Transcription

• Speaker #0

  that maybe a third of our country is short sleeping and the average for men, it's always changing. But I want to say it's less than six hours, maybe five and a half hours. We have to check ourselves when we have social media influencers. I only sleep four hours a night because it's discipline and you got to stay hard. It's like, no, you're going to die. And as we start to get better sleep health, actually everything in our life starts to get better.

• Speaker #1

  One thing I'll tell you, one thing that you should not do if you want to. Maximize your sleep. Don't have kids.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  Don't have kids.

• Speaker #0

  Yes. Be nerdy. Go to Walmart or Home Depot and get blackout curtains. If everyone was getting sleep the way that they should, we'd all feel great and the world would be a better place.

• Speaker #1

  Raw, uncut and unapologetic. Welcome to men talking mindfulness.

• Speaker #2

  Okay. Let's stop pretending you're fine on four or five hours of sleep. You're not. We brought back our sleep pro, Robert Sweetman, to teach us how to shift from those restless nights and frustrating nights of sleep to give us a clear path forward to high-quality sleep. Rob's a former Navy SEAL. He's been on the show before. And the guy who took battlefield grit, mixed it with serious sleep science, and built Sleep Genius. For years, his incredible platform has been helping vets, first responders, and hard-charging civilians like yourself to sleep like children again. You're smart to be listening to this conversation because without great sleep, everything is compromised. Your work, your relationships, your mind, and all those goals that keep driving you forward. So, John, what else are we going to learn today?

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, so I wanted to start adding in, like, what is the value add? Like, what are the listeners going to get out of this? So, yeah, today you're going to learn from Rob, who we've had on the show before. Awesome guy. I've gone through his 62 Romeo course, and it was tremendously helpful. fixing my sleep. I probably need to go through a refresher though, Rob. But anyhow, today you're going to learn from Rob why sleep is the most leverage you're leaving on the table. And that's for faster recovery. That's for sharper decision-making, better mood, fewer injuries. And you're going to learn about all the villains, the things that hurt our sleep, blue light, noise, inconsistent schedules, caffeine timing. That's one I suck at. If I'm tired at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, I'll drink a cup of coffee, and then I don't know why I can't sleep. So you're going to learn all about that. You're going to hear about Seal Grade, the sleep kit that Rob's put together. It kind of been plain English, like the light, sound, temperature. And, yeah, you're going to walk away just with tools, knowledge that's going to set you up for a better night's sleep. So thanks for checking this out. Now enough from us. Rob, great to see you, brother. How are you?

• Speaker #0

  Good. Really good. I feel like... My sleep journey has evolved recently. When I started out on this mission back in 2017, 2018, I didn't know anything. And not that I know everything now. I'm finding that the more I know, the more I realize I don't know anything. But, you know, I've grinded hard for the last eight years trying to individually help people. And I have, and I do that and I enjoy that. But the evolution I think this year has been to really step away from being mixed up in the problem and try to empower others to do what I've done. So we are trying to get sleep coaches trained up so they can host their own cohorts and so forth. I've been trying to do more keynote speeches so I can reach a larger audience. and I've kind of delved into corporate workshops too, so we can start impacting civilians. Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  There you go, man. Well, Will and I do some of that too. So at some point, maybe there's some collaborative effort that we can do.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah. Bring him down to that book we just, that was booked. You know what I mean? Yeah, we'll see. Because actually one thing, that's the leader down there is like, yeah, we got to get someone in for sleep. So bye. All right, I got Rob Sweetman.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, there you go.

• Speaker #2

  All right. Very cool.

• Speaker #1

  Well, hey, we'll discuss all that business on the side. But hey, anyway, Rob, great to have you back. And as you all know, we do a breathing practice right at the beginning of this. And I know you're a practitioner, so there's no explanation needed. But for our audience, hey, this is just one breath grounding us, the three of us here, and for you out there listening or watching. So let's go ahead and get comfortable, whatever that might look like or feel like for you. And let's begin by emptying out our lungs with a nice, good exhale. bringing our navel to our spine we've been holding empty at the bottom and then a nice long slow deep breath in feeling all the way to the top holding full and letting go Letting go, letting go, and coming into this present moment, maybe bringing some movement back into your body, wiggling your fingers, cracking your knuckles, rolling your head, rolling your neck. All right, so thank you all for being here. Yeah, punching your fist. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for tuning in to our podcast. One thing I forgot to announce, Will and I, we just wrapped up the Spartan down in Dallas, the Spartan race down in Dallas. Clint Musgrove joined us. And that's our first Spartan race that we've done together. And we are in discussion right now for our next one. So we're thinking it's not firmed up yet, but we're thinking of doing the 10K Spartan out here in Colorado Springs May 30th or 31st of 2026. So we're going to start building that together and maybe we could get some teammates jumping in with us. Yeah,

• Speaker #2

  fucking Rob's going to join us. Rob's going to join us. Yeah, man. I'm just going to get started.

• Speaker #0

  I'm not going to join you, but I would be remiss if I didn't say you're hosting. a three-day adventure race right here in Montrose, Colorado, from Happy Canyon Ranch into Telluride. Yes, that means we're going over the Telluride Mountains. Oh, my God. When is that? That'll be, well, we'll muster here on June 11th. Okay. I've got a famous chef from Argentina. He's going to be cooking a big fire with meat and all that. We'll have teams of four. And then June 12th through 14th. Three days, we're going to launch that morning. We'll do the whole ceremony and everything. We'll launch that morning. And here's the thing that's different about this that no other adventure race has. We're going to put sleep at the forefront of this. That means everyone, that's right, everyone gets to rest at night. And then we'll launch people again in the morning. That also helps us manage the sort of accordion effect. Sure, sure. or make sure that we have. sort of a window when people arrive and tell you ride.

• Speaker #1

  So nice. Love it. Well, shoot that like not even two weeks after the Spartan. So maybe Will, would you just stay out here?

• Speaker #2

  I'll just try and stay out there at work. Yeah, that'd be a lot of fun. That'd be a lot of fun.

• Speaker #1

  All right. So let's get in the meat and potatoes here, man. So I know we've had you on the show, but for those who haven't heard or just got the bio here at the beginning, can you give us a little summary of what brought you into the work that you're doing and how you found it? you know, Sleep Genius and the 62 Romeo courses.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, I'll try to summarize that because there's a lot there. This all started when I was in the SEAL teams and I found myself getting medically retired. My sleep was terrible. But more importantly, Ryan Larkin took his life in 2017. And when I saw that unfold, it... The biggest thing that came to mind for me was that it had something to do with his sleep health. I didn't know anything about sleep health at the time, and I didn't know if there was a link between mental health and sleep health, but that was my hypothesis. And so I began doing research and asking a lot of questions, probably being more annoying than I should to doctors and scientists. But I had a hunch, and I wanted to sort of prove it out. And so... Coming from special operations into sleep science, a lot of people ask me, like, why did you do that? That doesn't even make any sense. Because I wanted to save people like Ryan. And I felt like if I could help people get better sleep, we'd have better health outcomes across the board, specifically with mental health. And if we could improve mental health, then maybe we can prevent this type of thing from happening in the future. So the 62 Romeo was next on the list. Um, I actually spent a few years trying to build technology that would help sleep. And in the process of testing this light and sound machine in 2021, uh, we put together a cohort, much like the cohort that you were in John, but this was the pilot study. I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, I put everything on the line. You know, I had Jason Tushin was in the class. Oh yeah. Talk about pressure and like, right. And so I'm like. And we're filming a documentary. And I didn't know if this plan was going to work. I just wanted to give it everything I got, put it all on the table, and see what happened. And the result of that was profound. That changed the direction of my life forever. We took that, the 62 Romeo, which just means... uh, six, two R that's the way that military people say it. And, um, we, it was meant to just be six weeks to sleep restoration. We shortened it and then it just somehow turned into 62 Romeo. Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  So it's not 67, which I'm not even sure what the hell that's all about, but it's like, apparently you're not supposed to say 67 anymore.

