Sleep Deprivation

[00:00:00] Astonishing Legends Network Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me. Hey everybody, welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Killari. And I'm Ed Vecola. And today, we are tired. Of course, we're always tired, that's just the nature of being a hose boy in good standing. But this is a new frontier of exhaustion.

[00:00:31] We've pushed past normal sleep deprivation and are now cruising on the kind of brain function usually reserved for corpses. And it's not because we're worried about meeting the hat man. Although, for the record, yes, obviously we are always and infinitely terrified of that. It's just because Ed and I have been through the ringer lately. And we're getting a front row seat to what happens when your brain taps out. For us, the consequences are grogginess and a bad attitude.

[00:00:57] But the longer you go without sleep, the worse your mind and body will function. You'll experience the horrors that visit us when we can't close our eyes. Paranoia, hallucinations, and in extreme cases, death. So hopefully, you're listening to this episode on your way to work after a nice solid eight hours of sleep. Or at least maybe after a short nap.

[00:01:17] But if we've caught you at hour 36 of your own personal sleep apocalypse and you're questioning reality, seeing shadow people, or wondering if you even have a name anymore, welcome to the club. Let's get into it. What are we? Scared. When are we? All the time. Joy. Joy. Joy. Now it is time for... Time for... Scared all the time. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show.

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[00:03:29] So Ed, without further ado, would you please read us Our Producers in Good Standing? And this is the full names edition because on Patreon you can put whatever you want. So whether you put your full name or some other crazy thing, that's what's getting read here. So let's get into it. God help me with some of these last names. We'll see how I do. Amanda Morris, Anita Andrade, Andrade? Anna Banana. That was easy.

[00:03:52] Ann Evans, Ariel Thinkblue, Audra McWright, Bambi Fuller, Buttercup Honeycutt, Cassandra Oborn, Christopher Ford, Christopher Mamerel, Claire Ballantyne, Cracked Paint Studios, Christine Monfort, David Villas and Victor, Diana Elder, Donna Bowden, Gabrielle Goodfellow, Ibis Ebbis Ibbis Klim, Isabella, new last name since marriage. JC, Jeffrey Cantania. Quintania? Cantania?

[00:04:20] Let's go with Jeffrey Cantania and let me know. Very fun. The two L's better be a Y here. Jonathan The Moon Luna, Jonathan Banta, Justin Heron, Justin Richardson, Carly Cannon, Catherine Lombardi, Kevin Williams, Kirsten Tattersall, Kristen Schoonover, Kyle, Just Kyle, Lauren Martinez, Madeline, Madeline, Madeline, Miller Ween. It's got to be a lean, right? Because that would rhyme, but it's probably Madeline.

[00:04:46] Marshall Kerchuk, Matthew Sangstock, Melissa Larson, Michael, I give permission to use my whole name, Smith, Nick Ang, Nicole T. Guile, Ovial, The Party's at My Place, Mendoza, Rio, Who Has Always Been Here, Roger E., Royce DeWeese, Samantha Cardamon, Sean Klein, Soft G and Gypsy, Timothy Moore, and Will Ferguson. Hey, there they are, beautiful producers in good standing.

[00:05:12] Thank you so much, guys, for supporting the show and for following us wherever we go, including into this very sleep-deprived episode, which begins right now. So this is a first for Scared All the Time. This is our first meta episode. We are writing and recording an episode about sleep deprivation while experiencing sleep deprivation. And, you know, can't do that with airplane crashes, so enjoy the meta episode while you can.

[00:05:39] Although I feel like you can do that with airplane crashes easier now than ever before. If we just really set our mind to record the next 10 episodes aboard planes, we might be able to do that. Yeah, one of them would end up in a horrible explosion. Yeah, these days, 100%. Like, I've never wanted to get a new car that can drive across the country successfully more now than any other time. But anyway, back to sleep deprivation.

[00:06:03] If you listened to the Wildfires episode a few weeks ago or our episode with Mike Racine about chimp attacks, you might have noticed that I wasn't my usual self. Although Ed does an excellent job editing the show, so maybe you didn't notice that anything was off about me. But either way, I was tired. And as a podcast perfectionist, it drove me crazy that I couldn't wow you with fire facts with my usual gusto. And as a different type of podcast perfectionist, let us know if you hear a cat purring right now.

[00:06:33] Because that's my... That's something to think about. Well, look. Gertie is spending a lot more time in my lap in front of the computer lately because she is... She has mixed feelings about my son. So she is... Any chance she gets to sit on my lap while I'm at the computer, she takes. So... Wow. You may hear a little bit of soft purring, but it's just because she's having so much fun. I'm the only one who needs your attention who can't get it. This is great.

[00:07:00] So speaking of babies, that is why I am going through it. As listeners of the show know, I just had a kid a few weeks ago and newborns are really antithetical to getting good sleep or really any sleep. It's one of the reasons I kind of dragged my feet about becoming a dad because I know that I need lots of sleep to function and I get extremely cranky without it. Do you? Yeah, I do.

[00:07:24] Even during the busiest, craziest times of my life, like back in college and stuff, I never stayed up very late to party or work or study. If something wasn't done by midnight, it wasn't happening. I could not do all-nighters. I still can't. Wow. I mean, I can like if I have to be on set or something overnight, obviously, like I'll do it. But I just I am not the greatest without sleep. I had one overnight editing job at a company.

[00:07:51] I don't know if they exist anymore, but there was briefly or maybe still a channel called the Africa Channel. Oh, my God. I remember when you had that job. Didn't Nicholson work there, too? Yeah. Our buddy, Andrew Nicholson, got me hired there as an assistant overnight editor. And I was very bad at it. Not only do I not have much of a background in editing, although at the time I was editing lots of music videos and stuff. So I had mastered or gotten pretty good at whatever the current version of Final Cut was at the time.

[00:08:20] But I was there from like it was like the shift was like 6 p.m. to like 3 a.m. And I would have to do a bunch of like QC stuff and mix downs and then print the shows off to tape and go deliver the tapes to the broadcast center at like 3 or 4 in the morning. And I was constantly forgetting to do things all the time. And I even managed one night to lock myself on the roof of the building. I went up there to get like a little fresh air at like 2 in the morning or something.

[00:08:49] And I forgot that the doors all locked behind you after a certain time. Oh, my God. So I was just on the roof of this, not a skyscraper, but like one of the taller buildings in the valley thinking I was going to have to call the fire department to come and get me. Wow. I banged on the door long enough and like a night janitor came and he was like, he like cracked the door open. He was like, hello. And I was like, hi, I work here. I have to get back in. And I just sort of like shoved my way in and went back down the stairs. And I don't think he believed me that I worked there.

[00:09:19] But well, I don't know how else you'd be on the roof. But that's true. I also did the late night shift at CBS during upfronts. So upfronts used to be a thing. I'm not even sure they're a thing anymore. Yeah. So it's like they hire on a lot of extra staff during that time period to like dub tapes, get tapes delivered, get stuff out to wherever it needs to be done. So it was just like, yeah, I'd have the late night shift because they were doing 24 hour shifts there. So people were. Yeah. And so I would I would do the late night shift.

[00:09:49] Ariel got me that job. It wasn't bad. I mean, I'm pretty much the same at three in the morning as I am at fucking two in the afternoon. So yeah, you're you're I was stuck with in an office still had to hear me talk the whole time. Yeah, you're you're pretty good at it. We did stay up really late a few times on set in college doing overnight shoots and stuff. I don't know if you were on the shoot. I think it was our buddy Tyler's shoot. Oh, the hop. The hop.

[00:10:12] We went from we drove from Boston to a high school on Cape Cod to shoot a 1950s period piece student film. And I don't remember exactly how this got fucked up. But basically, it was it was going to be almost impossible to accomplish in a long weekend unless the crew agreed to do one 24 hour shoot day in addition to a regular 12 hour shoot day. And so we'd all agreed, OK, we'll do this 24 hour day.

[00:10:41] But somehow we made the mistake of going to bed early the night before the 24 hour shoot because we were all like, oh, well, we'll be responsible. We'll get some sleep before this tough day. But the problem was that the day, our 24 hours didn't start until like 5 p.m. the following evening. So we all went to bed and we fucked up. We all went to bed at like nine and got up at 6 a.m.

[00:11:07] So that our 24 hour day became like a 36 hour day because we were up for 12 hours before the clock even started. And then we drove home without sleeping, which was insanely dangerous. And I think Mr. Disclaimer was there if he wants to chime in to remind us of all the things we definitely shouldn't do. Yeah. Yeah. I remember trying to sleep on a sandbag for like 20 minutes on that set. Yeah. There's a picture of me like hanging off of one of the gym windows.

[00:11:35] And I don't remember why, but it doesn't look like we were we were being very responsible. No, but which is funny because we all do take our jobs really seriously for absolutely no reason at that time period in our lives. Yes. So there was I'm sure tons of people being responsible, but yes, at a certain point, you're like, where the fuck am I? It's the middle of the night. Everyone's dressed like it's the 50s. Yeah. Someone being like, I'm sorry. These are all the streamers we have.

[00:12:02] So we have to only everyone has to pack into this 13 streamers section of the gym. Yeah. And it was just like someone trying to like, yeah, paint like the art department was losing their minds. It was so crazy. It was the biggest, weirdest, most dangerous production. Well, it wasn't the most dangerous, the most dangerous. Oh, the one where we're in the rain. The one in the alleyway. Yeah. The rain in the alleyway. OK, that's another one. Yeah, that's another one where Mr. Disclaimer saved our lives because we were in the rain in an alleyway.

[00:12:31] And then we were also shooting in an unfinished apartment building that I don't know how we got permission to be in. We didn't. And like the well, that probably is the case. There was an exposed like electrical panel, I remember. And Mr. Disclaimer was like, don't fucking touch that. It'll kill everybody. Yeah. You know, I didn't know. I'm glad someone knew. Yeah. I started a fire on the on Wattenville Road. Yep. I started the generator fire anyway. But that wasn't because of sleeplessness. That was. I just didn't. I didn't know.

[00:13:01] We have film stories for days. Speaking of work, in terms of work and like just my own personal being into working at night, but also like you said, you're like, oh, after midnight, there's nothing good is going to come of it. You know, I worked in comedy writers rooms for years and unlike drama writers rooms, you know, we worked till three in the morning. It makes no fucking sense. So I was pretty used to just being up late and having your brain work after midnight and stuff like that.

[00:13:25] It wasn't as bad as like my friends who worked on community where they would just sleep in their fucking cars and then go to the table read in the morning. Yeah. But there was many, many, many nights where we stayed in the office or slept in the office and then just went to work, you know, when you woke up. Yeah. Yeah. I've done that on much less interesting and successful shows. Yeah. Well, Ed, you've recently what I was going to bring up is you have also not for baby reasons, but you've recently had a brush with actual insomnia, right? Oh, my God. Yeah.

[00:13:53] It's well, I mean, I've always been a night owl. I mean, Chris knows we would go on these writers retreats with a bunch of really good friends and fellow writers. And everyone would get up at eight in the morning, make their coffee, blah, blah, blah. And I would always just be going to bed because I would work while they slept and then I would kind of sleep while everyone else. Well, I don't know. Morning people have zero fucking respect for night people. So I guess I just like would wake up when it got too loud. Because we think night people are all fucking we don't know what you're doing up all night being a creep.

