Bookworm Transcripts

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All right, so we got to go to follow up. Let's do follow up from last week. I will start. So

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one of my things was looking at the 36 questions from the fast friends procedure and that fast friends

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procedure, which is very difficult to say quickly, actually has sort of been named differently. And

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now it's called what increasing closeness. So if you look at it, and this is from the Greater Good

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Science Center, you look at it now, it's about 36 questions for increasing closeness. And I looked

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at these and I think these are a wonderful set of questions. I mean, I think they're an absolutely

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wonderful set of questions. You can easily see how going through some or all of these would really

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help you connect with whoever that you're connecting with, regardless of whether you would answer them

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the same or whether, you know, you would answer them completely differently. You would learn a lot

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about the people. Some of them are like, intense is the wrong word, but I don't have a better word

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for it. Like some of them are like, Oh, wow, like that is a really deep question, right? I'm not so

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sure I'd feel comfortable talking to somebody about that. But overall, the 36 questions are really,

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really good. I recommend I'll throw the link in the show notes. So if people want to check those

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out, they can go to the site at Berkeley, the Greater Good in Action site. Okay, my second one

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was to pay attention to throw away identity comments, which I have noticed has actually been way easier

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than I thought it was going to be. So before, you know, when I'm introing a conversation or

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I'm introing a point, I think about, okay, what phrasing am I going to use? And is that going to be

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a sign of identity that I'm forcing on somebody? Or is that going to be a sign of identity that's

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going to bring us together? And I'm more strategic about that, which actually has been very, um,

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very good. So I'm glad that I threw that out there as an action item. And I've been thinking about this,

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and I want to keep thinking about this because I think when you do it well, it really makes

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that conversation effective or leads into that, you know, the question or whatever you're trying

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to do, the point you're trying to make. And when you do it poorly, man, you can really step on

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somebody's toes and put your foot in your mouth when you're not thinking about it. So those are

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my two action items. Like, what did you have for follow up? I had a couple, which I didn't actually

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get a chance to take action on. One was use do you want to be and then fill in the blank.

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It was heard, hugged or helped. And Rachel and I just did not have a chance to really talk much

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about this. So that's kind of the final version of the like this action item is completed when I

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get a chance to actually explain how this works. And then if she's on board, we build this into,

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you know, how we actually communicate. But we didn't have a chance to do that. We're recording

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this one at a shorter little bit of a shorter window between the last episode and this one.

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And things have been absolutely bonkers for us. We have a couple of kids in a play and was

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basically there all day last Saturday, Saturday is normally our our day to do stuff together. And

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didn't really happen. So the other one was a rephrase common questions to spark deep conversation.

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And I don't have a I didn't have a chance to practice this one either. I haven't been in those

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situations. So I don't know. I don't think I'm going to carry this one over because I don't know

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when I'll actually be able to take action on this one. But I am thinking about that. You know, I'm in

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those group settings. How can I kind of spark some deeper conversation? And by changing some of the

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common questions that they they gave us. But I don't also want to create a template for these.

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I don't want to have like a list of these that I just go to. I feel like I can do this in the

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moment and it'll be just fine. I did check out the Netflix culture deck. So you shared the link to

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the part on the website where they have the current explanation of their culture. But I did

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actually find the old culture deck as well, which was honestly much more interesting.

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There's some really cool stuff in there. And it's a whole bunch of pages. I don't even know how many

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pages it's got to be like 150 to 200 of 200 slides. And they have seven different things that they

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kind of hit on at the top. And then they go into big examples and explanations of what they all are.

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Oh, there's 125, I guess I just pulled it up. So there's seven aspects of their culture,

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values or what we value, high performance, freedom and responsibility, context, not control,

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highly aligned, loosely coupled, paid top of market promotions and development.

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Then they talk about how like just as an example, why that I think this is so great.

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The very first section, many companies have nice sounding value statements displayed in the lobby,

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such as integrity, communication, respect and excellence. Any idea where those are actually from?

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So that would be those motivation signs, these motivation pictures.

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Oh, no. Those are those were actually the ones that were on the wall in Enron. And so the next

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slide is like a picture of the Enron guy being led away in jail and handcuffs. So they're basically

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saying, you know, actual company values, as opposed to nice sounding values are shown by who gets

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rewarded, promoted and let go. So like, this is really cool in terms of setting the tone. But then

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I can also just looking through this, see where things maybe went off the rails a little bit,

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because they talk about how kind of what we mentioned in the last discussion, you just say

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the quiet part out loud. And they talk about in here, let's see, where is that section

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about? You don't want to be a jerk, essentially, but they frayed the way they frame it.

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It was, it leaves the door open to the scenario that we saw, essentially.

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And they could have taken, you know, a little bit harder stance on that. It's kind of interesting

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to see the difference between these and the ones that are currently on the website. They are like

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very, very different, very ambiguous compared to the ones that are in this deck, which I think the

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deck is actually really good. There's just a few things that I would have probably changed a little

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bit. But yeah, like, it's, I think this is, this is really great. I'll grab the link and I'll

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share this in the, the show notes for people who are interested in this. I'll paste it in the chat

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here so you can take a look at it too, Corey, if you, if you want. But I think there's a lot to be

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learned from looking at these, just modifying them a little bit to explicitly call out like,

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there are certain things that you just cannot say. Yeah, I was gonna, I was gonna ask you, like,

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how much modification do you think you would need to do to those? Like you started, you became the

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CEO of some big company, like, how much modification would you do before you'd implement that?

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Um, it's hard to quantify. Well, I think the template is here, you have to figure out the actual

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values that you, you want that those are the things that drive the culture. Like they kind of talk

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about that a little bit at the beginning of, of this deck. But then ultimately they're spot on in

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that like, you want to make sure that you're living these out all the time. So you can't have a value

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that's this thing. And then people act a certain way or they get rewarded for acting a different way.

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And that's, you know, they're, they're really good at giving explicit examples of that. So like,

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they say, we want really high performing people on our team. And that's the culture is they want

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this like excellence in performance. So they give out, they give examples. If you get consistent

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B level results, but you put in a level effort, you will get fired and given a general, they call

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it a generous severance package is how they, they frame it, you'll be given a generous severance

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package. If you get a level results, but you don't put in very much effort, you will get promoted

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and rewarded. Like they actually say that in their culture, like, I can't find the specific spot.

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There's so much in here, but yeah, they talk about there's a whole section on like brilliant

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jerks. So that's kind of where like they're starting to get into the scenario that we, we read about.

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But all they say is like, the ever styles are fine as long as a person embodies the nine values.

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So I think like that's where they need to go a little bit deeper because you could say,

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they embody the nine values, but they still got right through the coals because of something

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that legitimately they should have never said. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, just got to be a

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little bit more specific. But I think for the most part, it's a bold version anyways is really good.

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Awesome. I'm excited. I'm excited to look through it more. Thanks for sending the link over.

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All right. Are you ready to get in today's book? Let's do it. All right. So today's book is called

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Why We Sleep? And it's a by a Dr. Matthew Walker. And he is a neuroscientist and a sleep scientist

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and has done a massive amount of research around the idea of sleep and dreams. And the book is

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broken up into five and there's sorry, four parts and then a mini conclusion.

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And the parts are this thing called sleep, why you should sleep, how and why we dream,

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and then from sleeping pills to society transformed. Those are the four different parts.

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There are 16 total chapters in the book plus a conclusion. And the conclusion's like one page.

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So it's real small. 16 total chapters. So maybe a little bit different than we've done other books

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on bookworm, maybe not, but we're really going to talk about the parts, the one, two, three,

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four parts. We're not going to go through every one of the chapters. And part of the reason why

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I want to lead the conversation in that way is because I think there is, there are so many weeds

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that we could get lost in if we tried to do all 16 chapters that I one think it wouldn't be the

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best show that was ever ever produced just because there's so many different roads we could go down.

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But two, I don't think I don't think the individual specifics are as interesting from this book as

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the general takeaways are from the book. So I think that's the way I want to lead the conversation

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today. He even says this in the very, very like intro section of the book. I should point out

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that you need not read this book in this progressive four part narrative arc. Each chapter can and

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for the most part be read individually and out of order without losing too much of its significance.

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And I would tell you that that is 100% true. You could read these 16 chapters in whatever order

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you wanted to. They stand alone. They refer to research alone. He will refer back to other

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things that he's talked about in other chapters, but you wouldn't miss out other than to like,

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oh, I want to read about that more. So I'm going to go back to chapter two and read what he wrote

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in chapter two. So that's, I think, the direction I want to go. Mike, what do you have before we get

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into part one? Well, I think the sections are broken apart, maybe a little bit weird.

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Like there's a big emphasis in this book on how and why we dream. And I thought that was a little

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bit strange. I guess I was a little bit skeptical going into it that you could really dig

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too deep into how dreams are constructed. We'll get to specifics, I guess, when we get to that

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that section. But the overall flow of it felt a little bit strange. I like, you know, part one is

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obviously a deep dive into sleep itself. Why you should sleep. As we talked about in the

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Pro Show with our evening routines, this is something that has been on my radar for a long time,

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for personal reasons. When I was 18, I was diagnosed with epilepsy. I actually had a seizure while

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standing in line at a McDonald's. Unfortunately, there was a nurse on site who turned me on my side,

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kept me safe till they were able to take me to the hospital, do the tests. And yeah, so sleep is one

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of the things that I pay very close attention to because lack of sleep can be one of the things

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that triggers a seizure. So I am anxious to get to the discussion about that because I'm curious,

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I've been disconnected long enough that I'm curious how that actually hit with you. And then the last

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part about society transformed, like it's in the section title, but it's such a small piece at the

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very end that it was weird to me. Like, I wanted to get to that point and I'm cranking through the

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pages. I'm at like page 250. Nope, not there yet page 280. Nope, not there yet page 300. Nope,

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not there yet. Like, when are we going to get to the good stuff? But yeah, I mean, this guy,

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you look at his credentials, I think you actually said you looked up some talks that he had given

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or something like that. I didn't do that. But tons and tons of research go into this big long

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appendix. He's done a lot of the studies himself, obviously knows what he's talking about. And

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that's kind of evident right from the beginning. We're going to really go deep on this.

