EPISODE #997: How Sleep Tech Improves Your Performance – Matteo Franceschetti

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is an episode about sleep. And look, you've probably heard that sleep is good for you. At least if you've been listening for any amount of time by now, you should know. But just because something's good for you, plants are good for you, right? Well, it doesn't depend which plant you eat. Well, it depends a lot on how you sleep. And things have been changing rapidly, even in the last four years. The amount of AI artificial intelligence modeling that's possible. Just what we're learning about ourselves as a species is growing rapidly. So we're going to dive deep on sleep so you can show up the way you want in your life, and you're going to hear things you haven't heard me say about sleep before, which is pretty cool. And that's largely because of machine learning that tracks bio signals that go beyond the normal stuff that you might think about so that things work better for you. And you probably hear some things you heard before, but that's good because we're underlining them. But I always want to bring the newest and the latest. That's why you come to the show. Our guest is here for a second time, Matteo Franceschetti, and he knows a lot about high performance, both in athletics and in business, because he was a competitive race car driver across Europe. Our second race car driver guest on the show, Danica Patrick, was on recently as well, and he's worked as a top part of the legal world and he started two clean tech companies on two different continents. So he's a guy like me who just likes to do a lot of things, some of which are considered really hard, but maybe it's not as hard if you're doing a few things right. And he sucked at sleeping back then and decided that he'd start Eight Sleep, which you may have heard about. It's a 10 year old company that's working on hacking sleep in all the different ways you possibly could. And we talked about his eight sleep mattress, pod cover, and just general sleep health stuff about a year ago. But you're going to hear some new things. Matteo, welcome back to the show.

Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be back.

When we first started talking about doing another episode, I'm like, is there enough, is there enough new stuff about sleep? Part of my job is to say the same stuff over and over so that it lands right. And part of my job is to make sure that, hey, everyone who comes to the show hears stuff that's enlightening and educating and informing and interesting. Do you think sleep has changed that much in the last couple years that it's worth another hour of conversation about it?

I think so. I think it's becoming a much bigger deal. And I think a lot of athletes in particular are understanding that. And we see with our own business where we have hundreds of athletes really using our product and hundreds of athletes per week reaching out to see if they can do anything with us and use our product. And the reason is they really understand that performance is tied to very closely to the quality of their sleep. And this was not happening a few years ago and not even at this scale last year.

So there's been a big awakening, you could say, of awareness at the highest tiers. And what I've noticed is that the stuff that actually works shows up in athletics, and it shows up in Hollywood and in people who perform at really high levels. Hedge fund managers, entrepreneurs, people like that. And that was how it happened with Bulletproof Coffee. It was guys like, like Nick Foles saying, hey, you know, I'm doing this and it totally is working. And then talking about it and Rick Rubin and all, because these are the people who are pushing limits. And you're saying now you're getting inbound calls, whereas a couple years ago you had to call them and try and convince them. Yeah, why? What caused it to get over that chasm of. It's called the chasm of disillusionment, if you're looking at. At what consulting firms talk about, but something's cool. And then everyone's like, ah, screw that. And then all of a sudden it comes back as being real. I feel like sleep got there. What was the trigger?

Couple of different things in our specific case. First, the adoption of the product by certain athletes like Justin Medeiros, who is the world champion in CrossFit, Mercedes F1, like George Russell and Jus Hamilton. And so the bigger the athlete, the bigger the impact on the other side. I think sleep deprivation is becoming the new smoking, Right? And people realize that, and not just because of us, but because of Apple Watch and other wearables. And so there is a movement in terms of education where people realize that sleep is the new Red Bull.

Now, I got two nights ago, I stayed up late getting my final items packed before moving to Austin. And the moving company missed a bunch of stuff. And so I was kind of running around and I had to leave early the next morning. So three hours of sleep. I seem. I seem to think I was doing all right. It Kind of flagged at the end of the day, but I used a bunch of sleep hacks for it. What happens with a normal person if they get three or four hours of sleep? What does it do to their performance?

I think there are a bunch of studies showing that if you sleep that that little is equivalent to almost being having taken alcohol. So your mental performance, your mental agility, your ability to focus is really impacted. Call it a 50% range in terms of mental performance. Then if you are an athlete, there is another multiple factors. Now, a range of factors. It could be higher risk of an injury, right? Lower performance, lower focus, so more prone to mistakes. And in general, if you look at data for sleep deprivation, I have the data here. Insomnia results in the loss of 11 days of productivity per average employee. And lack of sleep is costing 400 billion to the US every single year.

