah. We're getting into it a little bit. In South Carolina,
 we don't get to see much of the white stuff. We get, we're an hour to the mountains and
 two hours or so to the beach, but we don't get a lot of white stuff. So we're, I'm a little
 jealous because I did live in Manhattan for a little while and miss a little bit getting
 of at least a little bit of snow here and there. So, and my kids would enjoy it. But nonetheless,
 I appreciate you getting on. I definitely want, you know, we usually just start with kind
 of getting your background and talking about the business and things like that. So maybe
 for everyone listening, you know, just a little bit of your story and, you know, what started
 whoop and all those things. So let's start there. Yeah. So I run a business today called
 whoop, which is really on a mission to unlock human performance. We build wearable technology.
 You can see on my wrist here, that's designed to measure everything about your body and,
 and I think what makes whoop different from other products in the market is that we've
 proven it can change behavior and improve health. So if you want to get fitter, if you want
 to lose weight, if you want to figure out how you can get more sleep, if you want to be
 a better executive, you name it, whoop is a product that that has had a lot of success
 in helping you, or we'll have a lot of success in helping you. I got into this space personally
 because I was in the sports and exercise. I grew up playing just a bunch of different sports
 and I ended up playing squash and hardwoods. I was a collegiate athlete and I felt like I didn't
 really know what I was doing to my body while I was training. I was someone who used to overtrain,
 which is kind of a sin. You get fitter and fitter and fitter and then you fall off a cliff.
 I think a lot of hard driving people, whether it's overtraining or burning out, don't have the right
 balance in their life. Anyway, for me, at a young age, I realized I didn't have the right balance in
 my life and I got very interested in what I could measure about my body to better understand it.
 What does it mean to train optimally? What does it mean to be healthy? These were just basic
 questions that I was surprised that there wasn't a whole technology business, what not around.
 I did a lot of physiology research while I was at Harvard. I read something like 500 medical
 papers while I was in school, which was frankly a lot. I wrote a paper around how I thought
 how I thought you could continuously measure the human body and that paper really became the
 business plan for WOOP and so I founded the company My Senior Year and by summer of 2012,
 we were kind of off for the races and so I've been building the business for
 eight and a half years now and it's been quite a journey and right now we're having a lot of
 success. Well, yeah, it couldn't be a better time period and we'll get to that and the implications
 for COVID, which have been really interesting. And I am aware of myself, shameless plug there for
 you. I guess four weeks or so is right around the hall a little before the holidays. It's just
 been fascinating. I do want to ask you a couple of questions when we get into it. But I did find
 some interesting stuff with how you started the company. I read some of the GQ articles, a
 few other things and it was really interesting to me this notion of the contrary and belief with
 which you started because when I think about I've worn everywhere a bowl and a lot of my friends
 of people that I've run with, where everything and it's always about heart races,
 the same old thing. It's heart rate, what's your fitness level, how much exertion have you had,
 and you kind of flip the whole thing on its head looking at the other side of it, which is the
 recovery aspect. Is it just your smart guy and you thought through that on the other side?
 Or what kind of took you down that path of the recovery and the sleep in and the importance of
 all those things? It's a great question. When I was a college athlete and I would talk to other
 athletes and I would talk to coaches about training optimally, so much of the focus was on training.
 And in fact, around when I knew I was going to start a whoop, I went and interviewed coaches
 and said, if you could have technology to understand your athletes better,
 what would you want that technology to be able to do? It was always so focused on practice,
 games, training. Could we get better video analysis? Could we get better weightlifting
 strain? Could we get better sweat analysis? What I realized is that there was a blind spot.
 And the blind spot was what's actually going on the other 22 hours of the day?
 And I also realized just personally that that's probably where I was falling over.
