59. Insomnia to Blissful Sleep– The 8 Sleep Journey With Matteo Franceschetti

I always say sleep deprivation is the new smoking. This is what our generation are facing today. If you go back 10, 20 years ago, a lot of entrepreneurs could say, oh, I work until 4am I sleep only four hours per night.

It was a badge of honor.

Yeah, well, instead, right now it would just look like, okay, so you're not really serious about your health. You need to try to sleep at least 7, 8, even 9 hours per day to take care of your body and your longevity. In a few years, your bed will become the most advanced preventative health platform in the world. And I'll tell you how. But I also tell you why. The reason is.

Ultimate Human. Welcome to the Ultimate Human podcast. Today, we're diving deep into the fascinating world of sleep technology with Pateo Francis Chetty, the founder and CEO of eight Sleep. Eight Sleep is actually something I use every day in my life. And Francis Chetty was a former athlete and lawyer turned groundbreaking entrepreneur. Mateo is at the forefront of revolutionizing our sleep through cutting edge technological innovations. Stay tuned as we explore how technology is unlocking the true potential of our sleep and how artificial intelligence, data, and science can make us a healthier and more energetic version of ourselves. Hey, guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human podcast. I'm your host, Gary Breca, human biologist. Where we go down the road, everything anti aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. I am super excited about today's guest. You heard about his background? I am a big fan of. Of the product that he's developed. I'm a huge fan of his mission to improve and correct sleep and to bring technology and artificial intelligence to the table to help Americans sleep better, get more sleep, get more quality sleep, deeper sleep, and then thrive. I just think that if you don't have the foundation of healthy, good sleep, really much else doesn't matter. So. Welcome to the podcast. We were actually just talking about the pronunciation of your. Of your last name, and I apologize. I've been traveling for 32 hours. I just got back from the Middle east and there was a. Like a sandstorm over there and I. And I got really, like, the worst sore throat from it. I'm actually not sick. I just had the sore throat from breathing in 30 pounds of dust for. For four days. But, Mateo, how do we pronounce your last name? I was telling you before the podcast started, we Googled it and. And there were all kinds of pronunciations, and one of the pronunciations actually said it was a French pandemic syndrome. So.

Yeah.

So how do we pronounce your last Name?

Francesca.

Francesca. Welcome to the PO Podcast. Matteo Franceschetti.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

You know, I'm. I'm really excited. We're a week away from my sleep challenge. We're going to take, you know, tens of thousands of people through, you know, tricks to get a better night's sleep. I was actually doing some research for the podcast, and it's astounding to me that almost 35% of Americans are chronically sleep deprived. Um, 30% of the world's population reports having some kind of sleep condition, an actual sleep anomaly, sleep apnea, narcolepsy, severely interrupted sleep patterns, circadian rhythm disorder. I mean, this is a much bigger issue than I think that society is even aware. And I know that my listeners are very, very interested in tips and tricks for getting a better night's sleep. But I want to talk about your journey from being a lawyer, from being an athlete into sleep eight and your. Your interest in sleep technology.

Yeah, of course. And 100% agree with you about the importance of sleep. I always say sleep deprivation is the new smoking.

Yes.

This is what our generation or the people of our generation are facing today. Right. If you go back 10, 20 years ago, a lot of entrepreneurs could say, oh, I work until 4am I sleep only four hours per night. I'm not.

It was a badge of honor.

Yeah, it was a badge of honor. While instead, right now it would just look like, okay, so you're not really serious about your health. You need to try to sleep at least seven, eight, if you can, even nine hours per day to take care of your body and your longevity. But talking about me, I'm Italian, as you can guess, clearly. Yes, very much from my last name. When I was a teenager, I was an athlete. I was a tennis player. That is how I was spending 99% of my time outside school. And. And so I have always been into recovery, physical activity. And I always try to be, you know, fit. Right. Then my professional career started. No, I went to college and I stopped playing tennis. I had two surgeries to many.

Wow.

And then I became a lawyer, a business lawyer.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, I'm sorry to you is my sc. Yeah. And so I worked for two very large law firms doing securities and finance at the European level. And then I finally became an entrepreneur. But there is this interesting gap in my life that goes from probably when I was 19 to when I was 30, where I almost stopped doing any physical activity. I always kept thinking, oh, I'm an athlete. I'm in good shape by default. So I didn't need to do that. I can just work. And then I have this realization when I was 30 years old that things were changing in my body, that I was not in a great shape. Actually, I still remember it was my birthday, my 30th, and I decided to go running that day. And after five minutes I couldn't run anymore. I was already tired. And that is when I realized, look, if I want to take care of myself, if I want to be the person I always no thought I am physically is better. I start taking care of myself again. And so that is when I started looking into a lot of things to improve my physical fitness, my longevity. And sleep is the foundation.

No question.

All this, right. If you look at health, I think there are really three pillars. There is nutrition, there is fitness, and there is sleep. And sleep is the foundational part of this pyramid.

I think, I think most of the, the biohacking community would absolutely agree with that. In fact, I was watching a Huberman podcast and he has sleep expert on a few months ago, any, any, any espoused statistic that was shocking to me. And he talks about the, the incidences of, of heart attacks just during the one hour sleep when we set the clocks backwards and we actually lose an hour of sleep. And, and the fact that there is, it goes in both directions and I don't want to quote the statistics because I won't get it exactly right, but to paraphrase it, you know, he, he pointed out that when we set the clocks backwards and we actually lose an hour of sleep, there's a concomitant increase in cardiovascular events. And when we actually get the additional hour of sleep, there's a corresponding reduction in cardiovascular events. So, and I know that's somewhat anecdotal, but still you, you see that just a slight alterations in the amount and, and probably also the quality of sleep that we're getting have demonstrative effects on our health. And I pride myself on, on being able to hack my sleep and I actually do use a sleep aid. So I'm a huge fan of what you guys do. But one of the things you talk about is sleep fitness, right? So, and I, I, I love that term because I, I always say that I don't think we have a pandemic of mental illness in this country. I think we have a lack of mental fitness. And so talk about what, what is sleep fitness? I mean, how do you become more fit from a sleep perspective?

