Tracy Merda: Welcome to the Future Tech Podcast in Good night’s sleep project Podcast. Today, I have Richard Jacobs, Founder of the good night sleep project in AI-powered custom-tailored pillow that I as myself has had the opportunity to try and I can say it is a real game-changer when it comes to sleep. Welcome, Richard. How are you doing?

Richard Jacobs: Good! Sleeping better these days.

Tracy Merda: Me Too! Well, I wanted to talk to you today about how this $197 investment can fix a huge thousand dollars sleep problem that millions of Americans and people around the world have. Why don’t you start to tell me a little bit about what first got you interested in getting to the bottom of your own sleep issues? How serious were the problems that you were facing?

Richard Jacobs: You know, I’ve had problems with sleep so I don’t know, probably 20 years, maybe less than 15, 20 years, I snore my wife would tell me I snore and then sometimes she just wasn’t able to sleep in the bed that’s snore her awake.

I would wake up tired quite a bit, I started waking up some nights, three and four and five times on a good night. Sometimes it would be 10 on a bad night. Yeah. I was stuffed up a lot. Just the sleep wasn’t good and there were times I dreaded going to sleep cause I felt unless I lay in bed eight, nine hours, I’m just not going to feel good. And even then it might not feel good, just sleep problems, one after another after another. Sometimes I would eat too close to bed and I wake up and you’re gonna have to pee or get indigestion while I slept I just didn’t know much about sleep and had poor sleep for a long time and I just got set up with it and I had some other health issues and they started looking at my entire health, what’s going on with every aspect of it.

So one day I’m lying there talking to my wife and you know this pillow I’m using, it’s just flattening out. It’s really annoying me and this side, I don’t know what to do and I said what they need to do is they need to have like a custom sickness pillow that suits you. Exactly. You’re not just large or small is that he says, well why don’t you go do something about it? Is that right? I will and cause I had a bit of free time to work on stuff, so I decided that’s what I’m going to do is make such a pillow that’s where all this came from.

Tracy Merda: Well if anyone, I mean like myself and probably you before the idea struck you, but we all just kind of put up with bad sleep. I mean, why do you think that is? You know, whether it’s us in the US or it’s a global thing I mean I think we’ve all kind of just come to accept like I sleep crappy, but at least I sleep kind of thing.

Richard Jacobs: I think there’s a bunch of reasons I think sleeps and afterthought for a lot of people like yeah, everyone knows obviously they need to sleep but they don’t want to and they don’t sit there thinking, all right, I gonna make sure I get to bed by this time I want to do this and that and I want to make sure I have a good sleep and you know I don’t think people think like that. I think you’re busy with life and work and family and all the others, evil necessity they call it I guess. So there’s not a lot of thought into it and it’s not easy. You know, when you’re asleep, you’re out of it, and you’re unconscious. So things that are going on, you may not be aware of what’s happening with you. You know just like if someone busted in the room and asks you questions.

You know, you’re just out of it, you’re sleeping. We trying to sleep. So if you’re having a problem, you’re not going to be aware. Like if you snore, most people that snore don’t know they snore. It’s someone else telling them, hey, you’re snoring really or you’ll wake up tired and it takes you a while to get going, but you’re not thinking why what happened? I’ve seen like in order to fix your sleep, you really get to think about it. You have to think about what’s going on, what are all the potential things that are affecting. It just seems like again that’s a place that’s had in my life so recently and I think for a lot of people, they probably feel the same way about it.

Tracy Merda: I’d say I’ve read your sleep book and I learned a lot from it about what seemed better actions. I mean, it seems like there are so many components that we don’t think about until your book broke it down for me. Tell the listeners a little bit about what does sleeping better mean rather than just closing your eyes and maybe you get five, six hours of sleep, but not necessarily the quality.

Richard Jacobs: The whole end goal, the good thing is pretty much everybody has had a really great night’s sleep at least a few times now. They remember that feeling. They wake up quickly, and they’re alert right away. They have a lot of energy, they have a great day. They can think clearly everyone’s had that experience, maybe not nearly as much as they should, but they’ve had it. And then everyone’s had formals experiences of dreading waking up or waking up and just be like, ugh and hitting the snooze button 10 times and just dragging yourself through the day and just feeling irritable and tired and foggy and all that. So thank God again everyone’s had both of these kinds of experiences. So the whole end goal is seven nights a week, wouldn’t it be nice if every night or every day you could wake up and feel great, you could say, I had a great sleep last night.