Did you see changes in all the data from 8 Sleep during the pandemic? Did people get more sleep? Did they get less sleep? Was it better sleep? Just tell me what you learned. Yeah, definitely.

The amount of sleep went up on average across the whole user base, more than 20 minutes. But we saw many customers, a large segment of our customers, increasing their amount of their time asleep by at least an hour. So on that side, that was probably the positive side of the pandemic.

So people slept more. Was their quality better or worse?

That depended. We saw much more anxiety with some people, a bit more depression for what we know. So it was something that was very different from person to person.

Talk to me about all the stuff you're tracking. So eight sleep. You guys make a mattress, you make a sleep pad that has some cooling tech, but you've got quite a bit of sensors in there. So walk listeners through the kind of data you're looking at that you're feeding into the AI model so we can learn how to sleep better from robots.

Yeah. So our Hero product is really the COVID right now. That is the largest part of our sales. And so is a cover that you can install onto any mattress. And it does two things. On one side, it will change the temperature of each side of the bed based on your biometrics and you will get better sleep. And I can share more data. And the other thing is tracking everything about your biometrics. So let's start with the tracking. So we reached 99% accuracy at tracking your heart rate and your HRV compared to a medical grade ECG. If you think of that for a second, 99% accuracy without wearing anything. You just go to bed. As you did for the rest of your life. And this device has that level of accuracy. It's pretty insane.

How are you doing that? Is that just microphones embedded in the COVID or what is it?

No, the technicality, the technology is ballistocardiography, so you're substantially sleeping on a stethoscope that you don't feel right, is a microfilm as a sensor and is picking up vibrations. And so it's really like when the doctor puts a stethoscope on the back, on your back, and can pick and detect everything about your heart rate and your respiration. We do the same, but with AI, machine learning. And then we. We stream the data to the cloud where our algos are able to identify heart rate, respiration and sleep stages.

So your mattress cover the eight sleep. I guess I started to call it a device, but it's the pad. If I tap my finger on it, you would know, like on a touchscreen that that's where I was touching.

Yeah, if you just hit the floor, we could see the vibration from the floor to give you a sense of how sensible.

It's like an earthquake detector on your mattress exit. But the idea here is that, you know, you can detect the smallest of movements. And as a former entrepreneur in the wearable space, just getting heart rate from the wrist the way your Apple watch does today, that was really hard a while ago because of all these artifacts. But we didn't have machine learning algorithms. We had to kind of make them up ourselves. And what you're doing is you're taking what would be a big jumble of data, you know, covers moving and, you know, who knows what other like sounds from the city even you're going to be picking up. Right. And your AI model filters that out and then is able to get 99% accurate as a wearable. You said ECG, not EKG though, right?

No, both even EKG. So comparable compared to an EKG, we are 99% as accurate as the EKG.

So you could detect arrhythmias and things like that?

Yeah, if you forget the legalese. Right. We cannot tell you. You have a retina. We are not FDA approved, so we are not a medical device. But if you ask me what we can see in the back end, we can see cardiovascular diseases. And you wear nothing. And we have 100% retention. Right. Once you install this product, you keep using it, it's not like a wearable that you need to charge it. It's always there. So maybe you don't have a cardiovascular disease today. But you might have it in two years. And, and if we do our job well, we can help you because of law. What we cannot do is for now we cannot diagnose any medical condition right now.

Can you tell me to call my doctor and look or say you have signs maybe of this?

We can show you a graph, right? That is what we can do. And you start seeing there is something wrong which is almost becoming even a moral problem at certain point. Because our now machine learning will know that you might have a certain medical condition. But we are not an FDA approved device yet. And so we cannot tell you. And another thing that will be interesting for you is this for cardiovascular problems, right? Then we are reaching 99% accuracy of respiration, which means we will be able to detect snoring and sleep apnea as well. We already see it in the back end then, same legal issues. So it's just a matter of getting the FDA approval.

Snoring, fortunately isn't a medical condition. You can report on snoring, sleep apnea and you just gave it a new name that wasn't a medical condition. And just like let's do that. You don't have cardiovascular disease, you have rdovascular disease. It's a new thing we made up telling you it's legally okay.