• Speaker #2

  Oh, why? Why? No, man. I don't know.

• Speaker #1

  It's some.

• Speaker #2

  pop culture bullshit that i got called out on the other day group is upended with numbers now whatever okay sorry like i'm sure okay sorry sidetrack yeah no that's okay in 2021 we did this thing this 62 romeo and

• Speaker #0

  it turned out really well and so i immediately shifted my focus to creating a non-profit and bringing this to people because i felt like I'd been in the lab working on stuff, ideas for three or four years, but I hadn't really helped anybody. And for the first time, I felt like, man, I really made a difference. So we turned it into a nonprofit. We started doing cohorts. We started raising money. We tried to put as many people through as possible. We cut our teeth with firefighters and then eventually made it full circle back to team guys. And so... I was helping a cohort of only Navy SEALs. And when we graduated, it was such a big impact that the guy who helped sponsor it with me, Gerald Arnold, he called me the sleep genius. And if you know, Gerald Arnold, he's, he's funny. He's like, well, there's Rob, the sleep genius. I thought, man, that's silly. I can't, I can't use that. That's, um, hubris. It kind of stuck with me. And so it's a blessing and a curse. But the name stuck and people get it when you say that Sleep Genius. So I didn't want to focus on highlighting myself as much. And I kind of shifted it towards, OK, Sleep Genius is what I want you to be. I want you to be the Sleep Genius. And this is a program and a platform. And so Sleep 101 was the evolution of 62 Romeo. So 62 Romeo still exists as a nonprofit effort, but the course itself, we now call it Sleep 101. It falls under Sleep Genius. And the reason that I did it that way is because if you go to the Sleep Genius app, or if you go to the website, you can access the Sleep 101 course, as well as a bunch of other courses. And so what I'm trying to do is create a library of resources so that People can get their life on track and we try to offer as much as we can for free too.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  Wow. And you mentioned Ryan Larkin there. I don't know if we made the connection that Ryan was awake for like three days before he took his life, right? Something like that.

• Speaker #0

  I think the story was five, but- Five days. Okay. Three or five. That's crazy.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. Yeah. So it clearly wasn't thinking straight. And like you've said, there is a link between your sleep health and your mental health. And now your adventure race is going to be named after Ryan. So clearly he has had an impact on your life, which you just mentioned. But I just wanted to kind of just mention the details there. Sorry, Will. No,

• Speaker #2

  that's good. Why don't we look at both sides of that? So let's look at sleep or let's talk about sleep. How is the ultimate performance enhancer? And then also go into like, you know, how it actually destroys our, you know, our. cognitive ability, our emotional ability, and all the things that kind of Ryan was dealing with in that woke us, that literally brought us into this conversation today.

• Speaker #0

  I'll tell you, if everyone was getting sleep the way that they should, we'd all feel great and the world would be a better place. But the truth is, right, the truth is most people are not getting enough sleep or the quality of their sleep isn't good enough. And in fact, it's an epidemic. Short sleeping in the U.S. is an epidemic. Um, they say that maybe a third of our country is short sleeping and the average for men, uh, it's always changing, but I want to say it's less than six hours, maybe five and a half hours. And that's, that's ridiculous, right? When, and we have to check ourselves when we have social media influencers and you know who I'm talking about, John, I love the depth. Yeah. Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  I know where you're going.

• Speaker #0

  Only sleep four hours a night because it's discipline and you got to stay hard. It's like, no, you're going to die. or you're going to be depressed, or you're going to have hormonal dysregulation, or you're going to develop hypertension. So nothing against anyone else. And perhaps that person takes naps throughout the day. that actually counts as your sleep. And there's a lot of techniques to do that. I do that with firefighters all the time. But we need adequate sleep. And if we're able to get adequate sleep, meaning enough time in bed and the highest quality of sleep that we can get, we're going to have amazing hormonal function. We're going to have amazing recovery. Our human performance is going to be at its peak. So, Will, when you say, you know, like a human performance, um You know, whenever we talk about it as sort of an additive, I laugh because, in fact, where we're lacking is the problem. And if we're not getting good sleep because we have poor habits, then that's when we're not able to make the gains or the goals that we want. And so I feel like if if we could all just sleep perfectly, then we're all going to perform at our best cognitively, physically or whatever. But the challenge is that life doesn't work that way. And all of us are going to struggle with insomnia or sleep challenges at some point. And in fact, in America, it's terrible with social media, the go, go, go, fast-paced mentality. Everybody's all about optimizing their time, squeezing in as much as they can in one day. And I get the value in that. And perhaps if we limit that, we put that inside of a container and say, I'm not going to let this consume my life. I'm going to put it here. Then perhaps we can optimize what's inside that container. But this relentless pursuit of success and money and fame and all of this, that the media and social media and the whole American culture, it's not healthy for our sleep. Everyone's going to nine to five jobs, pushing themselves as hard as they can. Kids, we know all of the research shows that they should not be going to school early. It negatively impacts their learning, their bodily function. In studies they've done, you know, shifting the start time for schools, the SAT scores went up and the vehicular accidents for students went down. Wow. And the thing is, kids aren't really choosing anything. It's their parents, right? And who's telling the parents to drop them off at that early? Who's saying that it has to start at 8 a.m.? Well, that's because the world starts at 8 a.m. The world of business.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, the parents.

• Speaker #0

  Forgive me for saying this, but being a slave to their job.

• Speaker #2

  Fuck, man. Right? Yeah, right, right. Well, I mean, dive in there for a second, Rob, if you will. I mean, you talked about we're kind of jumping into the go, go, go conversation. Like, why is that so bad? I mean, we just talked about, like, we should be structuring our day differently in order to kind of really optimize our performance and really respecting and being responsible with our sleep. but is it also is like is the you mentioned social media is that like We talked about hormones a little bit earlier and we kind of mentioned that or didn't talk about it, but you mentioned it. Is it like the fucking dopamine swings that we get? It's kind of like fucking with us. Is that part of this equation as well?