Yeah. So since when we started the company we wanted to Approach sleep from a different perspective from everybody else. Right. A lot of companies in sleep are about a lazy Sunday with waffles in bed relaxing. Right. That's not who I am. And so I always thought of sleep as a tool to maximize your productivity and your happiness during the day. And so that is how I shifted the angle and I started thinking of sleep as an action and is an active activity that you can perform at night to then perform during the day. And that is how we came up with the name. And the reason is if you are intentional and you put the effort into your sleep, you will get the results. It's exactly like going to the gym. Right. You have to show up. You have to show up x days per week for a certain number of minutes or hours and the results will come. The same approach is requiring sleep. You need to be consistent. You need to sleep a certain amount of hours. It's easier and simpler than going to the gym.

Yeah.

So it requires less effort, but it still requires the same amount of diligence. That is why we call it, you.

Know, I think a lot of people, and we're going to talk about this on my Sleep Challenge. We have, we have a routine for our exercise. We have routines to get our kids to school in the morning. We have routines for our business. We don't actually have good sleep hygiene or good sleep routines. And so we rely on tranquilitics, you know, or we rely on other things to kind of tranquilize us into a sleep state instead of developing a really healthy sleep routine. So to you, what is, what is an optimal sleep fitness routine look like? Like, what does it look like to be in really good sleep shape?

Yeah. And let me add something to what you just say, because it is. You really nailed the point. An interesting thing. I don't have kids, right. But I have a lot of friends with kids and babies.

And they all realize, I'll give you one, I got a couple extras.

But parents realize immediately when they have a baby the importance of a sleep routine. Right. For the baby. And so we know how important that is, then we just forget that we should apply the same methodology to our own sleep. But you have no doubt that the kids should go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time and be very consistent. We just believe as we become adults that that is not. It doesn't apply to our own bodies. So the perfect sleep routine, at least for me, I mean, you want to sleep somewhere between seven and nine hours, right. You want to go to sleep at a Reasonable time and meaning anywhere. I would say between 9 and 11pm and then you wake up based on.

When you go to sleep.

Yeah. So somewhere between 6 and 7am at least that. That is what I do. I usually go to sleep 9:30 to 10:00am and then I wake up somewhere between 6 and. And 7. Right. You want to try to pay attention to your sleep stages. That is really important. So how much deep sleep you're getting? For me, the magic number if is if I get more than 18% the deep sleep. I feel like a superhero. 15 to 18. I'm okay below 15 and that's deep sleep.

So that REM sleep, or separate from REM, that is deep sleep. So talk about the different levels of sleep. Because I think it's confusing when people hear there's delta sleep, there's theta sleep, there's REM sleep, there's deep sleep, there's light sleep, and then there's a waking cycle and I actually wear a whoop. I also track it on the sleep eight. And they usually seem to be very much in sync with one another. But make a little sense out of the sleep metrics for us.

I always try to simplify. Like if I was explaining this to my grandma. Right. And so I stay away from all the scientific definitions. And so oversimplify. You have your deep sleep, you have REM and you have light sleep. And again, oversimplify this. If you talk to a real doctor, they will be way more sophisticated, but I try to keep it very practical. So deep sleep happens mostly in the first part of the night. In the first half of the night, you will have way more deep sleep than rem. And deep sleep is when your physical body is recovering. REM instead is when you're dreaming. And that is usually when your brain is recovering and is reallocating all the information that collected during the day in the library inside your own brain. And that tends to happen more in the second part of the night. So what you will see is that your body tends to give prevalence to the physical recovery. So if you sleep only 4 hours, you will see you get way more deep sleep than REM because of these allocation.

Because deep sleep is coming first.

Exactly.

And then REM comes. REM comes later. And REM is not as deep a state as deep sleep.

Correct. And it's more focused on the brain than the physical body. The interesting thing is also that while you are in rem, your body is completely deactivated. So nothing is moving. And the reason is you are dreaming. Right. And so if you were dreaming and your body would be moving, you would be actually moving the body and it could be dangerous for, for yourself.

Right.

And so you're in this static position while you are in, in, in rem, rem. And if you're sleep deprived, your body will keep trying to give prevalence or priority to deep sleep versus rem. So what you are really penalizing is your brain functionalities and your brain sharpness.

So initially, when you get into this deep sleep and you move from the deep sleep, which is the body's time to recover, repair, detoxify, what have you, and then you move into the REM stage. This REM stage is the stage where the brain is really the focus of the attention. And you want the rem. Well, you want both, you want deep rem, but you're saying that as you become more sleep deprived, your body will prioritize the deep sleep.

Correct.

Which seems like a good thing. But then at the detriment of REM sleep.

Correct.

Which is compromising brain function.

Exactly. Because all the brain function, all your memory, mental sharpness, all that comes comes from rem.

Right.

So actually, if you, for example, when I have the board meeting of my company that day, I always try to sleep one hour longer than usual.

Really?

Yeah.

Okay.

And so that extra hour will give me extra ram, and I believe it will make me ext. Extra sharp. So sharp.

Now, do you find that you can just decide to sleep an hour longer? Because I think most people would be like, I would love to sleep an hour longer, but I, you know, I wake up the same time every day or I just wake up and I can't get back to sleep. I want to talk about some of the sleep hacks, some of the sleep tricks that we can, that we can use to, to get a better night's sleep. But I think that a lot of people would say, man, I would love to be able to just decide to stay in bed another hour. Some people that aren't even beholden to getting out of bed at a certain time really don't have a choice because their body wakes up and doesn't go back, back to sleep. So talk a little bit about a good sleep hygiene or a good sleep routine that people could develop in order to get into a good pattern of sleep. A good sleep routine, like they would plan their workouts.

Yeah, I think we all underestimate the importance of the routine. And so honestly, the first thing you want to fix, if you want to fix your sleep, is just consistency. You want to go to bed at the same Time. And you want to wake up at the same time. And the reason is pretty simple. You have a biological clock. Right. And by just training your body to feeling asleep at the same time every day and waking up at the same time every day, a certain point it will just become a biological habit.

Right.

And so for me, for example, I always struggle to wake up, to wake up early. My body just wants more, more sleep and more sleep. But as I train myself to wake up at 6am now my body, it just wakes up at six six or five, six, ten on its own.

