405. Master Your Sleep—Master Your Life: Top Tools & Power Practices w/ Todd & Tara Youngblood

Todd and Tara

April 19, 2022
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DISCLAIMER: This podcast is presented for educational and exploratory purposes only. Published content is not intended to be used for diagnosing or treating any illness. Those responsible for this show disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information presented by Luke or his guests. Please consult with your healthcare provider before using any products referenced. This podcast may contain paid endorsements for products or services.

Tara and Todd Youngblood are visionary leaders in sleep health. In this episode, they break down the sleep myths we still blindly believe, the amazing benefits of temperature control, and what most sleep tracking gets wrong.

Todd and Tara are the minds behind revolutionary cooling mattress pads The Cube (formerly Chilipad), OOLER, and Dock Pro Sleep Systems, are visionary leaders in sleep health.

Since launching the Chilipad in 2007, Tara has spent over 10,000 hours studying the science of sleep. Applying her analytical skills from her physics and engineering background, her current passion is to shape the future of sleep-driven health by making sleep easy and drug-free.

DISCLAIMER: This podcast is presented for educational and exploratory purposes only. Published content is not intended to be used for diagnosing or treating any illness. Those responsible for this show disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information presented by Luke or his guests. Please consult with your healthcare provider before using any products referenced. This podcast may contain paid endorsements for products or services.

If you’ve been listening to this show, you’re already familiar with the importance of sleep on your health and wellbeing. And I have to say, of all the hacks, supplements, and sleep trackers out there, nothing has been able to improve my sleep more than the products made by Sleepme Inc.

Tara and Todd Youngblood are visionary leaders in sleep health. They are the owners of Sleepme Inc. and the minds behind revolutionary cooling mattress pads, The Cube (formerly Chilipad), OOLER, and Dock Pro sleep systems.

In this conversation, we discuss why men and women almost always prefer different sleeping temperatures, the genetics behind being a morning person (or not), the history of midday nappers, how the eight-to-five grind disrupts our natural sleep cycles, and how blue blockers – like my Gilded brand – can help optimize your rest.

In the likely event that, by the end of this episode, you find yourself itching to get yourself a Dock Pro, visit lukestorey.com/dockpro and use code LUKE10 for 10% off the Dock Pro of LUKE22 for 22% off their other products.

09:17 — What Went Into Making the New Dock Pro

  • Dock Pro has twice the thermal capacity of Chilisleep’s previous products
  • Mesh top with a urethane membrane that water flows through
  • No tubes means 5X the surface area for thermal transfer
  • Making the sound of the fans quieter 
  • Nothing in biohacking can outweigh the value of good sleep
  • The Chilipad’s deep impact on my own sleep

19:50 — The Difference Temperature Preferences of Men & Women

  • How independent temperature control can improve relationships
  • Why hormones affect sleeping temperature
  • Our biological sleep switch and how to flip it

27:04 — All About Chronotypes

  • Your chronotypes are hardwired into your genetics
  • The history of midday napping and how the eight-to-five broke it
  • Balancing REM sleep with deep sleep
  • The myth of eight hours of sleep
  • We’re designed for more flexible sleep

35:08 — What You Can Do To Improve Your Sleep

  • Turning feedback into actions
  • Adjusting your temperature when you break out of your sleep routine
  • Keeping your sleep on track while you travel
  • Supplements for improving sleep quality
  • Magnesium for better sleep
  • The best ways to use blue blockers, like Gilded, to enhance sleep

1:04:58 — The Benefits of Cool Sleep

  • Lowering your energy bill with localized temperature control
  • Performance enhancing benefits of good sleep
  • Cognitive and reaction time improvements
  • Engineering Sleepme Inc. products to avoid EMF disruption

1:21:15 — Things That Wreck Your Rest

More about this episode.

Watch on YouTube.

Luke Storey: [00:00:02] I'm Luke Storey. For the past 22 years, I've been relentlessly committed to my deepest passion, designing the ultimate lifestyle based on the most powerful principles of spirituality, health, psychology. The Life Stylist podcast is a show dedicated to sharing my discoveries and the experts behind them with you. Alright, guys. Let's talk about some sleep.

Todd Youngblood: [00:00:28] Fantastic.

Luke Storey: [00:00:29] Great to see you again, Todd.

Todd Youngblood: [00:00:31] I know, it's been a while, a couple of years.

Luke Storey: [00:00:32] Yeah. Yeah. We did an episode way back in the day at Paleo f(x).

Todd Youngblood: [00:00:37] That's right. 

Luke Storey: [00:00:37] Well, not that I don't do that anymore, but that was like in the gorilla days when I would just like go and basically poach people off the tech hall floor, and be like, what's this thing you made? This is cool. Let's talk about it. 

Todd Youngblood: [00:00:37] We are upstairs pigeonholed in the second floor of the Palmer Center. That's right.

Luke Storey: [00:00:55] Yeah. And you guys have come such a long way and also so glad that I found you, because as we'll talk about, there's nothing that even comes close to having optimized my sleep than what you guys have created.

Tara Youngblood: [00:01:09] That's great, really great to hear.

Luke Storey: [00:01:10] Yeah. And I'm so glad, Tara, that you came along, too.

Tara Youngblood: [00:01:13] Yeah. It was nice that he could bring me this time anyway.

Luke Storey: [00:01:17] Yeah, it's cool, because as I always do, I've been listening to podcasts with you, and I'm like, Oh, Tara is like the secret weapon in the company, you know a lot of stuff, so I'm like, we're going to extract much wisdom from you today.

Tara Youngblood: [00:01:29] Yeah, definitely a sleep geek. 

Luke Storey: [00:01:32] So, first thing I want to ask you guys, as a married couple that both run a company, what's that like, and have you had any challenges with that, and if so, how have you learned to overcome them?

Tara Youngblood: [00:01:42] Oh, pretty regularly. I have quit so many times. I'm like, I can't work with you anymore, I'll get a job at McDonald's first. And I don't even like McDonald's, so that says like I would do that instead. But we've generally gotten—so we have our rules of like—because back to sleep, I'm a morning person, so by 9:00, if he brings up work stuff, and says, "Hey, I don't think we can do something by tomorrow", I'm like, "I'll stay up all night and not be able to sleep". And then, he doesn't really want to hear at 6:00 AM when I'm up like, "I've solved that problem, I'm ready to go", he's like, "Give me until 8:00, I want to warm up". So, we've kind of figured out our rules of, how do we navigate that?

Luke Storey: [00:02:19] How long have you guys been married?

Todd Youngblood: [00:02:21] About 26 years.

Luke Storey: [00:02:22] Oh, wow.

Todd Youngblood: [00:02:23] So, a long time. We met the first day of college and we were both engineering students. I lasted three days and I canceled all my classes. I'm like, I don't know what I'll do, but it's definitely not this. So, yeah, we've got all kinds of crazy stories about running life, four kids together. We've been running businesses together as co-founders since 2000, so 21 years.

Luke Storey: [00:02:44] Wow.

Todd Youngblood: [00:02:46] Yeah. If you can imagine a crazy triumph/struggle as entrepreneurs. We've just about seen them all. So, it's been kind of a fun adventure.

Luke Storey: [00:02:55] Well, I guess if you guys haven't figured it out by this time, something's wrong.

Todd Youngblood: [00:03:00] That's right.

Luke Storey: [00:03:00] That's a long time to be running companies together. I know a lot of people start out with that intention because we love each other's company, and we have a great idea, and we're passionate about the same things, but then when it gets into the practicalities of having a romantic and a business relationship, a lot of people have a hard time with that. I've tried it and it was very challenging.

Tara Youngblood: [00:03:19] Yeah, we we have a 51% rule that we kind of live by. So, like if an issue comes up, and I don't really care that much about it, I'm like, this is not 51% for me, if it's 51% for you, go ahead and this is yours to make. And we kind of hold that, I guess that pull back, that veto vote of like, no, this is really important to me, I'm going to pull 51% on it. This is not equal, I want this, I need this, this has to happen. And so far, that has always served us to be that tiebreaker of, okay, I'm going to let you run with that one, that one is your 51% thing.

Todd Youngblood: [00:03:58] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:03:59] I like that.

Todd Youngblood: [00:04:00] Yeah. And usually, like when you're actually having a disagreement or difference of opinion about an issue, the emotional energy almost always comes from another issue. Rarely is it like focus just on that one issue. It's like the baggage you bring in any relationship or any situation. So, like the 51% rule has really been a fun way to like, hold on a second, on this one issue, do you really care that much or are you just like pissed about the other six things that happened like yesterday or last week? Things like, no, actually, you're right, I really don't care about this issue, I was just kind of frustrated about da, da, da, da.

Luke Storey: [00:04:33] You said you were going to get the garbage disposal fixed and you didn't do that either. That's cool. So, you guys, just yesterday, and I didn't know this, you launched your new product, the Dock Pro. And for those listening, you're going to learn all about—we're going to talk about sleep and all the things that you guys have innovated, which are so awesome, but I want to tell you a quick, funny story.

So, the Dock Pro is the new kind of motherboard and it comes with this incredible mesh pad. It's kind of the Rolls-Royce of what was once the ChiliPad. So, I got it a few days ago, it was here in the office, and I had it in a box, and I wanted to shoot some video and stuff about it, so I didn't want to bring it to our temporary apartment that's not very sightly and a bit off-brand, but I didn't want to be unintegris or inauthentic and talk about it today without ever having used it.

So, last night, I was like, oh, God, I got the interview with Todd and Tara tomorrow, I got to sleep on this one night, so I can talk about it. So, I plugged it in, super easy to set up, by the way. Some of this tech stuff is really annoying to set up. When it syncs to your phone, it doesn't work and all that, so good job on that. But I plugged it in and I set it to my normal setting, which is like 65, maybe, usually on an average ambient temperature night, and I woke up freezing my ass off.

This thing gets so cold, because on the OOLER, the kind of middle unit, the second iteration, if it's warm out, I'll put that on low, like 61 or something, and it's just right. I don't even pay attention, I'm just like, low. So, whatever you guys did, I learned my lesson last night, and the temperature is real, you're going to get that temperature, and it was helical. So, congratulations on nailing that. So, when I used it yesterday, I didn't know that yesterday was the official launch. So, by the time this recording comes out, it'll have, I don't know, a few weeks, it will have been out, so maybe just to ramp up the excitement, tell me and those listening what you guys did with this latest innovation.

Todd Youngblood: [00:06:43] Yeah, pretty fun stuff. So, the reason it felt so cold is a couple of different reasons. Number 1, it has twice the thermal capacity of anything else we've ever made. So, we're measuring it in terms of watts, watts of cooling capacity. So, the control unit itself, the Dock Pro, has almost 100 watts of cooling capacity. So, it's fantastic.

Tara Youngblood: [00:07:04] And we'll get into why those matter and why we did that in a minute. 

Todd Youngblood: [00:07:04] And the reason that in the bed it felt so cold is the new pad, as you mentioned, it's a mesh top and it's got a urethane membrane that the water flows through, so there are no tubes. But because there are no tubes, it's five times the surface area of contact, so when you lay on it, rather than laying on tubes that, basically, the conductive element of the thermal exchange is happening between the tube and your body, but it's only really in that surface area of contact that it's having the thermal transfer.

So, if we have basically a mesh network more or less of water that is still highly breathable, there's airflow between it, and we've designed it, so it's comfortable to lay on, you get all of the thermal transfer of the entire grid network you're laying on. So, five times the surface area of what you're laying on, so the conduct of the thermal capacity of exchange is radically higher.

Luke Storey: [00:07:59] Ah, that makes sense, because the older pads, they had the little silicone veins inside them, and I mean, it wasn't uncomfortable, but you could feel them if you put your hand on it, right? Like, oh, that's where the veins are.

Tara Youngblood: [00:08:10] Mm-hmm.

Todd Youngblood: [00:08:10] Yeah. No, they're all gone. And actually, it took us about two years to come up with using very, very detailed flow diagrams and mapping to engineer a flow path that even when you're laying on it, it still flows beneath you. There's like a bias of the diameter of the grids that they're widest at the middle, where you're going to most likely lay on it. And they get a little bit thinner as they get to the outside, so it pushes the water underneath you.

Luke Storey: [00:08:36] Oh, that's cool.

Todd Youngblood: [00:08:37] Like there's all kinds of stuff, like that's where we get so excited. We've literally been working on this product for three years.

Luke Storey: [00:08:42] I remember seeing you at the Biohacking conference, and I think you had one under the table, and you're like, this thing's not out yet, but it's going to be awesome. Another cool thing about it, I mean, it's a minor thing, but if you use something like this all the time, it helps, is there's like a little reservoir tank now, where you fill up the water, because I found with the other ones, and again, not a big deal, I'm happy with whatever, but it was hard for me not to overfill it, because it has a little spout. And so, I have like a jug of distilled water, and then I overflow on the floor and I can never quite get it right, so I like that it has a little removable reservoir can, you can just pop the top off and [making sounds] fill it up super easy.