• Speaker #0

  Look, guys, I'm not an expert on all this stuff. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll say that, yes, people are addicted to social media because of the dopamine reuptake. If they get a dopamine hit every time they see something crazy or sexual or provocative or what's going on. in Israel right now. People get sucked into that and they get emotionally tied and they have to get that dopamine hit. And then they spend too much time on social media. The amount of screen time on phones for social media outweighs anything else. It's ridiculous. And so I don't think that it's healthy to be on social media too much just because of what it does to our mind. Definitely. not before bed, right? When we're getting wound up and spun up and feeding into that addiction right before bed, it doesn't put a focus on the sanctity of the sleep dojo and the recovery that we're trying to achieve.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah. Thanks for taking a little detour with us. Well, what about like, I think it'd be really helpful to talk about what are some of the biggest misconceptions that you're often correcting about sleep and high quality sleep?

• Speaker #0

  Most of the time. when I work with people. And so what I do is, you know, I mentioned that I'm doing a lot of keynote speeches. In the past, I've coached a lot of cohorts of people to go through the 62 Romeo Sleep 101 program. By the way, this book is on Amazon now. Super helpful. It basically is everything that I try to teach in one book. But you have to type in 62ROMEO. and then Sleep 101, because there's so many books on Amazon, sometimes it's hard to find, but I can send you a link.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, we'll keep rocking these misconceptions, please.

• Speaker #0

  So most of the time when I'm coaching a cohort or I'm coaching an individual, they try to hide their misconceptions. And so I can definitely talk about a lot of the things that are misconceptions, but I think the focus should be on... What is the truth, right? And oftentimes when I ask somebody to do something or shape their sleep dojo, which I'd love to talk about today, or shape their behavior, which is a challenge for people, that's when the behaviors that cause problems start to show their face. I think the biggest thing, well, how about this? If we're going to start with misconceptions and what can people do today for your viewers? I think that focusing on the concept of the sleep dojo should come first, right? Not only do we need to address our behaviors as well as psychological safety, but creating an environment that's neurologically conducive to good sleep. should be the first step, in my humble opinion. And so if we reframe our bedroom, right, we think of the bedroom as where we go to sleep so we can work the next day. And oftentimes we're watching TV, we're scrolling on social media. These are the misconceptions that that's okay. We break out our laptop because we've got one more proposal, one more email we got to send out. Or we're going over. some pretty complex things that we're working on in our life. All of those things can make it challenging to wind down and go to sleep. And so we have to be able to put those things away. We have to be able to bookend our day because the misconception is that those things don't affect your sleep. And they do big time. Some other things within the sleep dojo are. You know, taking the fighting out of the bedroom, if there's no psychological safety in the bedroom, then it makes it really difficult to sleep. And perhaps it's not you, maybe it's your spouse. But having this beautiful reverence for what's about to happen when you fall asleep and structuring the sleep dojo in a way that's conducive to the maximum benefit in the sleep period. then you can hope, you know, you can only then really hope to get the best outcomes. People ask, what is the sleeve dojo? Yeah,

• Speaker #2

  that's what my question was. I'm like, what? I mean, John's like, oh, I love the dojo. I'm like, what the fuck you got talking about? Yeah. Well, thank you, brother.

• Speaker #1

  You've been to a martial arts dojo, right, Will?

• Speaker #2

  I passed by them in New York. I'm like, dojo? Like, that looks good. Let's go.

• Speaker #1

  I know.

• Speaker #2

  We're kicking each other. I'm just kidding. Well,

• Speaker #1

  Chris, remember Chris Lee was on last week. Yeah. Of course, this guy, big time meditator. And I think he called it his like sleep cave or sleep. And

• Speaker #2

  I'm not trying to like make life of this. I just, I got to play the dummy sometimes. You know what I'm saying? For the rest of the people out there. Sometimes you don't play. I'm not playing. I know. It's a fucking egg, man.

• Speaker #0

  It comes so naturally.

• Speaker #2

  It does. I like it. Thank you. But this is. This is why I'm so intelligent. It's like, because I can play dumb. You know what I mean? You know what I'm saying? Right. You know what I'm saying? Anyway, guys, thank you for talking about this dojo. What are, what are we talking about?

• Speaker #0

  That's a great, that's a great segue, right? Yeah. What is the dojo in New York city? There's some unique things about a dojo, aren't there? That are probably similar, no matter what discipline that you're practicing. Most of the time there's a mat because you're probably going to fall or you're probably going to, you know, bang up something. And so that's for your safety. Most of the time there's a sensei or an instructor. Most of the time there is a uniform. There's a start and an end to class. And most of the time you're going there to improve yourself. You want to learn something. You want to practice a new kata in karate or. a new submission in jujitsu. But I know, having been in the dojo my whole life, that when you walk in, you sort of prepare for that. And when you... step onto the mat, you first take off your shoes and you're probably going to bow. Bow. You're going to be quiet when you're on the mat. Because there's something really special about this process. And sometimes we look forward to it all day. And so that's how I want to frame the sleep dojo, right? When we walk into our room, we want it to be a place of tranquility. We want to have some respect for it. And when it's time to go into the sleep dojo, You're not bleeding all of the other stuff from your day into that. Now, admittedly, jiu-jitsu is therapy for me, and I'm actually getting rid of a lot of the stress from the day. So I guess in that way, the sleep dojo can also be like that, right? But we have to put that, we have to leave that at the door. And so that means you got to stop with the late night Netflix. You got to stop scrolling until you fall asleep. And I'm not saying it's the end of the world if you do that, But If I say it's okay to scroll before bed, everyone's going to take it to the nth degree and it's going to destroy your sleep. So just leave all of that out of the bedroom. In fact, if you can get an alarm, kids out there, we used to have these things called alarm clocks.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, yeah,

• Speaker #0

  yeah. But we got to get the phones out of the bedroom because this addiction becomes apparent if we're truthful about our behavior. And we see that. And I am looking at my phone first thing in the morning and the last thing before I go to bed. Not saying it doesn't relax the mind to look over a checklist and make sure that you're comfortable with what you have tomorrow, your calendar schedule. But in doing so, now we have set the stage for the sleep dojo. We're leaving behind the day. We're bookending it. We're letting go of that. No matter if it was good or bad, we have to put a pin in it and focus on. what's about to happen, which the space-time continuum is about to dissolve, and we're about to go into the dream world. Nobody wants to talk about, right? You're scaring me over there,

• Speaker #2

  Rob. Like, you're scaring me with that voice.