It's borderline, let's say.

This is why I'm not an attorney.

Okay.

That's all I can say. I'm so intrigued just at the size of the data. My prediction is that over the next three years huge swaths of unknown things about humans are going to be unleashed because we've had enough data from a few years of monitoring and now the AI self learning systems are just coming online. So it's like the great enlightenment of the human condition happening because of these biohacking technologies combined with hardcore tech.

There is another interesting thing here that in the past we had consumer devices and we had medical grade devices, right? Medical grade devices were looking. No, they look ugly. They were terrible, terrible user experience. You didn't want to use them. Think of CPAP machines. Consumer devices were not accurate enough. These two things are merging now, right? Your Apple Watch is becoming a medical grade device as will become a medical grade device. And they still look great and is a product that you can use every day with a great interface UX and ui. So this is how the world is changing.

Well, okay, I'm going to assume that you get access to all the algorithms. You can do everything you want with your data. So as a guy who's you Know, started some companies that are doing really well. What are you doing in your daily routine since you have all the data? So let's, let's dive in on that. You okay to share?

Yeah, a hundred percent. I do a bunch of things. Probably not at your level, but I'm quite obsessed too. Do you want to talk just about sleep or everything? I do.

Oh heck, let's do a full how to be more productive as a human being sort of thing. I know that you have some stuff you do that's worked. We'll compare and contrast. So let's kind of nerd out a little bit and just let a few hundred thousand people listen. What do you think? It.

Yeah, let's do it. So let's start with nutrition. Okay, so I fast every day. I usually eat once a day. There are some pros and cons, but for me works really well and it gives, it maximizes my productivity. I don't have it down in the early afternoon. And I'm usually on a keto diet. I just cheat once a week.

Cycle out once a week. That's perfect. I love that. And what do you eat when you do eat that meal? Is it, is it meat or are you doing like the, the gluten based keto diet?

I'm on a keto, so I usually eat during the week. I eat a soup which is just literally veggies and some olive oil, nothing else. And then I have meat, could be chicken, turkey, some red meat, some fish and a lot of veggies. I eat a lot of batteries. I like them and they should be good. And then only on Friday night is when I have pizza because I'm Italian and.

You'Re saving up nutritionally all week for the pizza. I love it.

Yeah, I eat a lot of nuts the few times I'm hungry. And so that is nutrition and terms of training. I do a lot there too. So I train almost every day. I used to be a tennis player, so I play tennis and I use that as a, as a Zone 5 training. So I try to do Zone 5 at least three times a week.

Talk about what Zone 5 is for listeners because some of them don't know the zones.

Yeah. So you can. Your heart rate once you're, while you're training can be classified in different zones based on how high is your heart rate. Right, right. And so usually you should understand what is your maximum heart rate, which if I remember correctly is your age minus 40 or something like that. And that would be your maximum, your highest heart rate. And so zone five. Let's say your maximum heart rate is 180. Your zone five would be somewhere around 165 and 180. And then you, you can go down and lower starting from the 90s. And so what studies has shown is that the most effective zones are zone 2 and zone 5. Zone 2 usually is a sort of mild training like a jogging, and that is really good for burning fat. And Zone 5 is the best for your car cardiovascular system and your longevity. And so you want to alternate.

I. I figured out the equation. I. I just. I did. I have that in my book that's coming out in March, and I was like, that's not right. But I couldn't remember it. It's 220 minus 50 or. Sorry, no, it's 220. Yeah. 220 minus your age. So if you're 20 years older, maximum rate's 200. If you're, you know, if you're whatever, 40 years old, it's 180. So it, it gets, you know, it goes down and that's. They say maximum, and that's for average people. I don't think if you're on mitochondrial enhancing supplements, eating the right foods, whether those numbers actually apply to you. But we shall see.

Yeah. So I do this for cardio. Right. Don't chew it on.

Five. Okay.

Then I do strength training. I have a tonal and a technology machine, and so I do any sort of strength training that you can think of. Then I do stability and mobility and a lot of flexibility. So I do a lot of stretching, sort of yoga. Anything I can do to really maximize the mobility of my body.

Nice. So how many, how many hours a day do you spend on that? That sounds like a lot of work.

I would say an average of an hour, but weekends is probably two hours. Today I play 10 is two hours. So probably three times a week I do two hours, and the rest is one hour a day.

