Why your Whoop might tell you to up your testosterone

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they’re going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here.

Last week, our editor-in-chief Nilay Patel messaged me about his new Whoop band, which he’d gotten thanks to a generous yearlong offer from Chase. A few days later, he sent a cursed screenshot. The Whoop AI coach had recommended several ways in which he could dramatically improve his testosterone levels. Nilay gave me his blessing to share this tidbit, precisely because the idea is laughable to anyone who’s ever known him.

I did laugh, but then noticed dozens of Whoop-related pitches in my email. There seemed to be a lot of whooping about Whoop. A quick Google search revealed that the company had raised a whopping $575 million in a new round of funding, counting Abbott, Mayo Clinic, and LeBron James among its investors. This raised Whoop’s valuation to $10.1 billion and CEO Will Ahmed stated that Whoop’s next step was to prepare for an IPO. The company ended the week by suing Bevel, a startup that it claims is cribbing its app design.

Whoop was clearly in the air. Had something significantly changed since I reviewed it a year ago? I fished my Whoop MG from my Medusa’s nest of testing units. It’d been a while, and it was time to refamiliarize myself with the product. After a week of testing, all my opinions about the redesigned Whoop MG remain the same: a sometimes frustrating wearable that primarily makes sense for athletes.

What has transformed over the past year is the health and wellness tech industry at large. I’ve written about many of those changes here in Optimizer, but if I pull on the threads of why I’m seeing certain trends (AI coaches! Blood, sweat, and urine analysis! AI nutrition!) emerge, it leads back to two companies in particular: Whoop and Oura.

Wearable technology comes with a basic promise. Wear this device. Monitor your metrics and establish a baseline. If you do, you’ll be able to see when your body starts deviating from the norm. Then, you can go to the doctor, armed with a mountain of data. Doing so might just save your life — or, perhaps less dramatically, help you live healthier, longer.

It’s an attractive premise, and it has saved lives. But as I wrote in my CGM feature earlier this week, fulfilling this wearable vision is often harder than it seems and can come at a high personal cost. And this wearable promise is starting to shift. Over the last year or so, I’ve noticed a new cycle emerging. Tell people using wearables will help them take control of their health. To do that more effectively, collect even more specific and specialized data. To make sense of this massive amount of data, inject AI into the process. To justify adding AI, hop on wellness trends and frame this as a more personalized way to take control of their health.

From there, the hype cycle evolves. To reinforce the previous feature cycle, reemphasize that wearable tech will not only help people take control of their health, it will help them live longer. To do that effectively, introduce new scores that predict lifespan and aging. To make sense of new scores, update AI bots to dispense generic health advice as a resource. To justify adding AI, remind them that this personalized experience holds the key to living a longer, healthier life.

Rinse and repeat with a new wellness trend.

Engaging in this cycle can help a startup earn a seat at the big kids’ table. Whoop and Oura are two of the most successful examples of this. Both companies initially differentiated themselves from Fitbit, Apple, Samsung, Garmin, and Withings by eschewing simpler fitness tracking and focusing heavily on recovery. Step counts, calories, and activity tracking weren’t the important things. Sleep quality and how much physiological stress you took on? That was the secret sauce. Throwing in relatively unique recovery metrics with sleeker, display-free designs also sweetens the appeal among a niche, but highly influential and aspirational, clientele: professional athletes and movie stars.

But then the bigger players glommed onto the whole recovery schtick. So, both Whoop and Oura pivoted toward more innovative health features. Oura doubled down on detecting early signs of illness and estimating cardiovascular age. Whoop was one of the first wearable companies to add AI coaching in 2023. Then, both companies added partnerships to help people order blood tests and integrate the data into their platforms. Oura partnered with Dexcom to bring glucose data and added a chatbot. Whoop introduced longevity features, such as estimating how fast you’re aging by giving you a Whoop Age. (As I wrote in my MG review, the Whoop Age metric is my villain origin story.)

This isn’t inherently bad. The danger is when this cycle goes unchecked or begins outpacing necessary guardrails. What was once a clear distinction between wellness and medical features has grown increasingly blurry. Adding AI to the mix complicates things further. Then factor in both Oura and Whoop’s popularity with the very people who should be regulating these shifts. Several congressional staffers have been spotted sporting Oura Rings and Whoop bands. The devices have been embraced by the MAHA movement — RFK Jr. asserted that every American ought to be using a wearable device in the next few years. Whoop’s Ahmed met with the Health Secretary in May last year, a few weeks before that wearable proclamation. Oura has also lobbied in Washington for relaxed wearable technology regulation.

Case in point, Whoop received a warning from the FDA for a new blood pressure feature in July, which prompted Oura CEO Tom Hale to pen an op-ed proposing a digital screeners category with less stringent FDA clearance requirements. (Whoop, for the record, opposes that idea.) The FDA hasn’t fully agreed yet, but it did introduce updated wearable guidelines earlier this year. Not that long ago, Samsung cited those updated guidelines as a reason why its latest blood pressure feature didn’t need FDA clearance.

I’m naming this wearable hype cycle precisely because its ripple effects are starting to concern me. Explicitly, Whoop’s recommendation for Nilay made me think of the many influencers who have come to peddle testosteronemaxxing on social media. (“Low T” is another so-called health crisis on RFK Jr’s mind.) How many of them started supplementing testosterone because of their wearable journeys? How many ordinary people have received similar advice — and what paths did this encourage them to seek? And it’s not just testosterone. You could apply this to dozens of other health trends, like proteinmaxxing, nutrition, and perhaps even peptides.

It reminded me of the several outlandish recommendations that “innovative” wearable features have given me. I’ve been told to eat obscene amounts of protein by AI strength training features. I’ve been given training regimens that have caused repeated injuries. For all my wearables know about me, they don’t always understand what’s truly best for me. How can they?

As I wrote in my CGM feature, I’ve spent several months trying to address my metabolic issues. That’s been an ongoing, mentally challenging process. It requires a whole new set of medications, the side effects of which have made it difficult for me to work out for the past six weeks.

What have my Whoop band and Oura Ring said about that? Well, my cardiovascular age went from being seven years younger to two years. My Whoop Age says I’m five years older. My various smartwatches keep yelling that my VO2 Max is dropping. I know this is temporary — but trying to keep up with all the wellness trends and innovations baked into these platforms is something I cannot do. Alas, I am human.

That particular wisdom was hard-earned. Putting myself into the shoes of the average person? I’m starting to understand why wellness grifters have such a hold, why doctors are reporting an increase in public mistrust for evidence-based treatments, and how movements like MAHA gain traction. That, too, is its own cycle.

The healthcare system sucks and we can’t trust medical elites. Wellness grifters step in and recommend wearable tech and dubious supplements to fill the gaps. More and more people glom onto the trends. Seeking relevance and differentiation, wearable makers hop on these trends. And thus, we end up with people distrusting vaccines, injecting various peptides, and readily agreeing to hand over their blood, sweat, and urine to health tech companies.

None of this is Whoop or Oura’s fault. They’re just one, very influential part of the equation.