Will Ahmed is an entrepreneur, founder, and CEO of WHOOP. Wearable fitness tech has taken over in 2025, from sleep scores to stress tracking and everything in between. So how did WHOOP grow into a $3.6 billion giant? And how do you use the data to improve your life without letting it control you? Expect to learn why CrossFit is so unpopular now and what happened to its falloff, what the broad trends of fitness are across the globe, how to get past your self-doubt and stop being so hard on yourself, how to deal with rejection better, what it is like hanging with the world’s best athletes, how to avoid being a prisoner of your wearable fitness data, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What led to the downfall of CrossFit?
Dude, how high and how hard did CrossFit drop the ball over the last few years?
Wow, CrossFit. Well, CrossFit is, first of all, a great grassroots movement in the sense that it literally began as an email list. And it's amazing to think how far they were able to go with that. And then you've got the Greg Glassman racism stuff and like the craziness during Black Lives Matter. And then you've got this whole new leadership team that comes in.
By the way, around that time, we became partners with CrossFit. And I mean, I've now been building for 13 years, without question, the most dysfunctional partner we've ever worked with. And we've worked with a lot of partners. And a lot of dysfunction, I imagine, as well. A lot of different partners. And then the tragedy at this recent event. I don't know.
The whole thing is so poorly run, it's hard to even talk about it. Because it's such a missed opportunity.
2017?
Probably 2018? Something like that? Like absolute peak CrossFit?
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Chapter 2: How has the fitness industry evolved since CrossFit's peak?
I think so, yeah.
Yeah. If you'd said then what the next seven, eight years had in store, no one would have believed you. It's outrageous. And I think it... A lot of people, when they look at businesses from the outside, they see sophistication, they see popularity, they see a rate of adoption. The thing that nobody sees is what the internal operations of that company is like.
And sometimes it can be all shiny, shiny and perfect out front. And inside is just a total mess. It's just a dumpster fire. And it feels like that might be the case.
And they also had like a great community and a great brand, which are two things that are, that are pretty resilient. Like when things go wrong and there's like elements of dysfunction. And even with that, I mean, it's unbelievable how, yeah, how sorry of a place it is now.
Turning people that whatever consume your product or are a user into an evangelist for it. I mean, it, everybody's new fitness pursuit is their most exciting thing. Every vegan wants to tell you about veganism and every CrossFitter wanted to tell you about CrossFit and every High Rocks athlete wanted to tell you about High Rocks.
And then now every run club person is trying to get you to go to their run club on a Saturday morning and do a 5K. But yeah, the level of adoption that CrossFit had and the pace of change. And I think I get the sense that the only reason we're seeing High Rocks instead of hybrid training
come through is because of the hole that has been left by sort of the exiting of of crossfit there's some new things it's a bit it's lower impact maybe it's a little bit more accessible to go and do a high rocks event than it would have been to have tried to go to sectionals or do a local crossfit comp like i'd rather do burpee broad jumps than try and do a snatch or a handstand walk but uh yeah i don't think i think high rocks is ascendancy can be laid at the feet of what crossfit dropped i
I think there's an opportunity for a lot of these different fitness communities. I mean, you have F42, you've got Barry's, you've got Orange Theory, you've got these different types of Pilates studios. And it sort of seems like people are looking almost for the new thing. And that in turn allows for these different micro-communities to pop up around a particular activity.
And at the end of the day, I think... Weightlifting for a lot of people is intimidating. Exercise is lonely and hard. It makes sense that there are these boutique communities, so to speak. And so... I wouldn't actually attribute the success of these other communities solely to CrossFit's downfall.
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Chapter 3: What are the current trends in fitness for 2025?
The thing with at least The problem with looking at anybody through the lens of a narrow pursuit, like the success in business or the success in the sport, is that you only see the one vector that they've channeled their outputs into and you don't see any of the other fissures that their costs leaked out of. Right. Well, what if this guy hasn't had sex with his wife in like two years?
What if they're drugging themselves to go to sleep and stimulating themselves to wake up in the morning? What if their relationship with their father or their mother is just non-existent? What if they hate themselves? What if they can't bear to look at their body in the mirror? You know, all of these things happen and you go, okay. but they're the greatest, they're the best. But you want that.
Is that what you want? Because you don't, as you said earlier on, it's kind of stupid to just look at one element, either of a business or of a person and say, I really want Rory McIlroy's master's thing. Not being able to sleep on a nighttime because he's obsessing about that shot he missed. I don't really like the idea of that so much, but the green jacket, that sounds great.
It's like, you don't get to piece this person together. Someone is a whole, right? They're His level of obsession, I'm totally just throwing shade at Rory's mental state, but I imagine his level of obsession, inability to let go of things, is the reason that he's got to there. It's not some weird bug on the side of the code that makes him Rory McIlroy.
It's a feature that is a part of his performance. And yeah, this question of what is the price people pay to be someone that you admire is fucking endlessly interesting to me.
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.
I had, was I talking to this? I can't remember who it was. Uh, cultivated stupidity. We called it, uh, that, uh, Matt Fraser, good example of this, I think, actually. So Matt, in Ben Bergeron's book, Chasing Excellence, he tells this story about Matt was an engineering student, I think. And he would make himself wrote, memorize entire textbooks word for word.
And he would then sort of play them back in his head, or maybe he was writing them out. If he missed one word, he would just make himself go back to the start. So this guy was very, very smart and very, very driven and very, very obsessed. But there is a kind of... boneheadedness, and almost simplicity that you need to turn up and do 90 minutes of Zone 2 work.
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