Todd Youngblood: [00:09:21] Exactly. Yeah. We've been listening for feedback. We care a lot about making the best product, man, and part of that is listening to your customers, and like we have a very kind of new power approach to our business and it's really a vision that Tara brought, kind of her leadership style, and that's like listen to customer feedback, right? Listen to like user experience. We're always trying to find a better way to do it, like we're never done. The product, as excited as we are about it, we're already like, alright, what can we do better? What can we do better? So, yeah, but the fact that it launched yesterday and you got to try it on its inaugural day, pretty fun. Good timing.

Luke Storey: [00:09:56] Yes, it was purely by chance. I had no idea that—I thought everyone had it already, so yeah, it's cool.

Tara Youngblood: [00:10:01] No, you're one of the first. 

Luke Storey: [00:10:02] Right on. Another thing about it, and we'll talk about a bunch more stuff, I think this is just top of mind, because when I get a new tool or toy, which are often the same thing, I just get pumped. There was something else about it. Oh, much quieter.

Tara Youngblood: [00:10:16] Yeah. So, it's got an amazing fan in it. We really spent time—actually, we lined up the fans and like literally tested one by one. There's a decibel rating, but if you listen to music, there's a difference between just being loud and being an amazing sound. And so, not only did we dial it in from just total volume, but you'll hear the quality of the sound is very different for the fan. The resonance that comes off of it, we really dialed that in to be a pleasant resonance versus just quieter, because quieter, as we know, isn't all the same straight across. It's likely different levels of-

Luke Storey: [00:10:52] You could have like a car honking its horn at different volumes, but the level of annoyance is going to depend on the tone of the horn, right?

Tara Youngblood: [00:11:00] Yeah. So, it's dialed all the way down to that level.

Luke Storey: [00:11:03] That's cool. Alright. Well, I'm stoked for you guys. Well, we're going to do a bunch of stuff here, but I wanted to cover that just because I said it was top of mind. So, a little bit about my history with the stuff you guys make, first, I'm just going to say, and it'll sound like I'm just saying this, because you guys are here, but this is the honest to God truth, I've been really focusing on sleep for many years when I've done a number of episodes about sleep, one with you, one with the CEO of Oura Ring, different sleep experts, there's nothing in the entire world of alternative health or biohacking to me that outweighs the impact of sleep.

So, I don't care how many supplements, or PEMF things, or infrared saunas, or red light therapy, or all the things, I mean, I have tons and tons of amazing and powerful tools, none of them, if I woke up sleep-deprived and did every single thing I have, it would never equal a good night's sleep. You just can't beat it. And beyond that, as I've come to learn that, trying to kind of hack sleep deficits, so I started tracking my sleep and really putting a lot of focus on it, and not one thing has helped my sleep as much as the Chili sleep technology, beginning with the first model, which was the ChiliPad.

Like my sleep scores, my quality of life, everything has gone up immensely, and there's literally nothing that helps my quality of sleep as much as controlling the temperature, specifically under where I'm sleeping, not like the room. Cold room is nicer than a hot room, but still, I don't get the kind of sleep that I get from what you guys have created.

Tara Youngblood: [00:12:38] The science is pretty fun when we can deep-dive into that.

Luke Storey: [00:12:42] Yeah, I want to do that.

Tara Youngblood: [00:12:42] The science of why that is is beyond just our product, but temperature has an amazing spot in how sleep works.

Luke Storey: [00:12:49] Awesome. Well, we're going to get into that, but I just want to give you guys props on that. And also, to that point, I know what I was getting at, I've actually packed my ChiliPad in my suitcase. I remember a couple of years ago, I went to Spain and I think it was in the summer, it was hot as hell, and I'm like, ah, I don't know what these hotels are, what the AC situation is, so I literally like took an extra suitcase, packed my ChiliPad, plugged it in, in every hotel, and it actually saved the trip, because as I predicted, there was a lot of dot, it was on the island of Mallorca, and so some of it was less developed than others, depending on where we stayed, and I've taken it on numerous road trips.

And so, I don't know that I would fly with it all the time, I would probably just pay extra for a hotel that has really cold AC, but that's how like addicted to it and dependent upon it I've become, because now, I know what good sleep feels like and how I feel when I get it, so when I don't, which is usually because I'm overheating, it's just absolutely imperative that I pay attention to that.

Todd Youngblood: [00:13:58] Sure. And we've made every system we've ever made with a smart power supply inside it, so you don't have to worry about any voltage wherever you go. As long as you have a cord that'll fit into it, it'll take the power that's available. So, we totally designed our systems with the expectation that we know we're ruining a lot of vacations, that you got to bring extra stuff with you, because once you get your sleep dialed in, it's kind of hard to walk away from it.

In fact, that's why Tara and I, we got our motor home, because we're like, we love our sleep, so we literally take our whole bedroom with us when we go on vacation if we can stay on the East Coast, because like our sleep is, we know the impact of it. It makes everything else better, right? When you're out there kayaking, or biking, or paddleboarding, it's that much more fun, because you slept great the night before. But yeah, the smart power supplies, that's on all our systems so that we make it easier for people to travel.

Luke Storey: [00:14:50] Sweet dude. Sweet. I don't know that everyone's as extreme to me to fly with them, they're pretty substantial, but on that particular trip, definitely, definitely helped.

Tara Youngblood: [00:14:58] Well, let us know. We actually have pelican cases that we have designed for that, because Todd and—

Luke Storey: [00:15:04] No way.

Tara Youngblood: [00:15:04] Well, if you're in the sleep business, you can't show up to something and be exhausted, because it doesn't really sell the product if you're dragging at a trade show. So, we travel with them, we've made it for lots of different celebrities or VIPs that need to travel with it. So, full professional sports teams have them, the ability to pack those up and travel with them.

Luke Storey: [00:15:25] Well, I've got a pelican case right over there for my mobile studio. I love those things. So, we talked a bit about your working relationship. Let's talk about the difference in sleep temperature preference between men and women. I always say that, while the relationship that I'm in has lasted, some of the others obviously didn't, not necessarily because of sleep incompatibility, but I've never slept with a female partner in my life that prefers the same temperature as I. It seems overwhelmingly that they like to sleep warmer, including my wife, Alyson. Is that pretty universal? How many marriages have been saved by having the ability to control the temperature on either side?

Tara Youngblood: [00:16:11] Yeah. So, it definitely is a relationship saver from that perspective, but temperature for women in particular, we're just messier with our hormones. And so, temperature is one of those things that throughout life changes a fair amount for females, even more than males. It's not just attached to BMI or the size, there's a metabolism factor. So, we get really small athletes, we've done a bunch of tests on women's soccer teams, different professional women's athletes, women's cycle team, they all benefit from it being much cooler, but they're running at a high metabolism, high performance rate.

And so, you really almost need to think about it in terms of, we're all human engines and what that engine is. And most of the time, women like to warm up to fall asleep, but they'll still benefit by sleeping cooler after the fact, and even throughout their menstrual cycle, or again, lifetime, that's going to change pretty significantly. They'll run hotter right before their period, so they may actually change more throughout a month or throughout a year than guys do, but that's a hormonal factor.

Luke Storey: [00:17:16] Right. That makes sense. Yeah. I've noticed with Allison, because we haven't set it up here, because we're still kind of in flux, but when we were back in LA, we had the two units, and then two OOLER, right? And then, on a king bed, we each have our own pad. And I would set mine just cold all the time, but she would put hers on the timer in the app, so it's like real toasty when she got in bed, and then it would cool off during the night, and then it would wake her up warm, which is a really cool feature, and I just haven't got that high tech with mine. But now that I'm thinking about it, that would be pretty nice, because it kind of sucks waking up when you're cold, you don't want to get up.

Tara Youngblood: [00:17:52] Yeah. Actually, you don't want to wake up cold. Actually, you want to wake up warm. And it goes back to, we evolved to sleep outside. We evolved not with climate control environments, where it's all one temperature. So, when we get into the science of why temperature is one of those extreme ways in which you can control your sleep, there is something called the sleep switch. It wasn't discovered by us. It was Clifford Saper out of Harvard.

But there is a sleep switch and it's triggered by a change of temperature. And so, it depends on the person, so you may have a spectrum of people, even just putting on warm socks, again, probably more for a female, warming up your toes, may be enough to help trigger that, all the way to an extreme where 20 minutes in an ice bath may be part of getting that same sleep profile.

Arguably, I'd still prefer a Dock Pro to an ice bath right before I go to bed, but if you are ever totally stuck and you can't fall asleep, you can't do it right before you go to bed, it has to be about an hour. But an hour before you go to bed, a 20-minute ice bath, and you'll get amazing deep sleep and you'll totally crash out. But it's not always fun to spend 20 minutes in an ice bath. It really depends on what you like to do for your ice plunges or if that's something you like to do.

Luke Storey: [00:19:03] Twenty minutes is a long time and I'm a daily ice bather, but that's a long time.

Tara Youngblood: [00:19:07] That's a long time.

Luke Storey: [00:19:07] It's funny, though. I've noticed that it's a bit counterintuitive, but if I take a cold shower before bed, you'd think it would wake you up and make you not sleepy, but as long as it's not right before you go to bed, it does actually help you fall asleep. It's really weird.

Tara Youngblood: [00:19:22] Yeah. And it'll trigger deep sleep, so it's matching the circadian rhythm. Again, the planet's getting colder, your body's looking to get colder to fall asleep, and in particular, deep sleep really needs your body to be cooler, and that's just the problem of today's mattresses and climate control, you're really not able to get that same cooling that you need to to get really great sleep. But then, the second half of the night, you really want to warm up, the planet's warming up, and that's actually more for REM sleep, so if you want to be in balance, you really want to warm up.

And if you really warm yourself awake, you turn off sleep and you get a burst of cortisol when you wake up. And so, you actually are warming yourself up to get started for the day and you'll actually charge into a workout, or sunshine, or wherever you're going on your day, you actually get a better start. No snoozing. Snoozing is bad. But warming you up, you won't go back to snooze if you do a warm awake alarm.

Luke Storey: [00:20:14] Oh, so that's why I noticed in the app, you guys have a button that's warm to wake. And if, literally, you think about being snuggly in bed, but if you warm up to wake in the morning, you literally will pop up and you'll feel the difference. It's a burst awake.

Luke Storey: [00:20:30] Wow. That's interesting. Way cooler than an alarm clock, too.

Tara Youngblood: [00:20:32] Way cooler than an alarm clock.

Luke Storey: [00:20:34] Yeah, I don't like using alarm clocks. I mean, I've built a job that doesn't require that I have to be anywhere super early. And I'm a night person like you, Todd, and my wife's a morning person. It's so interesting to be with someone like that, too, because 8:30, 9:00 PM, she's smoked, like it's over, there's no more conversations, or it's just like cuddle a bit, whatever, do things, but not talk or do anything active.

And then, in the morning, like until 10:00 or 11:00 AM, I'm like, don't talk to me, I can't look at my email, I don't look at my phone, I'm just like, wake up, Luke. It takes me a couple of hours to feel like I'm awake. It's so interesting. I've heard you talk about the chronotypes. Could you maybe, beyond just people being in a partnership with someone, but is it true that we really have different sleep styles, and if so, how malleable are they? Because I feel like I've been trying since probably kindergarten to become a morning person, and it's never worked, and I'm 51.

Tara Youngblood: [00:21:39] Yeah. So, it's really the length of your PR3 gene. So, it is hardwired in what you are. It would take a really extreme act. The military works really hard. They literally sleep-deprive you for three or four days. They put you through an extreme change. And even then, they may not be successful in totally switching you to a morning person, so you're not alone. That's not an easy switch. You're really driving against what you're genetically predisposed to be.

That is your chronotype. It's a quiz you can take, so you don't have to do a fancy DNA test necessarily to get that. It's a pretty standard quiz. And then, you're like, yeah, this is me. And it's a spectrum like anything else, that bell curve that everyone looks at, there's an extreme morning person. They're waking up at 4:00 AM, ready to go. They're pretty extreme. Night person, almost all the way to that 3:00, 4:00 in the morning. They may stay up and do that.

But the rest of us really fit morning person, closer to that, we call it in our app at daylight, but it is that middle of the road that most people can function in, where they're going to bed at 10:00, 11:00 at night, and waking up reasonably, that's where the workday comes from. But even still, we're so ingrained to this 8 hours of sleep, all sleeping in what time. Night people, they really love naps. They can do naps way better than morning people. So, there are all these different types and different ways of sleeping.

You talked about being in Spain, they often will take a nap around 4:00 in the afternoon, have a later dinner. That first sleep, second sleep was very common. Even in like Dickens, you'll see references to it, so it was pretty common to have two sleeps. And between 11:00 and 1:00, a lot of people, mostly night people, were out wandering around, having conversations, having small meals, being social during that time. We've kind of lost track of the fact that that's just okay. We can sleep however, we just need to understand who we are, and understanding who you are first is a great way to dive into sleep.

Luke Storey: [00:23:39] What about the relevance of sleep architecture? So, many of us use the Oura Ring and things like that, and I've noticed that this might have something to do with how I'm setting the timing on your technology, too, but my deep sleep is usually pretty good, hour-and-a-half to two hours. On a good night, maybe two-and-a-half hours. But then, on the nights where my deep sleep is really high, then my REM kind of sucks. It's hard for me to kind of get them balanced, and not even know what the proper ratio is, but how important is that versus this idea that we have that every person has to get 8 hours sleep? Like we look more, I think, at the total number of hours rather than, actually, what type of sleep are we getting?

