Maintenance Phase - The "Sleep Loss Epidemic"

Episode Date: December 14, 2021

Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" was one of the most popular and acclaimed wellness books of 2017. There's just one problem: Much of it isn't true. Thanks to University of Ottawa Postdoctoral Fellow Dylan Smith for helping us with the research!Support us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreLinks!Walker's TED TalkAlexey's blog post: Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual ErrorsWalker’s ResponseTrouble With TEDDoes daylight savings kill people?Why We Sleep: A Tale Of Institutional FailureIs Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors?Up All Night: The science of sleeplessnessExploring the Necessity and Virtue of SleepWhy Do We Sleep?Siesta in Healthy Adults and Coronary Mortality in the General PopulationA Chronobiological Evaluation of the Acute Effects of Daylight Saving Time on Traffic Accident RiskHas Adult Sleep Duration Declined Over the Last 50+ Years?Americans Are Sleeping More, If Not Necessarily BetterHigh-profile sleep researcher loses paper for duplicationSupport the show

Hi everybody and welcome to Maintenance Faze, the podcast that already knows it's gonna die, you don't have to tell us it's fine. We're a J-shaped podcast, with M-shaped mortality. I always thought of this as an Apple-shaped podcast. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm Aubrey Gordon. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase, where you can get bonus episodes like this month's forthcoming bonus episode where we are doing an award ceremony. Yes, so we're going to do the best and worst wellness influencers. We're going to do

the best and worst wellness trends of 2021 and we have been taking nominations and we are really excited to dive in and give the uh smelly moon juice crown to somebody. Why is it smelly? I don't know I don't know where I was going with that I just I just was talking. I don't know either but I like it. Okay we we just learned like 30 seconds before we started recording that I had switched topics for this week and I thought that I told you but I did not in fact tell you. So I was supposed to do an episode on obesity and COVID but I got sidetracked and pulled by my own gravity

down a different rabbit hole. This week, Aubrey, we are talking about the science of sleep. We're talking about a sleep influencer. This is so good because I'm like a person who historically has had a hard time with sleep. I come from a family of people who historically have a hard time with sleep. So in our family, there are all kinds of things about like you got to do screen time., you gotta set an alarm for yourself for when you wind down. All of these little hacks, and in the back of my mind,

I'm always like, this all seems like maybe bullshit. It's mostly garbage, but we'll talk about it. Um, but tell me, first tell me about your, what is your sleep, like what kind of sleeper are you? Mostly it's just related, like I'm a person with just a nice little array, a little shark cutery platter of anxiety disorders. Nice. kind of sleeper are you? Mostly it's just related to like, I'm a person with just a nice little array, a little shark cutery platter of anxiety disorders. Nice.

So mostly it's like anxiety and sleep, not being able to turn your brain off, that kind of stuff. Which I think is not a, I'm not alone in that. Oh yeah, that's called being a millennial. I think that's the term for the condition. Dara, are you an eight hour person? Or you would, how many hours a night are you aiming for?

I think eight hours, but in an uninterrogated way, where I'm like, that's the number that people say is the number that you should have. Right. I think I probably feel my most rested at like nine hours, but that almost never happens. Right. How about you?

You're an early riser. I'm also, I'm a seven hour person. I mean, all of us get this sort of eight hours of sleep, you know, six glasses of water a day. Like there's these kind of numbers around health that we all hear growing up. And I'd always heard eight hours. I would just sort of set my alarm. Like, if I'm going to bed at 11, I set my alarm for seven. Yeah, same, same. And then I remember I read somewhere, heard somewhere in college that it was like, not everybody needs eight hours. And like, some people only need seven hours or like even less. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna try getting seven hours. Instead of eight hours, so I started setting my alarm

for seven hours and I noticed no change. I haven't felt tired, so I've just been a seven hour guy ever since. Sure, sure. But the thing that starts happening in your 30s is your body at just four in the morning will just be like, we're up now. So I also, like, I also have the normal ageing millennial thing

of like, oh, sleep is gonna be a thing that I think about way more in my 30s than I did in my 20s. Yeah, this is a thing where I'm like, I feel very aware of, oh, this is how it's gonna be from here on out. Yes, our bodies are decaying husks. That's the lesson for this episode.

Delightful, the slow march to death has begun. He's back. So, okay, before we get to this specific wellness influencer, we have to talk with a science of sleep, which is actually like really cool because a lot of it sounds fake. So, no one still kind of knows why we sleep. Like, there's a lot of cock-a-mamae theories

about like evolution and, you know, we would fall asleep at night to like avoid predators or like, I don't know, these kind of like conjecture little theories. But none of them really makes sense because sleep seems to have evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. Like, basically every vertebrate sleeps. Where are we differ is how different organisms sleep and how much we sleep. So elephants only need four hours of sleep at night, whereas lions and tigers need 15. This is one of the ones that sound fake. Dolphins sleep with half of their brain at a time.

Nope, bullshit. I know. Yeah. Like I trust you and I believe you, my instinctual response is like, no, that's a lie. I was typing in the Wikipedia address with one hand and making the wanking motion with the other. I was like, half a fucking brain, fuck outta here.

There's also another super fake one, is that there's birds, there's like bird species that will do micro-sleeps for like 30 seconds at a time. Like sometimes like while they're in the air, which again, it sounds fake but is true and lit. Birds, nature's pre-uses. Exactly. Yes. So I guess the thing is like monkeys and apes species sleep a lot longer than us. So the the current theory is that humans sleep less but we sleep much more efficiently. Do you get the thing where right when you're about to fall

asleep, you get like a little twitch? Yeah, it's a hypnic jerk, right? Oh, I got you knew the thing where right when you're about to fall asleep, you get like a little twitch? Yeah, it's a hip-nick jerk, right? Oh my god, you knew the term? Here's how the fuck I know it. Don't get too impressed. It's in a Fiona Apple song. I don't really know it. It's just in lyrics to a song that I really like. Those are basically like a universal feature of the human experience. Yeah, an old professor might because I did some sleep studies when I was an undergrad. to a song that I really like. Those are basically like a universal feature of the human experience. An old professor, because I did some sleep studies

when I was an undergrad. My professor said that they were the last of the day's energy leaving your body. What? Which is total bullshit that he made up. Like there's no- there's no- there's no- there's no- I was gonna say. The college professor.

But it's like, it's a fun theory. There's basically, there's no explanation for why those happen, but the sort of evolutionary explanation is that it's one of those things that keeps you a little bit alert if you're sleeping in a tree. Like, it's sort of a way of checking before you go to sleep. Like, am I in a firm place? Oh.

But that also kind of sounds fake to me, honestly. I don't know. I don't know, either. And I also think, like, listen, all of the sort of evolutionary logic kind of stuff often just feels to me, like, throw in darts at the wall. That's like, it's, like, Freud, where you're like, oh, that's an interesting way of looking at the world. Yeah, totally. So, they also, in the 1950s, was when they started discovering these stages of sleep. Mm-hmm.

I guess the way that they found out was that, like, somebody was sleeping in another person's sleep lab lab and they noticed their eyes were darting around as if like they were watching tennis or something. Oh, this is where we get REM sleep, huh? That's what REM sleep is. It's literally rapid eye movement, like you're looking around as if like things are happening around you. And I guess if you measure people's brain waves,

REM sleep looks like they're awake. It looks like normal thought patterns or at least like something very close to normal thought patterns. But then of course there's like all these, there's three stages of non-rim sleep. Like, that's when you sort of like defrag your hard drive of your memory and your experiences and stuff.

