3 Book Picks to be Healthy, Wealthy & Wise

Lately, in our conversations outside of the show, March, Ian and I have been discussing good books that we’ve recently discovered. This inspired us to do an episode on book recommendations. So on this episode, each of us share a recommendation for a book that we’ve read. We discuss what attracted us to the book in the first place, what the key takeaways were from the book, and what surprised us about the book.

Subscribe to the show: Apple Podcasts| Google Play| Stitcher | Overcast

We hope you enjoy these books as much as we did. Also, just a reminder that we also post the show on YouTube and are going to posting some additional content there. Check us out there at http://betrr.io/youtube.

Here are a few highlights from this week’s show:

• March recommends a book recently also recommended by Bill Gates called Factfulness by Han Rosling, Anna Rosling Ronnlund, and Ola Rosling.
• Darren recommends a classic by Napoleon Hill titled Think & Grow Rich — a book he saves and re-reads every few years.
• Ian recommends a book on his favorite topic: sleep titled Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker of the UC Berkely Sleep & Neuroimaging Lab
• And more!

We’d love to benefit from your wisdom on this topic so drop us a note on Facebook, Instagram, & Twitter and share your story with others in The Better Show community. Or you can email us at hi@bettershow.io. We can’t wait to hear from you!

Show Notes

• 4:06 — March recommends a book titled Factfulness by Han Rosling, Anna Rosling Ronnlund, and Ola Rosling.
• 6:40 — March describes how the world has moved away from “us” vs “them” to simply “us”.
• 7:15 — March shares stats about the average quality of life for people around the world.
• 11:58 — Ian notes that Factfulness sounds similar to another book he’s read titled Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker
• 13:29 — Darren recommends a book that he reads and re-reads about every three years titled Think & Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• 16:07 — Ian notes that his grandfather gave his this book with a request that he read it each year.
• 23:29 — Ian recommends a book titled Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker and shares a few insights into the science behind sleep.
• 29:05 — Darren decides that he now needs a nap. 😴😴
• 33:08 — Ian is going to report back on The Chilly Pad.
• 37:14 — Ian notes the difference in school start times today versus early 20th century and notes the affect the earlier start times have on childrens’ sleep health.
• 41:46 — Ian is curious about what March and Darren are drinking while we record the show.

Mentions

• Book 📖: Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Ola Rosling
• Video 🎞️: TED Talk by Hans Rosling from 2015
• Book 📖: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• Book 📖: Why We Sleep: Unlocking the power of sleep & dreams by Matthew Walker, PhD
• Book 📖: Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker
• The Chilly Pad bed air conditioner
• In March’s glass this week: Castello di Gabbiano Chianti Classico Riserva 🍷
• In Darren’s glass this week: Tequila Burrueco 🥃
• In Ian’s glass this week: H2O 💧💧💧

Episode Transcript

Ian Mikutel — 00:00 — Hello everybody, Ian here from The Better Show with a very special announcement. Before we dive into this episode. The Better Show is launching our very first giveaway. It’s called The Better Show bundle. It’s worth over $545 and it’s chock full of our favorite handpicked products that we’ve tested, loved, and discussed on previous episodes you can enter to win by simply going to betrr.io/giveaway. That’s betrr.io/giveaway. The bundle includes a two month supply of Qualia via the premium nootropic supplement that I take every day. A 12 pack of the ample natural meal replacement shakes, a one year subscription to maelstrom and intelligent email cleanup service, the Rohm sound machine that we use to get better sleep. The productivity planner that we plan our day with, the 5 minute journal that we find serenity and peace with and the happiness trap. An amazing book that March has talked about on the show before we worked with the makers of these great products to put together something special for our listeners and we can’t wait for you all to enter and for one lucky listener to win the giveaway ends June 13th, 2018.

Ian Mikutel — 01:21 — So make sure to head over to betrr.io/giveaway right now. Go ahead. You can pause this and come back in a minute so that you can enter for your chance to win. All right, good luck and on with the show.

Ian Mikutel — 01:37 — Welcome to episode 39 of The Better Show today. We discussed three books that will help you become healthy, wealthy, and wise, including one that Bill Gates called quote. One of the most important books I’ve ever read.

Ian Mikutel — 01:54 — It is a show for people who want to get better by people who love getting better, and that’s that’s us.

March Rogers — 02:02 — When you start thinking about all the different ways that we can improve and we can get better and we can help the people around us get better. It’s such a wide world like covers almost every aspect of human experience in daily life.

Darren Austin — 02:14 — I’m pretty excited about building a community of likeminded people.

Ian Mikutel — 02:20 — Hey everybody and welcome to The Better Show I’m Ian Mikutel.

Darren Austin — 02:20 — I’m Darren Austin

March Rogers — 02:20 — And I’m March Rogers

Ian Mikutel — 02:26 — And on this episode we are doing another one of our Better Bites. These are tiny little episodes that we do from time to time. They’re much shorter than our normal episodes and we typically focus guys right on a single product that we want to talk about. Recommend that we’ve enjoyed, tested, used, all that sort of thing.

Darren Austin — 02:40 — Yeah, a little bit of value and insight or something that we really liked that we’d like to share.

Ian Mikutel — 02:46 — Yeah. In the past we’ve done one on the recent purchase of a tesla model three. We’ve done one on the Five Minute Journal and the Productivity Planner and we just did one repair recently on sleep products that we’ve started to get a lot of great feedback on.

Darren Austin — 02:59 — It was super popular. Yeah. So maybe we should do more of these.

