Enhance Your Sleep Performance with the Organic, Athlete-Approved Essentia Mattress

[00:00:00] Dave: You’re listening to The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is an in-studio episode. I always love getting to do those, here in Austin, Texas. And our guest is Jack Dell’Accio, who is the CEO of Essentia. Essentia has been working on non-toxic organic mattresses for 20 years, and he’s funded a bunch of research on sleep quality and works with many of the professional athletes and with me on improving sleep.

[00:00:33] The reason I wanted to have him on the show today for you is that he’s got data on how to improve REM and deep sleep by between 20 and 60%. So if you’re a long-time listener or you’ve read some of my books, you understand how getting a lot of sleep is probably not good for you. If it’s more than eight hours, your chances of dying are higher than people who get seven hours a night. It’s not the volume. It’s the quality. And Jack has data for us about how to improve the quality, so you get the right quantity for you, but make sure every minute counts. Jack, welcome back to the show. 

[00:01:15] Jack: Thank you, Dave. Great to be back here. 

[00:01:18] Dave: Who’s the most famous athlete you’ve worked with who you can talk about?

[00:01:22] Jack: Geez. I think they really love working with me because they never name drop. I mean, we were really strong in hockey. I don’t know if that’s from my Canadian heritage, but over 30% of the NHL sleeps on our beds, including the known ones, the Crosby’s, and Toews, and so many of the superstars there. We also babble with football and a lot of NBA. Some of those are just oversized beds. Kevin Love is one that’s been a longtime client of ours. And so when we’re making the 8 foot by 81/2 foot beds, those are usually NBA bound.

[00:01:58] Dave: Why do you need eight feet wide? Because the NBA guys have two girlfriends sleeping with them?

[00:02:03] Jack: I’m not sure why the width is four, but I guess– 

[00:02:07] Dave: I get the length. 

[00:02:08] Jack: They need the length, and then maybe their interior decorators need to balance that out into the room.

[00:02:14] Dave: Maybe their arms are so wide, their wingspan. 

[00:02:16] Jack: They do have wingspan, right?

[00:02:18] Dave: Right. That’s hilarious. All right. We do know, also, Consumer Reports named Essentia the top foam mattress for seven years in a row. And if you’re listening, you’re like, Dave, why do you have the CEO of a mattress company on here? Well, it’s because I like to talk to the people who do the real work,  build the stuff that’s high quality. 

[00:02:38] It’s very simple to go on to Amazon, which is basically the world’s biggest flea market at this point. And someone’s going to say, I have a high-quality, organic foam mattress, and it’s going to cost you 600 bucks. And you’re going to think that you’re getting something that’s really good, and you’ll open it and be like, that smells funny.

[00:02:57] And the next day, I feel hangover, and you’re getting formaldehyde endocrine disruptors. You’ve broken your thyroid with flame retardants, and all this nonsense that goes on. But as a normal human being, you can’t tell the difference between the good stuff and the bad stuff. And that’s by design.

[00:03:13] This has driven this horrible cheapening of the world where knockoff brands have the same sticker on the box, but the inside’s not the same. So I want to find the people out there who are doing things that are noteworthy, unusual, who haven’t degraded over time. And Essentia is that company, as far as I can tell, for mattresses. And certainly, that’s what I’m sleeping on. And I’m noticing that’s by far my favorite mattress.

[00:03:41] Jack: We definitely are that company. We just push ourselves. The research, the lab, that’s where I live. That’s what we’re always just trying to make it better and really focused on that time of sleep. You hit the nail on the head on the quality of sleep and we’re able to really just push that forward. Got a lot of pro athletes that can’t get more than five, five and a half hours. 

[00:04:03] Dave: Why is that? 

[00:04:04] Jack: It’s a combination of things. So when they’re on there, and they’re training like crazy–

[00:04:09] Dave: They’re overtrained. 

[00:04:10] Jack: They’re overtrained. They’re hyped up. They’re revved up. And then sometimes there are late games. They need to get some nutritional intake in. They need to load up on calories because they’re burning so much. So everything in their lifestyle is designed for them not to sleep well. But the sleep component is critical for them to keep going.

[00:04:30] Dave: Long-time listeners will have seen me talk about number one thing that’s impacting your sleep quality is the lighting. So it’s bright lights. Number two is food timing. So let’s see. You’re at an arena. You’re playing late at night under the brightest possible lighting, and you’ve burned a ton of calories. 

[00:04:50] Oh, and exercise also ruins sleep quality. So if you’re exercising at 9:00 PM, you’re not going to sleep well. So they’re like, oh, I’ll have a late meal. Let me exercise under bright lights. And then, yeah, five and a half hours, no wonder– oh, and you’re overtrained, so cortisol is high. So they’re like the worst sleep athletes you could possibly have.

[00:05:05] Jack: Exactly. Yes.

[00:05:07] Dave: Okay, so how do you fix them? 

[00:05:09] Jack: Basically, all of our studies have been– and we’ve done this by each of these stimulants individually to see their impact, but the combination of it, we eliminate everything negative that stimulates your central nervous system in their sleep environment. 

[00:05:24] And oddly enough, the item in the sleep environment that has the most negative impact is typically the mattress. That’s the one that’s trapping heat. That’s the one that is expelling all of these VOCs in the room.  It’s the one that nests and harbors proteins from allergens.  So the bed, which is supposed to be there not just for comfort but for sleep, is probably one of the worst items in the bedroom for proper sleep. 

[00:05:52] Dave: I totally agree. I remember back when I still had mold toxins. My liver was really not doing that well. I bought a foam mattress topper, and I put it on the bed, and my partner at the time– this was many years ago– we woke up in the morning. I felt a 100 times worse, which wasn’t very good in the first place. And she woke up, and one of her ribs had dislocated, which is something that happens when you have toxins. 

[00:06:16] When your liver gets jacked, the rib that’s attached neurologically to the liver, that one is most likely where the nerve that goes from liver into the spine. The rib had just popped out to the point it was really painful. I had to take her to urgent care, and they had to give her muscle relaxants and all this. It was caused by the chemicals.

[00:06:34] We were already compromised by mold, and the chemicals pushed us over. And it was terrible. After three days, I threw it in the backyard. Just left it there for a while, and then went to the dump. What happened? What was in that mattress topper that was made out of healthy latex foam? 

[00:06:48] Jack: Basically, most latex out there are not organic latex. So you have a synthetic latex, which will have off-gas chemicals as anything else. So there are a lot of fire barrier laws that are in the US specifically that basically added more cocktails of chemicals into that as well. So what we’ve noticed in our sleep studies is that, specifically with toxins, when it comes to sleep, it keeps you in your wake and early stages a whole lot more than your deep sleep stages. So that constant stimulation is not keeping you in REM or deep sleep.

[00:07:26] Dave: From heat? 

[00:07:27] Jack: From the stimulants. From the VOCs. 

[00:07:29] Dave: Just from the chemicals. 

[00:07:30] Jack: Just from chemicals themselves. And the same thing happens with heat as well. 

[00:07:35] Dave: Okay. What’s going on there with mitochondria is those chemicals lower mitochondrial function. They get a sense, these ancient bacteria, something is wrong, and they don’t necessarily know. They didn’t evolve with VOCs. So they send you an anxiety signal. Something is wrong. And then you toss and turn, and you don’t know what’s going on. You don’t get good rest. 

[00:07:55] And I believe that, I’m pulling this number out of the air, but somewhere around 70% of anxiety that people feel is not emotional. It’s not from an old trauma. It might be different for you if you have a lot of trauma in your life, but it’s actually from your environment. Your body is going, I am starved of minerals. I have too many toxins. I’m not getting enough sleep.

[00:08:15] So the body feels that way, and then you think it’s you, and then you blame your mother-in-law, or your partner, or your boss, or whatever victim cult you’re following at the time, just because there has to be a reason that you’re just so tweaked. And your mattress could be a major part of it.