And what time are you going to sleep?

Somewhere between 9:30 and 10:00am okay, in the, in that 10:00pm okay, yeah. And 10:00pm sorry, 9:30 is my sweet spot. I'm using 10 minutes with my wife and then I start falling asleep. I'm lucky. I can fall asleep very, very fast, quickly. My sleep is not always perfect in terms of quality and performance. And so I try to sleep a little bit more than eight hours because then the real effective sleep will be around 7 hour and 45.

So that's like a 10pm Till 6:37am yeah.

The 9:30 to the 6. Right. Is 8 hours and a half. But then the high quality sleep, the true sleep, it ends up being somewhere around 7 hours and 45.

And if you were to partition out your sleep, when do you find that you're getting the most beneficial sleep sore? Early on, you're getting the deep sleep. Are you trying to extend the time that you spend in REM sleep so you have more advantages for your brain?

Sometimes, yes. Like the morning of the board meeting. I try to not wake up at 6, but to wake up at 7 if I can. That extra hour will make me extra sharp, just more agile mentally. I will feel more rested. But the other thing is our product, by changing your body temperature, enhances some of these phases. Right. And so what we see is we can enhance your, the, the percentage of your deep sleep and we can enhance the percentage of your rem.

Wow.

We also reduce toss and turns, which is the other big factor negatively impacting your sleep quality.

Right. Because those are sort of waking states. Exactly. Right, yeah. And so talk a little bit about how that occurs because now we're, we're bringing technology to, to the fitness industry. And I really want to talk about that because you have some really exciting technologies even coming out. You even have some new technologies coming out. But what does temperature have to do and bioregulating your temperature have to do with actually extending deep sleep or, or REM sleep?

Yeah. So your body has what is called a circadian rhythm. Right. Which is this cycle during. During the day. And your body temperature already changes during the night. So when you hear people saying, oh, you should sleep at 68 degrees, the whole night is not true. It might be true for an hour, but it's not going to be true for eight hours. And the reason is your body temperature follows more or less what happens with the sun and the night. Right. And so as soon as you fall asleep, your body temperature should drop. And three, four hours before you wake up, the body temperature should start rising. It literally follows the sun. Imagine if you were in a cave. It gets colder around midnight. And then two, three hours before sunrise, the sun starts coming out and it gets slightly warmer. And then by the time there is the sunrise, everything is warmer. Right. And so there is this U curve that your body temperature follows. And what our technology does is it's just helping your body to do what it's supposed to do to do.

So when I set those settings, because I'll do like, my wife has different settings than I do, she says it's too cold on my side of the bed. But so, you know, I set it to about a minus three. Now when I set it to minus three, that's where it's starting out. Right. When I get into bed.

Yeah.

And then as I'm, as I'm progressing through my night of sleep, is it then warming me up, you know, the next morning and bringing me out?

Yeah.

Because I do notice a considerable difference in my sleep when I use sleep eight. In fact, I had a 100 sleep score two nights ago.

Nice.

Which is awesome for me. I woke up and saw the. The whoop and I was like, oh, my God. I posted it all over Instagram. I'm so proud of it. Like 97 recovery and. And 100 sleep score.

That's great.

Yeah.

So let's start for, for a second from. From what is our product? And then I go back to. To your answer. So is. Is a mattress cover that you can install onto any mattress and it will improve your sleep. How to thermoregulation. So each side of the bed will have a different temperature that changes hundreds of times per night to maximize your sleep.

And what's causing that change? Is it sensing your.

Yeah. So there are sensors in the mattress cover that you don't see and you don't feel, but they are able to capture everything about your sleep. Your sleep stages, your heart rate, your HRV and your respiration. And based on these biometrics we have developed different algos that they keep changing the temperature to maximize your recovery and sleep stages, particularly deep sleep. And remember, this was already proven from a clinical standpoint before eight sleep. So again, we are not reinventing the wheels. There was plenty of evidence that by changing your body temperature during the night, you could get better sleep.

I think that's well established. Yeah.

And so what we did is we just created the first consumer product at scale that could just do that for every human being.

Right.

And so each side of the bed can have a different temperature. So if you sleep with a partner and the partner has different preferences, different biometrics, different body mass, whatever, everything will be personalized. And so you go to bed and the bed has obviously a temperature. And that could be whatever you like. You might like it cold, you might.

I like it a little cool when I get into bed. I actually really like that. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm not surprised. We see a lot of our users preferring, particularly men, they like it really cold. Well, instead, most of the women, they like it slightly warmer. As soon as you fall asleep, you want the temperature to drop even more. So in deep sleep, you want the coldest possible temperature that you can stand and afford. And for everyone is different. Right. Our scale goes down to minus 10 in terms of settings for you. You might like minus 10, I might like minus 5.

Yeah. Minus 5 is.

Yeah. But you want something colder because in deep sleep, the colder the better to maximize that, that phase. Wow. Then when you start getting more rem, which is again is in the second half of the night, you want a slightly warmer temperature. And the reason is this, that when you are in rem, your brain deactivates the temperature control of the body itself. And so if it's too cold, the brain will not let you fall into REM because it fears you could die. Right. And so you want a sort of neutral temperature where your brain thinks, okay, everything is safe, you can get into rem.

How does the bed know when to make this transition? It's monitoring your hrv, your respiratory rate and what have you. And how does it know that? Okay, they're sliding now from deep sleep into a REM state. So we're going to go ahead and warm this, this up a little bit. What's going on?

Yeah, great question. So we, we detect a RAM and oversimplify the gain. One of the easiest way to detect the RAM is that first you're not moving. Right. We go back to what you were saying earlier. Your body is standing still.

Yeah.

In. In Bed. But your heart rate is accelerated because you are likely dreaming.

Right.

So you are living an experience, but your body is not moving. And so oversimplified. This is a proxy, so this is.

How it understands that you're going into.

And then obviously there is more information about hr, hrv, all the different transition between the different sleep stages. So we have AI algos that now have been trained with, I think we cross millions of hours of sleep.

Wow.

In certain areas it still blows my mind. Like heart rate and HRV. In heart rate, we are 99 as accurate as a medical grade EKG.