 I thought if I did a great practice and really worked my ass off, it almost didn't matter what I
 did after that. I could stay up late, I could party, whatever. And it couldn't have been
 further from the truth. And in fact, I was erasing all the gains of training by not recovering
 properly. And it's not so obvious to see that today. But for whatever reason, 10 years ago,
 that was a somewhat like contrarian point of view. And I think it was also around the time where
 exercise had sort of top ticked on the pendulum. It was not can you do a two a day. Could you
 even be doing a three a day? You know, it was just as crazy like more is more is more.
 And the other thing that was interesting is that when I talk to coaches about, well, what problems
 are you trying to solve? What are your biggest issues? It always came back to availability and
 injuries. You know, this idea that coaches had athletes who would get injured or would over train
 or weren't actually able to play on the day of the game that they needed to play.
 And so this is a good insight for any entrepreneurs listening to this. I would encourage you
 to ask your customers what their problems are, not necessarily ask them what solutions they think
 you should build. It's your responsibility as an entrepreneur as a business leader to figure
 out what the solution should be to their problems. And often customers are phenomenal at describing
 problems and less capable at describing solutions. And so that's what I realized, you know,
 I've realized this years later, but in that moment in time, I was just recognizing a better way
 to solve their problems. And that was around understanding recovery and sleep. And we've talked
 about this Ryan from a very sports centric point of view. Admittedly, whoops, you know, our origins
 are in sports. You know, we had the best athletes in the world wearing whoop from the very early days.
 Two of our first 100 members were people like LeBron James and Michael Phelps. So we just started
 at this, you know, tip of the pyramid. However, today, which really is whoop as a big business now,
 we're, I mean, we're serving virtually every type of person. And I think what holds the whoop
 audience together is that it's a somewhat aspirational group of people who have something in their life
 they want to exceed at or improve at. And they can use whoop to find this balance to understand
 how much they're sleeping, how much they're recovering, what the strain is that they're putting on
 their body, how different behaviors in their life are affecting their body. And they can use that
 information to perform at a higher level. So we, we very authentically took a formula that made the
 best athletes in the world effective and have now been able to deliver it to a much wider market.
 I love that, especially the notion of balance because, you know, when you think about, you know,
 motivation and the people, you know, like you mentioned, you know, 18 years ago, especially on social
 media, whether it's a high performing person or athlete or a business person, it was always like,
 well, how can I sleep three hours at night and how can I get, you know, more out of my day.
 But the notice, but the issue with that and having gone through some of that myself is, you know,
 that, that seems to work for, you know, how, you know, individually, maybe a month or two.
 But then you burn yourself out. Maybe the highest performers and the best athletes can make that
 last longer. But this notion of recovery and balance in your life in general, I think is, is dead
 on and obviously why I think you're building success because there's not been that point of
 you from the other fitness trackers and the other things out there until even to this day and
 having been in the space a little bit, I started hearing about you guys and it just felt right.
 And so I think you're going to, you know, as you guys get more, you're obviously mainstream,
 you know, now with a PGA tour agreement and all that, I do want to talk about that.
 Can you talk about before I get into maybe some of those bullet points? Like,
 for those, you know, we have a lot of CO types or aspiring entrepreneurs and things like that
 for the podcast. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, building the company? You know,
 some of the nuts and bolts of the realities of being an entrepreneur, a young entrepreneur,
 and, you know, having an idea, bringing it to life. Because I think a lot of people think that
 stuff happens overnight, but, you know, whoops, what, eight, nine years into making now. And now,
 you're seeing, you know, the fruits of this, and that's been building. But can you talk a little
 bit about it from that entrepreneur's and business growth standpoint? Yeah, I'll start with a
 positive point of view, at least I'll frame it as positive, which is that starting a company and
 building a business is much harder than you think it'll end up being. But it's not nearly as hard
 as probably most people in your life will tell you, which is that it's impossible.
