How Dreams & Nightmares Affect Sleep & Why Wearables Suck For Sleep Tracking + The Blue Light Myth w/ Dr. Ian Dunican (SSOF Ep 76)

Dr. Ian Dunican1:09

In 2017 I started up my own business called Mele as Consulting. We have another arm of that business, Sleep for Performance, where we have a podcast, we do seminars and so on. It's kind of like an educational arm. So we have two kind of I suppose arms to the business of Mele as Consulting. One is we work a lot with industry, lots of mining, oil and gas, rail, transportation. We even work on entertainment, aviation. We helped them with the designing of fatigue risk management systems and shifts and roster design and sleep and all these type of things around safety.

And in the other side is we work with athletes as well. So we've worked with a number of different athletes. We've interfaced with Jordan at The Fight Dietitian. We work with the McLaren Formula 1 team. We do all their travel and jet lag planning for McLaren. I've worked one-on-one with Daniel Ricciardo before and a range of athletes.

I think the probably the final part then is in the business, all of us are a bunch of nerds really. We all do different types of research. So I do anything from dream research and nightmares right through to research in athletes to shift work and sleep environment. And yeah, that's really that's where I am today.

So I kind of like I still research. I have an adjunct senior research fellow position, which is a fancy way of saying I don't get paid but I get to do research. So it's like a professor position at the University of Western Australia, which is one of the top universities here in Australia, probably in akin to an Ivy League school in America.

And in conjunction with that, I've got a background in ultramarathon, so I've ran a number of like long distance runs, 100K runs, 100 mile runs. Leadville 100 mile at altitude in Colorado, I've done twice. I swam to Rottnest Island, which is a 20K ocean swim unsupported. I've done that as well. Well, sorry, unsupported by like fins and wetsuits and so on.

And I got a background in combat sports. I have a black belt in jiu-jitsu, although I'm a middle-aged shitty athlete. And I played rugby growing up as well. And yeah, probably have ADHD as well, say you, a bit crazy at the end.

James de Lacey4:33

That's awesome. That's a big, big background of a range of things and a lot of stuff we can dive into too. But obviously you mentioned about the dream research and nightmare research. Obviously you mentioned that before the podcast, that sounds very interesting. So what kind of things you looking at within that? Does any of that relate to performance?

Dr. Ian Dunican4:33

I suppose indirectly it may do. I also host another podcast called, I have my own podcast, Sleep for Performance, but I also have another podcast I do with a co-host in Ireland called Learning to Die, which is a podcast around philosophy, psychology, history, and learning to die.

James de Lacey4:57

Learning to die? Oh yeah, sounds good.

Dr. Ian Dunican4:57

Yeah. We've had some really interesting philosophers on that. It's actually, actually, it's the other way around. It's actually life-affirming. It's about grabbing life by the balls and actually going doing something instead of sitting around being terrified. And it was a number of guests on this podcast actually led me to combine this research in this area.

So we've seen during the pandemic and over the last few years that nightmares are increasing. And with nightmares as well, we see a lot of people having death anxiety. This was probably accelerated by COVID. I was talking about a little bit before. And so there's people like between 18 to 25 who are actually terrified to leave the house, James, because they're afraid they're going to get sick and die.

They're afraid a car is going to hit them, someone's going to rob them. It's this kind of just hide away. Jonathan Haidt spoke about in The Coddling of the American Mind, Jordan Peterson talks about and so on.

And we found a very high prevalence of nightmares and the relationship between death anxiety already in our research. And we've been, we're still collecting this. So if people want to jump on this, it's open to anybody. DreamTeam.study is our website and people can go and participate in that as well.

But I think indirectly it's going to allow people from a performance point of view to start living their lives, is what it's there for. Some people we can maybe use this data to start making some meaningful actions to reduce nightmares. And the other thing from a sleep perspective is we know that one of the easiest indicators of sleep quality is nightmares.

So if I asked you, James, do you dream a lot? And if you said to me yeah, I dream, I dream a lot and it's really good, yeah, I enjoy my dreams, that's a good sign of sleep quality. If you don't dream or you have lots of nightmares, it's a quick way of kind of saying you've got poor sleep quality. So it's kind of a quick kind of indicator of what's happening with your sleep.

James de Lacey6:32

Yeah. So someone who doesn't dream, like I, well, I don't, at least I don't remember any of my dreams. So I'm assuming I don't dream then. Does that mean my sleep quality could be better if I was trying to get to a point where I was dreaming?

Dr. Ian Dunican6:53

Yeah, so you may be dreaming but not remembering them. And for some people, even, we'd have to look at what you're doing. A lot of people jump out of bed straight away in the morning when the alarm goes off and they don't give themselves a chance to kind of what I would call wake up slow and just maybe sit there and contemplate what happened overnight for a couple of moments. And for some people that's just really easy and nice and then people go, oh wow, I'm actually starting to remember my dreams.

But most of us are running 100 miles an hour every day. Jump out of bed, get [expletive] done, go to bed. Like it's just, it's crazy.

James de Lacey7:12

So that's me, right?

Dr. Ian Dunican7:12

Yeah. And I won't lie, I'm in a 10 position at the moment as well. And so this will be, this will be a challenge for people. So I would urge people who don't remember, who can't remember their dreams, is don't jump out of bed. Maybe give yourself an extra five minutes when the alarm goes off and just lie there and just chew the fat for a minute and scratch yourself and look out the window and just let your mind wander for a moment and see if you can start recalling your dreams as well.

And the other thing as well we've seen is people actively going to bed going, "Tonight I'm going to remember my dream in the morning." That kind of affirmation actually helps as well.

James de Lacey7:55

Really? Yeah, okay, interesting, interesting. Yeah, my wife, my wife dreams a lot in her dreams and I know she has pretty poor sleep. So, but she dreams some, I guess, more nightmare stuff.

Dr. Ian Dunican8:20

Well, that can be an indication of the poor sleep quality as well, with the more nightmares. And they could be driven from a number of different factors.

Yeah, and the other I'd say to people as well who are like, "Oh, what does this dream mean and what does that dream mean?" We actually don't know. Like, you will go on to the internet and you'd be like, "I dreamt of I was walking a pig to school with a lead," and like 20 different interpretations. There's no consensus on that from a scientific perspective.

A lot of these websites are just kind of novel things where someone in the psychic world would say that's what it means, but can mean completely different things. So I wouldn't stress out about the content. The content of the dream is inferred, informed by what we have during the day, could be informed from what we have from the past. But then also as well, the other area, which is a bit more sketchy, is that actually might be a prediction of the future.