So you're spending nine or 10 hours a week on exercise. Okay, that's a pretty heavy load. Got it. All right. I'm substantially lower than that, like five to 30 minutes a week. But I do upgrade lab stuff, which is all AI driven. So I'm, you know, I'm doing reasonably well, but I also don't count. Like, if this morning I did somatic work, which is almost more massage of fascia and, like, activating muscle, so it's movement but not exercise, so to speak. So. All right, that's cool.

Then another thing, that was a real game changer also for my sleep is sauna and ice bath. So I built a item and I have an ice bath and I do it three times a week. If I could do more, I would do more, but it requires time. The ice bath is a. Is a pain sometimes, but that has been a game changer. How I feel and how I sleep if I do a sauna and even better if I do sauna and ice bath that night, my sleep is insanely good.

You do heat, then cold, then sleep like in the evening. Is that your sack? Or tell me how you do them in order and when you do them compared to when you sleep.

Yeah, so in my case, I do them like in the late afternoon, call it 5pm or 6pm I have heard of people doing it right before bed, but what I can tell you is that if I do whenever I do them, I'm able to nap immediately after and I have an amazing nap. So I believe that if I was doing them before sleep, it would be great. I just don't like to do it because I have dinner with my wife, other stuff. And so it just doesn't have a.

You have a life. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to ask you this. The busier you are and do you have kids?

No.

Okay. It's easier to do a schedule like that when you don't have kids. And a lot of people end up just saying, you know, I used to wake up at 5am Even though that's not natural for me. And I would do two hours of meditation and yoga and all this. And it just. No, that doesn't work. When there's a baby screaming like you're just not. So you end up figuring out how to fit biohacking into your schedule. And in your case, you do it before you have quality relationship time in the evening, which is nice. I'm assuming that you guys sleep on an eight sleep pad. Whose side is cooler?

Mine is cooler. I'm not a super cold guy. Some of our users are incredible. They sleep at the 55 degree temperature on the bed. I cannot do that. And because I freeze. I mean, it's very subjective. It depends on your weight on fat percentage and your metabolism and if you're an athlete or not, things like that. We see 10% of the customers sleeping at around 55 degree. Again, you're in contact with the 55 degrees. Not like saying, oh, the temperature is 55 degree. Yeah.

So do you. Do you believe that some humans are reptilians and that they're just like wearing masks to look like People, maybe I'm wondering if, like, we spotted those, those people, because that's really cold to want to sleep. I've tried it. It's. It doesn't work for me. But maybe they're hyperthyroid or something. I bet if you did labs on all of those 10%, you'd find they're weird. And whether they're alien, probably not. But whether they have a mitochondrial, genetic or some other thing, this is the kind of data that has me super excited, because when you mix everyone into a big vat, you get this big average, which is kind of junky. You just can't really tell. And you're not ever going to believe that. You could have these high dwellers in the Andes or in the Himalayas who have mitochondrial abnormalities to help them deal with hypoxic situations. But when you start going, oh, my God, there's a subset of people with superpowers. What other superpowers are out there? And your data sets, it's going to be amazing. That. So that's one. So those are the people who are like Iceman. Are there people who always sleep at like, you know, 90, 95 degrees or something? They're kind of sleeping in a sauna.

Women sleep way warmer than men, big time. You see a massive difference. Except women in their 45 plus. So when they get into menopause, and so then they revert back to cooling, or women, the week before their period, they move temperature towards cooling again because we have. They have a hormonal impact on their body.

You read my mind. So is aidsleep working on an algorithm where you could actually set your likely date and then it'll automatically cool you down the week before? So I'll bet you money, as the author of a fertility book, that that's going to massively enhance fertility, which is a good thing because we don't actually have the population problem everyone thinks we have. The actual population problem is a decline in the population because our birth rate is below the replacement rate, and it is in most civilized countries. We're losing hundreds of thousands of people every year. So I believe that enhancing fertility, not just to have more kids, but that someone who is fertile, who does things that enhance fertility, they have smarter, healthier, happier babies. So I would just encourage anyone who's thinking about being a parent look at getting innate sleep. Fix your sleep before, like three months before you decide to get pregnant and have your sleep cycles and your heating and cooling all worked out. And that's going to just make everything way easier. So I appreciate that. A lot.

