a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Sleep!

Episode Date: September 6, 2016

Sleep, productivity, and creatively are intimately linked, for better and for worse. And "we are living under a collective delusion that burnout is the way to succeed," observes Arianna Huffington, author of The Sleep Revolution. Not only does this affect our health and resilience, she argues, but the data shows that even though we are working longer hours than ever, we lose 11 days of productivity a year per employee due to sickness or diminished capacity. (It also hurts our ability to work in teams.) This isn't just a problem in the tech industry, either. BuzzFeed News senior writer Nitasha Tiku observes that "Any business book that's valorizing or diving into the life of a CEO is going to talk about how much he or she sleeps." But sleep isn't just a biological act, it's also a psychological (insomnia, anxiety, TV binge-watching?) as well as a socioeconomic one when you consider who gets to sleep (people higher or lower in the workplace hierarchy, other demographic factors?). And where does tech and the tech industry come in here? In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Huffington and Tiku discuss the hard realities of sleep -- everything from tech and culture to labor and the evolving nature of work.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal, and I'm excited today to have two special guests. We have Natasha Tiku, who is a senior writer covering technology in Silicon Valley for BuzzFeed News. And we have Ariana Huffington, the founder and editor-in-chief of Huffington Post, and the author of a new book called The Sleep Revolution. Welcome, guys. Thank you for having us. Hello. For the A6 and Z podcast, and we talk about technology. It's probably a little jarring for people to wonder why we're talking about sleep.

It's kind of funny because when I see Hacker News threads or Reddit threads or, you know, people who are really into biohacking, one of the topics that comes up a lot is how to, I hate this phrase, but how to hack your sleep. So I want to know, first of all, why sleep? Like, why did you write a book on sleep? I wrote a book on sleep because we are living under a collective delusion that burnout is the way to succeed. I'm sure Natasha is even more aware of it than I am living in. in Silicon Valley, because there is a cult of sleep deprivation and burning the candles at both ends and the mythology of the founder who never sleeps. We are actually ignoring all the latest science that shows unequivocally and conclusively

that sleep deprivation makes us less productive, less creative, degrades all our decision-making. When I realized that, after my own wake-up call of collapsing from sleep deprivation and breaking my cheekbone, my first response was to ask myself, how come an entire culture believe something false? And then if you look through history, that's happened many times, you know, going back all the way to us believing that the earth is flat to the 1960s, when we still thought that smoking was okay, if not glamorous. So it's not as surprising that an entire culture believes something. scientifically false.

What is exciting is that we are now in the middle of a culture shift where people are becoming more aware of the new science, where companies are gradually and slowly changing how they view sleep, hotels and airlines are making changes, and even among people who are struggling to put foot on the table, we see the difference that sleep would make in health and resilience. You know, this, let me just make it very clear, is not a panacea, nor is it a substitute

for major structural and policy changes that have to happen. But it's something that we can do something about right away. I think people would agree sleep is important. I don't think anyone would contest that. Oh, I don't think so. A lot of people would contest that. Really?

A lot of people may pay lip service to it. But in terms of really recognizing it is important, really understanding, the science, that's the biggest hurdle we have to overcome. And I think we have a long way to go. Because once we really recognize the importance, it's much easier to change our habits. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's massive overlap between sleep and the tech industry. You know, it's not just hacker news threads. If you start looking on Quora, you will see all these like Elon Musk fanboys, Peter Thiel fanboys that are all asking, how many hours does Zuck

sleep a night? I mean, sleep is such a huge part of your day. And I think, you know, for people who are competitive and, you know, want to aspire to be like their tech idols, sleep has become symbolic of how efficient somebody is, how smart somebody is, you know, how well they've optimized their life. What do you guys make of this culture of nap pods? Let's agree that naps are a form of sleep, but they're a different form of sleep. I mean, Google has like a ton of those. There was that movie The Intern, and there's this funny scene where he keeps meeting this woman

in a nap pod, which is like a whole other conversation. Anyway, I mean, I personally would. love her bus feed San Francisco to purchase a nap pod and I would take full advantage of it. But at the same time, I think it is very much in line with other tech company perks, which are very luxurious and everybody would love to have them. But at the same time, they're designed to keep you in the office and keep you working. Like, I imagine if you're truly exhausted, if you've pulled an all night or if you've been working all weekend, you probably should go home. Yeah. I just think like half an hour where you're being monitored. But sleep is something we do in private. And it's like an unlimited vacation policy.