 You know, I think that the hardest thing for me in building Woob was less so the actual business
 side of it, but more so me being comfortable growing into running today, what is, you know,
 now a business value over a billion dollars, right? Like, how do you grow into that? How are you
 making sure that you personally are advancing as a leader? And how do you deal with criticism
 along the way, self-doubt along the way? You know, it's a very vulnerable role being an entrepreneur
 because it exposes you, it exposes you to what your weaknesses are in such an obvious,
 transparent way. And what your strengths are too, which is in why in so many ways, I think people
 overstate the risks to starting a company or overstate the risks associated with being an
 entrepreneur, because the process for becoming an entrepreneur for starting something reveals so
 much about who you are as a business leader, what your strengths are, your character, where your
 holes are, what you need to improve. I mean, it reveals that so rapidly and so effectively
 that regardless of whether the business ends up being a success, you as an individual have learned
 so much about yourself and what it actually takes that you will go on most likely to do
 incredibly great things afterwards. So I'll just say that sort of first and foremost,
 the process for becoming an entrepreneur and for building a business I think is an incredibly
 powerful one for anyone listening. The other thing that I'll say is that there's this thing that
 happens, at least it happened to me, where you start a company and you start immediately comparing
 yourself to like the best entrepreneurs, you know, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, whatever,
 these people wouldn't be struggling with this thing. And here I am, I've got four people on my team
 and two of them are co-founders and I'm struggling to get the fifth person, like gosh, they would
 just never would have had to deal with this. And I think that's a really unhealthy mindset and one
 that I overcame as well, where you're trying to compare yourself to other executives, other leaders,
 other entrepreneurs, and really you just have to focus on how can you become a better version of
 yourself in this role? And I'll bet you that when those heroes that we think of today as entrepreneurs
 were first starting a company, they didn't know that much more than you did. I mean, I really
 believe that. I think the key thing though that they did much faster than everyone else is how
 they got better themselves. And it's why if you look at what they've been able to accomplish later
 in their careers, it's so powerful. And it's why many of the best entrepreneurs also have these
 sort of like failed early startups in their careers too, or things that weren't nearly as successful
 as what they did later. So again, I come back to this idea that you have to keep comparing yourself
 to yourself on that growth journey. I like that. And you know, you didn't say it, but again,
 I've read enough about your process and that notion of a lot of those you just named the ambition
 in the idea and making sure that's grand enough so that you know, you're kind of beating your
 competition ahead of the game, which I really like because I think a lot of people boxed themselves
 into the limits of the idea because it may seem easier. But while you're at it, what you're going
 to all these links be ambitious. And you know, I think that's what you've done with whoop. And you know,
 you're so I don't have every map shirts on your guys were at competitive radar and all that,
 but you're already so far ahead, you know, that it that and I think that's what some of the best
 entrepreneurs have done, whether that was, you know, Bezos or Jobs or whatever, you know, it was so
 ambitious. And you know, I think, you know, can you touch on that a bit? I mean, for the listeners
 that may not have read every article I already have. Yeah, you know, look, I think that again,
 back to this moment, like early stage of the company, one of the things that I constantly was told
 was that the vision for whoop was too ambitious. That why are you trying to build hardware and
 software and analytics and design it all from scratch and manufactured all from scratch? And I
 believe, well, the key is that you need to have this vertically integrated system so that you
 control every element of it. So you at the end of the day could actually deliver on this value.
 You know, people would say to me, well, why don't you just build software on top of
 the Fitbit or software on top of the Apple Watch or whatever, right? And I thought that was
 such a flawed way to think about the market and it totally missed the actual problem that you
 were trying to solve and the end user experience for the customer, which at the end of the day is
 the most important thing. And so this was a recurring piece of criticism. And in fact, I'll just
 say broadly, I think that the more ambitious your idea is the more potential it is, that's obvious,
 but it has all these lists, it has all these other benefits that you sort of don't fully appreciate
 in the moment. The first is, for example, that you end up being able to recruit in scenely good talent.