[00:14:23] Well, here's what we're doing. No matter what we're doing up all night, we're super respectful. We're like quietly getting a bowl out of a cabinet as if to not wake anyone. And then then you finally get to sleep on the couch. You know, we shared like these houses with like 20 fucking people at times. Yeah. And you'd get asleep on the couch and then morning people were like slam, bam, bam. There's like memes on the Internet about it, but it's so true. Anyway, the thing Chris is talking about is I had to get steroids for getting square.

[00:14:51] No, I wish I had to get it would be hilarious if you showed up to a recording and you're just ripped as shit like both veins. And you're like, yeah, you know, I had to get my steroids. I don't know. Actually, I don't know. I famously wrote a script that involved steroids, but I researched none of them. And so I think you still need to work out and stuff. I don't think you just like take steroids. Then you're big. No, yeah, you do. You do. You definitely do.

[00:15:15] No, but I took like I got prescribed some fucking steroid and I don't like to take antibiotics or steroids or anything, but I was just super sick. And they gave me these steroids. And that when I went to pick them up, the pharmacist lady was like, hey, just so you know, these have a side effect of like one of the side effects of this is insomnia. Yeah. Usually they don't say anything to me. They're like, have you taken this before? And you say yes or no. They're like, OK. Yeah. But this lady like really made it a point because I guess you have to take the first like six pills the first day. And she was like, oh, you know, it's not that late in the day yet.

[00:15:43] So you can probably take these today all at once. Like the first day is worth. But just so you know. And I was like, OK, thanks. And I'm not like a side effects guy. Like I luckily in life with almost everything. I don't ever really get the side effect. And then that night, I'm like, I am so awake and not awake in like a good way. Not like a awake. I'm sure he meant caffeine. Yeah. It's like I'm super tired, but I can't get to sleep. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So when you're super tired and you can't get to sleep, which I guess maybe is your life right now.

[00:16:13] But you could get to sleep if you wanted to. It would just be irresponsible to. Yeah. I felt like I couldn't edit the show. I couldn't do anything that was productive during those hours of just being awake because I just kind of felt miserable and groggy. Yeah. If you were up with the baby, at least we could be talking because I broke up at like four in the morning, three in the morning. Yeah. But yeah, that's what I just dealt with. It was my first thing where I was, yeah, not sleeping at all in a way that I didn't want. Right. Normally, I'm fine with being up. Like that's what I do.

[00:16:43] Right. Well, all that to say, you've got two super tired hosts powering through to keep you as scared as humanly possible, even if we feel like we're losing our minds a little bit, which brings us to today's topic, sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation is something that lots of you have probably experienced some degree or another. If you've ever stayed up all night, even if you were just a kid at a sleepover, you know that groggy, cranky, foggy, weird feeling that accompanies the rising of the sun.

[00:17:10] And that's just the start of what can happen if you don't get enough sleep. But the real question is, why do we need sleep in the first place? And the headline is, we don't really know. It's weird. We spend nearly a third of our lives asleep, unconscious and vulnerable, and we crave it. Unconscious and vulnerable is so true, but I never really think about it that way. Yeah. A third of our lives just in this like near death state. What is it? What's that movie?

[00:17:41] Existence. The Cronenberg movie? Yeah. The Cronenberg movie where they go into like the computer that's a fucking organ. Yes. Yeah. They're always like, you know what I mean? That's I think about that in the Matrix where, yeah, you do like our bodies are not safe right now. Like, yeah, they're just sitting in a hotel room. No. I mean, our bodies are, you know, we don't I'm not going to get into it too deeply here, but there is a lot of research around how much of sleep was shaped by human evolution and how much of human evolution was shaped by sleep because of this giant chunk of time

[00:18:11] where we're completely open to being preyed upon by animals or by each other. That's a good episode. We should do it because we can look at the history of why do we have our bed frames, you know, so that we can see the door. Yeah. Why do we blah, blah, blah. That's a really fun. I'd like to explore that in a future episode. Well, I mean, yeah, actually, that's this is a good point to also say, yes, not only will sleep, I think, be its own episode, but also sleep deprivation as torture is also

[00:18:39] going to be its own episode because it's been used for centuries and all kinds of super fucked up ways. And this episode would be five hours long if we tried to do all of it. So I think this is going to be biological sleep deprivation and then someday we'll do torture sleep deprivation. That's the order it should be. Yeah, because this is the kind of thing where someone would listen to this episode and then come up with the idea. I think we can use this as torture. So, yeah.

[00:19:08] Well, if they wouldn't be the first to have thought of it. But like I was saying, sleep, we crave it like food and breathing. But what we know about its origins and benefits remains kind of cloudy. All we know really is that sleep must be important. As Alan Rechstaufen, one of the world's foremost sleep researchers said in 1978, quote. Oh, thank God it's 1978. I thought you were going to say. Not 1939. How about that name doing human experiments?

[00:19:36] I was like, oh, let's see what year what this is. He said, quote, if sleep does not serve an absolutely vital function, then it is the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Because of the human fascination with sleep, we've been studying it for as long as we've been studying ourselves. Around 450 BC, a Greek physician named Alcmion of Croton postulated that sleep was a spell

[00:20:04] of unconsciousness brought on by the lack of circulation to the brain because of blood draining from the body's surface and retreating deeper into the body. Oh, my God. So he basically thought your blood like sank into your body and made you pass out. Yeah. But how many teeth did you think women had? Great question. I do think there's probably some. I don't know if they even knew about this, but there's something I forget what the term

[00:20:28] is, but there's something that they look at in like postmortem or in crime scene investigations where part of the way they determine how long ago you died is your blood does like sink. I think like there's a term for your blood goes to a different part of your body after you've died. So there may be some thought behind this other than just like those crazy Greeks and their wayward theories. Well, I mean, I don't know about when you sleep, but I imagine when you die. Yeah.

[00:20:59] Maybe the blood kind of loses energy or all the things that pump blood through your body stop working. So blood's just like, well, this is where I am now. Yeah. And then it just stops there and they can see like, oh, it's been it's been pooled in this spot for however long because blood's like, what are we even doing? The guy died. Like we don't have to keep working. Yeah. I can start falling apart now. Yeah. About 50 years after Alcmion of Crouton. No way it's Crouton. No, no, it's Crouton. It's Crouton. Okay. Okay.

[00:21:28] Crouton's better. After Alcmion of Crouton had his theory in 500 BC, Aristotle put forth his own theory about sleep. And I know we've touched on some of his beliefs before. I can't remember. Is he the one who had the theory about women's teeth? I mean, I just brought it up, but I don't remember if it was him. It could have been anyone. Yeah. It was one of those. He's one of those guys. He seems like he did well for himself. He's still he's still relevant. He is. But he had a cardio centric view of human consciousness. I never knew this.

[00:21:58] But for a while, there was a belief that the heart was responsible for thought, perception, emotion, and consciousness. And the brain served merely as a cooling mechanism for the blood that was heated by the heart. Do you think that's why the heart is still a representative of like love and emotions? And I'm sad. I'm heartbroken. I'm in love. My heart is full. Probably. Yeah. Probably. I don't know for sure, but that would make sense.

[00:22:24] Aristotle proposed that sleep occurred when vapors from food digestion rose to the brain, cooled there, and then descended to the heart, causing a temporary suppression of the heart's functions related to consciousness and sending us off to sleep. So this is just like he had a turkey dinner and felt tired and was like, I got it. This is his aha moment. Yeah. Instead of the apple falling from the tree, it was a turkey breast falling into his stomach. It was like, hmm. Yeah, that itis.

[00:22:54] In 162 AD, Galen identified the brain rather than the heart as the seat of consciousness. And this allowed him to expand on Greek theories of sleep, suggesting that sleep was actually the result of the brain becoming moist and heavy, causing a relaxation of nerves and muscles. Wow. Now we know that all of those things are wrong and sleep is brought on by a combination of things, but mostly just natural circadian rhythms.

[00:23:21] According to the sleep geniuses at sleepfoundation.org, our sleep cycles emerge to survive and thrive on a planet with a 24-hour cycle of night and day. Okay. These biological patterns are called circadian rhythms, which work alongside the sleep drive, which is a desire to sleep that grows in intensity the longer that you've been awake, which causes us to feel sleepy at night and alert in the morning. Although, I don't know, it's been a long time since I felt alert in the morning. So...

[00:23:48] Well, yeah, you're also addicted to coffee. You're like a coffee guy and stuff. So I think, you know, you're one of those people. You're not one of those people who's like, don't talk to me till I had my first cup, whatever fucking t-shirt that would be. Yeah. But I prefer not to drive until I have coffee just because like... Yeah. I mean, it sounds like I'd back out of the driveway and cause a five-car pileup. But if I haven't had coffee, I'm definitely a little bit slower. What is... Well, you share a bed with someone, so it's a little different. But... Yes.

[00:24:18] Like, are you a snoozer? Do you hit that snooze button? Um, it depends what I've got going on. Like, with the baby, I don't. I mean, pre... Let's look at all of this as pre-baby. Pre-baby, sometimes. Like, if I'm not on a deadline or something, my sleep was very like, I'll set the alarm for eight. If it goes off, I'll be up by nine. That's crazy. I shared a... Oh, you're saying you'll stick around in bed and then just try and make it a point to be up in the next hour. Yeah.

[00:24:45] Like, it was always a vague sort of like, I knew when I wanted to be out of bed. So I'd usually... I guess what I'm saying is I'd set my alarm like an hour before when I really wanted to be up. And then if my alarm went off and I felt good, I'd get up. If I felt shitty, I just kind of... I don't do the snooze every five minutes kind of thing. Wow. See, I wonder how this has affected my circadian rhythm, my life in general. I'm a snoozer through and through. I like, I'll hit that button every 10 minutes for hours. Yeah. And there's no way that's the best way.

[00:25:13] Although I am pretty good at like going back into a dream when I wake up. And if I go back, I can go back to the dream. But it is... Yeah, it's definitely always been something where it's one of my least favorite qualities about myself. And I have many least favorite qualities. I wish I could like kind of get over that hurdle. I shared a room with my cousin many years ago and he is... It's an insane trait to me. This is crazy person behavior. This is fucking comic Steve. It's like the alarm goes off.

[00:25:41] His hand hits the off button and then he, his legs swing out and he's greets the day. Yeah. Like he just gets out of bed and I'm sitting there for like, my snooze has been going off since 5.45 a.m. It's now nine. Yeah. Yeah. I, I'm not great at popping out of bed. I'm getting better with the kid. But I will say I have, I definitely, I prefer being like, I'm either awake or asleep.

[00:26:07] And when I'm doing one, I've found with the baby, like my wife, if she's got to be up with him at night, she'll try to get like 15 minutes of sleep here and 20 minutes of sleep there. And I'm like, if I have to be up all night with the baby, I'm just going to be up from, from midnight to, to seven or 8 a.m. or whatever, because I get so irritable if I'm trying to sleep and then I can't. And then the crying wakes me up. Like I'm the same way. Yeah. It's one or the other. Yeah. A hundred percent. And I am, I'm not a morning person. My mom will tell you right away.