Wow.

Which if you think is pretty impressive that you go to bed as you did for the rest of your life. And this device now is as good as a medical grade ekg.

Wow. So it is. So this is picking up your heart rate.

Yeah. 99 accuracy compared to medical grade EKG. 96, 97 accuracy at HRV and 97 at detecting your respiratory rate.

Wow. And so it's a combination of the respiratory rate, your HRV and. And these other metrics. Move movement, I was going to say, is that also seeing how much you're moving around. And then when things quiet down, heart rate slows down, our heart rate actually increases. Then it starts to help you move into the next phase of sleep.

Correct.

And when you capture this data, are you then updating the algorithms? Is the technology getting smarter when we do updates to, you know, sleep aid, is it progressively using more and more and more data? Because I really think I did a talk this past weekend about how just exciting this time frame is in our life because we have the convergence of all of these different diagnostic tools with massive amounts of data, with artificial intelligence that can make sense of the data and actually give us actionable steps. And I think that, you know, depending on who you talk to, some of these futurists will say if you're alive in five years, you're going to live to 500. I think if you're alive in five years, YOU'RE going to live to between 120 and 140 very easily. If you're born today, who knows, I mean you could easily reach. Reach 200. But I think a lot of it has to do with this intersection between artificial intelligence and massive amounts of real human data and what we can do to put that into actionable steps. So is it. So talk a little bit about how this algorithm is working. Is it, is it becoming more intelligent? Is it, is it continuing? If someone was using a sleep eight, would it progressively continue to get Smarter.

For lack of better words is a great question. And so the answer is yes. Think of it like the Tesla autopilot, right? And we call it our autopilot. And so it learns every single night from the whole user base and it becomes more sophisticated and more intelligent. And I think you said something that is spot on about how we use AI to really enhance human performance and human longevity. Because AI at the end of the day everyone is talking about that, but it's just a tool. It's like mobile, right? Mobile apps, but they are not a business per se. They are a tool that can enhance other activities. The way we use AI is exactly to enhance your sleep performance, which means that then you can have better performance during the day, better health and hopefully a longer and healthier life.

Right.

The way it works, usually there is what is called AI training. There are different types of training, one based on the data and one based on algos self detecting what the next type of learning could be. And so our algos, they keep improving based both on the data that we collect in the field plus what they self determine train themselves for.

Wow.

And the interesting thing of all these is not just that we give you better sleep, but it's how we personalize sleep. Because to get to better sleep is not that one situation or one cooling or one temperature fits. All right. Your temperature is different from mine, right? Your temperature is different from the one from my wife's partner. Right. Different gender maybe. Different age, different body fat percentage. There are all these different factors plus every day is different, right? Let's say probably. I don't know if in my case I don't have alcohol, but some of my friends, they do.

Oh, that's the worst. I mean.

Correct. So we need to self correct that true temperature at night.

Really? So you can actually offset some.

Exactly.

Concentration.

Because usually alcohol has an impact on your heart rate, on your hrv, on your body temperature. And so probably you will need a slightly colder temperature the same if you work out in the night. I play Padel. I have a Thursday usually on Thursday, usually I have a paddle tournament at 8pm by the time I go to bed I try to readjust all my temperature settings because I had adrenaline. Heart rate is accelerate, body temperature is accelerated.

And you just do that on your app, you just dial it down and make it colder.

Correct. And in the near future there will be tags so you can just tag alcohol or physical activity. Physical activity. We can also know get the data from from Apple because you can connect the pod to your Apple health Okay. And then for women, there is pregnancy, which completely changes all their settings and their sleep. There is their period and there is menopause.

Right.

And so we see a lot of women buying our product because they are going through menopause, they have hot flashes and they can't sleep anymore.

And also women that are going through their normal menstrual cycle.

Correct.

Are there different phases of the cycle.

Where actually the temperature, major hormonal changes and they start having some sort of hot flashes or their body temperature changes? So sleep is so dynamic even within the same person that because of what you ate, the time you ate, the activity, or if your body, particularly for women, is going through different periods of the month or your lifetime, you will need different settings things.

Wow, I didn't realize it was that sophisticated. I mean, I do notice that I'm getting better sleep and my wife does too. But you know, for menstruating women, I mean, that is a, that is a huge deal. I mean, we actually had a big discussion about intermittent fasting and menstrual cycles on females. And I had a renowned physician on the podcast talking about the detriments of always treating menstruating females exactly the same way. Meaning like you, they have the same feeding window every day of the month. When their cycle changes, it can be disastrous for their hormones. And sleep seems to be no different. So this is intelligently gathering data and changing the temperature based on where their body temperature might be and what helps them get into deep sleep versus REM sleep and what have you.

Exactly. And there is where you can really leverage the power of AI.

Yeah, that's just going to say the same thing. This is the really exciting thing about AI. I mean, millions of people with millions of different biometrics, millions of different genetic makeups, body temperature, you know, metabolisms, metabolic rates, what have you, you know, sleep schedules and all getting their own data to actually improve the metrics for themselves. So, so talk a little bit about good sleep hygiene or good sleep routine other than just, you know, sleep aid in your, in your bed, when you go to bed. But what are some of the preparatory things that people can do to like enhance getting a good night's sleep? I mean, I think everyone that I've ever spoken to about sleep that, that has, you know, any, any, any kind of wherewithal on, on sleep is, is consistent about how important consistency is. Right. Same time going to bed, same time waking. But what are some other things that they can do? Red light screen time, you know, breath work. What are some other Things that you find being in the industry are good sleep routines that people could use to hack their sleep.

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Breathwork is probably the one that I would recommend the most.

Wow, happy to hear you say that. I use it every night.

Yeah, that is great. It works. You need to find there are different now a lot of different types of breath work. In my case, what I do, I breathe in for four seconds, I hold for four seconds, I breathe out for four seconds. Yeah, exactly. That works really, really well for me. So that is one. The second that I use is thermoregulation, even before going to bed. And so there is an extreme version that is if you have a sauna and an ice bath that is absolutely perfect. You do a sauna ice bath. You do two cycles. After that you're ready to go to bed.