And we've seen this as well throughout history, is that many dreams have been predictors of the future. So many famous people—what, go into this?

James de Lacey9:02

This is—I love this, man. This is—

Dr. Ian Dunican9:02

Written—but I like this. I've written an essay on my website called "Dreams, Death, and Divinity" if people want to read it. It's about 3,000 words, so you can go over and read that. It's under the blog section on the website.

James de Lacey9:02

But you look at someone like—there was a mathematician, like never his name was, and they made a movie about him called "A Man Who Knew Infinity," which I think Dev Patel is his name, the actor that played him. It's a true story, a guy in the early 1900s from India with no formal education became like one of the world's best mathematicians in Cambridge and got a PhD.

Dr. Ian Dunican9:23

When he was asked where he got all this mathematical knowledge from, he said that God brought it to him at nighttime in a dream. So when he went to sleep, he saw basically a version of the god Vishnu would come to him and give him mathematical formulas. This a man that had no formal education. Where does that come from, right? That's first of all, right? That's one.

The other one is René Descartes, a famous French philosopher who's actually credited with bringing modern science to us today in its form with using data. So before, science was very kind of philosophical-based. We'd sit around and pontificate: "I think when I chew food it releases a vapor and makes me sleep," right? That's what people would sit around and say. It was these kind of things.

But Descartes had a dream. He actually was visited from an angel in the dream. The angel said to him the way of the future is to use quantification of science. That's why today we use numbers. So he started this, but that came from a dream, right? And we're very quick in society to say, "Oh, you know, religion is [expletive] and God is this and it's all just [expletive]," but so many of our—so many of the direction of society has been influenced by dreams and what people have dreamed. And there's just two examples. Yeah, there's many more.

The other interesting one as well is the relation between dreams and people are listening to this: "What is this about? Like, we're supposed to be talking about fighting or combat sports or something else." You know, one that's interesting as well is the relationship in Christopher Kerr's work, "Death Is But a Dream," about the relationship or the link between dreams and dying.

So many people who are about to die start having very vivid dreams. So they basically kind of use a time marker and they reverse back from when they die and they collect all this. So as they're going towards the death process in the palliative care, they maybe have six weeks to live, they start entering into these different studies. And so many people when they're about to die start having more dreams, more vividness of the dreams, and then start having more daytime hallucinations or seeing more visions during the day.

This is people sitting in a room, not affected by medication that's making them hallucinate, but someone that's dying. And basically would be sitting in the room talking to the doctor and go, "My grandfather that died in 1930 is sitting here and he's telling me I'm coming soon and everything's fine." And this is people with no mental illness, right?

And this has been well documented and published in palliative care journals as well, "Death Is But a Dream." And as people get more towards dying, the frequency of those dreams and visions goes up, less nightmares happen, and the more comforting it becomes as well, so people are ready to pass over. This is really interesting.

Also the other thing as well on this subject is William James, the founder of modern psychology, back in the 1800s and early 1900s. Himself and other people, they started up the field of psychology. Psychology was really about psychical research at the start. Many people don't know this. A lot, a big chunk of psychology over 100 years ago was about contacting the dead and the purpose of death and where will we go. So it was very kind of esoteric and spiritual, and over the years it's just been basically hijacked.

So there was a guy that was born in the West Indies of English and Irish background, Barrett I think it was his name. He ended up becoming a professor of physics in Dublin. He wrote a book called "Deathbed Visions," which spanned these accounts from like the late 1800s into 1900s. It was published in 1926, I believe, "Deathbed Visions." And this has numerous accounts in this of people reporting seeing people who've died, then they've died. It's just all this whole thing about deathbed visions and the relationship.

And we see this as well in other cultures. Tibetan culture has this as well in terms of Buddhism and so on. There's a big relationship between deathbed and dreams. So this is another area that's quite interesting as well. And maybe, maybe this dreaming process and this sleep process might be a bridge to another world. Who knows?

James de Lacey13:33

So we got—does this make you believe more in, say, an afterlife or spiritual realm and things like that?

Dr. Ian Dunican13:33

I've come to the conclusion, James, that this isn't it. I think this is—I think, for one of a better word, if I put it in very scientific terms, I think this is all [expletive] here. Yeah. I just—I've been—I also participate in some—I would wax and wane in meditation. I would say I've been on silent meditation retreats.

I have a very—have a soft spot for Eastern philosophy and Buddhism and Taoism. I'm more drawn towards that than the Christianity. But I would say that I think there's something more. Yeah. And I think the relationship with dreams and dying needs to be explored a bit more, and I think there's more to it.

There's also as well lots of—I spoke to a guy actually, his book's called "Realized Lives." He's what's called a tulku. Have you ever heard of a tulku? Tulku was a reincarnation of a Tibetan Buddhist master or spiritual guidance person. And this guy, Eli, was basically a tulku, a reincarnation, but he grew up in America, so he was like a Western version of this reincarnation.

But many of these people, these tulkus, actually have dreams when they're young of past lives, and then they start seeing things and describing things and painting pictures of places in Tibet or Nepal or India where they've never been to at the age of four in places like San Francisco.

This also—this links back to another thing called Indra's Net. Indra's Net comes out of Buddhism and Hinduism, that the world is kind of covered by a net, which is nearly like an invisible internet where our consciousness goes up into. And it's like a collective consciousness. Carl Jung spoke about—

James de Lacey14:56

Like a simulation?

Dr. Ian Dunican14:56

Yeah, well, kind of, maybe like a simulation. Carl Jung spoke about this. Rupert Sheldrake talks about this in morphic resonance theory. Other people speak about this. So maybe we upload stuff and download stuff.

A classic example I always say is like, look at the four-minute mile. Nobody could break it. Nobody could break it. Roger Bannister breaks it. 20 or 30 people break it. Exactly. So how does that happen? Nothing's changed. Like, we haven't adapted physiologically, but how is that consciousness going up and down straight away?

Or a fighter who's unbeaten, he gets beaten once. Next man, he goes, "Oh yeah, I can beat him." Then it's like this weird kind of thing that happens. Or in our own lives we go, "Oh, I could never do this. I could never do that." And then you just do something. Like, I know one guy at the moment, he's probably 51. "I could never go to uni. I could never go to uni. I could never do that." He went to uni, got on like the Dean's List in the first semester. So now he's like, "Boom! I can do anything."

It's just—I don't know. I've got more questions about this than answers, but this is where these are some of the things that are circulating at the moment.

James de Lacey16:07

Oh, I love this. I mean, you know what? It reminds me of the show "Ancient Aliens." I don't know if you've watched "Ancient Aliens."

Dr. Ian Dunican16:07

A few episodes, yeah.