[00:26:36] She'll, I am a prickly pear. So they all call me in the morning. Like it's not even like till I get my coffee. It's kind of like till I'm ready. Right. I don't know what it is. Yeah. I remember, I remember at monster fest last summer, you wake up in the morning and I mean, I felt like I was dragging ass, but when you would wake up, you were like, you needed some time. Oh shit. I don't really remember. Sorry. You're just in a different mode. I don't remember the trauma I caused. No.

[00:27:03] Anyway, circadian rhythms, including the sleep wake cycle operate according to environmental cues. Like when it gets dark at night, the body begins to release more of the sleep hormone melatonin. And every morning with the arrival of light, the body's melatonin levels become undetectable. Although not for me, because I don't know, Ed, have you ever taken melatonin to sleep? Yeah. Not often. Very, very rarely. But I have done it. I had a heavy melatonin phase during my panic attacks a few years ago.

[00:27:30] So I was having, I think I've talked about this on the show before, but I was having trouble falling asleep because I was so panicked 24 hours a day that as soon as I laid down and started to close my eyes, I would like, I wasn't like consciously afraid that I was going to die and not wake up. But as soon as I started to like fall into sleep, my brain would freak out and be like, wake up. Do you want to die? And so I didn't know what to do. So I started taking melatonin and not like a little bit of melatonin.

[00:27:59] I was trying to knock myself out. So I was taking like 40 milligrams at a time. Oh my God. And it helped me sleep. And I was, I was really lucky. I started reading about it and I saw all these warnings online about it can fuck up your sleep. It can fuck up your day. People talk about being groggy, like real groggy the next day after taking it. And that's on three milligrams. I never really had a problem. I think because I'm groggy anyway, you know, like when I wake up, I'm groggy as shit until I have my coffee. So in a weird way, I think I just never noticed if I was groggy. Yeah.

[00:28:27] I have these phases sometimes where I do like, I weaned myself off that after a while. I started taking less and less and then I took none. And then, you know, I'll have times where I go back on it, but I don't take any, I have two bottles of expired melatonin if you want it here, because like I said, I take like one or two every like fucking three years. Did I ever tell my Ambien story on the show? Uh, I don't know if you did, but maybe save it for the sleep episode. Yeah. It's such a quick but good story. I'll save it. Okay.

[00:28:59] Before we move on, I do want to address one other sleep related thing I find super interesting. And now this kind of maybe would go best in the sleep episode now that we're talking about doing that. But I think it's relevant to this conversation. Modern science tells us that we function best on eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, but that wasn't always the case. The eight hour sleep cycle is a modern invention. I didn't know this.

[00:29:24] And most people didn't know this until 2001 when the historian Roger Eckrich published a paper on human sleep. He found that rather than sleep taking place in the form of one long uninterrupted stretch known as monophasic sleep, our ancestors actually divided the night into two halves by having a first and second sleep or biphasic sleep. And what's really interesting about this is how most of the evidence he found for first

[00:29:50] and second sleep doesn't come from a body of scientific research. It comes from studying literature. One of the earliest mentions is when Homer refers to the first sleep in his eighth century epic poem, The Odyssey, or his eighth century BC epic poem, The Odyssey. It's casually dropped into works by figures such as the Greek biographer Plutarch, the Greek traveler Posnanius, and the Roman historian Livy and the Roman poet Virgil.

[00:30:19] You can find references to first and second sleep in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and in poet William Baldwin's Beware the Cat, a satirical book considered by some to be the first ever novel, which centers around a man who learns to understand the language of a group of terrifying supernatural cats. Oh, wow. One of whom, Mouse Slayer, is on trial for promiscuity. Oh my God. I got to actually get that book. Not a single word in that sentence is the word that I would think is going to follow the previous word. Yeah.

[00:30:48] Good luck with that large language model AI. Yeah. A lot of twists and turns there. 80% of those books are like books you're supposed to read in school. And I can say pretty confidently that I never got far enough to get to the second sleep part of any of those books. Well, and it wasn't just these books. He found these references in records across many centuries in poems, novels, diaries, as well as court records and anthological reports. But I think the dead silly scrolls, which is like for silly posturpedic. Yep. Yep. I gotcha. I gotcha. Yeah.

[00:31:18] I'll see myself out. I actually can't. We need to finish the episode. The reason that I don't think anyone really noticed this is that first and second sleep was so normal that ancient sciences didn't make a big deal out of it. And most modern literary scholars didn't notice the pattern because they weren't looking, you know, if someone's studying the Odyssey or someone's studying Canterbury Tales, they're thinking about language use, but they're not particularly interested necessarily in what first sleep means.

[00:31:46] And so what happened with Roger Eckerich was that he was actually reviewing court cases for a history of what he called a history of night that he was writing. Oh. And he found a court case where somebody was on trial for committing a crime between first and second sleep. Oh, interesting. And he was like, what is this? And then he went back and he started finding this reference in all of this other literature. And what he discovered is that an average night's sleep in 17th century England, just

[00:32:15] to pick a time period, probably started with people going to bed between 9 and 11 p.m. A few hours later, they would wake up from their first slumber for between one to two hours, and then they'd go back for their second sleep, which would last until the morning. During these nighttime waking hours, evidence shows that people engaged in any kind of past time you can imagine, whether they stayed in bed to read. How did they stay in bed to read? By candlelight? Yeah. Well, I mean, yes. Once they had candle and stuff, yes, they could stay in bed to read by candlelight.

[00:32:44] But I mean, that must have been obnoxious. Also, if they had to probably take a piss, every year on this planet, I'm having second and third sleeps now. I'm always waking up to pee. But if I had to walk outside in the cold-ass 16th century England, 17th century England, yeah, I'll be up for a few hours. I just fought a fox to take a pee. And now I'm alert and awake. I'll go to bed when I'm done. Yeah. Like being all fucking cold and weird. Well, there was also a bunch of research that I haven't included here.

[00:33:13] We'll touch on it in the sleep episode. But there's a history of like the way that families and stuff would arrange themselves to sleep because not everybody had their own rooms in their own beds. So, you know, if someone was getting up to pee or poop or whatever. You can lose your spot. Yeah. You're going to lose your spot. You're going to disturb the pod. Charlie and the Charlie factory. Yeah. And people also committed crimes. And people also thought of the time between first and second sleep as a great time to have sex and make babies. So that happened a lot.

[00:33:41] God, there must have been so much boredom at that time period, too. It's like what you didn't want to just read a book by candlelight. Like, of course, you're going to choose sex over squinting at typeset letters or just hand scrawled. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess. Yeah. If you were an incel, you could set aside this time for prayer instead. A lot of prayer manuals from the late 15th century cite special prayers specifically to be prayed during these hours between first and second sleep. Wow.

[00:34:09] And this kind of sleep was all over the world. It wasn't just England. There's evidence it was practiced all across Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, Australia, and the Middle East. Scholars think that the advent of electric light is what broke us from these natural sleep patterns by allowing us the ability to be more productive after the sun went down and before it came back up. And once we could do that, natural biphasic sleep was quickly forgotten. Man, technology fucks everything up all the time.

[00:34:38] Well, I mean, you could make the argument that generally electric light probably is a big plus. Oh, no. A hundred percent. I'm just saying it's like, you know, I'm sure I just feel like, you know, at that time there were definitely people being like, remember second sleep? Remember who we used to be a country? Yeah. We had second sleep. Now I'm up all fucking night, quite literally not even burning the midnight oil anymore. At least like I don't even know. Now we're, we couldn't leave well enough alone to just have first and second sleep.

[00:35:04] And now here we are answering emails at fucking three in the morning. Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm saying. Like whatever the equivalent, the 17th century equivalent of that, well, electricity is the 20th century. I guess 19th century? It was the 1800s who made the light bulb? Well, Edison invented the light bulb, right? So I think that was like early 1900s. I thought it was the 20th century. Yeah. But because cars didn't exist until 1890 or something. So, but I actually had read about this a few years ago and Braggler. No, no, no.

[00:35:33] But I wanted to bring it up here because all I knew was the most basic version of it. But the reason I found out about it was because when I was having trouble sleeping, I would beat myself up in the middle of the night, not physically, but I'd be like, oh fuck, I can't get back to sleep. And then that made it harder to sleep. And somehow I found this research about how there was first and second sleep. And so now when I wake up in the middle of the night, I just go, okay, yeah, this is totally normal. Oh, fun. That's a good way to look at that. Yeah.

[00:35:59] It makes it easier to go back to sleep because it's like, oh no, I'm just doing what we did for centuries before we had light. And so I'm not going to fight trying to get back to sleep. I'm just going to lay here and go back to sleep eventually. My buddy, Eric Durbin said this thing one night that just made me laugh. It made me laugh and it's insanity, but it's also just, it made me laugh because it's so true. He was like, the worst possible scenario is someone holding a gun to your head and being like, I'm going to fucking kill you unless you go to sleep right now.

[00:36:28] And it's like, that's the worst. There's no, it's a no win. It's a no win situation. Yeah. Well, in any case, once you do manage to force yourself to sleep with a gun to your head, there's actually four stages of sleep that we cycle through multiple times each night. Now, some of you might already know this, but we'll go through them kind of quickly because they're important in understanding why sleep is important and therefore what sleep deprivation can do to you if you're not getting sleep.

[00:36:55] So these four stages are divided into two main types. There's non-rapid eye movement sleep and rapid eye movement or REM sleep. And it takes about 90 minutes to get through a full cycle of these non-rapid eye movements to your rapid eye movement. The first three stages represent the NREM, the non-rapid eye movement sleep. And each has its own characteristics. So the first stage is considered light sleep when you're just getting into bed, you're just starting to drift off.

[00:37:24] I call this the podcast stage when you're maybe listening to this show. Or if you're me, you're listening to Jim Cornette yell about pro wrestling. But you're just starting to relax. If you're me, you're playing crosswords. Yeah, for five to 10 minutes, your brain slows down, your heartbeat, your eye movements, your breathing slows with it, your body relaxes, your muscles might start to twitch. You get that kind of kick. And at this stage, if someone woke you up, you probably wouldn't even realize you were asleep at all. You just think you were laying down.

[00:37:54] Then we move into stage two, which is a slightly deeper sleep. And this is where your brain waves actually start to slow down. Your body temperature drops a bit. You become less aware of your surroundings. And your brain starts to prepare for deep sleep, which is where the really important work of sleeping happens. That's when the blood all goes to your feet to live there for the night. Yeah, that's when the blood coagulates to your ass. Stage three is when deep, slow brain waves known as delta waves begin to emerge.

[00:38:21] And during this sleep stage, your body starts physically repairing itself, which to me is one of the craziest things about sleep. We actually get a little Wolverine action when we're sleeping. And I believe that to be true, even if they didn't tell me that in the paper, because I am a really helps that I have no pets or children or anything. But as soon as I start to feel unwell, I know my body enough to be like, I'm starting to get sick. I just go to sleep and I don't set an alarm and I don't do anything like I feel like sleep truly is like the best medicine.