• Speaker #0

  We go into these dreams and do the most ridiculous things, and then people wake up and pretend like it never happened. And if they were ever to tell people what they saw in their dream or experienced, and this starts to unpack. a whole nother topic, but they would be mentally, they would be locked up.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  But yet we all do this every single night and then we pretend like it didn't happen.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  And then of course, there's some people that say, Oh, I don't remember my dreams and that's okay. But if we are looking at the sleep dojo, we should first look at what are the conditions that I'm sleeping in, right? Some of the big factors are light, sound, and temperature. There's also other things, but those are the big ones that we focus on. And when I started in on this, I wanted to take a scientific approach to sleep. So that's why I call myself a sleep scientist. It's a whole field. Often people don't know what sleep science is, but it's just the science of sleep. And there are things that in our environment that neurologically affect our sleep. So that's another misconception, right? That these things don't affect me, that I can sleep in a noisy environment and I'm fine. I can sleep with the lights on, I'm fine. And the truth is, to a certain degree, you're right, because humans are very resilient. But the research is conclusive that blue light affects the melanopsin ganglion cells and slows down or completely eliminates melatonin production. We can consistently do that in a laboratory. Now, melatonin is a sleep hormone, and it's one of the big three, right? Melatonin, adenosine, and GABA. Those are the three big ones to set us off into sleep. And they all do different things, and they all interact in different ways. But if we are slowing down the production of melatonin because we're introducing blue light into our eyes, that's not good. And I'm not saying you can't fall asleep without good melatonin production. But what I am saying is you're not doing yourself any favors. The big thing about blue light that we hear about all the time is that you shouldn't have any blue light in your sleep space. And there is some conflicting research out there. But in essence, blue light affects the melanopsin ganglion cells in your eye more than any other frequency. And this slows down the production of melatonin. We need our big three, melatonin, GABA, and adenosine. Those are the three big things that make up that sleep pressure that we feel. And oftentimes we rely on that feeling of sleep pressure. And when we don't have it, when our sleep gets more shallow towards the beginning of the morning. I hear people complain all the time about, I just don't feel tired. I want to get up out of bed and go do whatever. And the truth is. Um, if they're not getting enough sleep and they're basing everything based on that feeling, um, then they could be shooting themselves in the foot. You know, light is so important. And what I encourage people is that, yes, be nerdy, go to, you know, Walmart or Home Depot and get blackout curtains, blackout your windows, take electrical tape and put it over all the LEDs. You should not be able to see your face. You see your hand in front of your face. If you do, then there's ambient light. Now, I know some people freak out when it's complete darkness. And if that's the case, then the type of light that's safe for you is an amber or a red tone. And it needs to be very, very dim. And so there's a ton of ways you can do that. Because optimally, what we want is to watch a sunset into darkness. And then we see fire, right? That's how humans have been wired for many, many years. Now we're in this. you know, post-industrial technology, 24-hour life that we live in. And there's no way that our bodies can know up from down if we stay constantly stimulated, whether it's on our phone, our devices, or just in the ambient light. So if we focus on light in our sleep dojo first, then we look at sound. And, you know, here's the funny thing. People, another misconception. People don't believe that sound affects their sleep. They think that when they go to sleep, they're completely cut off from the world. That's because the conscious mind is cut off from the world. But our brain is still processing sound. In fact, even a noise spike as low as like 35 decibels, a decibel is just a unit of measurement. I'm speaking at like 60 or 70 decibels. Even just a 35 decibel spike can... pull you out of a cycle, whether it's deep sleep or REM sleep. It may not even wake you up, but it disrupts your natural healthy sleep pattern. Maybe you're not getting good hormone production. Maybe you're not getting good cellular recovery. If you have a noisy environment, it's going to kind of keep your nervous system on edge. And so that's why I say, look, if we can get our light under control, how do we get our sound under control? Well, that could be as much as just... choosing to close the window in the city, or maybe the noise is too much and we need to introduce a white noise machine. And people say, well, how are you introducing white noise? That's noise. That's contradictory. Like if you're introducing noise into the sleep environment, now you're disrupting your sleep. But the thing is, the brain has a way of habitualizing to smooth melodic sounds. And so white noise, pink noise, brown noise is my favorite.

• Speaker #1

  most sleep yeah me too i like i like the brown noise dude yeah dude that's the one i listen to when we're whenever will and i whenever will and i share a room like we just did this when you're on this when you're on the spartan race yeah man i was like i was like hey man i'm gonna put on some noise and it's brown noise and and every time i sleep in the same room will's like hey can we just turn that down a little bit i'm like man one

• Speaker #2

  fucking time i got so dramatic over there One time probably I said something. Anyway. Like,

• Speaker #1

  Rob, man, Rob told me the brown noise.

• Speaker #0

  Well, let's take a look at that. So why are we doing that? And that's because it's so difficult to sleep around Will.

• Speaker #2

  There you go. Thank you, Robert. Exactly. Exactly.

• Speaker #0

  Just a perfect example. You teed it up there. So the real question in sleep science is how do we drown out Will? Yeah. And if we can get a very loud brown noise machine, we can accomplish that and get restorative sleep.

• Speaker #1

  My job is done here. There you go. We're done. Great show. Great show, guys.

• Speaker #2

  How come I'm the one who gets attacked by all the guests? All the guests, many fucking guests attack me. Rob, thank you again. Well,

• Speaker #0

  in the teams, we have a thing, Will. Like when somebody gets a little defensive, we attack like wolves.

• Speaker #2

  I wasn't even getting to turn down.

• Speaker #1

  And also, if we're not giving you shit, then we don't love it.

• Speaker #2

  We don't love me. That's the problem.

• Speaker #1

  Well, sorry, I interrupted there. So that, yeah, the brown noise, the fans. I mean, that's so that you don't hear like the little spikes. Like my example here in my house, you know, I've got dogs that for some reason they think like they need to be fed at 330 in the morning. And they'll come and they'll, you'll hear their claws like on the, on the hardwood floor. And, uh, if I don't have the fan on, I've accidentally left the fan off a couple of times. I will hear that and I will not be able to get back to sleep. But if I have the fan on, I don't hear that because it drowns it out. So. As far as I know, and I'm certainly no sleep genius, the reason for the white noise, the brown noise, the purple noise, fans, whatever it is that you're using, is to drown out the little spikes of noise, right?

• Speaker #0

  It's true. And I am not a sleep genius either, even though that's my nickname. I am the constant learner. There you go. But it is a catchy name. So, right? So you're exactly right. We're buffering out all of those noise spikes because remember, it is the noise spike that piques our brain's interest on what's going on in the environment. If it's smooth and melodic, like you're sleeping by the river, your brain will actually habitualize to the increased volume of that sound and it won't be alarming. But if it hears something like a twig snap, well, guess what? Now it's time to wake up. And that's how the human race has survived. So that, you know, there's light, sound, and there's also temperature. I think the biggest thing with temperature is just allowing our body to go into homeostasis and go through all of the beautiful processes of recovery, healing, restoration. And oftentimes what happens is it's not just about having the perfect temperature. It is important. And I would say that like 65 degrees to 69 is probably the best. Because our body wants to be able to drop one or two degrees to trigger sleep. And it's easier for the body to slip into sleep when it's cooler in the environment because our body's trying to, you know, cool off. And in fact, one of the markers in sleep science is lowest core body temperature, which is typically sometime in the morning. And so if it's hot in the bedroom, then it makes it harder. Our body has to work harder through sleep. But I think one of the most overlooked thing is The reality that we are humans and we're a part of this earth, right? Believe it or not, we didn't all just live in air conditioned buildings our entire existence. And so if we have, yeah, if we have a job,

• Speaker #2

  I was, anyway, keep going. I was going to play jump there, but I'm already, I already know it's stupid. Anyway, keep going. Okay. Man, you're throwing off so many softballs, bro. I know. It's all right. It's all right. I just need attention.

