Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Matt Walker,
00:00:02 sleep scientist, professor of neuroscience
00:00:04 and psychology at Berkeley, author of Why We Sleep,
00:00:08 and the host of a new podcast called The Matt Walker Podcast.
00:00:14 It’s 10 minute episodes a couple of times a month,
00:00:17 covering sleep and other health and science topics.
00:00:20 I love it and recommend it highly.
00:00:22 It’s up there with the greats,
00:00:24 like the Huberman Lab Podcast with Andrew Huberman,
00:00:28 and I think David Sinclair is putting out
00:00:30 an audio series soon too.
00:00:32 I can’t wait to listen to it.
00:00:33 I’m really excited by the future of science
00:00:36 in the podcasting world.
00:00:38 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors,
00:00:41 Stamps.com, Squarespace, Athletic Greens,
00:00:45 BetterHelp, and Onnit.
00:00:47 Their links are in the description.
00:00:49 As a side note, let me say that to me,
00:00:52 a healthy life is one in which you fall in love
00:00:55 with the world around you, with ideas, with people,
00:00:58 with small goals and big goals, no matter how difficult,
00:01:02 with dreams you hold onto and chase for years.
00:01:05 Life should be lived fully.
00:01:07 That, to me, is the priority.
00:01:10 That, to me, is a healthy life.
00:01:12 Second to that is the understanding and the utilization
00:01:15 of the best available science on diet, exercise,
00:01:18 supplements, sleep, and other lifestyle choices.
00:01:22 To me, science in the realm of health is a guide
00:01:26 for what we should try, not the absolute truth
00:01:28 of how to live life.
00:01:30 The goal is to learn to listen to your body
00:01:33 and figure out what works best for you.
00:01:35 All that said, a good night’s sleep can be a great tool
00:01:39 in making life awesome and productive,
00:01:41 and Matt is a great advocate of the how and the why of sleep.
00:01:46 We agree on some things and disagree on others,
00:01:49 but he’s a great human being, a great scientist,
00:01:52 and, as of recently, a friend with whom I enjoy
00:01:55 having these wide ranging conversations.
00:01:58 This is the Lux Friedman podcast,
00:02:00 and here is my conversation with Matt Walker.
00:02:05 You should try these shades on.
00:02:06 Let’s see what you look like.
00:02:11 So they are now your shades, and that’s not the question.
00:02:14 It’s the same thing as Putin took the Super Bowl ring,
00:02:17 and it’s now his ring.
00:02:18 Yeah, one wonders if he was offered it,
00:02:22 but they are yours.
00:02:26 When did you first fall in love with the dream
00:02:31 of understanding sleep?
00:02:32 Like, where did the fascination with sleep begin?
00:02:38 So back in the United Kingdom,
00:02:41 you can sort of start doing medicine at age 18,
00:02:44 and it’s a five year program,
00:02:46 and I was at the Queen’s Medical Center in the UK,
00:02:50 and I remember just being fascinated
00:02:52 by states of consciousness, and particularly anesthesia.
00:02:57 I was thinking, isn’t that, within seconds,
00:03:00 I can take a perfectly conscious human being,
00:03:03 and I can remove all existence of the mentality
00:03:07 and their awareness within seconds,
00:03:10 and that stunned me.
00:03:12 So I started to get really interested in conscious states.
00:03:15 I even started to read a lot about hypnosis,
00:03:19 and all of these things, hypnosis,
00:03:22 even sleep and dreams at the time,
00:03:24 they were very esoteric.
00:03:25 It was sort of charlatan science at that stage,
00:03:29 and I think almost all of my colleagues and I
00:03:33 are accidental sleep researchers.
00:03:36 No one, as I recall, in the classroom
00:03:38 when you’re sort of five years old,
00:03:40 and the teacher says,
00:03:41 what would you like to be when you grow up?
00:03:44 No one’s putting their hand up and saying,
00:03:45 I would love to be a sleep researcher.
00:03:48 And so when I was doing my PhD,
00:03:51 I was trying to identify different forms of dementia
00:03:55 very early on in the course,
00:03:57 and I was using electrical brainwave recordings to do that,
00:04:00 and I was failing miserably.
00:04:02 It was a disaster, just no result after no result.
00:04:07 And I used to go home to the doctor’s residence
00:04:09 with this sort of little igloo of journals
00:04:11 that at the weekend I would sort of sit in and read,
00:04:15 and which I’m now thinking,
00:04:16 do I really want to admit this?
00:04:18 Because it sounds like I had no social life,
00:04:19 which I didn’t, I was a social leper.
00:04:21 But, and I started to realize that some parts of the brain
00:04:26 were sleep related areas,
00:04:29 and some dementias were eating away
00:04:31 those sleep related areas.
00:04:33 Other dementias would leave them untouched.
00:04:35 And I thought, well, I’m doing this all wrong.
00:04:38 I’m measuring my patients while they’re awake.
00:04:41 Instead, I should be measuring them while they’re asleep.
00:04:43 Started doing that, got some amazing results.
00:04:47 And then I wanted to ask the question,
00:04:49 is that sleep disruption that my patients are experiencing
00:04:54 as they go into dementia,
00:04:55 maybe it’s not a symptom of the dementia.
00:04:57 I wonder if it’s a cause of the dementia.
00:05:01 And at that point, which was, cough, cough, 20 years ago,
00:05:07 no one could answer a very simple fundamental question.
00:05:11 Why do we sleep?
00:05:12 And I at the time didn’t realize
00:05:17 that some of the most brilliant minds in scientific history
00:05:19 had tried to answer that question and failed.
00:05:22 And at that point, I just thought, well,
00:05:24 I’m going to go and do a couple of years of sleep research
00:05:27 and I’ll figure out why we sleep.
00:05:30 And then I’ll come back to my patients
00:05:31 in this question of dementia.
00:05:33 And as I said, that was 20 years ago.
00:05:35 And what I realized is that hard questions
00:05:38 care very little about who asks them.
00:05:41 They will meter out their lessons of difficulty
00:05:44 all the same.
00:05:45 And I was schooled in the difficulty of the question,
00:05:48 why do we sleep?
00:05:50 But in truth, 20 years later,
00:05:53 we’ve had to upend the question
00:05:55 rather than saying, why do we sleep?
00:05:57 And by the way, the answer then was
00:05:59 that we sleep to cure sleepiness,
00:06:03 which is like saying, we eat to cure hunger.
00:06:07 That tells you nothing about the physiological benefits
00:06:09 of food, same with sleep.
00:06:11 Now we’ve actually have to ask the question,
00:06:14 is there any physiological system in the body
00:06:17 or any major operation of the mind
00:06:19 that isn’t wonderfully enhanced when we get sleep
00:06:22 or demonstrably impaired when we don’t get enough?
00:06:25 And so far, for the most part, the answer seems to be no.
00:06:29 So far, the answer seems to be no.
00:06:32 So why does the body and the mind crave sleep?
00:06:37 Crave sleep then?
00:06:39 Why do we sleep?
00:06:41 How can we begin to answer that question then?
00:06:45 So I think one of the ways that I think about this
00:06:48 or one of the answers that came to me is the following.
00:06:53 The reason that we implode so quickly
00:06:55 and so thoroughly with insufficient sleep
00:06:58 is because human beings seem to be one of the few species
00:07:01 that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep
00:07:04 for no apparent good reason, biological.
00:07:06 And what that led me then to was the following.
00:07:11 Mother nature as a consequence.
00:07:13 So no other species does what we do in that context.
00:07:17 There are a few species that do undergo sleep deprivation,
00:07:20 but for very obvious, clear biological reasons.
00:07:24 One is when they’re in a condition of severe starvation.
00:07:27 The second is when they’re caring for their newborn.
00:07:30 So for example, killer whales will often deprive themselves.
00:07:34 The female will go away from the pod, give birth,
00:07:37 and then bring the calf back.
00:07:39 And during that time,
00:07:41 the mother will undergo sleep deprivation.
00:07:43 And then the third one is during migration
00:07:46 when birds are flying trans oceanographic 2,000, 3,000 miles.
00:07:51 But for the most part,
00:07:52 it’s never seen in the animal kingdom,
00:07:54 which brings me back to the point,
00:07:57 therefore mother nature in the course of evolution
00:08:00 has never had to face the challenge of this thing
00:08:03 called sleep deprivation.
00:08:05 And therefore she has never created a safety net in place
00:08:11 to circumnavigate this common influence.
00:08:15 And there is a good example where we have,
00:08:18 which is called the adipose cell, the fat cell.
00:08:22 Because during our evolutionary past,
00:08:24 we had famine and we had feast.
00:08:26 And mother nature came up with a very clever recipe,
00:08:29 which is how can I store caloric credit
00:08:34 so that I can spend it when I go into debt?
00:08:37 And the fat cell was born, brilliant idea.
00:08:39 Where is the fat cell for sleep?
00:08:42 Where is that sort of banking chip for sleep?
00:08:44 And unfortunately we don’t seem to have one
00:08:46 because she’s never had to face that challenge.
00:08:49 So even if there’s not some kind of physics,
00:08:52 fundamental need for sleep
00:08:55 that physiologically or psychologically,
00:08:58 the fact is most organisms are built such that they need it.
00:09:03 And then mother nature never built an extra mechanism
00:09:08 for sleep deprivation.
00:09:09 So it’s interesting that why we sleep
00:09:12 might not have a good answer,
00:09:14 but we need to sleep to be healthy is nevertheless true.
00:09:19 Yeah, and we have many answers right now.
00:09:21 In some ways the question of why we sleep
00:09:23 was the wrong question too.
00:09:25 It’s what are the plory potent many reasons we sleep?
00:09:30 We don’t just sleep for one reason
00:09:32 because from an evolutionary perspective,
00:09:35 it is the most idiotic thing that you could imagine.
00:09:39 When you’re sleeping, you’re not finding a mate,
00:09:42 you’re not reproducing,
00:09:43 you’re not caring for your young,
00:09:45 you’re not foraging for food,
00:09:47 and worse still, you’re vulnerable to predation.
00:09:50 So on any one of those grounds,
00:09:52 especially as a collective,
00:09:54 sleep should have been strongly selected against
00:09:57 in the course of evolution.
00:09:59 But in every species that we’ve studied carefully to date,
00:10:03 sleep is present.
00:10:05 Yeah, so it is important.
00:10:07 So like you’re right.
00:10:09 I think I’ve heard arguments
00:10:10 from an evolutionary biology perspective
00:10:12 that sleep is actually advantageous,
00:10:15 maybe like some kind of predator prey relationships.
00:10:18 But you’re saying,
00:10:19 and it actually makes way more sense what you’re saying
00:10:22 is it should have been selected against.
00:10:25 Like why close your eyes?
00:10:27 Yeah, why?
00:10:28 Because there was an energy conservation hypothesis
00:10:31 for a while,
00:10:32 which is that we need to essentially go
00:10:34 into low battery mode, power down,
00:10:37 because it’s unsustainable.
00:10:38 But in fact, that actually has been blasted out the water
00:10:41 because sleep is an incredibly active process.
00:10:45 In fact, the difference between you just lying on the couch
00:10:48 but remaining conscious versus you lying on the couch
00:10:51 and falling asleep,
00:10:53 it’s only a savings of about 140, 150 calories.
00:10:56 In other words, you just go out
00:10:58 and club another baby seal or whatever it was,
00:11:00 and you wouldn’t worry.
00:11:02 So it has to be much more to it than energy conservation,
00:11:05 much more to it than sharing ecosystem space and time,
00:11:09 much more to it than simply predator prey relationships.
00:11:13 If sleep really did,
00:11:15 and looking back,
00:11:17 even very old evolutionary organisms like earthworms,
00:11:20 millions of years old,
00:11:22 they have periods where they’re active
00:11:24 and periods where they’re passively asleep.
00:11:26 It’s called lethargicus.
00:11:28 And so what that in some ways suggested to me
00:11:32 was sleep evolved with life itself on this planet,
00:11:36 and then it has fought its way through heroically
00:11:39 every step along the evolutionary pathway,
00:11:42 which then leads to the sort of famous sleep statement
00:11:46 from a researcher that if sleep doesn’t serve
00:11:48 an absolutely vital function or functions,
00:11:52 then it’s the biggest mistake
00:11:53 the evolutionary process has ever made.
00:11:55 And we’ve now realized Mother Nature
00:11:57 didn’t make a spectacular blender with sleep.
00:12:00 You’ve mentioned the idea of conscious states.
00:12:03 Do you think of sleep
00:12:04 as a fundamentally different conscious state than awakeness?
00:12:11 And how many conscious states are there
00:12:13 so when you’re into it,
00:12:14 you’re understanding of what the mind can do,
00:12:17 do you think awake state, sleep state,
00:12:20 or is there some kind of continuum?
00:12:22 There’s a complicated state transition diagram.
00:12:26 Like how do you think about this whole space?
00:12:28 I think about it as a state space diagram.
00:12:32 And I think it’s probably more of a continuum
00:12:34 than we have believed it to be or suggested it to be.
00:12:37 So we used to think absent of anesthesia
00:12:41 that there were already three main states of consciousness.
00:12:44 There was being awake, being in non rapid eye movement sleep
00:12:48 or non dream sleep,
00:12:50 and then being in rapid eye movement sleep or dream sleep.
00:12:53 And those were the three states
00:12:55 within which your brain could percolate and be conscious.
00:13:00 Conscious during non REM sleep is maybe a stretch to say,
00:13:05 but I still believe there is plenty of consciousness there.
00:13:08 I don’t believe that though anymore.
00:13:11 And the reason is because we can have daydreams
00:13:15 and we are in a very different wakeful state
00:13:20 in those daydreams than we are when we are as we are now
00:13:23 together present and extra septively focused
00:13:27 rather than intra septively focused.
00:13:30 And then we also know that as you are sort of progressing
00:13:35 into those different stages of sleep during non REM sleep,
00:13:38 you can also still dream,
00:13:40 depends on your definition of dreaming,
00:13:42 but we seem to have some degree of dreaming
00:13:44 in almost all stages of sleep.
00:13:48 We’ve also then found that when you are sleep deprived,
00:13:51 there are even individual brain cells will fall asleep.
00:13:56 Despite the animal being, you know,
00:13:59 behaviorally from best we can tell awake,
00:14:02 individual brain cells and clusters of brain cells
00:14:05 will go into a sleep like state.
00:14:07 And humans do this too.
00:14:09 When we are sleep deprived,
00:14:10 we have what are called microsleeps
00:14:13 where the eyelid will partially close
00:14:17 and the brain essentially falls lapses
00:14:20 into a state of sleep,
00:14:23 but behaviorally you seem to be awake.
00:14:25 And the danger here is road traffic accidents.
00:14:28 So these are the,
00:14:30 what we call these sort of microsleep events at the wheel.
00:14:34 Now, if you’re traveling at 65 miles an hour
00:14:38 in a two ton vehicle,
00:14:40 you know, it takes probably around one second
00:14:42 to drift from one lane to the next
00:14:44 and it takes two seconds to go completely off the road.
00:14:48 So if you have one of these microsleeps at the wheel,
00:14:50 you know, it could be the last microsleep
00:14:52 that you ever have.
00:14:54 But I don’t now see it as a set of,
00:14:57 you know, very binary distinct,
00:15:00 you know, step function state.
00:15:02 It’s not a one or a zero.
00:15:04 I see it more of a, as a continuum.
00:15:07 So I’ve for five, six years at MIT
00:15:13 really focused on this human side of driving question.
00:15:17 And one of the big concerns is the microsleeps,
00:15:23 drowsiness, these kinds of ideas.
00:15:25 And one of the open questions was,
00:15:27 is it possible through computer vision to detect
00:15:29 or any kind of sensors?
00:15:32 The nice thing about computer vision
00:15:33 is you don’t have to have direct contact to the person.
00:15:36 Is it possible to detect increases in drowsiness?
00:15:41 Is it possible to detect these kinds of microsleeps
00:15:44 or actually just sleep in general?
00:15:47 Among other things, like distraction,
00:15:49 these are all words that have so many meanings
00:15:52 and so many debates, like attention is a whole nother one.
00:15:55 Just because you’re looking at something
00:15:57 doesn’t mean you’re loading in the information.
00:16:00 Just because you’re looking away
00:16:02 doesn’t mean your peripheral vision
00:16:03 can’t pick up the important information.
00:16:05 There’s so many complicated vision science things there.
00:16:08 So I wonder if you could say something to,
00:16:13 they say the eyes are the windows to the soul.
00:16:15 Do you think the eyes can reveal
00:16:19 something about sleepiness through computer vision,
00:16:25 just looking at the video of the face?
00:16:27 And Andrew Huberman and I, your friend,
00:16:30 have talked about this.
00:16:31 I would love to work on this together.
00:16:33 It’s a fascinating problem.
00:16:35 But drowsiness is a tricky one.
00:16:37 So there’s, what kind of information?
00:16:39 There’s blinking and there’s eye movement.
00:16:42 And those are the ones that can be picked up
00:16:46 with computer vision.
00:16:46 Do you think those are signals that could be used
00:16:48 to say something about where we are in this continuum?
00:16:52 Yeah, I do.
00:16:53 And I think there are a number of other features too.
00:16:55 I think, you know, aperture of eye.
00:16:59 So in other words, partial closures, full closures,
00:17:03 duration of those closures, duration of those partial
00:17:06 closures of the eyelid.
00:17:09 I think there may be some information in the pupil as well,
00:17:13 because as we’re transitioning between those states,
00:17:16 there are changes in what’s called
00:17:17 the automatic nervous system,
00:17:19 or technically it’s called the autonomic nervous system,
00:17:22 part of which will control your pupillary size.
00:17:27 So I actually think that there is probably
00:17:29 a wealth of information.
00:17:32 When you combine that probably with aspects of steering,
00:17:37 angle steering maneuver.
00:17:39 And if you can sense the pressure on the pedals as well,
00:17:44 my guess is that there is some combinatorial feature
00:17:48 that creates a phenotype of,
00:17:52 you are starting to fall asleep.
00:17:54 And as the autonomous controls develop,
00:17:57 that it’s time for them to kick in.
00:18:00 Some manufacturers, auto manufacturers sort of have
00:18:03 something beta version, maybe an alpha version of this
00:18:07 already starting to come online,
00:18:09 where they have a little camera in the wheel
00:18:11 that I think tries to look at some features.
00:18:14 Almost everybody doing this and it’s very alpha.
00:18:19 So, you know, the thing that you currently have,
00:18:23 some people have that in their car,
00:18:24 there’s a coffee cup or something that comes up
00:18:26 that you might be sleepy.
00:18:27 The primary signal that they’re comfortable using
00:18:31 is the steering wheel reversals.
00:18:33 So basically using your interaction with the steering wheel
00:18:37 and how much you’re interacting with it
00:18:39 as a sign of sleepiness.
00:18:40 So if you have to constantly correct the car,
00:18:43 that’s a sign of like you starting to drift
00:18:46 into microsleep.
00:18:47 I think that’s a very, very crude signal.
00:18:49 It’s probably a powerful one.
00:18:51 There’s a whole nother component to this,
00:18:52 which is it seems like it’s so driver and subject dependent.
00:18:59 How our behavior changes as we get sleepy and drowsy
00:19:04 seems to be different in complicated, fascinating ways
00:19:08 where you can’t just use one signal.
00:19:09 It’s kind of like what you’re saying,
00:19:11 there has to be a lot of different signals
00:19:13 that you should then be able to combine.
00:19:15 The hope is there’s the searches for like universal signals
00:19:19 that are pretty damn good for like 90% of people.
00:19:23 But I don’t think we need
00:19:24 to take necessarily quite that approach.
00:19:27 I think what we could do in some clever fashion
00:19:31 is using the individual.
00:19:33 So what you and I are perhaps suggesting here
00:19:35 is that there is an array of features
00:19:38 that we know provide information
00:19:40 that is sensitive to whether or not
00:19:42 you’re falling asleep at the wheel.
00:19:44 Some of those, let’s say that there are 10 of them,
00:19:47 for me, seven of them are the cardinal features.
00:19:51 For you, however, you know, six of them
00:19:54 and they’re not all the same sort of overlapping
00:19:58 are those for you.
00:19:59 I think what we need is algorithms
00:20:01 that can firstly understand when you are well slept.
00:20:04 So let’s say that people have sleep trackers at night
00:20:06 and then your car integrates that information
00:20:09 and it understands when you are well slept.
00:20:12 And then you’ve got the data of the individual behavior
00:20:16 unique to that individual, snowflake like,
00:20:20 when they are well slept.
00:20:21 This is the signature of well rested driving.
00:20:26 Then you can look at deviations from that
00:20:29 and pattern match it with the sleep history
00:20:32 of that individual.