Tara Youngblood: [00:24:25] Yeah, it's one of my favorite myths to bust. So, 8 hours didn't exist as a thing until the industrial age when factory workers petitioned to get at least 8 hours off. And so, we started with this work schedule that we all kind of look at today. Again, we work really hard to get out of having that work schedule and having to wake up for the 8:00 to 5:00 grind, but the 8:00 to 5:00 grind has existed part of the industrial age, and that's where the 8 hours came from.

We did not sleep that way across the planet. There are siestas. Look at our circadian rhythms, they allow for an afternoon nap, they have the same dip right after lunch that they do in the evening. We really are designed to be able to be very flexible on sleep. It's not about the total number of hours, but it does matter what kinds of sleep you have back to that architecture. So, there is deep sleep, REM sleep, and light sleep.

Those are kind of just the standard types of sleep. Light sleep is probably the thing we know least about honestly from a sleep knowledge perspective, but it tends to be the ribbon of things that go throughout the night. So, that one's the one that's probably most easy to like throw it out, and say, I don't know what that metric is for light sleep, but it fills in the gaps. We do want two hours of deep sleep and two hours of REM sleep.

And oftentimes, if you're cannibalizing your REM sleep, it is because you're getting more deep sleep. Now, if it's in response, because you just ran a marathon, then very likely, that is going to happen. Your body's going to look for more of that sort of response. If you've just gone through a traumatic event, you may spend more time in REM sleep. You'll see that in extremes, in PTSD and depression. When there's a high mental state component, REM sleep will cannibalize deep sleep heavily.

The good news is sleep is all about your old part of your brain, your brainstem. This is not a new thing that we do. The on/off interval of sleep exists all the way down to the smallest organisms on this planet. They are designed to be on and off, and sleep is our off button, and we need to turn off. And that's really the important part. We need to turn off, and we need to get deep sleep, and we need to get REM sleep, but it doesn't really care how you do those intervals.

Luke Storey: [00:26:33] Yeah. The light sleep that you speak of, that always annoys me. When I look at my sleep score and it's like 4 hours of light sleep, I'm like, what is that even? Like what can I do? How much does the timing of, because we're talking about sleep in general, but a lot having to do with temperature, because it's so impactful, in terms of the sleep architecture, the REM and deep, what's the relevance of the timing of temperature?

Tara Youngblood: [00:27:01] Yeah. So, the timing does help with that, that on/off switch, and it is relevant for those different types of sleep of deep sleep and REM sleep. Deep sleep is going to want the first half of the night and that's really because your core body temperature is dropping two degrees temperature, which when we think about two degrees, when you're running a fever of two degrees, it doesn't feel great. That's significant for your core body to be two degrees difference.

And so, when it's trying to drop that, that's when you're most likely to get deep sleep. Now, just like everything else, once you get into physics and the small particles, it's all about probabilities. So, it's not like you're in deep sleep solidly for those 2 hours. You fluctuate in and out of those different sleep states, the speed of the frequency that your brain is going to change throughout that time, but you're more likely to get deep sleep in the first half of the night.

As you get older, that may stretch. So, it's nice, and neat, and tidy, like most things when you're 20. But as you get older, it's harder and harder to get deep sleep. And statistically, by the time you're 80, you may get almost no deep sleep, naturally, without the enhancement of temperature. But again, temperature is talking to the old part of your brain.

It bypasses any thinking part, so when you're unconscious, that's how we're able to trigger sleep states without you having to think about it. There's no willpower, there's no remembering. Once you set a schedule, and if you set the schedule to amplify the deep sleep in the first half and amplify REM in the second half, we can deliver an amazing sleep at 65, 80, and it's going to look like a 20-year-old sleep. And that's pretty phenomenal. That's the power of temperature.

Luke Storey: [00:28:30] So, is that the purpose of, on the Sleep Me app, I downloaded the new app last night, I was playing around with that, and I think I scheduled things backwards from what you just said, which is probably why I was so freezing. So, I had mine, I think, at 2:30 AM to go down to 65, and that's probably when I woke up like, what is happening? I'm in an igloo here in the tundra. Is the purpose of the scheduling in the app so that you can kind of start to play with that, and track your sleep, and find the sweet spot to get your deep earlier, and then warm up a little to go into REM later in the night?

Tara Youngblood: [00:29:07] Yeah. And we also find, we have like shift workers, we have people that have weird schedules that aren't always able to, back to that, it doesn't have to be from 10:00 to 6:00 that you sleep. Using temperature as a way, you can hack your sleep to sort of amplify that no matter when you go to sleep. Obviously, ideally matching it to your chronotype is going to help you get there faster and it's a way to reset that, but it really doesn't matter. It can trick that brain into saying, yes, it's time to get deep sleep.

Luke Storey: [00:29:34] Cool. Wow. So fun. Let's see here. Okay. Then, in terms of sleep tracking, what have you guys found to be the most accurate? There's a whoop thing or something, I don't have that, I've just had the Oura Ring forever, and I mean-

Todd Youngblood: [00:29:55] Yeah. So, we're launching our own sleep tracking later this year. Yes.

Luke Storey: [00:30:01] Really? So, screw Oura Ring, those other ones, they all suck. No, I'm just kidding.

Tara Youngblood: [00:30:05] We could tell you what's different about them, for sure.

Luke Storey: [00:30:07] Yeah.

Todd Youngblood: [00:30:07] So, a couple of things. I mean, I think we look at sleep tracking, right now, one of the biggest problems with sleep trackers is that they struggle to bring causality to—it's a measuring stick, right? So, you're getting a measuring stick, you're getting feet biofeedback, but it's not always actionable information, or you don't really know what to do or what's causing, say, a bad sleep outcome. And so, our vision is to connect the sleep state, which we're going to do in real time and feel that be able to feed real time to be able to set and recommend temperatures.

So, when you're able to connect the two systems, this is coming on board like right around Labor Day, so kind of we're throwing it out there that this is coming, it's not available now, but the vision is that this will actually be able to connect the two systems. So, if you have real time sleep tracking and hardware with a real time intervention, it can automatically change the temperature with an end of one. So, it'll determine Luke Storey's ideal temperature.

Tara Youngblood: [00:31:02] Yeah, it will calibrate to you.

Todd Youngblood: [00:31:03] It'll calibrate to you. And we'll actually have a training mode, because we know EMF is really important to you and a lot of people in your audience, it has a training mode, so you can basically have a train on your unique data set, and then turn off, and live in airplane mode, and then you can retrain it over time. But we have done a lot of research on the other sleep tracking systems. And Oura, we love the Oura guys. Tara and I both wear Oura Rings, but they really struggle with the full 360 view. They can't tell you exactly when you go to bed, they can tell when you're asleep in general, and they really struggle between deep sleep and REM sleep. 

Tara Youngblood: [00:31:03] Yeah, the sleep stages accuracy is really where all sleep trackers fail. Across the board, if you hit them up on the accuracy of sleep states, it's going to be 40 to 60% versus your HRV, resting heart rate, that's where they really rock it, it's not real time. And why real time is important, all of them have a battery life, you have to wear them while you're sleeping, this exists in the bed, it doesn't have a battery life, so it doesn't have to have a look back, when real time sleep data is really heavy on the amount of data burn.

And so, calculating that in real time is crazy. If you're a math person, it's crazy calculations. It's really fun if you're a math person, there's some fun part in it, but there's no look back. So, in the morning when you wake up like, crap, I sucked last night, what happened? That doesn't happen if it's in real time and we're adjusting while you're unconscious, while you're asleep, to sort of mitigate those changes and to be able to have that happen automatically for you. That's the goal. You want to show up in bed and have your bed work for you, and that's really the goal with the sleep tracker for us. 

Todd Youngblood: [00:32:45] And really foundational. So, patents that we started filing five years ago. In 2017, we started filing patents about your bed at home at night being your space to heal. So, how can we implement different technologies over time using this real time sleep tracker so that we can add PEMF treatment, we can add sound therapy, light therapy, doing the right thing at the right time when you're already unconscious? You're predisposed to heal at night, so why is that the dumbest space in our 24-hour day?

It's because the technology didn't advance to the point where we could get a feedback loop to know the dosage and the right interventions that would be the right things for the right people at the right time. So, that's all something we've designed this sleep tracker, this real time sleep tracker, to be available on open architecture for other hardware companies to connect to.

So, our vision is not like we need to build it all for it to be great stuff. There are tons of great tech out there, lots of great entrepreneurs working on amazing things, we want our Sleep Tracker to be an empowerment tool to help other people get better faster. And we think with an open ecosystem, an architecture that allows other hardware to be able to leverage our millions of dollars investment in the space, like that's just going to make a better outcome for everybody.

Luke Storey: [00:34:02] Oh, that's super, super cool. Yeah, I use a device called the Hapbee, you guys know that, the little ring?

Tara Youngblood: [00:34:07] Yeah, they're going to be one of our first platform partners for that reason.

Luke Storey: [00:34:11] Oh, cool. Yeah.

Tara Youngblood: [00:34:11] Again, they need sleep tracking information that interacts with theirs, and so that's where we can share device control, again, as we architected that platform. So, that's an easy pairing.

Luke Storey: [00:34:22] That's so cool. Yeah. Actually, I don't use it every night just because I don't know that I want something omitting a field on my brain every night, but on nights that I really need sleep, I'll put it on its deep sleep setting for 8 hours, and put it under my pillow, and my deep sleep scores are always off the charts on those nights. I mean, it totally works.

Todd Youngblood: [00:34:42] Yeah. In fact, we're working on a sleep me recipe that we're working on right now with Hapbee. So, we'll let you know, kind of we're coordinating timing, and how that's going to be all launched, and without putting the cart before the horse, but definitely, we've got an open collaboration, super excited about their tech and their team, we work really well together. We're excited about doing lots of things together.

Luke Storey: [00:35:03] Yeah, they're great people. I mean, I've interviewed Scott, their CEO, great guy, doing good things in the world. I love it when you guys know each other, like it's like, oh, man, if this thing connected with this thing, it would be so awesome, and there you go, you did it.

Todd Youngblood: [00:35:15] We work with all kinds of great people. And I think that's just a philosophy, frankly. I think it really helps, Tara and I work well together as well as work with other people of like it starts with like high ambition with high humility. Like we just want to do the right stuff, and do the right stuff the right way, and work with great people, and it delivers better outcomes for everybody. So, yeah, it's a fun moment in time. We've got a lot of amazing things in flight.

In fact, some of the app stuff that Tara is working on, really cool stuff with where we're trying to get our app. So, when you are traveling or if you just—a lot of people feel like they suck at sleep like, man, I've tried everything, nothing really works for me. I'm just not good at sleep, I don't sleep well, and Tara's got kind of a whole system built out to be able to meet people where they are in sleep and give them some wins, so they can start figuring out a way to help themselves sleep better, because it's not the same five tips that are going to work for most people, right?

Like back to get 8 hours, stop drinking caffeine at 2:00. Well, it's based on your chronotype, and it's like, you never tell someone go eat two pounds of food and you'll be healthy, like, well, that's the same as the 8 hours of sleep, right? So, yeah, we've got some really cool stuff that's coming with the app and how we're looking to change sleep for people that aren't getting good quality sleep.

Luke Storey: [00:36:29] With the sleep tracker that you're developing, is that something that's like underneath you?

Todd Youngblood: [00:36:34] Yeah.

Tara Youngblood: [00:36:35] Yeah, it's sensors. We got medical grade sensors, so it's a sensor array. We've benchmarked our algorithms, a company out of Finland called VTI. We've benchmarked—the good news about Finland is they have open health care, and so there's access to lots of nights of sleep data in order to be able to benchmark that. So, we've spent a lot of time getting that algorithm just right in order to be able to get to that higher accuracy on sleep states, which is so important to us.

Luke Storey: [00:37:02] Cool. There's another thing with tracking sleep that is worth mentioning, might be useful to people, having had the Oura Ring for a long time, I got in the habit of—because I put on airplane mode, because I don't want the Bluetooth when I'm sleeping, and then right when I wake up, I go look at the app, and like sync it, and like, oh, man, I only got x amount of REM, deep, and then I find myself being more tired that day. It's like a psychosomatic nocebo kind of thing.

And over time, I start to realize, I think I'm screwing myself because of the power of belief, right? And so, now, I don't—every once in a while, I'll be curious. Like last night, I looked, because I tried out a new technology and I want to see what happened. But now, I kind of do, I'll check once a week and just review the week, and be like, Tuesday night sucked, what happened? Oh, yeah. I ate a pint of ice cream at 1:00 AM and climbed in bed. Don't do that. But how much do you-

Tara Youngblood: [00:37:55] We can fix that with the Dock Pro, by the way, just so you know, and there isn't—the Staples easy button equivalent is coming on that, because we can mitigate the difference of that ice cream. So, if you are bad—because sleep is an ultimate party pooper, right? Like who wants to like always go to bed at the same time? It does love ritual, it does love habit, but if you increase your metabolism with ice cream or drinking light, you just adjust your temperature down a little bit and you can mitigate almost all the impact of that. So, you can guilt-free enjoy your ice cream, just tap your schedule down, but we'll have an automatic adjustment in the schedule that's coming out in an app release by summer. 

