Maintenance Phase - The ＂Sleep Loss Epidemic＂

00:00:00.000 hi everybody and welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that already knows it's gonna die

00:00:15.440 you don't have to tell us it's fine we're a j-shaped podcast u-shaped mortality i always

00:00:21.540 thought of this as an apple shaped podcast i am michael hobbs i'm aubrey gordon if you would like

00:00:26.800 to support the show you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase where you can get bonus

00:00:31.020 episodes like this month's forthcoming bonus episode where we are doing an award ceremony

00:00:36.600 yes so we're gonna do the best and worst wellness influencers we're gonna do the best and worst

00:00:41.920 wellness trends of 2021 and we have been taking nominations and we are really excited to uh dive

00:00:49.380 in and give the uh smelly moon juice crown to somebody why is it smelly i don't know i don't

00:00:56.120 know where i was going with that i just i just was talking i don't know either but i like it

00:01:00.480 okay we we just learned like 30 seconds before we started recording that i had switched topics

00:01:07.920 for this week and i thought that i told you but i did not in fact tell you so i was supposed to do

00:01:13.580 an episode on obesity and covid but i got sidetracked and pulled by my own gravity down

00:01:20.220 a different rabbit hole this week Aubrey we are talking about the science of sleep we're talking

00:01:26.220 about a sleep influencer this is so good because I am like a person who historically has had a hard

00:01:33.200 time with sleep I come from a family of people who historically have a hard time with sleep

00:01:37.740 so in our family there are all kinds of things about like you gotta do screen time you gotta

00:01:44.460 set an alarm for yourself for when you wind down all of these little hacks and in the back 0.96

00:01:50.160 of my mind i'm always like this all seems like maybe bullshit it's mostly garbage but we'll talk 0.89

00:01:55.080 about it um but tell me first tell me about your what is your sleep like what kind of sleeper are 0.94

00:02:00.700 you mostly it's just related to like i'm a person with just a nice little array a little charcuterie

00:02:06.320 platter of anxiety disorders nice so mostly it's like anxiety and sleep not being able to turn your

00:02:11.640 brain off that kind of stuff which i think is not on i'm not alone in that oh yeah that's called

00:02:16.380 being a millennial i think that's the term for the condition are uh are you an eight hour person

00:02:21.380 are you a like how many hours a night are you are you aiming for i think eight hours but in an

00:02:26.060 uninterrogated way where i'm like that's the number that people say is the number that you

00:02:30.180 should have right i think i probably feel my most rested at like nine hours but that almost never

00:02:35.840 happens right how about you what kind of you're an early riser i'm also i'm a seven hour person

00:02:41.060 i mean all of us get this sort of eight hours of sleep you know six glasses of water a day like

00:02:45.480 there's these kind of numbers around health that we all hear growing up and i'd always heard eight

00:02:49.300 hours i would just sort of set my alarm like if i'm going to bed at 11 i set my alarm for seven

00:02:53.900 yeah same same and then i remember i read somewhere heard somewhere in college there

00:02:57.880 was like not everybody needs eight hours and like some people only need seven hours or like even

00:03:01.700 less and i was like okay i'm gonna try getting seven hours instead of eight hours so i started

00:03:05.300 setting my alarm for seven hours and like i noticed no change oh i haven't felt tired so

00:03:10.320 i've just been like a seven hour guy ever since sure sure but the thing that starts happening

00:03:14.260 when you're in your 30s is your body at just like four in the morning will just be like we're up now

00:03:18.260 so i also like i also have like the normal like aging millennial thing of like oh sleep is gonna

00:03:23.980 be like a thing that i think about like way more in my 30s than i did in my 20s yeah this is a thing

00:03:29.380 where i'm like i feel very aware of like oh this is how it's gonna be from here on out yes our

00:03:34.920 bodies are decaying husks that's the lesson for this episode delightful the slow march to death

00:03:41.460 has begun exactly so okay before we get to this specific wellness influencer we have to talk about

00:03:49.640 the science of sleep which is actually like really cool because a lot of it sounds fake

00:03:55.600 so no one still kind of knows why we sleep like there's a lot of cockamamie theories about like

00:04:03.320 evolution and you know we would fall asleep at night to like avoid predators or like i don't

00:04:08.280 know these kind of like conjecture little theories but none of them really make sense because sleep

00:04:13.980 seems to have evolved hundreds of millions of years ago like basically every vertebrate sleeps

00:04:18.920 where we differ is how different organisms sleep and how much we sleep so elephants only need four

00:04:25.880 hours of sleep a night whereas lions and tigers need 15 this is one of the ones that sound fake 0.93

00:04:31.340 dolphins sleep with half of their brain at a time nope bullshit i know 0.88

00:04:36.780 like i trust you and i believe you my instinctual response is like nope that's a lie 0.95

00:04:43.640 i was typing in the wikipedia address with one hand and making the wanking motion with the other 0.98

00:04:47.580 i was like half a fucking brain fuck out of here there's also another super fake one is that there's 0.98

00:04:55.140 bird there's like bird species that will do micro sleeps for like 30 seconds at a time like sometimes 0.99

00:05:01.000 like while they're in the air which again sounds fake but is true and lit birds nature's priuses

00:05:06.320 exactly yes so i guess the thing is like monkeys and ape species sleep a lot longer than us so the

00:05:14.660 the current theory is that humans sleep less but we sleep much more efficiently do you get the thing 0.65

00:05:21.820 where right when you're about to fall asleep you get like a little twitch yeah it's a hypnic jerk 0.98

00:05:27.760 right oh my god you knew the term here's how the fuck i know it don't get too impressed 0.97

00:05:31.940 it's in a fiona apple song i don't really know it it's just in lyrics to a song that i really like 0.88

00:05:41.580 those are basically like a universal feature of the human experience yeah an old professor of mine

00:05:46.120 because i did some sleep studies when i was an undergrad my professor said that they were the 0.88

00:05:50.060 last of the day's energy leaving your body what which is total bullshit that he made up like

00:05:55.880 there's no there's no i was gonna say college professor but it's like it's a fun theory there's 0.82

00:06:00.320 basically there's no there's no explanation for why those happen but the the sort of evolutionary

00:06:05.160 explanation is that it's one of those things that like keeps you a little bit alert if if you're

00:06:09.620 sleeping in a tree like it's sort of a way of like checking before you go to sleep like am i in a firm

00:06:15.080 place oh like that also kind of sounds fake to me honestly i don't know i don't know either and i

00:06:19.540 also think like listen all of the sort of evolutionary logic kind of stuff often just

00:06:25.420 feels to me like throwing darts at the wall that's like it's like freud where you're like oh that's

00:06:29.800 an interesting way of looking at the world yeah totally so they also in the 1950s was when they

00:06:34.580 started discovering these stages of sleep i guess the way that they found out was that like somebody

00:06:40.360 was sleeping in another person's sleep lab and they noticed their eyes were darting around as

00:06:45.840 if like they were watching tennis or something oh this is where we get rem sleep that's what

00:06:49.580 rem sleep is it's literally rapid eye movement like you're looking around as if like things

00:06:52.860 are happening around you. And I guess if you measure people's brainwaves, REM sleep looks

00:06:57.440 like they're awake. It looks like normal thought patterns, or at least like something very close

00:07:01.780 to normal thought patterns. But then of course, there's like all these, there's three stages of

00:07:05.500 non REM sleep. Like that's when you sort of like defrag your hard drive of your memory and your

00:07:10.700 experiences and stuff. Another thing that sounded super fake was you read these things that are like

00:07:15.380 you sleep to clear your brain of toxins. And I was like, toxins, like everybody calm down.

00:07:21.600 but then you look it up and it's like no there are actual like named identified proteins in your

00:07:26.580 brain and your spinal fluid literally like washes into your brain and flushes them out

00:07:32.620 dude it sounds fake as hell but they don't know this in humans but in mice their brain actually

00:07:37.760 like physically shrinks when they're sleeping like it's being like wrung out that's bananas

00:07:42.760 and what i was about to say before you were like it's true i think toxins are a red flag word for

00:07:49.720 this podcast on the order of like a magazine or newspaper feature that where the headline ends

00:07:55.860 with a question mark oh i know totally we're like no do you know what i mean yeah the new miracle

00:08:00.200 drug question mark so the interesting thing about like health and sleep is that both of these stages

00:08:06.240 are important like this deeper non-rem sleep and rem sleep are both like they both have these kind

00:08:12.360 of restorative important properties one thing we're going to talk about a lot of the stuff that

00:08:15.960 is debated in the science of sleep. But one of the things that isn't debated in sleep is that

00:08:20.200 it's really good for you. Sleep deprivation is really bad for you. It wreaks havoc on your

00:08:25.160 immune system. Everything just sort of gets thrown off when you haven't slept. And you need sleep to

00:08:32.080 live. So I'm going to send you a little excerpt to read. So this is from a sleep researcher named

00:08:38.580 Jade Wu. This is on the recommendation of how much sleep we should all be getting.

00:08:44.300 Perfect. Quote, how much sleep we need depends on how we are biologically hardwired and on our body's current needs. The National Sleep Foundation's 2015 Guide for Healthy Sleep Durations agrees. To come up with this guide, a panel of sleep experts use the available scientific data to determine appropriate amounts of sleep for each age group.

00:09:05.640 After much rigorous work, they did not say you should get eight hours.