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Yeah. Yeah, so I can't remember, Mike, if you and I talked about it, or if I heard it somewhere else,

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so if it was you and I call that out, but somewhere I had heard that like, okay, when you're doing

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thinking work and creative work, you essentially gather all these resources and you think about

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all these things, but then you have these like working documents that have like active ideas on

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them. So you'll have this document that's like, oh, I want to write about creativity. So I have

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this creativity doc, but it's this gigantic working doc and you're throwing resources in and pulling

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resources out and you're linking to different things and basically you're generating ideas

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within this like creativity doc, but you might have that doc and then you might have a teamwork

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doc and then you might have a, you know, sleep doc or whatever it is. And you have all these working

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docs around the topic that you're that you care about. It's kind of what this felt like to me,

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right? So there was a binder that was called sleep. Then there was a binder that was called dreams.

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And inside of that binder, there was basically like the chapter headings and that was a working

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doc. And then the chapters were all written. And then it was brought back together into a book.

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Like that's the way I felt like where it wasn't mapped out from the beginning. And maybe I'm wrong,

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but it wasn't mapped out from the beginning. This would be the flow of a book. It was here like 16

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interesting ideas I have. And maybe there were probably 18 interesting ideas, but we're going to

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smush them into 16 chapters and we're going to we're going to write about them. Not necessarily

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bad in my mind, but that's the feel I got from from reading it. So all right, let's go ahead and

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move into part one. This thing called sleep. Now inside of part one, there are five chapters.

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The chapter titles are to sleep, coffee, jet lag, melatonin, losing and gaining control of your

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sleep. And then chapter three is defining and generating sleep, time dilation, and what we learned

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from a baby in 1952. Eight, chapter four, eight beds, dinosaurs and napping with half a brain.

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Who sleeps? How do we sleep and how much? And then chapter five is changes in sleep across the

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lifespan. So the titles of the chapters are can be quite long because they'll have colons in them,

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and then they'll they'll continue on there. So this whole thing is like basically we're trying to

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understand sleep. Like this is the we're going to set the stage. We're going to set the foundation.

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We're going to try to understand sleep. So what I liked about this chapter was as somebody who

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doesn't know much about sleep other than like, oh, they tell me I should get between, you know,

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seven and nine hours of sleep every night. But other than that, I didn't know much about the

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mechanics of it. I didn't know much about the research behind it. I didn't know much about

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any of that stuff. This was a good, I thought, pretty good chapter one was, or sorry, part one

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was a pretty good overview of the different types of sleep and the different details of it.

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So that's my high level. I'll turn to Mike now and then we can get more nitty-gritty as we go.

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Well, I'm kind of curious, you know, what did you think of chapter one specifically? Because chapter

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one was sort of interesting in that it's a condensation, I would argue, of the rest of the book. He talks

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about the things that not getting enough sleep leads to. And then at the end of that, he talks

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about all the different benefits of sleep. Would you go as far as to say it's like an executive

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summary? Or I think that's fair, but it also feels weird being in the first section. I don't know,

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it's almost like an introduction. That was that was the take I had on it. It was an introduction

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put into part one, which I thought was strange. Like I thought if we'd have pulled that one out,

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it would have made a lot of stuff more like, and we just called it the introduction before we got

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to part one. It would have made a lot more sense, a lot more sense. Yeah, it's also probably as deep

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as many people will want to go on the topic. Dear listener, I think you're going to get a theme

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here. If I'm reading Mike correctly, which hopefully I am, I think you're going to get a

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theme here that like the level of detail in some of these chapters is just egregious. I mean,

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it's like really, really intense, the level of detail and how much he goes into some of these

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studies. If you're into it, that's great. It's a really, I mean, you would just eat this book up.

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But if you're not into it and you're happy with the intro paragraph and then the conclusion

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paragraph, the rest of it just feels like, okay, what are we doing here? We're just turning through.

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At least that was my take on it. Yeah, I think there's definitely room between as deep as he went

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and the summary that you get in chapter one. But I don't know, like those are the two

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logical approaches, I feel, is just give me enough to kind of understand why I should take this

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seriously and do something to optimize for it. And then there's Matthew Walker who devoted his

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entire life to it. Yeah. If I were to try to condense this first section, like a couple of

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the important takeaways from this, I feel the, well, number one, this is a big deal. He talks

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about how insufficient sleep has been labeled a public health epidemic by the CDC. So,

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I take it seriously. There's the whole concept of the circadian rhythm, which is the 24 hour cycle

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for when you feel tired or alert at certain times. And that controls a lot of stuff, your moods,

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your emotions, your core body temperature, your metabolic rate, your circadian rhythms will go

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up and down regardless of whether you sleep or not. And this is the thing that kind of jumped

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out to me from the section on jet lag, because I'm getting ready to go to London is like,

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your, when you take someone out of a time zone and transfer them to a new time zone,

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it takes a while for your circadian rhythm to catch up. So it's not just, it's bright out,

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I'm going to be awake. It's, it's dark out. My body's produced melatonin. Now I'm going to sleep.

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It can really only adjust like an hour per day is kind of the guideline that he shared there,

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which was interesting. But there's also these visuals that go along with this. So there's like

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the process, s s and the process C, which are the two factors regulating sleep and wakefulness.

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The process C is a circadian rhythm. And then the process S is like the sleep drive. So if you've

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been up for a long time, your sleep drive is higher. And then the circadian rhythm, you know,

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that different levels of alertness, essentially, when these things are close together, then you're

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awake when they're far apart on this graph, then you are asleep. There's really not much

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actionable from this other than recognizing that this is how it works. And then gets into like the

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whole idea of the sleep cycles, the sleep cycles are interesting. There's these different levels.

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I've been aware of these ever since I started using sleep cycle to track my sleep. Pro-show

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pro listeners got to hear all about my crazy evening routine and how I track my sleep and all

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that kind of stuff. But essentially you go from being awake to REM sleep, which is basically

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where your brain is more active than it is when it's awake, but there's rapid eye movement sleep.

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And then below that, there's several stages of non-rapid eye movement sleep or deep sleep.

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And I kind of hate how these are all just broken down into non-REM sleep, stage one, two, or three

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and four, even group together. Like, what's the difference between these groups? We don't really

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know other than like the deep sleep is kind of where all the restorative stuff really happens. And

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so this whole cycle from, you know, I'm in REM sleep down to the bottom and then back up,

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there's, it's not like you make these jumps. It's kind of like the slope. The whole thing

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takes roughly 90 minutes, which is why they say eight hours of sleep, eight hours of sleep

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opportunity time. It uses that phrase a lot, doesn't it? Sleep opportunity? Yes.

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Yeah, because then your body will go through roughly five of those cycles. And that's really

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what you, what you need. But then again, like, you can kind of go too far with this, I feel.

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I mean, if you're a new parent and there's nothing you can do about your kid waking you up in the

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middle of the night, you can look at your graph from sleep cycle and you can be like,

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Oh, I didn't get any sleep cycles. I'm going to die tomorrow. Like, no, that's not. And really,

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like there's nothing you can do about that. You just do what you can with what you have and you

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let the rest of it go. So, so I, okay, so I'm glad you did what you just did because I was like,

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okay, I'm not quite sure how far Mike's going to want to take this. Like how, how deep down these

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rabbit holes is he going to want to want to dive down in there? So I've got a, I've got a pretty

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decent idea. So now I'm going to, I'm going to ask you a couple questions coming out of here.

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What kind of type are you? So from a circadian rhythm standpoint, are you a morning type? Are you,

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I forget the names of all of them, but are you the one that like is in the in between or are you

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one that goes to bed late and then wakes up late? Yeah. So there's morning larks, 40% of people

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are morning larks, 30% of people are night owls and then 30% of people are in between.

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I'm not exactly sure. I'm probably in between. I can do the early morning stuff when I started

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getting into writing online. That's what I was doing. I was getting up at 5am. So I could write

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for an hour every day before I went into the office for the family business. I don't think I've

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ever really stayed up super late. I mean, in college, my bedtime was after midnight, but

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that's just the culture that you find yourself in. And when I go to bed now, I'm usually in bed by

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about 10 30. I want to be asleep by 11. I want to be awake by seven. So that's when my alarm goes off

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is seven a.m. And I can force myself to get up earlier if I need to. I've been in different

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seasons of my life where I've like shifted my go to bedtime and my wake up time to be earlier.

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But this is just kind of where it naturally lands. But that's also just not just for me,

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but just our family and family. So you're not doing this in isolation. I think if you were just

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going to try to like, I'm going to implement my circadian rhythm and everyone else just

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do whatever the heck you want. That's not going to work. You got to get kids in bed,

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otherwise they'll stay up all night. My six year old is like, I'm not tired. She's rubbing her

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eyes at nine 30. So like her bedtime has got to be before that. So I don't know. You have to

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give it a take with this. So okay, I am clearly, clearly, clearly the morning type where like I

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go to bed, if I could go to bed on my ideal situation to be eight o'clock, right? Like at eight o'clock,

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I'd go, you know, start that sleep opportunity. But then I'd wake up at four a.m. and be completely

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fine. Like where I've found myself over the years is I will shift the go to bedtime as needed based

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on family and based on like being in college and based on those things. But I'm not as good at

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shifting the wake up time. So it might go to six a.m. But it's usually not been later than six a.m.

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And then one of the things he talks about later on in the book is about how we try to like,

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play catch up on the weekends. So it's like, that was always my philosophy. I was like,

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okay, I'll just, you know, I'll burn a four or five hour a night, you know, during the week.

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And then I'll just sleep until, you know, nine or 10, you know, in the morning on,

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on Saturday and Sunday. And that does never, it does not work. It never worked.

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Does not work. But I am clearly, clearly, clearly one of those early to bed, early to rise.

00:25:21

And it's, it's just ingrained in me. Like that's the way I've always been. And I like it that way.

00:25:26

But kids, right? Like, so kids right now dramatically impact this because I can't go to bed as early

00:25:31

as I want to. I just need to push that wake up time a little bit later. Because right now I wake

00:25:36

up, you know, four, four, 30 pretty much every morning. And it's too early. Like, I don't get

00:25:42

enough sleep. So it's, it's way too early. I'm going to start calling you Jacko, by the way,

00:25:46

with your early morning wake up times. I just don't, I just don't take pictures of like chalk

00:25:50

to work out gear. Right? Like, that's not my, that's not really my style. So if you all don't know,

00:25:55

Jacko will like, will take pictures at like four 30 every morning of his workout gear and put it

00:26:01

on Instagram. Okay, so there's different types of sleep. Okay, monophasic sleep, biphasic sleep,

00:26:08

and then polyphasic sleep. So monophasic is basically, we get one solid chunk of sleep.

