Will Ahmed
speaker
249 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 31 Mar
Will Ahmed’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Modern Wisdom · The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness - Will Ahmed - #943 · 19 May 2025
podcast
There's a lot of common themes amongst the world's best athletes. So, you know, Michael Phelps and Cristiano Ronaldo and Patrick Mahomes and... Rory, like I've spent a lot of time around these guys and there's a certain intensity that burns inside them that is hard to fake. Like you can kind of feel it even when you're chilling.
Ronaldo is probably the most exaggerated example of that that I've ever felt.
Just you can feel a drive, like you can feel a certain energy. you know, people, everyone kind of gives off an energy and, and depending on how healthy you are in a given day or how good you're feeling, maybe your energy is stronger or less strong, but like his, the energy that he gives off is one of, of real drive. And there's like an intensity burning there that you can't fake.
Like you can just feel it. And, and I think for a lot of these guys, there's a cost that comes with that, that we, the fans don't see. Like you don't see the, The cost of having to be the first person at the practice facility every single day and cold plunging for hours afterwards and the time away from the family and the sacrifices and all these other areas of life.
I mean, it is very inspiring when you really... get a close-up look at it and you realize just like what a grind it is like it is such a grind you see the goals and you see the the master's jacket but you don't you don't see the grind and the pain and the injuries and like the the time that they're not on camera and there's something about it that's
both inspiring and also you're like, yeah, maybe I wouldn't want to do that. Intimidating.
He's actually easier to compare to some professional athletes than any other business leader.
In just that it's clear that he's got a drive that he's... tormented by and he's willing to sacrifice everything else for it. And you see that with the world's best athletes.
Yeah, and I think athletes have gotten more introspective. Actually, Rory's extremely thoughtful, and he's gone through phases of reading books on the Stoics and meditating and all sorts of things. I think a lot of athletes end up being more introspective because they get into visualization, which becomes sort of the gateway to...
meditation, intuition, these sorts of different levels of self-discovery. And then I think there's plenty of really capable athletes who don't actually go that deep in words and they don't really analyze the, how it works as much as know that it works and they just go.
The rest thing was kind of the unlock for getting into all these pro athletes and building those relationships was this idea that you can now measure recovery. And one thing that I was really surprised by, but now makes sense kind of knowing the cast of characters is like amongst the very best athletes, they're actually willing to experiment a lot.
Like they're kind of always looking for what is that additional way I can get a little edge. And that's one of the things that separates, I think, the very best from just like a great professional athlete is this like drive towards experimentation. And it's part of the reason that in the early days of building this company, like...
someone like LeBron James or Michael Phelps was willing to wear a whoop.
I think... first and foremost, we view Whoop as a tool that anyone can use. We don't view it as your master. We view it as a tool that can make you healthier or live longer or perform better. And the general sort of broad critique of, is more knowledge better? I've always rejected. I mean, you can go back to the printing press and people being like, oh, we can't have the printing press.
God forbid so many people have access to information. So I think in almost every stage of human history, this rejection of people having more knowledge is sort of a lazy analysis. Now, there's certain things from a technology design standpoint that we've done with that in mind. So I've never believed that having a screen on the product actually made it a better tool.
And I've always thought that there's plenty of screens in the world. And do we really need one more screen that's giving you numbers that you're obsessing over and looking at and they're vibrating and alerting you? And so in many ways, we designed the product to disappear into the background and to be there when you needed it and to look at it when you need it.
And for a product that people wear 24-7, It's actually remarkably unobtrusive. You know, it's not talking to you. It's not beeping at you. It's only going to vibrate if you want it to vibrate. If you want it to wake you up. So. Yeah, we've done, I think, a lot of things around the concept of have this be a tool that's in the background versus having it being a master that's trying to control you.
Yeah, and look, I think you – well, first of all, the concept of – hiding data, that is actually one thing that we did develop against because we would have these really exaggerated examples. Like imagine you're an Olympian and you're training for four years for one day.
It turned out for the most part, the Olympians wanted to know how recovered they were, but they didn't necessarily want to see how recovered they were. So we created a toggle. This actually exists in the app today. Yeah. Where you can literally have your data collect, but it'll hide your recovery score and your sleep score. Oh.
And so in a sense, we built the George feature for Olympians a long time ago. Now, the point about it being for a week, I mean, what I would just say is just don't open the app for a week, right? And keep the thing charged because it's going to store data.
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