00:09:10.180 Rather, they said things like, quote, for teens, we recommend eight to 10 hours, but

00:09:14.900 anywhere from seven to 11 hours may be appropriate.

00:09:18.300 Notice how there is up to a four hour range in their recommendation.

00:09:21.600 That's a lot.

00:09:23.260 Also, notice how they specified the age group they were speaking to.

00:09:27.900 For newborn babies, the quote unquote, may be appropriate range is 11 to 18 hours.

00:09:34.240 For seniors over 65, that ranges from five to nine hours.

00:09:39.040 The takeaway message is twofold.

00:09:41.400 Not only do healthy sleepers differ from each other in how much sleep they need,

00:09:45.220 but healthy sleepers also change their sleep needs over time.

00:09:48.700 Really boring message.

00:09:50.220 But, like, makes sense, right?

00:09:51.760 Like, your grandma sleeps less than the baby in the family.

00:09:54.600 And also, like, how much sleep do I need?

00:09:56.560 Well, it depends.

00:09:57.680 I mean, so here's the thing about sleep and about eating both,

00:10:00.740 is that you have this sort of built-in alarm, right?

00:10:03.080 if you're not done eating you still feel hungry yeah exactly if you're not done sleeping you still

00:10:08.240 feel tired right like yes there's this desire for some sort of like mandate some scientific

00:10:14.560 clarity i think the clarity is maybe just in your body one of the sleep procedures that i

00:10:20.460 spoke to he said it's a really boring message but the fact is we know that it's really good

00:10:25.500 for you to get a good night's sleep but what a good night's sleep means is different for different

00:10:30.740 people the institutional recommendation is that quote-unquote normal adults need seven to nine

00:10:37.820 hours a night there's also i mean everything is a bell curve right so like this sleep researcher

00:10:42.000 told me that like yeah if you're sleeping like five or six hours a night and you're feeling good

00:10:46.700 all the time and you're not like super struggling to get out of bed and just like dying whenever the

00:10:51.060 alarm goes off then like yeah you might just be somebody who needs less sleep than other people

00:10:54.900 yeah and it's the same if you're sleeping nine hours a night like yeah you might just need more

00:10:58.260 sleep than other people yeah i think as we're talking about this i'm like it sounds like you're

00:11:02.420 on the seven end and i'm on the nine end yeah generally speaking and that's like fine and

00:11:06.440 normal the problem is that it's very hard to write best-selling books and become a wellness

00:11:12.220 influencer telling people that like they should listen to their bodies and like it depends are

00:11:17.420 we about to get into grifty territory mike we have to meet somebody now we have to meet the

00:11:21.620 protagonist now we have to we have to bring individuals into the story all right so i am

00:11:26.920 going to send you i've i'm sorry to do this to you i'm going to send you a link to a ted talk

00:11:31.300 i apologize for what i'm about to do to you that text that you sent me where you're like i hate

00:11:38.080 that i'm serious about this but we should get you a ted talk is maybe the funniest text i've ever

00:11:42.800 gotten because i know how much that pains you to say i remain i remain staunch in both of those

00:11:48.780 beliefs it sucks and you should do one so i'm going to send you two links we're going to watch

00:11:55.820 two short clips. Ooh, I can't wait. Thank you very much. Well, I would like to start with 0.95

00:12:07.100 testicles. Men who sleep five hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who 1.00

00:12:17.300 sleep seven hours or more. What? I know. In addition, men who routinely sleep just four 0.99

00:12:25.420 to five hours a night will have a level of testosterone

00:12:29.700 which is that of someone 10 years their senior.

00:12:33.840 So a lack of sleep will age a man by a decade

00:12:37.600 in terms of that critical aspect of wellness.

00:12:40.700 This is the best news that I have for you today.

00:12:45.300 Sleep, unfortunately, is not an optional lifestyle luxury.

00:12:51.020 sleep is a non-negotiable biological necessity.

00:12:56.100 It is your life support system,

00:12:59.380 and it is Mother Nature's best effort yet at immortality.

00:13:04.640 And the decimation of sleep throughout industrialized nations

00:13:09.180 is having a catastrophic impact on our health, our wellness,

00:13:14.420 even the safety and the education of our children.

00:13:17.920 It's a silent sleep loss epidemic,

00:13:21.000 and it is fast becoming one of the greatest public health challenges

00:13:24.340 that we face in the 21st century.

00:13:28.840 Oh, God.

00:13:30.620 Tell me what you just saw. 0.84

00:13:31.920 So he's like a white dude. 0.50

00:13:33.960 He's a thin guy.

00:13:35.260 He's got blonde hair.

00:13:36.480 It's sort of swooped off to one side.

00:13:38.640 He is, as you have noted, a very slow talker.

00:13:41.880 I've been watching him on 1.75 speed all week.

00:13:44.160 Yeah, good idea. 0.99

00:13:44.880 Now I'm just like, oh, my fucking God. 0.99

00:13:46.880 he's talking at the rate of someone who seems sleepy i mean he's he's blonde he's blue-eyed 0.99

00:13:54.940 like he's very conventionally attractive and very good at presenting his ideas right he opens with 0.99

00:14:01.580 like a cute little icebreaker he's got you like i'm gonna start with the testicles and then he 0.98

00:14:06.680 does a bunch of stuff in the middle that we skipped and then at the end he's got your sort 0.95

00:14:10.260 of call to action and the broader scope i think this is all the stuff of this sort of like ted

00:14:15.500 talky kind of era which is just like a bunch of interesting tidbits and anecdotes sort of 0.94

00:14:21.720 sound and fury signifying nothing it struck me as the kind of shit that we talked about with like 0.91

00:14:27.520 mortality statistics this kind of person lives this long okay so then what what's instructive 0.97

00:14:34.220 about this this is the problem with doing a podcast with somebody smart you're like mike

00:14:39.020 i know all of your twists in advance delightful some of the science is going to turn out to not

00:14:44.100 be super watertight i think what you and i are sort of informally doing is like compiling a list

00:14:50.000 of things to be skeptical of yeah and one of them is this kind of mortality little nuggets about

00:14:56.220 mortality where i'm like okay so then what so this gentleman that we just met is named matthew

00:15:01.680 walker it seems like he basically has spent his entire career working on sleep he started out in

00:15:07.640 a lab for a phd where he was trying to differentiate between different types of dementia and he was

00:15:13.660 looking at people's brainwaves and he realized that there was like no difference in their brainwaves

00:15:18.320 but then he realized that you could measure their brainwaves while they were sleeping

00:15:21.640 and if you measure their sleeping brainwaves you could tell that they were suffering from

00:15:25.900 different types of dementia i guess there's like parkinson's dementia there's different ways that

00:15:29.460 this presents sure and since then he's just gotten more and more prominent in the field of sleep so

00:15:36.100 he goes to harvard after his phd and then eventually he's offered a post at berkeley

00:15:41.700 where he now runs like a sleep lab it's like the berkeley sleep center or something and he's one

00:15:47.160 of the most prominent sleep researchers in the field so this is not like a journalist

00:15:51.000 parachuting in interloper this is like an actual scientist who has published dozens of articles in

00:15:57.160 very prestigious scholarly journals i love that you're like this isn't like a journalist 0.98

00:16:01.900 parachuting in interloper and i was like like us like some fucking podcaster sitting in their mom's 0.55

00:16:07.280 closet so in 2017 he publishes the book that will be the subject of this episode it is called why we 0.81

00:16:15.540 sleep when the book comes out it's positively reviewed in the new york times and the guardian

00:16:20.600 it's one of npr's favorite books of 2017 you know he's on joe rogan's podcast he's on npr he's on

00:16:26.880 the bbc like he's just one of these guys who like this hasn't really been popularized as an issue

00:16:31.420 before. So he just gets scooped up everywhere. And one of the things I found in like, I think

00:16:37.520 it was in his Wikipedia entry. It says a month after the book's publication, he became a sleep

00:16:42.600 scientist at Google. Oh, that is a cursed sentence. Why would Google have a sleep scientist on staff?

00:16:50.180 Nope, nope, nope. I don't know why, but it feels real bad. So now we're going to talk about the

00:16:54.100 contents of the book. I'm going to send you an excerpt from chapter one. It's a little bit long,

00:16:58.840 but it's kind of the thesis statement of the entire book.

00:17:03.020 You know I love story time, though.

00:17:04.660 I know, right? You like to read.

00:17:06.420 Quote,

00:17:06.800 Do you think you got enough sleep this past week?

00:17:09.320 Can you recall the last time you woke up without an alarm clock,

00:17:12.560 feeling refreshed, not needing caffeine?

00:17:15.540 If the answer to either of these questions is no, you are not alone.

00:17:19.500 Two-thirds of adults throughout all developed nations

00:17:22.040 fail to obtain the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep.

00:17:26.100 I doubt you're surprised by this fact,

00:17:27.640 but you may be surprised by the consequences.

00:17:30.640 Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night

00:17:33.060 demolishes your immune system,

00:17:35.080 more than doubling your risk of cancer.

00:17:38.000 Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor

00:17:40.560 determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer's disease.

00:17:44.260 Inadequate sleep, even moderate reductions for just one week,

00:17:48.340 disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly

00:17:50.620 that you would be classified as pre-diabetic.