00:26:14

Like through, and typically it's in the middle of the night. So, you know, between the hours of

00:26:20

nine and, you know, whatever it might be six AM, then there's a biphasic sleep, which you get the

00:26:25

long night sleep, but then you intentionally or also get like a 30 to 90 minute nap in the

00:26:30

afternoon. Then there's polyphasic where basically you just kind of randomly take little short

00:26:35

sleeps throughout the day. I'm curious, what are, what are you like, what do you, if you had your

00:26:41

way, what would you do? That's a good question. I'm primarily the monophasic sleeper. However,

00:26:51

I have gotten into a routine of taking a nap on Sunday afternoons. Just Sunday? I don't.

00:26:57

Yeah, just Sunday. Like we're at church most of the day Sunday, but we'll be there for AM service,

00:27:03

we'll come home, we'll have lunch, and then I'll usually fall asleep on the couch, take a nap.

00:27:09

But I don't know that I could do that every day. Maybe that's because I like coffee and I have too

00:27:18

much caffeine in my system. I don't know. I will say that the days that I do take a nap,

00:27:24

usually I feel better during the day and have a little bit harder time falling asleep at night.

00:27:29

Okay. I would take a nap every day. Like every day around one 30, maybe two o'clock,

00:27:37

and it would go until whenever I woke up, right? Like I would 100% take a nap every day if I could

00:27:43

take a nap every day. I love naps. I feel so much better when I take a nap. I have no idea if it

00:27:50

keeps me up at night or not. I don't really care. Like I would take a nap every day. So I would 100%

00:27:54

sit in this bifasic sleep pattern. I've actually thought about like, how do I change my schedule

00:27:59

to where I do bifasic sleep? And I just haven't figured out actually how to do that. And then I

00:28:04

also feel bad for my wife because she doesn't have that option. So if I took an nap every day,

00:28:08

she'd be like, what are you doing? Like, what are you doing guy? Okay. You mentioned the REM

00:28:14

sleep and the non REM sleep. I actually noticed myself getting annoyed by REM sleep and non REM

00:28:21

sleep as we as we read through the book. And I understand it's important and I understand it's

00:28:25

a fundamental piece of him writing this book. But like, I don't know, I just felt like we hit on

00:28:31

the idea or he hits on the idea of this, this REM sleep especially, right? Like in this REM sleep

00:28:39

dream thing to where it was like, I kind of got this and I was like, okay, I get it already. Like,

00:28:44

REM sleep's important, right? Like, and I think the reason why he hits it so much or he hits it so

00:28:48

hard is because if we're going to sacrifice our sleep, typically we sacrifice on the tail end of

00:28:54

our sleep, which he would say and the science would say, that's where we do a lot of our REM sleeping,

00:29:00

you know, our dream type sleeping. So therefore we lose that. And then in the very later, we'll get to

00:29:05

in part five, we'll get some of the impacts on that in terms of emotional stability and those

00:29:09

things. And it has a dramatic impact on us. But I don't know about you. I just, I got, I was like,

00:29:14

okay, like, stop. Like, just give me a break on the, give me a break on the REM sleep, the REM sleep

00:29:20

thing. Yeah. In fact, the, the graph that he shows in chapter three about the different cycles,

00:29:28

you can kind of see in the first cycle, you go all the way down to the deep sleep for an extended

00:29:33

period of the cycle. And then the amount of time that you spend in that stage three and four level

00:29:38

gets shortened with each subsequent cycle. The last one, you don't really go down into three or

00:29:44

four at all. And that's the one where you spend two thirds of that cycle in the REM sleep. So

00:29:51

you're right that it is the one that gets compromised if you cut your sleep short. But the other thing

00:29:58

and I think the reason that he just keeps talking about it so much is I think it's in this beginning

00:30:05

section, he talks about how this is not something that every living being does. There's a lot of

00:30:14

animals that don't actually have REM sleep. I forget which ones specifically do which ones don't.

00:30:21

But it's a sort of a distinctly human thing. And then there's a whole bunch of benefits that

00:30:28

come from it. Now again, the question is like, okay, what do I actually do with this?

00:30:33

Try to get as much sleep as you can. And then if you don't get as much as you wanted, like,

00:30:39

don't beat yourself up about it. But just try to control your environment the best that you can.

00:30:46

He does have in the very back of the book, the appendix of 12 tips for healthy sleep.

00:30:52

Pause on this. Pause on this. Let's do this at the very end. I want to do this at the very end.

00:30:55

Yeah. That's essentially a summary of what you can actually do with the information that he

00:31:03

shares here. And then the first 340 pages are largely, hey, this is bad for you. Hey,

00:31:09

this can kill you. If you don't do this, then you're going to die. And then by the end,

00:31:13

it's like, I have a dream. I need pain, this utopian picture of life where sleep is important

00:31:19

to everybody. All right. I have one more for you before we move it on to part two.

00:31:23

Briefly, what would your ideal sleep schedule be? Or like sleep pattern, sleep schedule, like,

00:31:30

what would the perfect dream world ideal sleep be?

00:31:34

I think I'm pretty close to it. It's in bed by 1030 and I'm up at seven.

00:31:45

And I think the thing that I wish was different is like just sharing that. I feel

00:31:53

a little bit of shame in that I get up at seven. Like some people will be like, well,

00:31:59

my kids are on the bus at five 30. So aren't you fancy? And I think like that's kind of his point

00:32:07

is like it shouldn't be that way. But the question really is just like, what is the right

00:32:15

thing for you and get as close to that as you can? And I don't think it's really that hard.

00:32:19

So yeah, this is a long way of answering the question, but essentially, like, I think I'm pretty

00:32:26

close to living it and I would encourage everybody to try to figure it out for themselves too,

00:32:30

because it should be a lot more attainable than you may think.

00:32:33

So I hope I can get to your point where I'm comfortable and like happy with my sleep schedule.

00:32:40

My ideal, like I told you would be eight to four. So 8 p.m. to four a.m. I love the morning.

00:32:48

Like before everybody else wakes up, I love that time. So, you know, if I can get two, three hours

00:32:53

in the morning of protected time, man, like it is, it's just glorious to me. But then I want to

00:32:58

take a solid nap, like, you know, 130 to 230, like every afternoon. I want to, I want to caught in

00:33:03

the corner of my office and I want to take a nice nap every afternoon. All right, cool. So let's

00:33:09

go to part two. So part two is why you should sleep. There are, let's see, one, two,

00:33:15

three chapters in part, part two. So the chapters are what your mother and Shakespeare knew, the

00:33:22

benefits of sleeping for the brain. Too extreme for the Guinness Book of World Records, sleep

00:33:27

deprivation in the brain, and then cancer, heart attacks, and a shorter life, sleep deprivation,

00:33:32

and the body. So basically, we take a turn here, right, in my mind. Like, so we set the foundation

00:33:38

in part one, and as Michael alluded to before, we kind of take a turn here where we start to talk

00:33:43

about like, hey, you're going to die, right? And if you don't sleep well, you're going to die faster

00:33:49

and you're going to die worse. And you're going to, and like, we, we, all the effects of poor sleep

00:33:54

and all of the negative aspects of poor sleep. So I'm just going to read off, you know, some of

00:34:01

the negative effects just to kind of give us an overview as we, as we work through this. So basically,

00:34:06

your memory and your learning take a significant hit in terms of if you're asleep deprived. So all

00:34:12

of this is basically if you're asleep deprived. Okay, so mastery takes a hit. Injury prevention,

00:34:18

quicker recovery takes a hit. Creativity takes a hit. You're drowsy driving. So he calls out the

00:34:26

fact that he has this huge section on drowsy driving and basically it's equivalent to drunk

00:34:30

driving. And you know, you're going to die, basically, because you're, you're essentially

00:34:35

falling asleep at the wheel, but you're doing it in a way where you're like sleep paralysis, where

00:34:40

it's different than drunk driving where you just react slower. You actually are going through

00:34:44

sleep paralysis during that. What else? So he's got all these different emotions swing heavily.

00:34:53

So you're more emotionally reactive than he links it to Alzheimer's. And the fact that we've

00:34:58

get these diseases and cancer through sleep deprivation and we've got weakened heart,

00:35:05

we've got high blood pressure, we've got calcification of the arteries, less growth hormone, diabetes,

00:35:10

obesity. So he's got all these things. So all of that is like the overview of chapters six,

00:35:15

seven and eight. I have written here, sleep eight hours a night, I think three times, right? Like,

00:35:22

so it's not that he said it, but it was basically sleep eight hours a night, sleep eight hours a

00:35:26

night, or you need to sleep eight hours a night, right? Like I have that multiple times throughout

00:35:31

this section. And we said this before, but let's just really call it out one more time. All of this

00:35:36

stuff is backed up by scientific research. So he's not like, I never got the impression once

00:35:43

that he's like a fearmonger, or he's trying to do this to like, you know, excite you in a negative

00:35:48

way or to get attention or anything like that. He's literally like looking at the research,

00:35:53

you know, in a lot of different research and saying, we've got a lot of evidence here that lack of

00:35:58

sleep, sleep deprivation, both in quality and quantity is really detrimental to the human body.

00:36:05

And it's really detrimental to the human mind. And we need to think about this and take this

00:36:09

seriously. So in my mind, I took this as the, hey, be shocked and odd about all the stuff that can

00:36:15

actually happen if you are sleep deprived. Yeah, he's not looking at the research. He's doing the

00:36:20

research. He doesn't have in the back of the book a link to the studies that he's done. Maybe they're

00:36:27

just not published and he couldn't link to them that way, or maybe there's just too many to link to,

00:36:34

but almost every chapter, I don't know, there's like a dozen different studies that he's mentioning,

00:36:42

because he's not diving deep into them. He's like, I did this study with this person to test this

00:36:46

hypothesis. And this is what we found. And so even though like in this section, like you said,

00:36:52

he's explicitly saying these are the bad things that come with a lack of sleep, it's prevalent

00:36:56

throughout the entire book where it's like, so if you go back to REM sleep, you know, we were

00:37:04

talking a lot about that, you know, what, what are the effects of not doing this? And then they

00:37:10

would figure out a study and then they would put people through the study. And most of the studies,

00:37:14

he even like has a caveat is like they volunteered for this study. So we don't get in trouble.

