All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
00:09:13 · Will Ahmed, Jason Calacanis
[00:09:13] S0: Yeah. [00:09:13] S1: And my train today is incredibly low because all I've done is sit and do no work. But, you know, this is, like, super critical for me to have these numbers now. I travel. I go to Japan. I go to Saudi. I go to Davos, you know, World Economic Forum. I... I'm all over the globe, and I'm trying to regulate my sleep. I'm trying to figure out should I be on this sleep schedule or, you know, the other one, and I'm just trying to make sure I'm fresh for when I'm doing performative stuff, you know, like on on podcasts or speaking gigs, and it's essential for me now. It's just essential for me. Yeah. I can't live without it. The thing that was interesting that happened for me is you also have under those three most important metrics there The health monitor? Yeah. Have the health monitor. Now this is critical for me because twice now in the past... Yeah. I think it's two or three times now, I have had under health monitor, which has your respiratory rate, your resting heart rate, skin temperature, blood oxygen, and HRV, heart rate variability. Right now, I'm all in green. However, the other week, I'm gonna tell you this story, involves me going to the emergency room with chest pains. This is serious. Some people in the house, the kids, whatever, had a respiratory infection. I didn't get it, but I wake up one day, and my respiratory rate is two breaths higher than normal. Instead of 16, it was, like, 18 or 15, it was 17. And then my skin temperature was, like, two degrees hotter. Right? And just And
00:10:47 · Will Ahmed
[00:10:47] S0: for people listening, when your respiratory rate is elevated by two breaths like that, that's actually pretty meaningful because respiratory rate is normally a very boring statistic. It normally doesn't change at all.
00:10:58 · Jason Calacanis
[00:10:58] S1: So it's like, hey. What's going on? Then it does it a second day in a row. So then I, you know, like, do the warm bath. I I got me sure I got my electrolytes. I'm I'm thinking maybe I'm coming down with something. Anyway, I recover on Saturday, Sunday. Sunday night, I can't sleep. I start getting chest pains. I put the Tesla at 1AM and self driving, and I go to the emergency room because I used to work on an ambulance. I know, hey. You know, when you have chest pains and you're a 55 year old male, this could be serious or it could be indigestion. I go. I do every possible test. I go right to the heart center in Austin here, and they do the CT scan. I think that's the the big scan of your heart. EKGs, everything. I'm there from 1AM until 7AM. Turns out I had inflammation in my lungs, around my chest, and my heart was being constricted. So I was experiencing chest pain. I was not having a heart attack. But there was something going on, and I was alerted to it too for two days in a row without having any other symptoms. Very strange. Right? And it was the Whoop those two days early, that Thursday, Friday, that on Sunday, I was on high alert. I was like, something's going wrong with my system. It had done that. And the reason is three years ago, the same thing happened. My skin temperature is going crazy. And then in that case, I think it was my HRV. I'm like, what's going on? I got COVID. Yep. So I have two two bad scores. I'm in New York with one of my daughters, and I was able to take that Paxlovid, which you can only take if you get to it early. So I'm like, f this. Two days of, like, heat, I go... My wife goes, maybe you got COVID. I'm like, wow. That's so retro. I go right to Duane Reade. I take the test. I got it. I get Paxlovid all in the same day because the Whoop told me. So you anticipated two acute situations for me. What other acute things are are you starting to learn here now that you have 4,000,000 people in the system? I understand now you're becoming a contributor to the preemptive delivery of medical services and or, you know, you're you're starting to understand things before, let's say, the the the rest of the medical community is is learning them.
00:13:09 · Will Ahmed, Jason Calacanis
[00:13:09] S0: Oh, thanks for sharing that. I mean, that's an amazing story and I'm grateful you're feeling alright and and grateful that Whoop could could play a small role helping. I think it's it's amazing. We now get these testimonials every every day, every week from from members who haven't experienced like the one you described. I got a message last week from, you know, a fit healthy baseball player who all of a sudden saw he had these elevated heart rates while he was sleeping that looked very abnormal. Know, someone with a resting heart rate of 50 beats per minute getting a heart rate of a 120, a 130 while he's sleeping. And and he goes in to see the doctor, and they do some tests and sure enough stage four Hodgkin lymphoma. Wow. And and he was able to get treated for it and he's recovered from it. And and then, you know, another similar story where a member with their HRV, they'd been on Whoop actually for I think close to a decade. So they had this incredible baseline and an HRV for for people who are less [00:14:18] S1: familiar Yeah. Unpack that because you're the one who introduced me to this whole concept and I I have since gone down the rabbit hole.
00:14:24 · Will Ahmed
[00:14:24] S0: So HRV stands for heart rate variability. It's the amount of time between successive beats of the heart. And and it's a little counterintuitive, but the more variability in time between successive beats of the heart, the healthier your overall system is operating. And it's this lens into your autonomic nervous system, which consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. So sympathetics activation, heart rate up, blood pressure up, respiration up. It's what happens, you know, when you have a thought like the... There's a lion in the room or, you know, when you start to exercise or you're thinking about something stressful. Conversely, parasympathetic is all the opposite. Heart rate down, blood pressure down, respiration down. It's what helps you fall asleep. If you exhale for a long period of time, that's parasympathetic. And what you want is for for sympathetic activity and parasympathetic activity to be coupled, and so your body's kind of constantly regulating its environment. And when that's the case, it it means you have a higher heart rate variability, that the measurement will be higher. And we're measuring heart rate variability twenty four seven. It was really one of the the key innovations in founding the company. I did all this medical research when I was a student at Harvard and heart rate variability was a thing that jumped off the page to me because there was really interesting research on it but it couldn't be measured twenty four seven. And and so that's where, you know, part of where Whoop was born out of. Anyway, heart rate variability is something that we use for stress monitoring. It's something we use for our recovery score. And and we baseline everyone on Whoop, then we're able to show you every day, are you within your baseline? Are you a little higher? Are you a little lower? When you look at trends of this over years, you start to get a sense for is someone getting healthier over time or or less healthy? It's a really important longevity indicator. Typically speaking, as you get older, your heart rate variability will drop. So, you know, people who are in their twenties, their heart rate variability will be anywhere between, like, 80 and a 100 on average. Thirties, you start to drop to 70. Forties, you start dropping to 50. You know? Fifties, sixties, all of a sudden, you're in, you know, thirties and below.
00:16:37 · Will Ahmed, Jason Calacanis
And so if you can fight that trend, that... Those averages and keep your heart rate variability even just flat over years, that's actually a sign of good fitness, good longevity. And, anyway, back to the story I was telling you, the... This individual, they had a very steady heart rate variability that was within a specific range and all of a sudden it plummeted. So it was a healthy person. They had a heart rate variability of about a 100 and and then it was 50 all of a sudden for for a period of time. Again, goes in, gets all these tests. He turned out to have testicular cancer. Oh, wow. And so [00:17:11] S1: Now was that known previously that HRV would in some way be a a lead indicator for testicular cancer? [00:17:19] S0: I mean, I don't think so. You know? That's what's so fascinating about this moment in time is we've never had this much data on the human body continuously. One of the principles to founding Whoop was twenty four seven data. And it's it's why we have a fourteen day battery life now. It's why we we invented a charger that you slide on to your Whoop. [00:17:39] S1: I was about to say these are super important. And when you first told me about this on on this week in startups, I was like, wow. I need a... I wanna see how many steps I've done and the time. It makes no sense. And you were like, trust me, Jake. I'll... [00:17:51] S0: You know,