Luke Storey: [00:38:36] Wednesday night's ice cream night. That's pretty cool. How much do you guys think the psychosomatic power of belief affects how tired we are when it comes to tracking?

Tara Youngblood: [00:38:47] It is absolutely why I tell a lot of people, don't track your sleep unless you're going to use the data, to your point, I'm trying a new technology, I'm going to try a new supplement, I'm going to increase my magnesium intake for the next two weeks. So, I'm going to really try tracking that, I'm going to try this new supplement, I'm going to do some new exercise, then you should track your sleep. But otherwise, it actually is very destructive.

Study after study is showing that it is, it's bad news in the morning. Who wants to get bad news to start your day? It actually is very destructive to your hormones, all your good hormones. The last thing we want, we don't get dopamine in the morning if we look, and we're like, oh, crap. Like you feel more tired, because you don't have the same rush of, oh, wow, that was great, I'm amazing. And actually, your brain is giving you a feedback loop for that. So, there's a chemical response to getting bad news, and if you feed off of that, yeah, you're going to be tired.

Todd Youngblood: [00:39:38] And if you're an A-type like Tara, and you wake up, and the first thing you see is a 70, or an 80, or an 82, it's not 100. So, it starts with like, number 1, you're never perfect, which unfortunately from a scoring standpoint, it's like we're all unique. Like we're totally unique beings, why is there a one to 100 score? Like the whole approach to like one to 100 means, number 1, you're never perfect, and if you are, it's like a unicorn's sleep, right? You're probably in bed for ten-and--half hours, and like whatever.

Tara Youngblood: [00:40:07] Yeah, you broke their algorithm. 

Tara Youngblood: [00:40:07] But it's not set up to maximize you feeling great, and like that gratitude, and that moment of like self-love in the morning of like, I feel great, like I am going to have my best day. And you look at the number, you're like, damn it, I already started by screwing up my night last night. Like it's definitely not the best way to start your day.

Luke Storey: [00:40:25] Yeah, I agree. And the other thing about it, too, is when I go back and look at the prior week, you know, say my score, I check in on Saturday, my score this Tuesday past was really shitty, and I think back, it was like, I had a great day that day. I felt great. I had tons of energy But had I looked at it, I was like, oh, today is going to be a struggle. I mean, sometimes, you sleep less or your sleep architecture is not so hot, and for whatever reason, you just feel on point anyway.

Todd Youngblood: [00:40:54] Yeah.

Tara Youngblood: [00:40:55] Yeah. Sleep hides a lot of things. So, sleep is a look back, and that's the other complexity with sleep tracking, is that you'll see it when you're starting to not feel well. You can see that in your Oura scores. A lot of them were benchmarking it for getting COVID. Your temperature would change. Your HRV scores will crash. All of those will happen when you're starting to get sick, but you won't see the symptoms manifested necessarily in your body, and even if your body is fighting something and they fought it off, but you didn't really register that you got sick from it, all of those things can happen in your sleep, and it does show up in your sleep scores, but it doesn't mean necessarily, like you said, that you had a bad day. It just means your body was doing something in the background, taking care of you, and good for it, glad it was doing that, but that doesn't mean you failed at sleep, it just means your body was working really hard to heal your body during that time.

Todd Youngblood: [00:41:41] Well, the other thing that happens with really good sleep, and now that you're aware of it and you're listening to yourself rather than just looking at a measuring stick, is you're increasing your sleep elasticity. So, we're working with like 63 pro sports organizations right now. Pretty much every type, whether it's NBA, or NLB, or hockey, or pretty much every league in some capacity. And what we're doing with these folks traveling is if they can sleep really, really well at home, when they travel, they can overcome sleep adversity better. And so, we're trying to get them set up with road kits and other things, but it lends itself to the sleep elasticity.

If, in general, you sleep really well at home, one bad sleep have a much lower effect, than if you get mediocre sleep, and you have a bad sleep, it's like, man, you're wrecked, but you can kind of skip over a night of bad sleep like, ah, it wasn't that big of a deal, you just kind of glossed over it, because you had enough built up sleep elasticity that it didn't have the same impact. And that happens. We've seen it on even measuring someone that hadn't slept with our technology for a while and they've slept on it for maybe a couple of weeks, two, three, four, or five weeks, and then they go travel. Actually, their travel nights are better night's sleep even without the technology, if it's over a relatively short duration.

Luke Storey: [00:42:59] Oh, interesting.

Todd Youngblood: [00:42:59] So, it's kind of neat.

Luke Storey: [00:43:00] Speaking of travel, is there a difference between jet lag and just travel fatigue? I feel like I get travel fatigue a lot, but even if I'm not changing time zones that dramatically, I'll still get smoked just from the travel itself, and I'm like, well, what is that then? Is that travel fatigue?

Tara Youngblood: [00:43:21] Well, there's a ton of EMFs, if you look from a physics perspective, your airplanes are EMF-generating machines. So, as soon as you get on an airplane, the air's bad, the EMFs are bad. You're basically stressing your body out. That's what EMFs do. They put your body in a stress state, because it's taking an impact. Even though we can't see it, as you know, it's still having an impact. But the travel life, moving around, all of that does wear and it creates a stress response in our body, and when we get stressed out, that response is there for a reason.

It's designed if an arm got ripped off by a lion, we could respond to it, which is good, but it's exhausting, right? It puts our body in a state where it's always on, because it's ready for whatever the next thing is. And when we're traveling, we're in an always on kind of state. So, beyond the jet lag, beyond the time change, which can mess your sleep up and hurt that, there's an always on that needs to get turned off as well, so it's really important to monitor stress.

When in doubt, take an extra minute at least in the bathroom, do a breathing technique. That's where some of the meditations that you talk about, just take a minute, and even if you can dump the cortisol for a minute, you'll actually get back a little bit of that fatigue feeling, but it's just because we're always on. There's a state of stress. Even if it's not seeming to be stressful, it can actually still be creating your body—a stress response in your body. And if it's in a stress response the whole time you're traveling, yeah, it's going to wear you out.

Luke Storey: [00:44:43] Yeah. Especially these days, traveling is weirder than ever.

Tara Youngblood: [00:44:47] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:44:47] It's like you're in a low oxygen environment already in a plane, and they're like, let's make it lower and breathe some PCBs or whatever. 

Tara Youngblood: [00:44:56] Yeah, like let's do everything wrong.

Luke Storey: [00:44:59] Let's inhale flame retardants, or graphene oxide, or whatever the hell is in those things. Yeah, that's a really good point, the nervous system stress. I have gotten in the habit over the years to pretty much, entire flight, I used to try and work, I bring my laptop, and it's just like that would increase the level of exhaustion upon arrival. Now, I pretty much meditate the whole time. I'll listen to the NuCalm tracks or Joe Dispenza meditation. I mean, I'll be over there three or four hours meditating on long flights. Everyone else is like up eating snacks, I have my eye mask on, earplugs in, headphones on, like just full disconnection from the entire experience, and I find that to help a lot.

Tara Youngblood: [00:45:39] Yeah. So, you're not hitting that stress response the same way.

Luke Storey: [00:45:41] Yeah, I just rest as much as possible on the plane.

Tara Youngblood: [00:45:44] Yeah, because the entire experience is stressful, so anything you can do to take that away.

Luke Storey: [00:45:49] What about sleep supplements? I've gone through different things over the years. Of course, many people are familiar with melatonin. I just got a new sleep supplement from Ben Greenfield's company, Kion, and it's really good. It's got tryptophan and a really good bioavailable GABA, and one of the thing that I forget. And if I take three of those like an hour before I want to go to sleep, like I am done, I'm sleeping.

Tara Youngblood: [00:46:16] Yeah, tryptophan is no joke. It is really great. So, melatonin is naturally released in your body, so it's part of that sleep switch. So, if you flip your sleep switch with temperature or naturally dimming light, those environmental triggers, you will actually get a release of melatonin naturally. And so, if you treat melatonin as a short-term tool, so you want to treat that of like not going to do a hormone replacement equivalent.

It's a low level hormone, but still, replacing that over time isn't good for you, so you want to make sure you're using it as a tool. But things like tryptophan, which occurs naturally in foods, you can use those different factors and they will enhance your sleep. That's really powerful. Again, we've used those over centuries without realizing it and making-

Luke Storey: [00:47:00] Eating a bunch of turkey or whatever.

Tara Youngblood: [00:47:01] Yeah, and low glycemic snacks. Sleeping is still a fasting state, so again, anything that's feeding our brain while we're trying to do all that recovery, sleep stuff, is good for us.

Luke Storey: [00:47:15] What about magnesium? Do either of you ever play with that?

Todd Youngblood: [00:47:18] Well, Tara's got a great story on magnesium, why it doesn't work for so many people.

Tara Youngblood: [00:47:22] Well, and most people really are short on magnesium, most people do not hydrate well. All water is not created the same as we know, but it's really important to understand bioavailability, and you kind of hinted at that in your last statement, and that's really important. A lot of people drink it with something acidic, which immediately reduces its bioavailability. They haven't matched or taken the time.

There are so many different combinations and some combination of magnesium is likely to work better for you. There's a lot of different profiles to kind of consider when what type of pairing you want with that magnesium. And if you eat processed foods, that's going to also hurt your bioavailability when it comes to magnesium as well. Potassium and magnesium, that's one of the reasons why we're so chronically short of it in a US society, is all that processed food.

Luke Storey: [00:48:12] Well, hopefully, people listening to this show aren't eating processed food.

Tara Youngblood: [00:48:15] Yeah, they're probably saying amen, but yeah, that is a big factor in that magnesium.

Luke Storey: [00:48:21] Someone might share with their auntie or uncle-

Tara Youngblood: [00:48:24] If they want a good excuse, just say, don't eat Hormel ham or something.

Luke Storey: [00:48:28] I have found magnesium helpful. One of our sponsors is Magnesium Breakthrough. I'm sure the audience hears me talk about all the time. And they have a great product, it's got seven forms of magnesium, so you go to the health food store, and it's like three and eight, this and eight, it's like, how do you know? So, they're like, cool, we'll just pack them all in one, those work really well to help sleep. And another company, Upgraded Formulas, the guy, Barton Scott, that I interviewed about minerals, he found a way to take—it's only one type of magnesium, but he shrunk the molecules super tiny, way smaller than the cells, so you absorb the hell out of it. And I'll, sometimes, take both just because why not?

Tara Youngblood: [00:49:07] Yeah.

Todd Youngblood: [00:49:07] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:49:08] The Kion sleep pills and those two magnesiums, like recipe, because I've tried a lot of stuff, and it's like, I don't really notice, but that's pretty much guaranteed to help me.

Tara Youngblood: [00:49:20] Yeah. Magnesium is involved in that transportation of melatonin, and in your neurons themselves, so if you don't have a lot of magnesium, you're not going to get great sleep. You just need that mineral, and where we evolved from, we had a lot of availability to those minerals that has dropped off, again, back to that processed food comment, but eating more naturally, you're going to get better minerals. Your leafy greens are going to have more in them if they're more natural, if they're not chemically modified or messed with too much, all of those are going to lose their minerals, and that's important. It's just how we evolve to have that as a transportation mechanism. And if we don't have it, our cells don't work the same way.

Luke Storey: [00:50:02] That's super cool. So, magnesium helps utilize the melatonin that your brains make.

Tara Youngblood: [00:50:08] Mm-hmm. It's part of the chemicals you need. Minerals are the base. If you don't have good minerals in your system, you're going to really struggle on most chemical reactions in your body.

Luke Storey: [00:50:19] Wow, that's so cool. Yeah. I don't know how I missed them. I mean, I've always been a little aware of minerals, but lately, they're hitting me in the face. I'm just like hearing about them everywhere and really excited to start learning more.

Tara Youngblood: [00:50:30] We just spend more time with the dirt. We evolved to love on dirt. And just even contact, I think that's why—it's not really even about grounding, but I love putting my hands in the dirt. I love growing stuff, and half of it, I think, is just getting my hands in with dirt. It feels good.

Luke Storey: [00:50:48] I agree. Okay. What about light? I know I have this company, Gilded, I sell, shameless plug, blue-blocking glasses, gildedbylukestorey.com. I've been wearing blue blockers for many years and there are some great brands out there, but I wanted to make some that looked really cool and also blocked the correct spectrum of light. And so, I did that and I wear them, also use these lumi sleep bulbs in the house by BLUblox. Those are great. They don't flicker, they're just a red LED light. And so, I kind of have a set of daytime bulbs that are brighter and more white, a.k.a blue, and then a set of orange or red bulbs, and then I wear my glasses. Dealing with the light temperature has helped my sleep a lot, so I'm convinced, but do you guys have anything to add to-

Tara Youngblood: [00:51:36] No, I think you pointed it out on daylight bulbs versus blue light blockers. I think back to sleep tracking, the one thing people do wrong is you need light to turn off sleep, to be in daylight mode. And so, don't wear them too early, wear them in the evening when you're trying to dim light. Make sure you still get enough daylight. If you're not going outside for work, or taking walks, or being outside, then making sure you get enough light on the first half of the day, usually, by 9:00 AM, you want to make sure you have a good dose of light, because that also helps that sleep drive, and it's really important to make sure you get enough light.

