The Pomp Podcast - #1229 Matteo Franceschetti on The Sleep Secret of Elon Musk & Mark Zuckerberg

Episode Date: July 31, 2023

Matteo Franceschetti, co-founder & CEO of Eight Sleep. In this conversation we talk about how to optimize your sleep, importance of sleep fitness, and how Eight Sleep is working to improve your sleep. Eight Sleep creates premium mattress covers that improve members' sleep quality through intelligent cooling and warming technology. Go to https://www.eightsleep.com/pomp/ and save $150 on the Pod Cover. Invest in the rest you deserve with Eight Sleep, now shipping within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat

any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. We are going to start with Matteo Franchetti. He's the co-founder and CEO of 8sleep. 8sleep is a business that when I was trying to optimize my personal sleep, I found them, I tried the product, and then I literally ran to Matteo and I was like,

this thing changed my life. I've got to invest in your business. After he gave me a hard time and tried to avoid me for a while, I eventually convinced him. And so not only am I proud to call Matteo a friend, but also I'm a proud investor in the business, 8sleep, and I sleep on the mattress every single night. Here, let's bring up Mateo

and let's learn more about how to optimize our sleep. All right, Mateo, I thought a great place for us to start this conversation is the idea of sleep fitness. This is something that you all are pioneering. What exactly is sleep fitness and why is it so important to people? Yeah, we came up with this concept of sleep fitness

that is different from what most of the other companies in sleep do or think about, right? So for us, sleep is literally like fitness. You need to put the time, you need to put the effort, and then the result is your sleep performance, which really means how you feel when you wake up. And so sleep fitness means things like you need to be consistent with your time, the time you go to bed, the time you wake up. You need to put the hours, so you need to try to sleep anywhere between seven and nine hours. And then the results will come and you will feel great, energized, and in a good mood every single day. So when people actively work to sleep better, longer, deeper, all these different things,

how many of them are sleeping because it's athletic performance, it is mental clarity and kind of like business type performance, or it's things like longevity? Do you see people trying to specialize or really focus on their sleep for one of those? Or is it really them saying, hey, I just want to be healthier. I actually want to get more longevity. I want to get better athletic performance and mental health. How much specialization versus just generally people realize it's good for their health and that's why they focus on it?

For most, it's a great question. For most of the people, it's more probably a general feeling, right? Because it's really the feeling of when you wake up in the morning and how you feel in terms of energy and in terms of mood. Then I think there are a lot of people that now are more into biohacking and health and longevity. And so they know that there are second order effects that will impact also these verticals. But I would say for most of at least our customers that is just normal people is just how great you feel every morning. Describe a little bit the Eight Sleep product itself. And one of the things that's been so interesting to me over the years is it's probably the technology product I spend the most time with. So if I look at the amount of time I spend on my phone, it's, I don't know, four hours a day or so.

If I look at my computer, again, it's hours a day, but it's not eight hours. And eight hours being one third of the day seems like, man, I really better get this right because it is the thing I spend the most time with. So what exactly does the product do and how does it work? Yeah, it's another great point. I think actually Elon Musk tweeted about how much you use your car in a week. And I don't remember if it was like two hours a day at the most, so call it 14 hours. But then you start thinking, how long do you sleep and how much do you use our product every single day? you're talking about almost 60 hours a week so it's an order of magnitude almost an order of

magnitude bigger than how much you use your car um our product is a cover so it's something that you can install onto any mattress so if you like your mattress keep using it then we don't expect you to change it you put this cover on top of it and then you put your bed sheets on top of our cover and the cover does a couple of different things first there are sensors embedded in this discovered that can track everything about your sleep, your respiration, and your heart rate. So cardiovascular system, and again, respiration in the future will be things like snoring and sleep apnea. And then based on your biometrics, we adjust the temperature of each side of the bed based on your sleep stages and HR and other factors. So there's plenty of medical evidence