[00:38:51] Yeah. No, I mean, I my wife was dealing with a little bit of bleeding after she gave birth. And the first like week or so she was getting like no sleep and the bleeding. It wasn't an unhealthy, dangerous amount, but it just it wasn't really stopping. And then the first night that she got actual sleep, it healed up. Yeah. So like it's crazy. Your brain is actually increasing its production of growth hormones that are essential for spurring on tissue repair and growth when you're sleeping.

[00:39:21] And, you know, if you're exercising or doing any physical activity, which we both need to be doing more if we're going to get square anytime soon. We got to get back into the square game in a big, bad way. I am. I'm basically cleared to clear to square. Excellent. But yeah, I see that two more doctors next week at the time of recording. So hopefully by the time of the next episode, I'll be able to back in the gym. We're going to circle back around. Oh, shit. That's great. Woo. That's what they call geometry. That's.

[00:39:49] But when you exercise or do any physical activity, you're actually creating tiny tears in your muscles. And it's those tears that really heal during the stage three sleep. And this is also when the body strengthens, like Ed, you were saying, it strengthens the immune system by producing and releasing cytokines, which are proteins that help fight off infection and disease. At this stage, stage three is not just important for your body. It's really important for your brain, too.

[00:40:14] So something we've learned about sleep over the years of studying it is that sleep is when your memories are actually processed and sorted. So this is another kind of like wild, like sleep magic, because when I think about making a memory, I don't think of sleep as being part of the process. I think of it as like if you're paying enough attention or something means enough to you or you learn something, it sticks in your brain. But that's not really true.

[00:40:42] According to George Dragoi, MD, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Yale. So, you know, he's telling the truth. I don't know what that's supposed to mean. No. Everything I know about making memories I got from Kodak commercials. Yeah. Well, so it's more about sleep. Dr. Dragoi studies how episodic memories, which are memories of specific events or experiences, form and develop. I only have serialized memories. Oh, do they have cliffhangers? Yeah. Yeah.

[00:41:11] So this is for people who don't work in the industry. There's two types of television, episodic and serialized. Yeah. And that's what I was referencing. Episodic memories complement semantic memories, which are memories based on facts and general information. And the memories that Dr. Dragoi studies episodic primarily involve parts of the hippocampus and neocortex in your brain, and they require two separate phases. So there's the encoding phase and the consolidation phase.

[00:41:37] So during encoding, which is phase one, your brain samples stimuli from the outside world and rapidly encodes that within sequences inside networks of neurons in your hippocampus. Dragoi says that when activated, these connected neurons fire one after another, fleshing out the details of the memory. And the amygdala seems to attach emotional significance to these memories or details as appropriate at some point along the way. And that all happens when you're awake.

[00:42:07] But then in consolidation, which is a process that researchers think occurs during sleep, particularly slow wave sleep, those delta waves in stage three, your encoded sequences are integrated by chemical connections into new and existing neuronal knowledge networks and filed for long-term storage in the neocortex. Which means, basically, if you cut all the jargon out, sleep is essential for episodic memory

[00:42:34] function and likely for most types of memory function. Encoding, Dragoi says, is certainly required but not sufficient for episodic memory formation. If encoded information is not consolidated after exposure to new experiences, you simply won't remember it. So something can happen to you during the day and if you aren't sleeping enough, even if it's kind of important, there's a good chance that you won't remember that it happened.

[00:43:01] He further notes, Dragoi notes, that sleep may also give the brain time to make space for new memories by removing or reducing the strength of neural links tied to memories that are no longer useful. During human development, a process called pruning calls excess neuronal links. Dragoi says this is like in a tree. You cut off the branches or remove connections in the brain long term. In adults, the structure of connections is already built and the strength of these connections

[00:43:28] can be reduced or increased over time. Yeah, the brain is crazy. Yeah, there's a whole host of interesting rabbit holes about memory and sleep to go down here. But basically, all of those theories just get increasingly complex and further away from the topic at hand. Yeah. Stage three is also when sleepwalking is most likely to occur because stage three is a transitional stage to the deepest sleep you can get. But our bodies aren't yet fully shut down.

[00:43:54] Our brains can still fire off information down the spinal cord and cause us to get up and engage in all kinds of behaviors from walking to driving to even sex, which is real. It's called sexsomnia. And it's been that sounds like it was made up by an abuser. Yes. To be like that. That's the thing they always do. Listen to this. I found an article that explains, quote, behaviors during an episode of sexsomnia by Bill Cosby may include with a doctor, right? He had that honorary degree.

[00:44:23] Well, Bill Bill wasn't the one sleeping during those episodes. Behaviors during an episode of sexsomnia may include fondling, masturbation, sexual intercourse, pelvic thrusting and spontaneous orgasm. Although you're asleep, it can appear to others that you're awake. Someone experiencing an episode might have an open eyed, vacant look or what I would call the worst sex look someone can have.

[00:44:48] The article also notes that you may only find out you have the disorder from a partner, roommate or family member. And my heart goes out to anyone who discovered they suffer from sexsomnia from a family member. Oh, no. Do you think this might have been the origin of like, let's say this disorder existed forever. Do you think it could have been the origin of like succubus and succubi or whatever the hell that shit is and like weird sexual demon stuff? Maybe.

[00:45:15] I mean, I think usually that was linked a little bit more to sleep paralysis because sexsomnia is the person who is asleep is the one performing the sex. Whereas I think in succubi lore, it's usually the person who is asleep having the act performed to them. Got you. Like an unnecessary scene in Ghostbusters. Yes, exactly. Okay. You all know the scene we're talking about. Interestingly, a study published in the American Academy of Sleep Medicine found that men are

[00:45:44] three times more likely than women to exhibit sexsomnia symptoms. Or maybe men are just three times more likely to be fucking creeps who lie about having sexsomnia. Yeah, tell as old as time. Yeah. Well, finally, we have the most important stage of sleep, stage four or REM sleep. While you're in REM sleep, your eyes move rapidly beneath your eyelids, giving this stage its name. They dart back and forth.

[00:46:11] And interestingly, studies show that these eye movements are caused by the brain's array of nerve tissues devoted to sight and visual processes, which means basically your eyes are treating dreams as if they were part of the real external environment. Each rapid eye movement itself is part of a visual scan, just like when we're awake and focusing on something in front of us. And it's during this state that most of your vivid dreaming takes place.

[00:46:37] At the same time, your muscles become temporarily paralyzed, which is important so that you're not acting out your dreams. And that's how like before they fully become paralyzed, it's when sleepwalking and stuff can happen. REM sleep involves more brain activity than non-REM sleep and is considered a more wakeful state as your heart rate and blood pressure increase the levels closer to what you experience when you are awake.

[00:47:01] Newborns like baby boy Felix get the most REM sleep of any age group with about 50% of their sleep taken up by REM sleep, while adults only spend up to 25% of their time asleep in REM sleep. And that percentage goes down as we age, which kind of sucks because I think REM sleep is the most creative and interesting part of being asleep. But you just said per that person's admission, it's the least restful sleep. I don't understand. Like it seems like it's the most beneficial sleep, but they also just said that like your

[00:47:31] heart rate's elevated, your blood pressure's up. Well, it's whatever. It's that's not restful. Well, it's I think what they're saying is that it is it's the closest to a full body experience during REM sleep. So your body is functioning in ways that it might while it's awake, even though your brain is firing off all kinds of crazy stuff. And it's more REM sleep is more important for your brain and your body, at least from what I was reading.

[00:47:58] It sounds like most of the body healing and immune system stuff happens during stage three. And then stage four is when our brains are the most active. Got you. Studies have shown that even brief periods of REM sleep enable us to make stronger neurological associations between existing memories. And this allows us to pull together many different pieces of information when we're faced with a problem needing a creative solution, which is I think when you hear about was a Paul McCartney

[00:48:26] said that he dreamed one of his famous songs. He says that it came to him in a dream. I think a lot of creative people will solve creative problems in dreams. I've woken up twice. I've had full movie trailers for movies that don't exist play in my brain. And once it was actually a really good idea. And the project never went anywhere, but it was a full trailer for a movie. And I was like, oh, that's great. I'll try to write that.

[00:48:55] I used to keep a little notepad by my bed in case things like that happen, because sometimes I would have like a crazy dream that I was like, that would be a good idea. And I feel like by the time I just turned and got the pen, it just disappeared so fast. Yeah. You know? And then you'd look at the paper the next day and it said nothing that made sense. It was like Sox Cavern. It was like, what the fuck? Yeah. A lot of times when you go to... It is weird because I've done stuff. I usually write it in my phone. But yeah, it makes sense literally until you're writing it down.

[00:49:24] And then as you're writing it down, you're like, oh, this doesn't make any sense. But I was trying to do that for a while, like writing down dreams and stuff. And yes, it would always slip away. And so when I started realizing that for me, the moment it would slip away was when I was like getting a pencil and getting the paper or opening up my phone. I was focused on something else. So instead, what I started doing is... Screaming to your wife, remember this! Yeah, yeah. Remember what I'm about to say! Yeah. No, I would just...

[00:49:51] As I would wake up, if I had something interesting from the dream, I would just turn it into a narrative. So like I would take the pieces that were the most interesting and I would tell it back to myself as a story while I was waking up. And then that would help me remember it for another, you know, 20 minutes or something until I could write it down. And it would also help me weed out the parts that didn't make any sense. So if there's like... Interesting. If there's like interesting elements and I can see that they string together, but they

[00:50:20] all take place on a, you know, a carnival in outer space and like that doesn't make sense. When I tell the story back to myself, I just leave that part out instead of trying to make sense of it. Sure. And then I just get the usable stuff from it that way. So... Got you. And I'm going to ask a question and it's going to be, I guess, saved for the sleep episode. So I just want a yes or no answer and we will only elaborate in another episode. Yes. Do you ever have reoccurring dreams? Yes. Okay, great. We'll talk about it in the sleep episode.

[00:50:49] So while we're here, I think we might as well mention that interrupted REM sleep is what causes sleep paralysis. Obviously, we're going to return to sleep paralysis in the future. We never miss an opportunity to give Hatman a shout out. But basically, the reason that sleep paralysis occurs during REM sleep is that that's when you're experiencing what's known as muscle atonia or a full disconnect between your brain and body so that you don't act out your dreams.

[00:51:17] And when your body slips out of muscle atonia while your brain is still experiencing REM sleep, that's sleep paralysis. But that's a horror for another time. Or in our first episode. Go back to the first episode. We're here to explore what happens when you don't sleep at all. So I found a really helpful infographic for this, actually, that is in the show notes. It's an infographic on a mattress site of all places. Of course it is. That's their business, baby. Sleep. Makes sense.

[00:51:45] It gives us a pretty good timeline to work off of, of what happens when you are sleep deprived. Does their infographic end with like, and none of this happens with the competitor's brand or whatever? No, there's no branding. There's no branding on the infographic. Gotcha. The bad news is that you don't even need to stay awake for 24 hours before you'll start to get hit with negative effects from sleep deprivation.