So, before you think about blocking it, make sure you get enough, and then block it in the evening when you don't want it. So, just make sure you're not sort of putting those glasses on. I've seen people on a 10:00 call, and you're like, I'm sure those glasses are cool, but actually, wearing them now at 10:00 AM is probably not when you need to wear those. And so, that's my first—like they're amazing, but the number of people that do it wrong, it's not great.

Todd Youngblood: [00:52:39] And different chronotypes are more sensitive to light. So, I think if you're an early riser, you're probably more sensitive to light spectrums later in the day than you or us being night owls. 

Tara Youngblood: [00:52:52] Or you will have to wear your blue light blockers earlier. So, you may be around 6:00 if you're a super morning person that you're going to put those on, but as a night person, you may not want to put them on if you're still highly functioning daylight at 6:00. 

Luke Storey: [00:52:52] I know. It's funny, actually, when you put on the right red ones, because we have the yellow ones for like computer use and stuff during the day, and then the red ones, but they make you sleepy. I mean, you start making melatonin, because I wear them out sometimes to events and things like that, and then I notice like on those nights, I'll be much sleepier when I drive home, but I like it, because then I'm not too amped up.

Tara Youngblood: [00:53:29] Yeah, it does help with being amped up. Like I wore them, we did a sleep challenge in the evening in September, and I'm like, I wore them every night on Zoom to try to not be as amped up at the end of it, so it's really helpful. 

Luke Storey: [00:53:42] With the morning light, you're talking about getting outdoors, right?

Tara Youngblood: [00:53:47] Ideally. But again, don't wear your glasses like when you're outside first thing in the morning, enjoy it, get the vitamin D, be outside, get sunlight. Certainly, morning people should, by 9:00 AM, be outside if they can. Even if it's cloudy out like it is today, get outside, because you're still going to get some of that through.

Luke Storey: [00:54:08] This is one of the most effective ways I've found to get on a better sleep schedule if I find myself habituating, and now, I'm going to bed at midnight or 1:00, and even if I like it, the rest of the world is not doing that, so it screws up my next day. When I need to switch them around, I'll go and do sun-gazing, like watch the sunrise. Unfortunately, in Texas, I am learning it's quite cloudy often, so I don't get the sun much, but even getting out in that bright light, but if I catch a sunrise, like right when it's coming up, the first 15 minutes, I'll get tired that night way faster. It's crazy. 

Tara Youngblood: [00:54:08] Because you start the clock, because the moment you turn off sleep, and that's why turning it off is as important as turning it on, it really helps create that off. You don't want to be in limbo. The mechanism of it literally is an empty balloon to a full balloon. We want to start filling our balloon towards sleep the moment we turn it off, and if it stays in limbo, that's really where it makes it much harder to go to sleep.

Luke Storey: [00:55:06] Right. And then, what about light in the room? Just not even blue light, but just while you're sleeping, how important is it that the room is pitch black? It's still a spectrum, so it's back to that bell curve. There's going to be people like, I'm in a hotel right now, and there's one little yellow light I was like staring at last night going, I think I'm going to kill it.

I'm going to just like pull it—if I had a BB gun, I'd be shooting that light and taking it out, because it's in the ceiling staring at me, I'm like, this is terrible. Why do they do that in hotel rooms? I don't know. I'm highly sensitive. I don't think it affects Todd nearly as much as it does me, back to that chronotype part, and then I'm just more sensitive probably to light than he is. And so, really, there is a spectrum of those of us that, you know, hate those little blinking yellow lights in the smoke detector or whatever, I was ready to do something horrible to it.

Luke Storey: [00:55:56] I travel with tape to cover them up.

Todd Youngblood: [00:55:57] Yeah.

Tara Youngblood: [00:55:57] Yeah. And we have a travel kit with stickers, which I did not remember this time.

Luke Storey: [00:56:01] Some hotel rooms, I mean, all those little indicator lights, you don't realize that you turn—even if you have blackout curtains, you turn the lights off, and it's like, okay, one, two, three, four, there are like five little green or blue lights, and they emit, to me, I must be sensitive, a lot of light. Like it annoys the shit out of me.

Tara Youngblood: [00:56:17] Yeah.

Todd Youngblood: [00:56:17] Well, for sure. Yeah, know your tools and like manage them, so yeah, bring tape.

Tara Youngblood: [00:56:22] Yeah. We put that in the sleep kits even for the travel teams and things like that.

Todd Youngblood: [00:56:26] Curtain clips.

Tara Youngblood: [00:56:26] Yeah. We have curtain clips, and stickers, and things like that, because again, how can you make curtains—at an even nice hotel, they don't close.. Like why can't they stay closed? So, we literally have like little clips in.

Luke Storey: [00:56:38] Little binder clips?

Todd Youngblood: [00:56:38] Yeah. 

Tara Youngblood: [00:56:39] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:56:39] You guys have the same travel kit that I do. That's really good.

Todd Youngblood: [00:56:41] No. That's pretty cool. We designed it, actually, for MLB teams that were traveling based on their travel schedule. And like you can find them on chilisleep.com right now, too, the travel kit. It's like about 120 bucks or something, but literally, it's like high-quality earplugs, stickers, so blue light-blocking stickers, you can put on all the electronics in the room. It's got the curtain clips, it's got not your blue light-blocking glasses, but a really high-quality blue light-blocking glasses.

Tara Youngblood: [00:57:07] I think we need to talk. Yeah. After the podcast, we'll figure that out.

Todd Youngblood: [00:57:11] But yeah, I mean, it's like all the essentials to like manage the things that are most creating sensitivities for the individual.

Luke Storey: [00:57:17] That's super smart. Oh, speaking of which, I forgot to announce that guys can—guys, well, all people, let's call all humans guys, can catch the show notes for this at lukestorey.com/sleep. So, we've been talking about all these different supplements, and things, and all your products, you can find them there. Also, I don't know if I have this exactly right, but correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we have a discount from you guys on the Dock Pro with the code Luke10, 10% off, is that real? 

Todd Youngblood: [00:57:50] Check show notes, it probably is the right answer, but discounts are not readily available for Dock Pro, so that's really a special one.

Luke Storey: [00:57:59] Okay.

Todd Youngblood: [00:57:59] So, yeah, definitely-

Tara Youngblood: [00:58:00] Yeah, because it's brand new, so like getting a discount on it is a good deal. 

Luke Storey: [00:58:03] You don't need to put a discount on it, people want it. And then, I had another one, Luke22 for other stuff.

Todd Youngblood: [00:58:11] Yeah. And that would be for like the OOLER and the Cube. 

Luke Storey: [00:58:14] Does that count for accessories? 

Todd Youngblood: [00:58:16] Great question. We will make sure there's some discount for your audience and all the Luke Storey fans out there, for sure. They can get what they need.

Luke Storey: [00:58:24] It's like when you have someone on and they have a cool product, I mean, I'm happy to promote, and everyone makes money, and it's all good, it's good commerce, but the audience I know, sometimes, listening is like, ah, I want that thing and I can't afford it, so any little bit helps. So, don't worry about the codes, guys. Just go to lukestorey.com/sleep and you'll find everything there.

Tara Youngblood: [00:58:43] I will say from an affordability perspective, especially in Texas, but air conditioning and the cost of all of that, we do find that you get your energy back pretty quickly, back to the wattage we're running on, what we're able to achieve from cooling, you're able to increase your air conditioning, that thermostat for your house significantly if you're in bed, whether it's 8 hours or whatever we've decided is the right number. There is a savings part to just managing that. We've got some fun study, actually, in the UK happening right now that will kind of prove that out in a sort of more academic spot, but it is definitely helpful that way.

Luke Storey: [00:59:23] So, like cooling your bed instead of running an HVAC in your whole 3,000 square foot house or whatever.

Todd Youngblood: [00:59:29] Yeah, exactly.

Luke Storey: [00:59:29] Yeah. When I was in LA, I mean, in the summer, I did have to put the AC on a little bit, too. I had set it to 72 or something.

Tara Youngblood: [00:59:36] And with the OOLER, you would, but with the Dock Pro, like-

Luke Storey: [00:59:41] Based on last night, I don't think you could have—it could be 110 degrees in your room and like you're still going to be freezing. But that said, even with that, my bill was way less than if I didn't have a cold bed. I mean, if you keep your place at 67 and it's like 98 degrees outside, wherever you are, I mean, you're going to—I remember what my bills were, I think they were like $750 every two months, like crazy amount of money.

Todd Youngblood: [01:00:09] Oh, yeah. Well, think about the only time you actually feel like we need air conditioning is at night to sleep.

Luke Storey: [01:00:15] Yeah.

Todd Youngblood: [01:00:15] But if you're like sleeping in a cool bed, like it totally derisks the air conditioning proposition, because like if you're spending time outside, especially if you're doing something fun and outdoorsy, then like you don't really care. It doesn't matter if it's 80, 90 degrees, it could be 100 degrees. If you're hydrated right, by the time you go home, you're like, alright, now, I want a cool room, because I want to get ready for sleep. Really, it's all about the sleep, to get the air conditioning. There's some pleasantries about, okay, let's not cook dinner, and if it's 90 degrees in the kitchen, that would be not awesome, so there's some conveniences, but it's really required to get sleep.

Luke Storey: [01:00:51] Well, the thing about the AC, too, just in terms of wasting energy and money, unless you have like a wall or window unit in your bedroom, if you have a whole house HVAC system, that's always annoyed me that like I'm wasting energy and money cooling the entire house. I literally only need the bedroom cold, I'm sleeping.

Tara Youngblood: [01:01:09] Yeah,, you're not moving around, you're not doing anything.

Luke Storey: [01:01:11] No, it's super—I don't know. I just don't like wasting stuff. I'm like OCD about it, so that annoys me about having like a whole house thing. 

Tara Youngblood: [01:01:11] And the Dock Pro has the capacity to do it. So, even in the UK, only 1% of homes have air conditioning, and unfortunately with global warming, they're having more heat waves, there are no options to not have it. And so, that's where it's benchmarked, Australia, a lot of those, but there's a lot of places even in the US that normally wouldn't need it, you want to sleep with the windows open. Even North Carolina right now, it's wonderful there, but I still want it cold enough at night, so I don't need to have air conditioning on much later into the season. You just save time without having that on all the time.

Luke Storey: [01:01:52] Yeah, for sure. Also, in terms of spending money on stuff like this, because I know, like I said, a lot of people are probably listening to this show, and they're like, ah, I can't afford all this stuff. I'm like, I know, I talk about all this cool shit all the time, some of it is expensive, I don't think yours is, your technology is a few hundred dollars, like whatever. Eat out less for a couple of months, like turn off your AC at night, you just save that money.

But the other thing is, I often, for myself, quantify things in terms of my performance, right? Like if I'm going to spend money on something, is it going to help me make more money, because my performance is higher. And so, to me, like almost beyond anything else that I do, if something helps my sleep, I'm going to make more money, because I'm going to have more energy and just be more focused. So, in terms of like the categories of your like biohacking or health to invest in, I think sleep's probably the best one.

Tara Youngblood: [01:02:49] Yeah, we have that conversation-

Luke Storey: [01:02:50] So, it's like, I don't know.

Tara Youngblood: [01:02:52] Yeah, we have that conversation with athletes all the time. So, performance athletes, you figure depending on the sport, they may only have a few years to make all of their money in the sport or be active. Their cognitive ability is better with sleep, so we're able to show, if you can get that 2 hours of deep sleep, their reaction time for baseball, because we do a lot of coaching with baseball, it's going to be faster, and it's in that millisecond response, it's not in the broad brush response, but your ability to respond in a millisecond, that firing of your brain, it's actually 23% different.

So, it doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're making a millisecond decision, that is a big difference of someone that slept well and didn't. And so, sleep, also, over your lifetime, we think about entire retirement, and investing for retirement, and saving, we talk about that with our younger athletes, when you sleep, you're saving for your health span, you're saving for that future. If you don't get deep sleep, you don't file memories, you build up protein in your brain. Not good protein, the tau proteins that are attached to Alzheimer's, that doesn't get cleaned.

So, in deep sleep, your spinal fluid actually washes your brain, because your brain is separate from the rest of your body, and how its cleanliness is managed is different, and it only happens during deep sleep. So, one for one, if you're not getting deep sleep, if you're not getting good sleep, your chances for all of those cognitive loss, all that bad, mindful stuff that we want to have the rest of our lives, we don't want to not remember our husband or our kids, we're investing in that when we invest in sleep. And when we make sure we get deep sleep, whether you buy our product or not, sleep is absolutely the one thing to invest in, to take time on, to make sure you're measuring over the course of your life, because that will make a difference in the end.

Luke Storey: [01:04:36] You reminded me of something. My dad's mom, she lived to be 99, and my whole, I don't know, in my childhood, but definitely in my adolescence and into my 20s, she would talk to me constantly about how important sleep was. Granted, this is a time when I'm like playing in a rock and roll band, doing tons of drugs, living in Hollywood, I mean, many nights over the course of a few years, I literally didn't sleep at all, let alone deep or REM, and I always thought, that's nice, I love my grandma, like that's cute, but she was always hammering on that, and then, now, little longer in the tooth, and I'm like, oh, I get it, right?