Ian Mikutel — 03:01 — Yeah, absolutely. So today’s Better Bite is all about books. We said this on a recent episode and we are fulfilling that promise, so we aren’t going to take today to each give a recommendation of a single book that we have found to be very useful in our lives. Very insightful, very interesting or surprising. And we’re going to break each book recommendation down into eight or nine simple parts. Uh, we’re going to talk about, give you the title of it when it came out, a who wrote it, the author, and then when we read it and maybe why we read it. And then we should obviously make it worth your time. So we’re going to tell you why it matters to our audience. Why is it something you should be interested in reading? And then we’re gonna wrap up by telling you what our key takeaways from the book where, and my favorite question guys, which is what surprised us the most when we read this book and a, and we’ll wrap up with if you are interested, where can you go grab a copy of it?

Ian Mikutel — 03:54 — Uh, and, and, and in doing so, help out the show actually. So we’ll explain that in a little bit. So with all that preamble guys, March, why don’t you kick it out, kick it off for us. I know you have a, a recent Bill Gates’ book recommendation that you just finished reading, right?

March Rogers — 04:06 — That’s right. Yeah. I just finished reading it. It’s called Factfulness. 10 reasons we wrong about the world and why things are better than you think it was written by Hans Rosling, who is a sadly now recently deceased, a global health researcher. It was coauthored by his son, Ola Rosling and a Ola’s wife that’s Han’s daughter in law, Anna Rosalie, and uh, all three of them have been working for a long time in trying to both gather data about the state of the world and then communicate that data to, to audiences all over the world.

Darren Austin — 04:40 — It’s a noble cause.

March Rogers — 04:42 — Yeah, that’s right. So the reason why I read it was that it was a gift that was given to me by a friend of mine who was the husband of a woman who works for Bill Gates’ company called bg three, which is sort of the company that manages all of his sort of communication, the gates notes and philanthropy and stuff like that.

Ian Mikutel — 04:42 — Annual letter.

March Rogers — 05:02 — That’s right. That’s right. Um, and so bill gates, a one that was a gift. The second one was Bill Gates called it one of the most important books I’ve ever read. An indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world. Uh, which is a, as you might imagine, if Bill Gates had written that, uh, it’s on the dust cover of the jacket.

Ian Mikutel — 05:22 — I’ll say about that is he reads a crap ton of books. When he says it. It’s not like the guy who read like five books and it’s like, it’s, you know,

Darren Austin — 05:22 — It’s funny is he, uh, is somebody asked them if you, you know, if there’s any super power you would want, what would it be? And he said, I want to be able to read faster and can consume information faster, learn faster. Yeah, I love.

March Rogers — 05:22 — The last reason is, is that a Hans I originally heard of Hans Rosling through his ted talks and he does these really fun to talk to put a link in the show notes that’s really about like these animated charts illustrating change over time in economic development of countries around the world. Great. So you know, to me it’s a, it’s an incredibly insightful book about how to think about the world and specifically about cultural change, economic development and the biases that make us think the world is worse than it is and that it can be improved.

Darren Austin — 06:16 — And so to believe that your mind wants to believe the worst this, the sky is falling.

March Rogers — 06:22 — And as we’ve talked about in our, like healthy media diet episodes, the media is incentivized to make you afraid of the world and they don’t report, Hey, in 90 percent of the world everything’s going great. They focus on the things that are going really badly or scary or exciting or dramatic.

Darren Austin — 06:39 — It bleeds. It leads.

March Rogers — 06:40 — That’s right. Yeah. And so like just kinda, there’s three key takeaways that I would, that I sort of got from the book and then I think that others might get from it as well is there is no us and them in the world anymore. We used to think of like the rich countries and poor countries, the first world, third world, the developed, the developing and actually when you look at all of the major ways that you might want to measure progress, whether it’s child mortality rates, whether it’s income per person, whether it’s health outcomes, whether it’s a number of children who get education to primary, secondary and university level.

March Rogers — 07:15 — This actually just this really smooth continuum. There are, there are countries that are the poorest countries in the world. There are countries that are the richest country in the world and there’s just this fine sort of slope of every country in between. There is no separation anymore. So we’re addressing together are progressing. And in general, every country has made some very significant progress in the last 30 years. There’s essentially no country that is not better than it was 30 years ago. There are many countries that are dramatically better than they were 30 years ago. And there’s a couple of countries that have, are sort of more struggling. But what’s interesting is the total population of the world, it’s living in what we would consider extreme poverty. Like the sort of thing that you see on the news where there’s no running water where people have to walk two miles a day to fill a bucket with dirty water.

March Rogers — 08:07 — Like the level of life there’s about, of, about the 7 billion people who live in the world is about 1 billion people who that’s their day to day existence. The other 6 billion people have a life that’s, that is better than that. And on a range. And the middle income people, you know, that’s, we learned about in the, from the, from the book. They’re not like people who live in the United States or western Europe where we’re, you know, globally incredibly wealthy. But they do have access to emergency healthcare. They do have access to the Internet. They do have access to, uh, to clean water and probably stable electricity and they probably own a bicycle, if not, if not a moped, like that’s the majority of people in the world thing,

Darren Austin — 08:47 — Not to take away from anything from the billion people that are still in that abject poverty. But like that, the percentage of the human population, I believe used be significantly higher that was in that category, right?

March Rogers — 08:57 — Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean originally before agriculture, everybody was in that. Everybody’s in that category, right? Uh, but yes. So now you seeing it’s a minority of people who are desperately poor and the majority of people are sort of in that middle income tier. One thing that really struck me and I think as a key takeaway from the book is that we need to be able to talk about the fact that things are getting better and that they’re still bad. At the same time, those two ideas are not contradictory to each other and we need to be able to talk about them at the same time because we need to both appreciate that all of the work that we’re doing is actually working and we also have to say that there’s much more work to do the danger. I thought this was really insightful.