Another thing that sounded super fake was you read these things that are like, you sleep to clear your brain of toxins. And I was like, toxins, like everybody calm down. But then you look it up and it's like, no, there are actual like named identified proteins in your brain and your spinal fluid literally like washes into your brain and flushes them out. What? Dude, it sounds fake as hell,

but they don't know this in humans. But in mice, their brain actually like physically shrinks when they're sleeping like it's being like wrong out. That's bananas. And what I was about to say before you were like, it's true. I think toxins are a red flag word for this podcast on the order of like a magazine or newspaper feature

that where the headline ends with a question mark. Well, I know totally. We're like, no. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. The new miracle drug question mark. So the interesting thing about like health and sleep is that both of these stages are important.

This deeper non-REM sleep and REM sleep are both, they both have these restorative, important properties. One thing we're gonna talk about a lot of this that is debated in the science of sleep, but one of the things that isn't debated in sleep is that it's really good for you. Sleep deprivation is really bad for you.

It wreaks havoc on your immune system. Everything just sort of gets thrown off when you haven't slept and sleeping, like you need sleep to live. Yeah. So I'm gonna send you a little excerpt read. Yes, yes, yes. So this is from a sleep researcher named Jade Wu.

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

After much rigorous work, they did not say you should get 8 hours. Rather, they said things like, quote, for teens, we recommend 8 to 10 hours, but anywhere from 7 to 11 hours may be appropriate. Notice how there is up to a 4 hour range in their recommendation. That's a lot. Also, notice how they specified the age group they were speaking to. For newborn babies, the quote unquote,

maybe appropriate range is 11 to 18 hours for seniors over 65 that ranges from five to nine hours. The takeaway message is twofold. Not only do healthy sleepers differ from each other in how much sleep they need, but healthy sleepers also change their sleep leads over time. Really boring message. But like, make sense, right?

Like, your grandma sleeps less than the baby in the family. And also, like, how much sleep do I need? Well, it depends. I mean, so here's the thing about sleep and about eating both, is that you have this sort of built-in alarm, right? If you're not done eating, you still feel hungry. Yeah, right? If you're not done eating, you still feel hungry. Yeah, exactly. If you're not done sleeping, you still feel tired, right?

Like, there's this desire for some sort of like mandate, some scientific clarity. I think the clarity is maybe just in your body. One of the sleep researchers that I spoke to, he said, it's a really boring message, but the fact is we know that it's really good for you to get a good night's sleep. But what a good night's sleep means is different for different people. The institutional recommendation is that quote-unquote normal adults need seven to

nine hours a night. There's also, I mean, everything is a bell curve, right? So like this sleep researcher told me that like, yeah, if you're sleeping like five or six hours a night, and you're feeling good all the time, and you're not like super struggling to get out of bed, and just like dying, whenever the alarm goes off, then like, yeah, you might just be somebody who needs less sleep than other people. And it's the same if you're sleeping nine hours a night.

Like, yeah, you might just need more sleep than other people. Yeah, I think as we're talking about this, I'm like, it sounds like you're on the seven end, and I'm on the nine end. Generally speaking, and that'm on the nine end. Yeah. Generally speaking, and that's like fine and normal. The problem is that it's very hard to write best-selling books and become a wellness influencer,

telling people that like they should listen to their bodies and like it depends. Are we about to get into grifty territory, Mike? We have to meet somebody now. We have to meet the heavens now. We have to bring individuals into the story. All right. So I am going to send you, I'm sorry to do this to you.

I'm going to send you a link to a TED Talk. Right now. I apologize for what I'm about to do to you. That text that you sent me where you're like, I hate that I'm serious about this, but we should get you a TED Talk is maybe the funniest text I've ever gotten because I know how much that pains you to say. I remain staunch in both of those beliefs. It sucks and you should do one.

So I'm going to send you two links. We're going to watch two short clips. Oh, I can't wait. Thank you very much. Well I would like to start with testicles. Men who sleep five hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who sleep seven hours or more. What? I know.

In addition, men who routinely sleep just four to five hours a night will have a level of testosterone, which is that of someone 10 years their senior. So a lack of sleep will age a man by a decade in terms of that critical aspect of wellness. This is the best news that I have for you today. Sleep unfortunately is not an optional lifestyle luxury. Sleep is a non-negotiable biological necessity. It is your life support system and it is Mother Nature's best effort yet at immortality. And the decimation of sleep throughout industrialized nations is having a catastrophic impact on our health or wellness.

Even the safety and the education of our children. It's a silent sleep loss epidemic and it is fast becoming one of the greatest public health challenges that we face in the 21st century. Oh God. Uh, what, tell me what you just saw. So he's like a white dude. Uh, he's a thin guy. He's got blonde hair. It sort of swooped off to one side.

He is, as you have noted, a very slow talker. I've been watching him on 1.75 speed all week. Yeah, good idea. And now I'm just like, oh my fucking god. a very slow talker. I've been watching him on 1.75 speed all week. Yeah, good idea. Now I'm just like, oh my fucking god. He's talking at the rate of someone who seems sleepy. Buh. I mean, he's blonde, he's blue-eyed, like he's very

conventionally attractive, and very good at presenting his ideas, right? He opens with like a cute little icebreaker. He's got you, like, I I'm gonna start with the testicles and then he does a bunch of stuff in the middle that we skipped and then at the end, he's got your sort of call to action and the broader scope. I think this is all the stuff of this sort of like

Ted Talkie kind of era, which is just like a bunch of interesting tidbits and anecdotes sort of sound and fury signifying nothing. It struck me as the kind of shit that we talked about with like mortality statistics. This kind of person lives this long. Okay, so then what? What's instructive about this?

This is the problem with doing a podcast with somebody smart. You're like Mike, I know all of your twists and events. Oh, delightful. Some of the science is gonna turn out to not be super watertight. I think what you and I are sort of informally doing is like compiling a list of things to be skeptical of.

Yeah, and one of them is this kind of mortality. Little nuggets about mortality. Where I'm like, okay, so then what? So this gentleman that we just met is named Matthew Walker. It seems like he basically has spent his entire career working on sleep. He started out in a lab for a PhD where he was trying to differentiate between different types of dementia and he was looking at people's brain waves and he realized that there was like no difference in their brain waves.

But then he realized that you could measure their brain waves while they were sleeping. And if you measured their sleeping brain waves, you could tell that they were suffering from different types of dementia. I guess there's like Parkinson's dementia, there's different ways that this presents. And since then, he's just gotten more and more prominent in the field of sleep. So he goes to Harvard after his PhD.

And then eventually he's offered a post at Berkeley where he now runs like a sleep lab. It's like the Berkeley sleep center or something. And he's one of the most prominent sleep researchers in the field. So this is not like a journalist parachuting in interloper. This is like an actual scientist who has published dozens of articles in very prestigious scholarly journals. I love that you're like, this isn't like a journalist parachuting in interloper.

And I was like, like us? Like some fucking podcaster. Sitting in their mom's closet. So in 2017, he publishes the book that will be the subject of this episode. It is called Why We Sleep. When the book comes out, it's positively reviewed in the New York Times and the Guardian. It's one of NPR's favorite books of 2017. You know, he's on Joe Rogan's podcast, he's on NPR, he's on the BBC, like, he's just one of these guys

who like, this hasn't really been popularized as an issue before. So he just gets scooped up everywhere. And one of the things I found in like, I think it was in his Wikipedia entry, it says, a month after the book's publication, he became a sleep scientist at Google. Oh, that is a cursed sentence.

Why would Google have a sleep scientist on staff? Nope, nope, nope, I don't know why, but it feels real bad. So now we're going to talk about the contents of the book. I'm going to send you an excerpt from Chapter 1. It's a little bit long, but it's kind of the thesis statement of the entire book. You know I love story time, though. I know, right? You'd like to read.