Todd Youngblood: [01:05:13] Yeah, exactly.

Luke Storey: [01:05:13] It's like if I could only go back to my 20s and listen to my grandma, God bless you, Grandma, thank you for trying to warn me wherever you are, but yeah, it's—and especially as you get older, too. Like when I was younger, yeah, I was a partying, little maniac, I didn't really notice, but now, like, wow, my performance is noticeably less if I don't get good sleep. We touched on EMF. Let's talk about that, because I appreciate that you guys have been mindful about that.

There's a lot of really great things that people come up with, inventions, technologies, et cetera, and they have benefits, but then especially in the kind of biohacking space, there's a lot of techie stuff that gets plugged in, and has Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connectivity, a lot of things that people send me or pitch me on to talk about on the show or to put on my website, I can't do it, because it's EMF.

And so, if I don't want it around me, I can't give people a platform or promote something, especially because my audience knows I'm so anti-EMF and so savvy about it, right? I mean, I have an online course about EMF. It's like six, seven hours, I think, at this point of content. So, you guys have done a couple of cool things, because I get asked about your products, too, from people that are like, yeah, what about the EMF? So, let's demystify some of that.

What I've noticed is, A, you have a grounded power cable, which is super cool, so there's not going to be an electric field coming off the actual cable that plugs it in the wall. It's going to be a lower electric field on the actual motorized part. There will inherently be, and correct me if I'm wrong anywhere along the line, with anything that plugs into a wall that has a motor, there's going to be a magnetic field that emanates from it, and I've tested the OOLER and I think it went out about two feet or something like that, so, great, I'll just put it two feet away from the bed and there's no magnetic field, same with the electric field, because this doesn't have to go under your bed.

And then, you've got the RF fields, which would be the connectivity to the app of the Bluetooth and/or Wi-Fi. So, I noticed last night when I plugged in the Dock Pro, I had to connect it to the Wi-Fi in the house, and I was like, oh, did this guy screw this up? We talked about this. And then, it just wanted to do that, so I could connect it, and then you just disconnect it, and it goes on airplane mode. And now, that unit, I use the app to set all the settings I want, but then [making sounds] it goes airplane, and so I can't now be in bed, which I would have done last night when I woke up cold, I'm like, oh, shit, I turned off the EMF, so now, I can't control it from the app,, I would have to get up, turn on the Bluetooth in like settings.

Tara Youngblood: [01:07:56] And that's why we put control on the unit so that, again, you're stuck, you're like, okay, I've disconnected it, you can still up and down on and off like on there, but yeah, those advanced features, you can on and off in your app and make those choices. We're all about those consumers getting a chance to choose how they interact with our product and keep all EMFs out of the bed surface.

Todd Youngblood: [01:08:19] Yeah, we even went to the next step.

Luke Storey: [01:08:21] Yeah. So, what did I miss? This is what I noticed.

Todd Youngblood: [01:08:24] Yeah.

Tara Youngblood: [01:08:24] Yeah.

Todd Youngblood: [01:08:25] So, actually, inside our water flow path, because all this is like heating, cooling, using water, and we actually went so far in the water flow path to add an extra grounding lead from the grounding electrical cord to the grounding flow path of the water, so we're actually grounding the water as it's circulating underneath you.

Luke Storey: [01:08:43] Oh, no way. Cool.

Todd Youngblood: [01:08:44] So, we haven't gone to the point where we've measured like the grounding effect of the water flowing beneath you, but like the whole time that water is flowing beneath you, we're actually grounding the flow path of that water. Like we are like committed to give the best EMF-free experience we can deliver, and even doing things that are invisible, we never talk about. But like it's in our engineering approach to solve these problems of like, how do we continue to evolve the product and what it does for people with minimizing any EMF to the greatest extent we can?

Tara Youngblood: [01:09:19] Yeah, we have a fabulous like sci-fi-ish kind of room. It's really like when you think of being covered in tinfoil, so we've literally like—in order to measure like every little inch of it, we've actually created a room where your cell phone's dead, there's nothing going-

Luke Storey: [01:09:35] Oh, you made like a Faraday room?

Todd Youngblood: [01:09:36] Yeah.

Tara Youngblood: [01:09:36] A whole Faraday room, yes.

Luke Storey: [01:09:37] Oh, cool.

Tara Youngblood: [01:09:38] Yeah.

Todd Youngblood: [01:09:38] Metal floor, metal walls, metal ceiling.

Luke Storey: [01:09:40] Really?

Tara Youngblood: [01:09:40] Yeah. And then, it has a tiny hole, so we can run electricity, and then put it in there, and then do measurements and figure that out, but yeah, we've dialed it down to millivolts and being able to really look at that.

Luke Storey: [01:09:54] Oh, man. Thank you so much for doing that. And another thing just to clarify for people, I think you described how it works with the mesh and what used to be these veins of water. I think some people think, because I've gotten questions on this, that there are like electric wires going into the pad, like an electric blanket, I'm like, no.

Tara Youngblood: [01:10:11] Oh, god, no.

Luke Storey: [01:10:12] By the way, if anyone listening, if you use an electric blanket, please, for the love of God, stop. Those things are so bad for you.

Tara Youngblood: [01:10:21] It's really awful. 

Todd Youngblood: [01:10:22] Either stop using electric blanket or just commit, and get a sleeping bag, and sleep under power lines, because it's basically the same. So, like whichever one you want to do, either keep using your electric blanket or sleep under power lines, because—and so, we don't often talk about this, but the ChiliPad also heats.

Luke Storey: [01:10:37] I was just going to say that.

Todd Youngblood: [01:10:39] So, yeah, you don't have to sleep in electric, but if you're chronically cold and you have maybe low metabolism or maybe as you get older, you-. 

Tara Youngblood: [01:10:46] Or if you just feel like you want cancer. Like it is like a cancer-making thing, those-

Todd Youngblood: [01:10:51] But what we've designed, and I think that we've got another competitor out there that's out there promoting product and some of the biohackers are talking about their products, and competition does make you better, sometimes, but we work so hard to have on-device controls to have an EMF-free experience with both airplane mode. No one is required to have any electrical anything in the bed or the mattress topper.

We didn't really get into like the serviceability, but our thing is really easy to take off the bed and wash. I think you set it up last night without instructions. Our whole commitment is like making usable products, hey, we know we're not perfect, people have had issues with their systems or maybe the the pump is worn out over a period of time, we stand behind our stuff, we're always making things better, and this is definitely the best system we've ever made.

Tara Youngblood: [01:11:43] But we won't put EMFs in your bed.

Todd Youngblood: [01:11:45] Right.

Luke Storey: [01:11:45] Yeah. I like that policy. I talked to that company, Eight Sleep, maybe a year ago or something like that, and did they make a whole mattress?

Todd Youngblood: [01:11:54] They do.

Luke Storey: [01:11:55] It's like temperature-controled.

Todd Youngblood: [01:11:56] They do. 

Luke Storey: [01:11:57] And I thought it was a cool idea, but then we went—and I'm not trying to shit on them, I'm sure there are benefits to controlling the temperature even with that mattress that would outweigh some of the EMF exposure, it's probably a net positive, so good for them, but I'm just such an EMF freak, I elected, at that time, not to work with them, because it would just go against my own kind of brand.

Todd Youngblood: [01:12:22] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:12:23] But I was like, oh, this is exciting, this looks cool, because I'm not like a competitive person, I don't think, because I like what you guys do, I can't like anything else. It's like I have two different saunas, they both have different benefits. But anyway, I talked to them or got an email, I was like, "What's the deal with the EMF? Can you turn the whole thing off and just have it be cold?" And they're like, "Well, no, but it's a really low RF reading, how the thing connects to the motherboard or whatever, and you can't turn it off and have it be functional. It's a safe level", and it might be low and maybe it is safe to some people, but I don't want any. Safe to me is zero.

Tara Youngblood: [01:12:58] And it is, it'll measure about a vacuum cleaner being on. So, compared to other household appliances, it'd be-

Luke Storey: [01:13:06] Your stuff?

Tara Youngblood: [01:13:07] No, their stuff. So, again, it depends on what you care about, but we'll measure on the bed surface, that's about the EMF level you're going to get.

Luke Storey: [01:13:18] Yeah, I don't want any electric field anywhere near my bed, and I've gone to great lengths to make sure that it's not. Actually, another cool thing to do with your stuff, a hot tip for people, how do I explain this? Okay. I have an EMF kill switch on the circuits in my room, so there's like a remote, and when you go to sleep, click, everything in your room goes dead, all the outlets, they just turn off, so there's no electric fields in there.

But yours is the one thing I do want to plug in, so what I did in LA, and we haven't moved in our house here, is I plugged it in, in the bathroom, and then I got a couple of your extension tubes, the water hoses, and made the extension tube like 15 feet long, and then I just kept it in the bathroom, which also made it—the new one's relatively quiet, but there is a fan, and it also made it so we couldn't hear, because we had two of them running. It's kind of [making sounds], it's a bit of a hum. So, that's how we got—I mean, there's like literally zero EMF in our bedroom.

Tara Youngblood: [01:14:16] Yeah.

Todd Youngblood: [01:14:16] Our customer experience team hates those stories, because people complain it doesn't get cold enough or whatever their issues are, well, you're decreasing thermal efficiency the longer it runs through tubes.

Tara Youngblood: [01:14:27] But I'd put the Dock Pro on that any day. Like go ahead, if you're going to do it, like do it with that.

Luke Storey: [01:14:32] Even with like my 15 feet of hoses, it was still plenty cold. I mean, I never woke up hot or anything like that.

Tara Youngblood: [01:14:36] Yeah. No, you're just going to—the headroom is really, and that's why we designed the Dock Pro is that you need that headroom to get people cold enough, again, to achieve, we adapt to cold over time, so the longer you sleep on it, you may keep adjusting, want to adjust that cooler, and having the headroom to be able to get cold enough. It turns out being cold in the right time is pretty amazing, back to that circadian rhythm. How do you reset after jet lag? How do you control that? The colder you can get that, and the more succinct and the faster you get there, that's where you're going to get really great control of the sleep states.

Luke Storey: [01:15:11] I love it. I can't wait to reset my schedule, so I don't play myself like I did last night. I was not expecting that. I mean, for people listening, this will come out pre-summer, but like if you live somewhere super hot, you won't have a problem with that anymore. Let me see. Okay. There's a couple of things. I wanted to talk about, what are some of the things, aside from not having our temperature regulated, but what are some of the main offenders in terms of things that will ruin your asleep? We covered blue light, what about alcohol, weed, eating windows, stuff that people might ingest that's going to actually ruin their sleep architecture or duration?

Tara Youngblood: [01:15:51] So, when we think about sleep, we talk about the three pillars of sleep, the things you need to manage, the things you need to think about or the levers you want to pull, one is mindset. So, that's about being mindful, controlling that stress state, making sure you're peaceful. Behavior is absolutely part of that. That's the second one. And then, environmental. And those all have different levers within them.

Weed, cannabis is one of those, I get asked about all the time, and there's such a wide variation of what goes into—you can't just say weed, because the combinations, and hairpins, and it's a complex thing, but for the most part, if it's high THC, it's going to help relax you, but over time, you'll see that ruin your deep sleep. We work with that with veterans a lot, and they'll use weed for pain or anxiety, and it will hurt your sleep over time. So, we want to use it as a tool. Alcohol is another thing. Unfortunately with the pandemic, so many people used alcohol to fall asleep.

It was chronic across the country on use of alcohol. I think other countries as well, been a lot of depression. But it's terrible for your sleep. Back to the Dock Pro easy button, if you've misbehaved, and you're out having fun with it, and it's just one of those nights, definitely adjust the temperature down, but alcohol over time is also going to really hurt not only your metabolism and make it harder to sleep, but it really is a poison for your body, so it's about making sure you're understanding what your tradeoffs are if you're using alcohol a lot, what it does for the other things.

Luke Storey: [01:17:20] I think I haven't had a drink in a long time, but I remember going to bed drunk a lot and I always felt like I passed out. I was like, oh, I passed out last night, I had a bunch of drinks. And then, you feel like you slept all night, but I think there's a difference between being passed out and being asleep, right?

Todd Youngblood: [01:17:40] Yeah, for sure.

Tara Youngblood: [01:17:40] Yeah. There's no deep sleep in that. It's all that light sleep that we talked about that's just miscellaneous. You're technically out, you're technically unconscious, but you're not getting great sleep at all.

Luke Storey: [01:17:51] Good to know. Well, I don't have to worry about that one myself, but I know a lot of people like to have a couple of cocktails and I'm happy for them.

Tara Youngblood: [01:17:58] Yeah, it's not a problem. Yeah, just be smart about it. And again, if you're using temperature, you can mitigate most of it. It can't stop chronic use of alcohol, obviously, and all those other factors, but you can get away with a fair amount if you just adjust your temperature lower.

Luke Storey: [01:18:13] Noted. Okay. Cool. What is this Ebb Versa headband, you guys? I don't think you guys make it, but it's another sleep tool, what is that thing?