• Speaker #0

  It's making it too easy.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  Well, here's the thing, guys, is that it's all about circadian rhythms, right? It's about being in touch with the earth. And how did we live? How does our body function? How does a flower open up in the morning? It's because it's cold at night and then warm in the day. So if we stay in a cubicle at 70 degrees all day and we come home and it's 70 degrees, our body doesn't actually have the signaling. to set those circadian rhythms, right? So it is important to have heat in the day, right? And I know I'm thinking of my friend in Alaska right now, and it's like, I wish there was more light and heat, but if it's hot in the day and cold in the night, then our body knows better that it's time to go to sleep. And it begins these routines and these rhythms. And guess what? If you're completely out of any, you know, assemblance of a rhythm, your body doesn't know when to go to sleep. And we're trying to give it those triggers and those rhythms so that when it's time to go to sleep, you go to sleep like that.

• Speaker #1

  Well, first off, I want to talk about a couple of things there that you said. So with the light piece, you know, I sleep with an eye mask now because inevitably my my kid is going to want to come in and crawl in the bed of freaking 2 a.m. And and then he or she there, they don't want the lights out. So we turn the bathroom light on and it's just a disaster. One thing, I'll tell you one thing. that you should not do if you want to maximize your sleep don't have kids yeah don't have kids but uh in all seriousness they come into bed you know they want to light on so then i sleep with a sleep mask um red light i mean you've seen that on on navy ships right when we darken ship we we turn red light on there's no there's no room that's actually pitch black in the ship or at least very few And there's a red light, but you can still sleep with the red light. And then the phone piece you mentioned, I don't sleep with my phone in my room. But again, this past weekend, Will and I were down in Dallas for the Spartan, and I had the phone right by the bed. And the first thing I did when I rolled over was I grabbed my phone because it is a habit. But if you have that type of habit built in, you need to know how to control it. So I sleep with my phone charging normally in the kitchen. And then... Then I don't know why, but the the dreaming thing. And if anybody ever saw our dreams, people would think that we belong in an insane asylum. That made me think of Max Hedrum. Rob, I don't know how old you are,

• Speaker #0

  but I remember Max. Yeah,

• Speaker #1

  Max Hedrum. OK, so for those who are who do not remember Max Hedrum, I think it was Pepsi or maybe Dr. Pepper or something. Yeah, it was Pepsi in this particular era, which I think was probably around now on this show. People would get paid to download their dreams and people would watch them. And I was like, Jesus, what if that could happen? Like if people could watch our dreams. Anyhow. I'm getting that.

• Speaker #0

  It's possible through AI to start reading dreams.

• Speaker #1

  Oh, man, that's that's going to be the downfall of humanity right there. So anyway, I digress, but I just wanted to bring up some of those things. But the circadian rhythm that you just talked about. Right. So, you know, the sun comes up, the day gets brighter, the day gets warmer. Sun goes down, it starts getting darker. We just start getting cooler. You had developed the sleep pod or the sleep frog. Can you tell us? what those were and what did you learn about circadian tech? And what can the average person, how can they use this tech?

• Speaker #0

  That is a great point. And I'm glad you brought it up because one of the things this year that I've focused on big time is I wrote a memo to the Secretary of Defense, now Secretary of War, stating my position on sleep in the military. which was backed by the GAO in all academic records and reports of sleep in the military within the last 10 years, at least. And the memo was titled Weaponizing Wellness for the Warfighter. And it absolutely is relevant. It's absolutely being read. And I hope that at some point it will make an impact. And so that's what the sleep frog was. It was a light and sound machine that It goes on the wall. It's meant to help. sort of create a, um, a good environment to sleep in, uh, just a widget. Right. And that was because I couldn't get the virtual sleep environment, uh, which is a sleep pod I created, um, years ago, wrote a patent back in 2018. I couldn't figure out how to build it and get it off the ground without selling my soul to the devil of VC. And, and I had no idea what I was doing. Um, and so now current day, what we're doing is. taking the same principles as the sleep dojo and the stuff that we're talking about and building sleep pods for the military. And it's been something I've worked on for a long time. And we haven't, you know, implemented this with any specific military unit, but we have built our prototype. We have talked to dozens of fabricators and manufacturers, and we have talked to government offices and people are getting excited about it because Imagine having imagine this, John, in in a wartime environment. You know, we've got the barracks, we've got the Jews, we've got the Alaska shelters. And the further you push out, especially outside the wire, the more sketchy the sleeping situations get. Right. Right. And so, I mean, even, you know, like I just keep thinking about like damn neck on a three month J set and they are. in a specific place conducting operations. Now, are we asking those warfighters in austere conditions, are we asking them to sleep in a tent? Are we asking them to just suck it up, right? And I fully acknowledge that we must have a strong military. You can't be weak. And I'm not encouraging people to be soft by encouraging sleep. I realize that we may sleep deprived to complete the mission. We may sleep deprive in operational training, but there is no excuse to do it in garrison. And if we can improve the sleeping quality in between all of those things, that's what I want to do. So imagine instead of like having to call the Seabees out to build a quick fob, right? Imagine having a rapidly deployable, affordable at scale, using the same exact military logistics platforms that we already do. like the ISU 90s and all that other stuff, we drop a sleeping situation in country instantly. There's no building, there's no setup. You have backup solar power, battery power, whatever. And on the inside is the most optimal sleeping environment, not putting any crazy technology that costs, you know, $400,000, like the cost of one of the new heads up displays for pilots in their helmets, right? but just something simple and affordable that observes these basic physics and neurology that we know. And then here's the additional thing. is that there's probably a much bigger factor for our warfighters, and that is psychological safety, right? And a lot of times that is managed with alcohol. And of course, we want to get away from that. But if we look at the newest threat to our warfighters in austere conditions, I would have to say that it's probably going to be drones. Drone warfare, drones with explosives. We've seen the proliferation across Ukraine and Russia conflict. And like when I spoke with Congress, Congressman Harrigan, he said that is one of his top concerns. And so how are we going to address that? How are we going to prevent an entire platoon of SEALs from getting smoked because they're sleeping in tents? And so that's why we want to have sleep pods that also have ballistic protection. And it doesn't have to be expensive. Right, so... All of this is to say is that the sleep dojo is not just in your bedroom in New York City or in Colorado, but it also is something that we can take these simple, basic principles and put them into a thing that helps our military sleep better and maybe gives Doug Collins a break when they get out of service at the VA.