James de Lacey16:07

Yeah, I think, to be watched—

I was going to say this sounds like we smoked a bowl and did a podcast and just turned into—but Ancient Aliens, they talk about the same thing about all the people on there downloading information from the gods and that's how they created and they have all the things on there. But yeah, I love that show. That show is awesome too.

But similar concept. But yeah, we should move this on to some performance stuff. People listening on like, what is going on?

Dr. Ian Dunican16:32

But that's—start with wearables. Wearables and sleep. So all the companies now jumping on this bandwagon. You got Oura Ring. I think Whoop might even track your sleep as well. You've got all sorts of stuff.

But obviously there's potential issues in tracking accuracy, what they actually track, what's actually important for someone to track, and then if you know, is that going to cause any tracking anxiety from the person using it?

James de Lacey16:51

So what's your take on wearables for sleep? Do you have one that you recommend, or do you recommend not using them, and anything else in between?

Dr. Ian Dunican17:13

Okay, so this is very interesting. I'm just typing here at the moment so I get this title right, because unfortunately I'm actually half an idiot. So I'm going to pull up the version of the paper that we just had published, because too much dream information. I went completely off topic there.

So myself and a guy called Matt Driller, Shona Halson, a bunch of us—anyway, a bunch of nerds, right—we actually published a paper and I can give you this afterwards, and it's open access so anybody can read this. It's called "Pajamas, Polysomnography, and Professional Athletes: The Role of Sleep Tracking in Sport"—sleep tracking technology and sport. But before that I have actually validated some of these technologies in the laboratory as well and have them published. But I'll send you this afterwards.

So overall, before we talk about wearables and the validity of them, we have to probably break this into maybe three or four chunks. To measure people's sleep, we've got different methodologies.

We have one: PSG at the top of the ladder, right, the gold standard, top of the Wasa. This is what you might see people put all these wires onto their head and around their body. That's really focused on investigating sleep disorders, of which there's over 70 of those. They can be done in a laboratory, it can be done at home. That's not meant to be done longitudinally, so over time. It's meant to be basically a diagnostic tool overnight.

The second bucket, then down we go, is into the wearables. So what we're talking about, then we go down into more other stuff like nearables, stuff you can put in the room, and then we might go into self-reported diaries and so on.

So coming back onto the wearables, they can be further broken down into more clinical-grade actigraphy devices that a scientist will give you, and then you've got all these wearables: the Fitbits, the Oura Rings, the Garmin, and so on.

In general, for measuring the time you go to bed and the time you get up, the amount of sleep you've had, they're not too bad. They're somewhere between 80 to 95% accurate, which is actually quite good in measuring those things. For sleep stages—REM sleep, non-REM, light sleep—they're all really bad. There's loads of variation in them.

So I would say to you, if you're wearing a wearable, don't look at the sleep stages, just look at the sleep measures. And the second thing is I would say, is look at them over a period of time. Don't wake up in the morning and freak out and go, "Oh, you got 20 hours sleep yesterday, or two hours sleep, or four hours sleep." Don't worry about that.

Look at the average over a week or a two-week or a three-week period, because sleep does fluctuate, just like people on diets. Some days you want to have a pizza and you want to eat a lot of Mars bars, okay? But you're looking for, on average, across maybe a two-week period: I'm getting like 2,500 calories a day, whatever it might be. You're looking for that.

And in terms of recommendations, we don't in the business recommend technologies. But what I would say is that based on the latest research, it would look like, from the latest research that's come up by people like Evan Chinoy, who's done stuff for the military comparing and contrasting these devices, that the Fitbit algorithm would have the best one for accuracy currently is what I would say.

James de Lacey20:09

Interesting.

Dr. Ian Dunican20:09

Yeah, so in terms of for sleep, the Fitbit would have some of the best and the Garmin would have some of the worst in the latest research. But they're constantly playing with the algorithms and constantly changing around with them.

Now we also spoke in this paper about what you just mentioned, James, is people getting stressed out by them. The scientific term is orthosomnia. So people basically getting obsessed with "I wake up in the morning, I only got six hours sleep." Do not stress about that. For some people, the wearable actually makes their sleep worse because they're freaking out about the number.

You cannot action that every single day, right? What you want to do is action it over a period of time. So collect some data for a week or two and then you can action that data. Because what you can see is things like, "Oh look, on Monday night I go to bed at 9:00, on Tuesday I go to bed at 10:00, on Wednesday I go to bed at 8:00, on Thursday night I go to bed at 12:00, on Friday I go to bed at 1:00 in the morning." That variation at time you go to bed is what we called social jet lag, and that's bad because that's going to lead to poor sleep behaviors and practices.

What we're looking for is consistency. And we find a lot with athletes this happens, particularly those that have to work part-time or full-time because they're trying to get trained in the evening as well. So it's very difficult. We see a lot of this kind of social jet lag across the week and then people trying to recover on the weekend as well. But you can use the wearable end devices then to kind of make some changes to your schedule around that.

James de Lacey21:24

What are you looking at, or if someone is tracking their sleep, you obviously mentioned talking about one-, two-, three-week averages. What are you looking at within the stages of sleep, or what should someone look at regarding the stages of sleep in the averages, in terms of what stages they should be and I guess for how long, et cetera? Is that something that someone should even check and track?

Dr. Ian Dunican21:44

I wouldn't even bother. No one, because those devices are really poor at doing it. And so they can be out by 200%. But on average, if we look at what we should do from a clinical perspective, we should be looking at about 25% of our night in REM sleep, which is dreaming sleep at the back end of the night. So that's predominantly where dreaming sleep happens. Dreaming sleep happens in other stages as well, but predominantly it's in the REM stages, at the REM stage, sorry.

Then in the non-REM stages—stage one, two, and three—different things are happening there. So stage one is quite light, stage two is a little bit deeper, and stage three then is deep sleep. A lot of people say REM sleep is deep sleep. It's not. That's like saying Mars bars are lettuce. It's just completely upset, right?

Deep sleep is stage three. This is where growth hormone is released. So this is very important for all the guys out there that are getting on the Joe Rogan podcast and want to do TRT and all this sort of stuff. The first thing you should action is improving your sleep, because testosterone is naturally released overnight if you get enough sleep.

So, you see these guys, "Yeah, well I'm going to be like Jocko and get up at 4:00 in the morning and I'm going to crush today and do all that." All you're doing, man, is crushing your balls, because you're basically not releasing testosterone because you're getting only about four or five hours sleep, and then you're getting on the TRT, and you have yourself in this negative cycle.