[00:52:10] After about 17 hours awake, or what is roughly considered one hour of missed sleep. So we're considering 16 hours of wake to your eight hours of sleep to be your, your full day. So after 17 hours awake, your hand eye coordination decreases and your abilities drop to those of someone with a blood alcohol level of 0.05%, which is a low percentage, but is roughly the

[00:52:38] equivalent of four beers in two hours for someone my size. So that's not nothing, you know, four beers in two hours. You'll notice. Sure. The risk of heart attack also increases with UC Berkeley neuroscientist, Matthew Walker, noting that there is a 24% increase in heart attacks during daylight savings time in the spring when we lose an hour and a 21% decrease in heart attacks during the fall when we gain an hour. What? We should just get rid of one of those then. That hurts us less.

[00:53:07] There's a lot of reasons to get rid of daylight savings time. And this is, do you like heart attacks? Someone needs to run on that. Do you like heart attacks? If you don't vote for me, we're getting rid of this fucking useless daylight savings. Come to Arizona. You'll die from other reasons. Yeah. Heat stroke goes up 50%. Yeah, but they don't have it right. Arizona doesn't, doesn't have daylight savings. No, correct. Correct. They don't. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:53:31] At 18 hours of wakeness or two hours of miss sleep, your stroke risk increases with those learning abilities decrease as sleep deprivation affects working memory, as we learned a few minutes ago. So you're just piling on at this point. By 24 hours without sleep, you'll experience increased cortisol levels. And cortisol is your stress hormone.

[00:53:59] So you're, you'll feel more stressed and you'll also experience inflammation throughout the body. The stress hormone elevation may lead to more serious wrinkles and puffy eyes while the inflammation affects your metabolism and immune system. Cognitive impairments at this point are equal to someone with a 0.1% blood alcohol level, at which point you're basically slurring your speech. In California, a 0.08 blood alcohol level is enough to be arrested for drunk driving.

[00:54:25] So after 24 hours without sleep, you're in a bad way. And that's why not to relate everything to the movie business, but there have been campaigns over the years about how many hours people can be on set and how much sleep they need between drives to and from set, because there have been accidents when people have been on set for too long and they try to drive home. They're basically driving drunk. And it is crazy that like as an industry we've fought for and lost on many occasions the

[00:54:54] like, I think reasonable, like 12 on 12 off. Like, can we just have 12 hours off in a day? You know what I mean? Like, yeah. And they were like, nah, maybe give you 10. Yeah. You can maybe give you 10, 10 hours between shifts. And it was like that, that doesn't include your drive home or then going to sleep or anything. It's just an average day on a film set is minimum 12 hours, I would think. I mean, I remember when we were shooting 12 Deadly Days in 2016, which is a YouTube show

[00:55:22] that Ed and I worked on, we were shooting in Pomona, which is about an hour and a half to two hours to two and a half hours if you hit traffic away from Los Angeles. So there's this thing called the zone around Los Angeles. It's a 30 mile radius around Los Angeles where if you shoot a project within the zone, you don't have to put your crew up in hotels because it's considered you're shooting locally. They're shooting at home. So they should be able to drive back and forth every day.

[00:55:47] Now Pomona is not within the 30 mile zone, but through some weird law, they managed to get a carve out where they're considered to be within the zone, even though they're not. So the production didn't put, they put the creators of the show and a couple of directors up at a hotel, but the rest of the crew had to drive to and from Pomona every day, even if they lived

[00:56:12] in Santa Monica, which adds, you know, easily 45 minutes to your drive if you're hitting traffic. And that was shocking to me. I didn't have any control over that. I mean, that's how I got into a two and a half year toxic relationship because I was... Yeah, that's true. Because you got stuck in Pomona. I got stuck in Pomona and then I ended up meeting someone there. Yeah. But yeah, that was crazy because people were driving to and from Pomona, working a full 12 hour day and sleeping for what? Maybe six hours by the time they got home, maybe four.

[00:56:43] I mean, it's not good. After 28 hours awake, there's an increased risk of serious depression with University of Pennsylvania research showing that participants deprived of sleep for 28 hours were mentally less likely to recover from negative stimuli, which would lead to higher likelihoods of depression. And they basically did that study by showing them like disturbing photos and stuff.

[00:57:11] So they'd keep them up for 28 hours, show them disturbing photos, then, you know, ask them all these questions about how they feel. And they used a control group who got a normal amount of sleep. And the people who were sleep deprived had more trouble getting over the things that they saw. Sure. Yeah. Well, the brain doesn't have any of its like go to sleep and filter things out and, you know, equalize everything. Yeah. At 36 hours with no sleep, extreme emotions emerge with individuals becoming highly emotional.

[00:57:40] That's also the first 36 minutes of me being awake. Yes. Matthew Walker, the neuroscientist we mentioned earlier, says one day without sleep is enough to turn someone into emotional jello. And his research found that those who went more than 35 hours without sleep experienced more intense fight or flight responses in their amygdala than rested counterparts did. Also, when shown evocative images.

[00:58:04] Around 48 hours or two days with no sleep, a person will start to experience micro sleeps, which are involuntary episodes of sleep lasting somewhere between a fraction of a second up to 30 seconds long. One of the only things I liked about the terrible Nightmare on Elm Street reboot from the 2010s was that they included these micro sleeps as a way Freddie could close in on a victim, even if they were successful at staying up for days at a time. Oh, that's cool. Yeah.

[00:58:32] Something they didn't include in the movie is that this is also the point where your body stops being able to process glucose, leading a person to crave carbs. So if they wanted to be scientifically accurate, they should have had Nancy housing loaves of bread while Freddie closed in on her during her micro sleeps. At 48 hours, ataxia can begin, which is a loss of muscle control leading to involuntary movements, spasms, dizziness and difficulty walking.

[00:59:00] And 48 hours is also the point where one of the first deaths related to sleeplessness pops up in the research with a mention of a 39 year old Chinese soccer fan who reportedly died from a stroke after staying up for 48 hours to watch the World Cup. Now, Ed, you're a soccer fan. You get up at all kinds of hours. What's the have you stayed up a long time to watch games or you just get up early? Yeah, no, I mean, I do it less and less with age, but I remember nights where me and our

[00:59:28] friend Pat would just stay up all night and then just go at 6 a.m. or 530 a.m. to the bar that led us in the back door to drink at 530 when it's not necessarily legal, I guess. Yeah. And it was it was the best. It was the best time. Yeah. But yeah, so we would definitely just stay up all night. We would just like party all night or just watch movies all night. And it's usually we only usually did that when people were like in town. And so it was like our friend Sam from England was here or whatever. And it's like, we'll just stay up all night and then then go to the game.

[00:59:56] And then around like all I go to sleep at like 10 or 11 in the morning. Yeah. I looked this up because I was having trouble wrapping my head around why he needed to be up for 48 hours because soccer games aren't that long. And I still couldn't quite wrap my head around it. But it had something to do with the fact that the game was being played in Brazil, which was 11 hours behind Shanghai. So I think it probably was something similar to the way we went to sleep too early for our 24 hour film shoot. And somehow this guy ended up staying up for 48 hours to watch the World Cup. Yeah.

[01:00:25] But I feel like you probably have something going on with your body if you're stroking out, if you're dying after 48 hours of being awake. I don't think it's the healthiest way to live. But I imagine there's some underlying pre-existing condition. Maybe you didn't even know about that. Yeah, probably. Was triggered by whatever change happened here. Because I don't know. I've never, I don't think I've ever been awake for a full two days. And I am not a healthy person. And I have definitely been awake for longer than a day. Yeah.

[01:00:54] Like longer than 24 hours, numerous times. And I haven't, you know, knock on whatever the fuck this IKEA desk is made out of. Yeah. I haven't had any, I didn't stroke out or have any heart attacks on any of those occasions. And that was maybe because I'm sleeping in a fucking bed of cheeseburger wrappers. And I don't know, my body had other issues to address and work on. You're surviving on meat fumes. Yeah. I should mention here, there are actually a couple other soccer and sleep related deaths I'm going to jump into.

[01:01:21] But I guess this is a good point to say that I have fully lost track of when this episode is going to be coming out. But at the time of recording, I just spent the previous 24 hours, I guess a little bit longer of a cycle than that. Not completely sleepless, but I got probably, Felix was having some trouble digesting. He was constipated. He wasn't sleeping. He was eating like every hour as newborns tend to do.

[01:01:48] But I basically went, I think about 27 or 28 hours with probably an hour of sleep in there somewhere, like combined. Like I was getting these like mini little micro naps. So I was writing this episode while experiencing all of that. And maybe it's just because my head was there, but I was starting to notice like I was forgetting words. I was forgetting how things worked and not in like a momentary lapse either in like,

[01:02:15] aha, I'll have to come back to that later kind of way. Not, not, I'm trying to think it wasn't a doorknob. It was something, there was something really stupid that I was like, I couldn't figure out how it worked. It was some kind of latch on one of the baby products. Yeah. And, and I was like, I know that I must know how this works, but I cannot figure it out right now. Wow. So it is, I mean, just a little, a little more than 24 hours and you feel fucked up. I mean, one of the worst feelings I've ever had.

[01:02:44] I remember I stayed up for, it was like during finals or something in college. And I was, it was just so much work that, you know, it's one of those, it was one of those classes or two classes in a row that was like your whole grade kind of relies on the last kind of test type of thing. Yeah. And I remember just staying up all night, like finishing like two huge essays. I mean, it was on top of like three days of studying and all this other crap. And I remember being on the subway, just feeling like cold. Yeah.

[01:03:13] Like physically my body wasn't working. Yeah. Correctly. And like going to that class and just feeling pale. And like, it's felt like my blood moved slowly through my body. That was one of the longest I'd ever, I think that was like over three days. I maybe had three hours of sleep. Yeah. And it was like, holy shit. I was noticing things not working. Yeah.

[01:03:36] Well, another guy who stopped working completely was another Chinese soccer fan during Euro 2012. He spent 11 nights up watching every game of the tournament and died from exhaustion. Now, doctors point out he'd been drinking and smoking and also had a weakened immune system. So there may have been extenuating circumstances there. Chinese hospitals also saw a surge in patients admitted with symptoms of exhaustion during World

[01:04:04] Cups in 2006 and 2010. It's the most popular sport in the world. Well, you know what? This is the most popular podcast in the world. So a message to any of our Chinese fans staying up all week waiting for the next episode to drop. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. And if you're waiting for us to convert anything into, I can't even get subtitles to turn to change the Spanish. Like I don't even, I can't even get the subtitles to like auto generate. So I don't know. I am pumped that you speak English enough to listen to our show every week, but yeah, please go to sleep. Actually.

[01:04:34] Holy shit. Yeah. We could. How much do you think we could expand the audience for this show? If we just put out like a translation in Chinese of each episode, I looked it up and it's so expensive. Oh, okay. I mean, AI and automatic caption is so bad at doing English for us. Right. And it also doesn't know who's speaking and all this other crap. I looked it up and it's like $8 a minute or something to have it translated correctly. Fuck. So what would that be per episode? You know, we do two hour episodes.