 Like the best, best talent by far. You know, today, whoop has a 96% job offer acceptance rate,
 which in like the world of engineering is kind of unheard of. And the reason we have such a high
 job acceptance rate is that what we're doing is so hard that it attracts these like insanely
 competent people because they want to work on the hardest problems. You know, it's why SpaceX and
 Tesla, for example, also have, I'm sure, amazing engineers because they're doing stuff that's on
 the cutting edge. So if you're doing stuff on the cutting edge, I think you inherently have these
 advantages of being able to attract really great talent. You also have the opportunity to work with
 other very cool brands because those brands want to associate themselves with the next thing,
 like the cool cutting edge thing. I mean, look, it has limitations or challenges. First of all,
 you have to be able to raise a lot of capital. This was something I got better at over time.
 Whoop has raised like $200 million. I mean, at this point, over $200 million of capital in
 order to pursue this vision. And you said it yourself, like, you know, we've been building the
 business for eight, nine years, but six or seven years into it, the whole thing almost blew up,
 or you know, went bankrupt. You know, so are you, you know, are you willing to really put that
 much time into something to see your vision through? I think you also need to know that if you're
 going to take something on that super ambitious. How's, you know, on the raising capital side,
 and I know we could go down this road for more time than we have, but what was that like for you,
 you know, being, you know, a young entrepreneur, you've got a great idea. You're building it.
 Where do you, did you know that that was the path? I mean, were you just insightful enough,
 or did you have ins, or people are telling you like to get this where you got to go? You're going
 to have to take on investors. And then once you take on investors, did you feel more pressure of
 suddenly not that you aren't the owner? You're still the CEO, the founder. You still have all the,
 a lot of skin in the game, but what was, what was that, you know, what was that like?
 You know, I think it's, it's like a lot of things that we've discussed where, again,
 you have to keep getting better at it. I think, you know, for example, raising the first 700 grand
 as a 22 year old found in Woog was harder than the last round of financing in which we raised
 $100 million. So don't, you know, don't ever look at the headline big number. All of these things
 are relative to the stage that you're at, the proof points that you're at, and also how much time
 you've spent raising money. I mean, now I've spent nine years learning how to raise capital. So I
 think I've started to understand the ins and outs and what investors are looking for and what
 they're not looking for. So anyway, I bring up those two numbers, though, just for your audience,
 to appreciate like just because you're having a hard time raising that first 250 grand or that
 first million dollars or whatever it is, it doesn't mean you can't go on to raise an enormous
 amount of capital. It's, it's just learning, it's learning the fundraising process. The other thing
 I'll say that I feel fortunate about is I have, I've raised capital from investors that I've built
 great relationships with over time. And, and I will say that, you know, when you take capital from
 someone, it's, it's like a marriage, except that you can't get divorced. I mean, it's, it's,
 there's a real bond that happens there. You're now both on the capital. And so, you know, you need
 to just be pretty thoughtful about that. And I would also say that you don't want to, you don't
 want to take any capital. You want to make sure that there's some real alignment around what
 you're, what the vision is for that capital. And that's, that's been another thing that I think
 has boated well for who've been being very ambitious. You know, there, it itself selected out
 investors who were maybe at the early stage scared of losing their money. They knew that there
 were some real technology risks. And so they said, like, let's take it on. Whereas now at a later
 stage, you know, it's more of a, it's more of a business model story. You have to think about
 these things relative to the stage as well. You know, is, you know, transitioning a bit, we are
 a marketing podcast. I mean, what were, you know, maybe some of the, the successful, you know,
 marketing tactics or, you know, in the early days versus now, I mean, obviously with the PGA
 agreement, certainly helps when you have a killer product and you get some organic things
 already happening, you know, anybody would love to have, you know, LeBron or, or Justin Thomas