So the first thing I'd say to people that want to increase testosterone is look at the amount of sleep that you're getting, because this is the easiest way to do it. It's an endogenous way. It's not an external thing you have to do to increase testosterone naturally.

So you got stages one, two, and three, and then REM sleep. Predominantly the non-REM happens at the first half of the night and the REM happens at the back.

Now many people have probably heard, "Oh, this goes in 90-minute cycles, so I should just get six hours and that's perfect." No, it's not that. That was a study that said on average for thousands of people, it looks like it's happened every 90 minutes. If you've had a bad night's sleep, James, the night before, your cycles might be 60, 45, 90, 120. They're always different. They change night to night, and depending on what happened in the days before, depending on your training and so on.

So this kind of every cycle is 90 minutes is not right. It's inaccurate. If we want to track your sleep cycles correctly, we have to put electrodes on your head. We have to look at EEG in the brain. That is the best way to do it and the only way to do it. The wearables are using heart rate variability to do that as an inference of an inference, right? So it's not accurate. They're getting better, but they're still not accurate.

I would say to people: don't stress about sleep stages. Look—

James de Lacey24:32

I hope you're enjoying the chat so far. Before we get back to that, I just want to let you know that Sweet Science of Fighting is more than just a podcast. We have a full training app with strength conditioning programs for strikers, grapplers, and MMA athletes, so you don't have to think about what you're doing and you're getting access to the latest scientific methods to improve combat sports performance.

We have programs specifically for judo, for jiu-jitsu, for wrestling, MMA, boxing, Muay Thai is coming soon. All these things are going to be in the training app. We also have a private community where some of the coaches that have been on the podcast are in there to help you with any training questions and any performance questions you have, for example Andrew Usher and Casper dvit.

We also have some online courses within the training app. They cover strength conditioning, mental skills, and weight cutting. And finally, we now have Ryan Vos in the community, a second degree jiu-jitsu black bout who is there to break down any of your grappling matches that you want seen to by a second eye. He's currently breaking down videos on a separate Sweet Science of Fighting YouTube channel, and he will break down your video within the community.

So if you have a match or a roll that you just recorded, you can upload that in there and Ryan will break that down for you. So what are you waiting for? Jump down the description, you can check out the Sweet Science of Fighting underground. Otherwise, enjoy the podcast.

Interesting. I just had Nick Littlehales on the podcast a couple weeks ago actually. We were around the I guess the sleep cycle, 90-minute sleep cycle, having 35 90-minute sleep cycles a week, space on that however fits your schedule.

So you mentioned obviously the 90-minute sleep cycle is probably not accurate for most people because it can vary a lot. So instead of I guess planning sleep in cycles, how do you recommend or how much sleep do you recommend someone get, say, a night? Do you still recommend them napping in the day? Are there other rules around that? So as the general 8 hours of sleep, what you okay, that's probably what you should get, or is there a lot of individual variant around that and can someone get away with less and make up for it later? Lots of questions in that one.

Dr. Ian Dunican26:19

Okay, so first, it's a good question because people often fire that at me as a big ball of different arms to it. It's a good question.

So on average, for 95% of the population, people need 7 to 9 hours of sleep per night. For most people, yes, there's individual variances for people and there's also night to night variances for that person. So some nights time might get 7 1/2, 6, 5, 8, 9, and so on. We have a life, we have to get up early, we have to work, we have sleep problems, we wake up a few times, whatever might be. Completely normal. So it's not, it's completely normal.

Less than 1% of the population can get by – sorry, let me rephrase this – less than 1% of the population can sleep less than 6 hours per night and perform well. People can get by on less than 6, but they're getting by. They're just basically existent. And we've seen these people at work, we've seen these people in the gym, we've seen these people in our lives. We've seen people 35 that look like they're 70 because they're just absolutely [expletive]. Let's be honest, they're just [expletive].

They got two or three kids, they're trying to train, they're trying to do work, they're trying to do an MBA. They're just [expletive]. They just look [expletive] the whole time. So we've seen these people. They're existing and they'll rub their eyes and say, I can get by on 5 hours sleep, what's wrong with you? But we know less than 1% can get by in 6 hours and perform well.

Many people will just be on exhaust fumes, and we see this time and time again when we give people sleep opportunities and they increase sleep, how better they feel, and then the impact on their overall health and fitness and particularly on their diet, nutrition. So I don't know if you've ever spoken about the impact or had any talk about the impact of leptin and ghrelin and appetite regulation.

James de Lacey27:53

No, I haven't. This is quite interesting.

Dr. Ian Dunican28:22

So particularly here in Australia, but also in the Western world, we're seeing obviously an increase in what we call counterweights. People are getting fatter, particularly men. They're developing a counterweight around their gut and they're arching forward. This then leads to obstructive sleep apnea, which is a sleep disorder. So we're just getting fatter and sicker, more metabolic conditions and so on.

And coming back on some of my other work, if you look at the value of dying, a report by the Lancet Commission, the journal the Lancet that put together a group, a 50-page report showed that actually the life expectancy has gone going backwards. We're actually dying younger. Yeah, there's a few outliers older, but we're actually not living as long as what we did, and that's linked back to diet, nutrition, mental health, and so on, many of these lifestyle factors.

So if we can look at diet, nutrition, or for athletes or people trying to cut weight or all these type of things, we need to look at sleep. Because if you don't sleep enough, we have this interaction between two hormones, ghrelin and leptin. Ghrelin, think about the G, to grow hunger. If you're sleeping less than 7 hours or 6 hours, those people doing night shift, you will have an increase in ghrelin.

This is why when you're working on a night shift at 2 and 3 in the morning, you're not craving a salad or nuts or a muesli bar. You're craving something from the happy clown, Ronald McDonald. You want burgers, fries, and shitty food. This is because of ghrelin.

Now if you sleep 8 hours or more a night, or the more you sleep, then you will have an increase in leptin and this lessens your hunger. So think about the G, the ghrelin, to grow the hunger, and L will be leptin to lessen the hunger. And this, these studies have been repeated numerous times in different environments. And so if people want to look at their body composition, they need to be looking at their sleep as well.

I think overall, James, in this podcast I'm probably going to tell you it's a bit like BMI. There's only one positive correlation with high BMI that I've seen, but high BMI and low sleep, there's generally no positive benefit from it. So everything here is I'm going to spin it in terms of a positive benefit, because we know the negative outcome of lack of sleep. But if we can increase it back up in that 7 to 9 hours, it's cheap and easy wins.

I'm not selling anything here. So a lot of people like, oh, buy this bed, buy this mattress, buy this, buy this wearable. My message is routine and focus. It's like Jocko says, and I will agree with Jocko on this: discipline equals freedom. Routine is boring, but [expletive] me, it's effective. That's going to make hopefully a great clip from this. Come back to haunt me someday.