00:17:53.900 Add the above health consequences up

00:17:55.940 and a proven link becomes easier to accept the shorter your sleep the shorter your lifespan

00:18:01.180 every component of wellness and countless seams of societal fabric are being eroded by our costly

00:18:07.040 state of sleep neglect human and financial alike so much so that the world health organization has

00:18:13.700 now declared a sleep loss epidemic throughout industrialized nations sleep loss epidemic i

00:18:20.940 that was fat people get it straight public health get in line man i know i'm next to be the greatest

00:18:26.860 public health challenge i'm a fat person who sleeps great you're giving me mixed messages

00:18:32.040 what about me this also seems like one of those things again in the like informal book of things

00:18:40.040 to be skeptical of this kind of stuff where it's like every possible cause of death or ill health

00:18:46.660 is linked to this one thing i know am i spoiling something to say like this really feels like he's

00:18:52.500 just talking about like poor people in industrialized nations or like people who have to

00:18:56.880 work graveyard or swing shifts or people do you know what i'm saying like it's related to sleep

00:19:01.780 but it's not necessarily about the sleep caused by sleep yeah that it's like it's probably more

00:19:06.460 likely to be caused by poverty or by you know a lack of a social safety net or support system

00:19:11.940 like to isolate sleep and be like it's about how many hours a night you sleep and if you slept one

00:19:17.620 more hour but everything else remained the same you would be in like perfect health or significantly

00:19:23.200 better health just seems really facile to me he i mean he does say he says after 10 days of seven

00:19:30.780 hours of sleep the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for 24 hours

00:19:36.500 nonsense so i michael hobbs walking around as if i haven't slept for 24 hours at all times

00:19:43.000 basically yeah that that's definitely my experience of you it's just like somebody get that guy caught

00:19:49.300 but i mean throughout the rest of the book i mean not only does he insist that like everybody needs

00:19:54.080 to be getting eight hours or more but he he connects sleep and not in a like tenuous like

00:20:00.760 some of the data is there in a like this causes that kind of way he's asleep causes schizophrenia

00:20:07.500 he says it causes adhd there's a weird thing where he says it causes autism oh no because i guess

00:20:14.540 autistic kids do actually have different sleep patterns there's like signatures and like rem

00:20:19.100 versus non-rem he says this this is from an interview that he gave to his hometown newspaper

00:20:24.960 He says, by the way, and strictly non-scientifically, I've always found it interesting that Margaret

00:20:31.260 Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, two heads of state who were very vocal, if not proud about sleeping

00:20:36.240 four to five hours a night, both went on to develop dementia.

00:20:39.900 I don't know, man.

00:20:41.500 That's phrased in the way that someone phrases something where they're like, I know I can't

00:20:45.900 substantiate this. 0.98

00:20:47.140 I know it won't hold up to any scrutiny, but I still want to fucking say it. 0.96

00:20:51.280 Isn't it interesting? 0.97

00:20:52.240 I'm just noticing.

00:20:53.580 It's just an observation.

00:20:54.960 The main message of the book is like sleep is super important and we all need to be getting

00:20:59.840 eight hours of sleep. The second main message of the book is that we're in the middle of a

00:21:04.880 sleep loss epidemic. This is the thing that like we're not sleeping as much as we used to

00:21:09.880 because we're on our telephones and we're overworked and stressed, blah, blah, blah.

00:21:14.300 So I'm going to send you another little excerpt.

00:21:16.960 Okay. Within the space of a mere hundred years, human beings have abandoned their

00:21:21.760 biologically mandated need for adequate sleep, one that evolution spent 3.4 million years

00:21:28.080 perfecting. Visit cultures that are untouched by electricity, and you often see something rather

00:21:34.060 different. Hunter-gatherer tribes such as the Gabra in northern Kenya or the San people in the

00:21:41.080 Kalahari Desert, whose way of life has changed little over the past thousands of years,

00:21:46.140 sleep in a biphasic pattern.

00:21:49.100 Both these groups take a similarly longer sleep period at night,

00:21:52.720 seven to eight hours of time in bed,

00:21:54.980 achieving about seven hours of sleep,

00:21:57.080 followed by a 30 to 60 minute nap in the afternoon.

00:22:00.160 So the idea is that there's these biological patterns

00:22:03.080 that we should be sleeping like,

00:22:06.180 but we have broken from those patterns.

00:22:08.920 So modernity, industrial revolution, technology, cities,

00:22:13.440 decoupled us from the way that our bodies want to sleep it's also interesting because i'm like

00:22:18.840 the thing that you're talking about is capitalism yeah that's another way to think about this is

00:22:23.500 that people's ability to sleep and therefore avoid these negative health markers is in tension with

00:22:31.720 the sort of mandate to produce and to show up in these capital systems right this sort of gets

00:22:37.660 to the next thing that i wanted to talk about before we get to the debunking the the chapter

00:22:41.900 of this book that really stuck out to me was the final chapter we we have both read a million like

00:22:47.280 fat panic books for this podcast and like wellness panic books and they all do the exact same thing

00:22:53.780 it's like obesity is killing us our kids can't go into the military their life expenses are shorter

00:22:58.880 and you get to the final chapter of like the fixes like the policy fixes and they're like

00:23:03.100 we need billboards and like people need to stop drinking soda yeah wait didn't you just tell me

00:23:08.760 this is like a massive problem and then when i suggest to you that like oh maybe we should like

00:23:13.340 expand food stamps so that people can buy like fresh food for their kids and you're like i don't

00:23:17.620 know about that no we need a tv ad that's like look at how gross these fat people are where you're

00:23:23.000 like okay you know he just told you your risk of cancer is doubling he never understates this

00:23:28.160 problem right he's saying this is like the biggest problem in developed nations and then final

00:23:32.900 chapter his first recommendation like how are we going to fix all this how are we going to get us

00:23:36.740 back to these patterns he says we should have more sleep apps on our phones 0.87

00:23:40.820 and he has he spends like two-thirds of the fucking chapter on he says like someday we'll 0.87

00:23:51.980 have like machine learning that can adjust the temperature of your bedroom because i guess 0.96

00:23:56.960 you're supposed to sleep in slightly colder rooms theoretically we could have a thing where like

00:24:01.820 your your home your smart home knows that you're like a seven o'clock riser or whatever so it would

00:24:07.600 set the heat to go up at 6 30 or something and i'm like first of all i don't know that we need

00:24:12.760 machine learning for my house to get slightly warmer at 6 a.m and secondly it's like this is

00:24:19.260 your fix bro like we're all just supposed to have apps on our phones right and also have you used 0.99

00:24:24.420 those fucking apps dude those apps are trash i have used a bunch of those sleep apps and i'll 0.99

00:24:28.820 like they're like put it on your bed i know and every time i would like go to sleep and be asleep 1.00

00:24:33.840 for six hours or eight hours or whatever and then i would wake up and it would be like you got 20 0.96

00:24:38.500 minutes of sleep and i'm like you fucking liar it's like my jogging app or when i tried to use 0.99

00:24:43.000 the jogging apps that have me like leaping across the street like 75 times you ran 44 miles 0.99

00:24:50.320 i don't know that i did it just seems like such garbage i'm gonna send you another excerpt from

00:24:58.180 his book this is one of his big ideas for like the technological fix to this problem you're gonna 0.89

00:25:03.700 fucking die okay here we go going even further what if we moved from a stance of analytics to

00:25:09.220 that of forward-looking predictalytics you can see why joe rogan invited him on it sounds like 0.99

00:25:14.700 designer imposterpedia light to explain the term let me go back to the smoking example

00:25:21.760 there are efforts to create predictalytics apps that start with you taking a picture of your own

00:25:27.660 face, the app then asks you how many cigarettes you smoke on average a day. Based on scientific

00:25:33.440 data that understand how smoking quantity impacts outward health features such as bags under your

00:25:39.220 eyes, wrinkles, psoriasis, thinning hair, and yellowed teeth, the app predictively modifies

00:25:44.740 your face. Fuck you on the assumption of your continued smoking. Get fucked. I knew you'd like 1.00

00:25:51.640 this. The very same approach could be adopted for sleep, but at many different levels, outward

00:25:56.780 appearance as well as inward brain and body health. For example, we could show individuals

00:26:02.260 their increasing risk of conditions such as Alzheimer's disease or certain cancers if they

00:26:07.820 continue sleeping too little. Men could see projections on how much their testicles will 0.99

00:26:13.260 shrink or their testosterone level will drop should their sleep neglect continue. Similar

00:26:20.020 risk predictions could be made for gains in body weight, diabetes, or immune impairment and

00:26:25.660 infection so he's just doing like an app version of like faces of meth please excuse me i'm getting 0.90

00:26:31.720 notification on my phone oh it's a picture of my balls if i continue not to sleep it's just a 0.82

00:26:37.880 picture of two very tiny balls okay so like listen i'm a person as we've discussed who struggles with 0.99

00:26:43.800 sleep from time to time so i see a picture of myself looking like shit or i see these predictions 0.99

00:26:49.580 of like i'm gonna get alzheimer's and cancer and tiny testicles apparently this is not gonna lower 0.98

00:26:56.500 my anxiety levels and be like this is real restful and i should get more sleep we all know that when

00:27:01.800 you're struggling to sleep the most helpful thing to do is to lay in bed and go i really need to 0.99

00:27:05.920 sleep it's just like it's not even like an angel and a devil on your shoulder it's just fucking 0.98

00:27:10.540 gremlins being like if you don't sleep you're gonna get alzheimer's how's that dementia treating 0.95

00:27:15.520 you chill out dude this is like the main conclusion of the book there's like what he doesn't really

00:27:21.920 have any like policy stuff he mentions vaguely stuff about like school opening times which are

00:27:26.680 legitimately like do help but like he doesn't really say anything and it's just really weird

00:27:33.020 and really telling to some degree i'm like i get it he's a researcher his job is to research and

00:27:38.440 find out what's true and what's not it's not necessarily to provide like public policy

00:27:43.480 prescriptions or that sort of thing but if that's the case and you don't have solutions to offer

00:27:48.100 then don't write this kind of book yeah it does feel very similar to like the mandate to lose

00:27:53.160 weight that we talk about all the time which is like okay but then what works and everyone's like

00:27:56.660 well also i mean you can tell from the entire book and all of his pitch in the way that he

00:28:01.860 describes the work in media is like he wants to deliver you tips on how to sleep better like your

00:28:08.080 room should be slightly colder or you should set an alarm at 9 p.m. so you start getting into

00:28:13.260 restfulness he wants to cast this as a public health epidemic but i think he's doing that as

00:28:19.100 a marketing strategy to get like npr listening people to take their own sleep seriously sure 0.77

00:28:26.500 it's like a fucking marvel movie you have to establish the stakes right it's like the whole 0.83

00:28:30.300 galaxy is gonna die and then you can get people to care about these characters even though that 0.98

00:28:34.480 doesn't really work in those movies and it doesn't really work here because he's very clearly

00:28:37.880 not interested in the public health aspects of it.