 or whoever, you know, throw your, throw your band on. And I mean, I know some of those are
 starting to probably become paid engagements. But, you know, maybe talk about some of the early
 marketing tactics versus where we're at now. Well, one strong point of you I had around the
 product was that it needed to be able to be good enough such that a famous person, a professional
 athlete, someone who wanted to improve would wear whoop and we weren't going to pay them. Like,
 essentially, we didn't need to sponsor everyone who wore the product. And I said that if the product
 delivered on its value proposition was, which was that it could measure recovery, it could tell you
 how hard to work out. It should tell you what to go to bed. It could make you a better athlete
 person, you name it. Then people should pay us for that. And by the way, if if it didn't deliver
 on those things, there was no amount of money we could pay someone to wear something 24-7
 that they weren't getting value out of. I mean, ask yourself how many things in your life do you
 wear 24-7? And so, you know, and we saw them. What's that? Very few. Yeah, right. So we saw this
 with like the Nike fuel band, for example, which was, you know, sort of a Fitbit like wearable in 2013
 or 2014. And they had athletes like LeBron James and Tiger Woods and Serena Williams. And meanwhile,
 none of those athletes were wearing the Nike fuel band, even though they were paying these guys
 like hundreds of millions of dollars. So it was obvious to me that we were never going to sort of pay
 our way into the sports world. We needed to authentically build the best product. And we held
 that to such a high bar that it became actually a marketing strategy in that athletes paid for
 who we didn't sponsor them. And that was a really strong point of view. And what it did
 is then when you saw these athletes wearing the product, it had a real authenticity around it.
 And so we were able to authentically build a brand, which was also a marketing strategy. You
 know, we said early on we wanted to be a brand. Not every company needs to be a brand to be successful.
 But we believe that health monitoring as a broad landscape would consolidate around brands
 that, you know, it would make all the sense in the world that a company that owned human performance
 would be a brand. And so while the product I've always wanted to build a product that added value
 for really a wide audience of people, added value for a wide audience of people, the brand I
 always liked the idea of it being anchored around high end performance. You know, I think that so much
 of what we learn in health and fitness has come from professional athletes. And I think it's
 often taken for granted, you know, the fact, for example, that weightlifting really, you know,
 started with pro athletes in the 90s. You know, it wasn't that long ago. I mean, so let's call
 that 25 maybe 30 years tops, where most professional athletes lifted weights. I mean, now you can't go
 to a hotel in America that doesn't have a gym. And that story, I think, just permeated directly
 through sports into society. And so I've believed for a while that the next version of that story
 will be around sleep and recovery. And you're starting to see this happen, right? You read a 5,000,
 you know, word ESPN report on like LeBron James spending a million dollars a year on his
 body to recover, right? Like there's just it's the new, it's the news angle that people are
 talking about sleep and recovery. And so I think a lot of that story is being told by the best
 athletes in the world. And so I always wanted whoop to be anchored in sports. And so as a result,
 that's also where we've looked for for big marketing partnerships. Whoop just became the official
 recovery wearable of the PGA tour. So that's a, you know, a situation where every member of the PGA
 tour is going to be wearing whoop. And we're going to be creating a lot of
 cool visualizations around data for those players. Although again, the reason that deal came
 came to be Ryan was that all those golfers were actually wearing whoop organically. And that's
 where we realized, oh, this is going to be a great partnership because these guys organically like
 the product. So hopefully that puts a bow on some of what I'm saying here where you want to find
 people who authentically organically use your product and then help tell stories with that.
 Yeah, I love it. So I'm sure like you just mentioned the organic with PGA tour. I mean,
 is there anything you can talk about? I mean, I'm not asking you for like numbers of, but I'm
 assuming this is a, this is a paid agreement between whoop and PGA on some level. Are they,
 but you're also giving them data. I mean, there's a lot, there's a fairly equal, not equal,
 but there's a mutual exchange happening there for both them and you not to mention.
