Pod Insights The Pomp Podcast #1229 Matteo Franceschetti on The Sleep Secret of Elon Musk & Mark Zuckerberg About this episode 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/
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Anthony Pompliano? 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.
0:31 Speaker 01 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.
0:54 Anthony Pompliano? We are going to start with Matteo Franchetti. He's the co-founder and CEO of Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep 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, Eight Sleep, and I sleep on the mattress every single night. Here, let's bring up Matteo and let's learn more about how to optimize your sleep. All right, Matteo, 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?
1:38 Speaker 02 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.
2:16 Anthony Pompliano? 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?
2:45 Speaker 02 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, it's just how great you feel every morning.
3:20 Anthony Pompliano? 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?
3:48 Speaker 02 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? And 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. 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.
4:30 Speaker 02 And the cover does a couple of different things. First, there are sensors embedded in this cover that can track everything about your sleep, your respiration and your heart rate. So cardiovascular system and again, respiration in the future would 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 and 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
5:15 Speaker 02 your sleep quality by up to 27%.
5:19 Anthony Pompliano? 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?
5:42 Speaker 02 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 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 the 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 that the temperature in light sleep, the temperature in deep sleep
6:27 Speaker 02 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 your sleep.
7:02 Anthony Pompliano? 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 e-sleep?
7:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, so in business, we have Elon Musk, we have Mark Zuckerberg, Vinod Khosla, Paul Graham, I 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 10 tennis players, CrossFit champion,
7:56 Speaker 02 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 pod.
8:18 Anthony Pompliano? 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 like 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?
8:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, 100%. 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.
9:14 Anthony Pompliano? 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?
9:42 Speaker 02 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 Eight 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 we're something inefficient that didn't change for the past 2000 years. 2000 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,
10:27 Speaker 02 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 the potential illnesses that are developing in your body. So imagine if in three, four, five years from now, some of our products can scan your body almost like an MRI. It will not be MRI technology, it will be a
11:10 Speaker 02 different technology, but the results will be very similar. So we can detect the development of certain illnesses and potentially even cancer.
11:18 Anthony Pompliano? As you continue down that path, obviously, that is a technology problem. That's something you've got to build a company, you've got to build technology, you've 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? Or their 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?
11:47 Speaker 03 Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.
12:11 Speaker 02 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.
12:56 Speaker 02 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 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 8pm.
13:39 Speaker 02 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.
13:50 Anthony Pompliano? 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? And you've got your routine, but then all of a sudden you start traveling and people are like, I never get a good night of sleep on the road. Or, you know, I have some sort of time zone issue. What do you do travel wise? That's like a sleep protocol that works for you?
14:10 Speaker 02 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 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 two, 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 it becomes instead of being six days, it's just three days. Right?
14:56 Speaker 02 So that is another thing you can do. The other thing is when you land 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, 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.
15:27 Anthony Pompliano? 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 a night's sleep?
15:46 Speaker 02 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, we're talking about thousands and thousands of customers, they report better sleep. So sleep quality, you will sleep better, 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.
16:27 Speaker 02 And if you're wet at night, or you just feel too hot, we're going to fix that problem as well.
16:33 Anthony Pompliano? Where can we send people to find you on the internet? Or find out more about AIGHTH Sleep?
16:37 Speaker 02 Go on AIGHTHsleep.com, AIGHTH like the number. AIGHTHsleep.com. And there you can find our product and 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.
16:53 Anthony Pompliano? Mateo, I learn something, everything, every single time we talk. I always appreciate it. We'll definitely do it again in the future.
16:59 Speaker 02 Thank you.
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