• Speaker #2

  These are things we can take anywhere. Go ahead, John.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, yeah. So just some of the acronyms that were used there, just to kind of dumb it down for. Thank you. Sorry, that's a harsh term. Just to make it more clear for those. So one, the DAMNIT guys, that's the development group, Naval Special Warfare Development Group. And if you look that up, you'll know what I'm talking about. The CBs, that's the construction battalion. That's the Navy guys and gals that are out there building our everything. If you go overseas to a deployment area, specifically a war zone, a lot of stuff just going to be built with plywood. You know, the hoochies that we call the chews, that's really a plywood house, essentially, with little plywood rooms in it. The fob is the forward operating base, and then the outside, the wire is being outside of that forward operating base. And there's little outstations. And as you get to those outstations, it gets more austere. So there are guys living in literal tents. That kind of thing. ISU-90, that's just a big container that you use to ship everything overseas. And then I will say, Rob, when I was in Afghanistan, the last time I was in Afghanistan was 2014, 2013 into 2014. We were getting the ballistic pods to sleep in. I think they were called Draytanners. I'm probably screwing that name up. But they were ballistic just in case of incoming mortars or that kind of shit. But we never slept in them. They landed there. They were starting to set them up and then we flew out. So I don't even know what ever happened to that. But having a sleep pod inside of those with perfect temperature, perfect amount of light, man, I could tell you that would make a huge difference, especially because we're sleeping during the day most of the time, right? You're operating at night. So your circadian rhythm is already off. So when you try, you operate at night and you start coming back off these ops just as the sun's coming up and it starts getting hot as hell. And then you go and you try to sleep in these plywood buildings that are also hot. And man, I tell you, it wrecks you real quick. So sorry, I just wanted to kind of bring some context to some of that stuff there.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, so I just want to sell you on this, John. Yeah,

• Speaker #1

  you sold me.

• Speaker #0

  Imagine that same scenario where you get inside and we have this special foam that is not only ballistic, but it's thermal. and audio protective you get in and it's completely quiet and super cool in fact i think the challenge will not be getting people to sleep in them i think it'll be getting people to go up to work right they're

• Speaker #2

  just gonna lock themselves in there i want one right here that internet wow you're talking about high performers and how do you coach you know whether it's in the military out of the military, these high performers that insist, like... that they just don't need much sleep? Like, where do you start with them? Like, and obviously, I guess every individual is different, but like, you know, somebody that, you know, has that performance mindset, I only need four hours of sleep. Like, where do you begin with them?

• Speaker #0

  I would say that high performer is an interesting word, right? Because if you look at Olympic athletes, they do take their sleep. very seriously because they're aware of how it affects their performance. But if you're talking about somebody at McKinsey or Bain, who is a new associate making way too much money, working 80 hours a week minimum, stressed out, using alcohol to wind down, and we call them a top performer, I would argue that If our only metrics is how much, how many hours we work and how much money we make, then we probably should reassess that first, right? Because there's so much more to life. Now, I'm not trying to get into the philosophy of life, but I'll say if someone is this high performer, but they're not sleeping well or they don't respect sleep. Actually, I think that trend is changing. I think right now is an optimal time. to be a sleep coach or a sleep scientist because people actually listened to me when 10 or 20 years ago, no one talked about this stuff. But if you're still completely in the dark on sleep and you're ignoring all scientific revelations over the last 10 years, then you think that you have to use alcohol to go to sleep and use monsters or energy drinks to wake up and just go, go, go all day. In fact, I mean, I've met entrepreneurs that eat mushrooms and Adderall all day for creativity and energy, right? You have to get away from using chemicals and trying to bypass God's beautiful creation here, right? It's going to end up being a shorter, unhappier life for you. And if that's what you want to go out with a bang, then I totally respect that. There's a point in my 20s where that's Kind of how I looked at it. And I'm not here to judge anybody, but if you want true sustainable performance, you have to do the hard work, which is getting your sleeping situation set up right. We haven't even talked about behaviors, but getting your daily behaviors right, which lead to good sleep behaviors at nighttime and optimizing your health in that way. I don't think the answer, the good long term answer is to take. pills and focus on supplements and always try to shift your chemistry pharmacologically, right? We have everything we need inside of us short of, you know, water and good nutrition.

• Speaker #2

  What are some of those, you know, healthy habits, behaviors that kind of throughout the day or before you go to sleep that help you to get that high quality sleep? Or what's what also, what should we avoid, you know, that is going to fuck with our sleep?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, let's start with avoid. So You should not drink energy drinks. You should not drink alcohol. Got it. It's terrible for you. Okay. I know that energy drinks, and I'm not saying that I haven't done it before, but we know that energy drinks cause little defibrillations in the heart, right? That's not good. That's what a heart attack looks like. Excessive caffeine, right? There's a point where it becomes toxic to your nervous system. Nothing wrong with a cup of coffee in the morning, but we try to stop drinking that before it, after lunch, nothing after lunch. How about that?

• Speaker #1

  Well, how much caffeine is excessive as well? Like the timing of it is one thing, but how much is excess?

• Speaker #0

  Well, if we look at, we don't want any caffeine in our system when we go to bed. And I hear it now that the guy that says, oh, I drink a, you know, an espresso, a dinner and it's fine. It's like, well, no, it's not. But I guess it is. I mean, if you can torture yourself a little bit, is that bad? I mean, and everybody, everybody, right?

• Speaker #2

  You can ingest a little bit of cyanide and survive. Is that good? Yeah. Yeah. That was smart.

• Speaker #0

  I mean, it's true that some people, well, everybody's different. Like some people are more sensitive to caffeine than others. But we know. that it elevates things. And we know that the sleep is more shallow, right? And we really just need to be able to go through all the cycles of our sleep successfully, get great recovery, and then push hard the next day, right? But if we don't get that recovery because we chose to drink too much caffeine and we chose to use alcohol as a sedative to try to go to sleep, then we feel like crap. And the thing is, is, is the more you feel bad. the more you reach for the easy fix because you don't feel strong enough to do it the hard way. And you might not even know. And so it's a vicious cycle of, you know, sedatives and stimulants. So don't don't do that. Right. But what should we do? Just the very basics are we want to fall into behavior that is conducive to good recovery at nighttime. Now, I know that. In situations where people have extenuating circumstances, they have physical injuries, they have mental health concerns, they have an unstable life and sleeping environment. I get it that not everyone has the opportunity to have. like this perfect life. But there are things that we can do. And as we start to get better sleep health, actually everything in our life starts to get better. It's not just that easy, right? You have to have a good mental outlook. You have to have good nutrition and exercise. You have to do things that are going to benefit you. But just specifically talking about sleep, when we wake up in the morning, we want to embrace the cortisol. We want to embrace the sunlight of the day. We want to exercise. We want to breathe deeper. We want to increase our respiration, our perspiration, our temperature. These tell us that our body is alive. Think of how we used to get up and go hunt and gather. Our body, our metabolism, everything is feeling this wakefulness. And so I like to talk about it in terms of a pendulum. So if we swing the pendulum into wakefulness, then when it swings back, it's much easier to sleep. And so getting maybe a minimum of 30 minutes of sunlight first thing in the morning, no sunglasses, maybe going on a walk or a jog or PT, and then just live your life. Watch the caffeine, watch the alcohol, try to stay off of drugs. I don't know why I have to say that, but apparently the pharmaceutical companies have convinced the entire world. or at least the United States, that it's okay to take lots of drugs all the time. And it's disgusting. But if we're able to do that, then at nighttime, our body says, okay, I get it. Now it's time to go to sleep. And all of a sudden, you get these triggers like low light, cold bedroom, quiet bedroom. You step into your zen. You work on your breath work. You work on your relaxation techniques. They say that you need 45 minutes of dedicated time to wind down. So if we live in a busy lifestyle, then let's just use that time to transition while still being quasi productive. What does that mean? Well, there are things that you can do before bed that aren't really activating, right? Like let's turn the lights down. Let's turn off that silly TV. Let's put up the laptop. So go plug the phone in in the kitchen. And then now let's put on our bedtime clothes. Let's get into our routine. Let's go fold some laundry for a minute. And then let's sit down. Let's do some breath work, some meditation or prayer. But this becomes our process. And if we deviate from that, that's okay. But we should return to it.