That may not be attainable, but if four of the seven nights each week you wake up like ugh we can get that down to two or to one and you get six good days or you know, five good days. Well, not every single night be the greatest ever, but we could make big changes in people’s lives if we figure out how to sleep better and again encompasses tons of factors. But that’s like the overarching goal is just a better quality of life cause you know, I’ve learned if you feel better, obviously, it impacts your health, but you treat the people around you better, you have better relationships. You’re not a jerk to your husband or wife or kids or coworkers or in life is just better in every way when you feel good you have better relationships. When you don’t feel good you have bad relationships with everyone around you and a lot of tons.

Tracy Merda: Even to my one-year-old, it gets good sleep. She’s nice. If not, she’s mean just across the board. We all need it.

Richard Jacobs: Yeah! Culturally there’s a lot behind sleep too. I keep very late hours and whenever I tell people they go, oh my God. Really? You know, like as if it’s a bad thing. And you know, there’s the early bird gets the worm, old the adage, the old saying I know from personal experience, if you wake up late, people think you’re lazy, you’ll think something’s wrong with you. People that wake up early are prized for waking up early and they’re quote-unquote better and they just see it’s pervasive throughout society. So for certain people their clock may be running later, they’re night owls, they’re super night, late-night hours, you know there are different phenotypes they call them so there’s all this pressure from society on what you’re supposed to do and that may not correspond with you biologically. It may not correspond with your schedule that weighing on everyone too, which affects sleep

Tracy Merda: But seems obvious! Obviously, most of us sleep on pillows, we use payloads. But how did you really discover the importance of having an AI customized pillow and how that will drastically, should people sleep well at once?

Richard Jacobs: Well I started reading books about sleep cause I just wanted to address that area of my health and I started interviewing people, sleep professionals that’s just my way of doing stuff. So I’ve interviewed probably like 120 different scientists, sleep people by now and read a whole bunch of books and then I did some self-experimentation. I got blackout curtains so my room is darker and since they wake up later in the morning, the sunlight would come in and wake me up early. Now it doesn’t do that. I would take Melatonin and I tried that out that would help me sleep I didn’t try sleeping pills because when I read about them they’re just bad all around you don’t really sleep better. I’ve tried a weighted blanket. I have gotten a new mattress numerous times over the past few years.

I’ve used the humidifier because I was thirsty while I sleep. I use breathe right nasal strips to open my nose up. If I was stuffed up and I use the head pillow, I would hug a pillow. I put a pillow between my knees and my outstretched arm. I rest that on a pillow. I learned about all these ways that would put pressure on my body so that it’s not like I woke up and I said, oh, the pillows answers. I mean I’ve tried a lot of different things to sleep better and a lot of them did help. More and more and more things improved and I said I want to keep going with it. So, as I said, my memory had gotten this new pillow and I was laying on it within probably two weeks It got soft and it wasn’t holding my head up and I realized I would lay there and just my head neck didn’t feel right and I was waking up with headaches and go to the chiropractor and all that and I said now I’ve got to solve this problem.

Everything else is better, but now the fricking pillow is too low and I’m a big person. I got pretty wide shoulders. Everyone tells me that. So I looked online and you know, like on Amazon and stuff there was king and queen and regular pillows. There are firms and non-firm. I see nothing that tells me like, okay, based on your shoulder with this is what you should get if you know nothing about that and then I go to the store like Walmart or target or bed bath and beyond and again it’s the same thing. There are pillows, you can feel them all. This one’s extra firm. I don’t know if this is gonna work for me so I went through like 20 different pillows and some of them would work for a day or so and then not work and it was just a problem with the problems. So that’s why I came to this realization like I wear prescription eyeglasses. Why isn’t there a prescription pillow based on my measurements? So that’s where this came from.

Tracy Merda: Let’s talk about how it actually comes to be. I’m someone who’s got sleep problems, I needed custom, and how do you go about making miles?

Richard Jacobs: Yeah! So this is when I started thinking I want a customized pillow I thought I gotta make this as easy as possible for people. Otherwise, they’re never going to do it so I can’t go to their house and sit there with tape and measure them and you know, asking them to go somewhere and be measured and that sure, that’ll probably work. But everyone uses apps nowadays and the phone for everything. So what if we can take a picture of a person and we can use machine vision and AI to extract the measurement that way. So I worked with some programmers and I had them design an app and we took like 50 different measurements of a person, how tall their head is, how wide their face is there next with you know, the height of their shoulders, the width of their shoulders, all these measurements from the front and from the side and all that and I don’t know this app again where you can have a picture taken of you and the app itself and the software extracts all these measurements and calculates it.