[00:08:32] Jack: Yeah, it’s interesting. I just heard someone just recently talk about mental health. And they say that stress in combination with anxiety equals torture. It would be an interesting experiment to understand the mental health aspect of putting your body through that anxiety every single night.

[00:08:51] Dave: There’s a guy who’s done that. It’s Daniel Amen from Amen Clinics. He’s a good friend. He’s been on the show. I’m on his board of directors. And yeah, it’s very clear these environmental toxins have a direct and measurable effect on brain metabolism. And it’s horrifying when you think, oh, I just blew $1,000 on a healthy new foam mattress, but yeah, it smells. And then you sleep on it, and something’s not right, and you can’t remember things as well, or your joints hurt. Is there a way to fix that if you have a crappy mattress? 

[00:09:22] Jack: Well, I always say, whatever you can eliminate, the number one thing for me is eliminating the toxins. So you have to go organic. That’s the foundation to it all. One of these things at a time. The next step would be sleeping cool is the second most important thing. Then you focus on allergen. People usually go buy a mattress for managing pain. But for me, that’s the third or fourth on the list. Not number one on the list.

[00:09:47] Dave: Get toxins down, and pain goes away. It’s so weird. 

[00:09:52] Jack: Yeah, just incredible. The thing is I believe most people are not in tune with their bodies. So they just don’t realize what in their environment is causing things. That’s the hard part in what we do, is we’re not there just for pain management and pressure redistribution, which is what most people think a mattress is for, but there’s a lot more going on in those six to eight hours that we try to support someone.

[00:10:15] Dave: Most mattresses, I hate. I would rather sleep on the floor. In fact, a lot of hotels, it’s like, man, the mattress is full of chemicals. The carpet’s full of chemicals. Probably equal amounts, but the mattress is so mushy, my hips and my back hurt. I don’t normally ever have pain when I wake up unless I drank wine the night before or something. So is it a better choice to just get off a crappy mattress and sleep on the floor? 

[00:10:41] Jack: Well, the problem is that the race for all mattress makers is to make something that feels comfortable, specifically when you’re mattress shopping. So they’re looking for that initial cradle, that initial comfort, but they’re doing it by removing density. The easiest way to make a typical cheap mattress is to have a chemical foam on the bottom, which is low density and even lower density surfacing. Whether it be pillow tops.

[00:11:05] And all of those offer you zero support because there’s just no density in it. It’s a complete other way around. You need that cradle, but with extreme high density. Our mattresses, we build them not that we want to just throw a product in there, but they’re triple the weight of an average mattress because you need content in there. And the content needs to be organic so that we’re not adding triple the VOCs in there. 

[00:11:29] Dave: So it’s three times as much material as a normal mattress, and it’s organic. Exactly. So these are not the cheapest mattresses. I’ll be real straightforward. These are world-class mattresses. 

[00:11:41] Jack: Yes, definitely. We’re on a mission to make people sleep really well. When I started this business, we were mainly working with people going through cancer or other terminal or biggest health challenges of their life. That’s who we were focused on. And while those are still part of who we serve, over the years, it became a healthier lifestyle, people who are opting for us. 

[00:12:05] And when I issued the latest patents for increasing the rate of recovery that a person can have by sleeping well, with these specific cores, that’s when those pro athletes came in. Probably around 2012. And that’s my greatest passion. Right now, in the last few years, we’ve done a lot of– you’d think that there was not much more we can do, but with the introduction of quartz into our latex formulation, we’ve been able to unintentionally also drop the body temperature. 

[00:12:33] It’s almost like you’re sleeping on a stone, which doesn’t absorb heat very well. It expels it. So by having this as part of our latex formula, the body heat expels faster than it did before, which was already at a really good rate. And now we’re working on different formulas that also help to be mold resistant. Just by the organic nature of some of the essential oils that we’re using in our formula, we may have an ability to restrict the ability of mold to grow as fast as it normally would.

[00:13:06] Dave: That actually makes me happy. And by the way, guys, myessentia, E-S-S-E-N-T-I-A.com/daveasprey has all the discount codes and savings for you there if you’re wondering about this. I want to talk about quartz and mold, but I believe, and I’ve even seen some studies now that blame moldy mattresses on SIDS for babies, the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, where a lot of people have said, we don’t know what it is, but these mattresses get wet because babies are just water-making machines of every orifice they have.

[00:13:42] Any parent will tell you that. And then you get spores that have very strong toxic effects, and most baby mattresses are full of chemicals and stuff that you should never put near a baby, which is horrifying. So adults, same thing. You have this nice latex mattress. Your air conditioning’s on.

[00:14:00] It gets cool. Then you open the windows, and it’s super hot and humid. And you can actually get condensation on the mattress. And it sounds like what you’re doing is you’re putting essential oils that are anti-fungal into the oils in the foam itself so you couldn’t ever take them out because they’re part of the mattress.

[00:14:17] Jack: Correct. Yes. 

[00:14:18] Dave: Oh, that’s really cool. 

[00:14:18] Jack: Yeah. The essential oils have always been part of our makeup of how we build our beds. It’s just in the formula. It gives it the performance and the response time that we were looking for. It’s unique to us. But also, in playing around with a different essential oils, some that have higher acidity levels, we’ve been mandated to do this study for a contract that we’ve been working on. And so now we’ve been working on this for the last five months, and we’re seeing that based on the different essential oils we’re using, we’re applying mold to it, and we see that it’s not expanding as it would without it. So that’s pretty cool. 

[00:14:58] Dave: Why did you choose to put quartz in a mattress? That’s counterintuitive.

[00:15:02] Jack: So the quartz was just because it’s a material that stores memory. And the reason behind the quartz was specifically for the quantum energy. And what we’ve been able to identify, and we’ve spoken about this before, is, um, through, uh, dark field microscopy and seeing how the blood cells just group together when you’re exposed to the 3G, 4G, all the different wireless technologies that are out there. 

[00:15:30] And what we’ve been able to identify is that when we have our informed quartz on there, it maintains a, um, low level frequency that doesn’t obstruct the blood cells’ performance. So with the quartz, we’re able to protect the blood cells from behaving erratically as would just normal use of a cell phone. And we’ve had other benefits that we’ve discovered, for example, dropping in temperature. Our previous technology, pre-quartz, was seven degrees over an eight-hour time lapse. Now we’re at nine degrees. So it had a substantial benefit in there as well. 

[00:16:09] Dave: If you’re listening to that, and you heard some stuff that sounded like quantum woo, you’re right. And I don’t like it when people use the word woo the way I just did because it’s actually dismissive. It’s like when someone says you have misinformation. Actually, go screw yourself. There’s no such thing. People are either right or wrong, and they’re possibly lying.

[00:16:32] So when you say someone has misinformation, it’s either you’ve been lied to, and you’re stupid to know it, and I’m smart, and you’re not. And when someone says woo, they’re like, that’s not science enough for me. And it’s actually just a bratty, entitled type of mindset. You can say, when you say very low frequencies, what does that mean? 

[00:16:51] And it’s okay for you to say, I don’t know. We don’t know why it works, but if I put quartz in there and I get a two-degree variance and I can see that the red blood cells don’t stick together when I look at them on dark field microscopy, something is happening. And when I don’t put quartz in there, it doesn’t happen. Therefore, the quartz causes it. And maybe it’s because quartz attracts invisible leprechauns. We don’t know. And it’s okay not to know and still get results. 

[00:17:16] Jack: For us, just because we also have institutional customers, it’s really important that we have an evidence-based approach. Therefore, blood work is critical for us. Yeah.

[00:17:25] Dave: It’s a proof point, but the mechanism of action, honestly, we don’t know. What I do know, in fact, before we had the word biohacking, going back at least to the ’80s, uh, we have very clear evidence. This was a textbook by the former president of the Karolinska Medical School. Or maybe it was a dean, not president.

[00:17:47] And as he retired, he published this huge multi-volume tome of saying the body’s electric, not chemical. And he published it after his career was over. He’s like, they’ll cancel me for this. But it was full of incredibly dense information. The body runs on DC, direct current. And there was a war, a science war, between a guy named Royal Reif who believed life was DC and another more famous guy, Tesla, and Edison, who believed that was less important but that alternating current was the way to go.