James de Lacey31:03

So you obviously mentioned, okay, someone does sleep I don't know less than 6 hours, maybe it happens a couple nights in a row. Can you make up that sleep by napping in the day or trying to sleep longer maybe the next night, etc.?

Dr. Ian Dunican31:03

Yeah, sorry, you asked that. I didn't really answer that well. There's probably three different ways you can sleep. Monophasic, you have an 8-hour block. Biphasic, you maybe sleep 6 hours overnight and you have a nap in the afternoon, like they do in Latin America or in Spain, like the siesta culture. Then you have polyphasic. Babies, young kids have lots of sleeps across the day. People say Churchill did this during the war, Einstein did this as well.

It doesn't really matter once they all add up to 7 to 9 hours. It's completely fine. For some people their schedule allows that, but if you're working in a factory, you're not going to say to your boss, oh, I have to go out for my 40-minute nap because a sleep scientist told me on James de Lacey and Ian told me on the podcast I got to sleep for 40 minutes. He's going to be, get back to work.

But if you're a professional and you're training in the morning, do an AM session, and you want a break and you're going back in the evening, well then yeah, having a nap is going to be beneficial. But what I would say, James, is what I see in a lot of athletes is they kind of succumb to the [expletive] of YouTube. Get up early, rise and grind. Particularly if you're a combat sports fighter or rugby player and you fight or play at nighttime, why are you getting up at 5 or 6 o'clock in the morning?

Sleep in. You need to sleep in and get that sleep. I've seen many people, particularly in combat sports around us, particularly strikers, get up and run. I had one guy, say to me, I said to my boxer, I said, why do you get up and run at 6 in the morning? Because I want to get my road work in. But why wouldn't you sleep, I said, and then maybe do your run before your boxing session, like Valentina Shevchenko actually does a mono session in one day?

She does a big extended training session for 2 1/2 to 3 hours. That's how she trains, instead of doing two a day. Why wouldn't you do something like that? No, no, I want to come and get my road work.

In because, you know, when other people are sleeping I'm working. Okay, why? Why, why, why do you do that? I said to him. And this is why he said to me: "Well, that's what they did on Rocky."

I'm like, Rocky's a [expletive] movie. It's not real life. And it's interesting, Rocky's fictional. But it's interesting how people are influenced by that, as if that's, you know, in the Rocky scene when you know 4:00 in the morning starts cracking eggs and drinking them.

James de Lacey33:13

Those training montages man, they're [expletive] good. I love them. I do love them. I have to say one of my, I have a lot of Rocky music on my playlist when I run and it does make it, it does fire me up. Or when I watch a movie, I'm like, "Yeah, let's go." But I'm not using that as my Sport Science or sleep science input.

Dr. Ian Dunican33:36

I don't present that in a conference and now let's look at what Rocky did a case study. Maybe we'll write it up as a journal article as a case study. I'm trying to get published. I probably would get published too. Definitely give that a go.

James de Lacey33:36

But you also mentioned about the social jet lag, and I know a lot of, I've had questions about this before, and I've even experienced it myself. When I was living in Europe and I had to train late, like 8:00 p.m. session, finish 9:30, 10-ish, or you know any night session, then after you've been training jiu-jitsu or whatever, you're awake. You get home, you eat, and you're just Wide Awake. It's 10:30, 11, you're like, "[expletive], I got to get up early." I just can't get to sleep. What are some things someone can do in that situation?

Dr. Ian Dunican34:00

So you could, what we call a prophylactic nap. You could have a nap in the afternoon if you could, or when you come back from work. That would be helpful as well. You could sleep in the next morning if your schedule will allow it.

The other thing you can do is actually just look at redesigning your week in terms of training. So for me, I very rarely now train after 7 p.m. because I know it's going to impact my sleep so much. So I'll try and go at half four to one of those earlier sessions. I'd rather get up early and get my workout away.

I also back-end load my week. I'll train generally on a Friday and a Sunday to get my jiu-jitsu in there. During the week then I'll do running and weights and swimming, so I can work around with it. Obviously I'm a professional athlete or a semi-professional athlete. I'm a recreational middle-aged man on my way to 92.

So, you know, I'm not going to be worried about those sorts of things. For me it's more about having a laugh with the lads at the gym. But definitely you're going to have to look at those things.

Now, if people have incurred sleep loss during the week, which is come back to your initial question which I keep seeming to be skirting around, you should look to increase or recover that sleep as soon as possible on the weekend. Obviously it's not ideal. Scheduling, as I said, is best, having a routine and similarity across the week.

But if you can't, have a sleep in on a Saturday morning or a Sunday morning, whatever your day off is. Allow yourself that time to rest and recover. So don't deprive yourself of that where you're saying, "Oh, on Saturday morning I should be getting up to mow the lawn and do all this." Sleep in for a few extra hours. It will do you good and you will feel better.

But more for the professional athletes, if you're training in the evening like that, try to look at changing your schedule where you actually go to bed a bit later and get up later as well. Now that may be hard if you have what's called a lark chronotype, where you get up early and go to bed early. So you're kind of shifting your chronotype more into that what we call owl chronotype—going to bed later and getting up later.

And to do that, you might want to look at some other novel things around your sleep environment: blackout blinds, blackout curtains, even aluminum foil on the window would block out light if you put a bit of water on it and stick it to the window. Your house will look like, keep those government rays out. Keep those chemtrails out. But your house may look like a [expletive] crack den, but it will keep the light out.

Don't be worried if the cops come knocking. But it will look like a crack den, but it'll keep the lights out. Using eye masks, earplugs, all these things to try and increase your sleep the next morning will help as well. That's more for the professional athlete that has the ability to kind of change their environment and their schedule.

James de Lacey36:16

I don't think my wife would want me to tinfoil up the windows in the house. That won't go down.

You mentioned routines as well, having a good go to bed around the same time. So would you try to set someone's schedule, have someone set the schedule? Would they try to go to bed at the same time, wake up the same time all the time, and then if there's variance every now and then, that's okay?

Dr. Ian Dunican36:38

Yeah, ideally it would, and we look at that. We look at those in terms of what we call time onset variance, and that's a measure as well. So the more variance we see, the more challenge that people have with sleep quantity and quality as well.

So yeah, look, I often say it to people, James, right? Do you have kids, James? Do you have young kids or anything?

James de Lacey36:58

No, I have a six-month-old daughter now.