You will feel sauna for how long?

20 to 30 minutes. That you do your ice buzz. Let's say five minutes. It could be anywhere between three and five. And then you could do another round if you can, and end on cold. And. And then you can end on the ice.

Yeah, okay.

And. And after that you just go in bed, you relax and you will just feel so, so relaxed and you will likely fall asleep if you don't have an ice bath or a cold plunge, you can do something similar just with your shower. You could switch between hot and cold or a lot of people even particularly women, love a warm bath. Right. So you could just have a hot and warm bath. That really relaxes you even. There is something that we do with babies, right. And not before going to bed. We do their bath, then we change them and then we put them to bed. So there is plenty of history.

So now the warm bath, I mean, so you've warmed the body up, but then you're saying when you get into, to bed and you're actually cooling the body down, this helps correct, pull you into that deep sleep.

Because after being in a hot bath, your body will want to react, to cool down the core body temperature. And so that is what will help you to fall asleep. Because again, to fall asleep, your core body temperature needs to drop.

Right. And what is the drop in core body temperature? I've heard 2 degrees Celsius, 2 degrees Fahrenheit. What is the necessary drop? I mean, because people that don't have a sleep eight, you know, I encourage them to sleep in a cold room, 68, 69 degrees Fahrenheit. And that alone does have positive implications, you know, positive impact on, on their sleep. And we're going to take, like I say, tens of thousands of people through this, this sleep challenge next week. And we all joined the same group, so we're all, all part of the same group. And we're going to actually use these sleep hacks, one of which is the sleep eight to, to migrate through and, and, and check our sleep in the morning as a, as an entire group. So what's the importance and what's the physiology behind the body temperature drop? I mean, why is that cooling period so important?

Yeah, it's, it goes back to the, to the circadian cycle and what we were saying of the cave. Right. So this U curve. And so as soon as you fall asleep, to maximize your sleep performance, your core body temperature needs to drop. And the amount of degrees is different for everyone in particular now based on gender, based on age, based on what you ate. But directionally you want to have this, this drop. That is why before eight sleep, what was recommended was just to sleep in a cold bedroom.

Right.

Because that is the easiest proxy to try to kind of help your body to achieve that. Obviously now with technology we can be way more specific.

Yeah.

And we can specifically adjust your body in very different ways. But I don't know if you have this problem with, with your wife, but A lot of couples, they fight around temperature and.

Oh yeah, we definitely do.

Yeah.

And the reason is she's very thin and likes it warm. And I'm.

The definition of the four year bod is very different from the definition of cold for your wife. Right. And, and that is why the 68 degree in a bedroom doesn't work for, for everyone. And maybe then a certain point, if your wife is going through menopause, 68° will not even be enough anymore for her. And now she wants 65 and for you it becomes too cold.

Right.

Or she wants 60, whatever. Right, sure.

But the 60 would be nice and dicey.

That's the first principle is the same. Right. So the body needs to drop, right? The body temperature, the core body temperature needs to drop. And so you can prepare your body to do that in a couple of different ways with technology, with a colder room or with a bathtub. That is one, when you say the.

Bathtub, because the bathtub heats you up first you take it, talking about a warm bath. And it's actually this drop in temperature which helps ease you into that, that deeper rim or that deeper sleep that you're after.

Yeah. Another thing that sometimes for some people like me, my extremities are always cold. Right. Like the feet and the hands. And if your feet and hands are cold, you don't fall asleep.

Right.

And so a hot, a bathtub or a warm shower could help people like me or a lot of women have this kind of problem to make sure that your warm so then you can fall asleep.

Right. So yeah, and my, my wife and I both have that same situation. So for, for people that are, you know, looking to take advantage without, you know, with a sleep aid to, to maximize their, their sleep. What about the, you know, waking up at night for frequent urination? What about the people that have a hard time going to sleep because their mind is awake? You know, one of the things that we talk about is the, is the mental aspect of fitness, of, of sleep fitness. And you're talking a lot about the physical aspects of, of sleep fitness. What things outside of sleep? 8 supplements, ways to stop or reduce frequent urination at night. And when I was going to have you on the podcast, my members sent me a bunch of questions that they wanted me to ask you. And one was about frequent urination at night. You might not have any data on that, but I figured since you guys are tracking millions of hours of sleep, do you have any tips or tricks for, you know, reducing frequent urination at night or you know, waking up and having a really difficult time getting back to sleep.

So one of the things we see the most is obviously your mind keeps racing. Right. A lot of our users have, have, have that problem.

Yeah.

And so that is where breath work can, can help. And more than anything, I would say 30 to 60 minutes before going to bed. I always call it getting in the zone because I'm an athlete. Right. You need to get into the zone to prepare the firstly fitness. Right. Because if you, if you just keep working, you just keep emailing with whoever and you're there fighting or working on, on, on a big deal for your company right there between the adrenaline and accelerated heart rate. Your just now keep thinking about how, how do I win?

Yeah. Now your body tired and you're. And your mind awake.

Exactly.

Which a lot of people suffer.

And so the approach I always have, for example is I'm not against you using the phone or the screen. I just say pay attention to what you are doing with your phone. If you're chatting with your best friend about the memory of when you were a child and you had a great time, that is still completely fine. Right. Because it putting you in the, in in a, in a relaxing mode and you will fall asleep if you are there fighting with your boss about the budget for the next year. That will not help. Right.

Or God forbid looking at the news which is all just doom and gloom.

Exactly. So it's less about the screen per se, is more about what you're doing with, with your phone. And the other big thing is all my lights for example switch automatically to orange around 8pm so you want to start developing.

And how do you do that? Okay.

I use Philips U. And so you can have an automatic setting where they switch to orange. And the reason is you want to, you don't want to be exposed to blue light, you want to be exposed to orange light. That will help you develop melatonin. I almost never use melatonin unless I'm traveling or for jet lag because it creates some dependency. Right, right. And I test, I'm testing. We are testing at scale a large amount of supplements right now to really help people to ease their mind, to relax, to go asleep, to go to bed and then maximize their, their deep and. Right.

And, and what? You know, what do those supplements look like, their metabolites? Are they magnesium? Theanine? Yeah. You don't like melatonin Gaba?