And then I had a design, the pillow itself. How do we, is it just a regular pillow? No, it’s so good. I had a design in all these features which I can go into to make sure the pillow keeps its shape for a long time. You know, how do people lay when they lay on their side? Most people don’t think about that. You actually lay on your arm, your neck wrestling, your arm and your headrest on the pillow and your arm is either outstretched or kind curl on you and then your legs, your knees may be bent. What happens when you sleep on your side, you roll forward. How do you stop the person from doing that? And if they do that, what happens to their faces? So there’s a lot, you know, I had pictures taken of dozens of volunteers laying there.

I said lay how you normally lay like on your back or your side. We took pictures and I looked at them and I said, I realize people lay like that. And all this parlayed into not only had to take the measurement but had to extract the numbers again using AI software and then what to do about it. How had to make a pillow that was custom to that person’s physical measurements. That’s the overall process I went through.

Tracy Merda: Well I know you and I talked and been right down to the materials used. Everything was hand-selected by you tested and approved and kind of gone through that process all components kind of work together. Tell us a little bit about, you know, all of those customized pieces.

Richard Jacobs: You know, the good thing is I’m kind of an outlier. I do like destroy stuff pretty heavy. So I literally like crushed my bed. My bed will never last five years or two years, no way it gets crushed like within six months or a year. The same thing with pillows, I get very hot when I sleep so all of these things boiled in, again, I snore, I’m heavier I’m not like the skinniest person. So everything about the pillow first was catered to me again, it had to be the right height. So I had to figure out, my next level, should it be slightly inclined, declined, etc. It had to keep me cool because I was getting very hot with materials. When I sleep, I would relax to my face and kind of roll forward. How do I prevent that? So I don’t smother in the pillow or my neck doesn’t get kinked and my snoring gets worse etc.

So some of the design elements I noticed were that the human head weighs about 10 pounds. So if you have a flat pillow and you lay on it, the weight of your head will smash that pillow in and it won’t be leveling any more. So this pillow is more of a wedge shape. You sleep on the thicker side and it’s designed like that because then when you lay on it, the weight of your head now gives you a flat profile to lay on. So that was one innovation. I wanted to make sure the pillow didn’t go soft too soon. So we developed a model that sidewalls and I had to choose the right filler and I had to put in like supporting structural elements inside of it. But you can’t make the pillow too hard where it hurts your head, it’s not comfortable to lay on.

Then again, when someone lays on their arm you may look at like the width of their shoulders, but when they lay on their arm is not the right width anymore. So you have to look at that. How does that change? So the pillow went through like dozens and dozens of iterations. So I ended up filing for patents on the design and functionality and how you take the measurements and all that stuff because there was so much work involved in really dialing in what would work for somebody. You know, I saw that some people are really skinny, they have long necks and they have very narrow shoulders and they lay on a pillow completely differently from someone that’s really heavy with really broad shoulders and maybe a short neck.

So people physically are very different and they lay on a pillow very differently and they sleep differently and all that affects the design. So it was all like heavily thought of and incorporated to make it the best it can be.

Tracy Merda: What kind of feedback have you been getting friends, folks who have been using the pillows? I mean you’ve done a lot of work worldwide. You’ve had some users, myself included. What kind of feedback have you gotten?

Richard Jacobs: Yeah, we’ve sold hundreds of them so far. I mean it’s not a hundred percent positive, but it’s probably like 98% positive. So the biggest problems people come to us with is they’ll have neck pain when they wake up or it’ll take them a long time to fall asleep cause they’re just not comfortable.

Some people punch the pillow and squish it up. Now this one to go the traditional pillows though sleep on two pillows and they’ll punch them or they’ll try to make them more comfortable. But again, neck pain, shoulder pain, back pain because you’re out of alignment that’s sleeping on a level pillow. The other again is insomnia it takes them two hours to fall asleep for three hours or an hour to fall asleep. And another problem people have is they wake up three, four, five, six times a night, either to pee or they’re just waking up they don’t know why they’ll wake up, again, foggy, tired. Their spouse or their partner will say they’re snoring and they can’t take it and they don’t sleep in the bed with them. So these are all the problems that people have.

That is why they buy the pillow in the first place. And what we’ve heard is we usually hear two types of effects. So within three or four days of using it, most people tell us that the neck pain almost completely goes away with shoulder or back pain, which is awesome. And I think it’s because the neck is now straight. Imagine a picture of yourself, imagine you tilted your head to one side. And we stayed like that for eight hours. With weight on your neck, Yeah.