00:28:40.180 If you're positing that something is a societal epidemic in whole chunks of nations, that

00:28:46.700 points to macro level solutions, not individual, like you get an app on your phone and make

00:28:51.620 sure your room's cold enough, right?

00:28:53.440 Exactly.

00:28:53.960 His sort of goal in using that rhetoric seems to be to just like amp up the importance of

00:29:00.120 the conversation, not to say this is a systemic issue and here are the systemic solutions.

00:29:05.640 Exactly.

00:29:05.860 like this is a systemic issue so really listen to what i'm saying download this app super hard

00:29:11.140 yeah yeah okay so are you are you ready for the debunking i am always ready for the debunking i'm

00:29:17.200 hungry for the debunking i'm sleepy for the debunking here we go tell me what you got so

00:29:24.240 the book comes out in 2017 and then two years go by he's on podcasts the book is acclaimed it

00:29:29.740 becomes a big bestseller. He does this massively popular TED Talk. And then in November of 2019,

00:29:36.140 we meet a guy called Alexei Guzy. So I interviewed Alexei for this. What he says later, he's like,

00:29:44.880 I cannot emphasize what a random person I was. He is not a sleep researcher. He is 22 years old.

00:29:53.660 he is a russian living in moscow he has just graduated from college he did math and econ at

00:30:00.540 school he took like a couple statistics classes but like he's not someone sort of in this field

00:30:07.480 particularly just like some guy exactly this is not like an academic debate this is some guy

00:30:12.720 so his friend recommends this book to him and he starts reading through it and immediately starts

00:30:18.600 noticing all of the red flags and he basically he starts like a spreadsheet listing all of these

00:30:26.680 claims that seem like kind of dubious and looking into them already like this already like this guy

00:30:32.700 exactly this is like this is our people yeah yeah this is the audience surrogate for specifically 0.98

00:30:37.260 you and me of like this dude feels like he's full of shit and i need to spend like 300 hours 0.55

00:30:42.560 looking into this i need to have a weird academic grudge match exactly the person i've never met 0.95

00:30:49.280 yes so the first category of error in the book is he starts seeing just like weird baffling

00:30:57.000 mistakes or things that seem just like on their face wrong so in a section on like how doctors

00:31:04.660 make more errors when they haven't slept matt walker says when you limit trainee doctors to

00:31:10.980 no more than a 16-hour shift, residents make 400 to 600% fewer diagnostic errors.

00:31:18.660 What?

00:31:19.440 400% fewer.

00:31:21.780 So negatives?

00:31:23.000 We're in negative, now they're like just doing extra right things?

00:31:26.380 No one knows exactly what happened here, but obviously something cannot reduce by more

00:31:30.340 than 100%.

00:31:31.380 It's not the biggest deal in the world, but like, this did get published in The Lancet. 1.00

00:31:36.080 Fuck, man! 0.99

00:31:37.080 Another one is, you know how he said the World Health Organization has declared a sleep loss epidemic? 1.00

00:31:43.020 Did they not do that?

00:31:44.000 Alexei notices in the book, there's actually very few citations in the book.

00:31:47.120 It's really weird.

00:31:48.220 But, you know, you're citing like the WHO says it.

00:31:50.740 So, like, you would think it would be a link to the WHO, right?

00:31:53.520 WHO Task Force 1994 or whatever.

00:31:57.320 But it links, the citation links to a random National Geographic documentary.

00:32:03.000 What?

00:32:03.520 Of like the Wonders of Sleep or something. 0.99

00:32:05.880 So Alexei goes on YouTube and finds this fucking documentary and watches the whole thing. 0.94

00:32:11.260 And it's just like, I don't know, standard, like, sleep is cool documentary. 0.98

00:32:15.260 But it doesn't say anything about the WHO.

00:32:18.340 And then he starts looking around and, like, the WHO never said this.

00:32:21.480 What a weird thing to just throw in there and have it be so disprovable and so just, like, even just on its face, it seems not true.

00:32:31.100 It just seems weird.

00:32:32.160 Alexei also finds a bunch of exaggerations.

00:32:35.260 So one of the things that Matt Walker said in the excerpt that we read is he said,

00:32:39.880 the shorter your sleep, the shorter your lifespan.

00:32:42.940 But that's not true.

00:32:45.260 The mortality rates, the link between sleep and lifespan,

00:32:49.320 is just like the link between obesity and lifespan.

00:32:52.520 Right.

00:32:52.680 At the low end, it's high.

00:32:54.580 And at the high end, it's high.

00:32:56.620 So it's really bad for you to get, like, less than four hours of sleep a night.

00:33:01.360 People who sleep very little have very high mortality rates.

00:33:04.120 But people who sleep more than nine hours a night also have extremely high mortality rates.

00:33:10.160 And the highest mortality rates are people who sleep more than 10 hours.

00:33:13.480 Really?

00:33:14.080 The problem here is the same thing that we came across in our obesity episode in that it's all correlations.

00:33:19.420 Yeah.

00:33:19.680 It's not necessarily you're getting too much sleep and it's making you die.

00:33:24.220 It could be that like you have cancer.

00:33:26.280 You're sleeping a lot because your body is shutting down.

00:33:28.420 There's all kinds of health conditions that would make you sleep a really long time and

00:33:33.340 would also end up killing you.

00:33:34.580 And on the other end of the scale, there's also all kinds of conditions that cause insomnia.

00:33:39.660 If you have chronic pain, like lots of cancers, you're in pain and you can't sleep more than

00:33:45.360 four hours a night.

00:33:46.340 It's just a big old bundle of correlations and we can't really say that the sleep is 0.90

00:33:50.760 causing fucking anything. 0.96

00:33:52.500 Yeah. 0.98

00:33:52.640 I mean, it feels like it harkens back to our conversations about nutrition research.

00:33:56.760 Like, how do you isolate only sleep as the sole or even just primary factor when people are living complicated, messy lives with lots and lots of factors happening all the time, right?

00:34:09.620 Like, maybe it's that you're not sleeping.

00:34:11.540 Maybe it's that you had a couple of loved ones pass away and you're grieving and there are physiological impacts of that.

00:34:17.860 Maybe it's that you work in a factory and you're being, or a nail salon or whatever, and you're being exposed to chemicals on the daily that are, there's just like a bajillion things that it could be.

00:34:29.500 And you can't just isolate people and keep them in a lab and have them live identical lives except for the amount of sleep that they have.

00:34:37.160 There's also, I mean, this also brings us to his thing about cancer.

00:34:40.100 I don't know if you caught this.

00:34:41.600 Here's what I thought about the cancer thing.

00:34:43.260 It's often the thing that I think when people are like, you're 10 times as likely to get cancer.

00:34:47.960 I always want to be like, which ones?

00:34:51.400 It just feels like a very big bucket to sort of throw everything into without parsing a little bit.

00:34:58.080 And also, I mean, people have done studies on this.

00:35:01.000 There's no link between sleeping too much in cancer and there's no link between sleeping too little in cancer.

00:35:05.280 It just isn't.

00:35:06.160 So it's also just like, I'm like going too far down the path.

00:35:09.540 You're like, not even that.

00:35:10.540 It's just not true.

00:35:11.300 There's a couple. There's, I think, two or three. Breast cancer is one of them that, like, for whatever reason, people who sleep less are more likely to get breast cancer. But again, we don't know causality. So it could actually be that a precursor to breast cancer is causing you to sleep less.

00:35:27.160 Right. Or some third thing is causing both of them. So we don't actually know. And also considering how many types of cancer there are, the fact that there's like two or three that are linked to sleep does not justify saying if you sleep less, you will double your risk of cancer.

00:35:42.760 Yeah, no, no.

00:35:43.600 I'm also going to I'm going to send you this. This is an excerpt from this actually an excerpt from his TED talk, but the excerpt from the book is like slightly longer. This is like my favorite most debunk-y thing. So I'm going to send you this.