00:20:33 And then I don’t need to find the sort of, you know,
00:20:37 the one size fits all approach for 99% of the people.
00:20:41 I can create a very bespoke tailor like set of features,
00:20:45 a Savile Row suit of sleepiness features.
00:20:49 You know, that would be my,
00:20:50 if you want to ask me about moon shots and crazy ideas,
00:20:53 that’s where I go.
00:20:54 But to start with, I think your approach is a great one.
00:20:58 Let’s find something that covers 99% of the people
00:21:02 because the worrying thing about microsleeps of course,
00:21:04 unlike, you know, drugs or alcohol, which you know,
00:21:08 certainly is a terrible thing to be behind the wheel.
00:21:11 With those often you react too late.
00:21:17 And that’s the reason you get into an accident.
00:21:20 When you fall asleep behind the wheel,
00:21:22 you don’t react at all.
00:21:25 You know, at that point,
00:21:26 there is a two ton missile driving down the street
00:21:28 and no one’s in control.
00:21:29 That’s why those accidents can often be more dangerous.
00:21:34 Yeah, and the fascinating thing is,
00:21:37 in the case of semi autonomous vehicles,
00:21:39 like Tesla autopilot,
00:21:40 this is where I’ve had disagreements with Mr. Elon Musk,
00:21:46 and the human factors community,
00:21:50 which is this community that one of the big things they study
00:21:53 is human supervision over automation.
00:21:56 So you have like pilots, you know, supervising an airplane
00:22:00 that’s mostly flying autonomously.
00:22:02 The question is, when we’re actually doing the driving,
00:22:07 how do microsleeps or general,
00:22:09 how does drowsiness progress
00:22:12 and how does it affect our driving?
00:22:14 That question becomes more fascinating, more complicated
00:22:17 when your task is not driving,
00:22:19 but supervising the driving.
00:22:21 So your task is to take over when stuff goes wrong.
00:22:24 And that is complicated,
00:22:27 but the basic conclusions from many decades
00:22:30 is that humans are really crappy at supervising
00:22:34 because they get drowsy and lose vigilance much, much faster.
00:22:39 The really surprising thing with Tesla autopilot,
00:22:42 it was surprising to me,
00:22:44 surprising to the human factors community,
00:22:46 and in fact, they still argue with me about it,
00:22:49 is it seems that humans in Teslas with autopilot
00:22:55 and other similar systems are not becoming less vigilant,
00:22:58 at least with the studies we’ve done.
00:23:01 So there’s something about the urgency of driving.
00:23:05 I can’t, I’m not sure why,
00:23:06 but there’s something about the risk,
00:23:08 I think the fact that you might die
00:23:11 is still keeping people awake.
00:23:14 The question is, as Tesla autopilot
00:23:16 or similar systems get better and better and better,
00:23:19 how does that affect increasing drowsiness?
00:23:21 And that’s when you need to have,
00:23:23 that’s where the big disagreement was,
00:23:25 you need to have driver sensing,
00:23:27 meaning driver facing camera
00:23:30 that tracks some kind of information about the face
00:23:33 that can tell you drowsiness.
00:23:35 So you can tell the car if you’re drowsy
00:23:38 so that the car can be like,
00:23:40 you should be probably driving or pull to the side.
00:23:43 Right, or I need to do some of the heavy lifting here.
00:23:47 Yeah, so there needs to be that dance of interaction
00:23:50 of a human and machine,
00:23:53 but currently it’s mostly steering wheel based.
00:23:56 So this idea that your hands should be
00:23:59 on the steering wheel,
00:24:02 that’s a sign that you’re paying attention
00:24:05 is an outdated and a very crude metric.
00:24:09 I agree, yeah.
00:24:11 I think there are far more sophisticated ways
00:24:13 that we can solve that problem if we invest.
00:24:17 Can I ask you a big philosophical question
00:24:20 before we get into fun details?
00:24:24 On the topic of conscious states,
00:24:28 how fundamental do you think is consciousness
00:24:31 to the human mind?
00:24:33 I ask this from almost like a robotics perspective.
00:24:36 So in your study of sleep,
00:24:38 do you think the hard question of consciousness
00:24:42 that it feels like something to be us,
00:24:45 is that like a nice little feature,
00:24:46 like a quirk of our mind,
00:24:50 or is it somehow fundamental?
00:24:51 Because sleep feels like we take a step out
00:24:55 of that consciousness a little bit.
00:24:57 So from all your study of sleep,
00:25:00 do you think consciousness is like deeply part of who we are
00:25:04 or is it just a nice trick?
00:25:06 I think it’s a deeply embedded feature
00:25:09 that I can imagine has a whole panoply
00:25:13 of biological benefits.
00:25:16 But to your point about sleep,
00:25:17 what is interesting if you do a lot of dream research
00:25:20 and we’ve done some,
00:25:23 it’s very, very rare at all, in fact,
00:25:28 for you to end up becoming someone
00:25:31 other than who you are in your dreams.
00:25:33 Now you can have third person perspective dreams
00:25:35 where you can see yourself in the dream
00:25:38 as if you’re sort of,
00:25:40 you’ve risen above your physical being.
00:25:44 But for the most part,
00:25:46 it’s very rare that we lose our sense of conscious self.
00:25:51 And maybe I’m sort of doing a sleight of hand
00:25:53 because it’s really what I’m saying,
00:25:55 it’s very rare that we lose our sense
00:25:56 of who we are in dreams.
00:25:58 We never do.
00:25:59 Now that’s not to suggest that dreams aren’t utterly bizarre.
00:26:04 And I mean, when you slept last night,
00:26:07 which I know may have been perhaps a little less than me,
00:26:12 but when you went into dreaming,
00:26:14 you became flagrantly psychotic.
00:26:18 And there are five essentially good reasons.
00:26:20 Firstly, you started to see things which were not there,
00:26:23 so you were hallucinating.
00:26:25 Second, you believe things that couldn’t possibly be true,
00:26:28 so you were delusional.
00:26:30 Third, you became confused about time and place and person,
00:26:35 so you’re suffering from what we would call disorientation.
00:26:38 Fourth, you have wildly fluctuating emotions,
00:26:41 something that psychiatrists
00:26:43 will call being affectively labile.
00:26:46 And then how wonderful, you woke up this morning
00:26:48 and you forgot most if not all of that dream experience,
00:26:51 so you’re suffering from amnesia.
00:26:52 If you were to experience any one of those five things
00:26:55 while you’re awake,
00:26:56 you would probably be seeking psychological help.
00:27:00 But so I place that as a backdrop
00:27:03 against your astute question,
00:27:06 because despite all of that psychosis,
00:27:11 there is still a present self nested at the heart of it,
00:27:16 meaning that I think it’s very difficult for us
00:27:19 to abandon our conscious sense of self.
00:27:24 And if it’s that hard,
00:27:25 the old adage in some ways,
00:27:27 that you can’t outrun your shadow.
00:27:29 But here it’s more of a philosophical question,
00:27:31 which is about the conscious mind
00:27:33 and what the state of consciousness actually means
00:27:36 in a human being.
00:27:38 So I think that that to me,
00:27:39 you become so dislocated from so many other rational ways
00:27:45 of waking consciousness.
00:27:47 But one thing that won’t go away,
00:27:49 that won’t get perturbed or sort of, you know,
00:27:54 manacled, is this your sense of conscious self?
00:27:58 Yeah, that’s a strong sign that consciousness
00:28:00 is fundamental to the human mind.
00:28:03 Or we’re just creatures of habit
00:28:04 who gotten used to having consciousness.
00:28:06 Maybe it just takes a lot of either chemical substances
00:28:11 or a lot of like mental work to escape that.
00:28:15 I mean, it’s like trying to launch a rocket.
00:28:19 You know, the energy that has to be put in
00:28:22 to create escape velocity
00:28:24 from the gravitational pull of this thing
00:28:26 called planet earth is immense.
00:28:29 Well, the same thing is true
00:28:31 for us to abandon our sense of conscious self.
00:28:36 The amount of biological, the amount of substances,
00:28:39 the amount of wacky stuff that you have to do
00:28:42 to truly get escape velocity from your conscious self.
00:28:46 What does that tell us about then
00:28:48 the fundamental state of our conscious self?
00:28:52 Yeah, it also probably says that it’s quite useful
00:28:55 to have consciousness for survival
00:28:58 and for just operation in this world.
00:29:01 And perhaps for intelligence.
00:29:02 I’m one of the, on the AI side,
00:29:05 people that think that intelligence requires consciousness.
00:29:10 So like high levels of general intelligence
00:29:12 requires consciousness.
00:29:14 Most people in the AI field think like consciousness
00:29:17 and intelligence are fundamentally different.
00:29:19 You could build a computer that’s super intelligent.
00:29:22 It doesn’t have to be conscious.
00:29:23 I think that if you define super intelligence
00:29:26 by being good at chess, yes.
00:29:28 But if you define super intelligence
00:29:30 as being able to operate in this living world of humans
00:29:35 and be able to perform all kinds of different tasks,
00:29:37 consciousness, it seems to be somehow fundamental
00:29:41 to richly integrate yourself into the human experience,
00:29:46 into society.
00:29:48 It feels like you have to be a conscious being.
00:29:50 But then we don’t even know what consciousness is
00:29:53 and we certainly don’t know how to engineer it
00:29:55 in our machines.
00:29:56 I love the fact that there are still questions
00:30:00 that are so embryonic because, you know,
00:30:03 I suspect it’s the same with you.
00:30:05 Answers to me are simply ways to get to more questions.
00:30:09 You know, it’s questions where, you know,
00:30:12 questions turn me on, answers less so.
00:30:15 And I love the fact that we are still embryonic
00:30:18 in our sense of arguing about
00:30:20 even what the definition of consciousness is.
00:30:23 But I also find it fascinating.
00:30:25 I think it’s thoroughly delightful
00:30:27 to absorb yourself in the thought.
00:30:30 Think about the brain and we can move back
00:30:33 across the complexity of phylogeny
00:30:35 from, you know, humans to mammals
00:30:38 to sort of birds to reptiles, amphibians, fish.
00:30:41 You can, bacteria, whatever you want.
00:30:44 And you can go through this and say, okay,
00:30:46 where is the hard line of, you know,
00:30:48 what we would define as consciousness?
00:30:51 And I’m sure it’s got something to do
00:30:52 with the complexity of the neural system.
00:30:55 Of that, I’m fairly certain.
00:30:57 But to me, it’s always been fascinating.
00:31:01 So what is it then?
00:31:02 You know, is it that I just keep adding neurons
00:31:04 to a Petri dish and I just keep adding them
00:31:07 and adding them and adding them.
00:31:08 At some point when I hit a critical mass
00:31:10 of interconnected neurons, that is the mass of the,
00:31:13 you know, the interconnected human brain, then bingo.
00:31:17 All of a sudden it kicks into gear
00:31:19 and we have consciousness.
00:31:21 Like a phase shift, phase transition of some kind.
00:31:23 Correct, yeah.
00:31:24 But there is something about the complexity
00:31:26 of the nervous system that I think
00:31:27 is fundamental to consciousness.
00:31:29 And the reason I bring that up is because
00:31:31 when we’re trying to then think about creating it
00:31:33 in an artificial way, does that inform us
00:31:36 as to the complexity that we should be looking at
00:31:39 in terms of development?
00:31:41 I also think that it’s a missed opportunity
00:31:44 in the sort of digital space for us
00:31:48 to try to recreate human consciousness.
00:31:52 We’ve already got human consciousness.
00:31:54 What if we were to think about creating
00:31:57 some other form of, why do we have to think
00:31:59 that the ultimate in the creation of, you know,
00:32:03 an artificial intelligence is the replication,
00:32:07 you know, of a human state of consciousness?
00:32:11 Can we not think outside of our own consciousness
00:32:16 and believe that there is something even more incredible
00:32:19 or more complimentary, more orthogonal?
00:32:24 So I’m sometimes perplexed that people
00:32:28 are trying to mimic human consciousness
00:32:30 rather than think about creating
00:32:33 something that’s different.
00:32:34 I think of human consciousness or consciousness in general
00:32:37 as this magic superpower that allows us
00:32:42 to deeply experience the world.
00:32:44 And just as you’re saying, I don’t think that superpower
00:32:47 has to take the exact flavor as humans have.
00:32:49 That’s my love for robots.
00:32:51 I would love to add the ability to robots
00:32:56 that can experience the world and other humans deeply.
00:33:01 I’m humbled by the fact that that idea
00:33:04 does not necessarily need to look anything like
00:33:06 how humans experience the world.
00:33:09 But there’s a dance of human to robot connection
00:33:14 the same way human to dog or human to cat connection,
00:33:18 that there’s a magic there to that interaction.
00:33:21 And I’m not sure how to create that magic,
00:33:23 but it’s a worthy effort.
00:33:25 I also love, just exactly as you said,
00:33:27 on the question of consciousness
00:33:29 or engineering consciousness,
00:33:31 the fun thing about this problem
00:33:34 is it seems obvious to me that a hundred years from now,
00:33:38 no matter what we do today,
00:33:41 people, if we’re still here,
00:33:43 will laugh at how silly our notions were.
00:33:47 So like, it’s almost impossible for me to imagine
00:33:49 that we will truly solve this problem fully in my lifetime.
00:33:56 And more than that,
00:33:57 everything we’ll do will be silly a hundred years from now,
00:34:02 but it’s still, that makes it fun to me
00:34:05 because it’s like you have the full freedom
00:34:07 to not even be right, just to try.
00:34:11 Just to try is freedom.
00:34:13 And that’s how I see that.
00:34:15 Get me that T shirt, please.
00:34:17 I love that.
00:34:18 So, and human robot interaction is fascinating
00:34:22 because it’s like watching dancing.
00:34:24 I’ve been dancing tango recently
00:34:28 and just, it’s like, there is no goal.
00:34:31 The goal is to create something magical
00:34:33 and whether consciousness or emotion
00:34:37 or elegance of movement,
00:34:39 all of those things aid in the creation of the magic.
00:34:43 And it’s a free, it’s an art form to explore
00:34:46 how to make that, how to create that
00:34:49 in a way that’s compelling.
00:34:51 Yeah, I love the line in Sense of a Woman with Al Pacino
00:34:54 where he’s speaking about the tango
00:34:55 and he said, really, it’s just freedom
00:34:57 that if you get tangled up, you just keep tangoing on.
00:35:01 I still, to this day, I think first or second time
00:35:06 I talked to Joe Rogan on his podcast,
00:35:08 I said, we got into this heated argument
00:35:11 about whether Sense of a Woman
00:35:13 is a better movie than John Wick.
00:35:16 Because it’s one of my favorite movies for many reasons.
00:35:20 One is Sense of a Woman.
00:35:23 Partially.
00:35:24 I didn’t know that, by the way.
00:35:25 I was just gonna.
00:35:26 You just.
00:35:27 Yeah, I didn’t know if you would actually know
00:35:28 of the movie.
00:35:29 Awesome, awesome.
00:35:29 No, yeah, I said, I love the tango scene.
00:35:31 I love Al Pacino’s performance.
00:35:34 It’s a wonderful movie.
00:35:36 Then Joe was saying, John Wick is better.
00:35:39 So we, to this day, argue about this.
00:35:41 I think it depends on what conscious state you’re in
00:35:44 that you would be ready and receptive to.
00:35:46 But Sense of a Woman, I think it has one of the best
00:35:50 monologues at the end of the movie
00:35:52 that has ever been written or at least performed.
00:35:57 When Al Pacino defends the younger.
00:36:01 Yeah, I often think about that.
00:36:05 There’s been times in my life, I don’t know about you,
00:36:09 where I wish I had an Al Pacino in my life,
00:36:12 where integrity is really important in this life.
00:36:18 It is.
00:36:19 And sometimes you find yourself in places
00:36:20 where there’s pressure to sacrifice that integrity.
00:36:25 And you want, what is it, Lieutenant Colonel
00:36:29 or whatever he was.
00:36:30 To come in.
00:36:31 Slate.
00:36:32 To come in on your side and scream at everyone
00:36:36 and say, what the hell are we doing here?
00:36:38 Being, you know, unfortunately British
00:36:41 and sort of having that slightly awkward
00:36:44 sort of Hugh Grant gene.
00:36:45 It’s very, very, very at the opposite end of the spectrum
00:36:48 of the remarkable feat of Al Pacino
00:36:51 at the end of that scene.
00:36:53 But, and yeah, integrity is, it’s a challenging thing
00:36:59 and I value it much.
00:37:00 And I think it can take 20 years to build a reputation
00:37:04 and two minutes to lose it.
00:37:06 And there is nothing more that I value than that integrity
00:37:10 and, you know, if I’m ever wrong about anything,
00:37:13 I truly don’t want to be wrong for any longer
00:37:16 than I have to be.
00:37:19 You know, that’s what being in some ways a scientist is.
00:37:22 You’re just driven by truth.
00:37:25 And the irony relative to something like mathematics
00:37:29 is that in science, you never find truth.
00:37:31 What you do in science is you discount the things
00:37:35 that are likely to be untrue,
00:37:38 leaving only the possibility of what could be true.
00:37:42 But in math, you know, when you create, you know, a proof,
00:37:46 it’s a proof for, you know, from that point forward,
00:37:51 there is truth in mathematics.
00:37:54 And there’s, I think there’s a beauty in that,
00:37:56 but I kind of like the messiness of science
00:38:00 because again, to me, it’s less about the truth
00:38:03 of the answer and it is more about the pursuit of questions.
00:38:07 But their integrity becomes more and more important
00:38:10 and it becomes more difficult.
00:38:11 There’s a lot of pressures,
00:38:12 just like in the rest of the world,
00:38:14 but there’s a lot of pressures than a scientist.
00:38:17 One is like funding sources.
00:38:19 I’ve noticed this, that, you know,
00:38:21 money affects everyone’s mind, I think.
00:38:24 I’ve been always somebody that I believe money can’t,
00:38:28 you can’t buy my opinion.
00:38:31 I don’t care how much money, billions or trillions.
00:38:34 But that pressure is there and you have to be
00:38:37 very cognizant of it and make sure that your opinion
00:38:40 is not defined by the funding sources.
00:38:43 And then the other is just your own success of, you know,
00:38:48 for a couple of decades, publishing an idea
00:38:53 and then realizing at some point
00:38:55 that that idea was wrong all along.
00:38:57 And that’s a tough thing for people to do,
00:39:00 but that’s also integrity is to walk away,
00:39:03 is to say that you were wrong.
00:39:06 That doesn’t have to be in some big dramatic way.
00:39:08 It could be in a bunch of tiny ways along the way.
00:39:11 Right.
00:39:12 Like reconfigure your intuition about a particular problem.
00:39:18 That’s, and all of that is integrity.
00:39:20 When everybody in the room, you know,
00:39:23 believes a certain thing,
00:39:24 everybody in the community believes a certain thing,
00:39:27 to be able to still be open minded in the face of that.
00:39:31 Yeah, and I think it comes down in some ways
00:39:33 to the issue of ego that you bond your correctness
00:39:38 or your rightness, your scientific theory
00:39:41 with your sense of ego.
00:39:45 You know, I’ve never found it that difficult to let go
00:39:48 of theories in the face of counter evidence
00:39:52 in part because I have such low self esteem.
00:39:56 Well, I kind of liked that.
00:39:57 I always liked that combination.
00:39:59 I have the same, I’m like very self critical,
00:40:01 imposter syndrome, all those things,
00:40:04 putting yourself below the podium,
00:40:05 but at the same time having the ego
00:40:08 that drives the ambition to work your ass off.
00:40:11 Like some kind of weird drive,
00:40:13 maybe like drive to be better.
00:40:16 Like thinking of yourself as not that great
00:40:18 and always driving to be better.
00:40:20 And then at the same time,
00:40:22 because that can be paralyzing and exhausting and so on,
00:40:25 at the same time, just being grateful to be alive.
00:40:28 But in the sciences, in the actual effort,
00:40:31 never be satisfied, never think of yourself highly.
00:40:33 It seems to be a nice combination.
00:40:35 I very much hope that that is part of who I am
00:40:39 and I remain very quietly motivated and driven.
00:40:44 And I, like you, love the idea of perfection
00:40:47 and I know I will never achieve it,
00:40:49 but I will never stop trying to.
00:40:52 So similar to you, which sounds weird
00:40:55 because there’s all these videos of me on the internet.
00:41:01 So I think I just naturally lean into the things
00:41:04 I’m afraid of and I’m uncomfortable doing.
00:41:07 Like I’m very afraid of talking to people
00:41:09 and just even before talking to you today,
00:41:12 just a lot of anxiety and all those kinds of things.
00:41:16 About talking to me?