And that would be like bad shape. So if you straighten your lines, you’re lying in that position for eight hours, or if you flip over again, you’re still laying for about eight hours in that position. The right position can help you. The wrong position will really screw you up. So again within three to five days, most people say neck pain, shoulder pain, back pain, it’s massively reduced.

We also get reports that people may still snore, but it’s like a third of the volume or some people, they completely stopped snoring. They can’t hear them. And it was great. So we’ve had couples that tell us like, we haven’t slept together for 10 years and now they’re back in the bed together and just really, that’s cool. That’s a really cool feeling when they hit we’ve gotten a couple of strange comments. A couple of people with arthritis told us their arthritis got better. I don’t know why. I mean, but it did, which is great. And the second set of effects happens after about a month of sleeping on the pillow or a few weeks. And I think this is because you’re not sleeping properly and you’ve built up this habit of sleeping well and you’re sleeping better and waking up fewer times. So at least that just improvements in other areas. They’re telling me they have more energy during the day. They’re less grumpy. They notice, oh yeah I used to wake up a couple of times at night and now I don’t wake up at all. I wake up less. So there’s like these two effects. There’s immediate, for a few days, and then after a few weeks, other things are starting to settle in and improve and that’s helping them in other ways too. That’s all the thing that I’ve noticed

Tracy Merda: From my personal experience. I’ve noticed just even, I mean, no matter what surface I’m on, I’ve got kids. I often am on the floor. It just feels like the pillow aligns your whole body somehow. And I still don’t have back pain when I’ve been laying on the floor with a pillow for multiple hours at night.

Richard Jacobs: Well that’s really good, a really simple way to think of it as this is your lane.  Motionless in a position for about eight hours. So imagine if you laid in a position where your necklace kink throughout I mean what happens to you if you sit too long? Or if you’re in an uncomfortable position, like even in a movie, the two hours, it’s uncomfortable and you may go numb so imagine for eight hours you’re lying in a bad position or whatever that means to you, of course, it’s going to make you not feel good. So the main thing the pillow does physically, mechanically keeps your spine, your head, your neck, and all that stuff straight. The head pillow does that. So now you’re gonna lay there for eight hours and you’re not going to be kinked. So now your body is in the right position. That’s better for you. That’s really what it boils down to.

This is a technical solution. My pills, there’s not any Voodoo or biochemical anything. It’s literally a mechanical and in addition to the head teller, we’ve now developed a pillow that you hug in there because like I said, if you sleep on your side, you’ll tend to roll forward. So a lot of people will hug a pillow. So we want that to be customized so that when they hug the pillow keeps them from rolling forward, which causes a strain. If you do, then between your knees and your ankles, if you don’t have a pillow, they’re on your side, your lower spine will be out of whack. So we developed those. A custom need, an ankle pillow that helps you too. And then the last part, which some people need, some people don’t, is when you lay on a given side, you’re lying on one of your arms and your arm is that stretched, It can be hyperextended pretty easily. So you want on your, you want your hand to rest on a little pillow too to prevent hyperextension of your arm. Sounds silly. Sounds decadent or extravagant and overkill, but it’s not. So we’ve actually developed this complete sleeping system for side sleepers. It’s for pillows, head pillow. Need an ankle pillow, huggable pillow and until the one that some people only need three, but four is like the full-blown thing for a back sleeper. Oh, you want one underneath your head, if you need one and then underneath your knees because that again helps keep the rest of your body, your line, your back. And if you sleep on your stomach, it’s actually been recommended not to have a pillow at all. And frankly not even to sleep in that position. I know some people do, but the people we run into predominantly they side street. Yeah, I would say 70 some odd percent and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and other studies have shown that some odd percent of people are assigned seats predominately. So that’s like a major way to be able to sleep.

Tracy Merda: And that was actually one of my questions was about the expansion of the good night’s sleep project line. What else can we look for in the future from the good night’s sleep project?

Richard Jacobs: Well, it’s called the good night’s sleep project and not just custom pillows because I wanted to not just be pillows. I’ve also learned by looking at people, laying on mattresses had had a manufacturer a better mattress that will wear better and won’t cause you to have a divot that you fall into are the sleeping properly. So some patents around that there’s also a mattress topper same thing that’s also been filed. And then an air mattress that actually keeps you in the proper line and too, so those are other products that they’re not here yet, but they’re in development right now. Eventually, it’ll be anything and everything that can help people sleep better because again, it’s not a two-second thing. Even a great pillow may not solve everything. It’ll help, but some people may need extra help in other ways.