[00:18:22] So the direct current guy lost, and all life on earth runs on DC, direct current. So we are both chemical, magnetic, light, and electrical beings, and it’s not alternating current. It’s direct current. Given that what reality looks like, even though that’s not the picture most of us have today because we just think we’re chemicals, that provides a lot of scope for mechanism of action for why being on quartz does something. 

[00:18:49] And this is also why all the people who use crystals for various things, they’re not crazy. They’re looking at life from a different lens. And there’s data that you should not be able to do the studies you’re doing unless there was an effect there, because you keep seeing the effect. So let’s talk about why it is, and maybe I’m wrong about that too.

[00:19:07] Bottom line is I’m going to trust the black box model which is, we don’t know why, but we know if we do this, we always get this. And inside it, there’s all these stories about molecules, and atoms, and quarks, and neutrinos, and the center of the universe, all that stuff. Okay. But maybe that’s all wrong and we just think it’s right. It doesn’t matter because if you do this, you get this. How strong of an effect did you have, though, in these studies? 

[00:19:34] Jack: For us, the studies were very obvious. I mean, it was not even–

[00:19:39] Dave: Statistically significant. SP less than 0.01 and all those things.

[00:19:43] Jack: But I think the reason the people are skeptical of this is there’s a lot of people that will just go with, based on what you’ve said or based on what we’ve tested, and they run with it, but they don’t feel that they need to understand it completely. They just go with that. But then, when they tell their surroundings, they don’t know how to explain the supporting document, the supporting arguments. So there’s a lot of people out there that think this is a little odd or that the whole quantum energy is not real. 

[00:20:14] Dave: Tell that to Google. Some of them have a quantum computer that just did 47 years of calculation based on provable scientific quantum effects that are too woo for us to use in our bodies. I don’t know. 

[00:20:27] Jack: But I do think that people have opened up to this so much more, exponentially, over the last few years. And that’s where I was confident to come forward with our technology, where maybe 10 years ago, our athletes were not ready for this, but today they are. 

[00:20:41] Dave: So there’s always been a small group, we’ll call them alchemists, or wizards, or something, who’ve worked with pro athletes on the stuff that no one talks about. One of the guys like that was on the show many years ago. I did a little bit of coaching with him. It was Jeff Spencer. He was the coach wellness guy for a Tour de France team for nine years in a row. And he was out– this is 20 years ago– earthing people. And all the other teams want to know what he was doing. So he’d go out at night and put a little metal rod in the ground, run a wire through the window, like, what are you doing?

[00:21:15] And so it was almost spy level stuff for athletic performance. And I think he’s also a chiropractor if memory serves. So doing all the things that might work to see what does work, and then maybe 20, or 50, or 100 years later, we figure out why they work. That’s the history of all ancestral medicine. Why do we do this? I don’t know. It’s what makes our kids the strongest. Let’s keep doing it, and all that. So you decided on quartz. Is this one crystal, or is this a powder that’s just– I’m curious– 

[00:21:42] Jack: Yeah, it’s really extremely thinly broken down powder, and it’s blended into latex foam.

[00:21:50] Dave: Wow. 

[00:21:50] Jack: So it’s throughout the formula. 

[00:21:52] Dave: Oh, so you’re doing some real interesting stuff there. Wilhelm Reich. Have you heard of this guy? 

[00:21:59] Jack: No. 

[00:21:59] Dave: Reich was one of those early energy guys. There’s a group of people like Royal Reif and, to a certain extent, Tesla, and Wilhelm Reich who were working on, today, we call them esoteric technologies, but not that esoteric, where he figured out that you could charge a capacitor. And guys, if you’re listening and this is getting too nerdy for you, a capacitor is something that stores a large amount of electricity and can dump it all at once. So it’s a source of lots of electricity when you need it. 

[00:22:28] And you can make one of, he called it, orgone energy, but you could make– I think even the Ark of the Covenant was made out of this. And it’s a layer of insulation, like epoxy or wool. It doesn’t really matter, and then a layer of metal, like aluminum foil or whatever lead they would have used back then. And then wool, then lead. And the more layers you have, it picks up such a strong charge from the energy that’s all around us, the ambient charge in the air, that it’ll kill you.

[00:22:54] You can even make one out of a Coca Cola can, if they’re still made out of metal. Who knows? But it’s coat of epoxy, aluminum foil. Epoxy, aluminum foil. And you do 20 of these things. And if you isolate each of the layers, you have a very powerful thing that pulls electricity out of the air.

[00:23:08] Jack: Right there from the air. Amazing. 

[00:23:10] Dave: What you’re doing in the mattress, it’s not metal. It’s quartz. But people have been doping that type of thing with pieces of metal and pieces of quartz together in a matrix. Unlike latex. I wonder if there’s a way to measure that, but I do think you’re doing something that affects us in a way that people can feel. I miss my Essentia mattress when I’m traveling, for sure. 

[00:23:35] Jack: Sorry about that.

[00:23:35] Dave: That’s all right. Part of it’s the support. I hate it when my hips sink into hotel mattresses partly because I’m really dense. My bone density is off the charts, and I’m lean. The other thing is there’s just a calm feeling that comes with it as well. 

[00:23:51] Jack: Everything is designed not to stimulate you. So again, from its supportive cradling nature of the dense material to allowing your body heat to escape to having this controlled frequency, that’s what we’re seeing. That’s where we’ve been able to push those limits and have, in the study, showing that the minimum improvement was 20% increase in REM. So all these things, we’re slowing down your central nervous system and allowing it to stay into those deeper sleep phases longer. And you’re sensing it, but today, with the tracking devices, we’re able to put a number on it.

[00:24:28] Dave: Do you see a change in heart rate variability when people start sleeping on Essentia mattresses? 

[00:24:34] Jack: Yes. Right now, I have to look at the data on the heart rate variability. It has been tested, and we haven’t been looking at that part of it, which is actually really important. But when we worked with our athletes, everything had to be– so the data that they were willing to give us was just the time spent in those– 

[00:24:52] Dave: Oh, yeah, of course. They’re not going to give you HRV because you could actually bet based on games. 

[00:24:56] Jack: Yes, there was limitations to what we were allowed to have. And everything had to be anonymous just because we’ve been trying to get these studies done with athletes for years, and we always get roadblocked any time that there’s too much information shared or contract renegotiations and all that. So the PAs are very involved in tracking.

[00:25:16] Dave: And of course, it’s going to get released under whatever– it’s not protected by law, we’ll put it that way, if you give away your data. So here’s a plan for you guys. It has nothing to do with essential mattresses, but it’s cool. I believe you could probably get heart rate variability from a person using just very good optics. So right now, the camera that’s in your Xbox or something can look at your heartbeat.

[00:25:40] And just by looking at your face, they can see micro capillaries get bigger and get smaller. If that data is rich enough to pull heart rate variability. What you’d end up being able to do is probably look at a professional athlete with a camera like that, figure out their heart rate variability, and then bet on the next game based on the team with the highest heart rate variability as opposed to the one before. And I’ll bet you anything. That team would be sleeping on Essentia mattresses. Or maybe not. But bottom line is that would be a killer quantitative-based biohacking betting strategy, and if you do it, just let me know. I don’t even want to cut.

[00:26:17] All right. You ever think about adding magnets to Essentia mattresses? 

[00:26:22] Jack: I know that that’s been around for a long time. I’ve never looked into any studies to know the benefits of it. To me, anything we’re putting in, we’d have to really know what– 

[00:26:32] Dave: There’s some really good data, as long as the magnets are arranged in the right way. I’ve been doing that for, geez, probably 12 or 13 years.

[00:26:41] Jack: Where are you positioning them right now? Under the Essentia mattress?

[00:26:45] Dave: Yeah, they’re under the mattress. The field from them is so strong that if they were on top of the mattress, they would probably disrupt my biology. Okay. We can chat after the show.