00:41:17 Yeah, yeah.
00:41:18 Oh, I like.
00:41:19 Nervousness.
00:41:20 Fear in some cases, self doubt and all those kinds of things.
00:41:24 But I do it anyway.
00:41:25 So the reason I bring that up
00:41:27 is you’ve launched a podcast.
00:41:32 I have.
00:41:34 Allow me to say, I think you’re a great science communicator.
00:41:37 So this challenge of being afraid
00:41:44 or cautious of being in the public eye
00:41:47 and yet having a longing to communicate
00:41:51 some of the things you’re excited about
00:41:53 in the space of sleep and beyond.
00:41:55 What’s your vision with this project?
00:41:59 I think firstly to that question, like you,
00:42:03 I am always more afraid of not trying than trying.
00:42:07 Yeah.
00:42:08 That to me frightens me more.
00:42:12 But with the podcast,
00:42:13 I think really I have two very simple goals.
00:42:18 I want to try and democratize the science of sleep
00:42:22 and in doing so,
00:42:23 my goal would be to try and reunite humanity
00:42:26 with the sleep that it is so desperately bereft of.
00:42:30 And if I can do that through a number of different means,
00:42:35 the podcast is a little bit different than this format.
00:42:38 It’s going to be short form monologues from yours truly
00:42:45 that will last usually less than just 10 minutes.
00:42:47 And I see it as simply a little slice of sleep goodness
00:42:51 that can accompany your waking day.
00:42:53 It’s hard to know what is the right way
00:42:56 to do science communication.
00:42:58 Like your friend, mine, Andrew Huberman,
00:43:03 he’s an incredible human being.
00:43:05 Oh gosh.
00:43:06 So he does like two hours of,
00:43:09 I wonder how many takes he does.
00:43:10 I don’t know, but it looks like he doesn’t do any.
00:43:12 Yeah, I suspect he’s that magnificent of a human being.
00:43:16 When I talk to him in like in person,
00:43:18 he always generates intelligent words,
00:43:21 well cited, nonstop for hours.
00:43:24 So I don’t.
00:43:25 He’s a Gatling gun of information and it’s pristine.
00:43:29 And passion and all those kinds of things.
00:43:30 So that’s an interesting medium.
00:43:32 I wouldn’t have,
00:43:35 it’s funny because I wouldn’t have done it
00:43:36 the way he’s doing it.
00:43:38 I wouldn’t advise him to do it the way he’s doing it.
00:43:40 Cause I thought there’s no way you could do
00:43:41 what you’re doing.
00:43:43 Cause it’s a lot of work,
00:43:45 but he is like doing an incredible job of it.
00:43:48 I just think it’s the same with like Dan Carlin
00:43:51 and hardcore history.
00:43:52 I thought that the way Andrew’s doing it
00:43:56 would crush him the way it crushes Dan Carlin.
00:44:00 So Dan has so much pressure on him to do a good job
00:44:04 that he ends up publishing like two episodes a year.
00:44:08 So that pressure can be paralyzing.
00:44:10 The pressure of like putting out like
00:44:13 strong scientific statements
00:44:16 that can be overwhelming.
00:44:17 Now, Andrew seems to be just plowing through anyway.
00:44:21 If there’s mistakes, he’ll say there’s corrections and so on.
00:44:25 I just, I wonder,
00:44:26 I actually haven’t talked to him too much about it.
00:44:27 Like psychologically, how difficult is it
00:44:30 to put yourself out there for an hour to a week
00:44:34 of just nonstop dropping knowledge.
00:44:37 Any one sentence of which could be totally wrong.
00:44:41 It could be a mistake.
00:44:42 And there will be mistakes.
00:44:44 And I, in the first edition of my book,
00:44:47 there were errors that we corrected
00:44:50 in the second edition too.
00:44:52 But there will be probabilistically,
00:44:55 if you’ve got 10 facts per page of a book
00:44:59 and you’ve got 350 pages,
00:45:02 odds are it’s probably not going to be
00:45:05 utter perfection out the gate.
00:45:07 And it will be the same way for Andrew too.
00:45:11 But having the reverence of
00:45:15 a humble mind
00:45:19 and simply accepting the things that are wrong
00:45:21 and correcting them and doing the right thing.
00:45:23 I know that that’s his mentality.
00:45:26 I do want to say that I’m just kind of honored to be,
00:45:30 it’s a cool group of like scientific people
00:45:34 that I’m fortunate enough to now be interacting with.
00:45:38 It’s you and Andrew and David Sinclair
00:45:41 has been thinking about throwing his hat in the ring.
00:45:43 Oh, I hope so.
00:45:43 David is another one of those very special people
00:45:46 in the world.
00:45:47 So it’s cool because podcasts are, it’s cool.
00:45:51 It’s such a powerful medium of communication.
00:45:53 It’s much freer than more constrained
00:45:56 like publications and so on.
00:45:58 Or it’s much more accessible and inspiring than like,
00:46:01 I don’t know, conference presentations or lectures.
00:46:04 And so it’s a really exciting medium to me.
00:46:06 And it’s cool that there’s this like group of people
00:46:08 that are becoming friends and putting stuff out there
00:46:12 and supporting each other.
00:46:13 So it’s fun to also watch how that’s going to evolve
00:46:18 in your case, because I wonder it’ll be two a month.
00:46:20 Or devolve is the answer to that.
00:46:24 Well, I mean, some of it is persistence
00:46:27 through the challenges that we’ve been talking about,
00:46:30 which is like.
00:46:31 I think I’ve got a lot to learn.
00:46:32 Yeah.
00:46:33 But I will persist.
00:46:35 Can I ask you some detailed stuff?
00:46:37 You mentioned that.
00:46:38 Oh my goodness, go anywhere you wish with sleep.
00:46:41 So I’m a big fan of coffee and caffeine.
00:46:45 And I’ve been, especially in the last few days,
00:46:47 consuming a very large amount.
00:46:50 And I’m cognizant of the fact that my body is affected
00:46:55 by caffeine different than the anecdotal information
00:46:59 that other people tell me.
00:47:00 I seem to be not at all affected by it.
00:47:03 It’s almost, it feels like more like a ritual
00:47:08 than it is a chemical boost to my performance.
00:47:12 Like I can drink several cups of coffee right before bed
00:47:15 and just knock out anyway.
00:47:17 I’m not sure if it’s a biological chemical
00:47:20 or it has to do with just the fact
00:47:21 that I’m consuming huge amounts of caffeine.
00:47:24 All that to say, what do you think is the relationship
00:47:29 between coffee and sleep, caffeine and sleep?
00:47:32 If there’s an interesting distinction there.
00:47:34 There is a distinction.
00:47:35 So I think the first thing to say,
00:47:37 which is going to sound strange coming from me
00:47:40 is drink coffee.
00:47:43 The health benefits associated with drinking coffee
00:47:46 are really quite well established now.
00:47:51 But I think that the counterpoint to that,
00:47:54 well, firstly, the dose and the timing make the poison.
00:47:57 And I’ll perhaps come back to that in just a second.
00:48:01 But for coffee, it’s actually not the caffeine.
00:48:06 So, a lot of people have asked me
00:48:09 about this rightful paradox between the fact
00:48:12 that sleep provides all of these incredible health benefits
00:48:15 and then coffee, which can have a deleterious impact
00:48:19 on your sleep has a whole collection of health benefits.
00:48:23 Many of them Venn diagram overlapping
00:48:25 with those that sleep provides.
00:48:27 How on earth can you reconcile those two?
00:48:30 And the answer is that, well, the answer is very simple.
00:48:33 It’s called antioxidants, that it turns out
00:48:37 that for most people in Western civilization
00:48:40 because of diet, not being quite what it should be,
00:48:44 the major source through which they obtain antioxidants
00:48:49 is the coffee bean.
00:48:50 So the humble coffee bean has now been asked
00:48:53 to carry the astronomical weight of serving up
00:48:57 the large majority of people’s antioxidant needs.
00:49:01 And you can see this if, for example,
00:49:04 you look at the health benefits of decaffeinated coffee,
00:49:08 it has a whole constellation
00:49:10 of really great health benefits too.
00:49:12 So it’s not the caffeine.
00:49:13 And that’s why I liked what you said,
00:49:15 this sort of separation of church and state
00:49:17 between coffee and caffeine.
00:49:19 It’s not the caffeine, it’s the coffee bean itself
00:49:23 that provides those health benefits.
00:49:24 But coming back to how it impacts sleep,
00:49:29 it impacts sleep in probably at least three different ways.
00:49:33 The first is that for most people,
00:49:37 caffeine can make it obviously a little harder
00:49:39 to fall asleep.
00:49:41 Caffeine can make it harder to stay asleep.
00:49:44 But let’s say that you are one of those individuals
00:49:46 and I think you are, and you can say,
00:49:48 look, I can have three or four espressos with dinner
00:49:50 and I fall asleep just fine
00:49:52 and I stay asleep soundly across the night.
00:49:54 So there’s no problem.
00:49:56 The downside there is that even if that is true,
00:50:00 the amount of deep sleep that you get will not be as deep.
00:50:03 And so you will actually lose somewhere
00:50:05 between 10 to 30% of your deep sleep
00:50:08 if you drink caffeine in the evening.
00:50:11 So to give you some context,
00:50:12 to drop your deep sleep by let’s say 20%,
00:50:16 I’d probably have to age you by 15 years,
00:50:19 or you could do it every night with a cup of coffee.
00:50:22 I think the fourth component
00:50:24 that is perhaps less well understood about coffee
00:50:27 is its timing, and that’s why I was saying
00:50:29 the timing and the dose make the poison.
00:50:31 The dose, by the way,
00:50:32 once you get past about three cups of coffee a day,
00:50:35 the health benefits actually start to turn down
00:50:38 in the opposite direction.
00:50:40 So there is a U shape function.
00:50:41 It’s sort of the Goldilocks syndrome,
00:50:44 not too little, not too much, just the right amount.
00:50:47 The second component is the timing though.
00:50:50 Caffeine has half life of about five to six hours,
00:50:55 meaning that after five to six hours,
00:50:57 50% of that on average for the average adult
00:51:01 is still in the system,
00:51:02 which means that it has a quarter life of 10 to 12 hours.
00:51:06 So in other words, if you have a coffee at noon,
00:51:08 a quarter of that caffeine is still circulating
00:51:10 in your brain at midnight.
00:51:12 So having a cup of coffee at noon,
00:51:14 one could argue is the equivalent
00:51:16 of tucking yourself into bed at midnight,
00:51:18 and before you turn the light out,
00:51:19 you swig a quarter of a cup of coffee.
00:51:22 But that doesn’t still answer your question
00:51:24 as to why are you so immune?
00:51:26 So I’m someone who is actually unfortunately
00:51:28 very sensitive to caffeine.
00:51:29 And if I have even two cups of coffee in the morning,
00:51:34 I don’t sleep as well that night.
00:51:37 And I find it miserable because I love the smell of coffee.
00:51:40 I love the routine.
00:51:41 I love the ritual.
00:51:43 I think I would love to be invested in it.
00:51:46 It’s just terrible for my sleep.
00:51:47 So I switched to decaf.
00:51:49 There is a difference from one individual to the next,
00:51:52 and it’s controlled by a set of liver enzymes
00:51:56 called cytochrome P450 enzymes.
00:52:00 And there is a particular gene
00:52:03 that if you have a different sort of version of this gene,
00:52:06 it’s called CYP1A2.
00:52:11 That gene will determine the speed
00:52:14 of the clearance of caffeine from your system.
00:52:18 Some people will have a version of that gene
00:52:20 that is very effective and efficient
00:52:23 at clearing that caffeine.
00:52:24 And so their half life could be as short as two hours
00:52:28 rather than five to six hours.
00:52:30 Other people, hands up Matt Walker,
00:52:34 have a version of that gene
00:52:35 that is not very effective at clearing out the caffeine.
00:52:40 And therefore their half life sort of sensitivity
00:52:43 could be somewhere between eight to nine hours.
00:52:48 So we understand that there are individual differences,
00:52:50 but overall, I guess the top line here is drink coffee
00:52:56 and understand that it’s not the caffeine,
00:52:58 it’s the coffee that’s the benefit
00:53:00 and the dose makes the poison.
00:53:01 Is there some aspect to it that it’s like a muscle
00:53:04 in terms of all the combination of letters and numbers
00:53:08 that you just said?
00:53:09 Is there some aspect that if I can improve
00:53:13 the quarter life, the half life,
00:53:15 could decrease that number if I just practice?
00:53:19 Like I drink a lot of coffee,
00:53:21 so like habit alters how your body’s able
00:53:25 to get rid of the caffeine.
00:53:27 Not how the body is able to get rid of the caffeine,
00:53:30 but it does alter how sensitive the body is to the caffeine.
00:53:34 And it’s not at the level of the enzyme
00:53:36 degrading the caffeine.
00:53:38 It’s at the level of the receptors
00:53:41 that caffeine will act upon.
00:53:44 Now it turns out that those are called adenosine receptors
00:53:46 and maybe we can speak about what adenosine is
00:53:49 and sleep pressure and all of that good stuff.
00:53:51 But as you start to drink more and more coffee,
00:53:56 the body tries to fight back
00:53:58 and it happens with many different drugs by the way,
00:54:01 and it’s called tolerance.
00:54:03 And so one of the ways that your body becomes tolerant
00:54:06 to a drug is that the receptors that the drug is binding to,
00:54:10 these sort of welcome sites, these sort of picture myths,
00:54:13 as it were, that receive the drug,
00:54:16 those start to get taken away from the surface of the cell
00:54:21 and it’s what we call receptor internalization.
00:54:25 So the cell starts to think, gee whiz,
00:54:28 there’s a lot of stimulation going on, this is too much.
00:54:31 So I’m just going to, when normally I would coat my cell
00:54:35 with let’s just say five of these receptors
00:54:38 for argument’s sake,
00:54:40 things are going a little bit too ballistic right now.
00:54:43 I’m going to take away at least two of those receptors
00:54:46 and downscale it to just having three of those.
00:54:49 And now you need two cups of coffee to get the same effect
00:54:52 that one cup of coffee got you before.
00:54:55 And that’s why then when you go cold turkey on coffee,
00:55:01 all of a sudden the system has equilibrated itself
00:55:05 to expecting X amount of stimulation
00:55:08 and now all of that stimulation is gone.
00:55:10 So it’s now got too few receptors
00:55:12 and you have a caffeine withdrawal syndrome.
00:55:15 And that’s why, for example, with drugs of abuse,
00:55:18 things like heroin, when people go into abstinence,
00:55:23 as they’re sort of moving into their addiction,
00:55:26 they will build up a progressive tolerance to that drug.
00:55:30 So they need to take more of it to get the same high.
00:55:34 But then if they go cold turkey for some period of time,
00:55:38 the system goes back to being more sensitive again.
00:55:40 It starts to repopulate the surface of the cell
00:55:43 with these receptors.
00:55:44 But now when they reuse and they fall off the wagon,
00:55:47 if they go back to the same dose
00:55:49 that they were using before 10 weeks ago
00:55:53 or three months ago, that dose can kill them.
00:55:56 They can have an overdose.
00:55:58 Even though they were using the same amount
00:56:00 at those two different times,
00:56:02 the difference is that it’s not the dose of the drug,
00:56:05 it’s the sensitivity of the system.
00:56:08 And that’s the same thing that we see with caffeine.
00:56:10 In terms of training the muscle, as it were,
00:56:13 the system becomes less sensitive, can calibrate.
00:56:17 Is there a time, the number of hours before bed,
00:56:22 that’s a safe bet to most people to recommend
00:56:27 you shouldn’t drink caffeine this many hours?
00:56:31 Like, is there an average half life
00:56:33 that you should be aiming at?
00:56:35 Or is this advice kind of impossible
00:56:38 because there’s so much variability?
00:56:39 There is huge variability.
00:56:41 And I think everyone themselves to a degree knows it,
00:56:45 although I’ll put a caveat on that too
00:56:47 because it’s a slightly dangerous point.
00:56:50 So the recommendation for the average adult
00:56:53 and who, where is the average adult in society?
00:56:55 There is no such thing.
00:56:56 But for the average adult,
00:56:58 it would be probably cutting yourself off maybe 10 hours
00:57:02 before.
00:57:03 So assuming a normative bedtime in society,
00:57:06 I would say try to stop drinking caffeine before 2 p.m.
00:57:10 and just keep an eye out.
00:57:13 And if you’re struggling with sleep,
00:57:14 dial down the caffeine and see if it makes a difference.
00:57:18 Can I ask you about sleep and learning?
00:57:22 So how does sleep affect learning?
00:57:25 Sleep before learning, sleep after learning,
00:57:30 which are both fascinating kind of dynamics
00:57:33 of the mind’s interaction with this extra conscious state.
00:57:37 Yeah, sleep is profoundly and very intimately related
00:57:42 to your memory systems and your informational systems.
00:57:46 The first is you just mentioned is that
00:57:48 sleep before learning will essentially prepare your brain
00:57:53 almost like a dry sponge ready to sort of,
00:57:56 you know, initially soak up new information.
00:57:59 In other words, you need sleep before learning
00:58:01 to effectively imprint information into the brain
00:58:04 to lay down fresh memory traces.
00:58:07 And without sleep, the memory circuits of the brain,
00:58:10 and we know we’ve studied these memory circuits,
00:58:13 will, you know, they essentially become waterlogged
00:58:16 as it were for the sponge analogy,
00:58:18 and you can’t absorb the information as effectively.
00:58:23 So you need sleep before learning,
00:58:26 but you also need sleep unfortunately after learning too,
00:58:30 to then take those freshly minted memories
00:58:33 and effectively hit the save button on them,
00:58:36 but it’s nowhere near as quick as a digital system.
00:58:38 It takes hours because it’s a physical biological change
00:58:42 that happens at the level of brain cells.
00:58:45 But sleep after learning will cement and solidify
00:58:49 that new memory into the neural architecture of the brain,
00:58:53 therefore making it less likely to be forgotten.
00:58:56 So, you know, I often think of sleep in that way as,
00:59:01 it’s almost sort of future proofing information.
00:59:04 In what way?
00:59:06 Well, it means that it gives it a higher degree of assurance
00:59:11 to be remembered in the future
00:59:15 rather than go through the sort of degradation
00:59:19 that we think of as forgetting.
00:59:22 So the brain has in some ways by default,
00:59:26 you know, there is forget,
00:59:28 and actually I would love to,
00:59:29 I was going to say sleep is relevant for memory
00:59:31 in three different ways,
00:59:33 but I’m going to amend that
00:59:34 and say there’s four different ways,
00:59:36 which is learning, maintaining, memorizing,
00:59:42 abstraction, assimilation, association, then forgetting,
00:59:47 which the last one sounds oxymoronic
00:59:50 based on the former three, but I’ll see if I can explain.
00:59:53 So sleep after learning then sort of, you know,
00:59:57 sets that information like amber in solidification.
01:00:02 The third benefit, however, is that sleep,
01:00:05 we’ve learned more recently is much more intelligent
01:00:08 than we ever gave it credit for.
01:00:10 Sleep doesn’t simply just take individual memories
01:00:14 and strengthen them.
01:00:15 Sleep will then intelligently integrate and cross link
01:00:20 and associate that information together.
01:00:24 And it’s almost like informational alchemy.
01:00:27 So that you wake up the next morning
01:00:29 with a revised mind wide web of associations.
01:00:34 And that’s probably the reason that, you know,
01:00:36 you’ve never been told to stay awake on a problem.
01:00:40 And in every language that I’ve inquired about that phrase
01:00:44 or something very similar seems to exist,
01:00:47 which means to me that this creative associative benefit
01:00:52 of sleep transcends cultural boundaries.
01:00:55 It is a common experience across humanity.
01:00:58 Now I should note that I think the French translation
01:01:05 of that is much closer to you.
01:01:07 I think you sleep with a problem.
01:01:08 Whereas the British, you sleep on a problem.
01:01:11 The French, you sleep with a problem.
01:01:12 I think it says so much about the romantic difference
01:01:15 between the British and the French, but let’s not go there.
01:01:19 That’s brilliant.
01:01:20 So such a subtle, but such a fundamental difference.
01:01:23 Yeah.
01:01:24 Oh, goodness me.
01:01:25 Sleep with the problem.
01:01:27 Yes, exactly.
01:01:28 That’s why I love the French.
01:01:31 So, and we can sort of double click on any one of these
01:01:35 and go into detail, but the fourth,
01:01:38 I became really enchanted by about eight years ago
01:01:44 in our research, which was this idea of forgetting.
01:01:48 And I started to think that forgetting may be the price
01:01:52 that we pay for remembering.