00:35:54.100 quote i could tell you about sleep loss and your cardiovascular system and that all it takes is

00:36:00.100 one hour because there is a global experiment performed on 1.6 billion people across 70

00:36:06.180 countries twice a year and it's called daylight saving time i hate it mike it's coming it's

00:36:12.820 coming now in the spring when we lose one hour of sleep we see a subsequent 24 increase in heart

00:36:19.700 attacks that following day hard facts bible facts in the autumn when we gain an hour of sleep we see

00:36:25.880 a 21 reduction in heart attacks isn't that incredible and you see exactly the same profile

00:36:32.440 for car crashes road traffic accidents and even suicide rates i mike i hate it do you want to 0.96

00:36:38.780 know what this is based on yes i do and i'm about i just am ready for fucking lift off with my like 0.93

00:36:44.180 irritation with this you're gonna explode it's based on one paper that looked at data from 0.84

00:36:50.420 michigan one state and only over three years what and i actually like respect the researchers for

00:36:57.240 publishing this because they're quite transparent about what they find so what they do is the

00:37:02.800 researchers look at the seven days following daylight savings time this one hour of sleep

00:37:08.260 deprivation that we're all getting on the sunday heart attacks are slightly less likely on the

00:37:13.960 Monday, they are 24% higher. On the Tuesday, they are lower. On the Wednesday, they are lower. On

00:37:21.260 the Thursday, they are lower. On the Friday, they are lower. And on the Saturday, they are 4% more

00:37:25.160 likely. What? The closest thing to an explanation for this I can come to is it's just a fucking

00:37:29.780 coincidence. Pick any week out of the year. By random chance, there's going to be more heart 0.98

00:37:34.760 attacks on like the Wednesday or something. Any pattern, you're always going to find a little peak.

00:37:40.180 It's the same number of heart attacks spread across the week. And they even say this in the

00:37:43.580 study they're like hey everybody just want to be transparent it's the same number of heart attacks

00:37:48.560 there's like this weird spike on monday but there's no actual overall increase in the heart

00:37:53.700 attacks it's just moving them around he's not saying hey look at this three-year study on

00:37:58.600 michiganders michigandigans yes he's saying there's an experiment involving 1.6 billion people

00:38:06.080 across 70 countries and like i get that that's like a rhetorical flourish but it also does set

00:38:11.220 up the expectation that you're looking at a data set that size and not a data set of

00:38:16.600 like 1500 people in the upper peninsula or whatever.

00:38:20.660 Right.

00:38:20.860 And also it's just the researchers of the city, the only data that he's basing this

00:38:24.760 on, they're really transparent of like, we don't think this is a thing.

00:38:28.500 We're just putting the data out there so other people can see it.

00:38:30.940 I actually love this because publishing studies that don't find anything is actually really

00:38:35.540 important because then somebody else doesn't waste their time looking at the same thing.

00:38:38.920 totally it's like researchers that are just like hey we have this data we're gonna look into it

00:38:42.660 we didn't really find anything but we want to publish it so like everybody else knows maybe

00:38:45.800 it's different for your state but in our state for this data we're not finding an effect that's

00:38:49.760 like how science is supposed to work but then other people like take this data and they're like

00:38:54.040 oh 24 increase it's like well on one of the days i just think about like i've been in enough state

00:38:59.920 legislatures and watched enough hearings about daylight saving time and should we keep it or 0.69

00:39:04.660 should we get rid of it people fucking hate it i know if they were like daylight saving time is 0.77

00:39:09.500 making people die like it would be like so much more than the tiny nudge that people need to be 0.99

00:39:16.160 like fuck daylight saving time it's the worst although he's actually correct about the thing 0.99

00:39:22.880 that there's more car crashes the day after daylight savings time oh interesting as usual 0.99

00:39:28.900 he's oversimplifying so there's a million studies on this because the data is like pretty readily

00:39:32.420 available so there is a spike the entire week after it's like really high the day after then

00:39:37.960 it sort of tapers off throughout the week the week after daylight savings time but that's not

00:39:42.540 because of sleep deprivation it's because of light people are driving in the dark yeah because like

00:39:48.980 people aren't used to it right you're not used to driving in the dark and then all of a sudden

00:39:51.920 you're driving in the dark and it takes you like you know a couple days to adjust all of a sudden

00:39:55.840 all these people are driving to work in the dark most of the accidents are people running into

00:40:00.380 pedestrians oh the weird thing is there's like the spike in the spring in car crashes but then

00:40:05.620 there's like a reduction in the fall in car crashes because it's lighter out so matthew

00:40:11.040 walker wants to say that it's like oh because we're sleeping less and then in the fall we're

00:40:14.860 sleeping more and in the studies they say that like yeah sleep deprivation is probably in there

00:40:19.740 it's probably a factor but it's probably outweighed by the fact that it's just really

00:40:24.120 fucking dark and like in general like there's way more car accidents at night than during the day

00:40:28.700 for the same reason and also there's more car accidents on the western side of time zones 0.99

00:40:34.360 where it's darker than on the eastern side this is a great time for occam's razor do you know 0.99

00:40:39.320 what i mean like there's a simpler explanation here which is just it's real dark it's fucking 0.89

00:40:43.800 dark dude real dark so okay we're not even to the fucking major problems with the book yet 0.77

00:40:48.520 these are just minor problems with the book and like the exaggerations in the book you're like 0.89

00:40:52.880 let me get the little stuff out of the way this was the easy stuff it's all lies the main

00:40:57.840 existential problem with the book is that there is no evidence that we're in the middle of a sleep

00:41:04.040 loss epidemic. There's no evidence that like 30 years ago people were sleeping more and now they're

00:41:09.720 sleeping less. Exactly. Yeah. As usual, this is a really difficult thing to measure. You know,

00:41:15.220 most of the research is based on self-reported sleep data. So either how much did you sleep last

00:41:20.060 night or how much do you typically sleep throughout the year, right? So you ask people

00:41:23.980 this stuff. And even on these sorts of surveys, the number of hours that people are sleeping

00:41:30.160 in developed countries is like pretty flat. Two thirds of the population says that they get between

00:41:35.340 seven and nine hours of sleep a night. That hasn't really budged. Roughly 40% of people say that

00:41:40.900 they're getting less than seven hours of sleep a night. But also on self reports, people tend to

00:41:44.540 take off around an hour for however much they're sleeping. Because I mean, we live in a culture

00:41:49.220 that glorifies productivity yeah one of the sleep researchers that i spoke to he said he works in an

00:41:54.920 insomnia lab where you know they they bring people in and they attach electrodes and stuff and he said

00:41:58.860 one of the most remarkable things is that you bring people in you measure their sleep for eight

00:42:02.820 hours and then they wake up and then he you know comes into the room and he's like hey how did you

00:42:06.940 sleep and oftentimes people will be like oh i had such a terrible night and he's looking at the

00:42:11.920 brainwave stuff and he's like uh no you didn't oh interesting you had a great interesting so it's

00:42:17.200 like people don't know even on like a night to night basis there's other studies that use sort

00:42:23.720 of like objective methods and find the same thing it's basically flat yeah so like the core the

00:42:28.960 foundational premise of the book is in like demonstrably false the literal premise yes and

00:42:35.800 i also think that this is like a fascinating methodology thing it sounds like a really obvious

00:42:40.900 easy question how much are we sleeping right it seems like we would be able to say that with some

00:42:46.160 uncertainty. But even something that simple, like we don't actually have a good picture.

00:42:51.020 People might actually be sleeping less now than they used to. And like, I don't know,

00:42:54.440 it's vaguely plausible to me that the fact that you have this like device, like a little light up

00:42:58.800 emotion invoker device in your hand at all times, if there was data indicating it, like I find that

00:43:05.440 totally plausible. But if we don't really have any data, then like what, what is Matt Walker

00:43:09.200 basing his book on? Right, totally. It might be the case and it might not. But it's definitely

00:43:13.000 not the case that we like are in the middle of a sleep loss epidemic yeah if it's happening it's

00:43:18.780 not currently proven and so what alexei finds when he's looking into this is that the way

00:43:23.100 that he gets the numbers for his book the standard cdc national sleep foundation advice is seven to

00:43:30.440 nine hours right that's how much we're supposed to be getting he averages that to eight and then

00:43:35.080 he measures everyone who's getting less than eight hours of sleep well but hang on if you add up

00:43:39.800 everyone who's getting four, five, six and seven hours of sleep. Yeah, it's like a third of the

00:43:44.180 country or two thirds or something isn't getting enough sleep. But that's only because you're then

00:43:48.100 counting all the seven hour people. Yeah, this isn't like standard advice that everybody has

00:43:52.220 to be getting eight hours. He's just made that up. Well, and it is sort of the shorthand when you're

00:43:57.040 like, what's the right amount of sleep to get people are like, I don't know, eight hours.

00:44:00.060 Right. And so that's then what he's basic like making research calculations based on that.