[00:26:55] Jack: Yeah.

[00:26:55] Dave: There’s good enough evidence for that. Bottom line is, if you realize that our bodies are electrical, then all of a sudden, you mean magnets have an effect on electrical currents? Actually, they do.

[00:27:05] Jack: They actually do. The question is tracking, where to position them, what they’re doing, and manage the flow, right?

[00:27:11] Dave: Yeah. It’s funny because if we had– in fact, I’d like to see a study on an Essentia mattress with this. Using physics, magnetic field visualization tools, you can actually measure the field coming off of your heart. It’s one of the strongest effects. It’s probably the strongest magnetic field in the body. And it’s shaped like a donut or a torus, and it’s tipped eight degrees to the left unless your heart is installed wrong. And so we all walk around with this invisible donut that no one can see coming off our heart. Mine’s probably an eclair.

[00:27:40] Jack: I can see a little picture of the eclair. 

[00:27:45] Dave: [Inaudible]. That’s not a donut. What’s wrong with you? Anyway, so we have this coming off of our heart. And things around us, including other people’s fields affect us. So I would like to see what happens to the shape and strength of the torus around someone’s heart when they lay on an Essentia mattress because of, specifically, the quartz that you put in there. My guess is it’s going to enhance the field, and that would be reflected in heart rate variability. 

[00:28:14] We’ll have to do some more exploring because that’s what I live for. You’re in a rich field because we’re spending a third of our life doing that. And people think the bottom of the ocean is the most unexplored part of the earth. Maybe. There’s a lot down there that we don’t know about, that’s for sure. But I would say that the third of our lives when we’re asleep is less explored than the ocean. 

[00:28:36] Jack: That’s right. 

[00:28:38] Dave: And there’s a lot of work we can do there, both on changing sleep as well as understanding what’s going on during that time, because we still don’t really know.

[00:28:46] Jack: Yeah, and it is game-changing. That impacts. Every other effort we do in our lives is based on that foundation that if we do it well, you don’t remember. 

[00:28:55] Dave: Exactly. Or maybe, you remember some dreams or something, but why and how, and–

[00:29:00] Jack: A lot more REM, more vivid dreams.

[00:29:02] Dave: How much REM do you get? 

[00:29:04] Jack: Basically, anywhere from an hour and a half, and then sometimes push towards two hours. 

[00:29:08] Dave: Nice.

[00:29:08] Jack: Same with my deep sleep.

[00:29:10] Dave: Hour and a half to two hours? 

[00:29:11] Jack: Yeah, so that’s– 

[00:29:12] Dave: How much do you sleep every night?

[00:29:14] Jack: Seven hours is my typical–

[00:29:16] Dave: Do you wake up on purpose after that, or is that just how–

[00:29:19] Jack: I wake up on purpose.

[00:29:20] Dave: So you set an alarm. 

[00:29:21] Jack: I set an alarm. Yeah. 

[00:29:22] Dave: Okay. 

[00:29:23] Jack: I actually don’t set an alarm. It’s my wife starting to start with her daily routine that is my alarm. 

[00:29:30] Dave: So you have a built-in alarm in your environment. The marital alarm. I get six and a half hours per night, and people who live the longest actually get that. Mine’s six hours and 32 minutes over the last 15 years of monitoring. Except the last three months. I lost the charger for my Oura ring. I’m like, I always get a good sleep score. I’m just not going to try it. I’ll get a charger when I get around to it. 

[00:29:54] What I could do is that. And it’s 90 minutes of deep, 90 minutes of REM, more or less. Sometimes a little bit less. Sometimes a little bit more. Always predictable based on bright light and food timing. It’s just easy at a certain point. You know how to do it. So we’re pretty similar in that way. And I sometimes will sleep a little bit more if I’m jet-lagged, or stayed up late, or whatever. But yeah. So we’re both doing about that. Call us masters of sleep. If you could change one thing about your sleep personally, what would it be?

[00:30:25] Jack: If I could change one thing about my sleep, it would be my lighting environment. Again, there’s compromise that happens in a marriage, and my lighting needs, what I’d prefer to have in my environment, is not specifically aligned with that what my wife would like.

[00:30:41] Dave: There’s a solution for that. It’s pepper spray. So whenever the lights are too bright, you just mist that stuff around, and eventually, automatically, the lights will get dimmer. Then you won’t have to do anything. 

[00:30:52] Jack: I should, yes.

[00:30:53] Dave: You just can’t be caught being the one spraying the pepper spray.

[00:30:56] Jack: Exactly. Sometimes you get that thing of bringing your work home. Well, my work is sleep. Say, we shouldn’t have this, and we shouldn’t have that, and I could be fully respected as a master at work, but at home, I’m still a second in charge. 

[00:31:10] Dave: Yeah, it’s funny. And there are always compromises like that. With my kids, I’m like, guys, since you were tiny babies, three days old, we’ve only had dim red light in your rooms at night because especially for little kids, if your kids sleep all night, you sleep all night. But now that they’re teenagers, it’s like, look, you have a dimmer switch in your bedroom. Why are the lights on all the way? And it’s 9 o’clock at night. Because it actually really does affect your sleep. But it’s a habit-forming thing.

[00:31:37] Jack: I did find something satisfying just about a week ago, where sometimes I feel that my family’s not listening to what I’m saying. But I walk into my son’s room, and he’s gaming, and he’s wearing TrueDark glasses. All right, he’s listening to me. 

[00:31:51] Dave: Does he really? 

[00:31:51] Jack: Yeah. 

[00:31:52] Dave: That’s awesome. And guys, TrueDark is my glasses company. It’s one of the first circadian optics companies out there. And the glasses work really well for sleep. I know that when we travel– I posted pictures of my son, actually, and my daughter. They’re wearing a baseball hat and the TrueDark glasses for jet lag, and they’re on airplanes. Because that combination of blocking light from above and all that, you’re not going to get your essential mattress when you land, unless you’re flying home. But at least you won’t be jet-lagged. 

[00:32:20] Jack: I talk about it all the time. I prescribe them to people who are struggling with their lighting environment all the time because I know they work. I’ve used them myself. 

[00:32:29] Dave: Yeah. And a combination of a really good mattress and really good lighting is magical. So you would change your lighting environment, which, man, other than wearing glasses, if you can’t dim the lights, what are you going to do? I did something else too for my sleep that’s really important. 

[00:32:46] In July of 2023, the US government, without a lot of press about it, probably because people were talking about some submarine or something that actually didn’t change anyone’s life except for five people and their immediate families. But we banned all incandescent light bulbs, which are the ones that are most similar to sunlight. And any company selling incandescent bulbs is subject to a 450-dollar fine per light bulb sold. Did you know about that? 

[00:33:13] Jack: I didn’t.

[00:33:14] Dave: Yeah, very few people heard about this, but I did. So I bought thousands of incandescent bulbs and stuffed them in a bedroom. And the reason for this is that normal lights, the LED lights that we’re used to today, they only show you about 90, maybe 94% of colors in the world around you versus natural lighting from incandescent or sunlight.  You just took a five to 10% reduction of what’s coming into your brain through your eyes because a government official wanted to make sure that Chinese factories got all the money from light bulbs.

[00:33:45] Jack: Insane. 

[00:33:46] Dave: It doesn’t make any sense to me either. 

[00:33:48] Jack: All the laws are– you just have people using half their brain and really focused on solving one issue and they’re not really concerned about the other issues that they cause. We’ll worry about that in 20 years. 

[00:34:01] Dave: It’s really funny. If I was in the government, I know that the first law I would pass is that if you’re choking on an ice cube, you have to drink boiling water. 

[00:34:10] Jack: It’s one of those things, I don’t know if it’s because you know what it’s like to be an entrepreneur, you need to be well balanced about everything. I think politicians need to be a little more entrepreneurial. Look at the global thing and not just–

[00:34:22] Dave: Politicians are always imbalanced. I’m not picking on any party. I don’t care what party you’re in. Sorry, we have too many laws, period. Let’s talk about laws, and mattresses, and sleep because this is a travesty, what’s happened there. How did we end up with six pounds of endocrine-disrupting anti-fire chemicals in our mattresses? 