• Speaker #2

  Excellent. Thank you.

• Speaker #1

  In the 62 Romeo course, you know, you run us through several meditations. You know, the alternate nostril breathing we did. box breathing, you've got some meditations that are out there on inside timer. But then we also talked about getting obsessed with tracking different metrics. Like I was wearing a whoop for a long time. Will still wears one. I wear a garment now and I look at my sleep every day. I forgot what that was called, but there was a specific name and a section of the 62 Romeo course that talks about the metrics. So what metrics matter? um, what should we ignore and what should we be tracking?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, that's a great call. Um, I think taking a look at, so let's say you want to passively look at your sleep. I think right now Oura Ring 4 is crushing it. Um, I fell in love with them and we brought them in. It's a little expensive, but they're picking up on all my naps. The, the sleep data seems to be very accurate. Um, but when we passively look at sleep, we want to look at what is my week, right? And oftentimes it's a daily thing. They don't really give a good week long snapshot. But if we look at it every single night and we try to modify things every single day, what we can fall into is orthosomnia, right? And it's. Humans are so funny. We created these sleep measurement devices to measure our sleep. The big... year of sleep was 2018. Everybody who's anybody tried to get into the sleep business. We have all these wearables to track your sleep, but not a single one could help your sleep, right? And so you can measure your sleep till you're blue in the face. And what actually ended up happening was in all of our infinite wisdom, humans created these sleep devices that actually cause their sleep to get worse. Oh, wow. I'm not surprised. You're not surprised. I'm not surprised.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jesus.

• Speaker #0

  You don't need to measure your sleep, right? You know if you feel good or not. You know if you're jacked up or not. But it is helpful if you're taking a concerted effort towards modifying your sleep. Because the biggest fallacy that I hear in... as it pertains to these sleep measurement devices is people think that they go to bed at a certain time and wake up at a certain time. And almost in every case, they're wrong. Right. And they get pissed off about it, too. Right. Like I've spoken with people that are 100 percent like I went to bed at 11 and it's like, I saw you on social media at midnight.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  No, I wasn't. Right. But those sleep measurement devices, they kind of cut through all of that. Now, with that said, any of these sleep measurement devices are no more than 80% accurate, right? It's not measuring brainwave activity. And even in the brainwave sleep measurement devices that I've used, they do get more accurate, but they're still not perfect. They're good indicators as to sleep staging, which means, John, you asked, what should we be looking for? We want to know. how much deep sleep and how much REM sleep we've gotten. Deep sleep is where we get a huge hormone boost, testosterone, human growth hormone, and other hormones. And it's also where we have a lot of cellular repair. It's the biggest time to recreate the immune system function, right? If we have a night of sleep deprivation, our... immune system function and our T-cell production is cut in half, right? We talk about cancer being the number one issue in fire service, and it's primarily testicular cancer. And guess what is the number one cancer caused by poor sleep? And it's testicular cancer, breast cancer in women. So when we look at this, what do we do with all this data? We've got deep sleep, and we've got REM sleep. Now, REM sleep is... emotional regulation, memory consolidation from the day. We're sorting out cognitive dissonances. We don't give the dream sleep enough credit, but it directly impacts our mental health. So if we have deep sleep for body recovery, and these lines cross, there's a lot of things that scientists have found happen alternatively, but that's splitting hairs. So there's deep sleep and there's REM sleep. Now, of course, there's light sleep and sleep spindles and all that stuff, but don't worry about any of that. Did you get an hour and a half or more of deep sleep? And did you get an hour and a half of dream sleep? And if you didn't, you need to find out why. And there's going to be solutions. And if people hit a dead end, that's when they call me. Or if you just want to sleep better, that's when they call me.

• Speaker #1

  No, no, no. I actually... one thing, cause I've been trying to protect my sleep because I'm connected to the metrics and I'm not going crazy in them. But one thing that I saw and, uh, because of the metrics, uh, and it really helped improve the quality of my sleep and good quality to sleep. Meaning I'm getting that 90 minutes of REM and REM and deep sleep. Um, and also like sleep consistency has really been good. Like I'm going to bed at the same time, uh, every day and also honoring that circadian cycle that we're talking about earlier. But one thing that I did, and it was a big shift for me and it Definitely took some work. is when I'm eating. And I want to just like talk about what my, what I've seen in my metrics and how it's helped me to get higher quality sleep. And, you know, like I just mentioned, was I stopped eating or I kept, I tried to eat. three hours, two and a half to three hours before I went to sleep. And, uh, um, so that's, I, so I wouldn't have, I'd basically go to bed on an empty stomach. And by doing so my HRV, my heart reliability, which, which speaks to, uh, like kind of the overall, our harmoniousness or lack of harmony within our body and relaxation of body, my HRV started going up, right. Which is a good indicator of like, okay, my body is in a good, just overall state of being. Um, and By doing that, it even helped slow my heart rate down a little bit for sure. But I got deeper sleep because instead of my body, and let me know, tell me if I'm off the course here, my body was not digesting food. It was getting the sleep and doing the repair on the cellular level and the deep sleep, giving their, like, I know I heard it. We had Nina Shattuck on the show talk about, like, in that REM sleep, there's something called neural pruning. So clipping away the stress of the day when it's moving through these REM cycles as well. and it's like I felt more refreshed. I definitely woke up with more clarity. I was less of an asshole to the people in my life, you know? Anyway, but yeah, what's kind of the relationship between when you're eating and those, you know, what I kind of mentioned about the quality of sleep that you're looking for and does like when you eat determine or help to raise the level of your quality of your sleep.