Dr. Ian Dunican36:58

Six-month-old daughter, right. So you're going to come into this probably, this zone now, where when she gets a little bit older, you know, at three, four, five, six, and seven, you want to have a sleep schedule. And so many of us may remember when we were young that we had a bit of a routine before bed.

You would have dinner, maybe watch a bit of TV or a cartoon or whatever it might be, and then you would go to bed. So your parents might bathe you, shower you, whatever. In my case, they used to beat me, but that's okay. Whatever. I loved it. It was the best time of my life.

And so you would have this routine before sleep. Then you might get into bed, the lights are turned down, you read a story, relax, go to bed. "I love you, nighttime, bye," and then everything. And you would have that routine for kids.

But as adults we don't do that. We come home from work, we get kids ready, we get dinner, blah blah blah, whatever it might be. We pull out a laptop after dinner, we start trying to type to catch up on some emails.

We generally have a glass of wine or a beer because we think we deserved it. We have the phone going, looking at Instagram. We have Netflix on in the background, so we're getting blasted by just constant interaction and stuff as well. And so this is really bad for us.

And many people blame electronic devices, but electronic devices, the literature on that and how it impacts sleep, is actually divided. So when people say, "Oh, electronic devices do this to your sleep," whoa, whoa. Hold on. There's many papers out there that actually show the opposite. So there's a bit of a narrative.

A bit of a narrative going on in the media around this. So this is a problem, and a few scientists as well have gone on this crusade. I think it's absolutely [expletive], based upon the evidence, not upon my opinion. It's a [expletive] statement to make based upon the evidence.

And I think what we need to do is take a step back and look at what's happening. Because if you go to bed, James, and you're on your phone looking at a cat jumping up and down on YouTube and you're giggling away and then you fall asleep, that may be fine for you. But if I'm on my phone texting my boss, trying to look at data on an Excel sheet, that's a completely different thing.

You're not having any impact to your stress, there's no impact to your cortisol. My stress has gone through the roof, I'm getting pissed off. And as cortisol goes up, we can't basically secrete melatonin, which is related to sleep. So that's going to impact my sleep.

The other thing is, people say, "Oh, electronic devices impact your time to fall asleep." Yeah, but what if you fall asleep, James, in a half an hour from watching YouTube, but it takes me five minutes because I'm a champion of falling asleep? But what about if I only sleep six hours and you sleep eight hours? Who's actually slept more? You have, but it took you longer to fall asleep.

So we're not looking at this entirely. We're just looking at little isolated things and we're creating scaremongering tactics around this. And the media's got a big part to play in this as well.

So I would say to people, you know, these two things, the things on electronic devices is completely divided. But coming back to routine, think about how you would put a kid to bed. That's what we need to do for us as adults. We want routine.

Because when the routine goes out for kids, they start getting grumpy and irritable, and then they need a nap during the day because they can't regulate it. But as adults, we can sort of override and push through and grind through it. Particularly when money comes into play, we know we need to make that money, we need to do these other things. And we tend to overload ourselves.

James de Lacey40:20

I also think this is part of society. We're becoming crazier and crazier for work. Both parents are working, there's too much on, we're just constantly fried, I think.

Yeah, it's funny you mentioned about the screens as well. I mean, even on a Saturday night trying to watch the UFC, I'll fall asleep on the couch with the screen blasting light at me in a dark room. Doesn't make a difference, I'm just like can't even keep my eyes open.

Dr. Ian Dunican40:45

That's a great example now, James, of cumulative sleep debt. That's the fact that across the week you're tired and you're just crashing. That's a classic sign of that, that people do that. So people that fall asleep in cinemas, fall asleep maybe at a traffic light, sitting down watching TV, this is what we call excessive daytime sleepiness or excessive sleepiness.

James de Lacey40:45

Oh damn. So I've been called out.

Dr. Ian Dunican40:45

Yeah, this is, and many, look, many people, many people experience this, many people experience it. It's not uncommon.

James de Lacey41:11

And so this would be a problem? Well, doesn't matter what the time is. I'm talking like 10:30, 11 p.m., past my normal bedtime, so it's like I'm already getting tired. This isn't like 8:00 p.m. Does that make a difference?

Dr. Ian Dunican41:11

Yeah, but it might be still because sometimes if you've got good sleep routine and then you come to a period where you have to stay up, this would be like, so if you had good sleep routine and you had to stay up a little bit later, you should be able to overwrite that. But the fact that you're falling straight asleep will be a problem as well. But it's also a good sign because you're in a routine. So it's counterproductive to that.

So then you do get out of routine, you can see the impact it's having on your sleep as well. What I would say to combat that, James, is move here to Australia because UFC is on at 11 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

James de Lacey41:50

It's crazy. I know. I remember when I was obviously, I grew up in New Zealand, and New Zealand just start UFC at 12:00 p.m., or 1:00 p.m. on a Sunday. It'd go through to about 5:00 p.m. and I was like, that was so good. Didn't have to worry about cards that were extended and it's like midnight. Like, what the [expletive], who fights at midnight anyway?

Dr. Ian Dunican42:03

Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. I don't know how people do it. And you're right, it's a great point. Like, that's what I'd say for people, like aspiring athletes, especially if you have the time, is getting up early in the morning, because most these cards are at nighttime between like 7:00, 8:00 p.m. up until midnight or 1:00 a.m. So there's no point in getting up early in the morning. You're just completely desynchronizing your body for this.

James de Lacey42:23

Yeah, yeah, for sure. What's your take on melatonin? I know big science podcasts like Huberman and stuff, I'm pretty sure I think he's poo-pooed melatonin. What's your take on using it and are there any use cases for it?

Dr. Ian Dunican42:23

So there's two different types of melatonin. You get over-the-counter stuff. Well, it depends where you are. Over-the-counter in Australia generally is like a herbal supplement, so we don't know exactly the milligrams that's in it. In America you can get it over the counter in 3, 5, and 10. I think it's same in Canada. If we want to get those doses like that here in Australia, we'd have to get a prescription, depends on the issue with the person.

The latest research that we've looked at, reviews have shown that overall, on balance, melatonin makes no difference. That's what the latest review in the literature has shown. So overall it makes no difference. And then for some people who may have other issues like ADHD, circadian rhythm disorders, taking it for jet lag, you may be making it worse depending on the direction of travel, the time of day when you're taking it, and so on.

And so we published a paper on this in a travel consensus review recently for athletes. Very little research, very little efficacy on melatonin and athletes and the benefit for it. I would say if you're taking it, it's a hypnotic, it's not a sleeping tablet. It'll make you a bit sleepy. It's short-acting, it'll help you kind of fall asleep.