Todd Youngblood: [01:18:21] So, we merged with the company, Ebb Therapeutics, on December of 2020. Excuse me, yeah, December of 2020, so over a year ago, year-and-a-half ago. And basically, it cools the prefrontal cortex. So, their design has actually gotten an FDA approval for insomnia therapy to help people fall asleep. What we like about the device is not putting EMFs on your forehead all for 8 hours while you sleep, we think that's bad, but we do think that there's use case for traveling, we think there's use case for down-regulating. It's sort of an intermittent use and it does a lot of cool stuff about just basically cooling your prefrontal cortex. So, slow the racing mind. 

Tara Youngblood: [01:18:21] I'm sure your grandma would appreciate that keeping the cool head. It turns out that keeping a cool head actually settles you down. It does move you away from that stress response to a more relaxed state. It won't totally flip you, but it will help you unwind. So, it is helpful. Our athletes will often use it, because you warm up your body, you're also warming up your head when you warm up.

So, if you're going to an athletic event but you still want a high cognitive self, keeping your head cool will help you have a better cognitive response rate. And so, that's where that's really powerful there. But again, if you can cool your core body, that's going to trigger your brainstem response to sleep and that is more powerful still, but if you have a hard time falling asleep, you have high anxiety, you want to have something you can travel with, for short periods of time, it does freeze the heck out of your forehead.

Luke Storey: [01:19:54] That's cool.

Todd Youngblood: [01:19:54] We see a lot of people use it for migraine relief as well. So, if you just want to kind of hide in a dark room-

Luke Storey: [01:19:59] So, does it run on batteries?

Todd Youngblood: [01:20:01] It does.

Luke Storey: [01:20:01] Okay. So, the EMF you're talking about would be whatever-

Tara Youngblood: [01:20:04] The TEC is right there, yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:20:06] Okay. That's pretty cool, though. I've noticed if I've ever felt a little panicky getting in an ice bath or a cold shower, just putting cold water on my head, like it really does calm me down, like if you're getting a bit fiery.

Tara Youngblood: [01:20:20] Yeah. Actually, it's an ingrained response, so if you ever are stressed out, just splash cold water on your face, cool your frontal face, even put an ice pack right on your chest, it'll trigger your vagus nerve and you actually will get a more relaxed response almost immediately. So, the cooling thing, cooling is just really powerful. From a physics perspective, taking entropy out of anything is going to help settle something down. It's a core value of the universe. If you can cool something down, you're going to be able to settle something down, take energy out of it.

Luke Storey: [01:20:52] I'm thinking about that term, hotheaded, oh, he's really hotheaded. It's like, yeah, when you're super pissed and triggered, your whole head feels like it's on fire. That's cool.

Tara Youngblood: [01:21:01] Todd's laughing because he gets hopping up and down mad when he gets like that.

Luke Storey: [01:21:07] Really? Does your head turn red?

Todd Youngblood: [01:21:08] It has.

Luke Storey: [01:21:09] Yeah. I mean, because you don't have hair, so like you'd really be able to see the coloration. 

Tara Youngblood: [01:21:14] And there's no hiding it when he's angry. It's very clear.

Todd Youngblood: [01:21:18] The only person in the universe that can make you literally hopping mad is Tara. It's a special quality she has.

Tara Youngblood: [01:21:23] That's the power of like relationship, I guess. 

Luke Storey: [01:21:26] That's how it goes. That's how it goes. When you really know someone, I think that there's a different level of boundary you have in a relationship when you love and know someone intimately, right? And then, that also can mean that they annoy the shit out of you, and vice versa.

Todd Youngblood: [01:21:41] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:21:42] Another thing I wanted to mention to people that could be useful is that you guys, because I haven't been on your site in quite a while and I was going on there today, you have these certified renewed units on there, which were considerably less expensive for people that—what's up with that?

Todd Youngblood: [01:21:58] Yeah, a couple of things. One, so all the units, when they come back to us, if either someone didn't love it, or they wanted to trade it out, or they wanted to upgrade to the Dock Pro, every control unit we get back, we refurbish. So, if we can refurbish it to like new, we'll sell it as a renewed unit or refurbished unit, and if we can't refurbish to like new, but it's still functional-

Tara Youngblood: [01:22:22] Like it has a cosmetic blemish or something like that.

Todd Youngblood: [01:22:25] Or if it's maybe two years old or we have kind of a date on, we'll actually donate that to first responders. So, like in the last 18 months, we donated over $1,000,000 of product to first responders. 

Tara Youngblood: [01:22:25] Yeah, veterans and first responders.

Todd Youngblood: [01:22:38] Yeah. So, we use, like whatever comes back to us, we'll launder and service the bedding, and we'll refurbish the control units, and either we'll resell it if we can make it like new pad, and then a refurbished control unit, or we'll donate it to people that need better sleep to do their jobs, and make us safe, and take care of us.

Luke Storey: [01:22:56] Wow. Super cool. I'll give you a little business tip, guys. The refurbished ones that you can't tell that they've been used, you could just repackage them and sell them as new.

Todd Youngblood: [01:23:03] I know, I know, but yeah, we've had all kinds of internal debate. 

Luke Storey: [01:23:09] I'm obviously just kidding. It tells me that you have integrity, because you've done this, instead of just like, ah, they won't know.

Todd Youngblood: [01:23:16] And like, yeah, part of the warm up conversation, like be our best selves, right? We don't want to see like stuff going to the landfill. We want to see things, reuse it, right? Reduce, reuse, recycle, that kind of mantra of like, hey, let's put stuff back in motion. So, we do have discounted prices for people with price point is an issue. We've set up payment plans. We're trying to do everything we can to make this tech affordable. And a lot of people, that's why we have a 30-day money back guarantee, like let's just try it, like we even pay return shipping.

Like there's literally no risk if someone wants to try it for 30 days. If you don't love it, we'll give you your money back. Like we want people to sleep better. That's our focus. And if we do run our business right, we're going to make money, because like that's our scorecard, but it's not like make money first, and then hopefully, our customers will keep buying from us. It's like, no, no, no, buy from us, if we can't change your sleep, we shouldn't get paid for it, we'll give you your money back. Like that's kind of our approach to this is.

Luke Storey: [01:24:11] I love that approach. I wish more businesses in all sectors did that. A lot of businesses done like take the money and run, right?

Todd Youngblood: [01:24:21] Kind of, yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:24:21] It's stupid. Actually, it's stupid just at least according to me.

Todd Youngblood: [01:24:25] It's not sustainable.

Luke Storey: [01:24:26] Yeah. If you want to like really scale a company and you want to have lifetime value customers that are interested in—because you guys are innovating all the time, oh, we got this thing now and that thing now. Like if I was the customer that you pissed off, I don't care if you come up with 20 new things in the next couple of years, I'm not buying any of them, because I had a bad experience. So, super cool. Alright, you guys, I think I've covered just about everything I—oh, no, I didn't, psych. I noticed also, you guys are up to—you're very busy.

You have now some sheets, and mattress covers, and different things like that. And then, like for the bedding that's compatible with what you do and also with the actual pads that carry this cold, or warm, or hot water. What have you guys done in terms of the materials, the off-gassing, and stuff like this? Like I've been pretty hardcore whenever possible with using organic sheets and being mindful of flame retardants. And in the bed, I've done my very best to make sure that it's as nontoxic of an environment as possible. How are you guys navigating the actual materials part of it aside from just temperature?

Todd Youngblood: [01:25:40] So, the Dock Pro, specifically in that product, it's our first bedding product that's coming out as a mattress pad that meets the mattress pad flame retardancy requirements with no chemicals. So, there's no added chemicals to it. It's as natural as it could be. Now, we're not using all natural fibers, so I don't want to mislead anyone.

Tara Youngblood: [01:25:58] We're working on that.

Todd Youngblood: [01:25:58] But we're using urethanes versus some other people that are using PVCs in it. PVCs are terrible for the environment. They last 10,000 years. They off-gas like crazy. If you're in a PVC factory, you can smell it from like miles away.

Luke Storey: [01:26:11] Really?

Todd Youngblood: [01:26:12] Urethane is much, much more friendly, both for the environment and for the user. So, urethane membranes and no FR in the Dock Pro pad or the ChiliPad Pro. On our sheets and other things, we're using pre-washed materials. So, everything we're doing is to keep the toxins out of it. So, there is still the way we're dyeing the material, as with all, there are some—you have to put the dyes in to get the coloring, but we do have them all washed, so no FR chemicals. We're using YSL material, so it has an all natural component, a natural cooling effect. They're really, really well-designed. People struggle to get great sheets or to make sure that they're getting ones that will last and have a cooling effect, where we're trying to do the right thing to deliver more products to keep our customers happy.

So, the mattress bed is another one. We know that as your body naturally gives off a pint of fluid at night, and if you're sleeping with a ChiliPad or Dock Pro in a high-humidity environment with a high Delta T, there's a chance you have condensation, so we want to give people tools to kind of manage, keep the moisture out of their mattress. And even with the mattress protector, it's got highly breathable sides. Just put the urethane or the waterproof portion on the top of the bed, and so the rest of the bed still breathes really well, because keeping natural air movement is essential to managing that humidity and the temperature in the bed.

Luke Storey: [01:27:40] Right. Cool.

Todd Youngblood: [01:27:41] The moisture in the bed.

Luke Storey: [01:27:42] I like it. I like it. Yeah, the breathability is such a huge issue. I mean, going back to the temperature, I'm thinking about traveling and sleeping on memory foam mattresses or even my old mattress that was like a natural latex mattress. It's just like it seems like you hit a saturation point of temperature, and then all of a sudden, you're just cooking. It's like-

Tara Youngblood: [01:28:05] Those little bubbles absorb, and they go [making sounds].

Luke Storey: [01:28:06] Is that what it is?

Tara Youngblood: [01:28:07] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:28:07] You're like a boiled frog, you're like, oh, this feels great, it's so soft, and then two hours into sleep, waking up with hot sweats.

Todd Youngblood: [01:28:13] Right. So, the base of the material, it reaches its heat-carrying capacity. So, it's like a heat sink for the first couple of hours, so it feels great, and then the moment it's done, it can't saturate, take any more heat, that's when it feels like it's radiating the heat back at you. Now, it's hot. So, the mattress now, you're sleeping on a hot thing. We talk about the sleep cave, and that's like, all of us love a cool sleep, but the reality is you get to bed, and you're sleeping in probably a thermal, something that's absorbing heat, and then you're putting blankets on top of you. And the more artificial materials, the worse you are off to having a natural—being able to naturally maintain your temperature.

Luke Storey: [01:28:48] Yeah. I'm excited when we move in this house, I've got two different—we have two beds, because sometimes, one of us can't sleep, we need to get up at a different time, so we have the Essentia Mattress coming. They're like a natural, I mean, super organic, just amazing mattresses. I've been wanting one forever. And then, the Holy Grail, the SAMINA sleep system. I mean, I've been wanting more—I did like a 45-minute documentary on that bed, it's so cool, many years ago. So, we're going to have like my two favorite beds in there, but I still don't know like how they're going to sleep temperature-wise. So, I'm thankful you guys did what you do, so I don't think they're going to be like particularly hot.

Tara Youngblood: [01:29:29] No. More natural materials, again, are going to respond way better. They're not going to absorb, and then reflect back. Just the more naturally you can sleep, we joke about sleeping like a caveman, in general, the closer you get to that, the better you're going to sleep, minus the rocks. No one wants to sleep on rocks.

Todd Youngblood: [01:29:46] You may get some questions for people that have swimming beds that the grounding pad, our product is totally compatible with it, so we've done the testing, that if you put the grounding pad beneath our thermal layers, that has no impact, that has the same efficacy of the grounding effect of that grounding pad. So, not a problem. We're doing the research, we know how it interacts with all the different components, so yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:30:08] Good thinking. Well, I like what you were saying about you're actually grounding the water, and I'm sure you guys will get around to measuring this, but I would think that your pad with the grounded water is going to be producing a DC current.

Tara Youngblood: [01:30:20] Yeah.

Todd Youngblood: [01:30:21] I would think so. We haven't done the testing.

Luke Storey: [01:30:24] Because like that's the purpose of grounding, is to get that DC current. When we installed the ice bath, the Morozko Forge Ice Bath at my house, I was like, of course, paranoid about EMFs, because it plugs in, and then you're in the water, it had a crazy high level of DC current, which is amazing. So, it's like ultra grounded, because it's metal, and then that metal is grounded into the ground wire of the wall. And we were like, yes, not only is it not EMF, but yeah, it's just like the best EMF from the planet. So, that's super cool. Water and conductivity is very fascinating.

Tara Youngblood: [01:30:56] Water is like absolutely—like if we joke, not that even buy lottery tickets, but what would you do if like someone handed you $1,000,000,000? I'd be researching water. It's the most fascinating element ever. It is so cool, and the things you can do with water, and I think everything on the planet is headed towards, we need to figure out water sooner rather than later. We're doing it all wrong. We're treating water terribly and we need to figure that out.