And have you the impact during the pregnancy? Because hot or feeling cold and so then we can adjust the temperature for them.

Have you seen any effects on fertility from sleeping cooler or hotter?

We didn't measure it yet, but we see a lot of women sending us a thank you note because of how we are helping them. I'll tell you another one that might surprise you. Surprise me. We are helping a lot people with cancer while they are going through chemo. During chemo, they have hot flashes. And so we have helped a bunch of people to finally sleep again after they got cancer. I received multiple messages from customers saying, look, you really changed my life. I have cancer. Now I can finally sleep again.

Wow, that is incredible. So anyone with the temperature control, whether you're cold all the time or hot all the time, big deal. I feel like people are cold all the time. Seriously, just get an advanced thyroid test and get your thyroid meds fixed. That's probably going to help a lot. And if you go to your doctor and they say, oh, you're within range, but you're cold all the time, I hate to tell you, you got the symptoms and you're not at the end of the range, that would make you warm. So take some anyway with your doctor's support and then, you know, get your levels. So you're treating the symptoms, not the number. And magically you'll feel good. So you might not need to heat yourself as much as you normally did, but the real benefit comes from cooling even just a few degrees when you sleep. And like you said, it's different for men and women, but even there, a woman who's cold and shaking, you know, all, all the time, it's a metabolic signaling control system issue that you can handle. And one way to handle it is you warm your mattress up. Other way is to handle it from the inside so you get the match of the two systems.

Yeah.

All right, so I understand your sleep, I understand your eating, understand your exercise. As a high performance guy, just an example of a biohacker with a lot of data. What other stuff do you do, like, around work?

So I'm pretty obsessed with efficiency there too. So I color code all the meetings and then I receive a report from my EA at the end of each week of how much time I spent in meetings and in what type of meetings. Like, there is growth, there is product, there is finance, there is podcasts. Right. And prior to. And I have data for the past three years and so I know how much I was working every month or every day. And where most of my time was going. And I tried to match that with my priorities. So let's say sleep needs to raise money and am I spending 60, 70% of my time talking to investors or no, let's say sleep needs to hire a new CRO. How much time am I spending on that? And I always review the data.

Nice. Now, you say you always review the data. Do you actually do it yourself or do you review it with an assistant or someone?

She sends me a report. So I receive every Sunday multiple graphs of my day each day. And now I started again receiving a survey every Sunday. How did I feel mentally? How did I perform at work? How did I eat in terms of quality? And now we will start tracking that and compare it to work and all the other data I have on Apple Health.

Oh, you're doing that just once a week, the survey?

Yeah, I tried every day and then it was too much for me.

I did this for a year. I did just a daily. I called it my happiness score. And I was trying to determine. I was trying to disprove the Taoist equation for frequency of male ejaculation and the to kind of steal the punchline. The Taoists are right. There is a hangover for ejaculation for men. So. So more sex is better, but ejaculating frequently is depleting. And it's probably a dopamine and a testosterone issue. But what I did find, though, is just the act of sitting down and be like, what's one number from one to 10? Like, how good was the day? Like, how happy am I with my energy levels, with my health, with my relationships, with what I'm doing at work? And just like, you know how either meh or yay am I today? And you could get a pretty good signal from that over time. It was actually really a cool thing. And I've tried ranking myself on different aspects. Stu Friedman was on in the first hundred episodes, an old professor of mine from Wharton, and he talks about his book is called Total Leadership. Back then he talks about ranking yourself once a week on other priorities like community involvement and family and relationships and all. So I'm really into the tracking thing, but I haven't tried. Once a week is yours, you just pick a number or do you have like a defined survey that takes two minutes?

Is a defined survey that takes with the type form. I receive it on Sunday. And I rate each dimension only, like strong, medium, low, or the equivalent. Right. Like super happy, medium or low. Because I tried originally to rate 1 to 10. It was too much. So it's just one of the three. And it's a couple of different dimension. How I feel with myself at work, relationship, how did I eat in terms of quality? Because it's something that otherwise I don't track. And like, that's five questions and I get it done.

Okay, I. I like that.