March Rogers — 09:36 — The danger of not having those is either you say, oh, everything’s getting better, therefore we don’t have to do anymore. Like we don’t have to worry about it. That’s, that’s a mistake. Right, and then the. But the other problem is, Oh, if we only think about everything that’s terrible. We assume that every effort that’s going on around the world to make it better must be failing and we want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. We’re actually economic development, free trade education, particularly for women infrastructure programs, programs that are about vaccinating people, have programs that are about primary healthcare and preventative health care. These are the things that are actually working. We just need to keep doing them and do more of them. Not give up and say it’s hopeless or uh, or blow it all up saying we have to come up with some new solution.

March Rogers — 10:21 — We actually have figured out how to make the world a better place. We just need to keep doing it. So that was like an amazing, uh, sort of takeaway for me. The thing that surprised me the most about the whole book and was Hans Rosling would go around the world and he would do many, many of these sorts of talks and he would ask people, he would give them multiple choice questions, asking them about how they would, you know, uh, think that the world is, you know, how many children in the world die before the age of five? How, how many years in school do you know an average child in the world spend? How many fewer years in education does it say female child, a girl have or have access to then a boy, how many children in the world are vaccinated for at least one disease, like all of these things.

March Rogers — 11:05 — And he would, he would give three choices. Quantifying it. What he found was the vast majority of people, regardless of their expertise, and this is like literally people you know, who we’re working for, a corporation in the US or people who are public health experts in the UN would all get it pretty much consistently equally wrong and everybody assumed that the world was worse than it was. Um, and that, that idea that when everybody had the, you know, basically the vast majority of people got basic facts about the world wrong and that it didn’t matter if you were an expert or what your level of intelligence or education was, you got it wrong as well. Really, it was sort of the most surprising thing about the book. And then that’s his whole book is structured around why do we think that, like, what mistakes are we making in, in how we understand the world. It’s, yeah, it was a really mind opening a book. I’d highly recommend it.

Ian Mikutel — 11:58 — It really sounds a lot like a similar book that I read, uh, back in 2012 that when it came out called the better angels of our nature by Steven Pinker. That was specifically on violence, declining over history, and so it sounds like this is almost the same kind of a book in a way, but at a much broader scale than just violence. Is that A. is that a way to think about it?

March Rogers — 12:19 — Yeah, I think that’s. I think that’s totally a great way to think about it. I think. I think actually the reasons why violence is declining and the reasons why health outcomes and economic growth or are getting better are related but not the same next ether. They’re incredibly complimentary books. I loved both of them. If I was gonna start with one, I would start with Factfulness.

March Rogers — 12:38 — It’s a little bit of an easier read. It’s a little bit more applicable. It’s a. it’s got this sort of optimistic tone to it that I’ve. I’ve really enjoyed. Rosling actually describes himself not as an optimist but as a possibl-ist and so he would. He would talk about and say, hey look, we have all of the evidence to say it’s possible to get every person in the world out of poverty and into a comfortable and happy lifestyle. That’s possible. We just have to keep doing the stuff that we’re doing together.

Ian Mikutel — 13:05 — Great. Okay. So, uh, what, where can make little pick up the book if they, if they’re interested.

March Rogers — 13:09 — Sure. Well, we created a very short url to make it a little bit easier. So that’s a, betrr.io/factfulness. And we’ll also put a link to it in the show notes. Show notes.

Ian Mikutel — 13:23 — Cool. Alright. Mr Darren. Uh, so that was a good first pick. What are you going to follow up with?

Darren Austin — 13:29 — Well, uh, you know, the book that has been a big influence on me. It’s one that I read when I was pretty young. I was, I read this when I was in my, I think probably late teens, early twenties, and it’s a, it’s a classic. A lot of people have heard of it. It’s not a big surprise, but it’s a think and grow rich by Napoleon Hill. It was originally published in March of 1937. I’m sure. I’m sure you guys have probably read it before, but it was a, it was something that was super interesting to me. I’ve always been sort of interested in, in personal finance and I’m particularly interested, you know, no surprise, I ended up hosting and hosting a pod, a podcast about how to get better at life. I’ve always been interested in what do you know, highly successful people do that is different than everybody else.

Darren Austin — 14:15 — And so this was that book and I think it was, you know, what attracted me to it and why I picked it for this episode was, you know, Napoleon Hill was just a writer. He wasn’t a, like a self help guru or anything like that back in 1937. But um, he was approached by Andrew Carnegie with a proposition and Carnegie came to him and said, I will connect you with the 500 richest people in America so that you can interview them and get and distill their insights, their information in and learn from them what makes their paths to success work. Put all of that into a book so that we can share this with younger generations and they can be successful faster than any of us. And he said, the catch is, I’m not gonna pay you a dime to write this book. What do you say?

Darren Austin — 15:08 — And Napoleon Hill immediately said that he would do, he would, he would write the book. And so what came out of it was this book think and grow rich in basically what this book is, is it’s a culmination of some of the best tips. It’s sort of what makes these ultra successful in this case, successful equates to wealthy and money. But frankly, I think that the, the, the tips in this book, um, they really relate to anything you want to accomplish in life because it’s all about the. This is a book about the power of your mind in the power of your mind, in setting an intention and it focused a focused, a desire. And, and what that can do for anything you want to achieve, whether it’s a, accumulating, a lot of wealth, fine. If that’s your thing or it it’s, a frankly in the path you’re on, which is becoming a scratch golfer. Holy Cow. With your rounds lately, you know, it’s setting your mind to something. And I think that’s the, that’s the story of this book is the power of your mind.