[00:34:48] Jack: Basically, lobbyists, specifically after a senator had a child that was in a fire, they looked to eliminate all accelerators. So most mattresses are made out of petroleum-based products.

[00:35:01] Dave: So an accelerator is something that burns quickly in a hot fire.

[00:35:03] Jack: Correct. So from back in those days, then they started putting in legislation where, curtains and carpeting and mattresses need to be able to pass a flammability test. So with a product like ours, because it’s an organic latex, it doesn’t require–we use a Kevlar to pass the laws, but we don’t need much just because there’s more of a melting point and not an accelerant point that happens in organic latex. 

[00:35:30] Dave: If it’s got Kevlar on it, you could say this is actually a bulletproof mattress. 

[00:35:34] Jack: Yeah, it’s not that dense. But ultimately, it’s completely inert. The laws in there mostly require for a lot more, but what we do is we have this Kevlar. And if people want it without it, we also do it without it because anywhere else around the world, we don’t even put the Kevlar. It’s just to pass the US laws.

[00:35:55] Dave: The dirty part of the US thing is that about a 100 years ago, actually, a little bit more than a 100 years ago, we had Rockefeller. Figured out that oil was a monopoly he could get. And he fought really hard to maintain that monopoly. And then he realized that you can build chemicals out of oil.

[00:36:17] So most of the big chemical companies, like Dow Chemical, trace their roots back to Rockefeller, who is the world’s best and strongest monopolist. And his processes are still running today. So the big chemical companies also started the big pharma companies, because you need oil to make chemicals, and you need chemicals to make pharmaceuticals.

[00:36:38] And then he funded the campaign. He funded the AMA. He funded the campaign to destroy electrical medicine and to destroy natural medicines. Anything plant-based couldn’t be made out of oil, therefore it was a competitor, and it had to be crushed. And used all the worst, dirtiest tactics you could do. And those chemical companies still use government legislation as a weapon. So what they did is they said, huh, we make flame retardants. It doesn’t matter that they harm people. It’s irrelevant. In fact, we also own the drug companies. 

[00:37:10] Jack: Low level chronic exposure. 

[00:37:12] Dave: Yeah. In fact, it’s good for our business. And we’re going to cause the government of California, which was easier to manipulate than the federal government back then. Now the feds are easy to be bought. And what they did is they went in, and they said, okay, six pounds of flame retardants are required in case your child smokes in bed. Literally, that was the idea. And once they got that required by California, because so many people live in California, the California standards become de facto standards for the entire country.

[00:37:40] Jack: It’s for the manufacturing hurdle to have two different production lines. Everyone followed the stringent standard and apply it nationally. 

[00:37:48] Dave: Right. And California has done that with a lot of things. And so what happened is the California government was compromised by a chemical company with a 100 years of experience at compromising governments to enforce monopoly powers. And after that, great. We now have a law that says everyone has to buy our chemicals that make people sick, and we get to sell the drugs that treat the illness. It’s amazing. But you bypassed all that with Essentia.

[00:38:13] Jack: Well, one of the interesting things is that it reminds me of early on, 20 years ago, when I was exploring non chemical alternatives to achieve what I wanted to achieve. Every chemist, they all buy into the whole campaign. They kept questioning, why would you want to change something that works so perfectly?

[00:38:30] A synthetic petrochemical foam is consistent. It’s easy. It’s predictable. So it’s all that manufacturing processing ease, the scalability. Everything that’s really important for business but has nothing to do with your health and well-being. Trying to work with chemists on removing chemistry from something, that was an uphill ride the whole time. 

[00:38:51] Dave:  My favorite functional medicine doctors are the ones who got diabetes and then became functional medicine doctors. And my favorite chemists are the ones who got cancer and then became biochemists. And that sounds dark, but that’s the world they’re creating.

[00:39:04] Jack: Listen, I got into this when my father had cancer. There’s always a life-changing moment that makes you not follow the headlines. Listen, we’ve gone through the really tough five years. Why? Because the headlines are everyone’s following and with fear. Now, you have a majority of people forcing what they want you to do.

[00:39:24] Dave: Oh, it wasn’t a majority of people. It was a small, dark cabal of evil people with a plan who used psyops to convince a lot of people to bully other people to do all the same thing. It was disgusting. And if you listen to this show, you should be, by now, becoming unprogrammable. That’s part of Danger Coffee. Because who knows what you might do. You might decide for yourself.

[00:39:48] So I’m hoping that enough listeners, enough other people who’ve never even heard of the show learned their lesson this time. And the next time they try to roll this out, there is absolute resistance at every level from people just saying, no, I’m not going to sleep on a bed with chemicals. I’m not going to lock my children in small closets or whatever other bizarre crap you guys made up. The answer is no. You govern with my consent, and I’ve withdrawn my consent. I do that with flame retardants in my mattress all the time. That’s what I was talking about this whole time if– 

[00:40:17] Jack: Awesome. Yeah. I’m with you.

[00:40:19] Dave: And so are the millions of people who hear this show every month. There’s a very large number of people who are just like, you know what, I’ve had enough of being sick and tired all the time. That’s me in my 20s. I didn’t want to weigh 300 pounds. I didn’t want to wake up feeling like crap.

[00:40:35] And I started taking small steps. And over time, I figured out what works. And that’s why I want to have you here, because who else is going to put Kevlar on a mattress so it meets flame retardant standards that are unnecessary standards anyway. But now it’s free of the chemicals that really do break thyroid function.

[00:40:54] Jack: Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:40:56] Dave: Okay. There’s a recent study that you sent me as I was prepping for this interview with you about a bunch of men in their 20s who only got four hours of sleep per night for a week. They found that the rate of aging had increased to the rate of aging of 60s after one week of four hours a night.

[00:41:14] Now, I have a bit of a confession to make about that. When I started Bulletproof, I was working full time as a vice president of cloud computing at Trend Micro. I really am a computer hacker. And I had two young children, and I had just moved to a new country. So things were a little stressful.

[00:41:38] And I thought, I just don’t have time to be a dad, and to hold down the job that pays for all this stuff, and to start, at the time, it was just a blog. I just wanted to share all this stuff so no one else would go through what I went through. And then it became a company. So I said, I’m going to run an experiment.

[00:41:53] I’m going to eat 4,500 calories a day. I’m going to sleep 4 hours or less per night. I’m going to do this for a month, and I’m going to stop exercising. And I was eating the Bulletproof Diet. And by now, if you guys are unfamiliar with the Bulletproof Diet, go to daveasprey.com/roadmap. And that’s the basics of the book, but people have lost millions of pounds on that diet.

[00:42:16] It’s a precursor to carnivore. It’s a precursor to lectin-free diets. All that’s in the first chapter of that book. So I tested all this crap. And I didn’t have an Essentia mattress either, but at the end of that month, I lost weight. And my goal was to eat so many calories. The math says I should have gained 10 pounds, but I stayed even. But I actually lost a little bit of weight.

[00:42:39] This is impossible. And I ended up going for more than a year on four hours or less of sleep, and I grew abs during that time. It was terrible for me. And I’m absolutely sure I harmed my health, but I started a company that does $100 million a year in revenue. And I held down my job. And I, at least, I think, successfully parented my kids and all of that. 

[00:43:02] So it was enormous biological stress, but that sleep that I got was so important, and I tracked all of it with a headband at the time. So every variable I could tweak was there. And the reason I’m talking about this is that if you accelerate your rate of aging when you don’t get enough sleep, there might be another way of looking at that problem, which is that if you improve the quality of your sleep, you won’t accelerate your rate of aging. And if you only get four hours of sleep a night, which probably isn’t advisable, at least without tech, then maybe you can maintain a normal rate of aging, and your mattress is at the core of that. 