Quote, do you think you got enough sleep this past week? Can you recall the last time you woke up without an alarm clock feeling refreshed, not needing caffeine? If the answer to either of these questions is no, you are not alone. Two-thirds of adults throughout all developed nations fail to obtain the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep. I doubt you're surprised by this fact, but you may be surprised by the consequences. Routinely sleeping less than 6 or 7 hours a night demolishes your immune system, more

than doubling your risk of cancer. Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer's disease. Inadequate sleep, even moderate reductions for just one week disrupts blood sugar level so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic. Add the above health consequences up, and a proven link becomes easier to accept. The shorter your sleep, the shorter your lifespan. Every component of wellness and countless seams of societal fabric are being eroded

by our costly state of sleep neglect, human and financial alike. So much so that the World Health Organization has now declared a sleep loss epidemic throughout industrialized nations. Sleep loss epidemic. I don't know if that was fat people. Get it straight, public health.

Get in line, man. I know. I'm next to be the greatest public health challenge. I'm a fat person who sleeps great. You're giving me next messages. What about me? This also seems like one of those things again in the like informal book of things to be skeptical of. This kind of stuff where it's like every possible cause of death or ill health is linked to this one thing. Am I spoiling something to say like this really feels like he's just talking about like poor people in industrialized nations or like people who have to work graveyard or swing shifts or people. Do you know what I'm saying? Like it's related to sleep but it's not

necessarily about the sleep. Caused by the sleep. Yeah, then it's like, it's probably more likely to be caused by poverty or by a lack of a social safety net or support system. Yeah. Like to isolate sleep and be like, it's about how many hours a night you sleep and if you slept one more hour, but everything else remained the same.

You would be in like perfect health or significantly better health. It just seems really facile to me. He, I mean, he does say he says after 10 days of seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for 24 hours. Nonsense. So I, Michael Hobbs, walk in around as if I haven't slept for 24 hours at all times, basically.

Yeah, that, that's definitely my experience of you. It's just like somebody get that guy a cot. But I mean, throughout the rest of the book, I mean, not only does he insist that like everybody needs to be getting eight hours or more, but he connects sleep and not in a like tenuous, like some of the data's there, in a like this causes that kind of way.

He says sleep causes schizophrenia. He says it causes ADHD. There's a weird thing where he says it causes autism. Oh no. Because I guess autistic kids do actually have different sleep patterns. There's like signatures in like REM versus non-REM. He says this is from an interview

that he gave to his hometown newspaper. He says, by the way, and strictly non-scientifically, I've always found it interesting that Margaret Satcher and Ronald Reagan, two heads of state who were very vocal, if not proud, about sleeping four to five hours a night, both went on to develop dementia. Oh, I don't know, man. That's phrased in the way that someone phrases something where they're like, I know I can't substantiate this. I know it won't hold up to any scrutiny, but I still want to fucking say it. Isn't it interesting?

I'm just noticing. It's just an observation. The main message of the book is like, sleep is super important, and we all need to be getting eight hours of sleep. The second main message of the book is that we're in the middle of a sleep loss epidemic. This is the thing that we're not sleeping as much as we used to because we're on our telephones and we're overworked and stressed blah blah blah. So I'm going to send you another little excerpt. Okay. Within the space of a mere hundred years, human beings have abandoned their biologically mandated need for adequate sleep, one that

evolution spent 3.4 million years perfecting. Visit cultures that are untouched by electricity and you often see something rather different. Hunter Gatherer tribes, such as the Gabra in Northern Kenya or the San people in the Calahari Desert, whose way of life has changed little over the past thousands of years, sleep in a biphazic pattern. Both these groups take a similarly longer sleep period at night, 7 to 8 hours of time in bed, achieving about 7 hours of sleep, followed by a 30 to 60 minute nap in the afternoon. So the idea is that there's these like biological patterns that we should be sleeping like, but we have broken from those patterns.

So modernity, industrial revolution, technology, cities, decoupled us from the way that our bodies want to sleep. It's also interesting because I'm like the thing that you're talking about is capitalism. Yeah, that's another way to think about this, is that people's ability to sleep and therefore avoid these negative health markers is intention with the sort of mandate to produce and to show up in these capital systems, right? This sort of gets to the next thing that I wanted to talk about before we get to the debunking.

The chapter of this book that really stuck out to me was the final chapter. We have both read a million fat panic books the debunking. The chapter of this book that really stuck out to me was the final chapter. We have both read a million fat panic books for this podcast and wellness panic books, and they all do the exact same thing. It's like, obesity's killing us. Our kids can't go into the military.

Their life expenses are shorter, and you get to the final chapter of the fixes, the policy fixes, and they're like, we need billboards, and people need to stop drinking soda. Yeah. Wait, didn't you just tell me this is like a massive problem? And then when I suggest to you that like, oh, maybe we should like expand food stamps

so that people can buy like fresh food for their kids. And you're like, I don't know about that. No, we need a TV ad. It's like, look at how gross these fat people are. Where you're like, okay. You know, he just told you your risk of cancer is doubling. He never understates this problem, right? He's saying this is like the biggest problem

in developed nations. And then final chapter, his first recommendation, like how are we gonna fix all this? How are we gonna get us back to these patterns? He says, we should have more sleep apps on our phones. Right. Right. Right.

Right. And he has, he spends like two thirds of the fucking chapter on, he says like, someday we'll have like machine learning that can adjust the temperature of your bedroom because I guess you're supposed to sleep in slightly colder rooms. Theoretically, we could have a thing where like your home, your smart home, knows that you're like a seven o'clock riser or whatever, so it would set the heat to go up at 6.30 or something. And I'm like, first of all, I don't know that we need machine learning. Like how is it going to get slightly warmer at 6.00 AM? And secondly, it's like, this is your fix, bro.

Like, we're all just supposed to have apps on our phones. Right, and also, have you used those fucking apps? But do those apps are trash? I have used a bunch of those sleep apps, and I'll, like, they're, like, put it on your bed. I know. And every time I would, like, go to sleep and be a sleep for six hours or eight hours or whatever.

And then I would wake up and it would be, like, you got 20 minutes to sleep, but I'm, like, you fucking liar! It's, like, my jogging app, or when I tried to use the jogging apps that have me like leaping across the street like 75 times. And like, you ran 44 miles in 20 minutes and my time.

I don't know that I'd, it just seems like such garbage. I'm going to send you another excerpt from his book. This is one of his big ideas for like the technological fix to this problem. You're going to fucking die. Okay, here we go. Going even further, what if we moved from a stance of analytics to that of forward-looking, predict-delitics? You can see why Joe Rogan invited him on. It sounds like designer in posture pdlite. To explain the term, let me go back to the smoking example. There are efforts to create predict-delitics apps that start with you taking a picture of

your own face. The app then asks you how many cigarettes you smoke on average a day. Based on scientific data that understand how smoking quantity impacts outward health features, such as bags under your eyes, wrinkles, psoriasis, thinning hair, and yellow teeth, the app predictively modifies your face, fuck you on the assumption of your continued smoking. Get fuck! I knew you'd like this. The very same approach could be adopted for sleep, but at many different levels, outward

appearance as well as inward brain and body health. For example, we could show individuals they're increasing risk of conditions such as Alzheimer's disease or certain cancers if they continue sleeping too little. Men could see projections on how much their testicles will shrink or their testosterone level will drop. Should their sleep neglect continue? Similar risk predictions could be made for gains

in body weight, diabetes, or immune impairment and infection. So he's just doing like an app version of like, Faces of Math. Please excuse me, I'm getting notification on my phone. Oh, it's a picture of my balls, if I continue to sleep. It's just a picture of two very tiny balls. Okay, so like, listen, I'm a person, as we've discussed, who struggles with sleep from time to time.