Ian Mikutel — 16:07 — It’s so amazing that you brought this up. So I had no idea that actually Darren was going to do this until right now in the show. I didn’t, I didn’t look ahead of time. Why it’s crazy as a, this is the one book that my grandfather gifted to my father and I a first edition copy of and said that he read and reread every year of his life. And he was an entrepreneur and he wrote in the book, uh, note to, I believe me, it might be to my father, I forget now. And it basically was his advice for life saying, uh, if you. And he gave me this years ago and he said, if you just can do one thing for me, I want you to read this book. I think even said like two or three times a year. He was so adamant, on it. And so it was so influential in his own life. And he retired pretty early. He was an entrepreneur and inventor. And so he was a big inspiration to me personally and uh, he passed away fairly early because of emphysema, unfortunately, because they didn’t know that smoking was super bad back in, back in his day for time, different time. But, um, it, it was just an amazing, amazing, a kind of inspiration, but also just like what a powerful book. And I loved it. I didn’t know that you were gonna bring this up. So.

Darren Austin — 17:16 — Well, what’s, what’s interesting to me about is, I mean, you know, it was a different time in the early 19 hundreds. So the morals were different than what we have today. And there’s language in the book that is very foreign to what we, to the way we understand that the way we speak today, I think there’s actually some excerpts in the book that would, some people might even find offensive and the way they talk about people and in a, you know, so, so there’s aspects of the book that are just old, but that doesn’t detract from the ideas that the book tries to convey. And so what I thought I’d do is I’d share a handful of the, sort of the greatest hits from the book in, and I won’t share all of them, but there’s a few that I think really step out of the book, basically distills the advice from, from the 500 richest people in America at the time into these 13 steps to attain your goal.

Darren Austin — 18:05 — And in there, in this case they talk about attain your riches, attain your wealth. And the first one is probably the most important one, which was desire. And this is about fostering a strong, clear, sort of insatiable desire for the thing you want to achieve. You’ve got to really want it. And in this also speaks about the power of visualization in. We talk about visualization as a technique that athletes use today and a technique that the successful, uh, people in all aspects of life surgeons will use visualization when they’re sort of mentally practicing a surgical routines, things like that. So this was, this was the first one, is you’ve got to have a desire and you’ve got a really, really, really want it. And you can foster that. That’s something that you can develop. One of the other steps I thought was good was they recommend a developing the skill of autosuggestion.

Darren Austin — 18:57 — So this is. This is retraining your internal voice to motivate you towards your goal. Instead of casting doubt on your ability to achieve it. Right? This is that voice that we all have in our head that tells us we’re not good enough, or we’re too tired to go the extra mile in the marathon training. That’s that voice. And so retraining that auto suggestion, the. There’s a, there’s another step that I thought was interesting. It’s similar to this as something they, that Napoleon hill refers to as the subconscious mind, pretty similar to the auto suggestion, but this is basically the idea that positive emotions and negative emotions cannot coexist in a, in the mind. So if you can focus your mind on the positive ones, you’ve effectively removed the negative ones. So I think that was. That was actually pretty,

Ian Mikutel — 19:42 — Or at least blocked it out temporarily.

Darren Austin — 19:43 — Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s a few other ones that I think are interesting. The one that I liked the most is this idea of making decisions in this wasn’t this one was probably. There were two things that were really surprising for me and this was one of them have every single one of the successful people that Napoleon hill interviewed, they all shared this exact trait and that is that they reach decisions. They all had a quality where they were able to reach a decision very, very quickly, but they changed the decisions. They reversed decisions extremely slowly. So when this meant was they were able to accumulate and filter a lot of information, make a decision, and I would argue he doesn’t talk about this, but my interpretation is they’re relying on gut at some level, which we’ve seen is also something that is a real factor.

Darren Austin — 20:36 — I mean, uh, I think it’s Malcolm Gladwell’s book blink, which is all about your instantaneous response. So Napoleon Hill doesn’t say that, but the point is, is that these successful were able to come to a decision, a conviction very quickly, and they were very reticent to, to let go of that decision. So that was actually pretty surprising in that. Has that stuck with me for awhile? The other thing that was surprising is, and this is the one everybody remembers, is a, it’s like step 10. It’s about channeling one’s sex drive into motivation. And my interpretation of this, you can read a lot of things into this if you want. The way I read about this, the way I read into this as it’s about controlling and channeling your primal instincts to serve your own purpose. So there’s myriad examples of people that, especially people in power, right? We’ve had presidents that have been in this situation that have sort of let their sexual desires overcome them in and take control over them as opposed to sort of being in control of those sort of instincts. And so that is also one of the chapters in here that they followed, that he focuses on.

Ian Mikutel — 21:42 — What surprised you the most about this book? And I think your biggest surprise.

Darren Austin — 21:49 — Well, I didn’t expect them to talk about sex in a, in a, uh, in a book that was referring to how to think and grow rich. I think it was that that was the most surprising in this idea that you can, that these people all had the same trade of making decisions quickly and then being very, very slow to reverse them. So I’m a big believer in this. I will also pass this book down to my nieces and my nephews and write a similar a note in the, in the front page like your grandfather did in. I think this is something I would recommend to every young person read and read more than once and work to digest it.

Ian Mikutel — 22:26 — Yeah. I think it was really interesting because when I got that note from my grandfather, um, I, I still am this person. I really don’t ever reread a book. And mostly now that’s because I think there’s too much to consume. So it’s like it has to just be so I. But I remember when I was younger I just didn’t actually know that that was even a thing anyone did. And so I remember reading that note in the first thing I remember reading about it was he wants me to read the same thing over and over and over and over and like I was like, why? What’s going on? Like, what was so unique about them? It’s an easy read to. It’s easier. Yeah. Well it’s because there’s so much to digest in it, right? It’s like it’s like reading a verses from the Bible or something. Right.