01:01:54 And in that sense, there is an enormous benefit
01:02:03 to letting go.
01:02:05 And you may be thinking, that sounds ridiculous.
01:02:08 I don’t want to forget.
01:02:09 In fact, my biggest problem is I keep forgetting things,
01:02:13 but the brain has a, well, we believe,
01:02:17 has a finite storage capacity.
01:02:20 We can’t prove it yet, but my suspicion is
01:02:22 that that’s probably true.
01:02:23 It doesn’t have an infinite storage capacity.
01:02:25 It has constraints.
01:02:27 If that’s the case, we can’t simply go through life
01:02:31 being constantly informational aggregators
01:02:37 unless we are programmed to say,
01:02:39 we’ve got a hard drive space of about 85 to 90 years
01:02:43 and we’re good and we can do that.
01:02:44 Maybe that’s true.
01:02:45 I don’t think that’s true.
01:02:46 I think forgetting is an incredibly good and useful thing.
01:02:50 So for example, it’s not beneficial
01:02:54 from an evolutionary perspective for me to remember
01:02:57 where I parked my car three years ago.
01:03:00 So it’s important that I can remember today’s parking spot,
01:03:04 but I don’t want to have the junk kind of DNA
01:03:08 from a memory perspective of where I parked my car
01:03:12 two years ago.
01:03:15 Now, I actually have in some ways a problem
01:03:17 with forgetting, and again, I’m not trying
01:03:19 to sort of be laudatory, but you know,
01:03:22 I tend not to forget too many things.
01:03:24 And I don’t think that that’s a good thing.
01:03:27 And there’s a wonderful neurologist, Luria,
01:03:31 who wrote a book called The Mind of the Mnemonicist.
01:03:35 And it was a brilliant book,
01:03:37 both because it was written exquisitely,
01:03:40 but he was studying these sort of memory savants
01:03:44 who basically could remember everything that he gave them.
01:03:49 And he tried to find a chink in their armor.
01:03:53 And the first half of the book is essentially about him
01:03:56 seeing how far he can push them before they fail.
01:04:01 And he never found that place.
01:04:03 He could never find a place where they stopped remembering.
01:04:08 And then in his brilliance,
01:04:10 he turned the question on its head.
01:04:13 He said, not what is the benefit of constantly remembering,
01:04:17 but instead, what is the detriment to never forgetting?
01:04:22 And when you start to realize his descriptions
01:04:24 of those individuals, it’s probably a life
01:04:26 that you would not want.
01:04:29 But it’s fascinating both from a human perspective,
01:04:31 but also AI perspective.
01:04:33 There’s a big challenge in the machine learning community
01:04:38 of how to build systems that are able to remember
01:04:40 for prolonged periods of time, lifelong continuous learning.
01:04:44 So where you build up information over time.
01:04:48 So memory is one of the biggest open problems
01:04:51 in AI and machine learning.
01:04:54 But at the same time,
01:04:55 the right way to formulate memory is actually forgetting
01:05:00 because you have to be exceptionally selective
01:05:03 at which kind of stuff you remember.
01:05:05 And that’s where the step of assimilation,
01:05:07 integration that you’re referring to is really important.
01:05:09 I mean, we forget most of the things.
01:05:12 And the question is exactly the cost of forgetting
01:05:16 at the very edge of stuff that could be important
01:05:20 or could not be, how do we remember or not those things?
01:05:24 Like for example, doing a podcast,
01:05:28 I’ve become cognizant of one feature of my forgetting
01:05:32 that’s been problematic, which is I forget names
01:05:36 and titles of books and so on.
01:05:39 So when I read, I remember ideas.
01:05:43 I remember quotes, I remember statements
01:05:47 and like that’s the space in which I’m thinking.
01:05:50 But when you communicate to others,
01:05:53 you have to say this person in this book said that.
01:05:56 So it’s the same thing with like Andrew Huberman
01:05:59 is masterful at this.
01:06:01 This is important academia,
01:06:02 remembering the authors of a paper
01:06:04 and the title of the paper as part of remembering the idea.
01:06:09 And I’ve been feeling the cost of not being able
01:06:12 to naturally remember those things.
01:06:15 And so that’s something I need to sort of work on,
01:06:17 but that’s an example.
01:06:18 Are you good with faces?
01:06:20 Yes, very good at faces.
01:06:21 But not good with names.
01:06:23 So I am exactly like you.
01:06:25 And there is an understanding of that in the brain too.
01:06:28 We understand that there is partitioning of those
01:06:31 in terms of the territory of the brain
01:06:33 that takes care of faces and facts and places
01:06:36 and that they can be separate.
01:06:37 So I will never forget a face,
01:06:40 but as I said, I usually forget very little,
01:06:44 but for some reason, names are a struggle.
01:06:47 I think in some ways,
01:06:48 because I’m probably just a slightly anxious person.
01:06:50 So when you first meet someone,
01:06:52 which is usually the time when a name is introduced,
01:06:55 you were saying you were sort of anxious maybe
01:06:57 about sort of sitting down with me,
01:06:59 but I find that a little bit activating.
01:07:04 And so it’s not as though there’s anything wrong
01:07:06 with my memory.
01:07:07 It’s just the emotional state I’m in
01:07:09 when I’m first meeting someone.
01:07:11 It’s a little bit perturbing,
01:07:12 but I will never forget the face.
01:07:15 I completely relate to that
01:07:16 because I almost don’t hear people’s names
01:07:19 when they tell me because I’m so anxious.
01:07:21 Yeah.
01:07:22 But I think there’s certain quirks of social interaction
01:07:27 that show that you care about the person,
01:07:30 that you remember that person,
01:07:31 that they matter to you,
01:07:33 that they had an impact on you.
01:07:35 And one of the ways to show that
01:07:36 is you remember their name.
01:07:39 But that’s a quirk to me
01:07:40 because a lot of people I meet have a deep impact on me,
01:07:46 but I can’t communicate that unless I know their name,
01:07:50 unless I know some of the details
01:07:54 that we humans seem to use to communicate
01:07:58 that we remember each other.
01:08:00 What I remember well is the feeling we shared,
01:08:04 is the experience we shared.
01:08:07 What I don’t remember well is the detailed labels
01:08:10 of those experiences.
01:08:12 And I need to certainly work on that.
01:08:14 I don’t know.
01:08:15 I think it’s just allowing yourself to be innate
01:08:19 and who you are is also a beautiful thing too.
01:08:22 I’m not suggesting it’s not important
01:08:24 to try and better oneself.
01:08:26 But I also sometimes worry about the misery
01:08:29 that that puts us in.
01:08:31 But like you, I do struggle with name,
01:08:35 but I know the first time when we met in the lobby,
01:08:40 I know exactly what you look like.
01:08:43 I know that you were wearing headphones.
01:08:45 I know the shape and the size of those headphones.
01:08:47 You didn’t have your black jacket on.
01:08:49 I know exactly what the weave of your shirt looked like
01:08:51 and what your shoes look like.
01:08:53 And I knew exactly the height of your,
01:08:56 the end of your pants from the top of your shoes.
01:08:59 And so those things I don’t forget.
01:09:02 And I can remember when people,
01:09:04 I met people two years ago and I’ll say,
01:09:06 oh yes, we met there.
01:09:08 And I remember you had those fantastic boots on.
01:09:12 I thought they were pretty great pair of boots.
01:09:14 And they’re like, how do you,
01:09:15 I didn’t even remember what I was wearing that day.
01:09:18 It’s fascinating.
01:09:19 Yeah, I’m the exact same way,
01:09:21 but you can’t, until we have Neuralink
01:09:23 or something like that,
01:09:24 we can’t communicate that you remember all those things.
01:09:26 I know, that’s what I wanted.
01:09:27 So you have to be able to use tricks
01:09:29 of human communication for that.
01:09:31 But so that, I mean, that’s the,
01:09:33 it’s ultimately is a trick of like,
01:09:35 which to remember, which to forget.
01:09:37 And the forgetting is so, it’s so fascinating to say this.
01:09:41 I mean, it seems to be deeply connected
01:09:44 to that assimilation process.
01:09:46 So forgetting, you try to fit all the new stuff
01:09:50 into this big web of the old stuff
01:09:55 and the things that don’t fit, you throw out.
01:09:58 I think the assimilation,
01:10:00 the way I’ve been thinking about it with sleep
01:10:02 and it’s particularly sort of dream sleep
01:10:03 that we think can help with this assimilation
01:10:07 is that during wake,
01:10:09 we have one version of associative processing.
01:10:13 And what I mean by that
01:10:14 is we see the most obvious connections.
01:10:17 So I think of wakefulness as a Google search gone right.
01:10:22 Whereas I see dream sleep as doing something very different.
01:10:27 I think dream sleep is a little bit
01:10:28 like group therapy for memories
01:10:31 that everyone gets a name badge
01:10:33 and sleep gathers in all of the individual pieces
01:10:36 of the day and it sort of starts to get you
01:10:39 to forces you, in fact, to speak to the people,
01:10:42 not at the front of the room
01:10:43 that you think you’ve got the most obvious connection with,
01:10:45 but to speak with the people all the way
01:10:47 at the back of the room that at first you think,
01:10:48 I’ve got no idea what’s going on in the room.
01:10:51 You think I’ve got no obvious connection with them at all.
01:10:54 But once you get chatting with them,
01:10:56 you learn that you do have a very distant,
01:10:58 non obvious connection,
01:10:59 but it’s still a connection on the same.
01:11:02 And it’s almost as though you’re doing a Google search
01:11:05 where I input Lex Friedman
01:11:08 and it doesn’t take me to the first page of your home site.
01:11:12 It takes me to page 20,
01:11:13 which is about some like field hockey game in Utah.
01:11:16 It turns out that there actually is a link.
01:11:19 If I look at it, it’s a distant, non obvious one.
01:11:22 And to me, I find that exciting
01:11:24 because when you fuse things together
01:11:25 that shouldn’t normally go together,
01:11:27 but when they do, they cause marked advances
01:11:30 in evolutionary fitness.
01:11:31 It sounds like the biological basis of creativity.
01:11:34 And that’s exactly what I think dream sleep
01:11:37 and the algorithm of dream sleep is designed to do.
01:11:40 It’s not a Boolean like system where you have
01:11:45 the sort of assumptions of true and false.
01:11:49 Maybe it’s more fuzzy logic system.
01:11:52 And I think REM sleep is a perfect environment
01:11:55 within which we do, it’s almost like memory pinball.
01:11:58 You get the information that you’ve learned during the day
01:12:02 and then you pull the lever back
01:12:03 and you shoot it up into the attic of your brain,
01:12:07 this cortex filled with all
01:12:09 of your past historical knowledge.
01:12:11 And you start to bounce it around
01:12:12 and see where one of those things lights up
01:12:14 and you build a new connection there
01:12:15 and you build another one there too.
01:12:17 You’re developing schemas.
01:12:19 And so in that way, I think you could argue,
01:12:23 we dream, therefore we are.
01:12:27 Yeah, so in terms of this line between learning
01:12:31 and thinking through a new thing
01:12:33 that seems to be deeply connected,
01:12:36 there’s this legendary engineer named Jim Keller
01:12:40 who keeps yelling at me about this.
01:12:42 He says it’s very effective.
01:12:44 He likes to, for difficult problems before bed,
01:12:49 think about that difficult problem.
01:12:51 We’re not talking about like drama at work
01:12:52 or all that kind of stuff.
01:12:54 No, like a scientific for him engineering problem.
01:12:57 He likes to like intensely think about it
01:13:01 to prime his mind before sleep and then go to sleep.
01:13:05 And then he finds that the next day,
01:13:09 he’s able to think much clearer
01:13:12 and there’s new ideas that come,
01:13:13 but also just, I guess it’s more well integrated.
01:13:17 And sometimes during the process of like,
01:13:21 he’s able to like wake up and like see new insights.
01:13:26 That’s right.
01:13:27 If he’s deeply sort of aggressively thinking through a problem.
01:13:30 And there’s many scientific demonstrations of this.
01:13:35 The Mendeleev with the periodic table of elements,
01:13:39 he was trying for months to understand.
01:13:42 I mean, talk about an ecumenical problem
01:13:45 of epic proportions.
01:13:47 Here’s your question today.
01:13:49 You have to understand how all of the known elements
01:13:52 in the universe fit together in a logical way.
01:13:55 Good luck, take care.
01:13:57 It was non trivial at the time.
01:13:58 And he would try and try, he was so obsessed with it.
01:14:01 He created playing cards
01:14:03 with all of the different elements on.
01:14:06 And then he would go on these long train journeys
01:14:09 around Europe and he would just sort of deal these cards
01:14:12 in front of them and he would shuffle them,
01:14:15 shuffling and shuffling.
01:14:16 And he would just try to see
01:14:17 if he could find what the answer was.
01:14:20 And then, so the story goes,
01:14:22 he fell asleep and he had a dream.
01:14:25 And in that dream,
01:14:26 all of these elements started to dance and play around
01:14:30 and they snapped into a logical grid,
01:14:33 atomic weights, et cetera, et cetera.
01:14:35 And it wasn’t his waking brain
01:14:39 that solved the problem.
01:14:41 It was his sleeping brain
01:14:42 that solved the impenetrable problem
01:14:44 that his waking brain could not.
01:14:46 And there’s been count,
01:14:48 even in the arts and in music,
01:14:51 some wonderful dreams,
01:14:52 Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s epic Gothic novel
01:14:56 came to her in a dream at Lord Byron’s home.
01:15:00 And then we’ve got,
01:15:03 Paul McCartney.
01:15:06 Yesterday, the song came to him in a dream.
01:15:08 He was filming, gosh, what was the movie?
01:15:12 I don’t recall it.
01:15:13 I should be shocked because I’m from Liverpool myself.
01:15:16 And, but he was on Wimpole Street in London and filming.
01:15:21 And he came up with that song,
01:15:24 the melody in his sleep,
01:15:26 not to be outdone by the Beatles.
01:15:28 And by the way, Let It Be
01:15:30 also came from a dream that McCartney had.
01:15:34 People usually give it religious overtones.
01:15:38 Mother Mary comes to me speaking words of wisdom,
01:15:41 let it be.
01:15:42 If you’ve ever asked who Mother Mary is,
01:15:45 it’s not the biblical content.
01:15:49 It’s his mother.
01:15:51 It’s Mary McCartney.
01:15:54 And she came to him in a dream and gifted him the song.
01:15:57 But the best story I’ve heard
01:16:00 is not to be outdone by the Beatles.
01:16:03 The Stones, Keith Richards,
01:16:07 who I think once was suggested it.
01:16:10 Who was it?
01:16:11 It was a comedian who was saying that
01:16:13 in an interview with Rolling Stone,
01:16:15 Keith Richards suggested or inferred
01:16:17 that young kids should not do drugs.
01:16:20 And they said, well, look,
01:16:24 young kids can’t do drugs
01:16:26 because you’ve done all of the drugs.
01:16:27 And I always thought that,
01:16:29 but Keith Richards described he would always go to bed
01:16:34 with his guitar and a tape recorder.
01:16:39 And then probably who would have a whole set
01:16:42 of other things in the bed with him.
01:16:43 And who knows how many other people, but anyway.
01:16:47 And then he said in his autobiography,
01:16:49 and I’m paraphrasing here,
01:16:51 but one morning I woke up and I realized
01:16:55 that the tape had recorded all the way to the end.
01:16:58 So I rewound the tape and I hit play.
01:17:02 And there in some kind of ghostly form
01:17:05 were the opening chords to Satisfaction,
01:17:08 the most famous successful Rolling Stone song
01:17:11 of all time.
01:17:13 Followed by then 43 minutes of snoring.
01:17:18 That’s awesome.
01:17:19 That riff came to him.
01:17:20 One of the most famous riffs in all of rock and roll
01:17:22 came to him by way of a dream inspired insight.
01:17:25 So I think there is too many of those anecdotes.
01:17:30 And we’ve now got the side,
01:17:31 I don’t rely on anecdotes as science.
01:17:33 We’ve now done the studies in the laboratory
01:17:35 and we can reliably demonstrate
01:17:37 that sleep inspires creativity,
01:17:39 inspires problem solving capacity.
01:17:41 Well, the interesting thing is,
01:17:43 is it possible to some of the ideas that you talk about
01:17:45 to turn them into a protocol
01:17:47 that could be practiced rigorously?
01:17:48 So what Jim Keller espouses is saying,
01:17:53 not just the fact that sleep helps you
01:17:56 increase the creativity,
01:17:58 but turn it into a process.
01:18:00 Like literally, like don’t do it accidentally.
01:18:06 Like an athlete does certain things
01:18:08 to optimize their performance.
01:18:10 They have a training routine.
01:18:11 They have a regimen of like cycling and sprints
01:18:17 and long distance stuff.
01:18:18 In the same way, thinking about your job
01:18:22 as an idea generator in the engineering space
01:18:25 is like, this is good for my performance.
01:18:27 So like for an hour before bed,
01:18:29 think through a problem like every night
01:18:32 and then use sleep to work through that problem.
01:18:36 I mean, he’s the first person that I heard
01:18:39 like of the people I really respect that do like what I do,
01:18:42 which is like programming engineering type work,
01:18:46 like using sleep, not accidentally, but with a purpose,
01:18:50 like using sleep.
01:18:53 That’s just basically the difference between,
01:18:54 as you said, a passive approach to it
01:18:57 versus an active deterministic
01:19:01 or hope for a deterministic approach to it.
01:19:04 In other words, that you are actually trying to harness
01:19:08 the power of sleep in a deliberate way
01:19:11 rather than an unthoughtful way.
01:19:13 I still think that mother nature through it,
01:19:17 the 3.6 million years of evolution
01:19:20 has probably got it mostly figured out
01:19:22 in terms of what information should be uploaded at night
01:19:25 and worked through.
01:19:27 I think her algorithm is probably pretty good at this stage.
01:19:31 It’s not to suggest though,
01:19:32 that we can’t try to tweak it and nudge it.
01:19:35 It’s a very light hand on the tiller is what he’s doing.
01:19:39 I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
01:19:41 Just like, for example, for me,
01:19:43 fasting has improved my ability to focus deeply
01:19:47 and productivity significantly.
01:19:49 And in that same way,
01:19:52 it’s possible that playing with these ideas
01:19:55 of thinking before bed or some hours before bed
01:19:57 or some playing with different protocols
01:20:00 will have a significant leap
01:20:02 over what mother nature naturally does.
01:20:04 So if you let your body do what it naturally does,
01:20:06 you may not achieve the same level of performance
01:20:09 because mother nature has not designed us
01:20:12 to think deeply about chip design
01:20:16 or programming artificial intelligence systems.
01:20:20 Well, she’s gifted us the architecture
01:20:23 and the capacity to do that.
01:20:25 What we do with that is what life’s experience dictates.
01:20:31 She gives us the blueprint to do many.
01:20:34 Well, if I were to sort of introspect
01:20:37 and self analyze what mother nature wants me to do,
01:20:39 I think given my current lifestyle
01:20:42 that I have food in the fridge
01:20:45 and a bed to sleep on,
01:20:47 I think what mother nature wants me to do is to be lazy.
01:20:51 And so I think I’m actually resisting mother nature
01:20:56 because so many of my needs are satisfied.
01:20:59 And so I have to resist some of the natural forces
01:21:04 of the body and the mind
01:21:05 when I do some of the things I do.
01:21:07 So there’s that dance,
01:21:10 like I’ve been thinking about doing a startup
01:21:12 and that’s obviously going against everything
01:21:15 that my body and mind are telling me to do
01:21:18 because it’s going to be basically suffering.
01:21:21 But the only reason I want…
01:21:22 As you know, it will be over.
01:21:24 Yes, but nevertheless,
01:21:29 there’s some kind of inner drive that wants me to do it.
01:21:31 And then you start to ask a question,
01:21:33 well, how do you optimize the things you can’t optimize
01:21:36 like sleep, like diet,
01:21:38 like the people that you surround yourself with
01:21:40 in order to maximize happiness and performance
01:21:43 and all those kinds of things without also over optimizing.
01:21:47 And that’s such an interesting idea from a engineer.
01:21:52 So as you may know,
01:21:55 you don’t often get those kinds of ideas from engineers.
01:21:59 Engineers usually just don’t read books about sleeping.
01:22:04 They’re usually like the…
01:22:06 They’re not the healthiest of people.
01:22:11 I think that’s changing over time,
01:22:13 especially with Silicon Valley,
01:22:14 especially with the tech sector.
01:22:15 People are starting to understand what’s a healthy lifestyle,
01:22:18 but usually they’re kind of on the insane side,
01:22:20 especially programmers.
01:22:22 But it’s nice to hear somebody like that use sleep
01:22:27 and use some of the things that you talk about
01:22:29 strategically on purpose.