So I see a picture of myself looking like shit, or I see these predictions of like, I'm gonna get Alzheimer's and cancer and tiny testicles apparently. This is not gonna lower my anxiety levels and be like, this is real restful and I should get more sleep. We all know that when you're struggling to sleep,

the most helpful thing to do is to lay in bed and go, I really need to sleep. It's just like, it's not even like an angel in a devil on your shoulder. It's just fucking gremlins being like, you don't sleep here, you're gonna all simers. How's that dementia treating you? I know. Chill out, dude. This is like the main conclusion of the book. There's like, he doesn't really have any like policy stuff.

He mentions vaguely stuff about like school opening times, which are legitimately like, do help. But like, he doesn't really say anything, and it's just really weird and really telling. To some degree, I'm like, I get it. He's a researcher. His job is to research and find out what's true and what's not. It's not necessarily to provide like,

public policy prescriptions or that sort of thing, but if that's the case and you don't have solutions to offer, then don't write this kind of book. Don't write the book, yeah. It does feel very similar to like the mandate to lose weight that we talk about all the time, which is like, okay, but then what works? And everyone's like, mm-hmm.

Well, also, I mean, you can tell from the entire book and all of his pitch in the way that he describes the work in media, is it like he wants to deliver you tips on how to sleep better. Like your room should be slightly colder, or you should set an alarm at 9 p.m. so you start getting into restfulness. He wants to cast this as a public health epidemic, but I think he's doing that as a marketing strategy

to get NPR listening people to take their own sleep seriously. Sure. It's like a fucking Marvel movie. You have to establish the stakes, right? It's like the whole galaxy is gonna die. And then you can get people to care about these characters, even though that doesn't really work in those movies. And it doesn't really work here,

because he's very clearly not interested in the public health aspects of it. If you're positing that something is a societal epidemic in whole chunks of nations, that points to macro level solutions, not individual, like you get an app on your phone and make sure your room's cold enough, right? Exactly. His sort of goal in using that rhetoric seems to be to just like amp up the importance of the conversation, not to say, this is a systemic issue and here are the systemic solutions. Exactly. This is a systemic issue and here are the systemic solutions. It's like, this is a systemic issue. So really listen to what I'm saying.

Download this app super hard. Yeah. Okay, so are you ready for the debunking? I am always ready for the debunking. I'm hungry for the debunking. I am sleepy for the debunking. Here we go. Tell me what you got.

So the book comes out in 2017 and then two years go by. He's on podcasts, the book is acclaimed, it becomes a big bestseller, he does this massively popular TED Talk. And then in November of 2019, we meet a guy called Alexei Guzi. So I interviewed Alexei for this. What he says later, he's like,

I cannot emphasize what a random person I was. He is not a sleep researcher. He is 22 years old. He is Russian living in Moscow. He has just graduated from college. He did math and econ at school. He took like a couple statistics classes, but like he's not someone sort of in this field,

particularly. Just like some guy. Exactly. This is not like an academic debate. This is some guy. So his friend recommends this book to him and he starts reading through it and immediately starts noticing all of the red flags.

And he basically starts like a spreadsheet listing all of these claims that seem like kind of dubious and looking into them. Already like this, already like this guy. Exactly, this is like, this is our people, right? Yeah, yeah, this is the audience surrogate for specifically you and me. Of like this dude, feel like he's full of shit

and I need to spend like 300 hours looking into this. I need to have a weird academic grudge match. Exactly. Like the person I've never met. Yes. So, the first category of error in the book is he starts seeing just like weird baffling mistakes

or things that seem just like on their face wrong. So, in a section on like how doctors make more errors when they haven't slept, Matt Walker says, when you limit trainee doctors to no more than a 16 hour shift, residents make 400 to 600% fewer diagnostic errors. What?

400% fewer. So negatives? We're in negative. Now they're like just doing extra right things. No one knows exactly what happened here, but obviously something cannot reduce by more than 100%. It's not the biggest deal in the world, but this did get published in the Lancet. Fuck man!

Another one is, you know how he said, the World Health Organization has declared a sleep loss epidemic. Did they not do that? Alexa notices in the book, there's that? Alexei notices in the book, there's actually very few citations in the book. It's really weird, but you know, you're citing like the WHO says it. So like, you would think it would be a link to the WHO, right?

WHO Task Force, 1990 for whatever. But it links the citation links to a random national geographic documentary. What? Of like the wonders of sleep or something. So, Alexei goes on YouTube and finds this fucking documentary and watches the whole thing. And it's just like, I don't know,

standard sleep is cool documentary. But it doesn't say anything about the WHO. And then he starts looking around and like the WHO never said this. What a weird thing to just throw in there and have it be so disprovable and so just like, yeah, even just on its face, it seems not true. It just seems weird.

Alexei also finds a bunch of exaggerations. So one of the things that Matt Walker said in the excerpt that we read is he said, the shorter you sleep, the shorter your lifespan. But that's not true. The mortality rates, the link between sleep, the shorter your lifespan. But that's not true. The mortality rates, the link between sleep and lifespan is just like the link between obesity and lifespan. At the low end, it's high, and at the high end, it's high.

So it's really bad for you to get, like, less than four hours of sleep a night, people who sleep very little have very high mortality rates, but people who sleep more than nine hours a night also have extremely high mortality rates. And the highest mortality rates are people who sleep more than 10 hours. Really?

The problem here is the same thing that we came across in our obesity episode in that it's all correlations. Yeah. It's not necessarily, you're getting too much sleep and it's making you die. It could be that like you have cancer, you're sleeping a lot because your body is shutting down. Like there's all kinds of health conditions that would make you sleep a really long time

and would also end up killing you. And on the other end of the scale, there's also all kinds of conditions that cause insomnia. If you have like chronic pain, like lots of cancers, you're in pain, and you can't sleep more than four hours a night. It's just a big old bundle of correlations, and we can't really say that the sleep is causing fucking anything. Yeah, I mean, it feels like it harkens back to our conversations about nutrition research.

Like, how do you isolate only sleep as the soul or even just primary factor when people are living complicated, messy lives with lots and lots of factors happening all the time, right? Like, maybe it's that you're not sleeping, maybe it's that you had a couple of loved ones pass away and you're grieving,

and there are physiological impacts of that. Maybe it's that you work in a factory and you're being, or a nail salon or whatever, and you're being exposed to chemicals on the daily that are, there's just like a bajillion things that it could be, and you can't just isolate people and keep them in a lab and have them live identical lives except for the amount of sleep that they have.

There's also, I mean, this also brings us to his thing about cancer, I don't know if you caught this. Here's what I thought about the cancer thing. It's often the thing that I think when people are like, you're 10 times as likely to get cancer. I always want to be like, which ones? Exactly. It just feels like a very big bucket

to sort of throw everything into without parsing a little bit. I mean, people have done studies on this. There's no link between sleeping too much in cancer and there's no link between sleeping too little in cancer. It's also just like, I'm like going too far down the path. You're like, not even that. It's just not true. There's a couple, there's I think two or three, breast cancer is one of them that like

for whatever reason, people who sleep less are more likely to get breast cancer, but again, we don't know causality. So it could actually be that a precursor to breast cancer is causing you to sleep less. Or some third thing is causing both of them. So we don't actually know. And also considering how many types of cancer there are, the fact that there's like two or three that are linked to sleep does not justify saying, if you sleep less, you will double your risk of cancer. Yeah, no, no. I'm not talking, I'm going to send you this. This isn't excerpt from, this actually an excerpt from his TED Talk, but the excerpt from

the book is slightly longer. This is my favorite, most deep-bunky thing, so I'm going to send you this. Quote. I could tell you about sleep loss and your cardiovascular system, and that all it takes is one hour, because there is a global experiment performed on 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year and it's called Delight Saving Time. I hate it, Mike. It's coming.