00:44:05.560 another thing that isn't true is his whole fucking thing about hunter gatherers yeah that shit 0.97

00:44:12.340 there's now some studies on this these studies are honestly like pretty weird so there's actually 0.99

00:44:16.780 semi-uncontacted tribes in various parts of africa where they've given them like sleepometers

00:44:23.380 like these watches when you actually measure the sleep patterns of these tribes they sleep between

00:44:29.360 5.7 and 7.1 hours per night and they like barely take naps so it's like yeah they just sleep the 0.80

00:44:36.600 same fucking way that everybody does like they they go to bed around midnight they get up around 0.67

00:44:41.600 seven yeah so what's weird is that after his early like i think it's like chapter two or three where 0.99

00:44:47.060 he talks about like oh these biphasic patterns are so great and you know hunter gatherers live

00:44:51.840 like this and we need to get back to these patterns later in the book he acknowledges that

00:44:56.720 this other research has taken place. So it's actually one of his colleagues at Berkeley

00:44:59.900 who did this study. And so later in the book, Matt Walker is like, well, now we have data on

00:45:05.140 hunter-gatherer tribes. And it turns out that like they sleep basically the same as we do. But

00:45:09.080 he says, this is from the book. He says, now we discover that the average lifespan of these

00:45:15.640 hunter-gatherers is just 58 years, even though they're more physically active than we are,

00:45:20.980 rarely obese, and are not plagued by the assault of processed foods that erode our health. 0.97

00:45:26.020 so you're like wait so they don't live very long so why the fuck were you telling me about them 0.92

00:45:31.160 earlier right you just said we need to sleep like them so we can live longer but now you're like oh 0.96

00:45:36.200 they don't even live that long yeah it's fine society is changing this stuff is all a moving 0.90

00:45:40.840 target that doesn't mean that it was better back then exactly to get in the fucking way back machine 0.95

00:45:46.860 he also does some weird shit where he says the reason that they have shorter life expectancies 0.95

00:45:51.840 is because they're more susceptible to infections and infections are a sign that you're not sleeping 0.99

00:45:58.600 enough what so we're supposed to sleep like them but the people who actually sleep like them don't

00:46:05.480 live long enough and should sleep more and of course there's like various people have done

00:46:11.120 these like what are called polyphasic sleeps where you like sleep in sort of bursts there's also

00:46:15.880 there's a million societies that have siestas sure and there's no data that this does anything

00:46:21.200 There aren't clear health benefits.

00:46:23.220 Hey, man, if you want to take a nap, take a nap.

00:46:25.200 That's fine with me.

00:46:26.500 But there's this overlay that gets added about why it's like the right thing to do or the healthiest thing to do or the best thing to do.

00:46:35.900 And I'm like, it's enough that it just works for you.

00:46:38.900 It doesn't need to be a mandate.

00:46:40.740 Like, this is my thing with people who are morning people and people who are evening people.

00:46:45.300 Sure.

00:46:45.460 There's whatever. 0.99

00:46:46.040 There's fucking studies. 0.99

00:46:46.800 There's some dumb study that I saw that like there's a 6% lower depression rate among people who are morning people, which like that's basically zero. 1.00

00:46:54.880 Like that's zero. 0.75

00:46:55.680 It doesn't matter.

00:46:56.320 It's fake.

00:46:56.820 But also, if you're not a morning person and you're forcing yourself to be a morning person, i.e. setting your alarm before you are ready to wake up, that's also probably not good for you.

00:47:07.860 Yeah, that's right.

00:47:08.460 So like you're not going to get the health benefits of forcing yourself into a lifestyle that you don't like and doesn't work for you.

00:47:14.580 So here's my question for you.

00:47:16.520 He's a researcher.

00:47:18.160 He knows better than all of this stuff, right?

00:47:20.620 Presumably.

00:47:21.320 I mean.

00:47:22.060 Why is he doing this?

00:47:23.560 I mean, on some level, to his credit, his social media handle everywhere is TheSleepDiplomat.

00:47:29.400 That's the name of his website.

00:47:30.640 He sees himself as an ambassador for people should be getting more sleep.

00:47:34.540 People should be prioritizing sleep in their lives to an extent that they are not now.

00:47:38.720 On some level, that's probably true.

00:47:40.280 Yeah, we all kind of probably should get off of Tumblr a little bit earlier and, like,

00:47:43.840 go to bed and like maybe spend less time on our screens like in the same way that it's like

00:47:47.820 probably good advice to tell people to like eat more fruits and vegetables and like try to like

00:47:51.440 take the stairs instead of the elevator all this stuff is like perfectly prudent advice

00:47:55.200 so i think he sees himself as like sleep is not getting enough attention as a contributor to our

00:48:01.300 public health problems as a country i don't think he's doing this consciously and he's not doing it

00:48:05.480 explicitly but it's like he's using that as an excuse to like twist all this stuff and like make

00:48:10.240 it more important than it has to be yeah i mean that's the thing is like sure none of this is like

00:48:16.360 bad stuff to say like get off your screens and blah blah blah like all of those sorts of things

00:48:21.460 but again when i think about myself and the other people that i know that sometimes have a hard time

00:48:26.220 with sleep the issue isn't their sleep habits or their sort of quote-unquote sleep hygiene

00:48:31.760 the issue is untreated mental illness the issue is untenable work schedules i know it's always

00:48:38.420 about a different thing it's not just people don't think sleep is important enough so they don't get

00:48:44.440 it but this is also another thing that was really noticeable about the book is that throughout the

00:48:48.020 book he has you know a bunch of studies and a bunch of data whatever he never looks into the

00:48:52.260 reasons why people are not getting enough sleep he just assumes that people are choosing not to

00:48:57.520 get sleep right i do think that there is some contingent of people who like don't take sleep

00:49:01.660 seriously and have this like rise and grind attitude of like oh martha stewart only gets

00:49:05.960 four hours so i'm only getting it four hours like i think that these people exist but it's not clear

00:49:10.120 from the research and it's especially not clear in his book how many people this is yeah he never

00:49:15.200 compares them to people who like are desperate to get fucking sleep but cannot sleep yeah the 0.88

00:49:20.460 sleep researcher i talked to he says a lot of his patients are women going through menopause 0.99

00:49:24.580 yeah and like menopause that's holy shit yes i mean if you look at the actual numbers up to 30 0.93

00:49:30.260 percent of the population has chronic insomnia 40 of people with insomnia have a mental disorder

00:49:36.820 that in some way affects their sleep 16 of full-time workers work either evening or overnight

00:49:43.060 shifts 75 of people with depression suffer from insomnia 90 of people with ptsd like a huge number

00:49:50.760 of people want to be sleeping and feel like shit all day and are begging for any solution that

00:49:56.520 would help them sleep yeah i mean i think he's probably addressing this in a way like in the

00:50:01.600 same way that i'm like putting my own personal experience lens on responding to all of this i

00:50:06.820 think he's probably doing the same thing if he's a sleep researcher with google you are swimming

00:50:13.620 in just a just a lake of tech bros who strike me as probably likelier people to do the rise and

00:50:21.140 grind you only need four hours of sleep bullshit versus the people that i know who are much more

00:50:27.520 like i am desperate to sleep and i can't figure out how to make that happen one of the things that 0.96

00:50:32.680 he says i mean he does say a lot in his book about like there there's sort of this culture

00:50:36.100 of like pulling an all-nighter especially in tech you know you stay up all night coding and he's

00:50:39.980 like sure it's not great that that's normalized it's not great that this is part of american

00:50:43.680 productivity culture it's really bad for you and we shouldn't necessarily be glorifying that kind

00:50:47.900 of stuff and i think that's like super prudent advice sure but that's also a very small number

00:50:52.220 of people who are like i love doing all-nighters like yeah they actually have the option to not do

00:50:57.380 that and they're not taking that option right it's great advice for young ambitious attorneys

00:51:02.060 who want to be on partner track at their private law firm totally i buy that as advice for that

00:51:07.880 group of people and then there's everyone else in the country and world so okay the thing that i

00:51:14.600 cannot i cannot convey adequately is that so all of these errors that i just enumerated these are

00:51:21.520 all in the first chapter alexa is going through this book and he's like i had to cut down the 0.63

00:51:29.740 scope because like i came across so many fucking errors that i like i had to stop oh my god i mean 0.76

00:51:35.920 to be fair the first chapter is like kind of an overture where he like paints the picture and he 0.89

00:51:39.940 presents like it's slightly more information dense than the other chapters but in the version of the

00:51:43.980 book that i had this chapter is eight pages long so like all of this appeared in the first eight

00:51:50.580 pages and there's there's other errors that i'm not including too as we are talking i'm looking

00:51:56.120 at the little timer on quick time we've now been talking for two hours and ten minutes about eight

00:52:02.940 pages of garbage is that what you're telling me yes i'm not mad at you but i am mad at this dude

00:52:11.440 I mean, it's a lot. It's a lot. So in 2019, Alexei, again, random guy, he posts a massive blog post that I think is like 10, 12, 14,000 words long. That's just called Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep is riddled with scientific and factual errors. It's organized in just like bullet points. This is Matthew Walker's claim. I looked into it. It doesn't check out. This is Matthew Walker's next claim. 0.98

00:52:37.900 and this gets quite a bit of attention in methodology debunker blogging like people

00:52:45.240 who like this is how i came across it was it showed up on like a statistical retraction

00:52:49.180 something something website that i read it didn't really blow up in like the broader culture

00:52:54.020 also anytime you're like oh this was big on methodology twitter i'm like so you

00:52:59.160 i tweeted i tweeted about it and everyone else muted me when you say this is big on methodology 0.66

00:53:08.220 twitter it just means i michael hobbs tweeted it it's like mike is on his bullshit basically

00:53:16.760 but then so okay as he starts bouncing around methodology twitter it does the thing that like 0.95

00:53:24.420 always happens right that somebody like cracks open a door and then everyone else just kicks it

00:53:30.600 down so there's then like this wave following the blog post all these other errors in the book

00:53:36.620 right somebody went into chapter two and was like hang on guys there's more wait we're not done