[00:43:41] Jack: And if out of those four, half of it is spent on your REM and deep sleep, well, you’re not quite where you need to be, but you’re not far either.

[00:43:50] Dave: I had nights where 80% of it was REM or deep sleep, even though I was only sleeping four hours. And, yes, those nights I had a small current running between my ears, forcing my brain into those states. It’s a Russian sleep technology designed for their space program. So I did pull out all the stops.

[00:44:07] And I remember if I could hit the right frequency for that night, sometimes I’d sleep just a couple of hours, and I’m like, I feel so refreshed. But it changed per night. It was always a little bit of spinning the wheel, pulling the slot machine arm to try and figure out if I could just get it.

[00:44:22] Uh, so there are things you can do, but honestly, maybe your mattress is where you start.

[00:44:27] Jack: Well, five years ago, I was challenged by a friend of mine to compete in a triathlon, and basically, I’d never done a triathlon before. One of the interesting things is I brought in a couple of trainers, a swim coach, and really went all out, but obviously, had the responsibilities of Essentia and two younger children at the time–

[00:44:48] Dave: And a triathlon.

[00:44:49] Jack: And I tried to train myself within five months. Have some weight loss, build my endurance. So I went all in. I get competitive that way. But I realized three weeks in that I hit a plateau. And in fact, I felt like it was going backwards. I couldn’t lift as much as I was. It was on a decline, and I realized that I was trying to compensate, not to interrupt my family life, not to interrupt my work life. I was doing work before going to bed every time, and I said, I know better. I give lectures on this.

[00:45:22] So I just, again, focused on not interrupting my sleep and to get my seven hours no matter what, and my productivity went back up. I was able to work within a shortened work schedule, not to interfere with my family life as well. And everything just went straight up again. And that’s what I’ve been doing for athletes and did it for myself really for that moment when I realized, for the first time, maybe not training like these pro athletes, but at my own capacity as if I was the most pro athlete of version of myself possible. And recovery was a huge part of being able to do that.

[00:46:02] Dave: Did you lose weight during that time? 

[00:46:03] Jack: I did, yes.

[00:46:05] Dave: Some people find that they lose weight at first and then they basically burn out their adrenals, and then their cortisol levels go up, and then suddenly they’re not losing weight. That happened to me when I was doing the six days a week, 90 minutes a day, when I weighed 300 pounds. I was like, I’ll just work out no matter what.

[00:46:20] And I could not lose the weight after 18 months of that exercise regimen on a low-fat, low-calorie diet, and that’s why I got into biohacking. That was one of the reasons. But the sad truth is that men especially, we will steal from our sleep when it’s time to take care of our families, when it’s time to earn a living.

[00:46:40]  And if we decide we’re going to take care of ourselves with exercise or some other activity, yoga, it doesn’t matter, I have nothing left to give because I want quality time with the kids, quality time with my spouse, and I’ve got my job. So where does it go? It goes from sleep, which is why if you’re going to do that and you think exercise is the path, the more you exercise, the studies show, the more you need extra sleep.

[00:47:02] But you took the sleep time to exercise, and you wonder why you wake up with ED, or your hair starts falling out, or things just aren’t the way they’re supposed to be, and you don’t know why your pants keep getting bigger, or maybe they just feel like they’re getting tighter. So that’s a problem where if you’re going to exercise more, you’re going to start a company on the side, maybe you’re going to start a family, that’s when you get the better mattress.

[00:47:24] That’s when you black out your bedroom. That’s when you stop drinking even the one beer or a glass of wine to relax because it steals from your sleep. And if you focus on recovery as the primary activity that strong men do, then you can show up better in your life for all of the people that you’re serving. 

[00:47:45] Jack: It handles itself. That balance automatically happens, and you thrive, and you’re better at thinking, you’re better at executing, you’re better at performing, all those things that you didn’t want to steal from.

[00:47:57] Dave: It’s exactly right. And it’s different for women. Women will do the same thing that guys do today. Okay, I’m going to go to the gym, so I took it out of my sleep. But, especially if it’s having anything to do with kids, usually women get worse sleep than men. If the babies are young, it’s because they keep wanting to nurse. And because women are primed to wake up to the sound of a baby. So you’re sound sensitive for two years if you have young kids, no matter what you do. 

[00:48:23] Jack: I must have had a maternal instinct because I was up. I think I was up before my wife. 

[00:48:28] Dave: Wow. Did you also have a sympathetic pregnancy?

[00:48:32] Jack: No, I didn’t have it. But for some reason, though, any sound, I was alert when my boys were young.

[00:48:38] Dave: That’s also because men are wired– this is without any conscious thought. This is deep in our biology the same way lions, and tigers, and sloths will do it. We’re wired to protect the family from threats. And the women are also wired to do that. And you see the stereotypical mama bear and the mom picking the car up off their kid or something. 

[00:48:58] But the combative nature of that is there, and it’s meant to be a partnership. But it feels like the sleep problems, having now worked with these tens of thousands of people on their sleep, I’ve looked at so many of these, and it seems like the sleep problems are different for women versus men, and I don’t know the common knowledge.

[00:49:21] In fact, I should put this out there too. sleepwithdave.com is the best URL of my career, and I put all this stuff I know about sleep there. It’s a free thing, are source, and Essentia’s in it because it’s the mattress I use. But when it comes to women and mattresses versus men and mattresses, given you have an Essentia bed, king size, you got half for a woman, half for a man, what differences do you see in mattresses for men versus women?

[00:49:48] Jack: In general, mattresses, the main issue is that women are different. And then hitting a certain age, heat becomes even a bigger issue.

[00:49:56] Dave: You’re talking about perimenopause. 

[00:49:58] Jack: Exactly. So a lot of the solutions out there, people are thinking having cold rooms, having cold technologies. The problem there is that women also don’t like that onset of sleep in the cold. So while they don’t want to have hot flashes, they don’t want to sleep cold either.

[00:50:17] And so one of the things that we’ve been constantly analyzing, the difference between men and women, is that this is where I speak about a dynamic active drop in temperature. So it’s not that you are cooling yourself down, but allowing your body heat to escape. And that’s something that has to happen throughout your sleep.

[00:50:39] And that’s the only time it can be equal for men and women because a woman will expel more heat than a man in certain hormonal peaks of their lives. That’s the equalizer, is that it’s allowing your body heat to expel at its own pace as it needs. And that, we’ve seen it to be an equalizer for men and women.

[00:51:03] So you can’t just set a cold temperature, which is good for all because each body is different. And more active men will need to expel more body heat than less active men as well. That’s where we’ve noticed the similarities, but the pace is completely different between a man and a woman. But the technology that can assist in this is the same technology.

[00:51:27] Dave: So having the quartz in the mattress, which makes it more of a heat sync allows a natural absorption at a specific rate of the heat–

[00:51:35] Jack: Exactly. That’s why we’ve measured it at nine degrees surface temperature over an eight-hour time lapse. And that varies, whether it be a woman or a man, just because we all have a different rate of body heat that– 

[00:51:50] Dave: Do you have people who pair an Essentia mattress with the mattress cooler? 

[00:51:55] Jack: We do. We do have quite a few, especially since a lot of them knew about the mattress cooler even before they knew about Essentia.

[00:52:01] Dave: I’m one of those. I’ve slept on it with and without. 

[00:52:03] Jack: I do have better feedback of people who have the cooling weighted blanket, not to have any barrier between the mattress and themselves. 

[00:52:15] Dave: That’s actually a cool idea. I haven’t done that setup. But being right up against the Essentia with the level of support it gives would be nice. I have a cooling pad underneath it, and I sleep with a weighted blanket on top. And guys, if you’ve been listening to the show for a while, I’ve done an episode on each of those technologies at least once when they were first coming out. 

[00:52:35] You wouldn’t know this unless you’ve really been with me a long time. The first mattress cooler, the ChiliPad, this was the first podcast where that was ever mentioned. So it’s my job to go find the cool stuff first and help it to come into the world. I actually invested in ChiliPad way back in the day. 