It's coming. Now, in the spring, when we lose one hour of sleep, we see a subsequent 24% increase in a heart attacks that following day, heart facts, Bible facts. In the autumn, when we gain an hour of sleep, we see a 21% reduction in heart attacks. Isn't that incredible? And you see exactly the same profile for car crashes, road traffic accidents,

and even suicide rates. I might like hate it. Do you want to know what this is based on? Yes, I do, and I'm about, I just am ready for fucking lift off with my like irritation with this. You're gonna explode. It's based on one paper that looked at data from Michigan, one state, and only over

three years. What? And I actually like respect the researchers for publishing this because they're quite transparent about what they find. So what they do is the researchers look at the seven days following daylight savings time. This one hour of sleep deprivation that we're all getting. On the Sunday, heart attacks are slightly less likely.

On the Monday, they are 24% higher. On the Tuesday, they are lower. On the Wednesday, they are lower. On the Thursday, they are lower. On the Friday, they are lower. And on the Saturday, they are 4% more likely. What? The closest thing to an explanation for this I can come to is it's just a fucking coincidence.

Pick any week out of the year by random chance there's gonna be more heart attacks on like the Wednesday or something. Any pattern you're always gonna find a little peak. It's the same number of heart attacks spread across the week and they even say this in the study. They're like, hey everybody just want to be transparent. It's the same number of heart attacks spread across the week and they even say this in the study. They're like, hey, everybody, just want to be transparent. It's the same number of heart attacks. There's like this weird spike on Monday, but there's no actual overall increase in the heart attacks.

It's just moving them around. He's not saying, hey, look at this three-year study on Michiganders. Michigantigans, yes. He's saying there's an experiment involving 1.6 billion people across 70 countries. And like I get that that's like a rhetorical flourish, but it also does set up the expectation that you're looking at a data set that size and not a data set of like 1500 people in the upper peninsula or whatever. Right.

And also it's just the researchers of the city, the only data that he's basing this on, they're really transparent of like, we don't think this is a thing. We're just putting the data out there so other people can see it. I actually love this because publishing studies that don't find anything is actually really important. Yeah.

Because then somebody else doesn't waste their time looking at the same thing. Totally. It feels like researchers that are just like, hey, we have this data, we're gonna look into it. We didn't really find anything, but we want to publish it so like everybody else knows. Maybe it's different for your state, but in our state for this data, we're gonna look into it. We didn't really find anything, but we wanna publish it so like everybody else knows. Maybe it's different for your state,

but in our state for this data, we're not finding an effect. That's like how science is supposed to work. But then other people like take this data and they're like, oh, 24% increase. It's like, well, on one of the days, I just think about like, I've been in enough state legislatures and watched enough hearings about daylight saving time and should we keep it or should we get rid of it?

People fucking hate it. I know if they were like daylight saving time is making people die It would be like so much more than the tiny nudge that people need to be like Fuck daylight saving time. It's the worst although He's actually correct about the thing that there's more car crashes the day after daylight savings time. Oh, interesting. As usual, he's oversimplifying. So there's a million studies on this because the data is pretty readily available. So there is a spike.

The entire week after it's really high the day after, and then it tapers off throughout the week. The week after daylight savings time. But that's not because of sleep deprivation. It's because of light. People are driving in the dark. Yeah, because like people aren't used to it, right? You're not used to driving in the dark and then all of a sudden you're driving in the dark and it takes you like, you know, a couple days to adjust. All of a sudden, all these people are driving to work in the dark. Most of the accidents are people running into pedestrians. Oh, the weird thing is

there's like the spike in the spring in car crashes, but then there's like a reduction in the fall in car crashes because it's lighter out. So Matthew Walker wants to say that it's like, oh, because we're sleeping less. And then in the fall, we're sleeping more. And in the studies, they say that like, yeah, sleep deprivation is probably in there. It's probably a factor, but it's probably outweighed

by the fact that it's just really fucking dark and in general, there's way more car accidents at night than during the day for the same reason. Also, there's more car accidents on the western side of time zones, whereas darker, than on the eastern side. This is a great time for Occam's razor. Do you know what I mean? There's a simpler explanation here, which is just it's real dark. It book and dark, dude. It's real dark. So, okay, we're not even to the fucking major problems with the book yet. These are just minor problems with the book and like the exaggerations in the book.

You're like, let me get the little stuff out of the way. This was the easy stuff. It's all lies. The main existential problem with the book is that there is no evidence that we're in the middle of a sleep loss epidemic. There's no evidence that like 30 years ago people were sleeping more and now they're sleeping less. Exactly. Yeah. As usual, this is a really difficult thing to measure.

You know, most of the research is based on self-reported sleep data. So either how much did you sleep last night or how much do you typically sleep throughout the year? Right? So you ask people this stuff. And even on these sorts of surveys, the number of hours that people are sleeping in developed countries is like pretty flat. Two-thirds of the population says that they get between seven and nine hours of sleep a night. That hasn't really budged. Roughly 40% of people say that they're getting less than seven hours of sleep a night, but also on self-reports people tend to take off around an hour for much of their sleeping. Because we live in a culture that glorifies productivity.

One of the sleep researchers that I spoke to, he said he works in an insomnia lab where they bring people in and they attach electrodes and stuff. And he said one of the most remarkable things is that you bring people in, you measure their sleep for eight hours, and then they wake up, and then he comes into the room, and he's like, hey, how did you sleep? And oftentimes people will be like, oh, I had such a terrible night, and he's looking at the brainwave stuff,

and he's like, no, you didn't. Oh, interesting. You had a great night. Interesting. So it's like, people don't know, even on a night to night basis. There's other studies that use sort of like objective methods and find the same thing.

It's basically flat. Yeah, so like the core, the foundational premise of the book is in like demonstrably false. The literal premise, yes. And I also think that this is like a fascinating methodology thing. It sounds like a really obvious, easy question. How much are we sleeping?

Right, it seems like we would be able to say that with some certainty. But even something that simple, like we don't actually have a good picture. People might actually be sleeping less now than they used to, and I don't know, it's vaguely plausible to me that the fact that you have this like device, like a little light up emotion invoker device in your hand at all times. If there was data indicating it, I find that totally plausible, but if we don't really have any data, then what is Matt Walker basing his book on?

Right, totally. It might be the case and it might not, but it's definitely not the case that we are in the middle of a sleep loss epidemic. If it's happening, it's not currently brewed. And so what Alexei finds when he's looking into this is that the way that he gets the numbers for his book, the standard CDC National Sleep Foundation advice is seven to nine hours, right?

That's how much we're supposed to be getting. He averages that to eight, and then he measures everyone who's getting less than eight hours of sleep. Well, but hang on. If you add up everyone who's getting four, five, six, and seven hours of sleep, yeah, it's like a third of the country or two thirds or something isn't getting enough sleep, but that's only because you're then counting all the seven hour people.

Yeah. This isn't like standard advice that everybody has to be getting eight hours. He's just made that up. Well, and it is sort of the shorthand when you're like, what's the right amount of sleep to get people are like, I don't know, eight hours? Right.

And so that's then what he's basic, like making research calculations based on that. Another thing that isn't true is his whole fucking thing about hunter-gatherers. Yeah, that shit. There's now two studies on this. These studies are honestly like pretty weird. So there's actually semi-uncontacted tribes in various parts of Africa where they've given them like sleepometers, like these watches. parts of Africa where they've given them like sleepometers, like these watches. When you actually measure the sleep patterns of these tribes, they sleep between 5.7 and 7.1 hours per night, and they like barely take naps. So it's like, yeah, they just sleep the same fucking way that

everybody does. Like they go to bed around midnight, they get up around 7. Yeah. So what's weird is that after his early, like, I think it's like chapter two or three, where he talks about like, oh, these bifasic patterns are so great. And, you know, hunter-gatherers live like this and we need to get back to these patterns. Later in the book, he acknowledges that this other research has taken place. So it's actually one of his colleagues at Berkeley who did this study. And so later in the book, Matt Walker is like, well, now we have data on hunter gatherer tribes. And it turns out that like they sleep basically

the same as we do, but he says, this is from the book. He says, now we discover that the average lifespan of these hunter gatherers is just 58 years, even though they're more physically active than we are, rarely obese and are not plagued by the assault of processed foods that erode our health. Hmm.