Like it's wonderful to have it. But I mean, would you take a five hour nap in your company nap pod? No, exactly. And in fact, I forget to take vacation as well. I would even question like, I mean, I've been thinking about it myself. Do we really forget to take vacation? Or is it that there are subconscious messages that vacation is for people who aren't passionate about their job or aren't committed. And like you will be, you know, kind of move off of the treadmill. of what you're going towards if you take a break. It's like the cult of productivity, and Ariana, I mean, you are the one who referenced this as sort of a cult of the founder, which I find fascinating because a lot of our audience

includes entrepreneurs. And so why do you call it that? And do you think it's a Silicon Valley thing? I mean, is it all across the board? No, I don't think it's just a Silicon Valley thing. We have so many examples now, whether it's Bill Clinton, who said the most important mistakes I made, I made when I was tired, whether it's. It's what we are seeing during the presidential campaign of exhausted politicians.

I think that it's particularly intensified in Silicon Valley. I went to speak to the Stanford Business School, and students there were telling me how sick they get because they've sacrificed sleep, they sacrifice their well-being, and they end up with mono or whooping cough, and it's beginning to dawn on them that they are not actually more productive. And that's really what all these data-driven people are beginning to look at because the data is conclusive that we are working longer hours than ever, but we lose 11 days of productivity a year per employee. Clearly something is wrong here. Either we get sick more often or we show up at work, but it's only like with 40% or 60% of our capacity, so we're not as

productive and creative and also not as good at working in teams, which is increasingly important as practically every company has to work across multiple time zones and offer customer service at all hours, et cetera, et cetera. Building teams requires empathy, requires a lot of qualities which are less available to us when we are exhausted. Ariana in the book did a great job of comparing it to smoking and how cultural norms have changed. I kind of think about it as like the junk science around like low fat. I'm sure you have a better projection of the amount of time it would take, but that data about loss of productivity or, you know, the CDC coming out and saying that sleeplessness is an epidemic might slowly gradually seep into our culture the same way we hate carbohydrates now. Although it's funny because if someone did issue that type of policy change, like, hey, CDC recommendation requires you to sleep, you know, recommends you sleep this many hours. I think people would still want to be like Elon Musk and sleep only however many hours he sleeps or however many hours someone else sleeps. And so I think there's this inherent revolution people feel about sleep. I think that's part of the point here too. It's like regardless of the norm, they're always going to try to undo sleep as a way of being different.

It's not just the tech industry, obviously, like any business book that's valorizing or, like, diving into the life of a CEO is going to talk about how much he or she sleeps. At the same time, Silicon Valley has managed to associate their version of a founder with, like, somebody who will be successful in this, like, fast-paced futuristic world where robots will take our job. So even though their influence has less of a, you know, is newer, I think it is very impactful. There are CEOs like Jeff Bezos, who are coming. out now and saying, I sleep for eight hours. I saw him at a conference the other day and he actually said, and if that means I make fewer decisions, but the decisions I make are 5% better because I'm fully rested and recharged. That's better for Amazon. So we have like people like him, like Satya Natella, the new CEO of Microsoft, like Mark Bertolini, the CEO of

Etna, introduced a plan for Etna employees that asks them if they want to opt in to track their sleep. And if they get seven hours or more, they're given $300. Oh, wow. To pay to sleep. That's amazing. Yes, it's quite, that is exactly. That is amazing. Beyond the actual financial incentive, it's the fact that it sends a message to all, I think it's over 50,000 Edna employees that when they prioritize their sleep, it's not just good for their health. It's good for the health of the bottom line. The Etna example, they're monitoring what you do, but is much more convincing than Jeff Bezos or Satya Nadella, people who are already established. You know, Jeff Bezos is saying this at this stage in his career, even if it was early, you know, from the lower

rungs, if you feel like you're not going to become the next Jeff Bezos, like working on all your off hours is probably one way that culture has told you you can become him. Besides established in terms of hierarchy and progression in the company, it's established in terms of a person's life developmental stages of life. I've noticed that a lot of people who suddenly realize all these things that people have known for ages around the importance of sleep or sleep deprivation or having routine meals because, oh, all of a sudden, you actually have to provide your child nutrition and a balanced meal. So there's a lot of things that happen when people suddenly have these realities. These are things that I think a lot of people who don't,

for example, have children think about. I want to go back to one thing that both of you've kind of touched on, which is this notion of measuring sleep. Do you think that there's a connection between this move towards over-instrumenting our bodies and connecting that to sleep? Because pretty much every major fitness tracker out there has some sort of sleep mode or something related to sleep or their entire apps devoted just to sleep monitoring. Well, sleep monitoring. Like step monitoring or any exercise monitoring can be helpful in terms of helping us see where we are in terms of our sleep compared to our energy level, the next day, makes us more self-aware. But frankly, at some point, we can become self-aware without a wearable device.