[01:05:02] So that's 120 minutes, eight times 120. I opened up quick time, not calculator because I don't sleep. Almost probably almost $2,000 an episode. Yeah. It's almost $1,000 an episode. And that's not even for like, that wasn't even looking up a language like Mandarin or Cantonese. That was looking up like a romantic language. Like that's similar. And right. And I get it. If you need like real people working on that and doing real translation, they absolutely should be paid. But it's, we don't have that in the budget. Sorry, China.

[01:05:29] Well, look, if anyone out there works for the CIA and wants us to slip encoded messages into this podcast in Chinese, hit us up. If you can help us, if you can help us double our Patreon intake, we're for sale. Sure, sure. That's thank you, right? I don't know. I only know it from the rush hour bloopers. Yeah, that's a fun character. A guy who learned Chinese from the rush hour bloopers. Remember bloopers? Yeah. God, what a society we used to have. Yeah, we used to be a country.

[01:05:59] We used to be a country. By 72 hours without sleep, hallucinations begin. Some people see shadows, movement, maybe simple dots or light spots. You'll experience increased light sensitivity. Everything will appear too bright and sounds will become louder. This I love. I might write a movie about this. Truckers call this seeing the black dog. And when they see shadowy figures appearing on the road, they know it's time to pull over. Yeah. I went a little deeper on this because it sounds so creepy.

[01:06:28] And it seems like it was basically a rumor or urban legend or maybe even just more of like a saying that circulated over CB radios back in the day when trucker speed was maybe a little more prevalent. But the story is just a simple morality tale that if you got too greedy and rode too hard, you'd see the black dog and he would come to take everything away from you. Well, it's A, it's interesting. B, it's like trucker gremlins or whatever. Yeah. Because that was, you know, the pilots in World War II. Yeah. Oh, goblins or it was gremlins.

[01:06:58] Gremlins. Yeah. And also, I mean, the trucking industry is so fucked right now. But in terms of like how you're paid, it's not like time based or whatever. But, you know, there was a thing called West Coast Turnarounds, which were like little black pills that kept you up for just kept you up. Yeah. And there was a, was it Jim Croce? Jim Croce used to be a truck driver. And he, so he used to write a lot of songs about truck drivers. And he would talk about West Coast Turnarounds. And he would talk about these little black pills.

[01:07:26] And it's one of my favorite quotes because he's, and I'm paraphrasing, but he's like, it's for when you need to do twice as much in half the time. Which doesn't even make a ton of sense or any sense. But it's just about like, yeah, when you're not sleeping, you're just doing that haul. You know, you have to go to fucking California and back or vice versa. Yeah. Truck drivers. I mean, they have all the best stories, right? They've seen UFOs. They're out on the road when no one else is. They've, you know, Large Marge was literally a ghost. So. I didn't know that. Large Marge? About Large Marge.

[01:07:55] Well, Large Marge is from Pee Wee. No. Oh, oh, oh, oh. She's a truck driver that picks him up. Yeah. I mean, I bet there's probably a lot of great stories. I've had a couple of different ideas for TV shows and movies centered around truck drivers. And I always get pushed back because it's an expensive proposition doing stuff that takes place kind of on the road. Yeah. But I feel like also every idea I've had about truck drivers, I've talked to my brother

[01:08:25] about this. My brother drives trucks. And it's like, I kind of don't want to do anything in the truck space unless it's a period piece. Yeah. Because CB doesn't really exist anymore. Like every time we go on these long hauls, it's like you might hear someone chirp up once or twice on the whole drive. So I like the CB culture and stuff. It's a lot more fun in the truck community when. So if you go back to like a fucking Smokey and the Bandit and stuff era, like that's just more fun. Yeah. Than a modern day trucking movie. Well, you know my action epic I want to write about truckers. Hard drive?

[01:08:54] No, but I have a I want to write an action epic slash horror movie called Ghost Road Truckers, which is ice road truckers like the show. But it's about doing the most haunted highways that people don't take those routes because it's like it's too spooky. You absolutely should write that. Well, I'd already done it as an ETW sketch, but I guess I'll start the feature version tomorrow. I'll tell you about hard drive later. Yeah. Anyway, at 100 hours with no sleep or about four days with no sleep, lack of cognitive function

[01:09:20] becomes severe and you'll experience profound confusion and disorientation. Major hallucinations with complex imagery and false sensory experiences will occur. Paranoia develops. Your brain will stop separating fact from fiction and the urge to sleep will be greater than the urge to eat. And as sleep deprivation extends beyond 200 hours, this is where the records start to come in. So there's various cases. Peter Tripp has one of the smallest records of 201 hours without sleep.

[01:09:50] That was beaten by Tom Rounds who had 260 hours without sleep. Randy Gardner hit 264. Betty Wright hit 266. Betty White? Betty Wright. Oh my God. I thought the actress Betty White and she did it at 86 or whatever. It's crazy. Yeah, probably. 276 hours was the record set by Toimi Soini and 499 hours was clocked by Maureen Weston in a rocking chair contest. Oh my God.

[01:10:20] Yeah. When it's like a hand on a hard body situation. Literally. Yes. One of the most famous of these cases is actually that first one, the shortest record set by New York radio DJ Peter Tripp. And it's famous because he made this attempt very publicly. So in 1959, he was 32 years old and he was a popular radio personality who decided to stay awake for eight days and nights as part of a publicity stunt in order to raise money for charity.

[01:10:46] And at the time, it was the most daring sleep deprivation ever attempted. So they asked a bunch of researchers and physicians what the dangers would be. And basically, everybody told him, just don't do it. Don't do this. This is a bad idea. But he was determined. So on a cold January morning, he placed himself in a glass booth in the middle of Times Square so that he could be observed by onlookers and scientists alike. Do you have a place to take a pee and shit and stuff? Uh, that's a good question. He must have. It must have been an opaque section.

[01:11:16] Oh, yeah. No, he did. He could use. I didn't put it in here. But in the research, there was mention of how one of the ways that the observers who were making sure that he stayed awake thought that he was trying to sneak away to sleep was he kept asking to go to the bathroom without them. And they were like, no, no, no. You're going to try to go sleep in the bathroom. Yeah. So there must have been a bathroom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. After three days, Tripp began laughing hysterically at nothing at all. He also became confused, upset, and paranoid.

[01:11:46] He hallucinated. And at first, it was just simple things like he saw the patterned cobweb or cobwebs patterned on people's faces. He saw what he thought were insects, but were really just specks of paint on the table. But he soon started having more intense hallucinations. And the scientists monitoring him noticed that his hallucinations grew more intense around every 90 minutes or so, which suggested to them that his body was entering some sort of waking REM cycle.

[01:12:15] He famously saw mice and kittens scurrying around the room. He saw spiders in his shoes, and he saw flames bursting from desk drawers. By the end of this sleepless stunt, Tripp actually became psychotic and paranoid. He was rummaging through drawers looking for non-existent money. He then accused the doctors of trying to poison him. He then thought they were conspiring to imprison him. And he followed that claim up with a claim that he was not Peter Tripp at all, but actually an imposter.

[01:12:45] He was not the real Peter Tripp. I mean, he has a perfect name for this. Like, he was having a bad trip. Yeah, yeah, yeah. By the end of eight days, nothing made sense to him. He did make it the full eight days, and he seemed to recover pretty quickly after a good night's sleep. But his friends and family claim he was never the same. He was more irritable, moody, depressed. He fought with his boss. He got involved in the famous radio payola scandal. He was married and divorced multiple times.

[01:13:12] All of which sound not all that unusual for a radio DJ in the 1960s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, sure. Maybe it had something to do with his sleep stunt. If I stayed awake for eight days, I would use that as an excuse for everything I did in my life that wasn't great. I'd be like, oh, I was sorry about that. I stayed up eight days once, so now I thought you could steal. Yeah, I walked in. I just drove the car off the lot. I, you know, it's that pesky sleep deprivation.

[01:13:42] I mean, it's so funny. This guy's whole, you know, descent into madness and him seeing like bugs, which, you know, we talked about in Hat Man, you know, you see snakes, you see bugs. And it's interesting that it's always bugs. It's always bugs, which is, I think I talked about it in the Hat Man episode. It's like one of my favorite Simpsons signs is the Springfield Psychiatric Center sign, because the subtitle of the sign is because there may not be bugs on you. Yeah. So Tripp's record was then beat by another really kind of interesting figure, Randy Gardner.

[01:14:11] You'd have to be interesting if you were like, hey, I heard about all the shit that happened to that guy over eight days. I'd love to try that too. Well, what's really what's kind of interesting about Randy is that he was pretty extremely normal, but he was also only 17 years old. Oh, wow. He's like a Mr. Beast. Yeah, kind of. That was how he got to start, right? It was an endurance thing. Like his like first video that went viral before he became all this. I want to say was and I don't follow him or anything, but I heard him in an interview

[01:14:39] where he like counted from zero to 100,000 or something all without a break. And it's people just like were watching to see if he'll die. Mr. Beast. Because he was like losing his mind. Mr. Beast was like very autistically trying to figure out the exact. Oh, this guy isn't. Well, I was saying that Mr. Beast was young. He did an endurance thing. Sure. That's all I'm saying. And I'm surprised, honestly, in terms of people like Mr. Beast or people who just hands

[01:15:06] on a hard body, just people who know that endurance competitions sell. How many hot dogs can you eat? How long can I stay awake? How long can you keep your fucking hand on a thing? Like, look at what's his name? Blaine. David Blaine. The magician who at this point mainly just does endurance things. Right. Like I was surprised that his name wasn't on the list you gave. Well, Randy Gardner did this for the opposite of fame, money or attention. Randy was a little nerd and he was determined to make a splash in the 10th annual Greater San

[01:15:35] Diego Science Fair. That is fame and attention. He wanted to make a splash. He wanted to be recognized by the Science Fair Committee. I don't know what he's talking about. Sure. It all comes back to I'm going to do an endurance thing. No one does an endurance thing and doesn't tell anyone about it. He was researching for potential topics and he heard about a radio DJ in Honolulu who avoided sleep for 260 hours. So Gardner and his two friends, Bruce McAllister and Joe Marciano set out to beat this record

[01:16:01] over their winter break from school from December 1963 to January 1964. Randy lost the coin toss to determine who would undertake the feat and he became the test subject who would deprive himself of sleep with his friends taking turns monitoring his mental and physical reaction times as well as making sure that Gardner didn't fall asleep. Three days into sleeplessness, Gardner said he experienced nausea and had trouble remembering things.

[01:16:26] Speaking to NPR in 2017, Gardner said, I was really nauseous. And this went on for just about the rest of the experiment. And it just kept going downhill. I mean, it was crazy where you couldn't remember things. It was almost like an early Alzheimer's thing brought on by lack of sleep. But nonetheless, Gardner stayed awake. The news made its way to Stanford, California, where a young Stanford sleep researcher with

[01:16:49] the comic book villain name of William C. Dement or Dr. Dement was so intrigued that he drove to San Diego to meet Randy Gardner. Both Dr. Dement and Gardner reported that he suffered no physical ailments from his sleep deprivation, even beating Dr. Dement at pinball multiple times. Well, he's 17. He's going to be better at video games, essentially. He's going to be better at all arcade things than an old doctor would be.