 You know, so maybe start there, but the, the, the, the COVID aspect, which was just fascinating
 with Nick Watney this past summer in the notion of the advanced data that you guys are getting
 with these things are, are now leading to potential, if not early, real time, you know, signals that
 someone might have COVID. I know that was kind of a dual question there, but anything more specific,
 you can say around the PGA agreement, you know, as far as, you know, how that will work and things
 like that. Well, our PGA tour relationship probably goes back a couple years now where, you know,
 we discovered that about 50% of the PGA tour was organically wearing the product. You know,
 the, the way that I would discover that is just by watching golf on the weekend and I would see
 it on their, all the risks. And so I got to know a bunch of the players in that process and
 then COVID hits and golf says it wants to be one of the first sports that comes back.
 And Nick Watney, who is one of the professional golfers who had worn loop for a long time,
 test negative for COVID-19 on a Tuesday, the tournaments on a Thursday, he plays in the tournament
 on Thursday, wakes up on Friday and looks at his whoop data, right? So he looks in the whoop app
 and he sees that his recovery is incredibly low. Recovery is like this metric we give from zero
 to 100% red yellow green. He's got a red recovery, which means his body's really run down.
 And he also had something on whoop, which is called an elevated respiratory rate.
 So what is that? Respiratory rate is a measurement of breaths per minute.
 So, you know, most people have on average about 10 to 20 breaths per minute while they're sleeping.
 And it's a very static statistic. It really doesn't change. So Nick Watney,
 if you looked at his data for 10 months, every single day, he would wake up with a respiratory rate of
 14. It's a very boring statistic, doesn't change. However, this morning he wakes up with this red
 recovery and a respiratory rate of 18 and a half breaths per minute. So for 10 months, no change.
 And then all of a sudden it's 18 and a half breaths per minute. And we had just published all
 this research showing that an elevated respiratory rate could be a predictor of COVID-19.
 Now that's quite a statement. Why would we say that? Well, we had thousands of whoop members get
 tested for COVID-19. And we saw that the ones who tested positive all had this elevated respiratory
 rate. And in fact, an elevated respiratory rate caught about 80 percent of the cases who of
 these whoop members who got COVID-19. Now, this is published research. It's been peer-reviewed.
 I encourage listeners to look it up. So we have this peer-reviewed research that shows an elevated
 respiratory rate can be a predictor of COVID-19. And Nick Watney sees that he has this super-elevated
 respiratory rate. Now, just to be clear, why does it matter that you have an elevated respiratory
 rate? COVID-19 is a lower respiratory tract infection. So it makes all the sense in the world that if
 you have a lower respiratory tract infection, your respiratory rate would go way up. Anyway, Nick goes
 to see the doctors on this morning instead of playing in the tournament. He says, look, I think I
 should be tested again. They say, you're clear to play. He says, no, I've got an elevated
 respiratory rate on whoop. They say, what is whoop? Okay, you can figure it. And so anyway,
 they test him again. What is this whoop we're talking about? Who are you out with last night?
 So they test him again and sure enough, he tests positive and he's able to drop out of the
 tournament. And within 24 hours of the PGA tour learning of this story from Nick and the background,
 they procured 1,000 whoop straps, not just for every player on the tour, but also for every
 caddy, every media member, everyone in the bubble. Because again, if you're creating a bubble,
 you want to have everyone as safe as possible. So that was this summer. And then over the course of
 the past six months, we started talking about what would be a partnership that could one benefit
 player help, but two also help elevate the whoop brand and do some things around fan engagement
 that baby unique. And that's where we came up with this idea of whoop live. And whoop live is
 essentially our brand name for putting physiological data on videos. So you can do this in the whoop app
 even if you go to the camera, you can put your heart rate, you can put your calories, you can put
 your strain in real time on top of a video. And so we got thinking about, well, what if you were
 watching golf in real time, and you could see Rory McElroy's heart rate as he's putting on 18,
 or you could see what was happening inside his body during a high pressure moment.