00:37:18

That sort of thing. It's a very negative tone. But again, like I don't blame him for that,

00:37:25

I blame the culture for that where it's just not normal to prioritize sleep and rest,

00:37:34

even though as he talks about later in the book, there's significant costs that come along with that.

00:37:39

I do like chapter six from this section before you get into, you know, Guinness Book of World

00:37:46

Records doesn't even track this anymore because it is so harmful to people. Like it's a it's too

00:37:53

greater risk for the individuals to put themselves through this and he makes the point and they all,

00:37:58

but they do track like the longest freeform fall from miles up in the sky, you know, like that's

00:38:05

fine, but staying awake for too long is not. So I don't know. But there's a section,

00:38:12

chapter six about your mother and Shakespeare knew there's a couple things from here that I liked.

00:38:17

One of them was the story about the piano player and probably that I like this because it kind of

00:38:23

gets into how creativity works and skill development, things like that. But there was this piano player

00:38:30

who was trying to learn this passage of music and they kept messing up when they were practicing

00:38:35

in a particular spot. But then they went to bed and they woke up in the morning and they could play it.

00:38:41

And I grew up playing classical violin and like all the fancy, all these four seasons, stuff like that.

00:38:51

I know exactly what that's like. There's these passages that you got to learn to play because

00:38:57

you're playing it with the orchestra and the harder you try once you get to a certain point,

00:39:03

the less progress you make. And you just get frustrated because I can't play this thing.

00:39:07

And then you go to bed and you wake up and you come back the next day when you're fresh like,

00:39:12

"Oh, I can do this." And it feels really weird. But I think not that there's an action I'm

00:39:20

associated with this. But if there was, it would be where's the balance between the effort that I

00:39:26

put in to develop the skill while I'm awake and then just getting enough sleep and letting it's

00:39:31

almost like a two sides to a coin. You have the focused intentional effort that books like

00:39:37

Peak talk about, 10,000 hours to master a skill, stuff like that, the focus practice. But then

00:39:44

another aspect of that is how well are you sleeping at night. And I feel like you have to consider those

00:39:49

together. But they really are important for high performance and that's illustrated by the

00:39:55

other thing I really like from this section was they mentioned the sleep study with Andrea IgoDala.

00:39:59

And this is not the first time I heard about this, but this was really interesting.

00:40:02

I don't know people who are listening to this now know who Andrea IgoDala is or was. He wasn't

00:40:08

an NBA player. I think he's retired now. He was with the Golden State Warriors, Philadelphia 76ers.

00:40:13

He was kind of like a perennial all-star caliber player for most of his career.

00:40:19

And then he went through the sleep study and they found that increased sleep led to

00:40:25

increase of 29% in the points per minute that he was able to score. His 3.0 percentage goes up,

00:40:31

his free throw percentage shows up, decreased sleep leads to a 37% increase in turnovers,

00:40:36

45% increase in follows committed. I mean, it's probably common knowledge at this point with the

00:40:44

superstar athletes, but you really need to make sure that you're getting enough rest if you want

00:40:50

to be able to perform at that level consistently. I mean, I like how you put it in terms of

00:40:58

it's not like the tone he writes in is not negative. It's more I'm driving home this main point,

00:41:06

like I'm really driving home this point. I like the phrase that he makes to the piano player.

00:41:12

Practice with sleep makes perfect. Because you always hear the practice makes perfect.

00:41:17

It's like practice with sleep, like with good sleep makes perfect. And I really like that.

00:41:23

My action item, not really that it's going to be one of mine at the end, but like

00:41:26

one of the actions coming in coming out of this for me is let's say I want to learn to code or I

00:41:32

want to learn to play an instrument or a language or something like that. I think there's a lot of

00:41:38

value in doing that and then doing it before sleeping getting good sleep. And I think you'll see

00:41:46

advances in that and I would love to. I always want to do like a self study where

00:41:50

I'm trying to learn something and I intentionally like do it before I go to bed and then I try to

00:41:56

you know, get a good night's sleep and then see if I'm better at it in the morning than I was

00:41:59

before I went to bed. The last thing really that I want to hit on in this. I mean, if you

00:42:06

so like I guess if you're going to read this book and you want to be very strongly encouraged

00:42:14

from a physical health standpoint, read chapter eight. Chapter eight is called cancer heart

00:42:19

attacks in a shorter life, sleep deprivation in the body because he goes through all of these

00:42:23

different things and talks about how lack of sleep impacts or good sleep impacts, right? Like

00:42:30

in he talks about certain ones in certain ways, but how lack of sleep impacts, you know, these

00:42:34

different things. I want to call out though that in chapter seven, he gives maybe the best case

00:42:40

for non-rem sleep, right? So and that is the fact that non-rem sleep fights cancer and dementia,

00:42:49

that it helps clear out, you know, the beta amyloids or whatever it is out of the brain for

00:42:54

from dementia and Alzheimer's and that it actually lets your body like produce and filter these

00:43:01

natural killer cells through your bloodstream and into your system that way it kills cancer cells.

00:43:07

So it's like there, I think that is the strongest play he gives for non-rem sleep.

00:43:13

And then most of the rest of the book is about REM sleep. So anything else on part two before

00:43:17

we move to part three, might. Well, one thing that kind of stood out to me, he mentioned this in

00:43:22

chapter one as well, but the less you sleep, the more you are likely to eat because it messes with

00:43:28

your regulatory chemicals. And this was one of the the aha moments for me, I think was that

00:43:35

there's this hormone leptin, which tells you that you're full. And then another hormone,

00:43:40

ghrelin is the hormone that triggers a strong sense of hunger. And so when you

00:43:46

don't get enough sleep, you basically have this sense that you're hungry, like that one gets

00:43:52

amplified. And then the one that tells you that you're full gets diminished. So I don't know,

00:43:59

I've definitely hearing that understanding kind of maybe realize, you know, the

00:44:05

I definitely fall into that sometimes. It's like, I do feel tired today. And I didn't go for a

00:44:15

long run or anything, but I still just can't stop eating. What's wrong with me?

00:44:20

I agree. All right. So let's move into part three. So part three is how and why we dream. Now,

00:44:28

I'm going to give away the farm on this one. Like I was not I did not like most of this section,

00:44:37

right? Most of part three was like, okay, fine, like this is okay, this is good. But like, so,

00:44:44

okay, so it's three chapters. It's chapter nine, chapter 10, chapter 11. Routinely psychotic.

00:44:49

This is chapter nine. Routinely psychotic, REM sleep dreaming. Chapter 10 is dreaming as overnight

00:44:55

therapy. And then chapter 11 is dream creativity and dream control. The one I liked the most was

00:45:01

dream creativity and dream control. That was the chapter I liked the most out of this. But overall,

00:45:06

like was just not into this section. I just didn't get it. So you're shaking your head, no.

00:45:12

You agree? I mean, I assume you agree. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Like there's only so much

00:45:19

to be said about this, I feel. So he makes a strong argument at the beginning, I feel like he talks

00:45:26

about how when we dream, we're acting like someone who is psychotic, we're hallucinating, we're delusional,

00:45:32

we're disoriented, we're effectively labile and and we deal deal with amnesia when we wake up. So,

00:45:39

okay, you have my attention, but then like once you understand how this works, that's kind of

00:45:46

interesting, I guess, there's really not a whole lot you can do to control this. Like what do I do

00:45:53

with this information? I think the one thing that I liked about this and the kind of takeaway

00:46:00

was I've heard from a long time people advocating reading fiction at night because it helps them

00:46:10

fall asleep. But in the dream creativity and dream control section, they talk about people who

00:46:15

kind of got aha moments after they fell asleep and they were basically dealing with problems that

00:46:20

they couldn't solve before bed. So that kind of goes against that advice, I feel. A lot of the

00:46:27

nonfiction books that I read, I like reading them because they are speaking to a problem that I'm

00:46:32

trying to solve or I'm trying to wrap my head around how something actually works. A lot like

00:46:38

Dimitri Mendeleev, which was the the story in here that I liked the best about the Russian chemist who

00:46:43

invented the periodic table of elements. Now he had not slept for three days prior to this, so don't

00:46:48

do that. But he was struggling with how these elements could fit together somehow, but he couldn't

00:46:53

figure out how to do it. So then he finally falls asleep, he has this dream. And what was astounding

00:46:58

to me from that was that he got this whole big picture of how this stuff all fit together and

00:47:05

there was only one correction that he had to make afterwards. That's pretty astounding. But then

00:47:12

also this is kind of linked to how I traditionally felt about creativity. I've shared this other

00:47:20

places, even in the reading masterclass talked about how at one point I said, I guess I'm just not

00:47:25

creative because other people seem to get these flashes of inspiration, like the entire periodic

00:47:30

table of elements that shows up in a dream and they know how this fits together. But I don't

00:47:37

experience it that way. I try some things, I learned some things. My big revelation was that

00:47:41

when you create something new, you're connecting dots that haven't been connected before, so collect

00:47:45

better dots. And this is an application of that, I would argue, what he doesn't get into detail here

00:47:51

is how much information he was collecting and just thinking about in terms of all these different

00:47:58

elements. So I think it's kind of cool to see how you can using sleep and dreaming that can help

00:48:07

click those things into place. But you really can't count on that other than to make it part of your

00:48:13

regular routine. So again, control it, you can control and then the score will take care of itself.

00:48:18

Well, and I would think that he would say by setting yourself up, right? So doing all the front

00:48:25

end work when you're awake and then giving yourself a good sleep opportunity, you give yourself the

00:48:31

ability to go into these dream states, not that you can control it or not that you can have any

00:48:35

kind of regulation of it. But at the same time, if you give yourself that opportunity, there's a

00:48:40

chance these things or a higher chance that these things will come out of it. And I think that's a,

00:48:45

he never says that, but I think that would be a legitimate claim to say, set yourself up well

00:48:49

and then give yourself the time to actually get into dream state, which going back to the point

00:48:54

we made before, if there's going to be a thing that we cut out, it's we cut out this REM dreaming,

00:48:59

this REM dream state. So therefore, he's trying to make a push for that. I liked the fact and I

00:49:06

thought it was really intellectually honest of him. I mean, the very beginning of chapter nine,

00:49:11

he basically says, hey, we can't interpret dreams. Nobody can interpret dreams, right? Like,

00:49:16

trying to interpret dreams, that's silly, right? Like, and he kind of calls it out. And he said,

00:49:22

you know, he's like, you can try, like, think about it, see what it does for you. He's like,

00:49:26

but really, you're not going to, you know, you're not making any major insights there.