[01:17:17] By the end of all this, Gardner reported that he had trouble remembering things. He got extremely irritable by the end of the experiment. But after sleeping for 14 hours, he returned to normal. And it should be mentioned, he did win the science fair. Oh, good. Thank God. The kid who painted some styrofoam balls and was like, here's our planets. I know. Yeah, he should definitely lose to the kid who stayed up for 300 days. Randy Gardner created two supervillains during this process. Dr. Dement and the kid that fumed about this for the rest of his life.

[01:17:47] Who lost to him? Yeah. His model of the universe, his styrofoam model of the solar system got second place. Now he has to take out the Incredibles. Yeah. But there was a price to pay. In 2007, Randy Gardner suddenly lost the ability to sleep. He said, I couldn't sleep. I would lay in bed for five, six hours, sleep maybe 15 minutes and wake up again. I was a basket case. Oh, what? It's unclear what triggered this condition.

[01:18:14] But Randy says he sees it as some kind of karmic payback for his science experiment 60 years ago. I don't even know. I don't know. That doesn't even track for me. Like sleep doesn't care. Well, it's not like you ignored me once. So you don't get me anymore. I think he's concerned that maybe- He might be talking about a thing we don't know about. Like it's karma for like maybe he killed someone or something. And he's like, oh, this is for the- I ran a man over because I hadn't slept for four days and I shouldn't have been driving.

[01:18:42] No, I think afraid of is that somehow he maybe did some permanent damage to his brain. He might have. By staying up. He might have. I'm sure the brain got dry or something during that time. He got dry brain. He got dry brain. Fuck, dude. I feel like I have dry brain right now. I'll tell you what. You definitely do. I can see the dry brain in your eyes. I bet you the radio host also had a lot of scientists who showed up who were like, this guy's putting on an open lab essentially. Like this is-

[01:19:11] We should all be there to write a paper on it. He did. Yeah. He did. He had a few people show up. Randy Gardner's record has been beaten a few times over at this point, but the Guinness Book of World Records actually stopped keeping track of these attempts in 1996. Too dangerous. Oh, yeah. Over concerns about how dangerous it was. The record holder at the time was Robert McDonald, who went 453 hours, 40 minutes or 18 days, 21 hours and 40 minutes without sleeping. On his farm? No.

[01:19:41] Also as part of a rocking chair competition. Well, that sounds like some farm owner-esque fucking shit. That's true. Yeah. I just wanted to confirm if it was old McDonald. He probably did this whole competition with a straw hanging out of his mouth. Oh, my God. And overalls on. He whittled for nine days. Yeah. So Robert McDonald also didn't suffer any long-lasting effects, though he did report having trouble keeping food down near the end.

[01:20:07] And as far as anyone knows, his record still holds as the longest anyone has gone without sleep, at least on purpose. As we reach the end of the infographic here, it notes that at 768 hours or 32 days without sleep, death becomes a potential outcome. This discovery was made by our old friend Alan Rechstaufen. Oh, no.

[01:20:37] This guy lied about the years. Who performed really, I think, kind of heinous studies on rats in the mid-80s. I mean, look, someone had to do it probably, but they sound kind of horrific. So the rats were kept awake through something known as the disc over water method, which is kind of essentially torture. This method is where the subject, a rat or a pigeon or maybe your worst enemy or whoever is placed on a disc.

[01:21:06] When the subject shows signs of falling asleep, the disc begins to rotate at a few revolutions per minute, and the subject must walk to keep pace with the disc or get carried into a pool of water. Oh, my God. So these poor rats were subjected to this for weeks at a time until they died. And along the way, they would lose weight despite eating more. All right. I'm getting a disc installed. Let's go. Back it up.

[01:21:33] Along the way, these rats would lose weight despite eating more and develop terrible lesions all over their feet, bodies and tails. OK, get the disc out of here. The disc was a bad idea. Until they would expire. By 4,320 hours or six months without sleep, there's almost only one explanation for what a person is going through. It is a rare and horrific genetic disorder that prevents sleep and leads to death called fatal

[01:22:02] familial insomnia or FFI. It's so rare that it affects literally one in a million. And even that is really just a guess because it's only been diagnosed in about 40 families across the entire planet. Now, if you do that math, that doesn't come out to one in a million. So I'm not sure exactly what's 40 divided by 8 billion. I don't know. Let's see. I'm going to give you some weird like equations. I'm going to give you a number. Yeah. 5e to the negative. Yeah.

[01:22:32] Every time I'm trying to do like, how much can this rich guy give us all? It always just gives me like a fucking equation. So technically, FFI is not a sleep disorder. It's prion disease, which is caused by misfolded proteins in the brain that ultimately create holes in the brain tissue. You got to Marie Kondo those fucking proteins, dude. It's kind of a cousin to Alzheimer's disease. We've actually talked about a prion disease before. Kuru disease, which is the laughing disease caused by cannibalism.

[01:23:02] That Hillary Clinton has. Is a prion disease, as is mad cow disease. So in those cases, you're getting that prion disease by eating infected meat. In this case, FFI isn't known to have ever been passed on through meat. It's genetic. It was first identified in 1986 by Italian researchers, Dr. Ilio Lugaresi and Dr. Rossella Midori,

[01:23:28] who were studying a wealthy Venetian family with what seemed to be a bizarre curse. They literally called it. Well, we'll get to it in a second, but they literally called it a curse. For generations, members of this family had been dying mysteriously after developing severe insomnia and hallucinations. The story goes back to a Venetian doctor named Giacomo, who in 1765 suddenly developed insomnia that got worse and worse until he died in a state of total sleep deprivation.

[01:23:55] The family called it the curse of Giacomo, and it continued to kill family members for over 200 years across six generations. Oh my God. Yeah. That one guy that is now forever synonymous in that family is like, whatever he did. Yeah. We all pay for it here. Well, they wanted to find out. So in 1986, they got this Italian medical team. They got the Red Sox to win the World Series so that the curse could be broken. The curse of Bambino is another famous Italian curse. Oh my God, dude.

[01:24:25] And that is what led to FFI forever feeling insecure about how bad at baseball you are. Oh shit. Or forever feeling insignificant, which is what the Red Sox were for a long time. That's even better. Anyway, when the Italian medical team got involved, they performed an autopsy on one of the recently deceased family members and found that person's thalamus, which is the part of your brain that regulates sleep, was riddled with microscopic holes like someone had taken a tiny ice pick to it. Ew.

[01:24:53] Research revealed that this was caused by prions, those misfolded proteins that basically eat holes in your brain. So the researchers describe FFI scientifically as having four stages. Just like sleep itself. Yeah, that's true. So this is the black mirror of sleep itself. Stage one is the first stage of the disease, which is identified by the acute onset of insomnia, which worsens over months and causes psychiatric symptoms such as phobias, paranoia, and panic attacks.

[01:25:23] During this time, patients may report lucid dreaming. Stage two, in the next roughly five-month period, psychiatric symptoms will worsen along with the insomnia worsening, and the patients will begin to experience full complex hallucinations. Stage three is a short stage around three months, which is typically dominated by complete and total insomnia and complete sleep-wake cycle disruptions.

[01:25:48] The final stage, stage four, can last for six months or more and is defined by rapid cognitive decline and dementia. Patients experience an inability to voluntarily move or speak, which is followed by a coma and eventually death. Oh, it sucks. The really terrifying part is that there is no cure. At least rabies or something, which we will definitely do a rabies episode. There's like a one in a gazillion chance they can save you. There's no cure for this. Not a single treatment that works.

[01:26:17] The average survival time after symptoms begin is around 18 months. Some people with a particularly aggressive variant of FFI have died within seven to nine months after symptoms appearing. And one of the worst parts, too, besides the fact that there's nothing that can be done to cure it, is that towards the end, victims appear to fall asleep, but their brain activity shows they're not sleeping. They're in a weird limbo state where they are- Oh, like a coma thing? They're like slipping into weird comas? Kind of.

[01:26:46] They're exhausted beyond- They're fighting Freddy? Yeah. I mean, they're exhausted beyond any human comprehension, but there is no relief. They cannot sleep, even though their bodies have basically shut down. Wow. I would much prefer the, like, Loatian die suddenly in your sleep or whatever. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is kind of the inverse of that. Yeah. That's also, yeah, that was also a genetic disease, although I think that was a heart issue that they figured out eventually. It was like some heart problem where your heart- That's where our memories are stored.

[01:27:16] Yeah. And also, I can't imagine being someone who knows that this is somewhere in your genetic lineage because I guess it would only be a 50-50 shot of having it if one of your parents had it, but I don't know if that gene needs to express or not for you to end up with it. It might just be like a recessive thing that never- Yeah, but man, like, can you imagine being faced with, like, do you want to have a genetic test to find out if this is going to happen to you someday or not? Yeah, but how much do you really know personally?

[01:27:44] Have you, before you had Felix, did you be like, hey, Anna, does your family have a history of X, Y, and Z? Because every time I'm asked at the doctor, like, do you have a family history of heart disease? Do you have a family history of cancer? I'm like, I don't know. I never asked anybody. Just- Yeah. I'm allergic to sulfa. I don't know what to tell you. Well, that question always makes me wonder if how much other people's families talk about things, because that question is asked in a way where it's like, you should know this, and I'm like, I couldn't tell you if my parents have ever been to the doctor.

[01:28:14] Yeah, exactly. So it's like- I assume they have, but- Because, you know, for all we know, like, you know, Anna's like, oh, yeah, I've got, like, a great uncle who stayed awake till he died, you know? Anna does have one, like, uncle with a wild story, but it has nothing to do with staying awake. We did- they recommend before you have a baby to get genetic tests for a panel of however many hundred different genetic diseases. I don't think this is on there, but it did come back that she and I both have some minor

[01:28:44] potential genetic diseases, but unless you both have the same thing, they consider the child to be safe. Gotcha. Like, if you both have the same gene genetic problem, then it's guaranteed to be passed down to your child. That's some Gattaca shit right there, dude. Yeah. I forget what we have, but it was stuff where I was like, oh, okay. Yeah. I didn't- whatever it was, I didn't mind knowing that I have it and immediately forgot. It wasn't something- it wasn't like Huntington's disease or something.

[01:29:11] Oh, no, your kid- it says here you have an 80% chance of big dick energy. That's fine, I guess. Just let it- let the dice roll on that. Sorry, kid, you'll spend the rest of your life wishing you had more sex in high school. Or any, really. Okay, so I want to end this episode by recounting the most famous and well-documented case of FFI. And that is the case of Michael Cork, a music teacher from New Lenox, Illinois, who had just

[01:29:39] celebrated his 40th birthday in 1991 when he was struck by an unusual bout of insomnia. Now, Michael had never had issues sleeping before, and he brushed it off at first, expecting- Smooth criminal. Yeah. He expected this- this smooth motherfucking criminal expected his sleep schedule to return to normal, but it didn't. The sleepless nights kept coming one after another. Over the next few weeks, falling asleep became nearly impossible for Michael, as if some switch

[01:30:06] in his brain had flipped to awake and just gotten stuck there. During the day, he grew increasingly anxious and fatigued, and his body craved rest that he could not get. Friends and family reported that he was on edge, obviously, and he began to experience bouts of panic and irrational fear, which are often early signs of FFI's influence on the brain. After a few months of insomnia, Michael's condition escalated from strange to frightening,

[01:30:33] because at this point, the lack of sleep started causing obvious physical and mental deteriorations. He began to have trouble with coordination. Walking became challenging. He lost his sense of balance. He also started to suffer episodes of confusion and memory loss. It was as if he was aging in fast forward, and his wife noted that he looked years older than he should, which is actually another commonly observed side effect in FFI victims. Worse still were the hallucinations and delusions.

