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 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 we leave 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.

...