Darren Austin — 23:05 — That’s a really good way to put it. I mean it’s not a religious context to it necessarily, but like, yeah, it’s just like a, it’s like a, it’s reflecting on a lesson in which is in a large way what, what religion does.

March Rogers — 23:17 — I actually have never heard of this book or read. It’s definitely put it on my list to check it out.

Darren Austin — 23:25 — Keep it in perspective because it is 1930. What? Thirty seven. Yeah.

Ian Mikutel — 23:29 — If you’d like to pick it up, you can go to betrr.io/thinkandgrowrich. And we will have that in our show notes for you as well. Alright. So we are at our third and final book recommendation of de Jure and uh, my pick is a new one guys. This came out fairly recently, uh, about a year ago actually, and October of 2017 and it is called why we sleep and big shocker Ian pics a sleep topic. Uh, so

Darren Austin — 23:29 — The force multiplier baby.

Ian Mikutel — 24:02 — So that’s my reason. That’s why anyone should care about this. Yeah, I should get a sleep tattoo. I had gotten rid of the gun. Yeah, I ran the gun. Yeah, exactly from the video. If you’re watching on our YouTube page, which is now a thing or YouTube channel or overlay it on the YouTube, right?

Ian Mikutel — 24:19 — Yeah, there you go. Uh, so I read this book because I do believe sleep is the biggest thing that anyone can do to drastically, radically and very quickly improve their life. And this has been, I think the seminal book in sleep research that has come out in probably the last decade and it’s pretty new. It’s new to the scene and it’s by gaining by a guy named Matthew Walker. He’s a PHD, he’s also the director, uh, at UC Berkeley sleep in a neuroimaging lab, and so, uh, he’s been doing the rounds so you can actually find interviews with him all over the Internet. He’s a really cool guy, but his book is a really good, I would say holistic look at a bunch of different angles to sleep. Uh, he gets into the science of it. He gets into all aspects of that. That may surprise you frankly. And I’m going to give you a couple of my key takeaways, but I am going to leave a lot to you to go explore in this book.

Ian Mikutel — 25:17 — I, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m doing my thing right now where I, uh, actually read it, uh, on a kindle and then I’m relistening to it now in audio form because there’s just a lot to take care of. So yeah. Um, so okay. My first key takeaway, a, this one was surprising. So you know, the, how we typically sleep, right? So you go to bed at night and you sleep for a bunch of time no matter what that is, it’s a bunch of time. And then you wake up and then you do it all over again the next night, hopefully. So that kind of sleeping, which is one long essential session of sleep is called monophasic. It’s one model equals one. It’s one session of sleep. Well, he says is that humans actually are doing it wrong. The research shows us that we should be sleeping as bi phasic animals. And what that means is we should be basically doing what we do today, which is have a single long period about seven, eight hours. But then we should be having between 30 and 60 minutes of essentially a nap every afternoon.

March Rogers — 26:17 — Siesta. The Spanish had it, right?

Ian Mikutel — 26:19 — They did. They had a lot of things right. It turns out. But so that was fascinating to me. I knew that some people napped, but I had heard so many mixed messaging on napping over the years. Right. And I think

March Rogers — 26:32 — There’s a lot of cultural thing, right?

Ian Mikutel — 26:37 — Oh, you’re lazy. Why napping? What are you doing? Why is she at work? What are you doing? And so even if I, you know, I live my current office is a glass room, if I just like, laid on my couch and took a 30 minute nap, people would be like, ah, March would walk by and be like, right,

March Rogers — 26:53 — Tap on the tap on the glass of the terrarium.

Ian Mikutel — 26:58 — I love it. So, so that one was a big shocker and something that, um, you know, it’s funny, it’s not that, that it’s hard for anybody probably take a nap. Uh, it’s more that socially, like we said, or culturally. How do you actually make that work? He talks a little bit about the book, not to go into too much detail, but he does talk about how some places like Nike and Google are the ones he calls out are now creating. And I know Microsoft has started doing this and some of our new buildings on our campus, they’re creating a essentially nap rooms that are dark. They have lots of pillows there. You know, it’s a, it’s a trendy thing, but also the pods.

March Rogers — 27:34 — Have you guys seen the nap pods?

Ian Mikutel — 27:36 — Yeah. Describe it for someone on a listening.

March Rogers — 27:39 — Yeah. So imagine a giant egg shaped structure that is sort of a, it’s on a little stand that has little suspension thing that hangs from the ceiling. It looks almost like an art installation. It’s like an egg that a human might be hatched from a and you can climb into it and pull over this little, um, sort of cover that sort of like an accordion cloth cover and uh, and then you can snooze in there for a good 45, 60 minutes. They actually, in most of the officers, they have a sign on them saying that they ask you to not to, not to be in one of these pods for more than 90 minutes. So, you know, it’s sort of not being hogged by one particular person. But yeah, I’ve seen them in a few different offices both in, in San Francisco and in New York.

Ian Mikutel — 28:22 — And he does, he does talk about it at one point, if I do remember correctly, that’s a napping too long can be detrimental, probably not your health, but to your energy, uh, and it can send you into the wrong sleep cycle essentially. And get you messed up for the day. So the recommendation is the nap is 30 to 60 minutes max. So that was takeaway one. But the other thing that shocked me, this was just a kind of a quick research fact from a study that he quotes was that they took healthy adults and they found that the mortality rate from heart disease increased 37 to 60 percent when they eliminated napping, which is sane.

Darren Austin — 29:05 — Blows me away to the point where I’m going to have to start scheduling a nap because like, seriously, that’s crazy.