So you're like, wait, so they don't live very long. So why the fuck were you telling me about them earlier? Right. You just said, we need to sleep like them so we can live longer, but now you're like, oh, they don't even live that long. Yeah, it's fine. Society is changing. This stuff is all a moving target.

That doesn't mean that it was better back then. Exactly. I really need to get in the fucking way back machine. He also does some weird shit where he says the reason that they have shorter life expectancies is because they're more susceptible to infections and infections are a sign that you're not sleeping enough. What? So we're supposed to sleep like them, but the people who actually sleep like them

don't live long enough and should sleep more. And of course, there's like various people have done these like what are called polyphasic sleeps where you like sleep in sort of bursts. There's also, there's a million societies that have Ciestas. And there's no data that this does anything. There aren't clear health benefits.

Hey man, if you wanna take a nap, take a nap, that's fine with me. But there's this overlay that gets added about why it's like the right thing to do or the healthiest thing to do or the best thing to do. And I'm like, it's enough that it just works for you. It doesn't need to be a mandate.

Like this is my thing with people who are mourning people and people who are evening people. Sure. There's whatever. There's fucking studies. There's some dumb study that I saw that like there's a 6% lower depression rate among people who are morning people, which like that's basically zero. Like that's zero. It doesn't matter if fake.

But also, if you're not a morning person and you're forcing yourself to be a morning person, i.e. setting your alarm before you are ready to wake up. That's also probably not good for you. Yeah, that's right. So you're not gonna get the health benefits of forcing yourself into a lifestyle that you don't like and doesn't work for you.

So here's my question for you. He's a researcher. He knows better than all of this stuff, right? Presumably. I mean, why is he doing this? I mean, on some level to his credit, his social media handle everywhere is the sleep diplomat.

That's the name of his website. He sees himself as an ambassador for people should be getting more sleep. People should be prioritizing sleep in their lives to an extent that they are not now. On some level, that's probably true. Yeah, we all kind of probably should get off of Tumblr a little bit earlier and like go to bed.

And like maybe spend most time on our screens like in the same way that it's like probably good advice to people to like eat more fruits and vegetables and like try to like take those snares instead of the elevator all this stuff is like perfectly prudent advice. So I think he sees himself as like sleep is not getting enough attention as a contributor to our public health problems as a country. I don't think he's doing this consciously and he's not doing it explicitly, but he's using that as an excuse to twist all this stuff and make it more important than it has to be. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing is like,

sure, none of this is bad stuff to say. Get off your screens and blah, blah, blah, blah, like all of those sorts of things. But again, when I think about myself and the other people that I know that sometimes have a hard time with sleep, the issue isn't their sleep habits or their sort of quote unquote sleep hygiene.

The issue is untreated mental illness. The issue is untenable work schedule. It's always about a different thing. It's not just people don't think sleep is important enough so they don't get it. But this is also another thing that was really noticeable about the book, is that throughout the book, he has a bunch of studies and a bunch of data, whatever.

He never looks into the reasons why people are not getting enough sleep. He just assumes that people are choosing not to get sleep. Right. I do think that there is some contingent of people who don't take sleep seriously and have this rise and grind attitude of like, oh, Martha Stewart only gets four hours,

so I'm only getting it four hours. I think that these people exist, but it's not clear from their research, and it's especially not clear in his book, how many people this is. He never compares them to people who are desperate to get fucking sleep, but cannot sleep. The sleep researcher I talk to,

he says a lot of his patients are women going through menopause. And the menopause. Yeah. Menopause, that's where he's. Holy shit. Yes. I mean, if you look at the actual numbers, up to 30% of the population has chronic insomnia. 40% of people with insomnia have a mental disorder that in some way affects their sleep.

16% of full-time workers work either evening or overnight shifts. 75% of people with depression suffer from insomnia, 90% of people with PTSD, like a huge number of people want to be sleeping and feel like shit all day and are begging for any solution that would help them sleep. Yeah, I mean, I think he's probably addressing this in a way, like in the same way that I'm like putting my own personal experience lens on Responding to all of this. I think he's probably doing the same thing if he's a sleep researcher with Google You are swimming in just a just a lake of tech bros

Who strikes me as probably likely your people to do the rise and grind you only need four hours of sleep, bullshit. Versus the people that I know who are much more like, I am desperate to sleep and I can't figure out how to make that happen. One of the things that he says, I mean, he does say a lot in his book about like, there's sort of this culture of like pulling an all-nighter, especially in tech, you know, you stay up all night coding. And he's like, sure.

It's not great that that's normalized, it's not great that this is part of American productivity culture. It's really bad for you and we shouldn it's not great that this is part of American productivity culture. It's really bad for you and we shouldn't necessarily be glorifying that kind of stuff. And I think that's like super proven advice. Sure, but that's also a very small number of people who are like, I love doing all nighters.

Like, yeah, they actually have the option to not do that and they're not taking that option. Right, it's great advice for young ambitious attorneys who want to be on partner track at their private law firm. Totally. I buy that as advice for that ambitious attorneys who want to be on partner track at their private law firm. Totally. I buy that as advice for that group of people and then there's everyone else in the country and world. So, okay, the thing that I cannot, I cannot convey adequately is that so all of these errors that I just enumerated, these are all in the first chapter. Alexa is going through this book and he's like,

I had to cut down the scope because I came across so many fucking errors that I had to stop. Oh my god. I mean, to be fair, the first chapter is kind of an overture where he paints the picture and he presents. It's slightly more information dense than the other chapters. But in the version of the book that I had this chapter is eight pages long all disappeared in the first eight pages and there's there's other errors that I'm not including too as we are talking I'm looking at the little timer on quick time. We've now been talking for two hours and ten minutes about eight pages of garbage Yes We're two hours and 10 minutes, about eight pages of garbage. Is that what you're telling me? Yes.

I'm not mad at you, but I am mad at this dude. I mean, it's a lot. It's a lot. So in 2019, Alexei, again, random guy, he posts a massive blog post that I think is like 10, 12, 14,000 words long. That's just called Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep is riddled with scientific and factual errors. It's organized

in just like bullet points. This is Matthew Walker's claim. I looked into it, it doesn't check out. This is Matthew Walker's next claim. And this gets quite a bit of attention in methodology debunker blogging. Like people who like this is how I came across it, was it showed up on like a statistical retraction, something, something website that I read? It didn't really blow up in like the broader culture. Also, anytime you're like, oh, this was big on methodology Twitter,

I'm like, so you. I'm in the West. I tweeted, I tweeted about it and it was like, and everyone else muted me. When you say this is big on methodology Twitter, it just means I Michael Hobbs tweeted it. It's like Mike is on his bullshit basically. But then so okay, and it starts bouncing around methodology Twitter. It does the thing that like always happens, right?

That somebody like cracks open a door and then everyone else just kicks it down. So there's then like this wave following the blog post of all these other errors in the book. Right, somebody went into chapter two and was like, I'm on guys, there's more. Wait, we're not done.