01:22:33 When I get to that idea of not just trying to use
01:22:36 what Mother Nature gave,
01:22:38 but seeing if you can do something more or different,
01:22:45 in a conservative mindset,
01:22:49 I would then pose the question at what cost?
01:22:52 Because when you do something perhaps
01:22:55 that deviates from the typical pre programmed,
01:22:59 you know, Mother Nature’s program,
01:23:04 I suspect it usually comes at the cost of something else.
01:23:07 So maybe he is able to direct and focus
01:23:12 his sleeping cognition on those particular topics
01:23:16 that will gain him better problematic resolution
01:23:20 the next day when he wakes up.
01:23:22 The question is though,
01:23:23 at what cost of the other things that didn’t make it
01:23:26 onto the menu of the finger buffet of sleep that night?
01:23:31 And is it that you don’t process
01:23:34 the emotional difficulties or events,
01:23:37 and therefore you are less emotionally resolved the next day,
01:23:41 but you are more problem resolved the following day.
01:23:45 And so I always try to think,
01:23:46 and I truly don’t want to sound puritanical
01:23:51 either about sleep,
01:23:52 and I think I’ve come off that way many a times,
01:23:56 especially when I started out in the public.
01:24:00 The tone of the book, in some ways,
01:24:02 I look back and think, could I have been a little softer?
01:24:06 And the reason was I was that way back in
01:24:10 when I started writing the book,
01:24:11 which was probably something like 2014 or 15,
01:24:16 sleep was the neglected stepsister
01:24:18 in the health conversation of the day.
01:24:21 And I was just so sad to see the amount of suffering
01:24:25 and disease and sickness that was caused
01:24:27 by insufficient sleep.
01:24:29 And for years before I’d been doing public speaking,
01:24:33 and I’d tell people about the great things
01:24:34 that happen when you get sleep.
01:24:36 People would say, that’s fascinating.
01:24:37 And then they would go back and keep doing the same thing
01:24:39 about not sleeping enough.
01:24:41 And then I realized you can’t really speak
01:24:43 about the good things that happen.
01:24:44 It’s like the news, what bleeds leads.
01:24:46 And if you speak about the alarmingly bad things
01:24:49 that happen, people tend to have a behavioral change.
01:24:52 And so the book as a consequence,
01:24:55 I think probably came out a little bit on the strong side
01:24:59 of trying to convince people.
01:25:03 Well, you were trying to help a lot of people
01:25:05 and that’s a powerful way to help a lot of people.
01:25:07 I was genuinely trying to help people,
01:25:09 but certainly for some people for whom sleep
01:25:12 does not come easy, then it was probably
01:25:15 a tricky book to read too.
01:25:17 And I think I feel more sensitive to those people now
01:25:20 and empathetically connected to them.
01:25:23 So I think the, again, the point was simply
01:25:27 that I don’t mean to sound too puritanical in all of this.
01:25:32 And the same way with caffeine and coffee.
01:25:36 I am just a scientist and I am not here to tell anyone
01:25:40 how to live their life.
01:25:41 That is not my job at all.
01:25:44 And life is to be lived to a degree
01:25:47 and life is to be lived if you want to do a startup.
01:25:51 All I want to do is empower people
01:25:54 with the understanding of the science of sleep.
01:25:57 And then you can make an informed choice
01:25:59 as to how you want to live your life.
01:26:00 And I offer no judgment on how anyone
01:26:03 wishes to live their life.
01:26:05 I just want to try and see if the information
01:26:08 that I have about sleep would alternatively change
01:26:12 how you would think about your life decisions.
01:26:13 And if it doesn’t, no problem.
01:26:15 And if it does, I hope it’s been of use.
01:26:18 Well, maybe this is me trying
01:26:20 to justify my lifestyle to you.
01:26:22 But Dr. Seuss said, you know you’re in love
01:26:27 when you can’t fall asleep because reality
01:26:29 is finally better than your dreams.
01:26:32 I love that quote too.
01:26:34 Okay.
01:26:37 My sleeping schedule is complicated
01:26:41 and it has to do primarily with the fact
01:26:45 that I love basically everything that I do.
01:26:49 And that love takes a form that may not appear
01:26:53 to be love from the external observer perspective.
01:26:56 Cause it’s often includes struggle.
01:26:58 It often includes something that looks like stress
01:27:02 even though it’s not stress.
01:27:03 It’s like this excitement, it’s this turmoil
01:27:06 and chaos of passion, of struggling with a problem
01:27:11 of being sad and down to the point even depressed
01:27:15 of how difficult the problem is, the disappointment
01:27:18 that the last few weeks and months have been a failure
01:27:22 and self doubt, all that mix.
01:27:25 But I love it.
01:27:27 And a part of that is sometimes staying up all night
01:27:30 working on a thing I’m really passionate about.
01:27:33 And that means sleep schedules that are just like,
01:27:37 you know, sometimes sleeping during the day,
01:27:39 sometimes very often sleeping very little
01:27:43 but taking naps that are like an hour, two hours and so on.
01:27:46 That kind of weird chaos.
01:27:48 And now I’ll also try to give myself back up.
01:27:54 I was trying to like research yesterday
01:27:56 is anybody else productive, wild like this?
01:27:59 And there’s of course a lot of anecdotal evidence
01:28:02 and some of it could be just narratives
01:28:05 that people have told to the public
01:28:07 when in reality they sleep way more.
01:28:09 But there’s a bunch of people that are famous
01:28:14 for not sleeping much.
01:28:16 So on the topic of naps, I read this a long time ago
01:28:21 and I checked this, Churchill was big on big naps.
01:28:26 And is actually just reading more
01:28:28 about Winston Churchill’s sleep schedule
01:28:31 is very much like mine.
01:28:33 So I basically wanna give myself the opportunity
01:28:36 to at night to stay up all night if I want to.
01:28:40 And a good nap is a big part of that in the late evening.
01:28:44 Like I’ll often, this destroys social life completely
01:28:48 but I’ll often take a nap in the late afternoon
01:28:51 or the evening and that sets me
01:28:54 if I want to stay up all night.
01:28:56 And things like that, that I read that Nikola Tesla
01:29:00 slept only two hours a night, Edison the same three hours
01:29:05 but he actually did the polyphasic sleep
01:29:07 like where it’s just a bunch of naps.
01:29:10 What can you say about this madness of love
01:29:15 and passion of loving everything you do
01:29:18 and the chaos of sleep that might result in?
01:29:23 I love the Seuss quote and I’ve had that experience too.
01:29:28 Like you, I adore what I do.
01:29:33 If someone gave you enough money
01:29:37 to live the rest of your life,
01:29:40 got a roof above my head, rice and beans on the table
01:29:43 and they said, you don’t have to work anymore.
01:29:45 I would do nothing different.
01:29:46 I would do exactly, this sounds a little crass
01:29:51 and I hope it doesn’t sound this way
01:29:53 but being a scientist is not what I do, it’s who I am.
01:30:03 And when that’s the case, sleep, working out,
01:30:09 showering and eating are the things that I do
01:30:12 in between my love affair with sleep.
01:30:17 I fell for sleep like a blind roofer.
01:30:19 And it was a love affair that started 20 years ago
01:30:28 and I remain utterly besotted today.
01:30:33 It’s the most beguiling thing in the world to me.
01:30:37 And I could easily and I have, it’s kept me up at night.
01:30:41 When my mind is fizzing with experimental ideas
01:30:44 or I think I’ve got a new hypothesis or theory,
01:30:47 I will struggle with sleep.
01:30:49 I really will, it doesn’t come easy to me
01:30:52 because my mind is just so on fire with those ideas.
01:30:56 So I understand the struggle,
01:31:01 but I couldn’t advocate from a scientific perspective,
01:31:07 the schedule because the science just doesn’t,
01:31:11 I would feel as though I’m doing you a disservice
01:31:14 to say it’s okay, that won’t come with some blast radius,
01:31:20 some health consequences.
01:31:22 You can add Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan
01:31:25 to that list too.
01:31:26 Both of them were very proud chest beaters
01:31:30 of how little sleep that they get.
01:31:32 Thatcher said four hours, Reagan something similar.
01:31:35 And I, knowing the links that we now know
01:31:38 between sleep and Alzheimer’s disease,
01:31:39 I’ve often wondered whether it was coincidental then
01:31:42 that both of them died of the terrible disease of Alzheimer’s
01:31:46 meaning, maybe it doesn’t get you by way of
01:31:49 being popped out of the gene pool in a car accident
01:31:52 because you had a microsleep at the wheel at age 32,
01:31:55 or it doesn’t get you at 42 with heart attack
01:31:59 or even 52 with cancer or a stroke,
01:32:03 maybe it gets you in your seventies.
01:32:05 I think the elastic band of sleep deprivation
01:32:07 can stretch only so far before it snaps
01:32:10 and it ultimately seems to snap.
01:32:13 Nicola Tesla, I think he died of a coronary thrombosis,
01:32:21 I believe.
01:32:22 And there was a wonderful study done out of Harvard
01:32:25 where they took a group of people who had no signs
01:32:27 of cardiovascular disease.
01:32:30 And what they found is that when they track them
01:32:32 for years afterwards, they were completely healthy
01:32:36 to begin with.
01:32:37 Those people who are getting less than six hours of sleep
01:32:40 ended up having a 300% increased risk
01:32:43 of developing calcification of the coronary artery,
01:32:46 which is the major sort of corridor of life for your heart.
01:32:51 When someone says, he died of a massive coronary,
01:32:54 it’s because of a blockade of the coronary artery.
01:32:58 And Tesla passed away from a coronary thrombosis.
01:33:03 We also know that insufficient sleep
01:33:05 is linked to numerous mental health issues.
01:33:07 We know that Churchill had a wicked battle with depression.
01:33:11 Gosh, my goodness, he used to call it black dog
01:33:13 that would come and visit him.
01:33:15 And I think many of his paintings,
01:33:16 he was exquisite painter,
01:33:18 but some of them would depict his darkness
01:33:20 with depression as well.
01:33:24 Edison is interesting.
01:33:26 People have argued that he would short sleep
01:33:28 and he didn’t put much value in sleep.
01:33:30 Whether or not that’s true, we don’t know,
01:33:31 but he was a habitual napper.
01:33:33 You’re right, during the day,
01:33:33 I’ve got some great pictures of him on his inventor’s bench
01:33:36 taking a nap.
01:33:37 And in fact, I believe he set up nap carts around his house
01:33:41 so he could nap.
01:33:42 But what we also know, a study, again,
01:33:44 coming out of Harvard just a couple of months ago,
01:33:47 demonstrated very clearly that polyphasic sleep
01:33:50 is associated with worse physical outcomes,
01:33:52 worse cognitive outcomes,
01:33:54 and especially worse mood outcomes.
01:33:57 So from that sense,
01:33:58 sleeping like a baby is not perfect for adults.
01:34:01 So there’s a fascinating dance here
01:34:05 of the mean and the extreme,
01:34:09 like the average and the high performers.
01:34:13 So I,
01:34:17 this gets to like the meaning of life kind of discussion,
01:34:21 but let’s go that way.
01:34:24 And also happiness.
01:34:25 So when studying sleep and when studying anything
01:34:29 like diet and exercise,
01:34:31 I think you have to really get a lot more data
01:34:35 about individuals to make
01:34:40 conclusive statement.
01:34:41 That’s when people talk about like,
01:34:43 is meat, red meat good for you or bad for you, right?
01:34:47 It’s just so often correlated with other life decisions
01:34:50 when you choose to eat meat or not.
01:34:53 My sense is that whatever life decisions you make,
01:34:58 if they reduce stress and lead to happiness,
01:35:02 that’s also going to be a big boost
01:35:04 that needs to be integrated
01:35:06 into the plots in the science, right?
01:35:07 So I’ll give you an example of somebody
01:35:10 who is unarguably seen as unhealthy.
01:35:15 My friend, Mr. David Goggins.
01:35:17 So he’s clearly, obviously,
01:35:21 almost on purpose destroying his body.
01:35:23 He’s destroying his body and to say
01:35:28 that he’s doing the wrong thing or the unhealthy thing
01:35:32 feels like, feels wrong.
01:35:38 But I’m not sure exactly in which way he feels wrong.
01:35:41 One of the things I’m bothered by,
01:35:43 and again, I apologize for the therapy sessions,
01:35:48 a framework of this,
01:35:49 but I’m bothered by the fact that a lot of people
01:35:55 tell me or David that they’re doing things wrong.
01:36:02 A lot of people in my life, when they see me not sleep,
01:36:06 they’ll tell me to sleep more.
01:36:09 Now they’re correct, but one fundamental aspect
01:36:13 that I’d like to complain about is not enough people,
01:36:18 almost nobody, especially people that care for me,
01:36:22 will come to me and say,
01:36:25 you have a dream, work harder.
01:36:34 It’s like the healthy thing should be a component
01:36:39 of a life well lived, but not everything.
01:36:44 And I don’t know what to do with that
01:36:45 because you certainly don’t want to espouse.
01:36:48 And just like you said, when you were working in your book,
01:36:51 there is a belief, sleep was a secondary citizen
01:36:55 in the full spectrum of what’s a healthy life.
01:36:59 But at the same time, I’m bothered by in Silicon Valley
01:37:02 and all these kinds of work environments
01:37:05 that I get to work with, with engineers,
01:37:07 is there’s to me too much focus on work life balance.
01:37:12 And what that usually starts meaning is like,
01:37:16 yeah, yeah, of course, it’s good to have a social life,
01:37:18 it’s good to have a family,
01:37:19 it’s good to eat well and sleep well,
01:37:23 but we should also discover our passion.
01:37:25 We should also give ourselves a chance
01:37:30 to work our ass off towards a dream
01:37:33 and make mistakes and take big risks
01:37:36 that in the short term seem to sacrifice health.
01:37:40 And I think to come back to how you started
01:37:42 about David Goggins, who I’ve never met,
01:37:45 but who I admire incredibly
01:37:48 and have an immense reverence for the man.
01:37:51 You said two things,
01:37:53 is it wrong to do those things to yourself?
01:37:59 And is it unhealthy to do those things to yourself?
01:38:03 I disagree with the former and I agree with the latter.
01:38:07 So from a health biological medicine perspective,
01:38:12 sleeping in the way that you’ve described
01:38:14 or that other people may be sleeping
01:38:16 in terms of insufficient amounts,
01:38:19 now to your point too about into individual differences,
01:38:24 usually when I see a bar graph and a mean,
01:38:27 I usually say, show me your variance.
01:38:30 I want to see your variance.
01:38:32 In other words, show me the distribution of that effect.
01:38:35 How many people were below the mean?
01:38:36 How many, is it all tightly clustered around this one thing?
01:38:39 So it’s a very robust effect
01:38:41 or was this huge fan of effect where for some people
01:38:44 there was no effect at all and other people
01:38:46 there was a whopping effect and everything in between.
01:38:48 So I don’t discount into individual variability,
01:38:54 but, and I will come back to those two points about,
01:38:57 is it wrong and is it unhealthy in just a second?
01:38:59 When it comes to sleep,
01:39:00 we have found huge amounts of into individual differences
01:39:04 in your response to a lack of sleep.
01:39:07 But one of the fascinating things,
01:39:09 so let’s say that I take you
01:39:10 and we’re going to measure your attention,
01:39:13 your emotion, your mood, your blood pressure,
01:39:16 your blood sugar glucose regulation,
01:39:19 your autonomic nervous system
01:39:20 and your different gene expression.
01:39:22 Let’s say I’m just going to measure a whole kaleidoscope
01:39:25 of different outcomes, brain and body.
01:39:28 And I find that on our measure of cognition
01:39:31 on your attentional ability to focus,
01:39:33 you are very resilient.
01:39:35 You just don’t show any impairment at all
01:39:37 even after being awake for 36 hours straight.
01:39:40 Does that mean that you are resilient
01:39:42 in all of those other domains as well?
01:39:44 The answer is no, you’re not.
01:39:46 So you can be resilient in one,
01:39:48 but very vulnerable in another.
01:39:51 And we’ve not found anyone who isn’t at least vulnerable
01:39:56 in one of those domains,
01:39:58 meaning that it’s somewhat safe to say that
01:40:02 not getting sufficient sleep will lead
01:40:03 to some kind of impairment in any one given individual.
01:40:07 It may not be the same impairment,
01:40:10 but it’s likely to be an impairment.
01:40:12 But to come back to the question,
01:40:14 I think it’s wrong to tell anyone
01:40:16 that it’s wrong to do what they’re doing,
01:40:19 even if they are compromising their sleep,
01:40:21 even if they’re compromising their mental health.
01:40:24 As long as they’re not hurting anyone else,
01:40:28 then I think the answer is
01:40:31 that’s that person’s choice.
01:40:32 Yeah, but that’s that person’s life.
01:40:34 I’d like to push back further.
01:40:35 So see, the way you kind of said it,
01:40:39 yes, you’re absolutely right.
01:40:41 But I would like to say a stronger statement,
01:40:45 which is you should let go of that judgment
01:40:49 of somebody is wrong
01:40:51 and allow yourself to be inspired
01:40:53 by the great heights they have reached.
01:40:55 So take yourself out of the seat of being a judger
01:40:59 of what is healthy or not,
01:41:01 and appreciate the greatness of a particular human.
01:41:05 You watch the Olympics,
01:41:06 the kind of things that some athletes do
01:41:09 to reach the very heights.
01:41:11 The Olympics are taking years off of their life.
01:41:14 They suffer depression after the Olympics often.
01:41:18 The physiology is disastrous.
01:41:21 Everything, their personal life,
01:41:22 there’s their psychology, their physiology,
01:41:27 everything, it’s a giant mess.
01:41:28 So the question is about life.
01:41:32 Healthy now means longevity,
01:41:38 quality of life over a prolonged period of time,
01:41:42 optimum performance over a prolonged period of time.
01:41:46 But to me, beauty is reaching great heights.
01:41:52 And there’s a dance there
01:41:54 that sometimes reaching great heights
01:41:56 requires sacrifice of health
01:41:58 and not like a calculation
01:42:01 where you sat down on a sheet of paper
01:42:02 and say, I’m going to take seven years off my life
01:42:05 for an Olympic gold medal.
01:42:07 No, it requires more chaotic journey
01:42:11 that doesn’t do that kind of calculus.
01:42:13 And I just want to kind of speak to the,
01:42:15 in the culture that struggles of what is healthy and not,
01:42:19 we want to be able to speak to what is healthy
01:42:22 and at the same time be inspired by the great heights
01:42:26 that humans reach no matter how healthy
01:42:29 or unhealthy they live.
01:42:32 Yeah, I agree with that.
01:42:34 I think if that’s a flag you’re hoisting,
01:42:35 I will definitely salute it because it really depends,
01:42:38 what are you trying to optimize for in your life?
01:42:41 And if you are,
01:42:43 I think the only danger potentially with that mindset
01:42:46 is that if you look at many of the studies
01:42:50 of old age and end of life,
01:42:53 most people say I never look back on my life
01:42:57 and wish I worked harder.
01:43:01 I wish instead I’d spent more time with family, friends
01:43:06 and engaged in that aspect.
01:43:08 Now I’m not saying though, coming back to your point,
01:43:11 that that is the standard rubric for everyone.
01:43:13 I don’t believe it is too.
01:43:15 And there are many things that you and I
01:43:17 are both benefiting from today,
01:43:19 even in the field of medicine,
01:43:21 where people have sacrificed their own longevity
01:43:26 for the quest of solving a particular medical problem.
01:43:31 And they died quicker because of their commitment,
01:43:37 because they wished to try and solve that problem
01:43:40 in their pursuit of greatness scientifically.
01:43:43 And I now benefit.
01:43:44 Am I grateful that they did that?
01:43:46 Incredibly grateful.
01:43:48 You know, a simpler demonstration is this.
01:43:51 If tonight at 4 a.m. in the morning,
01:43:54 I have a ruptured appendix, I have an appendicitis,
01:43:59 I am incredibly grateful that there is an emergency team
01:44:04 that will take me to the hospital at 4 a.m. in the morning.
01:44:07 They are awake, they’re not sleeping and they save my life.
01:44:12 And that’s part of what their life’s mission and quest is.
01:44:17 And they saved another’s life by, in some ways,
01:44:20 shaving a little of their own off.
01:44:23 So I don’t take, I have no umbrage
01:44:27 with that mentality at all.
01:44:29 I think you just have to be very clear
01:44:30 about what you’re optimizing for.
01:44:34 And my worry is that most people fall into the rat race
01:44:39 and they never actually ask the question,
01:44:41 why am I doing this?