Another thing I do where I'm still not optimal, but is helping a lot is what I call stillness. So I tried a bunch of meditation. I always stopped for one reason or another. And now I do this thing called stillness that is just. I sit in a chair doing nothing for at least 10 minutes. Could be anywhere between 10 and 30 minutes. Depends on how much time I have. And at the beginning is really painful because my mind is like a monkey that is jumping around and is going crazy. And then after 10 minutes, finally I start finding some clarity. But I don't try to specifically relax. I don't have any process. It's just stand still, wait and suffer until when the monkey stops.

Got it. And it takes about 10 minutes for your monkey to stop?

Yeah, it depends on the days, but yeah, anywhere between 10 and 30, 30 minutes. But when you have a 10 minutes, you already see the benefit.

Okay, I like that. So 10 minutes. I would do heart rate variability or neurofeedback whenever I get a chance. Yeah. Just because I'm. I don't know, I'm lazy. And I know that if I can do neurofeedback even for an hour, I have the 40 years of Zen gear here. So I can do that even for an hour once a week. That it replaces many other hours of stuff. And I'm working on getting that stuff out there to the world. But any practice, including stillness, I love it. So that. And that is working for you. What do you feel when you're done with it? This is the middle of your day. And then you, you're energized, you go back to work or you're tired or you have coffee. Like what's, what's the post stillness protocol?

Look, I have this other thing that I do sometimes that is called the napuccino. Have you heard of the napuccino?

Napuccino. You have espresso, then you go to sleep right away. So the caffeine hits you while you're asleep and you get like a turbo nap.

Exactly. So if I, if I could nap, I drink an espresso. I'm Italian again, I drink my espresso, I try to nap for 20 minutes. By the time I wake up, adenosine is down, the coffee is kicking in and I feel like a superhero.

I love it. And for people who nap and drink coffee, you really should try this. It doesn't have to be espresso, but espresso is 50 to maybe 80 milligrams of caffeine. But you can drink it quickly because it's not much. And if you were to have a large cup of coffee and the caffeine's going to be kicking in from your first sips by the time you can go to sleep. So you'd have to basically put the coffee on ice to do it and then chug it and then go to sleep.

Yeah.

Okay.

And actually one sick, I mean one of the biggest hacks is napping. I don't do it enough. I'm, I'm busy like all of you guys. I think napping is a superpower. After that I can perform like if it was 9am And I can maximize my performance in the late afternoon. But I don't nap much. But the few times I do it, I feel great.

I'm always torn. I mean Winston Churchill was famous for just taking full on naps in the middle of the day, like put on his pointy sleeping hat and pajamas and smoke a cigar or whatever, but clearly knew a thing or two about handling stress. And he would go to bed and um, right in the middle of the day and his war cabinet was like, what are you doing? He's like, well do you want me to work or not? And but then there's also a bunch of studies that show you might not live as long. People take frequent naps, die more of all cause mortality. And maybe they're breathing, you know, flies with their sleep or something and they're choking. I have no idea. But I, I, I've not been a napper for a long time and I, I, I don't even feel the desire to do it. So I, I'm torn cause I've, I, I, I hear you on the performance, but it feels like it takes so much time to nap. But what do you like twice a week you take a nap?

No, probably once a week, the best weeks. But if I can do it, sometimes I can even try to force myself. If I have a big meeting in the second part of the afternoon, I set time for stillness or napping just to prepare for that meeting.

Cool.

The, the last thing I do is I do Wednesday morning, no meetings. I use that time to just go somewhere and reflect. Most of the times is about work. And then I do back to back Meetings. So I train my brain and I can tell you I can do eight meetings in a row, back to back, a big performance, I can get to 10 and I start seeing some degradation. And when I get to the 12 is when content switching becomes painful.

How long are the meetings?

30 minutes each.

Okay, I believe it. This is something that people who don't work in high pressure business may not understand. And it's weird, but after a while, if you're an executive, your working memory goes, goes up. And there's a correlation of the, the size of your working memory with the level of and scope of your control in an organization. So people who can remember eight or ten numbers or characters are oftentimes more senior leadership than people can remember seven, which is the average. That's why phone numbers are seven digits plus an area code. And if you can only remember five or six things, you're probably not going to do well in a cognitive thing until you fix your brain. But then there's the energy and focus thing. And you know, for me, I can do four interviews in a day, four podcasts at this level of listening and paying attention. Or I can do my conference, you know, where I'm on stage, you know, every few minutes all day long. My energy doesn't flag anymore, but it used to be a terrible drain. So how long did it take you to get your brain trained so you didn't get drained by eight half hour meetings, which for most people sounds like hell, but isn't hell for you or me?