Yeah.

You know what, what kinds of compounds are you testing for? You know, improve sleep?

Yeah. What we have noticed is, is never just One, you just want to stay away from melatonin. You don't want to take melatonin every single day because otherwise you just screw it. All the settings of the melatonin level in your body, but everything else is fine. The key is to find the right balance between feeling it within 30 to 60 minutes so you can go and fall asleep, getting high quality of sleep and making sure you wake up without feeling groggy.

Right.

And so we are testing from magnesium to gaba to glycine. Ashwagandha is another one with stress that seems working really well. But the point is there are a lot of supplement company out there, but not all of them. They have the amount of data that we have. Right. Right now we collect, I don't know, 20 terabytes of health data per day. Wow.

And so this is coming through the app. So you're, you're, you're millions of sleep hours.

Correct?

Right.

Yeah. And obviously everything is aggregated, anonymized, so it's not about any single user. Right. But it's, it's just this, this large library of anonymized and aggregated data that tell us what's working and what is not working at scale. Because one of the things I don't like in medicine right now is they publish a new study. And this study was run for seven days on 15 people. We have hundreds of thousands of people sleeping on our product every single night. And so we have a beta group and we involve some of our users, and we're talking about thousands of them. And in a week, we can have 7 to 14,000 nights of sleep for every test that we want to run.

Wow.

And so here is how I really think that medicine and clinical studies will really change, and we will stop looking at studies of 50 people sleeping in a sleep clinic, which is a foreign environment, for three, four, five days, which is not statistically relevant. And we will start having data from hundreds of thousands of people sleeping in their home in their usual days for maybe a month. Wow. Right.

And giving you feedback. And giving you feedback. Right. Because you can, you can actually input things into the, the, you can input things into the app that, that, that says, well, I had alcohol or I had.

Correct.

Didn't have alcohol. And that is the one thing that I would say consistently destroys sleep more than anything, with no exceptions.

Correct.

It is unbelievable. And, and it's, it's astounding to me, the, the, the small amount that it takes to have, you know, severe sleep disruption, because I think so many people are, you know, the glass of wine to go to bed at night kind of person.

And I. Europeans love a wine. Yeah. And sometimes Europeans have. Some of my friends, when I go back to Italy, they still have also coffee after dinner.

Oh, my God.

And I say, man, coffee. And me.

Yeah, they'll have double espresso.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I see it all the time. I mean, I think that's a big European thing. But, you know, the, Even, even a single glass of wine, you know, 20%.

Easily a 20 negative impact on your heart rate. So it accelerates heart rate variability. And heart rate variability drops at 20%.

Yeah. Heart rate variability down, which is essentially a measure of your readiness. And then your heart rate, which is a measure of the state of your nervous system, also also increases. So they actually go in opposite directions. And then your recovery, your strain, your. Your sleep score, you know, all. All of those 10, 10 drop. I mean, I've given it up entirely and so is my wife. And I just sleep so much better now. But every once in a great, great while. We were at a birthday party the other night and for a very, you know, close friend, and he passed around, you know, thing, thing of tequila, and I was like, well, you know, I haven't had drinking weeks. I was like, I'm not going to be that guy. So we toasted. I had I don't know how many ounces it was. And. And that night my sleep was actually destroyed. So was my wife, which is how I knew it wasn't an anomaly. So, yeah, that's. That's a great sleep hack right there. Just get rid of the alcohol and.

If you really need to have, or you want to have alcohol, limit it and let some time go by between when you had the last drink and when you go to sleep. Right. So if. I don't know if you're going to have a couple of hours in between, it will help. That time helps.

Yeah. And what about eating windows as you approximate sleep?

Yeah.

Some people say two hours, some people say three hours. Some people say it doesn't matter. I totally take issue with that. But. But I have had people say it doesn't matter even if you eat and then crawl right in bed. I think that actually destroys your sleep. But what's it. What's the optimal time frame between your last meal and going to bed and. And of fluid intake. Should people be thinking about as they approximate, you know, bedtime?

Yeah.

Especially for men. I think they. A lot of my followers have issues with, you know, getting up at night repeatedly to go to the restroom Sometimes they're like, gary, I don't get it. I mean, it's not. It's not like I'm getting up, and it's like a fire hose. I'm just getting up and, you know, a couple squirts and I go back to bed, and a few hours later, I'm waking up and the same thing is happening.

Yeah. So usually I would recommend at least two hours to stop eating. Two hours before going to bed even. This is very personal. There are probably some people that can eat. Eat 30 minutes before, and they are not gonna be heavily impacted. But I would say the rule of thumb for 90% of people. Yeah. Is at least two hours. Two to four is perfect. What I have seen in my case, for example, is if I have carbs. So usually I'm on a keto diet. I cheat only one day a week. On Friday night.

Okay.

With my wife, we make pizza.

Okay. Wow, you really go off the deep end there.

Yeah. That's all awesome.

So you're keto all the time.

Yeah.

And then just break it once a week.

Yeah. But what I have seen, if I have carbs, usually I tend to fall, to feel sleepy, which is. Which is good. But then my sleep quality will definitely will suffer, particularly will toss and turn more. The sleep stages will not be. Will not be optimal. And so it's not just when you stop eating, but it's also what you eat if you have a very heavy meal. And it could probably be also be a lot of meat, red meat, that will have things that are hard to.

Digest, take longer to digest, use more blood.

Correct.