00:49:31

I like the idea of these dreams decoding, waking experiences. And he links it to

00:49:39

that the REM sleep or the dream sleep will basically allow us to emotionally tune.

00:49:46

And the way he describes emotionally tuned, I thought was awesome. So he says, the level-headed

00:49:51

ability to read the social world around people, like, so the level-headed ability to read the

00:49:56

social world around you. And what I can tell you is that if I've had a good night's sleep,

00:50:00

I can't link it to dreaming, but if I've had a good night's sleep, I'm just more level,

00:50:04

right? Like a more level all around, like, so crazy things happen at work or with my family or

00:50:09

whatever it is, it just doesn't hit me as dramatically or as emotionally swingy when that happens.

00:50:18

So there's some, at least anecdotal evidence there from my, you know, my own life. I really like the

00:50:26

examples of the creativity that came out of, you know, dreams. He references, you talked about the

00:50:31

periodic table, but then he talks about the Beatles, McCartney writing songs and then Keith Richards

00:50:38

for those stones, kind of with songs. I want to ask you this, do you dream frequently?

00:50:47

I don't think that I do. Okay. Because I don't either, right? Like, I mean, I very rarely,

00:50:53

and they say we dream all the time, we just don't remember them, but it's like, I very rarely,

00:50:58

very rarely remember a dream, like, where I wake up and I'm like, oh, yeah, that was a dream.

00:51:02

Yeah, almost never. And usually when I do, like, when I come out of a dream, it's like a weird

00:51:10

dream. Like, I wake up and I'm like, man, that was strange. Like, it's never one of these like,

00:51:14

oh, I got the song lyrics for, you know, the chorus to this awesome song in my head. It's more a matter

00:51:19

of like, yeah, man, the weirdest thing happened. And like, for some reason, the house was upside

00:51:24

down, but we weren't and like, you know, it's like something, something changed by a piece of pizza.

00:51:29

Exactly. Do you, do you know people or has anybody in your circle, I'll just say immediate circle

00:51:38

or broader circle sleepwalkers? No, not that I know. My one son is a sleepwalker. So like, he'll

00:51:49

randomly come out. It doesn't happen like all the time, but he'll randomly come out. And you're

00:51:53

like, Hey, are you okay? And he just like kind of stares at you. And then you like have to encourage

00:51:59

him to go back to bed. And then you ask him the next morning and you're like, Hey, did you know

00:52:02

you came out and talked to us? And he's like, Nope, had no idea. And I was like, okay, that's great.

00:52:08

Well, I guess something like that happens every once in a while with our kids. But I think that

00:52:14

happens more frequently in kids he talks about. Yeah. And this book, I don't remember if it's

00:52:17

this section or in the next section. But we had one just the other night, actually. So I mentioned

00:52:24

last Saturday, we had two kids in this play production. There were multiple performances on

00:52:29

Saturday. My one son who is 12, first time he's been in a production like this, he had a minor

00:52:37

part with a few lines that he had to recite. And then a couple of songs that they were,

00:52:42

they were choreographed that they were doing on stage. And he walks out. We had been, I mean,

00:52:48

I mentioned at the very beginning, we've been watching basketball, I'm a big basketball fan.

00:52:53

So every night, you know, playoffs around, we're watching, watching basketball. And I don't know

00:52:59

if that's the night that the Lakers were playing or not, but he walks out of his room at like 10,

00:53:04

30. And he's like, what were the two songs that I have to do with LeBron James?

00:53:10

What are you talking about? And then he's kind of out of it. He goes back to bed in the morning,

00:53:17

we asked him, I hate, did you know that you asked us about these songs you were going to sing with

00:53:21

LeBron James? He's like, what? No, that's ridiculous. Like, no, it's true. That's awesome.

00:53:26

That's awesome. All right, let's move to, we'll move to part four. So part four is from sleeping

00:53:33

pills to society transformed. And as Mike alluded to before, we are going to cover kind of a broad

00:53:40

range of things. And it's going to then not hit as nearly as well as he wanted to. And I, I will

00:53:47

agree with him on that on the transformation of society thing. But there are, let me count real

00:53:53

quick, one, two, three, four, five chapters here, and then like a mini conclusion. So you have things

00:53:58

that go bump in the night, sleep disorders and death caused by no sleep. That's chapter 12,

00:54:02

chapter 13, iPads, factory whistles and night caps, what's stopping you from sleeping,

00:54:06

chapter 14, hurting and helping your sleep pills versus therapy, chapter 15, sleep in society,

00:54:11

what medicine and education are doing wrong, and then what Google and NASA are doing right,

00:54:16

chapter 16, a new vision for sleep in the 21st century. And then the conclusion was also

00:54:21

considered to be part of, I would consider to be part of chapter four, because it's one, it's one

00:54:25

page. So I'll start off chapter 12. I hope you don't get mad at me, Mike. I didn't read chapter 12.

00:54:36

I skimmed it, I looked at it, I went through the headings and I went, nope, just like,

00:54:41

because I read the intro paragraph and I was like, okay, sleep, sleep, disorder, sleep, disorder.

00:54:45

And I was like, and now he's going to go do what he's done on the last 11 chapters. And he's going

00:54:50

to go to an insane amount of detail about this sleep disorder. And I'm like, I just don't have it.

00:54:56

Like I'm not going to read about all these sleep disorders. But what I want to comment on is,

00:55:02

have you ever heard anybody tell a story about sleep paralysis? Or have you ever heard of it before?

00:55:08

No, I don't think so.

00:55:11

Okay. And I can't remember if he talks about it in this chapter or not, but it's like,

00:55:13

he talks about it in the very beginning of the book about this concept of sleep paralysis.

00:55:17

Basically, you are awake mentally, but you can't do anything physically. So you can't move,

00:55:26

you can't do anything. And it sounds absolutely frightening. Like absolutely frightening.

00:55:32

Like you have this thing, you say, I want to move my hand and your hand just doesn't move.

00:55:37

Or I want to get out of bed right now, or I want to yell at you and I can't do any of that stuff.

00:55:41

And maybe that's why I didn't want to read sleep disorder chapter because it makes me nervous and

00:55:45

uncomfortable. So I freely admit that I liked the chapter 13 because I thought this one was

00:55:53

more actionable. And you know, so that helped me out a little bit in terms of he talks about

00:55:57

electric and LED light. He talks about regularized temperature, caffeine, alcohol, and then

00:56:03

essentially working and setting alarms and punching the time clock. And I thought that one was a good

00:56:09

actionable one and a needed actionable one as we got towards the end.

00:56:14

Then he goes into it seems as though, and again, it's not that it's not evidence based,

00:56:20

but he seems like he has a pretty big vendetta against sleeping pills, right? Like he is not a

00:56:26

big fan of sleeping pills and using kind of that form to help yourself get to sleep.

00:56:32

Then we get into, I really like the chapter 15 where he ties it into the workplace and lost

00:56:39

productivity and then education. Not surprising. I work in that space. So therefore that was a

00:56:46

more interesting one to me. And then I was very underwhelmed by the 21st century chapter, right?

00:56:52

The chapter 16 where he tries to talk about how we can transform society. I wanted more. I wanted

00:56:58

much more there. And I don't know if he was trying to temper, trying to not be to shoot for the moon

00:57:05

kind of thing, but I wanted a lot more in there. So that's my overview on part four.

00:57:10

Yeah, so let's go back to the beginning here with chapter 12. I agree. I didn't really care

00:57:18

for this section, but there were a couple insights that stood out to me from this. Number one,

00:57:23

he's talking about insomnia and how a lot of people think that they deal with insomnia and

00:57:28

they really don't. Insomnia is having inadequate ability to get good sleep while giving yourself

00:57:34

adequate opportunity to get sleep. So this is where he talks about time, slept, not being the

00:57:38

sleep opportunity time. And the sleep opportunity time is the thing that you can really control.

00:57:44

The rest of it, I think, is a lot of environmental. So put yourself in the best position that you can,

00:57:51

but don't really worry about that a whole lot, I think. And then in the chapter 13 about the

00:57:58

iPads, iPads specifically, you mentioned that you read on your iPad. That's why I was shaking my

00:58:04

head at you at the beginning, you know, using an iPad for two hours before bed reduces melatonin

00:58:08

by 23%. Melatonin being the thing that helps you to fall asleep. So I don't know, there's probably

00:58:15

things that you could do about that. But essentially, what he's saying here is that, yeah, blue light

00:58:19

is is real. And it kind of bugs me when I hear people talk about that. And they're like,

00:58:26

I don't think this is a real thing, because I don't struggle with it. And really, in my

00:58:30

back of my mind, I'm thinking, well, you just are so exhausted that you fall asleep, you're not

00:58:34

getting the quality sleep that you really need, because you're not measuring all this other stuff.

00:58:38

But you're so exhausted by the end of the day that you can just pass out after looking at a phone

00:58:45

for a couple of hours. And that's actually a bad signal, not a good signal.

00:58:48

Okay, I want to pause you here, because I really want to really want your input on this.

00:58:51

Okay. And reason why I really want your input is because I've actually thought about this,

00:58:55

and I don't have a good solution. So I'm hoping you have a good solution for me.

00:58:58

I agree with you. I think I would benefit from reading paper books. But the way I take notes on

00:59:05

the books and the way I want to capture those things, I don't have a good mechanism. And I'm

00:59:10

not the kind of guy who's going to go back through all of my notes that I wrote down in that paper

00:59:16

book and then organize those into some system. So Mike, solve my problem for me. Like, what do I

00:59:22

do here? Because I've got a really good system right now where I've got a mind map and I've got a

00:59:27

book up on the iPad. It's like real clean. Like it's very, very well structured for me.