If you're taking it and you like it and you think it's working, do it. But I'd also say to them as well, maybe miss out for a night and see if the same thing is happening as well. So I think sometimes for people it's a placebo effect. It's just like a routine thing and I think it's helping them actually fall asleep. But on the balance, the research would say melatonin really is not beneficial.

James de Lacey44:02

I've heard, I don't know if you've come across, I can't remember where I heard this, on another podcast with some scientist, about high-dose melatonin as you age. Like high-dose, like I'm talking like 100 plus. I think it was 100 plus milligrams. Usually taking like 1 to 5. And I was like, holy [expletive], is that even possible? And I think I don't know if they used it for sleep or if they used it for something else. I think it was like high-dose, but it wasn't for sleep. It was, I can't remember what it was. I don't know if you've come across anything like that.

Dr. Ian Dunican44:29

No, I haven't seen that yet. I'm scratching, I'm clutching at straws here with that one. That I just can't remember what it was, something to do with. I'm not sure.

And the thing I'd say as well, James, is like there is a lot of health podcasts around, and I think I applaud people for promoting these issues around health and sleep and so on. But there's many people trying to make a buck off the back of sleep who have never researched sleep, never published a paper, never had any experience in their education. So there is a lot of [expletive] out there as well.

James de Lacey44:49

As well, I saw a clip the other day of a guy that says he gets ahead because he doesn't have one day in a day, he has four days in a day. And that he splits his day up into four sections, and that means he has four days, so he gets four more, four extra things done in a day than everyone's one day. And I was like, what's this guy on?

Dr. Ian Dunican45:10

Yeah, but also as well, I said to people, it's like that some schedule came out there a while ago, Mark Wahlberg. Up at 5:00 a.m., train 6:00 a.m., prayer 7:00 a.m., time with family, prayer, gym, prayer, breakfast, prayer. Like, all this, at bed at 7:00 p.m., prayers. Then he was on, he was at a UFC event at 10 o'clock at night in Las Vegas. I'm like, well, he's a [expletive] liar then, because he should have been in bed three hours ago and praying, right?

So what I say to people is like, don't believe half of this [expletive] that you read or these videos. People are doing it for clicks. The amount of people that come to me and go, "But this guy does this," and "This guy because does that and says this." I'm like, have you spent a day or a week with him?

It's like when people do those Men's Health photo shoots. "Oh, that guy's got an eight-pack." He probably had it for about two hours. Those guys use water-cutting strategies and photo and Photoshop. Those guys use water-cutting strategies to get to that, they're dehydrated. They do the same thing Fighters do. I know one guy that was on the cover, Men's Health or one of those things here in Australia, I think he walks around at 76 or 80 kilos, and he cut to 66 for the photo shoot for about 20 minutes, right?

So it's like, come on, guys, stop believing this [expletive]. It's weird. People are just, I think people are a little bit gullible with this stuff as well. So I'd urge people, with all the sort of health stuff that you're seeing, question it by all means, and the validity of it. Is it really true? And then who's giving you the message as well? Are they trying to sell you something?

When people are selling you something on a podcast, I'd be very wary as well. That's why we have no affinity with any product. My podcast gets the sponsor from Lumen, but we don't sell any products related to sleep because I don't want to be accused of pushing a product on the back of what we're saying. So exercise caution, my friends, with that.

James de Lacey46:58

Nice. And regarding another question around sleep, about sleep banking. I've heard this before about potentially, if you know you're going to have maybe a night with less sleep, that you can bank your sleep leading up to it. So sleeping more the nights before and sleeping in the day and things like that. Is that something you, is there something you can do, and how do you go about it if it is?

Dr. Ian Dunican47:21

Yeah, I think many people do this already. This becomes a big debate in the sleep science world as well at conferences and so on. Sleep banking or sleep optimization? I use the word sleep optimization. Some of the research I've done in Super Rugby has shown this as well.

If you know you're going into a day or a night of poor sleep, less sleep, you're going to travel, you got a game at night, you got a fight, whatever it might be, people generally should focus on optimizing sleep in the days before. We use it for shift work strategy as well. I've used it before ultramarathons as well, trying to get extra sleep leading into it.

So definitely sleep optimization or sleep banking, if you want to call it that, will definitely help people override those deleterious effects of sleep loss in that short term. So yeah, it's obviously not recommended.

The whole time, but it's definitely a good strategy to do leading into it.

James de Lacey48:05

Yeah, is there a general protocol or something you advise of someone how to do it? Is it just sleeping as much as you can, or is it maybe sleeping a few hours more than what you normally sleep?

Dr. Ian Dunican48:05

I would say to people maybe just extend it by an hour each day, and that'd be good for the 5 to 6 days beforehand. If it's a really short term, let's say you find out on a Thursday you have to go on a Saturday night somewhere, then you might want to sleep as long as you can on the Friday. Just give yourself car plans to kind of sleep in like maybe 10 or 11 o'clock next morning if you could.

But many of us generally get up—it's very hard for humans to oversleep, very difficult. The small proportion of people where they have hypersomnia where they're sleeping excessively, or people with depression—but it's also a bit of a misnomer. People say, "Oh, people with depression sleep more." They probably don't sleep more, but they spend more time in bed.

James de Lacey48:51

Hey guys, it's me again. I just want to let you know that I also have Sweet Science of Fighting rash guards and shorts, so you can represent Sweet Science of Fighting on the mats and within competition.

We have the classic—just like the shirt I'm wearing—rash guard, Sweet Science of Fighting on the front, and we have the logos on the sleeves and Exmarsh on the back. We also have that in a short variation, same thing with the Sweet Science of Fighting writing on one leg and we have the logo on the other.

But my personal favorite—this is my personal favorite far—we have this in black and white, and it is the Taney Fahr Protector Guardian version of the Sweet Science of Fighting with the logo on the back. This was designed by a Maori designer back in New Zealand, so a bit of my heritage on this jersey. It represents the acknowledgement of battle and war. It also represents strength and stability, and also has the New Zealand silver fern.

But even if you're not a Kiwi, cop this—this is an awesome design. It is a custom-made design. You will not find it anywhere else. So check that out. That'll also be down in the description with a discount code. But back to the podcast.

And then around sleep strategy—so when weight cutting, we talked about obviously the ghrelin-leptin, okay? When you sleep less, you become more hungry, etc. But I guess around the weight cut, some fighters might be hungry around these times. Do you have any strategies to help maybe improve sleep? Because obviously the hunger can kind of kill going to bed hungry—isn't very nice. So are there any strategies that you have there?

I mean, we've talked about routine and stuff like that. Was there anything extra on top of that?