Ian Mikutel — 29:12 — Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And uh, and like I said, this is not, this is not the pseudo sciencey kind of guy. This is a, a is the head of UC Berkeley’s sleep lab. And so he’s only going to publish stuff that he feels very confident in and that is one of them ones that he put his name behind. And so again, that’s a 37 to 60 percent increase of heart disease. Uh, if you do not nap in a healthy adult, that’s not even saying, you know, they were predisposed to it. Right? So it’s just so take a nap, people, there’s

March Rogers — 29:45 — Almost feel like you should be able to take that into your boss and say you’re going to be responsible for me having a heart attack if you don’t let me take a nap in the middle of the day, you know,

Darren Austin — 29:55 — The terrible boss would be like, I provide you health insurance, get back to work.

Ian Mikutel — 30:00 — That’s right. That’s a good point. Have you guys ever taken naps consistently? Like even just for like maybe a week or something have as an experiment. I’m curious how I’m gonna feel for

Darren Austin — 30:11 — As early as I can remember as young as I can remember it until I got through college. I always took a nap in the afternoon. Really? Always. Yeah. And I’ve never been a really late night guy. You know what I mean? Like I, I turned in pretty early, like not really early but like, you know, 10, 11:00, something like that. But like I’ve, I always did. I would to this day take a nap if I could, but.

Ian Mikutel — 30:30 — So do you remember when you did it consistently? Do you do feel a lot better than you do now when you don’t take a nap?

Darren Austin — 30:35 — Oh, I mean, let me tell you, when I was 20 years old, I felt like I could get a gray beard. I mean, the whole hair’s going away, their hairs growing in places that didn’t. I mean there’s all kinds of like. Exactly.

Ian Mikutel — 30:50 — Another YouTube exclusive. By the way, people will have no idea if you’re listening on. Audio is going on. Yeah. So anyway, take a nap. That’s key. Takeaway number one.

Darren Austin — 31:00 — What about you March? Did you ever take naps?

March Rogers — 31:03 — I was thinking about it. I think the only time that I’ve ever even slightly consistently taken naps during the day was uh, when my kids were really young and I was on paternity leave. And uh, the general sort of guideline is when you’ve got your young kids and they are, they’re sleeping and all sorts of weird hours and little fragmented pieces of sleep. The rule is if your kid’s asleep, you should be asleep. And so that was, you know, they would take a nap in the middle of the day and I would take a nap in the middle of the day, but I never really a sustained it. I have the same thing that you have in, which is this sort of self consciousness about like sleeping at work seems like a fireable offense to me.

Ian Mikutel — 31:40 — What we should do, we should like take a nap together. Like okay, like more obvious, like what

Darren Austin — 31:46 — I’m going to get a nice fuzzy blanket and you guys next to each other and you cuddle up and I’ll put it. It’ll have some unicorns on it and everything. And then I’ll take a nice picture.

March Rogers — 31:56 — Webcam, you know, the way they do it, like the panda enclosure with this. So you can see them snuggled up and sleeping.

Ian Mikutel — 32:03 — That’s amazing. I’m in. Okay. So thing number two. So here’s the key takeaway. They basically list the five key trends or factors that have happened in recent history that have really pow. They call powerfully changed how much and how well that humans are sleeping.

Ian Mikutel — 32:22 — And it’s, it’s, it’s a good list just to know about because I think even it’s like the first step in being able to be aware of something to take it, to start to address it. Right? So we have talked about these other episodes, but it’s good to see this in a condensed. Um, I would say research list like this. And so the first one was constant electric light, right? So we’ve talked about this in previous episodes. If you think back to the days before we had electricity, it was a lot harder to have light all the time, anytime you know, blinding you in your eyes and keeping you up and messing with your circadian rhythm. So, uh, so that’s, that’s one. The second one was actually I did not think about. And this one was interesting to me, it was regular rely, regularized. That’s a hard one to say, regularized temperature.

Ian Mikutel — 33:08 — Think about this ever. Right? But your natural body temperature drops at night and gets cooler and that’s a signal to your mind to fall asleep. And so when you’re sitting in climate controlled environments where you can have the heat at whatever you’d like all the time and you’re not out side because now we have the ability, uh, yeah, that impacts how you sleep and when you sleep and how well you sleep. And so a little little heads up or tip for future episodes. I just got my chili pat in which will help me regulate this. So now I can regulate temperature and

Darren Austin — 33:38 — We’re going to do better buy on the chilly pad, you know, because I need to know what the story is on the chilly pad that, that thing looks pretty cool.

Ian Mikutel — 33:44 — Maybe that’ll be my napping device. I should just bring that with me in work and just make things super weird and awkward.

Darren Austin — 33:51 — Ratchet up the weird and awkward when

Ian Mikutel — 33:54 — I’m well on my way already. So why not? I’m not going to stop A. Alright. Number three, caffeine. Caffeine. Not a shocker, but, um, I heard an interesting phrase for this, which is essentially this is the only essential essentially drug that we give to our children. Uh, all the time without any thought about at all. It’s a good point.

Darren Austin — 34:14 — You might argue sugar is in there, but yeah, caffeine is a legit drug.

Ian Mikutel — 34:19 — Yeah. And uh, and the, the biggest part about caffeine that they do talk about in the book is that the half life of it is what people don’t really realize. And so the half life is something I want to say like nine or 12 hours. And so, uh, what people don’t realize is you need to do the math backwards to, to like realize how long that’s going to be still in your bloodstream.

Ian Mikutel — 34:39 — Right? And there is a gene that’s a very small percentage of people have that allows some people to have that double shot of espresso after dinner and not be impacted, but that’s literally like one or two percent of the population. So the chances are you do not have that. And honestly the kind of recommendation is um, just to keep it as simple as just don’t have caffeine basically after lunch, if you’re going to bed at normal times. So keep caffeine as a morning thing if you want to enjoy it. You know, have your morning coffee, have your morning tea, but you know, kind of after lunch, just stay away from it and you will sleep much, much better. Uh, number four is alcohol, alcohol, same kind of thing. Uh, it just really, unfortunately the research has shown that, yeah, I can maybe be a night cap in the sense that it can help you fall asleep a little quicker, but it’s going to actually impact your deep sleep and all the quality of your sleep afterwards.