I mean, I know when I wake up fully recharged and I know when I wake up and I'm still tired and it is a direct function of how many hours sleep I got. And if you look at the science, it means basically completing all the cycles of sleep. There's a really good metaphor that Professor Roneberg from Munich gave me, which is that when you are doing the laundry, if you take the laundry out of the laundry machine before all the cycles have been completed, you end up with wet and dirty laundry. In the same way, if you wake up before all the cycles of sleep can be completed, You also feel like wet and dirty laundry.

And if tracking that can help you course correct, great. Right. Yeah, I think that's like, you know, kind of a solutionist approach. If you're at the point where you have a, you know, tracking device to monitor your sleep, you're probably in a pretty good position. Also, what happens when you get that information about yourself? I think there's the assumption from the people who build these devices that knowledge will equal behavior modification.

And I don't know. I mean, I always remember this one venture capital dinner that I went to where the guy was so excited about 23 and me, but his wife didn't want to know whether she had a cancer gene because it would just, you know, affect her behavior in a negative way. And I was like, yeah, I think, you know, a lot of people might respond differently to more information. Right. I don't think tracking something immediately equals insight, let alone behavior change. I think what's interesting about it is it also sometimes gives you, tricks you into thinking that you're taking care of the problem. And this might be the solutionistic aspect you reference. friends, Natasha, where you think you're actually solving something, but in reality, you're not. Well, let's then talk more about who cares about sleep, because the thing is, it's not just a bodily thing that we do. As much as we talk about science and data, sleep is a social phenomenon and it's psychological. That includes everything from insomnia being an indication of having anxiety to who gets to sleep. I mean, often the people who are doing the late shifts are people

who have to make ends meet in different ways or have to make certain sacrifices or not just all people who are self-motivated to try to do something because they're believing in the mission of this company. I would love to hear your thoughts on the role of class, gender, other socioeconomic factors.

Well, first of all, I think night shifts are a big problem, and I think as a society, we should be paying people who do night shifts more than who would pay them if they were doing the same work during the day, just based on all.

all the medical understanding of the impact of night shifts, we should make sure that we restrict them. Doing a night shift for 12 hours, for example, has huge consequences, both on the health of the employee and also often if that employee is in any occupation that involves the possibility of getting hurt. So that's something which we really need to pay a lot of attention to. It includes night shifts in hospitals and this still incredibly long hours. residents expected to work despite the changes that have happened. There are a lot of changes that need to happen now that the science is in, and we see categorically, you know, the impact that night shifts and long hours have.

Ariana, you know, the last time we talked to you were not a board member with Uber, although you had partnered with Uber in a drowsy driving campaign. So I would love to hear, you know, what are your feelings about frustrations from Uber drivers If you look at how it's being discussed on uberpeople.net, which is a forum for drivers, you know, they're talking about how because Uber cut their rates, they have to work longer hours. Bills don't, you know, shrink just because the rates shrink. What do you see your role in advocating for this segment of the population that's exhausted and frustrated? And also, what is the drowsy driving campaign?

I've never heard of that. The drowsy driving campaign is a campaign that the Huffington Post launched together with Uber to draw attention to the fact that, But last year alone, there were 8,000 deaths and over 1 million crashes because of drowsy driving. So while the numbers of drunk driving are going down because of greater awareness, the designated driver campaign, numbers around drowsy driving are going up because people still think it's a macho thing to do to power through when you are tired. And in terms of Uber, Natasha, you know, first of all, the majority of Uber drivers are powerful. hard time. And they have other jobs or they drive for other companies. Many are doing it to supplement their income rather than as their primary job. So I think it's a much more systemic

problem, how many hours people work, rather than a problem specific to Uber. But at the same time, Uber does advertise you can make $100,000 a year driving for Uber. There are lots of happy part-time employees and people are constantly questioning, should I leave my job and drive for Uber if it offers this much flexibility and the CEO is going out there saying I can make 100,000. There's 450,000 drivers on the app every month given Uber's influence.

