Joe Rogan Experience #1109 - Matthew Walker

Joe Rogan Experience [0]. I love that he sits down with people and actually has long in-depth conversations with them. Here's a few interesting ones: * Let's start with his Elon Musk discussion [1]. It came out 2 weeks ago and it already has 14m views. They basically discuss a bunch of his ideas along with things such as AI and the future of humanity. It's fascinating to get a peek into the kind of person he is. * His discussion with Matthew Walker has been one of the most enlightening ones for me [2]. He's a sleep expert, and in the podcast they go over different myths relating to that. There was recently a HN post [3] where some people were quoting him and his book. * Another big favorite of mine was his discussion with Paul Stamets [4], a mycologist (i.e. a mushroom expert). They discuss some of the effects of different kinds of mushrooms, including psilocybin mushrooms (colloquially known as magic mushrooms). * I loved his discussion with Gary Johnson [5], the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate for 2016. How many other presidential candidates would you imagine would be willing to sit down and answer hard-hitting questions for +2 hours? He also had a discussion with Larry Sharpe [6], the Libertarian Party's candidate for governor of New York in 2018. Full disclosure: I recently joined the Libertarian Party. Listening to these podcasts pushed me to learn more about their movement. * He had a discussion with Mikhaila Peterson [7], the daughter of Jordan Peterson, whi

> However, take some of the science positions in the book with a grain of salt. The author is notorious for being directionally correct in his opinions, I've read it and I agree. Although he does admit in the beginning that there basically is not much conclusive facts about sleep, hence his motivation for writing the book. It's implied that what he is saying is fact, and its a lot more correlation than I think panacea. > It's also commonly known that people get less sleep than they think they do. A few things IIRC from the book: - The specific number is irrelevant as long as its "around 7~9" - If you're lying down / resting this still "counts" (its not as impactful, but still beneficial) If people don't want to read the book, the JRE podcast is actually pretty good at summarizing whats in the book: [this video] Good high level points about what to do to get to sleep (5 things): [this video]

Matthew Walker, a sleep expert, says sleep aids like Ambien are counter-productive. [link] "Dangers aside, Ambien and other hypnotics don’t necessarily provide you the kind of sleep your body actually needs. In his book, “Why We Sleep,” Matthew Walker, director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that the sleep people get from taking hypnotics doesn’t have the same restorative quality as natural sleep. In an interview with New York Magazine, Walker explains that drugs like Ambien simply “switch off the top of your cortex, the top of your brain, and put you into a state of unconsciousness.” The drugs actually sedate you, he says, and “sedation is not sleep.” The good news for those who desperately crave sleep is that a variety of techniques and methods can help you achieve a blissful state of slumber without prescription medications. Here’s a look at some good ways to reboot your sleep cycle. ..." Discussed at length in his book: [link] Also mentioned in this review: [link] "At last comes an explanation: According to the new book Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker, the director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, the sleep people get on sleeping pills like Ambien is not true sleep. Drugs like these simply “switch off the top of your cortex, the top of your brain,” he explained to New York Magazine, “and put you into a state of unconsciousness.” That’s not sleep; that’s cryogenics. Accordi

It'll likely be the nth time Matthew Walker is cited here, but in his interview with Joe Rogan, he mentions this is likely a societal trend rather than a biological need: [this video] > Joe Rogan: Yeah, I've heard this recently, that people - that you should have two sleeps. The idea of two sleeps. > Matthew Walker: Yeah, it's actually a little different than the idea of two sleeps. So there was a time in the sort of Dickensian era where people would sleep for the first half of the night, maybe sort of 4 hours or so. Then they would wake up, they would socialize, they would eat, they would make love, then they would go back and have a second sleep. If you look at natural biological rhythms in the brain and the body, that doesn't really seem to be how we were designed. It certainly seems to be something that we did in society, but I think it's more of a societal trend than it was a biological edict. However, we do seem to have two sleep periods. Those tribes will often sleep about 6.5, 7 hours of sleep at night. And then especially in the summer they'll have that siesta like behavior in the afternoon. And all of us have that, sort of this - what's called the post-prandial dip in alertness, just means "after lunch" - and if I measure your brainwave activity with electrodes, I can see a drop in your physiological alertness somewhere between 2 to 4 pm in the afternoon [irrespective of diet].

Try to sleep 8 to 9 hours every day. In this JRE podcast [0], Matthew Walker, a sleep expert, claimed that sleeping poorly can decrease your performance by 30%. Strive to maintain a good work-life balance. Burnout sucks. Your health and family are more important than work. A workplace that doesn't consider this to be the case is likely to be toxic. As for actual software development advice... Beware blanket statements. They can help you develop a low-resolution model so you don't suffer from paralysis, but real-world problems tend to be complex and messy. Here's an example: if you were building a traditional web app, many software engineers would probably suggest using something like PostgreSQL. That doesn't mean other database technologies don't have their place. However, PostgreSQL is able to adequately serve a large category of problems with relative ease, so it often makes for a sensible starting point. Once you become more familiarized with that domain you'll develop a higher-resolution model and you can begin to evaluate other technologies more effectively. Much of software engineering is about figuring out what tradeoffs to make. Another example in traditional web apps is using cookies for auth. Using cookies for this purpose is well documented and pretty much supported everywhere. There's plenty of known problems with using cookies for this purpose, but the alternatives also have their own set of issues to deal with. My final example: testing. Testing your code is gre