[01:31:02] Without the restorative power of sleep, Michael's mind began to play tricks on him. He experienced moments where he lost touch with reality completely. He saw and heard things that weren't there. His heart would race. He would break into sweats, and that's because perpetual insomnia puts your entire body into overdrive. By the autumn of 1991, he was living a waking, walking nightmare. Sucks. Thoroughly exhausted, but unable to sleep, haunted by visions, and trapped in a body that was failing. Been there, bro.

[01:31:33] Yeah, that last part we're all going to feel someday. His family tried everything. They tried to giving him relaxing teas, which sounds like real weak sauce at this point. I feel like when you're on month five of constant insomnia, an herbal tea is not going to help snap you out of it. And his family's like, it says sleepy time on the box. Yeah, look how cozy the bear looks. Yeah. He should be just like this.

[01:31:58] They tried everything from relaxing teas to over-the-counter sleep aids, but nothing helped. He, at this point, was still teaching, but even that, he had to step down. I'm sure he was asked to step down. It was like, sir, you stood in front of the class for 45 minutes and just said like, you said granola. And we're all just wondering what that means. We've been asking you to retire for three days in a row. You've been a Supreme Court justice too long. Yeah. That is too true.

[01:32:28] Michael's wife and children watched powerless as he drifted further from the Michael they knew. And it was clear that this was not ordinary insomnia. So by the end of 1991, so like six months after the beginning of this, his condition worsened to the point that he couldn't function. He'd stop sleeping entirely. His speech was slow and slurred. He would often just stop mid-sentence and look off into the distance and never come back.

[01:32:53] In late 91, just after Christmas, he finally was admitted to the University of Chicago Hospital as an urgent case. That's like an overnight success after 10 years. You know what I mean? It's like, finally, he's an urgent case. It's like, bro, I've been in an urgent case for six months. Yeah. When doctors took a look at him, they really had no idea what they were looking at. He was awake, but not there. He was vacant. His eyes were open. They were bloodshot.

[01:33:21] His body was trembling from fatigue, but he couldn't sleep. And they had no idea why. They ran a barrage of tests. They initially misdiagnosed him with multiple sclerosis because some of his symptoms mimicked multiple sclerosis. But it clearly was more than that because they'd never seen an MS patient who couldn't sleep. Nothing fit the full range of symptoms until one clue finally steered the doctors in the right direction. They finally- Dr. House? Yeah.

[01:33:50] No, they finally studied his brain. At least studied his brain in a way that was monitored while he was sleeping. And they realized that his brain refused to fall asleep even when it appeared that he was resting. At times, he was observed with his eyes closed. But an EEG brainwave test revealed that his brain never fell into any kind of sleep stage. So the specialists suspected that they might be looking at the first known American case

[01:34:19] of FFI, which had just been discovered in 1986 in Italy a few years prior to this. It's Janine and Ghostbusters being like, we got one! And they hit that buzzer. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then, yeah, all the doctors- Came down a fire pole. Oh, man. That would make the hospital a lot more fun. Yeah. If doctors also came down poles? It would also- The hospital would just be filled with doctors who hurt themselves coming down poles. So there's never any rooms for anybody. It's a super fun place you can't get admitted to. Okay.

[01:34:48] So the doctors started to think this might be FFI. And they tried everything they could at this point, including sedatives and medications. In one extraordinary attempt, they pumped him with enough sedatives to induce a coma. But it didn't actually knock him out. His brain remained awake. So this is a guy who, for all of his many faults, his body has let him down on a tremendous level here. Yes. But luckily never let him down in a way that he needed surgery and needed to be put under.

[01:35:16] Because that wouldn't have worked at all. Yeah, that's true. I don't- That's a good question. I mean, you'd have to ask an anesthesiologist or something how that would have affected his brain. But yeah, I guess it's good that they didn't need to try to operate on him because, yeah, part of him at least would have probably been awake for that. Oh, yeah. Even under- Sorry. It's literally- Sleep deprivation, working wonders. The next thing I had written down here is that even under heavy anesthesia, his EEGs remained

[01:35:46] abnormal, suggesting that he was stuck in a waking dream state. See, there you go. I am your floating disc. Like, even when you think you're about to go to sleep, I interrupt your ass. So you can't fucking- Yeah. You can't fuck- Yeah, you can't actually contain a thought. I did the other night when I was just saying about how I did almost like 26, 28 hours, just a tiny little bit of sleep. I was having moments where I was on the couch with Felix and having these, like, I guess

[01:36:14] maybe they were micro-sleeps, but it was, I would imagine that not you, but that like somebody was at the door or like someone was in the bathroom. And then I'd be like, oh wait, no, they're not. No, they're not. No, no, no. That's a dream. Yeah. By now, Michael had entered the final stage of the illness. He became demented and unresponsive. He didn't recognize anyone around him. He would sometimes mumble or cry out in confusion, but he was often just silent with his eyes wide open in a blank stare.

[01:36:41] Eventually, he lost the ability to speak entirely. He became mute. The disease wrecked havoc on his brain. And there was some footage from his hospital room later shown in a BBC documentary that shows him lying gaunt and motionless, entirely unmoored from the world around him. Around mid-1992, one year after his insomnia began, Michael's journey came to an end. He slipped into a coma and passed away shortly after his 42nd birthday.

[01:37:11] And at that point, he had gone a full six months without a single true night of sleep. And doctors determined that the direct cause of death was neurodegeneration of the thalamus, or in essence, prion disease had burned out the sleep center of his brain. Michael's body couldn't take the relentless strain of prolonged wakefulness and organ failure set in. In medical terms, this would be the inevitable outcome of FFI. And in human terms, I guess we would just call it a merciful death. Yeah.

[01:37:41] So that brings us to the end of our sleep deprivation episode, Ed. Where would you place sleep deprivation on the fear tier? Pretty low. I don't have that disease. I've stayed awake super long periods of time. I'm a night owl. I don't know if that's genetic or what, but I've done a lot of things in my life, including not sleeping or while not sleeping, and I'm still here. So I'm going to have it pretty low. Pretty low. Yeah. I'm not too worried about it wreaking havoc on my life, thank God.

[01:38:10] I am going to put it a little higher than you. As I'm experiencing it, I'm not worried about having this genetic disease. And under no circumstances will I ever be Mr. Beast or a 17-year-old Mr. Gardner who needs the attention enough that I'm willing to stage a David Blaine-esque sleep deprivation stunt. Yeah, smart.

[01:38:33] But as someone who has been going through it, I can tell you sleep deprivation sucks. And I've only done really like the longest I've gone, I've still gotten bits and pieces of sleep. I can't imagine doing more than 24 hours without actually sleeping. I feel like would kill me. I don't think it'll kill you. And the way I don't think it's going to kill you is, and again, you've included the micro naps here, but we've got a million, zillion, bazillion, gajillion years of new parents.

[01:39:02] And you hear about the moms dying during pregnancy. You don't hear about them dying from not sleeping the next couple months. True, true. But I bet there's a lot of people who get in car accidents and stuff. That's why you got to put the baby on board on there. So to let people know to not hit you, it also explains why you hit them. Yep, that's true. That's true. All right, well, let's keep the fear to your short then. Yeah, there's not much to say. Sleep deprivation sucks. We'd love to hear your guys' stories if you want to shoot an email our way.

[01:39:31] I'm sure a lot of emails are going to mention your employers because who else is keeping us awake other than people who are like holding money over us, you know? That's true. That's true. And babies. Holding babies over us? No, babies hold power over us. Shit, and a lot of our bosses, they seem like fucking big babies. Well, the Boss Baby. Oh my God. Remember that movie? Boss Baby. Yeah, Alec Baldwin movie? Boss Baby might be the mascot of this episode. Boss Baby should be.

[01:39:55] There's a really great movie called Bachelor Mother from the 1930s, I want to say. Okay. It's such a fucking great movie. A lady leaves their baby on the steps, not of a fire station, they didn't do that yet, but on the steps of like an orphanage or some sort of like ward of the state institution in the city. Yeah. And this lady leaves her baby just like on the steps. And this other woman sees the lady do it and is like, hey, you can't leave your baby on the street. What the fuck are you doing?

[01:40:24] And the lady's all ashamed and she leaves. She doesn't talk to her. So the new woman, the just random lady on the street, brings the baby into the orphanage to not leave it on the fucking street. Yeah. And it's like, hey, this baby was outside and they don't believe her that it's that she's not the mother because they're like, oh, look, I know you're ashamed. You're saying you're not the mother. People don't want to leave their babies. And then she's like, no, this isn't my baby. But she's going through all these like problems in her life, like she's losing her job and stuff like that.

[01:40:52] And so they then don't believe her and try and find her to give her the baby back and be like, your life has meaning. You can't give up your baby. And she's like, it's not my fucking baby. But then the person who finds out that she has this baby she tried to give up was her boss who feels bad that because she lost her job, she thinks she can't keep her baby. So by keeping the baby, her life gets better. But she's like, this isn't my fucking baby. And it's really fucking great. And so she has to like raise it with this guy who's like a bachelor playboy who wants

[01:41:21] something to do with being a father. And she who has to make believe she's a mother. It's really fucking fun. It's like a really, really good movie. And that baby, Adolf Hitler. Oh, no. Shit, dude. And now, you know, the rest of the story. But anyway, I can't wait for our future sleep episodes. They I mean, I'm genuinely this is a topic I like. I like the science of it. I like the you can get philosophical with it, which is probably why you had people like Aristotle and them being like in Plato being like, oh, sleep. What is it?

[01:41:51] What are we doing? Why do we do it? Where do we go? Where do we go? Where do our brains go? Our souls go? Little little Nemo. But I need to go to take the baby to the doctor. All right. Get the fuck out of here. Good. This has been scared all the time. I'm Ed Ficola. I'm Chris Killari. We'll see you in two weeks. Scared all the time is co-produced by Chris Killari and Ed Ficola. Written by Chris Killari. Edited by Ed Ficola. Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Feifel. Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

[01:42:22] And Mr. Disclaimer is a**. And just a reminder, you can now support the podcast on Supercast and get all kinds of cool shit in return. Depending on the tier you choose, we'll be offering everything from ad-free episodes to producer credits, exclusive access, and exclusive merch. So go sign up for our Supercast and scaredallthetimepodcast.com. Don't worry. All scaredy cats welcome. No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions. Night. We are in this together. Together. Together. Together. Together.

[01:42:51] Together. Together.