that through temperature, specifically thermoregulation, you can improve your sleep quality. And that is what we see in our data. Nine out of 10 of our customers report better sleep. Plus, we see with hard data that we can improve your deep sleep by up to 30% and your sleep quality by up to 27%. So when we talk about this idea of the cold temperature, that is me laying on the actual mattress. I just sleep like I normally do and it's colder. But you guys have something called autopilot which is not just leaving it as one static temperature throughout the night help people understand kind of what autopilot is doing and like why is it that actually maybe changing the temperature throughout the night could be more advantageous yeah so first

probably you have heard people saying oh you should sleep at 68 degrees all night and that is wrong and it's wrong because your body temperature changes um during the night and you go through different sleep stages. And so 68 degrees could be right for maybe an hour, maybe two hours, whatever, but definitely it's not going to be right for the whole night. And so the first thing we did when we started the company was to create multiple different settings for different stages of the night. But then we started applying AI and ML to that. And so we said, instead of you manually

setting this temperature before going to bed, now the temperature in light sleep, the temperature in deep sleep, or in REM, we are going to manage this for you in real time while you are unconscious. And so while you are sleeping, we capture your sleep stages, we capture your biometrics, and our AI automatically sets the temperature that is better for you. Our AI also learns from you. So we look at toss and turns, sleep quality, and sleep stages, and every single day will improve the temperature that we provide to you. It's a sort of autopilot from Tesla, but instead of driving your car, it drives you asleep. So this is not just for average Joes, right?

You have some of the top athletes, the top professionals in the world sleeping on this. Who are some of the people that you're allowed to publicly talk about that are actually sleeping on an eSleep? Yeah. So in business, we have Elon Musk, we have Mark Dakenberg, Vinod Khosla, Paul Graham got one. So many others, many billionaires in Silicon Valley, they all sleep on our product. A lot of CEOs of public companies, they sleep on our product. And then another big bucket is athletes. And so we have Lewis Hamilton and George Russell, they're Formula One drivers.

We have around 60-70% of the Formula One drivers sleeping on the pod. We have tennis players, a couple of the top tennis players, CrossFit champion, a lot of cyclists. So we just work. There was the Tour de France in France, and there was a team sleeping on the pod. We have the best player from the Miami Heat sleeping on the pod and traveling with it. So we have hundreds of athletes, and I think we have more than 40 Olympians sleeping on the product. So what's so interesting to me is when I played football in college, you know, hyperbaric chambers and all these different kind of fitness-related products, it was seen as something that the professional used, right? A hyperbaric chamber is like, I don't know, $10,000, $15,000.

Super expensive. It's clunky. You get in. You zip yourself in this whole thing. But it's got this amazing benefit to it. what you all have built is almost a product that is good for the professionals, but it's available to kind of the retail individual or the retail consumer as well. Is that something that you think you can continue where it's good enough for the professional athletes, but it's available to

kind of the mass market? Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think there will be a portfolio diversification where we will keep building more products. Some, they will have a lower price and some others, they will have a higher price. And so based on what you can afford, you can sleep in the greatest sleep device ever built to maximize your sleep performance. And in that device, I think that you are already testing it. You're sleeping in it yourself. Talk a little bit in terms of kind of the company's mission. I think when I first started sleeping on it and you and I first started talking and I was begging you to allow me to invest in the business, you were like, well, actually the goal here is not just sleep in this cold environment.

you wanted to compress the hours of sleep that someone had but still kind of increase the quality so talk why is that goal so important to you but also how do you plan to do it yeah so one of the goals would be can you get in just six hours the same amount of rest you were getting in eight hours can we make sleep more efficient and the whole point is on my side i'm obsessed with efficiency as you know because we're friends and so i try to do everything possible in my life to maximize my time. And so originally, the first idea of paid sleep came from that. And I say, why do I need to sleep eight hours?