00:59:33

How do you do it? Like, because I mean, because you put notes in, I've heard you talk about this

00:59:38

before and you've talked to me about this before. You put the mind, you do the mind map on your phone,

00:59:42

don't you? I do. Yeah. So I'm grabbing my phone to jot down a note, but then I'm immediately putting

00:59:48

it back down. I'm not even locking it a lot of times afterwards. So the time that it's in my hand

00:59:55

is not all it's not that much. And I'm not ever doing anything besides just taking the notes.

01:00:00

And I take notes every couple of pages usually. If there's a lot of stuff,

01:00:07

then it's more frequent and I will go through a portion of the book a little bit slower because I

01:00:12

want to extract more from it. But for the most part, I'm only capturing the things that really

01:00:17

resonate with me. I think there are ways around that if you really want to. So you could just be

01:00:22

like I'm, it's okay to grab my phone every once in a while and capture some notes.

01:00:27

You don't have to use my node for that. You could also like, I know Readwise has a thing where you

01:00:33

can take a picture of the section in a book and highlight it and then you can pipe it off wherever

01:00:38

you want automatically. That's an option too. In the reading master class, I talked about how

01:00:45

Sean Blanc has this method. He picked up along the way. I forget the original person who did this,

01:00:50

but it's like a personal book index. So you make a highlight in the book and then in the back of

01:00:55

the book, you tag it essentially. So you have these different sections and then you put the page

01:01:00

number of the highlight. And then when you're done with the book, you could go just grab those

01:01:05

highlights, bring them over into a different app if you want to have a digital version.

01:01:10

Again, feels like more work. If you really wanted to avoid the blue light and you wanted the digital

01:01:16

workflow that you're describing, I would get an eink Android tablet. I actually have one of these.

01:01:23

It's a onyx books tab ultra and it can run obsidian. It can do all sorts of crazy stuff in addition to

01:01:31

taking handwritten notes, which is kind of the reason that I got it. I had a remarkable previously.

01:01:36

And then I got this Android tablet. The problem with that is that you're not going to have

01:01:43

my node, which is a deal breaker for me. There are other apps. Like Xmind is a pretty good

01:01:51

mind mapping tool and that's available on the Google Play Store. So I mean, if I were starting

01:01:58

from scratch today, I might actually do that. But I have 190 mind node files. Like there's a lot of

01:02:07

sunk costs there and my workflow is working. So why try to change it?

01:02:12

Yeah. Well, and will my node sorry not to get on nerd corner, but will my node import an

01:02:18

OPML? Like if I would do an outline, will it import it and then make it into the mind info?

01:02:24

Yeah. So you can see I have my node open right now because I'm looking at the my notes for

01:02:31

why we sleep as we work through this. Let's see. Is there an implied feature?

01:02:36

I don't see import maybe open and it'll just accept.

01:02:39

That would be my guess is that you could open OPML inside of my node and then

01:02:45

with my node and then it would just create the thing from it. I know you can export as OPML

01:02:52

from my node. That's one of the four different formats that I have for all my notes inside of

01:02:57

the community. I'll probably send you a text message later to remind me of the name of the

01:03:01

tablet that you have. So this may be a fun little trip down that lane.

01:03:08

Okay. So let's let's get back to chapter or sorry part four where we're talking about

01:03:14

kind of, you know, how we transition and do different things. It's a little more actionable.

01:03:22

I like. Oh, right. Yeah. Actually, just to pick up there before we got derailed,

01:03:26

I wanted to mention from chapter 14, the hurting and helping you sleep.

01:03:30

Essentially the big takeaway from this is this cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia being

01:03:36

the best option. And those things that he jotted down under that section are essentially the 12

01:03:43

things that are in the appendix. But this is all like environmental design and things that we talked

01:03:50

about in the Pro Show with the evening routines, like do what you can with this stuff. And then

01:03:55

you can't just like force yourself to go to sleep. The harder you try to fall asleep, sometimes the

01:04:00

less you're able to fall asleep. And eventually your body just gets the point was like, okay,

01:04:05

I'm going to do this now. Yeah, exactly. But you can't really do anything in order to get it to

01:04:10

that point other than the chemical, the chemical stuff, what you talked about the sleeping pills,

01:04:14

which don't actually get you to the deep sleep stuff. He talks about how those sleeping pills

01:04:19

and alcohol are both sedatives. So to help you like fall asleep, but you're really just sedated,

01:04:23

you're not getting the restorative benefits of the full sleep cycle.

01:04:28

I was really glad he made this point. Like this is one of the key takeaways. It's like these,

01:04:34

as with most things that they get, not get rich quick, but you know what I mean? Like the easy

01:04:40

button, right? Like as most things are easy button, you're not actually sleeping, you're sedated.

01:04:44

And it's like, oh, that's such a clear vision in my head. It's like, you think you're sleeping,

01:04:49

but you're not really like you're just numb to the rest of the world. This may be think of my one

01:04:55

boy. He'll always come out and he'll be like, dad, I can't sleep. And I'm like, son, well,

01:05:00

you haven't tried like you've only been in your room for like 30 seconds. And he's like, yeah,

01:05:04

I know, but I want to sleep now. And I'm like, well, you got to set the conditions, right? You

01:05:08

know, you got to lay there and you got to, you know, and he just he doesn't doesn't have it. But

01:05:14

it's I just think that's I think that's pretty funny. One of the one of the parts of this from

01:05:18

chapter 13 that I that I hadn't realized and he formalized it more was the idea of temperature.

01:05:24

And the the reason why this kind of rang so true with me is because I've noticed this, but I've

01:05:32

never tied it back to temperature. So you go in a long run too late at night. Well, then you have

01:05:36

a hard time falling asleep and he would say that's because your temperature is too high, your core

01:05:40

temperature is too high and you need more time to like lower your core temperature. Or if this is

01:05:45

the problem I have with weighted blankets. So in the pro show, you talked about having having

01:05:49

the weighted blanket. I love the weighted blanket, but I'm too hot. It typically won't make me too hot

01:05:54

if it's not winter, if it's not the winter months. And even then sometimes I get I get too hot. So

01:06:00

you know, he recommends taking like a hot bath or hot shower or heat on your hands and feet to kind

01:06:07

of disperse, disperse the heat variety getting in into bed. I like that a lot. I he goes on this

01:06:15

pretty good, you know, anti campaign against alarm clocks and how it spikes your blood pressure.

01:06:22

And then when you hit snooze, it spikes it and spikes it and spikes it and spikes it. It's just

01:06:24

really bad for your heart. So that was convicting, which I kind of liked that idea.

01:06:31

I just don't know if I can get on board with the whole caffeine thing. I mean, he, I'm sure there's

01:06:37

a lot of good scientific evidence, but this is one of those situations where I'm not sure how

01:06:41

much scientific evidence you need to present to me. Like, it's going to be really hard for me to

01:06:46

not not do the caffeine thing. I we we both homeschool, right? So therefore it's it's different for us.

01:06:56

But this is something that when I taught K-12 and then even seeing it now with college students,

01:07:00

the shift towards a later schedule, like starting later in the morning and enrolling through. So

01:07:08

we have two major problems is if I teach an 8am class, students are super tired when they come

01:07:13

into that class. I mean, they're really unless you have that one student who will get up at 4 or 5 in

01:07:17

the morning and then like work out and then come to class, they're super tired. But the other thing

01:07:22

is we see this and I forget what he what he called it. It's the parasomething dip in the afternoon.

01:07:27

It's got a it's got a technical term, but it's this dip around one between 1 and 4 pm.

01:07:32

And we see that a lot too. So it's like if I teach a class between 1 and 4 pm, there'll be

01:07:37

certain students who are just like completely completely dipped. And he talks about how if we

01:07:41

would shift this time window to be a more favorable time frame for the circadian rhythm.

01:07:48

He talks about it mainly in high school, but I think it's true. I would say it's true in college

01:07:52

students too. Man, like I would love to run a full scale demo where we don't teach a class before 10am,

01:07:59

you know, or or 9am. And we just see how it goes. And the reason why we don't do that is because

01:08:06

the faculty who are older people want to not teach until six at night or seven at night,

01:08:11

you know, we want to be done earlier than that. But I really think we would see a lot more

01:08:16

benefit from an educational standpoint if we would shift that schedule back even further. Colorado's

01:08:22

done it. Like there are quite a few schools where especially the high school kids, I mean,

01:08:26

they don't start until 830 or or nine o'clock, which he talks about in in the book. But it's a

01:08:31

really interesting concept to me. And I would love to do like a full scale experiment where it's

01:08:35

it's a later, later morning thing. Yeah, that was a, aha moment for me too, was that the circadian

01:08:44

rhythms of kids and teenagers specifically is different and made me appreciative of the fact

01:08:50

that we at homeschool, we can adjust those start times because he basically talks about how when

01:08:54

you have teenagers, I've known for a long time about like the target amount of hours for kids at

01:09:01

different stages. And teenagers do need more sleep than adults. But also their circadian rhythm is

01:09:09

a bit delayed, which is why they tend to want to stay up later. So they're staying up later. And

01:09:16

it's not just the fact that they want to be rebellious or, you know, they're too attached to

01:09:22

doing whatever they're doing. Like they're just not tired yet. But the parents are like, well,

01:09:27

I'm exhausted. So you better go to bed. And then, you know, they're sleeping in because they're

01:09:32

laying in bed, not able to fall asleep probably. And their circadian rhythm is telling them, oh,

01:09:36

you're going to get up at 9 a.m. instead of seven. So mom and dad are getting frustrated. Like,

01:09:40

I remember his story, my brother not telling me about how on a Saturday his, his dad would make

01:09:45

sure that he was like vacuuming outside the the hall outside his bedroom at like 7 a.m. in order to

01:09:52

get him up. And I realized like, yeah, that's, that's not the right way to do it. Now, obviously,

01:09:57

you don't want, I don't know, I guess maybe you can make the argument if they're teenage night owls,

01:10:02

then maybe they they should be allowed to sleep until noon. I don't know. But I feel like,

01:10:08

not that we were ever super strict about, you know, you're going to get up at this time.

01:10:13

Anyways, but I feel like it's a little bit more lax. But also, again, like the thing we're

01:10:18

trying to communicate to our kids by homeschooling is essentially you don't need to punch the clock.