I think, you know, you can't just dismiss it as like a concern for a less of a concern because there are part-time drivers. No, no, no. I'm not. What I'm saying is that there are the factors than Uber that determine how many hours

the majority of drivers are doing. What else are they doing in their lives? And how else are they making a living? But your point of increasing the prioritization of avoiding burnout is well taken. And certainly in my conversations with Travis, he's very clear of what, you know, he calls, you know, the red line and not getting close to that red line where you're basically terrible things can happen, whether on the road decisions, all the negative unintended consequences of burnout. A red line for his own employees or for the drivers or for passengers. This is not a problem that's confined to Uber. This is a broader shift that we're talking about, that the nature of work is evolving.

And the argument people make is that, you know, post-industrial revolution that we now have a new type of capitalism emerging where work might not be captive to a single company and where you might actually now share work across multiple jobs, something that a lot of people have been doing for many years who have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. But now is becoming sort of this choice-based economy as well. As the workplace evolves, we need to think more broadly about how to create these social safety nets for everybody in those systems. And sleep is a first indicator of something being off. And so I would love to hear your thoughts on how do you resolve this tension when someone says, I want to make the choice? I'm thinking of immigrant families, you know, people including

my own extended family, who would work multiple jobs in their first 10 years. in this country in order to buy a house. Well, I think, you know, you're right to say Uber is just a very small part of it. I think it's become symbolic. But, you know, the number of contractors and people who have like a different kind of structure as a, you know, somewhere between an employee and a contractor has grown, I think, like 9.4 million in the past decade. And oftentimes it's not a choice because that also correlates to unemployment levels. Right. So, you know, I think, yes, we can't blame Uber.

Uber, but it's tied up right in the middle of this, especially considering the lawsuits for misclassifying employees as contractors when they should be workers. And I know that like legislators are looking into this. And it's a super tricky problem because, you know, social insurance and social safety net has always been tied to the employer. That's where you get your health insurance. That's where you get your 401k. The benefits of living in civil society, how do you measure flexibility, which some people do appreciate with the total loss of those protections. That's the question of our times. We discussed in a lot of detail in our podcast with NYU Professor Arun Sinderarajan. He shared an economics take on the sharing economy where he talked

a lot about what the data say as well as what for many people are the benefits of a more flexible what people are calling gig economy. And that's really what's changing. That's even beyond the gig economy. You have millennials increasingly not interested in working for one company and having the safety. That comes from that. People now are going to have multiple jobs in a lifetime. So we need to completely rethink where the social safety net is coming from. I would argue there even was a real social safety net in the first place, because with a few exceptions of people who can stay in companies for 30 years where you're pretty much guaranteed a job and you're not going to get aged out or pushed out through political changes and a very

few government jobs where you actually get pensions. It's been quite a while since people are actually getting a lot of security from a single institution. But you're right, there are certainly things that are associated with being a full-time employee in the sense of health insurance and benefits. The argument that I would make here is that it is still early days. That's not to at all diminish the concerns and the realities of things that need to be addressed. But there are, it's, it's like the early days of, you know, the industrial revolution. Like as people went off farms and came into companies, it totally changed social structures. And I think we're in another moment like that. That's very abstract, I know. I'd love to hear more thoughts from you guys on what do people

actually do? Because it's not enough to just say, like, okay, the social safety is not there. Now what do we do moving forward? I wouldn't say that's early days. There are many socioeconomic factors that have led to this situation. This really great article in the Economist Lifestyle magazine earlier this year about the Keynesian dream talks about why do we work so hard? It's very interesting. Back in the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes predicted that society would be so rich that we'd only have to work like 10 or 15 hours a week. And at the time like data totally supported this, hourly wagers were rising, the working week was shrinking. He believed in technology's power to make everybody's life easier. And then like with globalization and removing labor restrictions and losing bargaining power, like the income gains went to the top and less skilled workers had to accept like shrinking pay to stay at work.