[00:52:49] Jack: Oh, really?

[00:52:50] Dave: Yeah. And so what I’m thinking here is that there’s always continuous improvement, but the idea of doing it in a weighted, cooled–

[00:52:59] Jack: And ChiliPad came up with one. They do have a–

[00:53:01] Dave: Do they? 

[00:53:02] Jack: They do have a cooling weighted blanket. 

[00:53:05] Dave: Awesome. I haven’t tried it. I haven’t talked to those guys in a while. It’s one of those things where you could do it, and I see the merit of having it on top. And of course, there’s issues with noise, and water, and condensation. You have to decide what works for you.

[00:53:16] Jack: That’s right. 

[00:53:16] Dave: But last night, for the first time in a long time, I didn’t turn it on because there might’ve been someone else on the other side of the mattress with me. So yeah, I woke up at 3:00 in the morning going, God, I am so hot. But I wasn’t up against the Essentia. I had that layer of–

[00:53:31] Jack: So that layer was trapping any of your body heat.

[00:53:34] Dave: Yeah, it was stopping the escape, but it– okay. So I’m going to switch to, at least if I can find one that I like, a [Inaudible] weighted blanket that goes on top. That’s a really good hack. Thank you. Because I’ve gone through a variety of mattresses I’ve tested, and there’s a few I’ve recommended over the years. 

[00:53:47] And each time I get a mattress they send me, I test it, but my default sleep surface for 17 years until I got the Essentia was, you’re going to laugh at me, a one-inch closed-cell hard neoprene, what a wetsuit’s made out of, on a piece of plywood. By the way, low VOC plywood. What? So this is exceptionally a hard surface, pretty much sleeping on a lawn. 

[00:54:12] Jack: You have a neck roll or something? 

[00:54:14] Dave: Yeah. I have a pillow. And for about two months, because I wanted to do the paleo sleep– it was a long time ago– I went with no pillow because this is how humans always slept. And I managed to train myself, but I just like it better with a pillow, but I managed to sleep like a wild human would, and that was with an earthing mat, by the way, so I was truly wild. And the first six weeks were hell. Everything hurt. And after that, I just woke up one morning, and nothing hurt. Everything was good. And so I’ve wanted that level of firmness. And then I get my Essentia mattress. It’s not nearly as firm as–

[00:54:52] Jack: Were you concerned at first? 

[00:54:54] Dave: Actually, I was. I was thinking, this mattress might be too soft because a lot of them are too soft. And I had another very high-end one that I just always woke up with sore hips because it didn’t work right. I was concerned because it was softer. It was more comfortable than I was used to, even though it became very comfortable. I’d lay down and go, ah. Finally, support. But I think what’s going on with Essentia is there’s a rate at which the foam resists. Does it resist quickly or softly?

[00:55:19] Jack: Yeah.

[00:55:19] Dave: Whatever it is, I get a little bit of support, but– it’s all the good parts of sleeping on a board and none of the bad parts. 

[00:55:26] Jack: And it’s the weirdest thing. I say it fails the fist test. When people go to a mattress and they knock it down with their fist or with their palm, it’ll seem really soft. When you’re horizontal on it, really dense. So it really fully adapts to your body. It has dense support, so you’re– it’s almost the illusion of being soft, but the density is so high that it’s giving full support.

[00:55:54] Dave: Explains why there’s three times more latex in one of those than a normal mattress. And it’s heavier than hell. I got to warn people. It takes two people to move it for either the king or California king, whatever size. 

[00:56:05] Jack: And we’re just doing one right now. 132 by 82 by 12. I wouldn’t want to move that.

[00:56:12] Dave: That’s a three person move, Jack. Plus, they’re floppy and all. 

[00:56:15] Jack: That’s a good 400-pound mattress.

[00:56:17] Dave: You do compress them well when they arrive. So they’re in big tubes. You can move it. Once you open that tube– better open it in your bedroom. 

[00:56:25] Jack: Don’t worry, it doesn’t spring open.

[00:56:27] Dave: Yeah.

[00:56:27] Jack: It’s a slow expansion. 

[00:56:29] Dave: It is a slow expansion, but once it’s open, it’s going to be rough to move. 

[00:56:32] Jack: That’s right. Yeah.

[00:56:34] Dave: And guys, you could say, well, Dave, you’re marketing Essentia. Yeah. I’m telling you what I do, why I do it, introducing you to the guy who spent 20 years in a family business actually, even before that doing it. So you know the why. You know the how. You know how it works. You know the evidence that it works. And then you decide, is it something that is the right thing for you to do? And if it’s not, maybe it goes on your bucket list. 

[00:56:57] Or maybe you’re saying, what was that thing you said about closed-cell neoprene that you did, Dave? That sounds more in line. Yeah, you could afford that in college. It’s cheaper than an IKEA mattress and a hell of a lot better for you. So do what works for you. And my path, when I started on all this stuff, I was in my early 20s. I was really sick, but my career was taking off. I was hiding how sick I was.

[00:57:21] And I think when I started biohacking, I made $40,000 a year, maybe $42,000. And I was just, okay, 20% of my post tax income is going into my biology because I want to be able to keep working. And so I wouldn’t have bought an Essentia mattress back then because I couldn’t afford it too.

[00:57:39] But I did start taking my supplements. I did start monitoring things, and I did my best. And as time went on, I had this list of, wow, there’s some stuff that I want to try. And eventually, I went to the big stuff, which became Upgrade Labs. We’re opening 15 franchises across the US right now, and many more to come.

[00:57:55] Go to ownandupgradelabs.com if you want to open a biohacking center. But the reason that happened is I kept investing some portion of my income into things that made me stronger. And of course, an Essential mattress is on the list, and lots of other tech. But you don’t have to do everything all at once right now. Not at all. 

[00:58:13] So have a list of, I don’t care about that. That’s not my thing. And you just forget those. You have a list of, I’m going to do this now because it’s in budget, and it’s helping me meet my immediate goal. And then you have the medium term things, and I would say your Essentia mattress goes on there if you’re just getting started. 

[00:58:32] And then you have your like big life experiences. I want to go climb Mount Kailash. Actually, you can’t climb it. You can only walk in a circle around it. Or you want to visit the Titanic. Scratch that one. But whatever your big items are, whether they’re health or something else, maybe it’s 40 Years of Zen. For a lot of people, it is. 

[00:58:49] But it could be to go trek 1,200 miles or something. It doesn’t matter. Those are the things you work towards over years. You want to get stem cells. And that’s how I’ve run my life. And in there, if you prioritize your sleep, everything else will happen faster, and that’s why I think this is one of the things that’s worth having a show about.

[00:59:08] Jack: Well, to me, I just want to help people sleep better. When I give a lecture at your conference, I’m not there to sell a product. It just so happens that we put so much care and love into the development of the product, it’s the best suited. But I’m also there to try to teach people, okay, here are the five things that you need to do.

[00:59:30]  We take care of all of them because that’s how we’re obsessed. But at least take away the VOCs. Try to focus on taking away the allergens. Focus on your sleep environment, your routine. So we’re constantly trying to help people not to buy our product. It sells itself. We’re focused on, how am I going to help you improve your sleep? And I’m just happy to do that part of it. 

[00:59:51] Dave: And I wanted to introduce you to all the new listeners on the show because you have that vibe. And thank you for supporting the conference. And by the way, guys, if you go to biohackingconference.com the next conference tickets are on sale. They’re exceptionally discounted because it’s early on. 

[01:00:05] When you buy your ticket now, you let Jack know that he wants to exhibit at the next show, and you help me figure out how big of a hotel. Where do you have the hotel? It’ll be in Dallas. But just how much space do I need. So I give you a big discount when you sign up now. So I’d appreciate it if you did that since you’re going to want to go anyway. You’ll be there, again, teaching people about sleep the way you always do.

[01:00:26] Jack: Absolutely, yeah.