Yeah, the thing I notice, and I'm rating activities, there are certain type of meetings that give me energy and certain type of meetings that drain energy. And so I work with my EA to try to organize the day and split the ones that drain my energy over the week and earlier in the day. Because if I have a 6pm energy draining meeting, I just don't even want to get there. I leave the whole day saying, look, I don't want to do the meeting.

Yeah, I hear you. Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach was on the show a few years ago. He's a friend and just an incredibly influential guy who's taught entrepreneurs for 40 years how to run their businesses. And he's straight up, you should have no meetings at Psychoenergy. It's like, find someone to take that meeting for you. And I aspire to that. I still have a few of those, but I have less and less. Is that that your idea? Sort of like hire out those?

I try, but there are some that they're still part of the CEO life. And so I have to deal with those.

I hear you. There's always, there's always some, but we can always minimize them.

Okay.

Tell me other things, other hacks that you're doing that you feel like perform improves your performance.

Power, posture. How do you say posture? And it's something I have learned from watching videos of Tony Robbins. And so the story there is there are a couple of postures that if you adopt for a couple of minutes, they should increase your testosterone and gives you energy and will help you to believe in yourself. And so usually it's just to stand up for with your chest open, you can put your arms like this. If you are on the chair, you can go like this. And so in certain moments of the day, I try to do that for a minute or two to try to increase my energy and testosterone.

Okay.

The other thing I do is I, for certain meetings like this one, I'm standing right. Because it gives me way more energy. So if I have an interview like this with you, I just want to be way more, know, flexible in my movements than being on a chair.

Okay. I wanted to get into some more eight sleep stuff because I was. We got into detail in our last interview and we talked earlier kind of about how it works, but you came out with a Pod 3 and you guys had sent me the Pod 2. I haven't seen the Pod 3 yet. You're going to send me one at my, my new place in Austin and I didn't want to get it up here before then. So tell me what's different, how you've evolved it from. From the time before?

Yeah, a couple of different things. The first one is it has two extra sensors. So that concept of this now microfilm, you have two per side of the bed instead than one. And so that, that is how accuracy went up, both on the machine learning side, but also on the Adler side. And so before we had some blind spots where in certain position we couldn't pick up your heart rate or your respiration. Now we don't have that problem anymore. So accuracy is better to ask the sensors, better connectivity so we can stream all the raw data to the cloud and a better comfort. So we work on the, what is called the active grid, which is the technology to heat and cool.

Okay, I love that. So more sensors, more data. Last time I gave you a hard time about WI Fi. So what about EMFs?

I mean, based on all our data, that we have no problem there at all.

So your system relies on WI fi when you're asleep. And if there's no WI FI signal available, what happens?

It stores the data and it will send it to the cloud once the WI fi is back.

Okay, so people can still turn off their WI fi at night, and then they're okay if they're EMF sensitive or something. But most people, they're leaving it on. And right now the mattress has a cable that goes to the hub, and then the hub uses WI fi, but there's no Ethernet connector. Yeah.

So the hub is on the side. So it's not that you have any WI FI chip close to you.

Okay, so the hub is. But it's on a wire. It's not stuck to the mattress, right?

No.

Okay, good deal.

So there is a umbilical, but just for the water and the liquid.

Yep.

And so it's just for that purpose.

Okay, good deal. And then the WI FI is from over there. All right, that makes good sense. I still would love to see. I have Ethernet. But if people can turn off their WI fi anyway, then it doesn't really matter as long as it's going to work that night. So the algorithms are going to be fine because you set what time you want to wake up and all, and that's on the local machine. So then it doesn't matter. Yeah.

There are certain functionalities that might not work without the WI fi, but others work.

Okay, very cool.

There's one thing we didn't talk about that is the benefits of thermoregulation. So using the heating and cooling, and so we have evidence that we can improve your sleep quality up to 32%. We can improve your deep sleep by up to, I believe, 21%. And we reduce toss and turns meaningfully, and we help you fall asleep faster.

So that's a pretty substantial. Okay, let me ask you this. If I have a 32% improvement in my sleep, which is what your eight sleep data shows, could I just sleep 32% less?

That is my goal. We discussed this last time, you and I. I want to sleep less, recover faster, without compromising my health and longev.