And the reality is you don't need to sleep eight hours. It's just something inefficient that didn't change for the past 2,000 years. 2,000 years ago, we were sleeping on a piece of stone. And now for the past 50 years, we have been sleeping on a piece of damp foam. But the reality is we still go to bed and we pretend to wake up eight hours later, fully refreshed and that is not possible and so first can we compress sleep and i think we can because we can maximize your sleep performance through temperature temperature of the bed temperature of the air light noise and other factors and then i started thinking fine even

if we can compress your sleep from eight hours to six it's still a lot of time what else can we do for you and so what we want to do is to substantially scan your body every single night to detect potential illnesses that are developing in your body so imagine if in three four or five years from now some of our products can scan your body almost like an mri it will not be mri technology will be a different technology but the results will be very similar so we can detect the development of certain illnesses and potentially even cancer as you continue down that path obviously that is a technology problem that's something you got to build a company you you got to build technology, you got to figure out how to sell it like there's a clear path,

right? But it's also one that is difficult to execute. What can people do today, like very specific protocols when they go to sleep, other than just sleep on the eight sleep that allows them to increase the probability of getting a great night of sleep? Are there routines or their products? Like what do you do? And what do you suggest other people take a look at that may work for them? This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time

spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Yeah. So the first thing that a sleep doctor would tell you is just to be consistent and so you need to go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time and the reason is you have a biological clock so you need to teach your body when it's time to go to bed and when it's time to wake up and after a while probably two three four weeks the body will just start doing it automatically that is one second you need to put the time right so you need to try to sleep anywhere between seven and nine hours i actually sometimes tell people look just do this test for a week try to sleep one hour longer every single day at the end

of the week you will have slept seven hours more than what you usually do which is the equivalent of one night and then you tell me how you feel this is the second one another thing you can do is you could do a thermal shock before going to bed a simple way to do it is you you take a shower and you keep switching between cold water and warm water. 30 seconds each, do it six times. That thermal shock usually really helps you to relax. Then if you are in a hotel or if you can afford it, the equivalent but the next stronger is to do a sauna and a nice bath.

If you can do that, it will help you. Particularly even just a sauna could be really helpful an hour or two hours before going to bed. The last thing is you can switch all your lights to orange in the evening so let's say after 8 p.m and so all the those that orange will help you stimulate your melatonin and make your body feel that it's almost time to go to bed and when you're doing things like the light how do you suggest people do this when they're traveling are there certain hacks that maybe it works at home right you've got your routine but then all of a sudden you start

traveling and people like i never get a good night of sleep on the road or you know i have some sort of a time zone issue what do you do travel wise that's like a sleep protocol that works for you yeah for the lights the only thing you could do is there are some glasses that you could wear and they will you know let you see everything in in an orange color that is an option the other thing is when i travel so i just came back from europe i tried to start adjusting my to the new time zone to three days in advance so what doctors say is usually your body is able to formally adjust only one hour per day to a new time zone so in theory if you go to a time zone where there is a six hours delta it will take your body six days to fully adjust to that time zone

one hour per day but if you start three days in advance then instead of being six days it's just three days right so that is another thing you can do the other thing is when you land in you in a new place the best is to land in the morning and immediately expose yourself to sunlight so the sun will help you to reset your circadian clock so your biological clock and the other thing is if it's morning or early afternoon when you land somewhere else just go to the gym but try to reactivate your body and do some physical activity so the body understands that it's not night but it is morning when somebody asks you cool you're the ceo and founder of eight sleep i get what the product does what is it going to do for me you mentioned that there's a bunch of

studies that you all have done what are some of the things you have learned from those studies that people who use the pod end up actually getting as a benefit of sleeping on and eat sleep Yeah. So first, you will get better sleep quality overall. It could go up to 30% based on what we see. Again, 9 out of 10 of our customers, and we're talking about thousands and thousands of customers, they report better sleep. So sleep quality, you will sleep better and you will wake up more refreshed.

That's one. Two, you will get more deep sleep. We have evidence of that as well. Three, if you're fighting with your partner about temperature every single night because your partner likes it warmer or colder that problem is going to be solved if you have hot flashes like many women right menopause is an example we can fix that problem as well and if you sweat at night or you just feel too hot we're going to fix that problem as well where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about eight sleep go on eightsleep.com

eight like the number um e-i-g-h-t sleep.com and there you can find our product and uh get one you have i think 90 days or up to 100 days to return it if you don't like it so there is no reason matteo i learned something everything every single time we talk i always appreciate it. We'll definitely do it again in the future. Thank you.