[01:00:27] Dave: And you do it because you care. And every vendor there, they truly believe in what they’re doing. And you go to Amazon, it’s probably a knockoff brand by some white-labeling internet marketer, whatever the heck. And you go there, and you just meet the person, the actual CEO, or PhD scientist, or whatever, who built it. And you see the passion, and the why, and the expertise. You go, oh, this is real. And right now, I have a hard time telling whether something’s real when you look at it online because people have become so good at lying. And the people at the conference aren’t lying, which is cool. 

[01:01:03] Jack: I know that my marketing team, they’ll absorb from my lectures, and put it on our website and our marketing tools. And then they’ll say that within six months, every other mattress maker is trying to pull from some of that verbiage, and they sound the same. 

[01:01:20] Now, the thing is people need to do some digging because the headlines are all identical. So whatever we say at Essentia, you’ll see it at a dozen other companies. But do they have the research? Is it more than just major talking points? Do they actually share science? All of them don’t. That’s the difference.

[01:01:39] Dave: I guarantee you that after this episode, someone will download the transcript from this, which is all at daveasprey.com, and they’ll feed it into ChatGPT. 

[01:01:48] Jack: There you go. Yeah.

[01:01:49] Dave: And say, rewrite this so my knockoff brand, high formaldehyde, whatever nasty mattress, that says it’s latex so that I can create a script. And they’re going to do it. And you know they’re going to do it. And the question is, as consumers, how do you practice discernment to know it’s real?

[01:02:08] The most important thing you can do is, who’s running the company? Not even who founded the company, but who’s in charge right now. If you hired a guy who was responsible for Twinkies to run your mattress company, how long do you think the mattress company would be– 

[01:02:23] Jack: And it’s an interesting thing, the discussion you’re going down, because every once in a while, I think I’m going to– yeah, maybe the industry has changed, and they’re ready for me. And every time I do a tour back in the industry, I run out of it just as quick because they’re still just faking it. 

[01:02:41] Most of the organic brands are not organic. They have just organic-sounding names, organic-sounding features that they want to describe, but because I was disappointed by the industry 20 years ago that they really had no interest in true wellness, and I visited again 10 years ago, and now in the last two years, maybe it’s time because wellness is becoming more really important to so many people.

[01:03:05] So I went, and I visited a few factories and said, oh, maybe I’ll consider because people do want my material for other mattresses, but I won’t do it because they think that they’ll be greenwashing with it. They’ll say that they have Essentia material inside, but the rest of everything is toxic around it. So I, again, approached this two years ago, and, no, they haven’t, changed. They still continue to fake it. 

[01:03:26] Dave: AD BREAK

[01:03:27] There’s an easy way to make money in the world. Find a problem, create a product that doesn’t solve the problem, but say it does, and you’ll make more money that way. That’s right. It’s absolutely provable. I mean, this is the stuff they teach you at Wharton Business School, which is where I got my MBA. And by the way, when I was there, there was no ethics program at Wharton either, which was interesting.

[01:03:47] But it’s sad because, look at the case of diet soda. They tell you it makes you lose weight, but it doesn’t, and it makes you gain weight. So you’ll be a customer for life. It’s also got addictive stuff in it. Now, if you wanted to create a wellness brand that actually made people well, they would buy less of it over time. So you will make less money with a wellness brand that works versus one that claims it works.

[01:04:08] And the case in point here is kale. Kale is garnish until 2014 when the Kale Marketing Association came out. Pizza Hut bought it to put around the salads so the salad would look pretty. That was the use of kale. And it was a starvation food if you really needed it. But then people started eating it. I fell for kale. One of the reasons I really talk about it a lot is I was a raw vegan, a devout raw vegan, and it gave me major health problems. And I’m still dumping the oxalic acid from my system to this day from the time I just drank excessive amounts of kale juice. 

[01:04:39] I warned Joe Rogan about it on his show a couple of times, and all that. But since that time, we know about oxalic acid. We know about thallium, which is an extremely toxic metal, much worse than lead, that accumulates in it. And last week, they just found out that more of the, they call them forever chemicals, but the PFA, some of which are in mattresses, not in Essentia mattresses, but in common ones, they accumulate best in kale as well.

[01:05:03] Jack: Really? Wow. 

[01:05:04] Dave: So it turns out, this is the garbage collector plant. And like, oh, let me just eat the garbage collector plant. 

[01:05:09] Jack: And that was widespread 10 years ago. 

[01:05:12] Dave: Yeah. 

[01:05:12] Jack: Kale was in everything. 

[01:05:13] Dave: Right. And it’s still widespread. So this is the idea of marketing over substance. Yeah. And you’re seeing that in the mattress industry. And I think you’re wise. Yeah, we have Essential foam, but we sprayed it with glyphosate for your safety. Gross. Don’t do that. So I appreciate that you’re staying pure to creating something that’s real and something that works. And also, it’s not the cheapest. And you get what you pay for, and I know that, over time, as you grow and scale, costs always go down.

[01:05:43] Jack: Sure.

[01:05:43] Dave: But it is going to be three times more material than the cheap stuff. So it’s going to cost three times more. Plus, it’s organic, so it’s going to cost four times more. And what would happen if the regulations changed tomorrow and someone in government who didn’t get assassinated for this actually came up and said, we’re going to change the standards for mattresses, so we’re going to remove the chemicals, and you can only sell chemical-free mattresses? Do you think costs will go down in the industry?

[01:06:08] Jack: Well, I’ll tell you. I’m working on a project right now which revolves around my mold formula, which may have me building a super factory in Florida. So the costs may be going down sooner than later.

[01:06:21] Dave: I would love to see that happen, Jack. When that happens, come back on. Long-time listeners know about Moldy Movie. Go to moldymovie.com. It’s a documentary I did on toxic mold, just to help the world know it’s real. You watch that, you cannot say that mold is something to ignore. And I have turned over mattresses and found huge amounts of mold under them. And if you sleep on a moldy mattress, your health will be destroyed until you get rid of the mold and then remediate yourself. It can take years to recover. So if you make a mattress that’s impervious to that, hell, yeah, brother. That’s mother and apple pie.

[01:06:56] Jack: It’s some pretty big stuff that they’ve been developing over the last couple of years. And some exciting things for people’s wellness through sleep. 

[01:07:03] Dave: Am I going to have to upgrade my Essentia to the mold free one? 

[01:07:06] Jack: Maybe.

[01:07:10] Dave: Jack, uh, your website, myessentia.com/daveasprey, that includes all the discounts. I think people can use the code. Is there a code? Yeah. Use code DAVE, and you get another 100 bucks off for using the code DAVE. So myessentia.com/daveasprey. Use code DAVE. And this is what I do at my home, and it works.

[01:07:31] My kids have Essentia mattresses, and I think it matters that much. And I also want to just show some respect if you are at a point where you’re saying, this is ridiculously expensive for a mattress. You now know why. You’re buying three mattresses, and you’re making them all organic. And that’s how this one works.

[01:07:53] If this is out of your budget, it’s okay. It was out of my budget too. And at some point, it’ll be in your budget, but you need to know. If you’re looking at, what are the things in my life that make me stronger or take away my strength, if you drop a couple of thousand dollars on a mattress that takes away your strength, maybe that was a bad investment.

[01:08:14] You just need to know, and then you can decide where and how you invest, what you save up for. And it’s okay if this isn’t the right thing for you, but you must learn how to get good quality sleep. And I will always highlight the very best in the world that I can find, so you know how it works, you know what matters.

[01:08:34] And then from there, there are ways, like I shared earlier, that you’re better off to sleep on the floor, or on buckwheat hull mattresses, which can be relatively affordable. Or even maybe a futon, than you are to spend a bunch of money on a crappy mattress full of crappy chemicals. 

[01:08:51] Save the money. Spend it somewhere else. Or save the money for a couple of years and get an Essentia. But don’t buy a brand new, semi-expensive mattress that smells like a paint factory and ruins your health because it happens to a lot of people, and I don’t want to see you doing that. So that’s why this episode exists. Jack, thanks again. 

[01:09:09] Jack: Thank you.