 And so that's where we came up with this idea of whoop live and we're going to have a lot more to
 come with it. Hopefully the marketer is listening to this can appreciate how fun of an idea it is.
 Yeah, and so it's a five year deal and a lot of it comes down to improving player health and
 performance and creating whoop live, which we think is going to improve the broadcast experience
 and improve the fan experience. Yeah, that's awesome. And yeah, we'll see.
 You'll probably be a whole I can just think of the applications of who's got the lowest heart rate
 over the most critical puts. You know, I bet you it's, you know, Brant's net occurs.
 One of the really good putters, they probably just have like a flat line heart rate or something.
 I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I don't know either, but it's intriguing. It's very intriguing.
 One of the interesting things about COVID was, you know, they started showing all these replays
 of old sporting events. And, you know, you're watching the Masters in 1997 or the Super Bowl in
 the early 2000s or whatever. And I remember thinking to myself, like, gosh, this is over 20 years ago.
 And how can I tell that it's over 20 years ago versus the broadcast today?
 And really the only difference, I mean, the only meaningful difference is the resolution of the
 camera. And if you think about how much our world has changed in the last 20 years, you know,
 doesn't that seem kind of underwhelming? Very. And I think professional sports broadly has gone
 through this, this sort of crazy bull run. You know, you bought a sports team. It went up. You're a
 player, point guard, all star in 2010 versus 2020. You're now making more money, right? It's like
 everything's just been up and to the right. And so when your winning innovation comes more slowly,
 right? And I think what's what's about to happen, and we're starting to see this with some
 serious rating declines for certain sports leagues. What we're starting to see is the evidence
 that there is a younger generation coming up that is glued to their phones. I mean, a lot of
 generations are glued to their phones. But pro sports today are competing with TikTok,
 Netflix, sleep, you know, like they're competing with things that that 20 years ago, maybe they
 weren't competing with the same way. And I mean, you know, those things barely existed 20 years ago.
 You know, in the case of at least TikTok and some of these other social platforms. So I just
 think that you're going to need to see pro sports adapt and innovate in a way that they haven't.
 And I think, you know, the leagues that do are going to continue to thrive. And I think that,
 you know, in the next 10 years, we may see a major sports league disappear. You know, if they don't
 innovate, you know, I think I think there could be real trouble ahead. Yeah, baseball might be on
 that list. I mean, it's talk about just the speed of the game. And you know, golf is playing with
 that too. And I think that's why it's brilliant to be integrating things like this that make it more
 interesting. The data points, the live aspect, because you know, golf is the biggest complaint for
 non players, watchers is just the speed of the game as well. So they're doing things like this that
 make a ton of sense for making that a more engaging experience because look, there's only so much
 you can do to speed up the game. So you've got to add interesting things that make the engagement,
 you know, more to the attention spans of today. And let's face it when in the TikTok world,
 we live in for a younger audience at spans, I think exactly 8.7 seconds. Maybe less.
 Yeah, yeah. So anyway, that's, you know, I hope we can play a role in that innovation,
 but I'm also a sportsman. So I hope that I hope that all the leagues are are thinking right now,
 like what can we do differently and and taking that very seriously? Well, as we close out well and
 I appreciate your time on this, but where are we going? I mean, you know, obviously you were way
 ahead of the game. It's landing perfect for you with being in the position you are with not that
 anyone's wishing for a pandemic by any means. I know that, but your position well because
 there's just more overall awareness of health and recovery and all these things and obviously the
 benefits that Woop has with identifying maybe some of those markers. So again, being an innovative
 company though, what what's the in game for you? Maybe with both the business and for yourself
 personally? And I know that's a loaded statement, maybe not in game, but you know, where do we want to
 see things go? You know, I do think that Woop has the opportunity to be like a massive standalone
 business much bigger even than we are today. And I think a lot of our
 responsibility is going to be helping individuals understand and improve their health.