00:53:42.620 and also the funny thing there's all these other like little errors that come out and also as i

00:53:47.180 was reading it for this show i also found like two more like pretty major ones like i didn't even see

00:53:54.380 these on reddit at the time but it's like i got something to add to the pile there's a lot that

00:53:58.860 i'm skipping because a lot of them are like it's just like they're very similar to the ones we've

00:54:03.060 already gone over sure there's a but i mean this is when the the testicular thing kind of falls

00:54:08.980 apart there's a study but it's like a really bad study with like a very small number of people and

00:54:13.740 their relationship that it found was actually more like u-shaped rather than a line there's also he

00:54:19.320 mentioned in his book this like really dumb study where he says that just one night of sleeping five

00:54:24.580 hours a night will make you like less attractive but what he doesn't mention is that those people

00:54:30.360 like the sleep deprived people had been deprived of sleep for 31 hours straight before then so they

00:54:37.820 were kept up for 31 hours then they slept five hours then their picture was shown to other people

00:54:43.160 who were like yeah that person looks really rough but it's like yeah we we all look rough after

00:54:47.740 being awake for 31 hours and then sleeping for five well and also he just wants to bring back 0.72

00:54:53.620 fucking hot or not websites exactly it's science now like yes i haven't slept for over a day but 0.74

00:55:00.440 am i hot the last thing that comes out in this like wave of criticism after alexei's blog post 0.97

00:55:05.220 is also some like self-plagiarism this article in the lancet basically appears in another journal

00:55:11.320 called neuron so we've gotten the blog post with all the main the main criticisms we've then got

00:55:18.120 this entire wave of criticism after this of like all these other random things let's do a hypothetical

00:55:23.940 if you your book something somebody writes like a long blog post saying like aubrey gordon's book

00:55:30.840 is bad and here's why and like much of it was false like a lot of it was like them accusing

00:55:35.540 you of stuff that wasn't true walk me through like what you would actually do in that situation

00:55:40.020 I mean, so depending on how high profile it was, if it was a little thing, I might just let it be. If it was like a big source or something, I might be like, let's have a conversation about it. Or I might be like, here are all of my primary sources. Once again, here's where it says the thing that I say it says. Those seem like the two or three main options to me.

00:56:02.380 Right. Like one is just like, leave it alone. Two is actually do a point by point refutation.

00:56:07.620 And three is like, try and connect with the person who has the criticism and just see what's

00:56:11.740 underneath that. So Matt Walker does none of those. There's a there's a little known weird

00:56:18.380 fourth option. So I could not believe this when I found out about it. So like I said,

00:56:23.600 all of the social media profiles are the sleep diplomat. That's like sort of his like jokey

00:56:28.020 name that he uses on the internet so he sets up a random wordpress site oh god called the sleep

00:56:35.520 diplomat.wordpress.com which to this day consists of one post he doesn't put this on any of his

00:56:41.640 existing platforms and to this day he has never like tweeted this blog post he has never publicly

00:56:47.800 acknowledged it and the blog post doesn't even say by matthew walker like at no point in the

00:56:53.640 blog post does he identify himself as the author so how do we know it's him though

00:56:57.940 There's been some sort of like oblique, indirect, third-hand confirmation.

00:57:03.580 At one point, somebody contacts his university and they're like, it's our understanding that

00:57:06.980 Matthew Walker has responded to the criticism.

00:57:09.260 If you were responding, like you, Aubrey Gordon, were responding to somebody who wrote an essay,

00:57:13.100 you'd probably like tweet it out.

00:57:14.360 Yeah.

00:57:14.940 Or I'd do it on the show or I would be like, yes, let's get it out into the world.

00:57:19.640 Let's propel it forward.

00:57:21.240 You would put it in the place where people find you.

00:57:23.660 Yeah.

00:57:24.200 Right?

00:57:24.640 Yeah.

00:57:24.860 So Matt Walker, I mean, I'm assuming that it's Matt Walker.

00:57:27.360 we still don't have proof that it's matt walker but like it seems like it is he's basically doing 0.97

00:57:33.060 it in a way that ensures this will be seen by the fucking weirdos like me on methodology twitter 0.95

00:57:39.560 who've been following this little debate but nobody outside of that world is ever going to see 0.92

00:57:44.540 it or at least that is the effect i have no idea what his intention was yeah he doesn't actually

00:57:48.660 want to engage in like a normal scholarly debate yeah the post this is bananas the post is called

00:57:54.480 why we sleep responses to questions from readers yeah in the opening paragraph he says like you

00:58:00.060 know i published this book and you know some readers have questions and uh some questions

00:58:03.860 have also come up in online forums and when it says online forums he links to alexei's post so

00:58:09.420 clearly he's aware of it the normal thing to do in this situation would be like alexei guzzi

00:58:15.280 made a series of claims about me i'd like to respond to those claims as you said like a point

00:58:19.480 by point rebuttal yeah but this post he it's sort of organized by theme it's not organized according

00:58:26.260 to like he says that i said this what i actually said is this or he says this here's my evidence

00:58:30.820 it's organized around a bunch of questions and the questions are like not what the claims are so one

00:58:36.620 of the questions is is sleeping fewer than six hours a night fine for your health and another

00:58:41.380 one is does sleep serve a vital function right no one was asking those things exactly and he

00:58:47.000 doesn't cite any readers specifically yeah good lord so he addresses like the who thing he's like

00:58:53.100 you're right the who never declared a sleep epidemic sorry it was actually a cdc paper

00:58:58.060 that declared a sleep epidemic and like here's the link my bad we'll fix it in the next version

00:59:03.860 of the book that comes out but what alexei notices when he looks at this response is that like he

00:59:08.480 doesn't actually link to the cdc because the cdc did actually issue this in like i believe the late

00:59:14.440 90s very briefly. And then when it got pushed back, they changed it to sleep is a public health

00:59:20.800 problem. So it's kind of chicken shit to say like, oh, sorry, the citation was wrong. It's 0.97

00:59:27.860 actually a CDC thing. And it's like, well, kind of, but the CDC doesn't actually stand by this.

00:59:32.600 Right. If you're going to do a point by point response, and one of your responses has since

00:59:36.820 been retracted, you do have to say it's been retracted. Exactly. There's also I mean,

00:59:42.360 in this kind of flurry of criticism people point out like very small errors so he's talking about

00:59:47.740 one there's one study that he mentions in his book where he says like the study had more than

00:59:50.840 4 000 subjects but then you look at the study it actually had like 2200 subjects they're errors

00:59:55.900 clearly but like no one no one is mad about those things right if you read alexei's post like yeah

01:00:01.320 there's like small stuff in there but we're talking about like the thesis of your book is wrong well

01:00:06.780 Well, and, like, those little things do matter, but they matter as part of a fuller picture.

01:00:12.160 Yeah, as part of a pattern, yeah.

01:00:13.260 The core question here is, like, hey, why is almost everything in this book, or why are big chunks of this book just categorically wrong or misrepresented?

01:00:22.560 Yes.

01:00:23.120 A very typical response is the thing about cancer, where in the intro, it's the second paragraph of his book.

01:00:29.500 He says, routinely sleeping less than six hours a night demolishes your immune system more than doubling your risk of cancer.

01:00:35.840 he never says what he said he never says what alexei said in response to what he says

01:00:41.700 he just says like cancer sleep and cancer and just like does this kind of like boilerplate

01:00:46.380 thing about like sleep and cancer and then he said this is bananas he says importantly

01:00:52.260 epidemiological data cannot be used to inform causality it is not correct to suggest based

01:00:58.960 on epidemiological findings that sleeping less than six or seven hours causes cancer

01:01:03.140 however one similarly cannot state that sleeping less than six hours a night does not double your

01:01:09.480 risk of cancer sir you seem to think that this is like really strong proof to be like

01:01:17.420 you can't prove it but you also can't prove it's not true it's like are you seven you say the moon

01:01:23.520 isn't made of cheese i say it is prove that it isn't like no it's like you're the one out here

01:01:30.500 saying that it causes a doubling of the risk and then now you're saying like we can't say that it

01:01:35.340 causes anything but we can't say it doesn't cause anything and it's like only one person here is

01:01:40.640 saying that losing sleep causes cancer and it's you so like why are you lecturing me about this 0.90

01:01:46.360 yeah so i looked up i had to i bought this fucking book twice i looked up the second 0.86

01:01:51.020 the new version so he says that like oh well you know we'll we'll fix that in later editions of 0.90

01:01:57.180 the book did he fix it did he actually change it well you tell me okay the book now says routinely

01:02:02.880 sleeping less than six hours a night weakens your immune system substantially increasing your risk

01:02:07.440 of certain forms of cancer no that's not different it's still implying causation it's still

01:02:13.360 functionally saying the same thing he's actually like the sort of clarification or the addition

01:02:18.360 that he's added in of like certain forms of cancer isn't actually the thing that people were taking

01:02:24.020 issue with right exactly he does the same thing with this thing of like our you know our americans

01:02:28.860 getting enough sleep like he has his little faq question he says are two-thirds of adults failing

01:02:35.360 to obtain eight hours of nightly sleep it's like dude the issue is that you arbitrarily chose

01:02:40.620 eight hours yeah boo so he then goes through this entire rigmarole where it's like according to this

01:02:45.940 survey this many americans are getting fewer than eight hours of sleep and you're like but it's seven

01:02:50.820 to nine it feels a little bit like two siblings are sitting in the backseat of a car and one of

01:02:57.120 them is like mom make him stop it and he's like what i'm not touching you i'm not touching you

01:03:01.540 right exactly this is all on a technicality and like you're not addressing the core thing which

01:03:07.000 is like someone's asking you to leave them alone why can't you just leave them alone right that's

01:03:10.840 like the perfect way to put it it's like he wants to make all of these things into technicalities

01:03:15.920 i found a podcast that came out after this where they sort of bring up they're like well how do

01:03:21.100 you respond to the criticism like you know we've received emails from listeners who knew that we

01:03:25.000 were having you on and they wanted us to address the criticism and he's like you know what i'm

01:03:29.060 really glad you brought it up in my book i said that there were more than 4 000 subjects in a

01:03:34.820 study it turned out that there were 2200 and i'm very sorry but it's this diversion tactic where

01:03:39.640 it makes it seem like he's being accused of all this like kind of meaningless technical stuff

01:03:45.100 Right. And because his platform is so much larger than any of the people who are raising any of these questions, him saying, oh, I said there were 4,000 subjects and there were really 2,200 is going to be the narrative that most people who follow him hear.

