a16z Podcast: Sleep!

Arianna Huffington and Nitasha Tiku Posted 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.

About the Contributors

Arianna Huffington

Nitasha Tiku

The a16z Show

The a16z Show discusses the most important ideas within technology with the people building it. Each episode aims to put listeners ahead of the curve, covering topics like AI, energy, genomics, space, and more.

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