AMA #2 with sleep expert, Matthew Walker, Ph.D.: short sleep mutants, optimal sleep environment, sleep apnea, & rapid fire questions

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
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Again, the podcast will remain free to all, but my hope is that many of you will find enough value in, one, the podcast itself, and two, the additional content exclusive for members to support us at a level that makes sense for you. I want to thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. My guest this week is Matt Walker. Many of you are familiar with Matt because in April of this year, we released a three part series on sleep that was probably one of the most listened to series we ever released. These have been really popular podcasts and it's reflected in the fact that many of you have requested a specific AMA with Matt, which we did. And we are now back for a second version of that. For those of you perhaps listening to Matt for the first time, Matt's a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley and the founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Sciences. I will gloss over the remainder of his bio because you can find it everywhere else, but needless to say, it has all of these ridiculous accolades and he's just kind of an all round total stud. He's also the author of an international best seller, Why We Sleep, and very recently in 2019 This year, that is, he gave a TED talk that was incredibly well received. We linked to that previously and we will do so again. Now in this AMA, which again, as a reminder, these are for subscribers only. So if you're not a subscriber, you're going to be able to hear a little bit of this. If you are a subscriber, you're going to want to activate your RSS feed so that you can hear this entire thing in an uninterrupted fashion. And by the way, that also means you will hear all podcasts in an uninterrupted fashion without any of the other sort of housekeeping stuff that is not necessarily intended for you at this point. So what do we talk about? We talk about a bunch of things. We talk about the DEC2 mutants. These are folks who actually don't need to sleep that much. We talk about a whole bunch of environmental factors that you've asked about as they pertain to sleep, position, temperature, other tools and tricks that may or may not help us sleep, elevation, all these sorts of things. We then go into a, what we call, I did or took and am this sort of thing and is it hurting or helping. So getting into caffeine, getting into sex, talking about the role of parents with young kids and things like that. We get into a little bit of sleep apnea before rounding out a speed round where we go through a bunch of, kind of a potpourri of questions that are all over the place. I thought, just personally, I thought this AMA brought up a lot of questions that I had, so I was really happy to see that. And I think we actually got through every single question on the AMA. It took a little while, but we did. And I'm not gonna put Matt on the spot, but I suspect he'd probably be willing to do a third round of this in some period of time. Oh, he's giving me the thumbs up because I'm doing this intro well. He's getting ready to go for a run. So with nothing else to say on the topic, please enjoy our follow-up AMA with Professor Matt Walker.