And every situation, I want people to sleep better cause it just, again, it just improves the quality of life. One quick example is that I travel with my pillow and so does my wife and I have encouraged anyone that buys a pillow to travel with it. Did you go to a hotel or you sleep at a friend’s house or Airbnb or whatever it is. You’re not sleeping on your pillow. You’re not sleeping in your bed. At least you have the pillow help you know, I’ve had people tell me that they travel with a pillow and it saved them. Otherwise, they would have been like infer a miserable experience. So that’s my goal is to again, help people have a better night’s sleep.

Tracy Merda: What would you say rich for like, I’m just thinking of people like my mother who are thinking, Ooh, AI, I don’t even know where to begin with that. How do I get these dimensions and measurements and all these things? How easy is it for layperson when it comes to AI to get you the information that you need?

Richard Jacobs: You don’t need to know anything about AI. All you gotta do is have a smartphone and take a picture of it. That’s what I want it to make it ridiculously easy. I mean I’ve literally like, you know, I was a visiting my parents and my dad dropped me off at the airport and literally I was about to walk into the court and they said that dad I didn’t get a picture of you for the pillow. Oh, okay. Can you do it now as a short, so literally I have a picture of him standing outside the car? You know, I had them hold a debit card upside down and backward, just as a ruler in the picture. So he helped me to have a card. I took a picture of them and said bye dad that was it. I took a picture, I’m like standing outside like in the airport and it worked just fine.

You know I’ve had people take pictures, they’re in the bedroom, they’re at work, and they’re out in the streets. It doesn’t matter as long as you have a smartphone with the app or even just, I can’t, you know, you can even send a picture of manually. The camera is really had to, but as long as somebody can take a picture of you, if you know one other human being in the world and they can take your picture, that’s all I needed. It’s that easy. You have to do nothing else and the pillow will come to you. It’ll be in right.

Tracy Merda: So Where do we find the app and the website is why? I mean how can people start this process of ordering their own customized pillow?

Richard Jacobs: The website is goodnightssleepproject.com it’s plural, good nights, sleep project.com it’s not the good night’s sleep project. I haven’t gotten that to me. Again, the domain is good nights sleep project.com.  The app is, if you Google a custom pillow maker or on the app store, IOS and Android, that’s the app. would you want to do is you want to go to the website and look like a pillow, check everything out. We have a small quiz we ask you to go through before you order to make sure that you actually need it, you know, and how it’ll help you. And then the app is really just for taking the picture. So the app is kind of like a secondary thing, but again, it can be done without the app. It’s you wish she could manually send him the photo or photos. And one thing I want to point out is that if you’re a side sleeper, I only need one picture of you.

If you are a back sleeper I only need one picture of you. If you want both, then I need two pictures, but I literally just need one picture of you holding an object so that’s the smartphone or a book or it debit card or credit card or loyalty card or whatever it is. Like card of a standard size to act as a ruler and that’s all I need. I can make that pillow for you. You can be on the surface of Mars. I can make it and get it shipped to you. It doesn’t matter where you are. So it takes like a minute to get this done. It’s super easy.

Tracy Merda: Awesome. Well, is there anything that our listeners should know about the good night’s sleep project in the customized pillow options?

Richard Jacobs: In the world of sleep in this, you know some people will say, oh I need a new mattress, and that could be two to $5,000. Or they may say, you know, I’m going to go to the doctor and get sleeping pills, or, you know, the doctor says I need surgery, whatever it is. I mean, this is not an expensive solution and we have a guarantee on it. You know, if you use the pillow and it’s not working right for you, and we adjust it and we just can’t get it to work for you, which is incredibly rare, but it’s happened maybe once or twice and you get your money back. So this to me is a guarantee and improvement in your sleep almost no matter what’s going on with you. I’m not promising a cure or any medical changes or anything that they can’t do that, but I can tell you just about everyone and of the hundreds of people we made this for and that includes chiropractors, sleep, doctors, etc. I’m trying to make sure I get this into the hands of various professionals like they’ve all given us like great reviews, so it’s helping, it’s working. So it’s worth your time if you’re having problems sleeping. I mean it’s not a lot of money to get yourself fixed up. So in my mind, it’s priced very well and it will help you and again, it’s got a guarantee on it so I see it as a no brainer.

Tracy Merda: Well thank you, Richard, appreciate your time and this is some incredibly useful information and as I said, I myself have tried it and use it every day in his dramatically, both my life as well as my husbands and I’m sure for our children as well. We’re happier and better. That’s great. I’m glad to talk to you, but this has been a great sort of insider’s guide to getting better with Richard Jacobs, the founder and creator of the good night’s sleep in AI, a specific custom pillow that is nearly guaranteed, I would say to improve everyone’s sleep. Thank you so much. For sure.