And also the funny thing, there's all these other like little areas that come out. And also as I was reading it for this show, I also found like two more like pretty major ones. I'm like, I didn't even see these on Reddit at the time, but it's like, I got something to add to the pile. There's a lot that I'm skipping because a lot of them are like,

it's just like, they're very similar to the ones we've already gone over. But there's a bunch, I mean, this is when the testicular thing kind of falls apart. There's a study, but it's like a really bad study with like a very small number of people and their relationship that it found was actually more like you shaped rather than a line. There's also, he mentioned in his book, this like really dumb study, where he says that just one night of sleeping five hours a night will make you like less attractive. But what he doesn't mention is that those people like the

sleep deprived people had been deprived of sleep for 31 hours straight before them. So they were kept up for 31 hours, then they slept five hours. Then their picture was shown to other people who were like, yeah, that person looks really rough. But it's like, yeah, we all look rough after being awake for 31 hours and then sleeping for five. Well, and also he just wants to bring back fucking hot or not websites and be like, it's science now.

Yeah, like, yes, I haven't slept for over a day, but am I hot? The last thing that comes out in this like wave of criticism after Alexei's blog post is also some self-plagiarism. This article in the Lancet basically appears in another journal called Neuron. So we've gotten the blog post with all the main criticisms. We've then got this entire wave of criticism after this, like all these other random things. Let's do a hypothetical.

If you your book something, somebody writes like a long blog post saying like, I beg your book is bad and here's why. And like much of it was false. Like a lot of it was like them accusing you of stuff that wasn't true. Walk me through like what you would actually do in that situation.

I mean, so depending on how high profile it was, if it was a little thing I might just let it be, if it was a little thing, I might just let it be. If it was like a big source or something, I might be like, let's have a conversation about it. Or I might be like, here are all of my primary sources once again. Here's where it says the thing that I say it says. Those seem like the two or three main options to me. Like, one is just like leave it alone. Two is actually do a point-by-point reputation.

And three is try and connect with the person who has the criticism and just see what's underneath that. So Matt Walker does none of those. So no. There's a little known, weird fourth option. So I could not believe this when I found out about it. So like I said, all of the social media profiles are the sleep diplomat.

That's sort of his jokey name that he uses on the internet. So he sets up a random WordPress site. Oh, God. Called thesleepdiplamat.wordpress.com, which to this day consists of one post. He doesn't put this on any of his existing platforms. And to this day, he has never treated this blog post, he has never publicly acknowledged it, and the blog post doesn't

even say, by Matthew Walker, like at no point in the blog post does he identify himself as the author. So how do we know what's him though? There's been some sort of like oblique indirect third hand confirmation at one point somebody conducts his university and they're like, it's our understanding that Matthew Walker has responded to the criticism. If you were responding, like you,

Aubrey Gordon were responding to somebody who wrote an essay, you'd probably like, tweet it out. Yeah, or I'd do it on the show, or I'd be like, I would be like, yes, let's get it out into the world. Let's propel it forward. You would put it in the place where people find you. Yeah. Right. So, Matt Walker, I mean, I'm assuming that it's Matt Walker. We still don't have

proof that it's Matt Walker, but like it seems like it is. He's basically doing it in a way that ensures this will be seen by the fucking weirdos like me on methodology Twitter who've been following this little debate, but nobody outside of that world is ever going to see it. Well, at least that is the effect. I have no idea what his intention was. He doesn't actually want to engage in a normal scholarly debate. The post, this is bananas. The post is called Why We Sleep Responses to Questions from Readers. In the opening paragraph, he says, I publish his book and some readers have questions and some questions have also come up in online forums.

And when it says online forums, he links to Alexei's post. So clearly he's aware of it. The normal thing to do in this situation would be like, Alexei Guzi made a series of claims about me. I'd like to respond to those claims. As you said, like a point-by-point rebuttal. Yeah.

But this post, it's sort of organized by theme. It's not organized according to like he says that I said this, but I actually said is this or he says this, here's my evidence. It's organized around a bunch of questions and the questions are like not what the claims are. So one of the questions is, is sleeping fewer than six hours a night fine for your health? And another one is, does sleep serve a vital function? Right. No one was asking those things. Exactly, and he doesn't cite any readers specifically. Yeah. Good Lord. So he addresses the WHO thing.

He's like, you're right, the WHO never declared a sleep epidemic. Sorry, it was actually a CDC paper that declared a sleep epidemic. And here's the link. My bad. We'll fix it in the next version of the book that comes out. But what Alexei notices when he looks at this response is that like he doesn't actually link to the CDC because the CDC did actually issue this in like, I believe the late 90s very briefly. And then when it got pushed back,

they changed it to sleep is a public health problem. So it's kind of chicken shit to say like, oh, sorry, the citation was wrong. It's actually a CDC thing. And it's like, well, kind of, but the CDC doesn't actually stand by this. Right, if you're gonna do a point-by-point response and one of your responses has since been retracted,

you do have to say it's been retracted. Exactly. There's also, I mean, in this kind of flurry of criticism, people point out like very small errors So he's talking about one. There's one study that he mentions in his book He says like it the study had more than 4,000 subjects But then you look at the study to actually like 2,200 subjects. Hmm. They're errors clearly, but like no one No one is mad about those things. Right. If you read Alexei's post like yeah, there's like small stuff in there

But we're talking like the thesis of your book is wrong. Well, and like those little things do matter, but they matter as part of a fuller picture. Yeah, it's part of a pattern, yeah. The core question here is like, hey, why is almost everything in this book or why are big chunks of this book just categorically wrong or misrepresented? Yes, a very typical response is the thing about cancer, where in the intro it's a second paragraph of his book, he says routinely sleeping less than six hours a night demolishes your immune system more than doubling your risk of cancer.

He never says what he said. He never says what Alexei said in response to what he says. He just says like cancer, sleep and cancer, and just like does this kind of like boilerplate thing about like sleep and cancer. And then he said, this has been in as he says, importantly, epidemiological data cannot be used to inform causality. It is not correct to suggest based on epidemiological findings that sleeping less than six or seven hours causes cancer. However, one similarly cannot state that sleeping less than six hours a night does not double

your risk of cancer. Sir. You seem to think that this is like really strong proof to be like, you can't prove it, but you also can't prove it's not true. It's like, are you seven? You say the moon isn't made of cheese. I say it is. Prove that it isn't.

Like, no. It's like, you're the one out here saying that it causes a doubling of the risk. And then now you're saying, like, we can't say that it causes anything, but we can't say it doesn't cause anything. And it's like, only one person here is saying losing sleep causes cancer into you.

So like, why are you lecturing me about this? Yeah. So I looked up, I thought this fucking book twice. I looked up the second, the new version, so he says that like, oh, we'll fix that in later editions of the book. Did he fix it? Do he actually change it? Well, you tell me.

Okay. The book now says routinely sleeping less than six hours a night, weakens your immune system, substantially increasing your risk of certain forms of cancer. No, that's not different. It's still implying causation. It's still functionally saying the same thing. He's actually like the sort of clarification or the addition that he's added in of like certain forms of cancer. Isn't actually the thing that people were taking issue with. Right, exactly. He does the same thing with this thing of like our Americans getting enough sleep.

Like he has his little FAQ question. He says, are two thirds of adults failing to obtain eight hours of nightly sleep? It's like, dude, the issue is that you arbitrarily chose eight hours. Yeah, boo. So we then go through this entire rigmarole where it's like according to this survey, this many Americans are getting fewer than eight hours. Yeah, boo. So it then goes through this entire rigmarole where it's like according to this survey,

this many Americans are getting fewer than eight hours of sleep and you're like, but it's seven to nine. It feels a little bit like two siblings are sitting in the back seat of a car and one of them is like, Mom, make him stop it and he's like, what, I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you.

Right where you're like, exactly. This is all on a technicality and like, you're not addressing the core thing, which is like someone's asking you to leave Malone. Why can't you just leave Malone, right? That's like the perfect way to put it. It's like, he wants to make all of these things into technicalities.