01:10:23

You don't need to have the seat time. I mean, if you're, if you're trying to get a specific

01:10:28

degree, you want to be a doctor or a teacher, you need the letters after your name, you need the

01:10:33

certificate on the wall. That's a different thing. But in terms of doing quality work,

01:10:39

how much you work doesn't really matter. So let's learn how to self regulate. Let's learn how to

01:10:45

manage ourselves, manage our time, manage our energy, manage our emotions in a way that allows us to

01:10:52

do as much good as possible. And I feel like this is very much in line with that.

01:10:56

Yeah. The another one that stood out to me in this section was asking your doctor

01:11:04

before surgery, how many hours of sleep they had the night before. And if they're like,

01:11:09

ah, four and you're like, nope, I'm good today. I'm not going to, I'm not going to have the

01:11:12

surgery today. I was like, this is just not realistic. Like it would be amazing if you could

01:11:16

actually do that. But then they're going to be like, okay, well, we'll reschedule your surgery for,

01:11:20

you know, six months from now. And it's like, well, can't really, can't really do that.

01:11:24

So I thought that one, that one was a fun one. I laughed a little bit at that.

01:11:29

Then there's a whole section here about sleep in the workplace and how there are negative consequences

01:11:34

with if we are under sleep from a work standpoint, from, you know, being less charismatic, from being

01:11:42

less efficient, less productive, and then actually making poor ethical decisions. So

01:11:48

all this was good. We get to chapter 16 and basically he offers like, what could we do things?

01:11:53

So could we get special lighting? Could we get automatic temperature controls? How can we track

01:11:59

data? And he, he calls out a couple companies where they incentivized based on the amount of

01:12:06

sleep. And I thought that was a really interesting, you know, if you slept this much, then you accrued

01:12:12

more days off. Or if you slept this much per night, then they gave you, you know, a bonus or whatever

01:12:19

that would be. That was a really interesting take on this. I mean, I would just be happy with,

01:12:24

you know, a standard old, you know, just like kindergarten, where it's like, hey, around one

01:12:28

o'clock to a clock, if everybody just wants to take a nap, like we're gonna understand, nobody's

01:12:31

gonna, nobody's gonna randomly randomly knock on your door. But you know, that's the, that's the

01:12:36

incentive I would, I would want. Yeah, so that actually the incentives, I think that comes from

01:12:41

chapter 16, which I want to talk about this a little bit, because this is basically his Martin

01:12:45

Luther King style. I have a dream speech about the different levels. So individuals, educational,

01:12:50

interpersonal, organizational, public policy and government and then societal at large.

01:12:54

And he's painting this picture of how our environments adapt around us to accommodate our

01:13:02

circadian rhythms. And he's talking about these apps that are going to trigger these automations.

01:13:09

And we're going to have these devices that we wear that are going to track all this stuff.

01:13:14

And he's describing this. And the tone is kind of like, this is so wild and crazy and out there

01:13:20

someday, but wouldn't this be incredible? And I'm hearing him describe that. And I'm thinking,

01:13:25

like, well, I already do a version of that, I already do a version of that, I do a version of that.

01:13:29

Do you think it's just changed that much since 2017? Because that's when that's the publication

01:13:35

date. So I mean, it hasn't been that was going to be my question was how long ago was this published

01:13:39

and probably at 2017, that it's more, it has the effect that he's that he is intending with this

01:13:48

chapter. But I just want to call out here, like, do what you can with what you have. You don't need

01:13:53

the $300,000 light bulbs that he's describing that eliminate all the blue light, you can get

01:13:59

hue lights and they do the same thing. And yes, they are expensive, but they do the same thing.

01:14:06

And if you read the rest of his book, it's worth every penny because, you know, like,

01:14:10

poor sleep is going to kill me. It's going to, you know, in terms of.

01:14:13

So this is something we don't do currently, but I've done this in the past. In our bedroom,

01:14:20

we have lamps on either side of the bed and we have hue lights there specifically because we

01:14:25

don't want blasting light late at night as we're getting ready for bed. We'll turn off the big

01:14:31

light in the bedroom. We'll turn on the hue lights to 30% or whatever. So we can see what we're

01:14:37

doing still, but it's not, it's again, getting you ready to go to bed as we talked about in the

01:14:43

Pro Show. But then with sleep cycles specifically, you can actually and probably just baked into the

01:14:49

hue app. Now you can use those hue lights to kind of simulate a wake up. Like I had a

01:14:57

Phillips hue light back in the day that was like a gradually got brighter and brighter to simulate

01:15:02

a sunrise and ease you up out of the deep sleep. So you were awake by a certain time. Well, you can

01:15:08

basically do that now on a schedule with these hue bulbs and, you know, a normal light bulb

01:15:14

costs a couple bucks. Maybe a hue light is you can get different packs of them, but if you don't get

01:15:20

the colored ones, maybe they're 30 or $40. So they're significantly more expensive, but they're

01:15:26

a far cry from the crazy bulbs that he's describing. Maybe those are better and they lack some

01:15:32

killer feature. I don't know. But again, there's an 80/20 to this stuff. And in terms of the devices,

01:15:37

the Apple Watch is fine, but the Aura Ring is another one I've seen out there, which is kind of

01:15:42

cool, which can do sleep tracking and a whole bunch of other stuff. And this stuff is not like

01:15:47

just released within the last six months. This stuff has been around for years, maybe not in 2017.

01:15:53

But I bet I've been using sleep cycle almost that long. Like it's been a really long time. So

01:16:00

that's kind of the general tone though, I think, when you talk about some of this

01:16:06

health-adjacent health, healthcare industry adjacent stuff is like, well, there are these

01:16:12

medical devices. I remember this with the family business, like that we worked with

01:16:17

students who were lower functioning and they had these augmentive communication devices,

01:16:23

the boards with the buttons that you could press and they would speak thousands of dollars. And

01:16:27

then the iPad came out, you could do the same thing. And there was a big fight like, well,

01:16:31

that's not actually a medical device. Well, it does the same thing. You could program the apps

01:16:36

to do the exact same thing. But it didn't go through the channels, didn't have the formal stamp of

01:16:42

approval. And it was always really frustrating because it's like, I'm a parent and I can't get

01:16:48

insurance to pay for this thing. So I'm going to buy it out of pocket, but it's $8,000. Well,

01:16:53

thank God now that there's now there's an iPad with this app that I can get for a couple hundred

01:16:58

dollars instead. And I remember actually going to Washington DC and lobbying. I actually set up

01:17:07

the appointments with the senators and representatives to talk about how we need to get the iPad approved

01:17:15

as a medical device for this use because it can do all the things that these other devices can do,

01:17:20

but it's way more accessible. Yeah. You know, obviously we didn't make any progress there.

01:17:25

Well, but I remember this conversation happened with like AirPods and hearing aids,

01:17:30

right? Like when when they became, you know, was it trends? What's the mode? Translusive mode?

01:17:36

I forget what it was. No, it's not. That's not the right word. But you know what I mean? Like

01:17:39

where you can hear through, it's like a pass through kind of thing. Yeah. And then saying about

01:17:43

how like, well, this is essentially for certain people going to replace the $5,000 hearing aids

01:17:48

with a $200, you know, product. So yeah, that's interesting. That's I hadn't thought about it

01:17:54

from that perspective. All right, Mike, let's bring it around. Let's let's finish out the book.

01:18:00

What other key takeaways do you have? What are your action items from from this book? What are you

01:18:06

going to do different? Well, I don't have a single action item from this. I'll give you one thing

01:18:14

that I am noodling on. So this is kind of like a half action item. Okay. So he does talk about caffeine

01:18:21

and the half life of caffeine, how that impacts sleep. I drink coffee in the morning and I drink

01:18:27

coffee in the early afternoon. And I don't drink a lot, but I do drink more than my wife does.

01:18:36

And maybe more than I need to. Okay. So I am thinking about how do I not trying to like

01:18:44

wean myself off to a point where like, I'm only drinking this much coffee. Like that's not the goal.

01:18:49

I drink coffee not because I need the caffeine because I enjoy the coffee. Okay. Every once in a

01:18:54

while, I go through a season where I'll fast for several days and I will completely cut out coffee

01:18:59

and I don't have the headaches. I'm not addicted to the caffeine, but it probably still has a little

01:19:05

bit bigger impact on me than I realize. So maybe that's just decreasing the amount of coffee that I

01:19:13

have in the afternoon. Maybe it's, you know, I start thinking about that a little bit more

01:19:17

intentionally and I cut out that afternoon coffee altogether. Maybe it's instead of the coffee,

01:19:22

I'm actually replacing that with a nap after lunch. I don't know exactly, but it's something that

01:19:28

I'm thinking about. Okay. All right. Mine is basically, I want to try to sleep eight hours a night.

01:19:34

So there's a pre-step to that one. And the pre-step to that one is I need to think about the plan

01:19:40

and what are my commitments in the early morning? And then if these are my commitments in the early

01:19:46

morning, what's the time I would need to go to bed? And what needs to give? Because something's

01:19:51

going to have to give like I'm not going to be able to go to bed that early. So do I need to bump

01:19:55

the other activity? Do I need to take a season and just not do that activity? I need to think

01:20:01

hard about that one. So my action item is going to be thinking hard about how do I actually get

01:20:06

eight hours of sleep every night? And then help me, because I can't remember if they, if he actually

01:20:12

said this specifically, if I would do like six hours at night in like a two hour nap,

01:20:16

he's saying it's not the same because I'm still missing that REM sleep at the end, right? I need

01:20:21

that eight hour chunk-ish, the eight hour chunk. I was hoping I could theoretically, but I

01:20:26

I don't know. I feel like you kind of have to experiment and practice with this stuff.

01:20:30

So I would do an experiment, you know, do one night where you get six hours and then two hours

01:20:37

and see how you feel. All right. So not a ton of action items out of this book.

01:20:41

Let's go to style and rating. So it's my book. I'll go first.

01:20:47

Here, I'm torn on this one. Like I'm really torn on this one because I think there are some gems

01:20:52

in here. I think there are some gems hidden inside 380 pages. So some of the gems that I'll call out,

01:21:02

right? You know, he said, when sleep is abundant, mind's flourish. When it's deficient, they don't.

01:21:07

He calls out the fact that lack of sleep is a slow form of self euthanasia.