I think loss of collective bargaining power and income inequality is how we arrived. I mean, you know, not totally, but it was really eye-opening to hear that point of view. I've fully bought into the idea subconsciously or not that work is life and, you know, work. My productivity is what makes me worthwhile in my contribution to society. So the idea that, you know, we were all at some point working towards less hours a week so that we could have leisure time to pursue, you know, what makes life meaningful was a real surprise. Well, that's actually a really important point, which goes back to what we value. Increasingly, when we only value money and status, we are seeing ourselves as completely

identified with our work, and that has huge consequences on every aspect of our life, including ultimately our happiness and what meaning we find in life. Listen, there are an enormous amount of policy changes, of shifts at the political and economic level that have to happen, and I'm acknowledging that in the sleep revolution. What the sleep revolution is about is one thing. It's not about everything. It's the fact that we need to reprioritize sleep as something non-negotiable in our lives, wherever we are, whether we are struggling to put food on the table or whether we are on top of the world managing multiple demands on our time. I had done a clinic in Harlem. What was stunning was there were people who thought

that the fact that they slept for four hours and they were exhausted was their fault because they thought there were all these Wall Street high flyers who could sleep four hours and conquer the world. And as a result, they did not prioritize sleep. There was a 32-year-old woman who was overweight with type 2 diabetes, with two jobs as a pastry chef and a nanny. And she said to me, I come home at night, and this is my time to watch my shows. And she would fall asleep with the TV on. The TV would wake her up at some point. She couldn't go back to sleep. She would go to the kitchen and eat something sweet. And then she would wake her. up exhausted. That's the kind of issue cycle that can be corrected right now, even before we

have successfully addressed a lot of the other problems that have been discussing. That example, to be honest, is frustrating to me because it seems like an example of a woman making poor choices and like kind of has herself to blame. I think that's partly like the symptoms and not the causes, you know, like why is she so stressed? I mean, because it's sort of like why is she so stressed out that she's binging. What are the food choices that she makes? I do agree with you. It does need to be a total cultural shift, but that example, I don't think, is what we should be concerned about. I think we should be concerned to the extent that we can help people make better choices that are available to them right now. I mean, that woman has begun to change her life, has lost weight,

is much healthier. I don't think these are things to be minimized. Also, the harder our lives are, the more we need resilience. These things are very interconnected, and I don't think we can give up personal responsibility for our choices, even while at the same time continuing to make significant changes as we need to do at the collective level. We obviously can't minimize the importance of choice and individual accountability in any of this. We can't also ignore broader structural factors at play. You're right.

Like this should not be minimized at all. And in fact, like I have much more in common with this woman and her example. I can relate to it. It's like what changes can you make from the vantage point that you're in. And I think that's what's frustrating about the sleep revolution or even about lean in. It's not disagreeing with any of the recommendations that are made. It's just putting forth only examples where its personal choice feels frustrating. When I've tried to lean in, I've gotten punished for it. You know, so somebody needs to tell them. managers to listen to them. From the bottom rungs, you want these changes to be supported by your employers and your legislators and leadership and culture. Changes on a much larger scale are needed, whether they're at the corporate level, at the national level. I think it's very important to stress, but people at every demographic level can make better choices about their lives, if they have the awareness, which at the moment goes contrary to the collective sleep delusion, that's really what the book is doing. It's not trying to address all the problems. I don't believe that one book needs to solve everything. And I also think that it's really important

to have that out there. Lean in as a great example. When the book first came out, I was incredibly frustrated by the concept of it because my whole reaction was, excuse my language, but why the fuck do I have to lean in? Why can't the rest of the world lean into how I am already? I don't need to change who I am. I started off not liking the book, but one of the things that I also realized when I moved into a different sphere was,

wait, there are things that I can do that this helps me do, even though I don't agree with all of it. And I don't mean to be either or like, oh, it's just, there's a happy middle. I don't think that the solution is to then not write those books. I think part of the solution here then is that when that awareness comes in with leadership,

at institutions, and that includes Bezos, then people have to find a way of concretely operationalizing that. That's what the, at an example, is so compelling. The question for me is who addresses that and how? What are some of the concrete things that we can do about it?

Ariana, like you are campaigning a lot about wellness and health and sleep. How do you see your role as an Uber board member? Well, I have, I'm going to have my first board meeting at the end of July, and I look forward to delving into the issues that you mentioned. In the meantime, Travis and I have had a lot of conversations about sleep.

His views of sleep have changed. Like many of the founders, as we talked earlier, he too believed that being perpetually exhausted was a badge of honor and a sign of being incredibly passionate about his startups, many of which failed. And he has finally recognized that when he's operating on all cylinders, when he has actually taken the time to sleep and recharge, he makes better decisions. Okay, you guys, well, that's all we have time for. Thank you so much for taking the time. And for those of you that would like to learn more, you can read Ariana's book, The Sleep

Revolution, as well as Natasha's article in BuzzFeed, where she goes into more detail with more of her perspectives. Thank you, everyone, for joining. Thank you both so much. That was really great. Thank you. Thanks, guys.