 And it's it's no easy thing to change behavior. It really isn't. And it's and it's certainly
 no easy thing to improve health. But you know, we as society are realizing from a global pandemic
 that feelings are kind of overrated. You know, you can have this virus and be asymptomatic and give it
 to a loved one and it gets that person incredibly sick and God forbid they die, right? And so I
 think you know, I think everyone's sort of waking up to this realization that feelings are overrated
 and in fact, there may be things that you can measure about your body that can help you understand
 the status of your body. You think about the health care system today. It costs a fortune
 and it's so inefficient. For example, should I go see a doctor on a random day of the year?
 Or should I go see a doctor 30 minutes before something's about to happen?
 You know, I mean, to me, all this, everything around medicine and health care
 improves when it's preventative versus curative. All the cost reductions are optimized around
 preventative care. And so I think wearable technology can play a huge role in in preventing
 on the preventative side of this and creating awareness. And then when something does have been
 providing that alert. So you'll see over time, we'll play a much bigger role in health broadly.
 And there's a lot of horrible things that have come from this global pandemic.
 But one positive I would take from it is that I think society at large is now taking a very close
 look at the health care system, at broad health awareness and is saying, yeah, this is something
 we really need to get right over the next decade. I love it. So what about you personally?
 I mean, you know, like do you see, are you in the, is this the brand or is this, you know,
 you never could really see Steve Jobs disconnected from Apple. I mean, is Will Ahmed and Woop
 are and you know, do you see this being the the forever rider? Do you have like, are you a good,
 you see yourself being a serial entrepreneur? Well, I'm someone who's all in until I'm not. So,
 you know, right now it's all in on Woop. It's making Woop the biggest success it can be. It's
 certainly a mission I'm incredibly passionate about. It's working with a group of people. I'm
 incredibly passionate about and who I think are exceptionally brilliant. And look, I gotta keep
 growing too. You know, 12 months ago, Woop had 100 employees today. We've got 375, right?
 The the role of a CEO for 100 people versus 375 is different. And I know we're going to blank and,
 you know, probably be at 700 or 1000. So, you know, I have to make sure I can keep growing. And so
 that's exciting too. I love it. And you know, I think you're blending what you're searching for,
 which is this humility combined with an intensity that I feel. And I think you're going to get
 where you plan to go. And I really appreciate you coming on. Will Ahmed founder and CEO, tell
 everyone will if they want to keep up with you and the brand, obviously all those locations where
 they can find you. Yeah, you can learn more about Woop just at woop.com that's w-o-o-p.com.
 You can find me on social media at Will Ahmed. And then at Woop as well. And I also host a podcast
 where I interview, you know, interesting athletes, entrepreneurs, CEOs, you name it. And that's
 the Woop podcast. And you can find that as well on everywhere podcasts are hosted.
 And really appreciate it. And really appreciate the time. It's the big things for Woop.
 I'm going to keep track in my HRV and hopefully getting that up. It seems to fluctuate a bit,
 but it all seems to come back to my five and a half hours of sleeps, which needs to get up as well.
 Keep that HRV high. Keep the respiratory rate flat. Keep the sleep disturbances low. You got it all
 gone. And I'm going to keep doing it. Well, that's, I, hey, man, I want to follow up with you in
 the next eight. You went from 100 to 375. And let's follow up in the next eight to 12 months and
 see where we're at then. Okay, that sounds good. Ryan, I appreciate your time. Thank you for having me
 on. Thanks, Will. All right, guys, we really appreciate Will coming on today. You know where to find
 everything the radcast. That's the radcast.com at the.rad.cast on Instagram. And you know where to find me on
 Instagram at Ryan offered. And we really appreciate you listening in and we'll see you next time.
 Yo, guys, what's up, Ryan offered here. Thanks so much for listening. Really appreciate it. Do
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 you can text me directly at 864 729 3680. Don't wait another minute. Let's get your business going.
 864 729 3680. We'll see you next time.