• Speaker #0

  Absolutely. Uh, this. You know, a lot of people are doing the continuous glucose monitoring. I think first and foremost, we must address the ultra high processed foods. These foods are killing us, guys. We are 42% obese in our country today. Everyone is dying earlier than they should, and they're artificially kept alive through pharmaceuticals. And I'm not going to get into who's causing this because there is a lot of people at play that have bloody hands in this whole thing. But I'll say you got to get off the ultra high processed foods. You have to get back to natural, holistic food. I've been eating only meat for 2025. I was vegetarian for many years. And so I've had a chance to look at different nutrition styles. and that the uniting factor across that is that you just have to eat. naturally, right? Now, the Ayurvedics would say that you need to eat seasonally and you need to eat based on your body. And there's healthy things that and also medicines through food. But aside from that, just in terms of sleep timing, what I've seen, and I'm not a nutritional expert, but what I've seen is that the timing of food is part of our circadian rhythms. It's absolutely part of our interaction between metabolism and the energy process. But I will say that the biggest thing that I've changed in the last couple of years is to stop eating late. And the reason why, you know, I'm the constant learner. I don't know everything, but it turns out that when melatonin is released, it blocks insulin. And so if you're eating close to bedtime and you're digesting, let's say your blood sugar spikes, which it a hundred percent will. It will less if you're only eating meat, right? But anytime you have a carbohydrate, anytime you have sugar, that blood sugar spikes, and the body is supposed to introduce insulin to balance that. Well, guess what? It cannot if you're releasing melatonin. And so what does that lead to? That leads to the accumulation of visceral fat, which is extremely hard to get rid of, and it can be terrible. It can cause high blood pressure. Um, because think about all that fat inside of you squeezing on all the veins. And I think there's a lot there. So I practice intermittent fasting. Um, my preference, I'm not saying this is good for anybody else, but my preference is to, um, skip meals in the morning. Um, I will drink a little bit of tea, uh, cause it helps with, um, if I feel really hungry. But if I don't eat in the morning, I've gone all night and. I come into the morning, what I find is that, you know, some people would argue that you need that breakfast, you need to get that, that food in there for good cellular recovery through the food and energy. But I have had zero problem with energy. And admittedly, sometimes I go all the way till 6pm at night into jujitsu, and I train and I feel no loss of energy. Now, can you do that consistently? No, that's like an accident, like I forget to eat, I'm too busy. But Typically speaking, my preference is I like to intermittent fast where I don't eat in the morning and I feel like that hunger. Right. It does two things. One, I want to cleanse the digestive system and make sure everything is out before I start. eating again, because it kind of bothers me to be full stomach still processing and then just stuffing my face more. I feel like it's typical American. But then when I eat, I try to, right? No, you're right.

• Speaker #1

  You're right. You're absolutely right.

• Speaker #0

  But then if I eat healthy foods and I put the pressure on digestion in my body, primarily inside of a small window, I think that's more naturally how we're supposed to function. and then definitely cutting out. food, like you said, like three hours, like leading up to bed, we should not be still grazing. I think about the Dave Chappelle episode of his sleep time remedy was ribs. Yeah, that feels good because you have all these things releasing and you get puppy tummy and you pass out. But that leads to all the things that we know are bad.

• Speaker #1

  Right, Instead of resting and sleeping and digesting and restoring, like your body's digesting, it's like it's digesting instead of doing what the fucking it should do while you're sleeping. John, yeah.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, I was just going to say when Rob and I first started talking about my sleep and before I went through 62 Romeo, you know, I was eating like a weed gummy, you know, before sleep to calm down. and And Rob was like, hey, that's probably not the best thing for you. You may feel more relaxed, but it's going to jack up your sleep. It's going to jack up your circadian rhythm. It's going to jack up your heart rate variability. And it's going to make you hungry right before you go to bed. So you're going to go get the munchies and eat that like midnight hamburger. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even wreck your sleep even worse. So. I try to stay away from that regularly.

• Speaker #1

  What's the science say on that? Because I'm going through sober October right now. I'm not doing nothing. I'm not having gummies. I'm not smoking stuff. I'm not, you know, I'm not having alcohol. You know, so how does like if somebody is listening and I'm listening, it's like, and I want to take like a gummy a night to just like kind of relax the body and the mind. What's the science saying out there about THC? Even if it's like the indica, which is supposed to be more of that body. uh high and relaxation what is this saying out there about um sleep they say it impacts or eliminates dream sleep yeah i've seen that i've actually i've seen that on my i'm measuring again and i'm definitely getting higher rates of rem sleep and that's that neural pruning that's like kind of like letting go of the stress of the day function of the mind so it's a really yeah yeah yeah i mean i'm living it right now right fucking now in october so october Yeah, we're going to do it again next year, everybody. So if you want to be part of that group, I'll let you know. But cool. I think we're like pretty, anything else before we kind of close here, Robert, that you feel would put a little bow on this little conversation we're having?

• Speaker #0

  All the stuff that I teach, or at least the majority of it, I put it in this book. I'll send you the link, but you can Amazon it, 6-2-R-O-M-E-O. And then Sleep 101 is two words. There's a lot of books on Amazon. on so it's Sometimes it's hard to find, but and I try to keep it cheap. It's just paperback, 10 bucks. The goal is to get it out to as many people as possible. This book is fantastic to talk about all of the things that we talked about in more detail. It also, if somebody wants to take the course like John took, it is now the partner manual for that course.

• Speaker #2

  I'm going to go ahead and I didn't clear this with Will beforehand, so I'm just going out on limb. I'll tell you what, I will buy 10 of those books for our listeners. If you comment on Spotify, if you comment about this episode, I will buy you a book and I will send it to you. The first 10 people would be that. So there it is. It's out there.

• Speaker #1

  First time we've ever done an offer like that, Rob. Like, this is awesome. I approve. I approve, John, in real time. We could do that. All right. Totally.

• Speaker #0

  I'll tell you, I will double down on that. and I will sign the books and send them to your patrons.

• Speaker #2

  There you go. Okay. There you go, man. All right, that's what we'll do. We'll have like- Love it, love it. Keep it connected. And now you got to listen to the whole show. Don't put that in the show notes, Michael. That's for our producer. Don't put that in the show notes. They have to listen to the whole show to get to this part. Yeah. Well,

• Speaker #1

  they got to leave a fucking comment, right? Yeah, yeah.

• Speaker #2

  But even though- Oh, that's true. They got to listen to it.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, okay,

• Speaker #2

  great. And Rob, so for people, they got the book, where else can they find you, man?

• Speaker #0

  My website is www.sleepgenius.us. Oh, well played.

• Speaker #2

  Well played.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, because we have the U.S. handles now. And then we have, I'm on LinkedIn, which I see you on there all the time, John, on Instagram. Don't hate me, I'm on TikTok. Twitter, you can love me if I'm on Twitter, but you can hate me if I'm on TikTok, right? and then uh Of course.

• Speaker #2

  I love you for being on TikTok and hate you for being on Twitter.

• Speaker #0

  There you go.

• Speaker #1

  I just love you, Robert. Fuck, I just love you, Robert. Thank you. Whatever platform you're on, dude.

• Speaker #0

  Well, I just try to be on these platforms as painful as they are. Necessary evil. Sharing the message. Exactly. It's a necessary evil. How else are we able to communicate? This is the mode of communication these days.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. Well, we appreciate you communicating with us and our audience. and We'll get some books out to some people, uh, connect with Rob. Like, I mean, he just, I obviously could tell he's just, I just love how you deliver this work. Like the humility you bring to it, obviously the wisdom from your own fucking experience and the passion you have for it. Um, and, uh, thank you. Thank you so much, Robert, for being with us today. Love it.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah. As always. Thanks brother. Appreciate you. Great to see you. Great to listen to your wisdom. And, uh, I know our listeners got a lot out of it. So yeah, brother, uh, until next time. Thanks, Rob. And until next time, everyone listening, thank you all for tuning in. Take care, everyone. Bye-bye. All right.

• Speaker #1

  Take care. Thank you, Rob.

• Speaker #2

  Thank you for joining us today.

• Speaker #3

  We hope you walk away with some new tools and insights to guide you on your life journey. New episodes are being published every week, so please join us again for some meaningful discussion. For more information, please check out mentalkingmindfulness.com.