Dr. Ian Dunican50:11

We did some overnight polysomnography with a couple of UFC fighters recently, and it's pretty interesting because one was kind of a poor sleeper and one was a very good sleeper. And it was also interesting to see that the good sleeper was actually ranked very high in the UFC, and the poor sleeper was not ranked so high. So there may be a relationship there between sleep and performance and so on.

In terms of the stuff around the weight cutting in the week, I think if you look at some of the work—we did a study actually at the Australian Institute of Sport with a guy called Reid Reale. I don't know if you know Reid. He works at UFC Shanghai.

James de Lacey51:03

No, I don't.

Dr. Ian Dunican51:03

Yeah, so Reid did his PhD in weight cutting in elite combat and contact athletes. He works for UFC Shanghai. He's the director, I think, of something there. He's got some fancy title.

Actually, myself and Reid and Andy Galpin are just wrapping up a paper looking at sleep and nutrition in combat sport athletes, where we've just basically found that overall sleep quality is [expletive] in combat sport athletes and nutritional knowledge is [expletive] in combat sport athletes. That's really the two-line approach to the paper, right? And we had nearly a thousand people in the study.

But strategies around that—I would urge people to work with a dietitian for weight cutting if they can, because I think too many people are actually looking at calorie deficit as opposed to reduction of fiber, what's in their stomach, and the water loading strategies as well. I think people are trying to cut massive amounts of calories in the last week.

And if you follow people like Danny Lennon, Jordan Sullivan from The Fight Dietitian—been on the podcast?

James de Lacey51:53

Yeah, these guys have been on the podcast. Yeah, perfect.

Dr. Ian Dunican51:53

Well, they'll tell you about this. It's not about reducing calories in the fight week. That's all done sort of, weeks minus 1 to minus 6. For now we're looking at kind of the gut content and so on.

So I think if you work with those guys, you're not going to have those appetite ratings through the roof in the week. The work that we did as well, simulating a week of a fight camp, when we controlled all those things with Reid—sodium, potassium, all these other things—I'm not a nutritionist or dietitian, so I don't know exactly, but we took blood and urine and so on. Appetite ratings were actually quite stable across the week when it's done correctly.

So I would say to people, come back to proper weight-cutting strategies. Danny and Jordan have just released a book actually last week on making weight. Order it. So that's coming out. I'd urge people as well, if you can't afford to work with a dietitian, grab some of those resources, listen to those guys and do that.

I think the weight-cutting thing is just how people approach it is ridiculous. They're just doing a big calorie deficit, and I think that's what's going to lead to them then going to bed hungry and worrying about it. So I'd say work with a dietitian in that week to basically help with your sleep.

In the work that we did, James, we had this work published as well. We didn't really see a massive difference in sleep across the week. In our study it was quite low sleep overall, but we had a control group and a water loading group, and we didn't really see a big difference in them in terms of sleep. But obviously we didn't simulate a fight week where there's media and other pressures and so on.

I know some people actually have this as an issue. And just on that fight week sleep as well, I'd say to people as well, for athletes, during fight week it can be a bit crazy when media, people around you, and hanger-oners and cling-ons and people are up your ass, right? Protect your sleep environment.

You see on these UFC Countdown shows or blogs or stuff, people in people's rooms playing video games and so on. The athlete should have his own space. Nobody should encroach on that. You want to play video games? Go to one of the cornermen's rooms and play video games. But the athlete should have his bedroom as a sanctuary—or hers—as a sanctuary where they can go and sleep and relax at any time.

Kick them out of your room. It is not a hangout. I know people want to hang out and distract themselves, but do it in someone else's room so you always know you can retreat back to your own room at any time.

James de Lacey54:12

Yeah, that's good advice for anyone who has a crew with them preparing for a fight. But I think I covered all the questions I wanted to ask you, Ian. But where can people find you, listen to your podcast, all of that stuff so they can see what's going on?

Dr. Ian Dunican54:32

So we've got sleepforperformance.com. You can go to that website. There's plenty of blogs on there, essays, all the podcasts up there. Over 130-something episodes. We have seminars for the last three years people can access all those.

Then we've got MESC Consulting, where we work with industry groups. So if people want to use us in industry for consulting, you can come to mescconsulting.com as well. We've got the Learning to Die podcast. If people want to go over there, they can see us talking to different philosophers and other people.

We had Robb Wolf on there before, if you know Robb Wolf. He's been on Rogan's podcast. Had Rob on with Stephen Blackwood from Ralston College and numerous other people on there as well. And then, where else can you find me? We've got the DREAM TEAM study over there as well.

So there's numerous different places. If you bang my name into Google, you can find me as well. I'm on Google Scholar if people want to look at my research, ResearchGate. And always happy, then, if people have any sort of questions to forward them over to me, and then I can do them in an FAQ on a podcast or get back to them via email or point them in the right direction.

James de Lacey55:20

Perfect. Now I'll link a bunch of those up in the description too for anyone to go check out and see. I'm going to have to follow your—was it the Learn to Die podcast? That's what you called it? I'm going to have to follow that. That sounds interesting.

Dr. Ian Dunican55:43

Yeah, Learning to Die, Learning Today podcast. Yeah, it is quite interesting. We had actually a lady on there from who works with the BBC, and we spoke about Islam, the Islamic religion. It was quite interesting. Got I think over 30,000 views, that one, so it was quite interesting. Some interesting comments in there as well. That was good.

We had Gordon Marino on as well, who's—I think, you know, as Mike Tyson—he wrote a book on existential philosophy. He's a recently retired professor from St. Olaf of Minnesota. We've had Robb Wolf on. And then myself and my co-host have often broken down topics like the Book of Five Rings.

We've looked at nuclear war. We had Sunny Brown on. Do you know Sunny Brown from the Sunny Brown breakdown?

We had Sunny Brown on talking about MMA. So if people don't know Sunny Brown, Sunny was in one of our studies years ago. That's why I met Sunny. Sunny actually was a fairly decent MMA fighter. If memory serves me right, he beat Dan Hooker, I think, in his early career.

James de Lacey56:28

Really?

Dr. Ian Dunican56:28

I think so. I think Sunny fought Dan Hooker at lightweight and beat him many moons ago, back in maybe AFC or one of these type of things.

James de Lacey56:50

Nice. Damn, okay. I'm following the podcast, so I'm going to have to give this some of these a listen.

Dr. Ian Dunican56:50

Awesome.

James de Lacey56:50

But thanks for coming on here. I really appreciate you coming and chatting and sharing all that knowledge.

Dr. Ian Dunican56:50

No worries. If anybody's got any specific question, you want to send me just put an envelope and send it.