I found a podcast that came out after this where they sort of bring up, they're like, well, how do you respond to the criticism? Like, you know, we've received emails from listeners who knew that we were having you on, and they wanted us to address the criticism. And he's like, well, how do you respond to the criticism? Like, you know, we've received emails from listeners who knew that we were having you on, and they wanted us to address the criticism. And he's like, you know what? I'm really glad you brought it up.

In my book, I said that there were more than 4,000 subjects in a study. It turned out that there were 2,200, and I'm very sorry. But it's this diversion tactic where it makes it seem like he's being accused of all this kind of meaningless technical stuff. Right. And because his platform is so much larger than any of the people who are raising any of these questions, him saying, oh, I said there were 4,000 subjects

and there were really 2,200, is gonna be the narrative that most people who follow him here. Exactly. And they're like, oh, honest mistake. Right. Versus this sort of like much more foundation-shaking sort of critique that's happening. Yes. And this is sort of the final chapter of the story. As a result of the blog post, the debate, the wave of criticism and his response, the only measurable response is that the journal unpublishes

the article that he self plagiarized. That's it! I don't want to defend self plagiarism because you shouldn't do it and the journal had policies against it whatever, but it's like of all the stuff that he did. Yeah, that feels like not in the top 10 of concerns. Right. The problem is it's the only one where sort of he broke a rule. Yeah.

There's a mechanism in place for when this happens, journal retraction, you know, some number of journal articles get retracted every month that happens. But in every other area, like there haven't been any consequences of this. People contact his university, the university's like, ah, we can't really do anything. We don't consider these things to rise to the level of like we have to do anything. And obviously he's tenured. The book publisher, book publishers

aren't really responsible for this stuff. And they say like, oh, we're updating the second edition. All the TED docs are still up. The podcast interviews are still up. The only actual change I could find. This is wild. Fucking Joe Rogan took his episode out of his field What fucking Joe Rogan is doing the most rigorous fact checking here the defender of journalistic ethics

Joe Rogan has the bias standards Although there I mean there's some there was some talk on reddit on the Joe Rogan subreddit This might have actually been like a technical error So I'm not I'm not sure if this was an FX thing. I just love the idea of you spending any amount of time on the Joe Rogan sub-raddit. Super user, you know me? Let's say he's talked about this quite a bit. And this is kind of like his new career. He's now working in like a sciences NGO that's like trying to reform the way that science has done.

He did a very angry tweet storm at some point that I found. A lot of people are like, his new career. He's now working in like a sciences NGO that's like trying to reform the way that science has done. He did a very angry tweet storm at some point that I found. Alexey says, I keep thinking about the fact that Walker falsified data and plainly lied about the most basic facts about sleep, like your relationships between sleep and mortality and sleep and cancer, and yet nobody gives a fuck. Neither other public intellectuals nor UC Berkeley nor media. If my accusations are without merit, where are the debunkings of them? I'm literally just a rando who read the book because a friend recommended it and maybe

I'm wrong. If my accusations are correct, why has nobody in the field spoken against Walker publicly? Yeah, I mean, listen, if I were Alexei, I would also feel like, what the fuck, man? What the fuck, man? And like people within the field, like I'm sure that sleep researchers, it must be really frustrating that like, what the fuck, man? What the fuck, man? And people within the field, like I'm sure that sleep researchers, it must be really frustrating that, like, yes, sleep is not seen as important a thing,

as diet or exercise, and it is linked to all of these other health impacts. And as a culture, we do sort of glorify, not getting enough sleep. So I can see why this would be frustrating, and you're like, man, we got this guy who's out there telling people about sleep and making people take it seriously.

I'm sure it's resulted in more funding coming into the field. Yeah. But structurally speaking, it's a huge problem. That if you're a sleep researcher, it makes no sense to go out on a limb to criticize this bestselling author because he's bringing in more attention to the field. Right.

The other worrying thing about this, I went on the UC Berkeley sleep center, whatever website, and they have press releases on there of, you know, here's our recent research, here's what our findings say, and I went through the press releases. And the most recent one is from last year, and it's this study of 37 people where they found porcelain might be linked

to these proteins in your brain that are a component of Alzheimer's. It's complicated. We don't really know. And it's like, you know, pretty boilerplate, press release, whatever. And the first quote is from Matthew Walker. And he says, we've found that the sleep you're having right now is almost like a crystal ball telling you when and how fast Alzheimer's pathology will develop in your brain.

What? I'm like, really dude, you're on this bullshit still? Also just like any fucking researcher who's like, this thing is like a crystal ball. Does not exactly instill confidence. And also, of course, I get Alexi's problem because I'm, well, now I have to go down like a fucking day long rabbit hole for these fucking proteins and Alzheimer's. Right. And you look and it's like, yes, they are predictors,

they are linked, but lots of people have these chemicals in their brain and don't get Alzheimer's. It's like WebMD where you're like, I have a headache and then you look it up and it's like, it could be a sign of brain cancer. And like, yeah, it could. Full fucking Dr. Google. But it also could be a sign of brain cancer and like yeah it could. Yeah, full fucking doctor Google.

But it also could be a sign of like you didn't drink enough water like it in most cases if you're in middle age and you're not sleeping well. It's not a fucking sign that you're gonna eat Alzheimer's and it's like so irresponsible to say that it's a crystal ball. Also I hear you on like it's so irritating to like find shit like that and you're like goddammit I know this is false but now I have to go dig around and prove why and blah blah blah blah. I know. But also secretly inside you're like, I get to go down a rabbit hole.

Yeah. Oh, this is so irritating, but also I love it. Merry Christmas to me. Digging in. Yeah. So look, sleep is really good for you. This isn't really disputed. I should also mention that in contrast to other people we've covered on the show,

there's been no accusations of Matthew Walker doing any fiddling with his academic work. So this really isn't a story of like a scientist that goes off the rails in his scientific work. This is about a scientist that is, I would say, irresponsible with how he presents this issue to the public, not necessarily within the field of sleep science. And one of the defenses that you see of Matthew Walker from people within the field is that, you know, it's a pop science book, so it's okay to sort of exaggerate or maybe cut a few corners. To me, that sounds like the argument of, like, well, he has a lower ethical standard, because more people are reading his book.

Yeah. Totally. I'm like, I actually think that if you're an academic who's writing for like people in airports and stuff, you actually have like a higher obligation to not oversimplify the science and not make them scared that they're going to get cancer because they can't sleep. Yeah, and it's not a great defense to be like, oh yeah, don't worry about this book. It's just the one that the most people are going to read and think.

No. That's not ironclad defense. It just sounds like Dr. Oz to me. Yeah. It's like, oh, I had to like over simplify things for popular audience, but it's like, we're not even talking about oversimplification. We're talking about wrongness.

Like just full misrepresentation of data and of like making conclusions that aren't substantiated and whatever. Yes. So the quote I want to end with is, this is also from Alexei. He says, the most common defensive walker is some version of the noble lie argument.

He brought people's attention to sleep. But if sleep is so important, why were so many lies needed for people to care about it? Yeah, there you go. Boom. You can hear Alexei dropping the microphone from Moscow from here. It's a really good line.

Oh, clank clank. Well, listen, man, this has been a great episode. It's totally fascinating. I gotta run, I gotta go get it taken app because I don't wanna get cancer or Alzheimer's. Oh, yeah. I'm gonna go do that. This has been great, solid work.

I'm gonna text you a picture of my balls. I'm sure you're just mother. Michael, hold my- I'm just gonna show you what picture of my balls. I'm sure you just mother. My god. Oh my god. Should you let it look like if we keep going on like this? Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh.

Oh. Thank you.