01:44:42 If you’re just working nine to five or,
01:44:47 and you allow that nine to five to stretch
01:44:50 into much longer, but it’s nevertheless a job
01:44:53 that’s kind of like wears you down.
01:44:55 That’s one thing.
01:44:56 Another thing is when it is like, you’re,
01:44:59 it’s a dream, it’s a life mission.
01:45:04 And for that, I think as long as you know what it is
01:45:09 that you could be doing to yourself
01:45:11 and you are comfortable and A okay with that,
01:45:15 I have no problem with that at all.
01:45:17 Again, as I said, as a scientist, I cannot, should not,
01:45:21 and will not tell anyone what they should do with their life.
01:45:24 All I want you to be able to do is say, okay,
01:45:28 now I understand more about the,
01:45:31 previously these would be known unknowns
01:45:35 and these were the unknown unknowns.
01:45:38 And now I am slightly more cognizant.
01:45:41 I have more knowns than I had before
01:45:46 regarding my sleep and my health,
01:45:48 knowing that information,
01:45:49 do I still choose to make this decision?
01:45:53 And if that’s what I offered,
01:45:57 then I think I’ve done my job.
01:45:59 That’s all I want to offer is just added information
01:46:02 into the decision algorithm.
01:46:04 And what you end up choosing as an output of that algorithm
01:46:09 has nothing to do with me.
01:46:11 It’s not my business and I will never judge anyone for it.
01:46:14 And as I said, I’m immensely grateful for people
01:46:16 who have sacrificed much in their lives
01:46:19 to give me what I have.
01:46:21 So you’re saying as long as the sacrifice sort of grounded
01:46:23 in knowledge of what the sacrifice is,
01:46:27 that sleep is important, all those kinds of things.
01:46:29 And that you’re comfortable with it.
01:46:30 That is, it is your conscious choice
01:46:32 rather than feeling as though you’re trapped
01:46:34 or that you are just, you haven’t thought about it.
01:46:38 And you start that job at age 32
01:46:41 and then you wake up the next morning and you’re 65
01:46:44 and you think, where did my life go?
01:46:45 What was I doing?
01:46:46 That to me, I would feel, I would want to hug you.
01:46:49 And I would say, I’m just, and I’m not saying,
01:46:52 I don’t want to sound belittling here at all.
01:46:56 I would just not wish that for you.
01:46:58 I would wish that you could have thought about
01:47:03 what it was that you’re doing and not have that regret.
01:47:06 Yeah, so I guess I’m, this is for you, the listener.
01:47:09 I’m coming out of the closet here a little bit.
01:47:11 The fact that I enjoy the madness I live in.
01:47:14 So please do not criticize me, embrace me.
01:47:17 I understand the sacrifices I’m making.
01:47:20 I enjoy sleeping on the floor
01:47:22 when I’m passionate programming all night
01:47:24 and just pass out on the carpet.
01:47:28 I love this life.
01:47:29 Okay, so it’s, but it’s definitely something I think about
01:47:33 that there’s a balance, a strike where.
01:47:37 I just want you to have as much of it though.
01:47:40 Of life.
01:47:44 See, quality of life is important.
01:47:49 I should have said,
01:47:50 I want you to have as much high quality life.
01:47:52 And if high quality of life means
01:47:57 I spend five decades on this planet,
01:48:01 but yet in that time, I am thrilled every day.
01:48:04 I’m turned on every day by what I do.
01:48:07 And I reveled in this thing called my life’s work.
01:48:14 I think that that is a 50 year journey
01:48:17 of absolute delight and fulfillment that you should take.
01:48:24 I think about my death all the time.
01:48:26 I meditate on death.
01:48:27 I’m okay to die today.
01:48:31 So to me, longevity is not a significant goal.
01:48:37 I’m so happy to be alive.
01:48:40 I don’t even think it would suck to die today.
01:48:43 I’m as afraid of it today as I will be in 50 years.
01:48:48 I don’t wanna die as much today as I will in 50 years.
01:48:51 There’s of course all these experiences
01:48:55 I would like to have, but everything’s already amazing.
01:48:59 It’s like that Lego movie.
01:49:01 So I don’t know.
01:49:02 So to me, I just wanna keep doing this.
01:49:06 And there’s of course things that could affect,
01:49:12 like you mentioned, dementia and these deterioration
01:49:16 of the mind or the body that can significantly affect
01:49:21 the quality of life.
01:49:23 And so you want to do.
01:49:25 As long as you’re aware of that,
01:49:26 and that’s the price you pay for the entry
01:49:29 into this magical kingdom that you are experiencing,
01:49:32 which is a lovely thing.
01:49:34 I feel privileged too.
01:49:37 I can’t believe the life that I live.
01:49:38 It’s incredible.
01:49:41 And just like you, I think about mortality a great deal.
01:49:46 I think a lot about death, but I don’t worry about death.
01:49:51 I probably, with the exception of the potential pain
01:49:55 that comes before it, that some people,
01:49:58 many people can suffer, that maybe concerns me.
01:50:01 But I actually think about mortality as a tool,
01:50:06 I use it as a lens through which I can then retrospect.
01:50:12 And by placing myself at the point of future mortality,
01:50:16 I can then use it as a retrospective lens
01:50:20 to focus and ask the following question.
01:50:22 Is there anything I feel I would regret
01:50:26 and therefore change in the life that I currently have now?
01:50:31 That’s the way I meditate and use mortality as a question,
01:50:35 is to try and course correct and focus my life.
01:50:39 I worry not about dying,
01:50:42 but I like to think about death
01:50:44 as a way to prioritize my life.
01:50:47 If that makes sense, I don’t know if that makes sense.
01:50:49 No, it makes total sense to decide
01:50:52 how do you want to live today
01:50:55 so that in the future you do not regret
01:50:59 the way you’ve lived today.
01:51:00 Right, and to place yourself in the future
01:51:02 at your point of mortality is one way to, I think,
01:51:06 as an exercise to retrospectively look back
01:51:10 and not lose out on informed choices
01:51:13 that you could otherwise lose out on
01:51:15 if you weren’t thinking about mortality.
01:51:18 Yeah, it clarifies your thinking.
01:51:23 So I mentioned I sleep on the floor,
01:51:24 take naps and power naps, and it’s just kind of madness.
01:51:28 Is there weirdnesses to your own sleep schedule
01:51:31 as a scientist that does incredible work,
01:51:35 has a lot of things going on,
01:51:39 has to lead research, has to write research,
01:51:41 has to be a science communicator,
01:51:44 also have a social life, all those kinds of things.
01:51:46 Is there certain patterns to your own sleep
01:51:49 that you regret or you participate in
01:51:56 that you find you enjoy?
01:51:59 Is there some personal stuff,
01:52:02 quirks or things you’re proud of
01:52:04 that you do in terms of your sleep schedule?
01:52:07 The funny thing about being a sleep researcher
01:52:10 is that it doesn’t make you immune
01:52:13 to the ravages of difficult nights of sleep,
01:52:16 and I have battled my own periods of insomnia in my life too.
01:52:24 And I think I’ve been fortunate in ways
01:52:26 because I know how sleep works
01:52:28 and I know how to combat insomnia.
01:52:30 I know how to get it under control
01:52:32 because insomnia in many ways is a condition
01:52:36 where all of a sudden your sleep controls you
01:52:40 rather than you control your sleep.
01:52:42 Wow, yeah, that’s a beautiful way to put it, yeah.
01:52:46 And I know when I’m starting to lose control
01:52:52 and it’s starting to take control,
01:52:54 and I understand how to regain,
01:52:57 but it doesn’t happen overnight.
01:53:01 It takes a long time.
01:53:03 So you’ve struggled with insomnia in your life?
01:53:06 I have, not all of my life.
01:53:08 I would say I’ve probably had three or four
01:53:10 really severe bouts, and all of them usually triggered
01:53:14 by emotional circumstances, by stress.
01:53:19 Stress that’s connected to actual events in life
01:53:22 or stress that’s unexplainable?
01:53:24 Well, externally triggered.
01:53:26 Yeah, it’s sort of what we would call reactive stress.
01:53:33 And so that’s sort of point number one
01:53:36 about the idiosyncrasies.
01:53:38 The point number two is that when you are having
01:53:41 a difficult night of sleep, as a sleep researcher,
01:53:44 you basically have become the Woody Allen neurotic
01:53:47 of the sleep world.
01:53:49 Because at that moment, I’m trying to fall asleep
01:53:52 and I’m not, and I’m starting to think,
01:53:54 okay, my dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex
01:53:57 is not shutting down.
01:53:57 My noradrenaline is not ramping down.
01:53:59 My sympathetic nervous system
01:54:01 is not giving way to my parasympathetic.
01:54:02 At that point, you are dead in the water
01:54:05 for the next two hours and nothing is bringing you back.
01:54:08 So there is some irony in that too.
01:54:11 I would say for myself though,
01:54:14 if there is something I’m not proud of,
01:54:16 it has been at times railing against my chronotype.
01:54:23 So your chronotype is essentially,
01:54:25 are you a morning type, evening type
01:54:27 or somewhere in between?
01:54:29 And there were times because society
01:54:32 is desperately biased towards the morning types.
01:54:37 This notion of the early bird catches the worm.
01:54:40 Maybe that’s true, but I’ll also tell you
01:54:42 that the second mouse gets the cheese.
01:54:46 Yeah, so I think one of the issues around,
01:54:52 firstly, people don’t really understand chronotype
01:54:55 because I’ll have some people
01:54:56 when I’m sort of out in the public,
01:54:58 they’ll say, look, I struggle with terrible insomnia.
01:55:00 And I’ll ask them, is it problems falling asleep
01:55:02 or staying asleep?
01:55:03 And they’ll say, falling asleep.
01:55:05 And then I’ll say, look, if you are on a desert island
01:55:07 with nothing to wake up for, no responsibilities,
01:55:11 what time would you normally go to bed
01:55:13 and what time would you wake up?
01:55:14 And they would say, I’d probably like to go to bed
01:55:15 about midnight and wake up maybe eight in the morning.
01:55:18 And then I’d say, so what time do you now go to bed?
01:55:20 And they’d say, well, I’ve got to be up for work early.
01:55:22 So I get into bed at 10.
01:55:25 I say, well, you don’t have insomnia.
01:55:26 You have a mismatch between your biological chronotype
01:55:29 and your current sleep schedule.
01:55:31 And when you align those two,
01:55:33 and I was fighting that for some time too,
01:55:35 I’m probably mostly right in the middle.
01:55:40 I am desperately vanilla, unfortunately,
01:55:43 in many aspects of life, but this included,
01:55:47 I’m neither a strong morning type
01:55:48 nor a strong evening type.
01:55:49 So ideally I’d probably like to go to bed around 11,
01:55:53 10.30, 11, probably somewhere between 10.30, 11,
01:55:56 and wake up, I naturally wake up usually most days
01:56:00 before my alarm at 7.04, and it’s 7.04
01:56:05 because why not be idiosyncratic
01:56:08 in terms of setting an alarm?
01:56:09 I love it.
01:56:10 And so I…
01:56:13 That’s kind of awesome.
01:56:14 I’ve never heard about that.
01:56:15 That’s amazing.
01:56:16 I’m gonna start doing that now,
01:56:17 setting alarms like a little bit off the…
01:56:20 Yeah, I know.
01:56:21 I’m never quite sure why we all…
01:56:22 It’s a celebration of uniqueness.
01:56:24 Yeah, and I am quite the odd snowflake in that sense too.
01:56:28 So I would usually then try to force myself
01:56:31 because I had that same mentality
01:56:33 that if I wasn’t up at 6.30 and in the gym by seven
01:56:38 that there was something wrong with me.
01:56:41 And I quickly abandoned that.
01:56:44 But if I look back, if there was a shameful act
01:56:46 that I have around my sleep,
01:56:47 I think it would be that for some years
01:56:49 until I really started to get more detailed into sleep.
01:56:53 And now I have no shame in telling people
01:56:56 that I will probably usually wake up around 6.45 naturally,
01:57:02 sometimes seven when people are looking at me thinking,
01:57:06 you’re a sloth, you’re lazy.
01:57:08 And I don’t finish my daily workout
01:57:12 until I’m not working until probably nine o clock
01:57:16 in the morning thinking, what are you doing?
01:57:19 Now I will work late into the day.
01:57:22 If I could, I would work 16 hours.
01:57:25 It’s my passion just like yours.
01:57:29 So I don’t feel shame around that,
01:57:31 but I have changed my mentality around that.
01:57:35 It’s complicated because I’m probably happiest
01:57:42 going to bed, if I’m being honest, like at 5 a.m.
01:57:45 That’s fine.
01:57:46 You’re just an extreme evening type.
01:57:48 But the problem is it’s not that I’m ashamed for it.
01:57:53 I actually kind of enjoy it because I get to sleep
01:57:56 through all the nonsense of like the morning.
01:57:59 Isn’t that a beautiful thing?
01:58:01 Like people are busy with their emails
01:58:03 and I just am happy as a cow.
01:58:06 And I wake up after all the drama has been resolved.
01:58:09 And cows are happy and the drama has been resolved.
01:58:12 Exactly.
01:58:13 But in society you do, especially,
01:58:16 I mean this is what I think about is
01:58:19 when you work on a larger team,
01:58:20 especially with companies, you are,
01:58:25 everybody’s awake at the same time.
01:58:26 So that’s definitely been a struggle
01:58:29 to try to figure out, just like you said,
01:58:32 how to balance that, how to fit into society
01:58:35 and yet be optimal for your chronotype, you said.
01:58:38 Yeah, you have to sleep in synchrony with it and harmony.
01:58:42 Because normally what we know is that if you fight biology,
01:58:47 you’ll normally lose.
01:58:48 And the way you know you’ve lost is through disease
01:58:51 and sickness.
01:58:52 You said you suffered through several bouts of insomnia.
01:58:57 Is there, aside from embracing your chronotype,
01:59:02 is there advice you can give how to overcome insomnia
01:59:05 from your own experience?
01:59:07 Right now the best method that we have
01:59:09 is something called cognitive behavioral therapy
01:59:11 for insomnia or CBTI for short.
01:59:14 And you work with, for people who don’t know what it is,
01:59:18 you work with a therapist for maybe six weeks
01:59:21 and you can do it online, by the way,
01:59:22 I recommend probably jumping online, it’s just the easiest.
01:59:26 And it will change your beliefs, your habits,
01:59:31 your behaviors and your general stress
01:59:33 around this thing called sleep.
01:59:34 And it is just as effective as sleeping pills
01:59:36 in the short term.
01:59:38 But what’s great is that unlike sleeping pills,
01:59:40 when you stop working with your therapist,
01:59:43 those benefits last for years later.
01:59:45 Whereas when you stop your sleeping pills,
01:59:47 you typically have what’s called rebound insomnia,
01:59:49 where your sleep not only goes back to being
01:59:51 as bad as it was before, it’s usually even worse.
01:59:55 For me, I think I found a number of things effective.
02:00:00 The first is that I had to really address
02:00:02 what was stressful and try to come up with
02:00:06 some degree of meaningful rationality around it.
02:00:11 Because I think one of the things that happens,
02:00:13 there’s something very, talking about conscious states,
02:00:15 to come all the way back to, gosh, I don’t know,
02:00:19 I feel like we’ve only been chatting for like 20 minutes,
02:00:21 but you’re gonna tell me it’s been a while.
02:00:23 Yeah, it’s been a while.
02:00:24 Okay, I’m desperately, I feel terribly sorry.
02:00:27 But let’s come back to conscious states,
02:00:29 which is where we started.
02:00:32 There is something very strange about the night
02:00:36 that thoughts and anxieties are not the same
02:00:41 as they are in the waking day.
02:00:43 They are worse, they are bigger.
02:00:45 And I at least find that I am far
02:00:51 more likely to catastrophize and ruminate
02:00:56 at night about things that when I wake up the next day
02:00:59 in the broad light of day,
02:01:01 I think it’s nowhere near that bad, man.
02:01:03 What were you doing?
02:01:04 It’s not that bad at all.
02:01:06 So to gain firstly, some rational understanding
02:01:10 of my emotional state that’s causing that insomnia
02:01:14 was very helpful.
02:01:15 The second thing was to keep regularity,
02:01:18 just going to bed at the same time waking up.
02:01:21 And here’s an unconventional piece of sleep advice.
02:01:25 After a bad night of sleep, do nothing.
02:01:31 Don’t wake up any later, don’t go to bed any earlier,
02:01:37 don’t nap during the day,
02:01:39 and don’t drink any more coffee than you would otherwise.
02:01:42 Because if you end up sleeping later into the morning,
02:01:47 you’re then not going to be tired
02:01:49 at your normal time at night.
02:01:51 So then you’re gonna get into bed thinking,
02:01:53 well, I had a terrible night of sleep last night.
02:01:55 And yes, I slept in this morning to try and compensate,
02:01:58 but I’m still gonna get to bed at my normal time.
02:02:00 But now you get into bed and you haven’t been awake
02:02:03 for as long as you normally would.
02:02:05 So you’re not as sleepy as you normally would be.
02:02:07 And so now you sit there lying in bed
02:02:10 and it’s another bad night.
02:02:12 And the same thing is, if you go to bed any earlier,
02:02:15 so don’t wake up any later, wake up at the same time,
02:02:20 don’t go to bed any earlier,
02:02:21 because then you’re just probably your chronotype,
02:02:23 your biological rhythm doesn’t want you to be asleep.
02:02:26 And you think, well, it’s a terrible night,
02:02:28 I’m gonna get into bed at 9 p.m.
02:02:31 rather than my standard 10,
02:02:32 I’m just gonna be lying in bed awake for that hour.
02:02:35 Naps will take our double edged sword,
02:02:37 they can have wonderful benefits.
02:02:38 And we’ve done lots of studies on naps
02:02:40 for both the brain and the body.
02:02:42 But they are a double edged sword in the sense that
02:02:45 napping will just take the edge off your sleepiness.
02:02:49 It’s a little bit like a valve on a pressure cooker.
02:02:52 When you nap during the day,
02:02:54 you can take some of that healthy sleepiness
02:02:56 that you’ve been building up during the day.
02:02:58 And for some people, not all people,
02:03:00 but for some people that can then make it harder
02:03:02 for them to fall asleep at night
02:03:04 and then stay asleep soundly across the night.
02:03:07 So the advice would be,
02:03:08 if you’re struggling with sleep at night,
02:03:10 don’t nap during the day.
02:03:12 But if you are not struggling with sleep,
02:03:14 and you can nap regularly, naps are just fine.
02:03:17 And we can play around with optimal durations
02:03:20 depending on what you want.
02:03:21 Just try not to nap too late into the day
02:03:23 because napping late into the day
02:03:25 is like snacking before your main meal.
02:03:27 It just takes the edge off your sleep hunger as it were.
02:03:30 But that would be, so that’s my unconventional
02:03:34 second piece of advice regarding insomnia.
02:03:37 The third is meditation.
02:03:39 I found meditation to be incredibly powerful.
02:03:41 I started reading about meditation
02:03:43 as I was researching that aspect of the book many years ago.
02:03:49 And as a hard nose scientist,
02:03:51 I thought this sounds very woo woo.
02:03:53 This is sort of, we all hold hands and sing come by hour
02:03:57 and everything’s going to be fine with sleep.
02:03:59 I read the data and it was compelling.
02:04:02 I couldn’t ignore it.
02:04:04 And I started meditating and that was six years ago
02:04:08 and I haven’t stopped.
02:04:09 And I find meditation before bed incredibly powerful.
02:04:14 The meditation app companies were perplexed at this at first.
02:04:17 They want people to meditate during the day.
02:04:19 But when they looked at their usage statistics,
02:04:21 they found that they would have people
02:04:23 in the morning meditating.
02:04:24 And then there’s a huge number of people
02:04:26 using the meditation app in the evening.
02:04:28 What they were doing was self medicating their insomnia.
02:04:32 And they finally, rather than railing against it,
02:04:34 they started to see it as a cash cow, rightly so.
02:04:39 So I found meditation to be helpful.
02:04:41 Having a wind down routine
02:04:43 is the other thing that’s critical for me.
02:04:45 I can’t just go from,
02:04:47 because when my mind is switched on
02:04:49 and I think you may be like this too,
02:04:51 if I get into bed, that Rolodex of thoughts
02:04:55 and information and excitement and anxiety and worry
02:04:59 is just whirling away.
02:05:02 And it’s not gonna be a good night for me.
02:05:05 So I have to find a wind down routine.
02:05:07 And that makes sense when you realize what sleep is like.
02:05:10 Sleep is not like a light switch.
02:05:14 Sleep is much more like trying to land a plane.
02:05:16 You know, it takes time to descend down
02:05:19 onto the terra firma that we call sound sleep at night.