Divert more blood from the brain to the gut. You know, it was an interesting. I was at a biohacking conference about two years ago, and they put participants in front of a thermograph, and they were measuring very sensitively the heat and its dispersion through the body, which is kind of an indication of where the blood is also. And wherever the blood is, the oxygen is. And prior to our lunchtime meal, the participants that stood in front of this thermograph, their head was glowing bright red, orange, showing that there was a lot of concentration of blood in the head. And then they ate varying levels of glycemic meals. Some ate very, very low glycemic meals, like eggs, avocado, and others ate pasta, white bread, white rice, white flour. And I think they gave him an acai bowl. And you could see the. The. The higher the carbohydrate level, the more heat went to the gut and the more oxygen went to the gut. And. And these people were significantly less focused, you know, less sharp, and they had less energy. They would just crash after these meals because of all that blood that gets diverted there. So. So, you know, I think that, you know, certainly not eating within two hours of bedtime, two or three hours before bedtime is a major sleep hack, because you're freeing up all that blood, all that oxygen to go to other places, you know, in the body where you want it to be for repair and rejuvenation, especially into the brain. Talk a little bit about the. There's a stage in sleep where the brain begins to eliminate waste through the glymphatic system. System. Right. Which is. We have a lymphatic system which is throughout our body, a static system. Then we have one in the brain called the glymphatic system. Do you have any data on when the brain gets the major. The most benefit from sleep in terms of eliminating its waste, cleaning itself, repairing, detoxifying, regenerating? You say that this is during the REM sleep, but what's happening there? And what. What, if anything, can we do to enhance that?

Yeah, this is another great question. Definitely the most important phase for. For your brain is. Is the ramp right there is where, okay, you collected a certain amount of information. Your brain collected a certain amount of information during the day, and that is the moment where there is the cleanup phase. Right. Okay. What do you want to retain? What do you want to throw away? And that is also why, if you think sometimes people wake up and they finally have a solution to a problem they have been working on for months.

Yeah, my wife is majorly like that. So is my chief of staff.

Yeah. Or sometimes people like me. I have a lot of ideas while I'm showering in the morning. And again, that is the result of your sleep. So your brain, while you're wearing wraps, is still working on solving some of your problems or readjusting and reconnecting the dots of some of the problems you're working on. And so the. There is no magic formula to really improve your rems are all these different tactics that we discuss. So try to. To sleep a certain amount of hours, because the second part of the night is when you get more rem, Try to use and have the proper temperature around you. You can play with some supplements. I play with supplements a lot. There are certain supplements. We don't have the results yet, but there are certain supplements that give me very positive dreams, for example, and others that give me very active and too intense dreams.

Right. Right, right. And so I take a lot of melatonin. I have very, I get nightmares actually. And I know a lot of people that say the same thing. I'll occasionally take a very small amount of melatonin, 1 to 3 milligrams, never more than 3 milligrams usually when I'm traveling. Yeah, like you of us have a.

Very difficult time meeting our protein needs. And certain protein sources like whey protein and others can be as little as 20% absorbable. This is 99 absorbable and it has all of the essential amino acids that the body needs to build lean muscle, to recover, to improve our exercise performance and most importantly to repair after we have intense exercise. So this is called perfect amino by body Health Health. It's like I said, 99 absorbable. It only has 2 calories. Eventually the caloric intake has virtually no caloric intake. It will not break a fast. It tastes amazing. You mix it in water. I take this literally every single morning. If you're working out in a fasted state, you have to take a full spectrum amino acid prior to your workout to preserve your lean muscle and make sure that you're recovering properly. And again, it will not break your fat fast. So the caloric impact is virtually zero. You get all of the full spectrum amino acids. It tastes wonderful. I use it every single day. You can go to bodyhealth.com forward/ultimate. That's bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate. And look for the perfect aminos. They actually come in capsules if you're on the go or it becomes in several flavors that they make in a powder, which I love. It's flavored with natural means of flavoring. So there's no artificial sweeteners in here. So this is one of my absolute favorite products. Give it a try. If you're working out at all. You need a full spectrum amino acid, go to bodyhealth.com ultimate. That's bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate. I love their lab tested products. You can actually see the absorption rate for all of their products. They've got great electrolyte protein combinations. My favorite is the perfect Aminos. Bodyhealth.com/forward/ultimate. And now back to the ultimate human podcast.

But I've, I've taken high dose melatonin before. One of my friends convinced me to do it because he said you'll get the best night's sleep ever. It was absolutely the most horrifying night of sleep I'd ever had. And I had very, very vivid, very dark, scary. You Know, dreams that felt very real and it was one of the worst nights of sleep that I, that I had. So what, what are some of the things that, that, that you do when you travel? When you're on the road, clearly you're not, you know, bringing all the equipment with you. So how are you hacking your sleep on the road? What are your tricks for.

Yeah, so when I go to the west coast and if I usually, let's say I go for three days, I try to stay on the east coast time zone. So I wake up really early and I go.

I kind of like that out there. I do the same thing. I like it because you're. You, you get like three extra hours in the morning. Nobody's bothering you, you're working out, out at 4am you feel amazing.

Exactly.

Yeah. You know, I love it. My son and I talk about it all the time. We love going, you know, from, from Miami to LA because 7:30 we're smoked.

Exactly.

And we just go to bed at the hotel and then get up at 4 o' clock in the morning. You got half your day done.

I love that too. So I try to stay on that time zone. So once I'm back, I'm ready to go with my consistency. If is a long flight. If I'm going to Europe, I try to use melatonin to readjust. I like for example, when I go to Europe to fly in the night, I go to the hotel and I immediately go to the gym. And so, and I try to. No, I land in the morning. So I leave the US let's say I leave Miami usually the flights at 8 or 10pm and you land around 6 to 8am it depends where you're going. I try to immediately get sunlight. I try to immediately have some breakfast. Even if usually I don't have breakfast, but I want to reactivate my body. And then I try to go to the gym. Gym.

Perfect.

And then I stay up until the night. It, it will be hard. Somewhere around 12pm to 2pm I, I really feel sleepy. But if you can cross that window then you will feel good. And then I take some melatonin in the night and I try to go to sleep.

And when you say sub melatonin, how many milligrams are you normally.

Yeah, one to chew. Yeah, one to three is about what I'm.

Yeah, I'm doing well.

And said again West Coast. I just stay on my routine. I try to set the right temperature of the, of the, of. Of the bedroom. I try to do a, A bath Or a, or a shower or going to bed. So I, I try to replicate the same habits.

Yeah.

And sometimes I do some breath work if I feel I cannot.

Yeah, the box breathing, really. I mean, that's, that's another one of those hacks that's worked very, very well for myself and my audience. You know, the four second inhale.

Yeah.