Ian Mikutel — 35:31 — So as March and Darren both hold up there, their alcohol is recording this. And number five on this list, the top five things was alarm clocks, which I thought was very interesting. And so the advent of having everyone having an alarm clock on their phone now a means essentially that you can interrupt in the middle of a sleep cycle and just be, you know, very detrimental to the quality of your sleep. And so anyway, that’s that. I’ve used a, just as a pro tip there thing like sleep cycle, which is a great app on your phone that you can go get. And that will set a little 30 minute window that’s time with your circadian rhythm. And so hopefully you don’t get interrupted in the middle of a cycle. You wake up at a good time but still in a window that you need to wake up and so you can kind of plan your day.

March Rogers — 36:18 — So I still have to check that out. I, I’ve heard you mentioned sleep cycle before and I never downloaded it, but that’s actually makes a lot of sense.

Ian Mikutel — 36:26 — I have legit used it every night. I’ve slept since 2010, so I’m on year eight of data tracking with that. Yeah. It’s pretty cool. So the last one, uh, that was really a key takeaway and surprising was around, uh, the, the kind of impacts on sleep for children and specifically around school a timing. And so I’m basically the recommendation from all the research of what we know is that if you’re starting school before 8:15 in the morning, especially for high schoolers, they basically said that’s like waking up adolescents in the middle of the night. That’s essentially what you’re doing. And more interestingly enough, and this is what really surprised me is I kinda just assumed because I went to school and my, my school actually started at like seven something, I think it was 7:20 a, so I was waking up at 6:45.

Ian Mikutel — 37:14 — That was when my alarm clock always went off. And uh, the thing that was really interesting is that has not always been the case, so they’ve been shifting the school times and I didn’t know this. And, and the, the staff that they call it in the book is that a century ago, a hundred years ago, uh, schools in the US started at 9:00 AM for the most part on average. And so we’ve been slowly moving that back to accommodate the work schedules of adults because they have to drop their children off at school,

Darren Austin — 37:14 — The industrial revolution. Right?

Ian Mikutel — 37:41 — And, uh, what a detriment, just basically to every children’s ability to learn, to sleep, to be healthy, right? As they’re growing pretty. And all these important times in our life, they have all these

Darren Austin — 37:52 — Children haven’t been the priority either. That’s sort of the weird, sad part about it, right?

Ian Mikutel — 37:56 — Yeah, exactly. They were doing it for the wrong reasons. It’s not because we didn’t know where we had different research. Yeah.

March Rogers — 38:02 — The other reason is is that many school districts, they want to reuse the school buses for the high school, the middle school and the elementary school interested in order to not have to have three times as many buses. They offset the schedules, the bus schedules for those three different age groups within the school district and that’s another thing that really distorts the time that you start school at and and actually, I mean the evidence is pretty uncontroversial. That adolescents should be probably 9:00 AM, is probably even early for, for them, that their natural circadian rhythm is going to be that they want to be night owls for that period to those few years of their lives.

Ian Mikutel — 38:41 — Yeah. So anyway, those are my key takeaways. What surprised me the most about this was a couple of things that the, the, the couple of key stats were like the one about the taking the nap in the heart, the heart disease or the associated risks that that really blew me away.

Ian Mikutel — 38:57 — The other one though, and he makes a point to say this in some of the other interviews I’ve watched with him, is that for all the things we do know about sleep, there’s still more that we don’t know than we do and I take that as. And he tries to phrase it this way in the book a little bit. I take that more as an action item to respect sleep. And I talked about this on a recent episode more than to say that, oh gosh, since we don’t know a lot, like who cares? Right? You could take that two ways. You could say like, oh, since we know so little, what’s the point in trying to optimize and the way I look at it as like what we do know so far is a little bit, but that little bit we know is crazy. Like in terms of the impact and

Darren Austin — 39:38 — It should make you more curious, not less.

Ian Mikutel — 39:39 — Exactly. That’s my point. And so for me, what it’s meant is like if I extrapolate out, we know a little but that little is really important and extrapolate that out to like when we figure out more, it’s gonna keep growing. I just say this has to be the most important thing in my life, pretty much. Um, and so that’s why I’ve been obsessed with lately and it’s uh, it surprised me.

March Rogers — 40:00 — Yeah, that’s great. I’ll have to check that one out. That’s, I’m Michael Walker you said, right. Why we sleep?

Ian Mikutel — 40:08 — Matthew Walker. Matthew Walker. Okay. Yep. So, uh, you can get betrr.io/whywesleep. Very easy to remember. Cool. So those are pretty good quality nations. I like it. We got some like health stuff we got like how to think about the world and then we got to like a kind of financial motivational, uh, you know, its greatness.

March Rogers — 40:29 — Great. I’m excited. I haven’t, I haven’t read either of the two books that you guys mentioned. So that’s A.

Darren Austin — 40:34 — I haven’t either and both of yours have been on my radar Factfulness for sure. Uh, since since, uh, Gates recommended it. I was like, that sounds like a book that would make me feel more positive about life instead of, you know, what you see and hear on the news all the time. And then the sleep thing and I remember when that came out late last year and I was intrigued by it because I’m a, I’m a fan of sleep.

Ian Mikutel — 40:56 — It’s the last thing I didn’t mention was the paperback is actually releasing a in just like two or three weeks, so June 19th. And so it’ll drop the price, make it cheaper to buy all that good stuff too. So that’s cool. Yeah. You might go, hey, when.