02:05:23 And we have this for kids.
02:05:24 You know, I don’t have children,
02:05:26 but you know, a lot of parents will say,
02:05:29 you know, we have to have the bedroom,
02:05:33 sorry, the bedtime routine.
02:05:35 You know, you bathe the kid, you put them in bed,
02:05:37 you read them a story.
02:05:38 You have to go through this routine,
02:05:40 this wind down routine for them.
02:05:42 And then they fall asleep wonderfully.
02:05:44 Why do we abandon that?
02:05:46 As adults, we need that same wind down routine.
02:05:51 So that’s been the other thing
02:05:53 that’s been very helpful to me.
02:05:54 So don’t do anything different.
02:05:57 If you have a bad night of sleep,
02:05:58 keep doing the same thing.
02:06:00 Manage your anxiety, understand it, rationalize it.
02:06:05 Then meditation, and then finally having
02:06:09 some kind of disengagement wind down routine.
02:06:11 Those are the four things that have been very helpful to me.
02:06:15 That’s brilliant.
02:06:16 So the regularities really do a lot of work against insomnia.
02:06:20 Is there,
02:06:21 is it possible to have a healthy sleep life
02:06:28 without the regularities?
02:06:30 I say that because I’m all over the place
02:06:34 and I’ve gotten good at being all over the place.
02:06:38 So I’ll often, like what happens,
02:06:40 I’ll go stretches of time.
02:06:42 There’ll be sometimes a month where I,
02:06:44 my days are like, this is embarrassing to admit,
02:06:47 but they’re like,
02:06:49 just you and I here, just you and I.
02:06:51 It’s like 28 hours or 30 hour days.
02:06:55 Like I’ll just go all the way around
02:06:58 comfortably and happily, I love it.
02:07:00 And then there’ll be a nap.
02:07:02 I mean, if you like add up the hours
02:07:05 when I’m just like sleeping as much as I want,
02:07:08 it’d probably be like six hour average per 24 hours.
02:07:12 Like that kind of, so it works out nicely,
02:07:16 maybe even seven hours, I don’t know.
02:07:18 But that it’s obviously irregular
02:07:21 and there’s chaos in the whole thing.
02:07:23 Like sometimes it’s shorter sleep,
02:07:25 sometimes it’s longer.
02:07:26 Is that totally not a good thing, do you think?
02:07:31 The best evidence that we have to speak to this question
02:07:34 is people who are doing rotating shifts.
02:07:37 And unfortunately the news is not good.
02:07:41 They usually have a higher instance of many diseases
02:07:45 such as depression, diabetes, cardiovascular disease,
02:07:50 obesity, stroke.
02:07:54 And again, that’s just me communicating the data
02:08:04 that we have and I’m not telling you
02:08:06 that you should do anything different.
02:08:08 The other thing is that there’s nothing in your biology
02:08:13 that suggests that that’s how your body was designed
02:08:16 to sleep.
02:08:18 It is a system that loves habit.
02:08:22 You know, if your circadian clock in your brain,
02:08:27 it’s called the suprachiasmatic nucleus,
02:08:30 sits in the middle of your brain, had a personality trait,
02:08:33 it would be a creature of habit.
02:08:36 It loves habit.
02:08:38 That’s how your biology is designed to work
02:08:42 is through very archetypal prototypical expected cycles.
02:08:47 And when we do something different to that,
02:08:52 then you start to see some of the pressure stress fractures
02:08:57 in the system.
02:08:58 But again, to your point, if that’s something
02:09:02 that you don’t mind, you know, adopting and understanding
02:09:06 and then I think you should keep doing
02:09:11 what you’re doing.
02:09:12 Yeah, it’s complicated.
02:09:13 Of course you have to be a student of your own body
02:09:15 and explore it.
02:09:16 One of the reasons I want to have kids
02:09:19 is kids enforce a stricter schedule.
02:09:23 I think I definitely feel that I’m not living
02:09:29 the sort of data wise, scientifically speaking,
02:09:33 the optimal life.
02:09:34 And me just living the way I want to live day to day
02:09:37 is perhaps not the optimal way.
02:09:40 And there’s certain things that I’ve seen
02:09:41 very successful people that I know in my life
02:09:45 when they get, when they have kids,
02:09:48 they actually, the productivity goes up,
02:09:50 they get their shit together.
02:09:51 There’s a lot of aspects that, yeah, the regularity.
02:09:55 I mean, that creatures a habit.
02:09:56 That’s the thing that’s power.
02:09:58 And then you start to optimally use the hours
02:10:01 that you have in the day.
02:10:02 Let me ask you about that.
02:10:03 Well, actually, I just have one quick point on that too.
02:10:06 You know, we often think about sleep as a cost,
02:10:14 but instead I think of sleep as an investment.
02:10:18 And the reason is because your effectiveness
02:10:20 and your efficiency when you’re well slept
02:10:24 typically exceeds that when you’re not.
02:10:27 And to me, it’s the idea of if I’m going to boil
02:10:29 a pot of water, why would I boil it on medium
02:10:34 when I could boil it in half the time on high?
02:10:39 And I sometimes worry that when I speak
02:10:43 to Fortune 500 companies and they’re of this mentality
02:10:46 of longer hours, getting people to rise and grind,
02:10:52 the first point is that after about 20 hours of being awake,
02:10:55 a human being is as cognitively as impaired
02:10:58 as they would be if they were legally drunk.
02:11:01 And the reason I bring that point up
02:11:03 is because I don’t know any company or CEO
02:11:07 who would say, I’ve got this great team,
02:11:10 they’re drunk all the time.
02:11:12 But we often lord the airport warrior
02:11:15 who’s flown through three different time zones
02:11:18 in the past two days, is on email at 2 a.m.
02:11:21 and then is in the office at six.
02:11:25 And I think there is some aspect, not in all people,
02:11:28 but there is sort of some aspect
02:11:29 of that slight sleep machismo.
02:11:32 And that’s not what you are very different.
02:11:36 You are driven by a purity of passion
02:11:40 and a very authentic, incredibly genuine goal
02:11:44 of wanting to do something remarkable with your life.
02:11:48 That’s not the issue I think I’m speaking about.
02:11:52 It’s just simply that I think
02:11:55 maybe this notion of wanting to be awake for longer
02:12:02 to try and get more done can sometimes be at odds
02:12:06 with the fact that you can actually get so much more done
02:12:11 if you’re well slept.
02:12:12 And it’s this trade off.
02:12:14 I actually admire people that take the big risk
02:12:17 and work hard, whether that means staying up late at night,
02:12:20 all those kinds of things,
02:12:21 but it cannot be in the framework,
02:12:24 in the context like what Edison said,
02:12:26 which is sleep feels like a waste of time.
02:12:29 So if you’re not sleeping
02:12:32 because you think sleep is stupid, that’s totally wrong.
02:12:36 But if you’re not sleeping
02:12:37 because you’re deeply passionate about something,
02:12:39 that to me, it’s a gray area, of course,
02:12:43 but that to me is much more admirable.
02:12:45 And everything you’re espousing is saying
02:12:48 whatever the hell you’re doing,
02:12:49 you better be aware that sleep,
02:12:51 long term and short term is really good for you.
02:12:54 So if you’re not sleeping, you’re sacrificing,
02:12:57 just make sure you’re sacrificing for the right thing.
02:13:00 I see vodka and getting drunk the same way.
02:13:04 I know it’s not good for me.
02:13:05 I know I’m not gonna feel good days after.
02:13:08 I know it’s gonna decrease my performance.
02:13:10 And there’s nothing positive about it,
02:13:12 except it introduces chaos in my life
02:13:17 that introduces beautiful experiences
02:13:20 that I would not otherwise have.
02:13:22 It creates this turmoil of social interaction
02:13:27 that ultimately makes me happy
02:13:29 that I’ve experienced them in the moment
02:13:31 and later the stories, you get to meet new people.
02:13:34 It’s like alcohol in this society
02:13:36 is an incredible facilitator of that.
02:13:40 So that’s a good example of not sleeping
02:13:43 and drinking way too much vodka.
02:13:46 Again, it’s this notion of life is to be lived to a degree.
02:13:51 But if you do have children,
02:13:55 I think one of the other things
02:13:56 that then maybe comes into the picture
02:13:58 is the fact that now there are other people
02:14:03 that you have to live for than yourself.
02:14:07 Yeah, but come on, like once they’re old enough,
02:14:10 like if you can’t defend for yourself,
02:14:13 you’re too weak, get stronger.
02:14:15 It’s gonna be that kind of fatherhood.
02:14:17 I got it, I’m understanding so much more
02:14:21 about Lex Freeman than I did before.
02:14:23 That’s why you have to have for me,
02:14:27 that would be my wife would be probably softer.
02:14:29 It’s good cop, bad cop, because I think I’m.
02:14:33 But of course, actually, because I don’t have kids,
02:14:35 I’ve seen some tough dudes when they have kids
02:14:39 become like the softies.
02:14:44 They become like, they do everything for their kids.
02:14:47 It’s become like, it’s totally transforms their life.
02:14:50 I mean, Joe Rogan is an example of that.
02:14:53 I just seen so many tough guys completely become changed
02:14:57 by having kids, which is fascinating to watch
02:15:00 because it just shows you how meaningful having kids is
02:15:03 for a lot of people.
02:15:04 Although I would say having chatted with Joe for some time,
02:15:09 I think he is a delightful,
02:15:13 sweetheart, independent of children.
02:15:14 I think, don’t get me wrong,
02:15:17 I don’t wanna be in a ring with him.
02:15:19 He would face me five ways till Tuesday,
02:15:22 but I think he’s a desperately sweet man
02:15:24 and a very, very smart individual.
02:15:26 Yeah, I mean, but he talks about the compassion he’s gained
02:15:30 from realizing just watching kids grow up
02:15:32 that we were all kids at some point,
02:15:35 you get a new perspective.
02:15:37 I think just like me, I still get this with him.
02:15:40 He’s super competitive and there’s a certain way
02:15:43 to approach life.
02:15:45 You’re striving to do great things
02:15:47 and you’re competitive against others
02:15:49 and that intensity of that aggression,
02:15:53 that can lack compassion sometimes and empathy.
02:15:56 And when you have children, you get a sense like,
02:15:58 oh, everybody was a child at some point,
02:16:00 everybody was a kid.
02:16:02 And you see that whole development process.
02:16:04 It can definitely enrich,
02:16:07 expand your ability to be empathetic.
02:16:13 Let me ask about diet.
02:16:16 So what’s the connection between diet and sleep?
02:16:19 So I do intermittent fasting,
02:16:21 sometimes only one meal a day, sometimes no meals a day.
02:16:24 Is there a good science on the interaction
02:16:26 between fasting and sleep?
02:16:29 We have some data, I would prefer more,
02:16:33 but we have data both on time restricted eating
02:16:38 and then we have some data on fasting to a degree.
02:16:45 On time restricted eating,
02:16:49 I think that it has some benefits,
02:16:51 although the human replication studies
02:16:53 have actually not borne out
02:16:54 quite the same health benefit extent
02:16:57 that the animal studies have.
02:16:59 There’ve been some disappointing studies,
02:17:01 one here close to where we are right now at UCSF recently.
02:17:06 So I think time restricted eating can be a good thing
02:17:09 and there are many benefits of time restricted eating.
02:17:13 Is sleep one of them?
02:17:14 No, it doesn’t seem to be
02:17:15 because there are probably at the time
02:17:17 that we’re recording this,
02:17:18 three pretty decent studies that I’m aware of.
02:17:22 Two out of the three were in obese individuals,
02:17:25 one out of the three were in healthy weight individuals.
02:17:29 And what they found is that time restricted eating
02:17:31 in all three of those studies
02:17:33 didn’t have any advantageous benefit to sleep.
02:17:36 It didn’t necessarily harm sleep,
02:17:38 but it didn’t seem to improve it.
02:17:41 When it comes to fasting though,
02:17:43 which is a different state,
02:17:45 we don’t have too many studies,
02:17:47 experimental studies with longterm fasting.
02:17:49 The best data that we have
02:17:50 is probably from religious practices
02:17:53 and probably the most data we have is during Ramadan
02:17:56 where people will fast for 29 to 30 days
02:18:01 from sunrise to sunset.
02:18:04 And under those conditions,
02:18:07 there are probably five distinct changes that we’ve seen.
02:18:13 None of them seem to be particularly good for sleep.
02:18:16 The first is that the amount of melatonin
02:18:18 that you release, and melatonin is a hormone.
02:18:20 It’s often called the hormone of darkness
02:18:23 or the vampire hormone,
02:18:25 not because it makes you look longingly
02:18:27 at people’s necklines,
02:18:28 but it’s just because it comes out at night.
02:18:31 Melatonin signals to your brain and your body
02:18:33 that it’s dark, it’s nighttime, and it’s time to sleep.
02:18:36 Those individuals,
02:18:38 when they were undergoing that regimen of fasting,
02:18:42 the amount of melatonin that was released
02:18:44 and when it was released,
02:18:45 the amount of melatonin decreased
02:18:48 and when it was released came later.
02:18:50 That was the first thing.
02:18:52 The second thing was that they ended up finding it harder
02:18:56 to fall asleep as quickly as they normally would otherwise.
02:19:00 The third thing was that the total amount of sleep
02:19:02 that they were getting decreased.
02:19:05 The fourth fascinating thing
02:19:06 was that a wake promoting chemical
02:19:09 called orexin increased.
02:19:12 And this is why a lot of people will say,
02:19:13 when I’m fasting, it feels like I can stay awake for longer
02:19:18 and I’m more alert, I’m more active.
02:19:21 And I’ll come back from an evolutionary perspective
02:19:23 why we understand that to be the case.
02:19:26 And then the fourth factor is that fasting
02:19:28 didn’t decrease the amount of deep sleep
02:19:31 that seemed to be unaffected.
02:19:33 It did, however, decrease the amount
02:19:35 of REM sleep or dream sleep.
02:19:37 And we know that REM sleep dreaming
02:19:38 is essential for emotional first aid, mental health,
02:19:42 it’s critical for memory, creativity.
02:19:45 It’s also critical for several hormone functions.
02:19:47 It’s when there’s direct correlations
02:19:50 between testosterone release peaks
02:19:54 just before you go into REM sleep and during REM sleep too.
02:19:57 So REM sleep is critical.
02:20:00 But so those are the five changes that we’ve seen.
02:20:02 None of them seem to be that advantageous for sleep.
02:20:05 But the fourth point that I mentioned,
02:20:07 which was orexin, which is this wake promoting chemical
02:20:12 and a good demonstration or a very sad demonstration
02:20:15 of its power is when it becomes very deficient in the brain
02:20:18 and it leads to a condition called narcolepsy
02:20:21 where you’re just unpredictable with your sleep.
02:20:26 So orexin when it’s in high concentrations
02:20:33 keeps you awake when you lose it.
02:20:35 It can put you very much into a state of narcolepsy
02:20:38 where you’re sleeping a lot of the time
02:20:40 in unpredictable sleep.
02:20:43 Why on earth when you are fasting
02:20:46 would the brain release awake promoting chemical?
02:20:51 And our answer is right now is the following.
02:20:54 One of the few times that I mentioned before
02:20:56 that we see animals undergoing insufficient sleep
02:21:00 or prolonged sleep deprivation
02:21:03 is under conditions of starvation.
02:21:06 And that is an extreme evolutionary pressure.
02:21:11 And at that point, the brain will forgo some.
02:21:14 It won’t forgo all, but it will forgo some of its sleep.
02:21:18 And the reason is so that it can stay awake for longer
02:21:21 because the sign of starvation is saying to the brain,
02:21:24 you can’t find food in your normal foraging perimeter,
02:21:27 you need to stay awake for longer
02:21:29 so you can travel outside of your perimeter
02:21:31 for a further distance
02:21:33 and maybe you will find food and save the organism.
02:21:37 So in other words, when we fast,
02:21:39 it’s giving our brain this evolutionary signal
02:21:43 that you are under conditions of starvation.
02:21:46 So the brain responds by saying, oh my goodness,
02:21:49 I need to release the chemical
02:21:50 that helps the organism stay awake for longer
02:21:52 which is orexin.
02:21:54 So that they can forage for more food.
02:21:57 Now, of course, your brain from an evolutionary perspective
02:21:59 doesn’t know about this thing called Safeway
02:22:02 that you could easily go to and break the fast.
02:22:05 But that’s how we understand fasting.
02:22:08 And I think my dear friend, Peter Attia
02:22:11 has done a lot of work in this area too.
02:22:14 I think fasting and David Sinclair’s brilliant work,
02:22:17 goodness me, what an individual too.
02:22:20 The work is pretty clear there
02:22:21 that time restricted eating and fasting
02:22:25 have wonderful health benefits.
02:22:27 Fasting creates this thing called hormesis,
02:22:32 just like exercise and low level stress
02:22:36 and sauna, heat, shock.
02:22:39 And hormesis is a biological process
02:22:41 I think as David Sinclair has once said,
02:22:43 in simple layman’s terms is,
02:22:45 what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
02:22:47 And I think there is certainly good data
02:22:53 that fasting and time restricted eating has many benefits.
02:22:56 Is sleep one of them?
02:22:57 It doesn’t seem to be, it doesn’t seem to enhance sleep.
02:23:00 But it’s interesting to understand its effects on sleep.
02:23:04 I’ve fasted, it’s a study of NF2.
02:23:12 I once fasted 72 hours and another time 48 hours.
02:23:16 And I found that I got much less sleep
02:23:20 and it was very restful though.
02:23:22 I hesitate to say this, but this is how I felt,
02:23:24 which is I needed less sleep.
02:23:26 I wonder if my brain is deceiving me
02:23:28 because it feels like I’m getting
02:23:31 a whole extra amount of focus for free.
02:23:35 And I wonder if there’s longterm impacts of that.
02:23:39 Because if I fast 24 hours,
02:23:42 get the same amount of calories, one meal a day,
02:23:45 there’s a little bit of discomfort.
02:23:47 Like just maybe your body gets a little bit colder.
02:23:50 Maybe there’s just, I mean, hunger.
02:23:54 But the amount of focus is crazy.
02:23:58 And so I wonder, it’s like,
02:24:00 I’m a little suspicious of that.
02:24:02 I feel like I’m getting something for free.
02:24:04 I’m the same way with sweetener,
02:24:06 like a Splendor or something.
02:24:07 It’s like, it’s gotta be really bad for you, right?
02:24:10 Because why is it so tasty, right?
02:24:12 And I think, yeah, as we said before with biology,
02:24:18 if there’s a gain, there’s often a cost too.
02:24:25 But we at least understand the biological basis
02:24:28 of what you’re describing.
02:24:29 It’s not that you actually don’t need less sleep.
02:24:33 It’s that this chemical is present
02:24:36 that forces you more awake.
02:24:39 And so subjectively you feel as though
02:24:41 I don’t need as much sleep because I’m wide awake.
02:24:45 And those two things are quite different.
02:24:47 It’s not as though your sleep need has decreased.
02:24:51 It’s that your brain has hit the overdrive switch,
02:24:54 the overboost switch to say, we need to keep you awake
02:24:57 because food is in short supply.
02:25:00 So you mentioned during sleep, there’s a simulation,
02:25:03 all those kinds of things for learning purposes,
02:25:05 but there’s also these, you mentioned the five ways
02:25:08 in which we become psychotic in dreams.
02:25:11 What do you think dreams are about?
02:25:16 Why do you think we dream?
02:25:17 What place do we go to when we dream?
02:25:21 And why are they useful?
02:25:22 Not just the assimilation aspect,
02:25:25 but just like all the crazy visuals that we get with dreams.
02:25:29 Is there something you can speak to that’s actually useful?
02:25:33 Like why we have such fun experiences in that dream world?
02:25:38 So one of the camps in the sleep field
02:25:43 is that dreams are meaningless,
02:25:46 that they are an epiphenomenal byproduct
02:25:49 of this thing called REM sleep from which dreams come from
02:25:53 as a physiological state.
02:25:55 So the analogy would be, let’s think of a light bulb,
02:26:00 that the reason that you create the apparatus
02:26:02 of a light bulb is to produce this thing called light
02:26:06 in the same way that we’ve evolved
02:26:08 to this thing called REM sleep
02:26:10 to serve whatever functions REM sleep serves.
02:26:13 But it turns out that when you create light in that way,
02:26:17 you also produce something called heat.
02:26:19 It was never the reason that you designed the light bulb,
02:26:22 it’s just what happens when you create light in that way.
02:26:26 And the belief so too was that dreaming
02:26:29 was essentially the heat of the light bulb.
02:26:32 That REM sleep is critical,
02:26:34 but when you have REM sleep with a complex brain like ours,
02:26:38 you also produce this conscious epiphenomenon called dreaming.