And that's okay?

Yeah. I don't have a final answer yet, but that is what I have on my mind.

What's your average hours of sleep per night right now?

Yeah. I still sleep quite a bit because I sleep somewhere between eight hours and eight and a half, but I want to compress it. And so the pod is helping me quite a bit. But when I have. Sometimes I still have it. And at that point I just keep tossing and turning. And so my Sleep quality drops, sleep efficient.

Okay, that makes so much sense. Well, you're, you're, you're still getting a. What do you get? Two hours of deep sleep? Like what, what's your typical nightly deep sleep and REM sleep score?

So I tend to look at that more in terms of percentage. And so if I'm between 18 and 20, 1% is good, I feel good. Above 21, I feel like a superhero. Below 18 or in the 15, I feel like shit.

Okay.

There are two things I didn't mention to you that are pretty important. So we have evidence. We can improve your hrv. And for certain customers, it get to a point where is more than 10% improvement, which could be in the best case, equivalent to your HRV 10 years ago. And then on top of that, we can reduce your heart rate at rest by one to two heartbeats, which is the equivalent of three or four months of heat training.

Amazing. So we have really meaningful changes. And this is the thing. If someone's going to spend, say, eight hours sleeping, you could just get that while you sleep, or you could not get that while you sleep. And that's why I think this is a fundamental and foundational technology. And thanks for doing the work to prove it with the numbers instead of just believing it works. Something else you added to the System three that I was reading about that I haven't tried yet was something I've been using just on principle for 20 years now is gentle rise. But you guys have a different algorithm. How does your gentle rise work?

Yeah, so I always hated alarms. And the sound in particular, in particular, the dumb alarms, they just go off at a certain point and maybe I'm in deeper room. And so now the device has a vibration, and so it wakes you up through vibration or through vibration and temperature. So it can maybe go really cold or really hot, plus the vibration. And so you wake up gently and so you don't feel groggy.

Amazing. The gentle wake for me was an absolute difference. I realized that there were certain times where I would, I would wake up and my day would just be ruined. Right. And it was usually if I was like really in the middle of a deep sleep cycle and you just have to sort of climb out of that and I felt like my vagal tone was off and it's just not a good day. Or if I was in the middle of a really deep meditation and then, you know, someone throws a ball at you or just roughly wakes you up. That rough transition, I think, is biologically really rough. So this stops that And I would never have an alarm that just turned on, like an alarm that really just starts. But are you looking at where I am in a sleep phase? So you've like, you can say, here's a 20 minute window. Wake me up whenever is best during that time. And then it does it.

There will be a software update that we will release soon. And so in the future there will be also a feature where we wake you up only after you have achieved a certain amount of sleep.

Oh, wow.

Right. And then it wakes you up gradually within 20 minutes. And so that is just software updates. So any hardware you have, it will get more features over time. Like a Tesla.

Love it. And is there a monthly fee? So you buy the slip the E sleep thing. What's the monthly fee look like?

Yeah, it's not mandatory, but the largest majority of our customers use it and it's 15 bucks a month.

Okay.

So you get all this machine learning. Okay, yeah.

That gives you all the machine learning and data storage. Or you just have the, have the device and it works without any monthly fee, which is cool.

All right.

In case people missed it, it's eight sleep E I G H T sleep.com Dave, you can get up to $450 off the whole Sweet fit holiday bundle, which is a really big savings. And I'll just gotta tell you the ROI on this, which is a one time installation. And then it just works without having to charge your ring or any of that kind of stuff. Completely, completely worth it. Otherwise I wouldn't have Mateo on the show for you. Mateo, thanks for being a guest and for giving me a look at what you do every day and letting us compare and contrast. I think, I think it's pretty cool, the very specificity saying, okay, 10 improvements in HRV, the amount of deep sleep. So this isn't around hoping it works. This isn't around an idea. This is around a lot of people have done it and we saw these results so that the certainty of it working for you is much higher than it normally would be. So thanks again.

No, thank you for having me. I had a lot of fun.

All right, guys, 8sleep.com Dave, I will see you all on the next episode. And very soon I'll be recording these from a place in Austin, but I'll probably be on the road a lot for a little while, so who knows what my background is going to look like. Like, but guests, as usual, are going to know what they're talking about. Like Matteo. See you soon. You're listening to the Human upgrade with Dave Asprey.