01:21:12

Like, I mean, there are just there are some of these gems in here where and he backs it up with so much

01:21:17

good research and incredible research that you really want to listen. Like I really want to listen

01:21:25

and take action on the things he says. And I want to prioritize sleep because there's one

01:21:31

part he talks about diet, exercise, and then the third pillar is sleep. And we don't often talk

01:21:34

about the third pillar. We talk about diet and exercise all the time. We don't talk about that

01:21:38

that sleep pillar. So I think there's so many of these gems that I come out and I go, man, I really

01:21:43

like, I really like what's here. But it's just packaged in so much of what felt like I want to

01:21:51

tell the world about all the cool research I've done over my 20, 30 year career. And I need an

01:21:58

outlet for that. And I'm going to do that outlet in this book. And like, that rubbed me in a way

01:22:04

that just wasn't like I didn't like it rubbed me the wrong way in terms of I didn't think it was

01:22:08

necessary. So that's not necessarily a knock on him or on the quality of the book. It's a knock on

01:22:14

my liking of the book. So this is a gigantic disclaimer that said there are some really,

01:22:19

really good gems in here that are packaged in a package that's what I think is way too large.

01:22:24

And what I'm trying to figure out is how how low does that knock my rating? Because if I come

01:22:31

out with like a super low rating, you're going to think, Oh, the book's not good at all. And it's

01:22:35

like, no, it's not true. I think I think the book is good. I just like, what I recommend you read

01:22:40

this book? No, I would not like I would not go to my go to a bunch of people and say, Hey,

01:22:44

here's a great one. Right. Go read why you sleep. But what I would what I would recommend is,

01:22:48

let me tell you about why we sleep in 15 to 30 minutes. And you're good. Like, and I think

01:22:56

you're going to be a okay. So what I'm trying to figure out, Mike, and I'm trying to process

01:23:01

verbally right now, like out loud externally and verbally. I mean, I really think I'm at a

01:23:06

two and a half on this one. Am I allowed to do halves? I can't remember. Am I allowed to do half?

01:23:10

You can do half. Yeah. Like I'm at a two and a half. I sit right in the middle of it.

01:23:13

All right, in the middle of the zero to five, you know, rating. So that's where that's where I'm

01:23:19

going to land Europe. All right. I'm going to rate it three stars because I'm not going to do halves.

01:23:26

But that's just me personally. And the because I want to use the stars in obsidian as a property

01:23:32

field and he can't do a half star. So I agree with a lot of what you said. There's a lot of good

01:23:42

information in this book. I don't think I really enjoyed it all that much. You know, the subtitle

01:23:51

is why we sleep. Subtitle is unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. The subtitle should really be

01:23:56

scaring you to sleep or something like that. Like if you don't, all this bad stuff is going

01:24:05

to happen to you. So knock it off and go to sleep. You're really, you're really just killing

01:24:10

yourself, right? Like that's the, that's the. Yep. Yep. But I think that if you're Matthew Walker,

01:24:18

this is almost like your business card. Not just a book that you are writing to help people. I do

01:24:27

think it probably can be helpful. And maybe that aggressive tone that he's got to take is just because

01:24:32

this is by the time you get someone to actually pick up a book on this, you really got to establish

01:24:39

like, Hey, pay attention. This is a really big deal. Again, my situation is a little bit different.

01:24:44

So don't have to do that with me, which is why I felt kind of ridiculous and very sensationalized

01:24:51

for most of it. But the things that he's saying are not, are not sensationalized. It's just a really

01:24:57

big deal. He's done all of the research. I will say the research itself, I got, I got bored with.

01:25:04

Like there's so many mentions to studies. And there's nothing like really sensational about a

01:25:11

lot of the results. It's like we did this study, we saw this percent improvement, we saw this percent

01:25:18

degradation. And you hear that, you know, a hundred times, and it kind of starts to sound the same.

01:25:24

But I'm not in the educational field or the medicinal fields that he's speaking to. So if

01:25:31

you're a doctor, maybe like you could read that stuff all day. And it's interesting to you. Like

01:25:35

I started toin it out after a little bit. The other thing is I feel like the style, he's a pretty good

01:25:42

writer, but I empathize for him because it's really hard. Like every single chapter, he has a

01:25:49

single sentence at the beginning to try to grab you and hook you, which I feel like he does a pretty

01:25:53

good job. And then immediately it goes into the research. It's almost like he knows I'm going to

01:25:58

lose him when I start talking about the research. And I feel like he writes in a style that is very

01:26:06

entertaining. But again, there's only so much you can do with the format that you've chosen and keep

01:26:12

coming back to the research. So by the time you get to page 340, it's kind of like, okay, you know,

01:26:18

it hits different at the beginning than it does at the end. Again, that the tone, not there's anything

01:26:24

necessarily wrong with the tone, but just like the whole format of the book. I feel like if you're

01:26:29

trying to pick up something that is edgy, what is that the edutainment? Like it's educational,

01:26:35

but it's still kind of fun. Like this is not that book. I would agree. I don't know what that book

01:26:40

is. I have not found a great book about sleep, even though it's really something that I pay very

01:26:47

close attention to. So I don't know, maybe, maybe I should write it. I don't have the research, though,

01:26:53

I like if there's one guy to write a book on sleep, it's Matthew Walker. I say just take his book

01:26:59

and just make it more entertaining. Sure, sure. Yeah. I don't know. You could definitely get the

01:27:06

gist of what he's talking about in the single chapter. You know, that's what I told my son

01:27:09

when I was talking about it yesterday. Like there's some aha moments here about the teenagers,

01:27:13

circadian rhythms being pushed back. He's like, Oh, really interesting. Like those are the kind

01:27:17

of conversations I have with my kids that he actually is interested in this, this sort of stuff.

01:27:22

But then like, he's like, well, what do you think of it overall? I'm like, Oh, it's probably like

01:27:26

a 10 page blog post. I told a guy this morning when I was talking about it, I was like, it's a

01:27:32

14 page PDF, right? Like, and I literally said that same phrase. That's funny that you said a 10

01:27:36

page blog post because that was the way I described it to. Yeah. So three stars decent,

01:27:43

I don't know, not super entertaining, but if you really want to dive into the science of sleep,

01:27:49

this is probably worth your time, but 340 pages. I mean, come on, this is a long book. This is not

01:27:54

an easy read. No, no, you're getting into it. Definitely. All right. So let's go ahead and put

01:28:00

why we sleep on the shelf. Mike, you have the next book. So what are we doing for our next book?

01:28:06

I do. And I apologize. I already picked. I just railed on this one for being long,

01:28:11

but the next one's long too. We have we have a full two weeks on this one. So that's true.

01:28:16

That's true. So the next one is super thinking by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann.

01:28:23

This is one that was recommended to me a long time ago. And as I mentioned, reading

01:28:28

masterclass, usually when someone I respect recommends a book, I buy it immediately. So it's

01:28:32

been on my book shelf for a long time. But then I share an office at the co-working space with

01:28:35

a designer for DuckDuckGo. And he had the book also and I was like, Oh, how'd you hear about that?

01:28:40

Oh, Gabriel Weinberg is the CEO of DuckDuckGo. Oh, interesting. So I've got multiple

01:28:46

recommendations for this now, but it's basically a big book on mental models. I started this last

01:28:50

night. I think it's going to be a pretty easy read. Good. All the mental models, by the way,

01:28:54

if you're taking notes on this, they're all listed in the order that they appear and then like the

01:28:59

inside cover. So that may help you with your mind mapping or note taking. You definitely don't

01:29:05

want to try to capture everything that sounds like it might be important with this. It's essentially

01:29:09

kind of like a reference work for mental models. So I think probably what we'll do is we'll

01:29:13

just broken on to different sections. We'll just pick some of our favorites from the

01:29:17

different sections and talk about it that way. But I love me some mental models.

01:29:21

Awesome. And this one so far is a good one.

01:29:23

Awesome. I'm excited for it. Then in two episodes from now, we are going to cover

01:29:29

Scarcity Brain by Michael Easter. So that's my book. I've read some Michael Easter. I've read

01:29:33

a Michael Easter book before the comfort crisis. And this one's his new one out. And it looks

01:29:39

pretty good in terms of thinking about how your brain works and sort of the dopamine cycle and

01:29:45

the recursive cycle of the way you think through different things. So that'll be the one two episodes

01:29:50

from now. So feel free to pick those up if you're reading along with us. And we'll do Super Thinking

01:29:56

by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann for the next one. Mike, do you have any gap books

01:30:00

between now and the next episode? I have a stack of books that I want to read as gap books, but I'm

01:30:06

nervous to pick one for having to read Super Thinking as well. Because again, that one is

01:30:13

over 300 pages. It's a pretty big book. I want to make sure I have enough time to get through that.

01:30:17

So that's what I'm focused on. If I am able to start a gap book, I will mention it next time.

01:30:21

How about you? So I said last time that liminal thinking was my gap book. I read maybe like 10

01:30:28

pages in liminal thinking and I was like, oh, this could be good. I'm going to like this. Like,

01:30:32

everything's going to be great. And then why we sleep just completely took over the rest of my

01:30:37

time. So I'd like to keep liminal thinking on the gap book priority chain. We'll see if I have time

01:30:44

with it with super thinking and how quickly I can work through super thinking. So liminal thinking

01:30:50

would be the one that I'm still up there. Awesome. Well, that does it for another episode of Bookworm.

01:30:58

We want to thank everybody for listening along and thank you for reading along.

01:31:02

If you want to know or want to hear more, we have a pro show. So in the pro show today,

01:31:08

we talked about our sleeper or sorry, our bedtime routines. We talked about our bedtime routines

01:31:13

before we try to go and get some good sleep. You can go figure out more and access the

01:31:18

pro show at patreon.com/bookwormfm. So patreon.com/bookwormfm. If you're interested in that,

01:31:27

that comes with not only the pro show, but the bootleg, a wallpaper. What else am I forgetting, Mike?

01:31:35

I think that's it. We're going to do some member special episodes pretty soon, but we haven't

01:31:40

scheduled those yet. We're going to go through the 36 questions that we found in super communicators.

01:31:46

And I think we might go back and talk about liminal thinking as well. So sounds good. Those

01:31:52

will be in the pro feed for people who sign up for that. When you sign up for patreon, it's seven

01:31:57

bucks a month and you get access to the feeds. You just plug them into your podcast catcher of choice

01:32:02

and can download the episodes. Wonderful. So we'll put why we sleep on the shelf. We'll get super

01:32:09

thinking out and we will prep for next time. So thanks everybody for listening.