02:26:44 I don’t believe that for a second.
02:26:46 And from a simple perspective is that I suspect
02:26:50 that dreaming is more metabolically costly
02:26:54 as a conscious experience than not dreaming.
02:26:56 So you could still have REM sleep,
02:26:58 but absent the conscious experience of dreaming
02:27:01 was probably less metabolically costly.
02:27:05 And whenever mother nature burns the energy unit
02:27:08 called ATP, which is the most valuable thing,
02:27:13 there’s usually a reason for it.
02:27:15 So if it’s more energetically demanding,
02:27:20 then I suspect that there is a function to it.
02:27:22 And we’ve now since discovered that dreams have a function.
02:27:26 The first, as we mentioned, creativity.
02:27:29 The second is that dreams provide a form
02:27:32 of overnight therapy.
02:27:35 Dreaming is a form of emotional first aid.
02:27:38 And it’s during dream sleep at night
02:27:40 that we take these difficult, painful experiences
02:27:43 that we’ve had during the day, sometimes traumatic,
02:27:46 and dream sleep acts almost like a nocturnal soothing balm.
02:27:51 And it sort of just takes the sharp edges
02:27:53 off those difficult, painful experiences
02:27:56 so that you come back the next day
02:27:58 and you feel better about them.
02:28:01 And so I think in that sense, dreaming,
02:28:03 it’s not time that heals all wounds.
02:28:07 It’s time during dream sleep
02:28:09 that provides emotional convalescence.
02:28:12 So dreaming is almost a form of emotional windscreen wipers.
02:28:19 And I think, and by the way, it’s not just that you dream.
02:28:24 It’s what you dream about that also matters.
02:28:30 So for example, scientists have done studies
02:28:32 with learning and memory
02:28:33 where they have people learn a virtual maze.
02:28:37 And what they discovered was that those people
02:28:40 who then dreamed, but dreamed of the maze
02:28:45 were the only ones who, when they woke up,
02:28:47 ended up being better at navigating the maze.
02:28:50 Whereas those people who dreamed,
02:28:53 but didn’t dream about the maze itself,
02:28:55 they were no better at navigating the maze.
02:28:57 So it’s not just that you,
02:28:59 it’s not sort of necessary, but not sufficient.
02:29:02 It’s necessary that you dream,
02:29:04 but it’s not sufficient to produce the benefit.
02:29:06 You have to be dreaming about certain things itself.
02:29:09 And the same is true for mental health.
02:29:13 What we’ve discovered is that people
02:29:14 who are going through a very difficult experience,
02:29:17 a trauma, for example, a very painful divorce,
02:29:21 those people who are dreaming, but dreaming
02:29:23 of that difficult event itself,
02:29:26 they go on to gain resolution
02:29:28 to their clinical depression one year later.
02:29:31 Whereas people who were dreaming just as much,
02:29:34 but not dreaming about the trauma itself,
02:29:37 did not go on to gain as much clinical resolution
02:29:40 to their depression.
02:29:42 So it’s, I think to me, those are the lines of evidence
02:29:46 that tell me dreaming is not epiphenomenal.
02:29:50 And it’s not just about the act of dreaming,
02:29:53 it’s about the content of the dreams,
02:29:57 not just the fact of a dream itself.
02:30:00 It’s, first of all, it’s fascinating.
02:30:01 It makes a lot of sense,
02:30:02 but then immediately takes my mind to,
02:30:05 from an engineering perspective,
02:30:07 how that could be useful in, for example, AI systems of,
02:30:13 if you think about dreaming as an important part
02:30:16 about learning and cognition and filtering previous memories
02:30:22 of what’s important, integrating them.
02:30:25 You know, maybe you can correct me,
02:30:27 but I see dreaming as a kind of simulation of worlds
02:30:31 that are not constrained by physics.
02:30:34 So like you get a chance to take some of your memories,
02:30:37 some of your thoughts, some of your anxieties,
02:30:40 and play with them, like construct virtual worlds
02:30:43 and see how it evolves.
02:30:46 Like to play with those worlds
02:30:48 in a safe environment of your mind, safe in quotes,
02:30:51 because you could probably get into a lot of trouble
02:30:53 with the places your mind will go.
02:30:56 But this definitely is applied in much cruder ways
02:31:04 in artificial intelligence.
02:31:05 So one context in which this is applied
02:31:08 is the process called self play,
02:31:12 which is a reinforcement learning
02:31:14 where agents play against itself or versions of itself.
02:31:19 And it’s all simulated of trying different versions
02:31:23 of themselves and playing against each other
02:31:25 to see what ends up being a good.
02:31:29 The ultimate goal is to learn a function
02:31:32 that represents what is good and what is not good
02:31:34 in terms of how you should act in the world.
02:31:36 You create a set of decision weights based on experience,
02:31:39 and you constantly update those weights
02:31:41 based on ongoing learning.
02:31:43 But the experience is artificially created
02:31:45 versus actual real data.
02:31:48 So it’s a crude approximation of what dreams are,
02:31:51 which is you’re hallucinating a lot of things
02:31:54 to see which things are actually.
02:31:56 No, I think it’s been a theory that’s been put forward,
02:31:59 which is that dreaming is a virtual reality test space
02:32:04 that is largely consequence free.
02:32:07 What an incredible gift to give a conscious mind
02:32:11 to each and every night.
02:32:13 Now the conscious mind, the human mind
02:32:15 is very good at constructing dreams
02:32:17 that are nevertheless useful for you.
02:32:20 Like they’re wild and crazy,
02:32:22 but they’re such that they are still grounded in reality
02:32:27 to a degree where anything you learn in dreams
02:32:29 might be useful in reality.
02:32:32 This is a very difficult thing to do
02:32:34 because it requires a lot of intelligence,
02:32:36 it requires consciousness.
02:32:38 This has been effectively recently being used
02:32:41 in a self supervised learning for computer vision
02:32:45 with the process of what’s called data augmentation.
02:32:50 That’s a very crude version of dreams,
02:32:53 which is you take data and you mess with it
02:32:56 and you start to learn how a picture of a cat
02:33:02 truly represents a cat by messing with it in different ways.
02:33:06 Now the crude methods currently are cropping, rotating,
02:33:09 distorting, all that kind of stuff.
02:33:11 But you can imagine much more complicated
02:33:14 generative processes that start hallucinating different cats
02:33:19 in order for you to understand deeply of what it means
02:33:23 for something to look like a cat.
02:33:25 What is the prototype of a archetype of a cat?
02:33:27 Yeah, the archetype.
02:33:28 I mean, that’s a very difficult process for computer vision
02:33:31 to go from what are the pixels
02:33:36 that are usually associated with a cat
02:33:38 to like, what is a cat in the visual space?
02:33:42 In the three dimensional visual spaces projected on an image,
02:33:46 on a two dimensional image, what is a cat?
02:33:50 Those are like fundamentally philosophical questions
02:33:52 that we humans don’t know the answer to,
02:33:56 like linguistically.
02:33:57 But when we look at a picture of a cat and a dog,
02:34:00 we can usually tell pretty damn well what’s the difference.
02:34:04 And I don’t know what that is because you can’t reduce that
02:34:06 to pointy ears or non pointy ears,
02:34:09 furry or not furry, something about the eyes.
02:34:12 It’s been a long standing issue in cognitive science,
02:34:14 cognitive neuroscience too,
02:34:16 is how does the brain create an archetype?
02:34:20 How does it create schemas that have general applicability,
02:34:26 but yet still obtain specificity?
02:34:29 That’s a very difficult challenge.
02:34:31 I mean, we can do it, we do it.
02:34:33 It’s rather bloody amazing.
02:34:35 And it seems like part of the toolbox
02:34:37 is this controlled hallucination, which is dreams.
02:34:41 Well, it’s a relaxing of the rigid constraints.
02:34:45 I often think of dreaming as,
02:34:48 it’s from an information processing standpoint,
02:34:52 the prison guards are away
02:34:54 and the prisoners are running a mock in a delightful way.
02:34:58 And part of the reason is because when you go
02:35:00 into dream sleep, the rational part of your brain
02:35:03 called the prefrontal cortex, which is the part,
02:35:05 it’s like the CEO of the brain.
02:35:07 It’s very good at making high level, rational,
02:35:09 top down decisions and controlled actions.
02:35:12 That part of the brain is shut down during REM sleep.
02:35:17 But then emotional centers, memory centers,
02:35:20 visual centers, motoric centers,
02:35:24 all of those centers actually become more active.
02:35:27 In fact, some of them are more active
02:35:29 than when we’re awake in the dream state.
02:35:32 That’s fascinating.
02:35:33 So your brain from a neural architecture perspective
02:35:37 is radically different.
02:35:39 Its network feature is not the same as wakefulness.
02:35:44 And I think this is an immensely beneficial thing
02:35:48 that we have at least two different rational
02:35:51 and irrational conscious states
02:35:54 that we do information processing in.
02:35:56 The rational, the veritical,
02:35:58 the page one of the Google search is wakefulness.
02:36:01 The more irrational, illogical, hyper associative
02:36:05 Google page 20 is the REM sleep.
02:36:08 Both I think are critical, both are necessary.
02:36:11 That’s fascinating.
02:36:12 And again, fascinating to see how that could be integrated
02:36:15 in the machines to help them learn better
02:36:18 and to reason better.
02:36:22 And in some ways we also know it
02:36:24 from a chemical perspective too.
02:36:25 When you go into dream sleep,
02:36:27 it is a neurochemical cocktail like no other
02:36:31 that we see at the rest of the 24 hour state.
02:36:34 There is a chemical called noradrenaline
02:36:37 or norepinephrine in the brain.
02:36:40 And you know of its sister chemical
02:36:42 in the body called adrenaline.
02:36:44 But upstairs in the brain, noradrenaline
02:36:46 is very good at creating a very hyper focused,
02:36:49 attentive, narrow, it’s sort of very convergent way
02:36:54 of thinking to a point, sharp focus, that’s the only thing.
02:37:01 The spotlight of consciousness is very narrow.
02:37:04 That’s noradrenaline.
02:37:05 When you remove noradrenaline,
02:37:08 then you go from a high SNR, a high signal to noise ratio
02:37:14 where it’s just you and I in this moment,
02:37:16 I don’t even know what’s going on elsewhere.
02:37:18 I am with you, noradrenaline is present.
02:37:22 But when you go into REM sleep,
02:37:24 it is the only time during the 24 hour period
02:37:27 where your brain is devoid of any noradrenaline,
02:37:30 it is completely shut off.
02:37:31 And so the signal to noise ratio is very different.
02:37:34 It’s almost as though we’re injecting
02:37:36 a greater amount of noise into the neural architecture
02:37:40 of the brain during dream sleep,
02:37:42 as if it’s chemically brute forced
02:37:45 into this relaxed associative memory processing state.
02:37:50 And then from an anatomical perspective,
02:37:53 just as I described, the prefrontal cortex goes down
02:37:56 and other regions light up.
02:37:58 So it is a state that seems to be very,
02:38:01 I mean, if you were to show me a brain scan of REM sleep
02:38:06 and tell me that it’s not REM sleep,
02:38:08 just say, look, based on the pattern of this brain activity,
02:38:11 what would you say is going on in this person’s mind?
02:38:14 I would say, well, they’re probably not rational.
02:38:16 They’re probably not having logical thought
02:38:18 because their prefrontal cortex is down.
02:38:19 They’re probably feeling very emotional
02:38:21 because their amygdala is active,
02:38:23 which is an emotional center of the brain.
02:38:25 They’re definitely going to be thinking visually
02:38:27 because the back of the brain is lit up, the visual cortex.
02:38:30 It’s probably going to be filled with past experience
02:38:33 and autobiographical memories
02:38:35 because their memory centers are lighting up.
02:38:39 And there’s probably going to be movement
02:38:40 because their motor cortex is very active.
02:38:43 That to me sounds very much like a dream.
02:38:45 And that’s exactly what we see in brain scanners
02:38:48 when we’ve put people inside of them.
02:38:50 One of the things I notice sleep affects
02:38:54 is my ability to see the beauty in the world.
02:39:00 So what do you think is the connection
02:39:03 between sleep and your emotional life,
02:39:06 your ability to love other human beings and love life?
02:39:10 Yeah, I think it’s very powerful and strong.
02:39:16 So we’ve done a lot of work in the field
02:39:19 of sleep and emotion and sleep and moods.
02:39:21 And you can separate your emotions into two main buckets,
02:39:26 positive and negative.
02:39:28 And what’s interesting is that when you are sleep deprived
02:39:32 and the more hours that you go into being awake
02:39:35 and the fewer hours that you’ve had to sleep,
02:39:37 your negative mood starts to increase.
02:39:43 And we know which individual types
02:39:46 of emotions are changing.
02:39:48 I’ve got a wonderful postdoc in my lab
02:39:51 called Etty Ben Simon, who’s doing some incredible work
02:39:53 on trying to understand the emotional,
02:39:57 individual emotional tapestry of affective,
02:40:02 meltdown when you’re not getting sufficient sleep.
02:40:07 But let’s just keep with two dimensions,
02:40:09 positive and negative.
02:40:10 Yes.
02:40:10 Most people would think, well, it’s the negative
02:40:13 that takes the biggest hit when I’m sleep deprived.
02:40:15 It’s not.
02:40:17 By probably in a log order, magnitude larger
02:40:20 is a hit on your positive emotions.
02:40:23 In other words, you stop being sleep deprived
02:40:27 of positive emotions, in other words, you stop gaining
02:40:32 pleasure from normally pleasurable things.
02:40:35 And it’s a state that we call anhedonia.
02:40:38 And anhedonia is the state that we often call depression.
02:40:43 So depression to most people’s surprise isn’t necessarily
02:40:47 that you’re always feeling negative emotions.
02:40:52 It’s often more about the fact that you lose the pleasure
02:40:56 in the good things in life.
02:40:58 That’s what we call anhedonia.
02:41:00 That’s what we see in sleep, an insufficient sleep.
02:41:03 And it happens quite quickly.
02:41:05 Yeah, it’s kind of fascinating.
02:41:06 I think I do, it’s not depression,
02:41:10 but like it’s a stroll into that direction,
02:41:15 which is when I’m sleep deprived,
02:41:17 I stop being able to see the meaning in life.
02:41:21 The things that gave me meanings starts to lose meaning.
02:41:24 Like it makes me realize how enjoyable everything is
02:41:29 in my life because when I start to lose it,
02:41:31 when I’m severely sleep deprived,
02:41:33 you start to see how much life sucks when you lose it.
02:41:36 But that said, I’m just cognizant enough
02:41:38 that sleep fixes all of that.
02:41:40 So I use those states for what they’re worth.
02:41:44 In fact, I personally like to pay attention to the things
02:41:48 that bother me in doing that time.
02:41:52 Cause they also reveal important information to me.
02:41:58 That’s interesting.
02:41:59 I have to use like a Rorschach to, yeah.
02:42:02 I mean, there’s, so I find this when I fast combine
02:42:05 with sleep deprivation, I’m clear to see with people,
02:42:10 clear and identifying the things
02:42:12 that are not going right in my life
02:42:15 or people that I’m working with are not doing
02:42:19 as good of a job as they could be doing.
02:42:21 Like people that are negative in my life,
02:42:25 I’m more able to identify them.
02:42:28 So I don’t act on that.
02:42:30 It’s a very bad time to act on those decisions,
02:42:32 but I’m like recording that information
02:42:36 because I usually, when I’m well rested and happy,
02:42:40 I see the beauty in everybody,
02:42:42 which can get you into trouble.
02:42:44 So you have to balance those two things.
02:42:46 But yes, it’s fascinating.
02:42:47 But there’s irony there too, which is the fact that,
02:42:50 you know, when you’re well rested and well slept,
02:42:51 just as you said, you see the beauty in life
02:42:55 and it sort of enlivens you
02:42:56 and sort of gives you a quality of life
02:43:01 that’s emotionally very different.
02:43:04 Yet then we are contrasting that against the need
02:43:13 for not getting enough sleep
02:43:15 because of the beautiful things
02:43:17 that you want to accomplish in life.
02:43:20 And I don’t actually see them as,
02:43:25 you know, sort of completely counterintuitive
02:43:29 or paradoxical because I still think that you can strive
02:43:32 for all of the brilliant things that you are striving for,
02:43:35 to have the monumental goals,
02:43:38 the Herculean challenges that you wish to take on and solve.
02:43:43 They can still enthrall you and excite you
02:43:46 and stimulate you.
02:43:48 But because of the insufficient sleep that they can
02:43:52 or that goal can produce,
02:43:55 it will shave off the beauty of life
02:43:59 that you experience in between.
02:44:01 And again, this is just about the trade off.
02:44:04 I will say though that,
02:44:05 and this is not applicable to your circumstance,
02:44:11 we do know that insufficient sleep
02:44:14 is very strongly linked to suicide ideation,
02:44:18 suicide attempts and tragically suicide completion as well.
02:44:24 And in fact, in 20 years of studying sleep,
02:44:28 we have not been able to discover
02:44:29 a single psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal.
02:44:34 And I think that that is a profound,
02:44:37 I think it tells us so much about the role of sleep
02:44:41 as a potential causal agent in psychiatric conditions.
02:44:45 I also think it’s a potential sign
02:44:47 that we should be using sleep as a tool
02:44:50 for the prevention of grave mental illness.
02:44:52 Yeah, it’s both a cause and a solution.
02:44:54 So yeah, I mean, me personally,
02:44:57 I’ve gone through a few dark periods quite recently
02:45:01 and it was almost always sleep is not the cause,
02:45:06 but sleep is the catalyst from going to a bad time
02:45:10 to a very bad time.
02:45:12 Yeah.
02:45:13 And so it’s definitely true.
02:45:15 And it’s funny how sleep can just cure all of that.
02:45:18 There’s actually a beautiful quote
02:45:20 by an American entrepreneur called E. Joseph Kosman,
02:45:24 who once said that the best bridge
02:45:26 between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep.
02:45:30 And I spilled quite so much ink and hundreds of pages
02:45:37 in elegantly trying to say the same thing in my book.
02:45:40 And he said it in one line and it’s beautiful.
02:45:43 What do you think is,
02:45:45 we’ve been talking about how to extend this life,
02:45:47 how to make it a good life.
02:45:50 We’ve been talking about love.
02:45:53 What do you think is the meaning of this whole ride?
02:45:55 Of life?
02:45:56 Of life.
02:45:57 Why do we wanna make it a good one?
02:46:00 Do you think there’s a meaning?
02:46:01 Do you think there’s a answer to the why?
02:46:05 For me personally,
02:46:06 I think the meaning of life is to eat,
02:46:15 is to sleep, is to fall in love, is to cry,
02:46:22 and then to die.
02:46:27 Oh, and probably race cars in between.
02:46:29 Race cars.
02:46:30 Well, there’s a whole topic of sex we didn’t talk about.
02:46:33 So that’s probably in there.
02:46:34 Should we do that?
02:46:35 Maybe if you’ll have me back, I would love to do.
02:46:38 I will go around to.
02:46:39 Next time we will do another three hours on sex alone.
02:46:42 Has it been?
02:46:43 Yeah.
02:46:44 It has been over three hours.
02:46:46 Gosh, okay.
02:46:47 Matt, I’m a big fan of your work.
02:46:50 I think you’re doing really important work.
02:46:51 Even despite all the things I’ve been saying
02:46:54 about the madness of my own sleep schedule,
02:46:56 I think you’re helping millions of people.
02:46:58 So it’s an honor that you spend your valuable time with me
02:47:02 and I can’t wait until your podcast comes out.
02:47:05 I’m a huge fan of podcasts, I’m a huge fan of you,
02:47:08 and it’s just an honor to know you
02:47:10 and to get a chance, hopefully in the future,
02:47:12 to work together with you.
02:47:13 You’re a brilliant man and you’re doing amazing things.
02:47:17 And I feel immensely honored to have met you,
02:47:22 to now know you, and to start calling you a friend.
02:47:25 Thank you for what you do for the world
02:47:27 and for me included.
02:47:32 Thank you, Matt.
02:47:33 Take care.
02:47:34 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Matt Walker
02:47:37 and thank you to Stamps.com, Squarespace,
02:47:40 Letter Greens, BetterHelp, and Onnit.
02:47:43 Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
02:47:46 And now, let me leave you with some words
02:47:49 from Nikola Tesla, who we discussed in this podcast
02:47:52 as sleeping very few hours a night.
02:47:54 All that was great in the past was ridiculed,
02:47:57 condemned, combated, and suppressed,
02:48:00 only to emerge all the more powerfully,
02:48:02 all the more triumphantly from the struggle.
02:48:05 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.