Hello folks, welcome to the Whoop podcast. I'm Will Ahmed, your host, the founder and CEO of WOOP.

And at WOOP, we are on a mission to unlock human performance. So we build technology across

hardware and software and analytics to better understand the human body.

And wow, does that feel like an important time right now?

I'm thinking of everyone listening to this and wishing my absolute best for you and your family

as you stay healthy during this crazy time of coronavirus COVID-19.

We feel at Woop it's incredibly important to do as much research as possible on coronavirus and

COVID-19. We've added COVID-19 tracking to the WOOP journal, which many WOOP members will

have noticed by now. We've gotten hundreds of positive responses to that, people saying that

they believe they have COVID-19 or have tested positive for it.

So we are doing lots of research on what that data may look like before, during, and after

COVID-19. Our goal is to share that with the Woop community and potentially society at large.

Now, my guest today is Nicholas Christakis, who is brilliant in so many ways

and happens to have become really one of the leading experts to talk about COVID-19.

Nicholas Christakis is MD, PhD, M-PH, sociologist and physician who conducts research in the

areas of social networks and bioscience.

He's the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science Internal Medicine and Biomedical Engineering at Yale University.

And literally the two topics that he focuses on in his research are the social, mathematical, and biological rules

governing how social networks form, which you can think of as connection, and the social and

biological implications of how they operate to influence thoughts, feelings, and behaviors,

literally the contagion. So there's really very few people who are better equipped to be

analyzing coronavirus as Nicholas. And he was on this from, I want to say, mid-January, he started

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