Four second hold. Four second exhale, four second hold. That seems to work incredibly well for lots of people. And it's free. I mean, there's no downside to trying that. I find that if I tried to do six or eight cycles, I don't think I've ever made it to eight cycles. As I sort of get to that, I get actually tired of doing it and I go right down into sleep. I mean, blows my wife's mind. So talk to me a little bit about what the future of Sleep eight holds. I know you've got some technologies that you're working on that you're releasing, some you're willing to talk about, some not yet. But what is the future of Sleep eight? Because what's exciting to me is this convergence again of AI and data and massive amounts of data, and the fact that you can actually make adjustments in real time and feed it back to these people that are trying to get a better night's sleep. So where is technology going for, for your company?

Yeah. In a few years, your bed will become the most advanced preventative health platform in the world. And I'll tell you how, but I also tell you why. The reason is the form factor. We have a lot of space. Right. Our product is, is at the price point where adding certain sensors for $5 is not going to change anything. Right. Well, instead for wearable, they need, they have battery problems, they have space problem. And because of the price at which they sell five bucks in the cost of the device makes a difference for their margins.

Right.

The other big thing we have is once you install our product, you don't remove it. It's not like a wearable or wearable. They have a lot of drops. After six months, people stop using it because they forget to charge it or they forget to bring the charger with them. Our product, once you install it, it stays with you for the next three, four, five, six, seven, eight, in hopefully 10 years.

Right.

And even if you don't open the app, it still means we have the, the data of what is happening in your body and so we can come back to you with valuable information. But in 2017, I wrote a memo, which is what then drove to for us to raise the first large amount of money from KLA Ventures. And the vision is what I call Hyperpod. Hyperpod is a canopy bed, right. Where there are blackout curtains and we control air temperature, air quality and oxygen level while asleep. And because there is a ceiling, we work on certain technology for full body scanning. So even when you were talking about thermoregulation earlier in our chat, that is something we are already working on.

Wow.

So we want to scan your body every single night to detect early signs of certain and diseases that might be developing in your body.

Wow.

The other big thing is because we have this longitudinal data, right. Some of our customers now, they have been with us for four years, so maybe you don't have a certain cardiovascular problem today, but we soon, we will have soon enough data to know that just based on the trajectory of your heart rate, HRV and other biometrics, you might develop arrhythmia five years later.

Wow.

The real power of AI and machine learning right now is, will be the prediction, not even the detection. Right. Detection will already be 100 times better because we can scan you every night. Right. But the real true value to reach the 500 years of life will be to be able to predict 5, 5, 10 years in advance what might happen with 80% chance.

And intervene now.

And intervene now.

Right.

Because maybe you can start taking drugs for diabetes now instead than when you discover you already have the diabetes. Right, Right, right. And obviously for cancer, you know, things like pancreatic cancer, if you discover it very early, you have 90 chances to survive. If you discover it late, you have 90 chances to die.

Right.

And with thermal imaging, maybe you don't know if you have a pancreatic cancer, but what you could see is that the temperature around the pancreas is 2 degrees higher than what has always been your baseline. And so maybe at the beginning we will not know what the disease is or what the problem is, but we will be able to tell you go to your doctor. We don't expect to replace the doctor, but go to the doctor and check this specific thing because we are seeing a thermal difference compared to your baseline.

Wow, that is fantastic. And, and how soon on the horizon are some of these changes coming for you guys?

It's purely a matter of priorities. Meaning we could have these in six months if we wanted. The technologies already exists. So I'm not talking about building reusable rockets like Elon 15 years ago. Right?

Right.

All the pieces of the puzzle already exist. It's just a matter of eight sleep do we want to focus on this now or we release the next version of the current product and how much money we want to deploy in R and D in one year versus over three years.

Right.

But I already sleep in an hyperpod.

Yeah. Oh, you know this is already available.

Yeah. I mean, it's not available for normal people, but for this year, for the CEO of the company. Yes. And so I'm already sleeping in a canopy bed. It doesn't have all the features yet, but it has many of these features.

Have you found any positive impacts, even beyond the regular sleep aid, of being in this pod?

Yeah, first of all, I mean, even just the blackout core tents, they are very basic, but sleeping in a completely dark environment makes a massive, a massive difference.

Yes.

I have tested altitude tents for quite a while and I saw major benefits in my HRV and hr.

Most of these are becoming hypoxic and then.

Correct.

Hyperoxic.

Okay, exactly. I, I, we actually believe that. Exactly. The shifting between hypoxic and hyperoxy multiple times during the night is what will give you the biggest advantage. But we need to run more clinical tests. Sleeping in mountain air, I call it. So in a very purified air, the whole night for eight hours should have a major benefit. And then on thermal imaging, we can already see a major inflammation. So imagine even for athletes, right? You work with a lot of athletes. If you're Lebron James and we start seeing you're developing an inflammation in your elbow, we're going to see it with a high accuracy because these thermal cameras already exist.

Wow, that is absolutely fascinating. Well, ta, this has been unbelievable and I think my audience is going to get a lot of benefit out of this. You know, I, I end every podcast this the same way I ask every, every podcast guest. If you watch my podcast, you already know this question's coming. But I ask, you know, there's no right or wrong answer to this question. I ask, you know, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

It's the method of health span and lifespan. Right. Lifespan we all know is okay, how many years you will live, but the health span is okay. Let's say it's 100 years, hopefully, or 100 years plus, as you were saying, how many of those years I will be active, I will be able to play with my grandkids, kids, and I can keep playing paddle with with my friends. I had a grandma, she died that I think she was 92, 93, but probably the last 10 years of her life. She was really sitting on on her chair.

Right.

It was still beautiful to have her because I loved her and she loved me. But she couldn't really live her life in the way I would want her to have lived it. And so that for me means being having a superhuman life. Wow.

That is amazing, man. Guys, definitely check out the sleep aid. I'm going to put links in in the show notes below. How can they find out more about you? How find out more about eight sleep? Where do they go to get more information on your product or your technology?

Yeah, go on 8 sleep.com 8 spell out like the number E I G H D sleep.com so there you can see and find all our technologies. There is also something really cool coming out soon, soon. So stay tuned. And for me, you can find me on Twitter with my name and last name. I'm pretty active there. So you can ping me and ask me anything on Twitter and I will reply.

That sounds amazing. And as always, that's just science.