01:04:02.780 Exactly.

01:04:03.280 And they're like, oh, honest mistake.

01:04:04.660 Right.

01:04:05.240 Versus this sort of like much more foundation shaking sort of critique that's happening.

01:04:11.780 Yes.

01:04:12.040 And this is sort of the final chapter of the story. As a result of the blog post, the debate, the wave of criticism and his response, the only measurable response is that the journal unpublishes the article that he self-plagiarized.

01:04:31.760 That's it?

01:04:32.280 I don't want to defend self-plagiarism because like you shouldn't do it and it's like, you know, the journals have policies against it, whatever. But it's like of all the stuff that he did.

01:04:40.360 yeah that feels like not in the top 10 of concerns right the problem is it's the only one where

01:04:46.320 sort of he broke a rule yeah there's there's a mechanism in place for when this happens

01:04:51.700 journal retractions you know some number of journal articles get retracted every month it

01:04:56.180 happens yeah but in every other area like there haven't been any consequences of this people

01:05:02.020 contact his university the university's like oh we can't really do anything like we don't consider

01:05:06.120 these things to rise to the level of like we have to do anything and obviously he's tenured

01:05:09.720 the book publisher book publishers aren't really responsible for this stuff and they say like oh

01:05:13.880 we're updating the second edition all the ted talks are still up the podcast interviews are 0.84

01:05:18.760 still up the only actual change i could find this is wild fucking joe rogan took his episode out of 0.94

01:05:26.400 his feed what fucking joe rogan is doing the most rigorous fact checking here the defender of 0.94

01:05:33.120 journalistic ethics joe rogan has the highest standards although honestly there i mean there's 0.97

01:05:39.220 some there was some talk on reddit on the joe rogan subreddit this might have actually been

01:05:42.920 like a technical error so i'm not i'm not sure if this was an fx thing i just love the idea of

01:05:47.740 you spending any amount of time on the joe rogan subreddit super user you know me

01:05:53.060 but then i mean alexei has talked about this quite a bit and this is kind of like his his

01:06:00.500 new career he's now working in like a sciences ngo that's like trying to reform the way that

01:06:05.660 science has done he did a very angry tweet storm at some point that i found alexei says i keep

01:06:11.120 thinking about the fact that walker falsified data and plainly lied about the most basic facts about

01:06:15.260 sleep like the relationships between sleep and mortality and sleep and cancer and yet nobody

01:06:19.460 gives a fuck neither other public intellectuals nor uc berkeley nor media yeah if my accusations 0.72

01:06:25.480 are without merit where are the debunkings of them i'm literally just a rando who read the book 0.95

01:06:30.600 because a friend recommended it and maybe i'm wrong if my accusations are correct why has nobody

01:06:35.520 in the field spoken against walker publicly yeah i mean listen if i were alexei i would also feel 0.97

01:06:41.380 like what the fuck man what the fuck man and like people within the field like i'm sure that sleep 0.98

01:06:46.360 researchers it must be really frustrating that like yeah sleep is not seen as as important a 0.99

01:06:50.960 thing as diet or exercise and like it is linked to all of these other health impacts and like as

01:06:55.640 a culture you know we do sort of glorify not getting enough sleep yeah so i can see why this

01:07:00.400 would be frustrating and you're like man like we got this guy who's out there telling people about

01:07:04.400 sleep and like making people take it seriously i'm sure it's resulted in more funding coming

01:07:07.820 into the field yeah but structurally speaking it's a huge problem that like if you're a sleep

01:07:13.320 researcher it makes no sense to go out on a limb to criticize this best-selling author because like

01:07:18.340 he's bringing in more attention to the field right the other worrying thing about this i went on the

01:07:23.640 uc berkeley sleep center whatever website and they have press releases on there of you know here's

01:07:29.000 our recent research here's what our findings say and i went through the press releases and the most

01:07:34.360 recent one is from last year and it's this study of 37 people where they found poor sleep might be

01:07:42.380 linked to these proteins in your brain that are a component of alzheimer's it's complicated we

01:07:48.120 don't really know and it's like you know pretty boilerplate press release whatever and the first

01:07:52.940 quote is from matthew walker and he says we've found that the sleep you're having right now

01:07:58.960 is almost like a crystal ball telling you when and how fast alzheimer's pathology will develop 0.99

01:08:05.240 in your brain what i'm like really dude you're on this bullshit still also just like any fucking 0.99

01:08:12.300 researcher who's like this thing is like a crystal ball does not exactly instill confidence and also 1.00

01:08:20.480 of course i like i get alexi's problem because i'm like well now i have to go down like a fucking 0.60

01:08:25.060 day long rabbit hole these fucking proteins and alzheimer's right and you look and it's like yes 0.90

01:08:30.420 they are predictors they are linked but like lots of people have these chemicals in their brain and 0.99

01:08:35.360 don't get alzheimer's it's like web md where you're like i have a headache and then you look it up and 0.64

01:08:40.660 it's like it could be a sign of brain cancer and like yeah it could full fucking dr google but it

01:08:45.620 also could be a sign of like you didn't drink enough water like it in most cases if you're in 0.98

01:08:49.740 middle age and you're not sleeping well it's not a fucking sign that you're gonna get alzheimer's

01:08:53.460 And it's, like, so irresponsible to say that it's a crystal ball. 0.99

01:08:56.220 Also, I hear you on, like, it's so irritating to, like, find shit like that. 0.98

01:08:59.700 And you're like, goddammit, I know this is false, but now I have to go dig around and 0.99

01:09:02.920 prove why and blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:09:04.380 I know.

01:09:04.960 But also, secretly inside, you're like, I get to go down a rabbit hole.

01:09:08.960 Yeah.

01:09:10.360 Oh, this is so irritating, but also, I love it.

01:09:13.180 Merry Christmas to me.

01:09:14.960 Digging in.

01:09:15.920 Yeah.

01:09:16.180 So, look, sleep is really good for you.

01:09:18.980 This isn't really disputed.

01:09:20.060 I should also mention that in contrast to other people we've covered on the show,

01:09:24.280 there's been no accusations of Matthew Walker doing any fididdling with his academic work.

01:09:31.320 So this really isn't a story of like a scientist that goes off the rails in his scientific work.

01:09:36.840 This is about a scientist that is, I would say, irresponsible with how he presents this issue to

01:09:42.980 the public, not necessarily within the field of sleep science. And one of the defenses that you

01:09:48.820 see of matthew walker from people within the field is that you know it's a pop science book

01:09:54.720 so it's okay to sort of exaggerate or maybe cut a few corners to me that sounds like the argument

01:10:00.420 of like well he has a lower ethical standard because more people are reading his book yeah

01:10:05.120 totally i'm like i actually think that if you're an academic who's writing for like people in

01:10:10.320 airports and stuff you actually have like a higher obligation to not oversimplify the science and not

01:10:16.300 make them scared that they're going to get cancer because they can't sleep yeah and it's not a great

01:10:20.900 defense to be like oh yeah don't worry about this book it's just the one that the most people are

01:10:25.260 going to read and believe no that's not ironclad defense it just sounds like dr oz to me yeah it's

01:10:31.480 like oh i had to like oversimplify things for popular audience but it's like we're not even

01:10:35.040 talking about oversimplification we're talking about wrongness like just full misrepresentation

01:10:39.840 of data and of like making conclusions that aren't substantiated and whatever yes so the

01:10:45.600 quote i want to end with is this is also from alexei he says the most common defense of walker

01:10:51.640 is some version of the noble lie argument he brought people's attention to sleep but if sleep

01:10:58.120 is so important why were so many lies needed for people to care about it yeah there you go boom

01:11:04.340 you can hear alexei dropping the microphone from moscow from here it's a really good line

01:11:08.940 clink clink well listen man this has been a great episode it's totally fascinating i gotta run i

01:11:14.320 gotta go get it take a nap because i don't want to get cancer or alzheimer's i'm gonna go do that 0.94

01:11:19.280 this has been great solid work i'm gonna text you a picture of my balls and show you how small they 0.97

01:11:24.100 are michael oh my god to show you what it'll look like if we keep going on like this 1.00

01:11:29.160 Oh, shit. 1.00

Maintenance Phase - December 14, 2021

The ＂Sleep Loss Epidemic＂

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