March Rogers — 41:09 — One thing normally I love listening to books on audio book of. One thing I will say about faithfulness is there’s lots of graphs and illustrations in it. So it’s one of those books that I would recommend getting either like a print copy or a kindle copy, uh, in this particular case.

Darren Austin — 41:24 — Yeah. Good point. Good

Ian Mikutel — 41:26 — They actually do that in the why we sleep as well. There’s a lot of graphs and I in the audio book, it’s funny because they keep trying to try to describe them. Right. Which I think is so interesting how they handle that and audio books where

Darren Austin — 41:36 — That is funny when they try to do that in my book. I don’t think they had invented graphs in 1937. So no worries about that. Go with the audio book or. Yeah.

Ian Mikutel — 41:46 — So for people on the video, uh, that we’re seeing you guys drink some especial tonics or something tonight. I don’t know. Why don’t you give a quick shout out and tell folks what you were drinking tonight?

Darren Austin — 41:58 — Oh my God, we weren’t even expecting to talk about this, but we’re gonna put this on the show notes but a March start us off.

March Rogers — 42:06 — Sure, sure. It was just about finished it. Um, I was drinking a glass of classical from the Gabbiano a winery in northern Italy. Uh, this was their Reserva Chianti and it’s a very fine, if not very expensive wine. I like my, my perfect wine is you can find it in the supermarket or the grocery store somewhere between 15 and $20 a bottle, but like really good. And this, this hits the mark.

Ian Mikutel — 42:34 — Nice. How about you Darren?

Darren Austin — 42:36 — Uh, I’m doing my typical routine, which is I’ve got a nice little glass of Tequila in this case I have a little empty, an empty glass of Tequila and I’m drinking a really obscure brand that not a lot of people know about. It’s called Burrueco, b e r r u e c o. It’s an anejo tequila. An aged Tequila. It’s kind of Nice. It’s actually a bit more like a cognac than it would be a typical Tequila. I like Tequila that you can sip, not shoot. And this was sort of got a lot of banana in the, uh, in the, in the smell and the. Yeah, it’s kind of Nice. A little banana. Little caramel little bananas. How about bananas? Foster? That’s what we’re going to go with a bananas foster tonight.

March Rogers — 43:22 — Ian. How would you, uh, how you quenching your thirst tonight?

Ian Mikutel — 43:25 — I’m doing, I’m following the sleep advice from the book. I’m drinking some delicious h2o that I’m showing right on the video there.

Darren Austin — 43:33 — Is this the sparkling water with the lithium? Are you feeling happier?

Ian Mikutel — 43:37 — It is not. It is highly refined. So I had been doing some water quality testing as I mentioned recently and I am looking into a more advanced version that I’ll talk about in the future with reverse osmosis and doing remineralization and a whole bunch of crazy stuff. So anyway. Uh, okay. So

Darren Austin — 43:56 — We’re going to do an episode, a Better Bite on water. At some point.

Ian Mikutel — 43:59 — Oh, for sure. Yeah, definitely. Um, all right. We should wrap up this episode. So where can people find out more about the show Darren?

Darren Austin — 44:08 — Well, if you’re curious about anything we’re talking about today, or if you’d like to read any of the show notes or even search the transcripts, you can find all of our episodes at BetterShow.io and you can find us on all of the socials. We are at The Better Show and that’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, anywhere you can find this.

Ian Mikutel — 44:27 — And March what is going on recently for show that we want to let people know about it as a, a way that they can get their hands on some free goodies.

March Rogers — 44:35 — So we’re very excited is, you know, over the course of the show that we’ve been running, we occasionally come across products that were super fans of and that we really liked and we use ourselves and we recently put together a better show bundle worth over $500 of like some of the, our favorite products and we have a giveaway going on. And so if you go to betrr.io/giveaway. Then you can also find links to this on our website, on our social networks. Uh, you can go to an entry page and there’s a few different things you can do, like, subscribe to our newsletter, follow us on various social networks and that will enter you into our giveaway. And, uh, the giveaway runs until June twelfth, 2018. And then we will pick one lucky winner to win that bundle of, uh, of awesomeness. So check it out and if it’s, if you’re listening to this after the June 12th, 2018, don’t worry. We’ll be having more giveaways in the future.

Ian Mikutel — 45:29 — I’m showing on the video. This is the Rohm Sleep Sound Machine. It’s part of the package so you can win that guy.

Darren Austin — 45:36 — Cute little sleep machine. Make you go right to bed.

Ian Mikutel — 45:39 — Yeah. All right guys. Well let’s wrap this episode up for The Better Show.

Ian Mikutel — 45:44 — Hi, I’m Ian Mikutel.

Darren Austin — 45:44 — I’m Darren Austin

March Rogers — 45:44 — And I’m March Rogers,

Ian Mikutel — 45:47 — And we’ll see you next episode. Thanks for listening or watching.

Ian Mikutel — 45:56 — Thanks again for listening to the show. Three quick notes before we go. Number one, we really hope what you heard today can help you on your journey to getting better. And if it did, it mean the world to us. If you could head on over to iTunes or wherever you found the show and leave a review. This is one of the best ways to help grow the show and ultimately the community that we’re trying to build together. Number two, for links to anything you heard in today’s episode, just head on over to BetterShow.io. While you’re there, sign up for a better show newsletter where each week we send a summary of the latest tips, tricks, and hacks and cool articles that we’ve come across in our journey to getting better. And finally, number three, join the conversation and let us know how you’re getting better on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Just search that better show. We’d love to hear from you. Thanks again for listening and we’ll see you next episode.

Subscribe to the show: Apple Podcasts| Google Play| Stitcher | Overcast