Luke Storey: [01:31:21] I know. I agree. Yeah, I just did a podcast, a solo cast last week all About water. And it was going to be one mega episode, and then I started making the manuscript, and it was going to be like 3 hours, it's basically like a short book that I put together, and I'm like, this is going to be two or three episodes. And then, I started finding all these other water experts I want to interview. Yeah, it is nonstop.

Tara Youngblood: [01:31:42] Water is fascinating.

Luke Storey: [01:31:43] Hey, speaking of water, this would be a fun thing to close on. If I'm not mistaken, your dad, Todd, invented the waterbed? Do I have that right? 

Todd Youngblood: [01:31:51] My uncle.

Luke Storey: [01:31:52] Your uncle?

Todd Youngblood: [01:31:53] Yeah. My mom's brother. 

Luke Storey: [01:31:55] Like literally came up with the idea and like-

Tara Youngblood: [01:31:57] It was a Jell-O chair to start to be fair.

Luke Storey: [01:32:00] I want a Jell-O—that idea, I like. The waterbeds didn't turn out as well as I would hoped.

Todd Youngblood: [01:32:05] He's got all kinds of crazy stories. Awesome guy, serial entrepreneur, he's always been near water his whole life, grew up on boats. But yeah, he's the original patent holder for the waterbed invented 51 years ago.

Luke Storey: [01:32:20] Wow.

Todd Youngblood: [01:32:21] So, pretty cool.

Luke Storey: [01:32:22] I'm old enough to remember those and they were sort of positioned as a luxury item, like it would be a wealthier kids parents that had them, and you'd kind of play around on them and stuff, but from what I recall, and no offense to your uncle and his brilliance and the idea, I recall not so good for sleeping actually like the moving around, it's like it's hard to be-

Tara Youngblood: [01:32:45] He was kind of groovy, he kind of walks like that, so he kind of liked the ergonomic groove of it.

Todd Youngblood: [01:32:51] I think it depends on what's vintage of waterbed. So, it started with like a pleasure pit. The pleasure pit was the pleasure pit, right? It really wasn't so much about sleep. I think he had like 30-something patents. He eventually patented all kinds of different versions of waterbed. His whole premise was like sleep in the bed, not on the bed, and there's a lot of benefit to that. He's like, let the bed surround you and take the pressure off of you, so they eventually got to the point where the modern waterbeds actually did a pretty good job supporting you, and were pretty good beds, but there was there was some sketchy times in the middle that you were sleeping on a big back of water.

Tara Youngblood: [01:33:25] Well, yeah, he designed it in San Francisco in the height of '70s, so it was definitely a groovy time.

Luke Storey: [01:33:34] Like a swinger bed. Okay. I see where you're going with this. I was way too young to even catch that. That went over my head. But I just remember like, if you're on, and someone sits on it or lays on it, [making sounds].

Tara Youngblood: [01:33:44] Yeah, weight balancing. 

Luke Storey: [01:33:47] Like how do you sleep? And then, there were things, too, where people would actually puncture them, and flood their house or something like that.

Todd Youngblood: [01:33:54] Oh, all kinds of horror stories.

Tara Youngblood: [01:33:55] But you froze your tail off if it didn't have its heater on. So, again, the power of water, it is really powerful, and he did harness that, for sure.

Luke Storey: [01:34:03] I wanted to know, what happened to the gel chair thing or-

Tara Youngblood: [01:34:07] When that leaks, you get sticky, nasty stuff all over the floor.

Todd Youngblood: [01:34:11] So, he invented it, it was part of his a thesis project for, it was University of San Francisco Design School. And he started with the gel, trying to find just funky furniture. Everyone has a furniture project they have to do pretty much out of design school, right?

Luke Storey: [01:34:24] Okay.

Todd Youngblood: [01:34:24] So, he started with a gel chair and I think it was like 300 pounds. And I think if I understand the story correctly, they ended up like throwing it out of their third-storey bedroom window on Haight-Ashbury Street. So, it was like classic—I mean, that was like epicenter of hippieness. So, yeah, it didn't work out, the Jell-O chair. It's hard to move around a 300-pound piece of chair. And I think, literally, it did have Jell-O. I think it was literally a Jell-O-filled chair.

Luke Storey: [01:34:50] Well, I'm a supporter. I like that idea.

Todd Youngblood: [01:34:52] It could be fun. 

Luke Storey: [01:34:53] Because I'm really good at sitting. Alright, you guys, so want to remind everyone you can find the show notes for this episode, and any codes and stuff, we'll just put everything there at lukestorey.com/sleep. I got one last question for you all, and you can each answer. It's a three-parter. Who have been three teachers or teachings that have influenced you, your life, your work that you might share with us?

Tara Youngblood: [01:35:17] So, mine are probably all very science-skewed, and he has become, for a lot of people, sort of icon, Nikola Tesla, mostly from a patent perspective. I've got his quote actually on my desk of the—and I'm going to paraphrase it, so I don't get it wrong, but the job of a scientist is not to change the world, it's to plant seeds so that the world can be changed as it should. And I do believe how he went about scientifically looking at things, figuring things out, it was just phenomenal.

A lot of his patents today are still actually behind the scenes by the government, they won't release all of them. He had insights into mobile phones and things well before anyone else, and the sense of the future really, really requires you to think well ahead, to think across science disciplines. He did all of that really well. So, huge fan. He unfortunately wasn't treated very well with patents, but he should be respected for all that he did for science. It's pretty phenomenal.

Luke Storey: [01:36:22] Agreed. Yeah. He got pretty screwed over, right?

Tara Youngblood: [01:36:24] He did. He got really screwed in the end.

Luke Storey: [01:36:26] A lot of people jacked his stuff, yeah.

Tara Youngblood: [01:36:27] But just amazing brain.

Luke Storey: [01:36:31] That's funny you mention that. I just want to interject really quick. I was listening to a gentleman who channels this being called a Bashar, I think is the name yesterday, and someone was asking, what about—and he's like an alien kind of off-world-type entity, this Bashar, and people listening to my show won't even be fazed by that, I'm just like, I know it sounds crazy, but anyway, he was saying some really interesting stuff, but someone in the audience asked, what about free energy?

Why haven't you guys, being these ETs, like given us access to technology so that we don't have to have cell towers everywhere and things like that? And Bashar, the entity answered, we already have. We gave it to this guy, Tesla, and you guys fucked it up, but you could be carrying data on essentially like a harmonic of the Schumann resonance and not have all this. It's totally here available, you could do it any time, this guy, Nikola Tesla, got it right, and you guys kind of blew it, so that's all you get for now, basically, something like that. yeah.

Tara Youngblood: [01:37:36] Yeah. Energy is definitely my thing. I actually went to school for physics, for fusion energy, changing the world from an energy perspective right there next to water. And I do feel like water has certain things to unlock in that energy realm that we haven't tapped into yet. But as far as other mentors, Laurance Doyle, who worked under Carl Sagan and the SETI Project in sort of the universe and cosmos, was, by far, probably my greatest mentor. We spent a lot of time talking about time, and heat, and entropy, which turns out to be part of the end result in a Dock Pro.

But when you think about how the universe ages, it's not time by itself, it's time and heat. Time is a horrible variable by itself, it should never be set by itself. It should always be paired with something in order to have relevant matter to whoever you are. So, talk about general relativity. It all has to have things tied to it. Time needs to be anchored and it's anchored to heat when it talks about the age of the universe. So, any time we can take energy out and keep things cooler, we're actually slowing down entropy. We're slowing down the universe. And he was a big part of letting me be me on my energy journey.

Luke Storey: [01:38:52] Cool. That's two.

Tara Youngblood: [01:38:54] It's two. Well, it's Carl Sagan before him, but I feel like I've taken a big chunk of it. I could go on and on. I have a long list, so I probably should let Todd do.

Luke Storey: [01:39:07] That's totally acceptable.

Todd Youngblood: [01:39:08] So, I'm like the antithesis of terrorism on list, which is probably why we work so well together. For me, it's all about who's influenced me at my moment of time. Like right now, I have to say that I've had kind of somewhat infrequent but meaningful interaction with Rick Rubin, which has been amazing. So, I don't know if you've spent any time with him or you have a relationship with him, but I think-

Luke Storey: [01:39:31] He loves the ChiliSleep technology, yeah.

Todd Youngblood: [01:39:34] Yeah. Actually, it was Dave Asprey.

Luke Storey: [01:39:36] Actually, it's funny, dude, I remember going to his house in Malibu, which subsequently burned down. It was an incredible freaking house. So cool. But he had, I think it was the first ChiliPad on both sides of the bed, and that might have been the first time, I was like, oh, you can have two different temperatures.

Todd Youngblood: [01:39:52] Yeah, that's right.

Luke Storey: [01:39:53] It's super cool.

Todd Youngblood: [01:39:53] So, he's a guy that what's amazing about being around him or being in his presence and even communication to some extent, it's the first person I've ever been around where like you just want to be your best self, because there's enough pause in the interaction, there's enough silence or quietness that there's a sense of like who you are and who you could be, and I think that there's an incredible value, and for me, it was transformative to a great extent of being able to be around someone that just expects greatness from people.

And not greatness from an ego standpoint, just expects each individual person to be their best self. And I'm sure he describes it a different way, but my interaction with him, that was definitely something that I took away from him. It was every interaction I ever had with him was just amazing. And even just email correspondence or whatever, there's just a pleasantness and enjoyment that goes from those interactions. And then, I really feel like—obviously, I love working with Tara. She's been sort of inspirational in my life about how you can have a vision for things.

I grew up in—I'm not going to blame it on my parents, but I never learned to dream. I didn't think of like the future. I didn't have a futuristic version of myself. It was very sort of very present, but not futuristic thinking. And I think that's one of the things that I appreciate working with Tara, like her sense of the vision and how she can feel things, but I've very much listened to what I need—I always have the things I need when I need them, but I don't really have a roster of the people most influential in my life, per se.

Luke Storey: [01:41:34] Yeah. Well, those are two good ones, and you got some major points, shouting out the wife.

Tara Youngblood: [01:41:38] I know, I was going to say.

Luke Storey: [01:41:39] I mean, I got to remember that. Yeah, that's good. It's funny when I ask people that question, oftentimes, it's like their parents, or their uncle, or something like that. And then, sometimes, it's like Buddha, Jesus, Nikola Tesla. Sometimes, they're these monumental figures. But oftentimes, I think the people that we learn the most from are just the people that we're close with. If we're close to people we like, that should be how it goes. Alright. I think we've done it, guys.

Tara Youngblood: [01:42:08] I think so.

Luke Storey: [01:42:08] Thank you so much.

Tara Youngblood: [01:42:09] This has been really fun.

Luke Storey: [01:42:09] Yeah, likewise. I'm so glad you got to join us for this round. And thank you guys for making the time to come here live in the studio. It's always better that way. Living in Austin has been pretty good for that. Most people are going to pass through at some point or they'll come here to do it, so thank you so much, and can't wait for more people to discover what you do and see your next innovations. You guys are, like I said, I haven't been on the site in a while, and I was like, damn, they've been productive. There's all kinds of cool stuff coming.

Tara Youngblood: [01:42:37] Yeah. You will have to check out our new site, you can see it on our branding, but sleep.me is our new site. By September, they'll combine and kind of match all of the branding parts, but you'll see meditations, and Yoga Nidra, and things starting to pop up there. Maybe we can even entice you to do a content for us at some time there. .

Luke Storey: [01:42:59] I would love to.

Tara Youngblood: [01:42:59] That is our future state. Every me needs to sleep amazing, and sleep easy and accessible for everyone.

Luke Storey: [01:43:05] So, you guys are evolving into like a whole sleep brand.

Tara Youngblood: [01:43:08] Yeah. 

Todd Youngblood: [01:43:08] It's all sleep.

Tara Youngblood: [01:43:08] Yeah, everything that's sleep.

Luke Storey: [01:43:11] Cool. Love it, dude. And thanks for the T-shirt. Now, I have a Sleep Me t-shirt as well.

Todd Youngblood: [01:43:15] It can freeze your ass off.

Luke Storey: [01:43:16] Yeah. Are you guys going to Paleo f(x)?

Todd Youngblood: [01:43:19] Yes, we'll be there.

Luke Storey: [01:43:20] Okay. Cool. So, I will see you guys there. For those listening, pretty much everyone that's been on the show in the health space is going to be at Paleo f(x). So, if you want to meet these two, you could probably come and meet them there, because I'm pretty sure this will come out before that. 

Tara Youngblood: [01:43:20] Yeah, then they can touch and feel the Dock Pro if you want.

Todd Youngblood: [01:43:39] It's the last weekend of April.

Luke Storey: [01:43:40] That's what I did at the last conference, I was like, oh, this thing looks cool. Yeah. Alright, you guys. Thanks for coming in.

Todd Youngblood: [01:43:46] Thanks a bunch. Appreciate it.

Tara Youngblood: [01:43:47] Okay. Thank you.

 

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HEALTH CLAIMS DISCLOSURE
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not evaluated the statements on this website. The information provided by lukestorey.com is not a substitute for direct, individual medical treatment or advice. It is your responsibility, along with your healthcare providers, to make decisions about your health. Lukestorey.com recommends consulting with your healthcare providers for the diagnosis and treatment of any disease or condition. The products sold on this website are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

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