I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University

of California Berkeley, director of the Center for Human Sleep Science and Host of the

Matt Walker podcast.

Dr. Matthew Walker, welcome to the Rubin Report.

Pleasure to be with you Dave, thanks for having me.

Well I'm thrilled that we're doing this because as you know we're airing this in August,

but right now it's the last couple days of July.

I am on my 30-day digital and really societal sabbatical and I'm going to work on a lot

of things, diet, exercise, digital detox, but also work on some sleep stuff and that is

your area of expertise.

So I guess before I ask you anything else, how does one become curious and enamored

and eventually live their life to tell people about sleep of all things?

Yeah, I think myself like many of my colleagues, we are all accidental sleep researchers.

You know, I don't think when we were kids and you were going around the classroom and

the teacher was saying, you know, what would you like to be when you grow up?

No one was shooting up the hand and saying, I'd really love to be a sleep researcher.

So I fell into it by accident when I was doing my PhD.

I was studying different types of dementia and trying to diagnose them very early on.

Failing miserably and I realized I should be measuring my patients when they were asleep

rather than when they were awake to measure their brainwave activity.

Started doing that, got some great results and realized that was 20 years ago, realized

that at the time no one could answer a very simple question, why do we sleep?

...