Podcasts

Meet the podcaster helping a worried world fall asleep 

Sleep With Me – Drew Ackerman's hit podcast that hopes you won't hear how each episode ends – is booming, as an anxious world finds it increasingly hard to get shut-eye
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Drew Ackerman always found it hard to fall asleep as a kid. A naturally anxious child, it always felt like a battle. But he remembers clearly the only thing that helped: turning on the radio and listening to comedy.

“And I kind of never forgot that memory of the pain of not being able to sleep," he says, "and the loneliness, and the escape that the radio brought me, and especially someone being funny.” 

Since he launched his podcastSleep With Me – in 2013, Ackerman has endeavoured to be that voice for others. What started of as niche obsession has soon become mainstream, regularly getting more than three million downloads by last year. Now, as the world hunkers down during the pandemic and frets about the future, more of us than ever before have started to stream what might just be one of the strangest podcasts around: one that intentionally tries to bore you, that genuinely hopes that you won’t hear how each episode ends. 

If, in our infantilised lockdown, Joe Wicks has become our PE teacher and Jamie Oliver our dinner lady, Ackerman has become the parents reading us a bedtime story.

Ackerman lives in California and so has been locked down like the rest of us. “I guess I have, like a lot of people, lost track of time," he says in his creaky, dulcet tones, "but it’s been like three or four weeks. And I’m having trouble sleeping. So I’m in the same boat, for sure.” 

It was in the late-2000s that he first had the idea for the show. He knew there were a lot of “sleep solutions” out there, “but they were all so righteous and serious. I thought to myself: why isn’t there anything that’s goofy in a relaxing, old-friend way?”

He’d always been a good teller of bedtime stories, always one to tell that tale at camp. And he would often find himself making up “goofy” stories for his friends. And so, when he started listening to podcasts, it was so different to radio – so much less hyperactive and corporate, so much more intimate – he felt, instantly, you could do a podcast about anything.

More specifically, he realised you could also do a podcast about nothing. One in which someone would intentionally be boring, would tell a story, but ramble, go off on tangents, repeat himself, go off on tangents of tangents, ask himself endless questions and endless questions about those questions, repeat himself again and lull the listener to sleep. 

For a while he thought the idea was stupid – after all, who would listen to that? – but he had a secret weapon. Himself. He used to find himself, he says, boring people at parties. He was a natural! Now, he wondered, if he just tried to replicate what made that person excuse themselves to go to the bathroom – in podcast form. “In some ways, I was already making the podcast,” he says, laughing. 

The show started short – only 15 or 20 minutes in length – which wasn’t nearly enough for seasoned insomniacs, who frown in the clock-face of such a deadline. “I quickly felt if I was listening to the podcast, that would stress me out.” 

He found the sweet spot was somewhere over an hour: “Because then people look at it, like, ‘Oh, I don’t need to listen to that. I know I’ll be asleep.’ It gives them peace of mind.” 

Early on, he also used to make jokes the later the show went on. “I would joke I could say anything now, no one’s listening.” The people who were got angry. They wrote in saying their insomnia was so bad they had no hope of falling to sleep, but that he was company for them while they lay awake. “And I took that to heart. Like, I’m supposed to be there. I’m there friend on the phone, talking to them.”

It took, he estimates, a couple of years – around episode 150, if you want him to pick a number – for the show to start to find its rhythm. In 2018, he left his library job to work on the podcast fulltime. 

Each episode will start with around 15 minutes of preamble – a meandering introduction to the show’s goal, all delivered in his lulling voice, often followed by an advert for a mattress company or suchlike (it won’t surprise you that most of Sleep With Me’s advertising comes from sleep aids in one form or another). And then, the story – or, rather, “story”. 

He describes the show as a “strange sandbox” that he gets to play about in, “as long as I’m fulfilling the basic needs of the podcast”. By which he means it can be a story, but it can’t be a story where you want to know what happens next. 

Most are meandering flights of fantasy, almost dreamlike in their surreal nature. Being uninteresting is the goal. 

He’ll sketch out a very brief outline. But when he’s recording the show, he mostly, he says, just tries to be “in the moment”. The key, he feels, is to be immersive. Nothing is spared. 

“Like, I’m trying to be there, in my imagination, paying attention to the small details. Like, ‘Oh, what does that acorn look like? OK, and how does it feel? On my fingers? And how does that…’ So the stuff you’d normally take out of the story for brevity, to get to the point, I call the ‘big middle’ or ‘meander point’.” Also: “I have a natural proclivity to go off on tangents.” He estimates that he puts in about 15 hours of effort for everyone hour or so of Sleep With Me

His slow speaking voice, he says, come from his anxiety. Before he records each episode, he tells himself that he’s simply telling one person a single story: “And so the voice comes from that. Like, I’m here, I’m at your bedside. With podcasts, I’m right up against your brain, so it’s like a respect to that space.”

Though he has to be careful: his meandering, he points out, walks a tightrope. While he can go anywhere and imagine anything (“Is it some inane details? Is it explaining something?”) he doesn’t want to accidentally be topical, or interesting, or veer towards such mental stimulants as money or religion. “It’s a strange balance of creative restraint and creative freedom.” 

When I first spoke to Ackerman, this time last year, for a story about the booming sleep industry, he had just finished an episode called Build A Bird Home, for which, in his imagination, he was hanging out with an expert on birdhouse building. (Sample monologue: “And I said, ‘Tell me about the elements of your birdhouse.’ And she said, ‘First you’ve got your roof, your perch, your entryway.’ She goes, ‘These are all optional. You wouldn’t believe it but everything in a birdhouse – nearly everything – is optional.' And I said, ‘Even the birds?’ And she said, ‘Ideally no.’ And I said, ‘Do you remember that movie with the titans, there was a clockwork bird. I forget its name now…’”)

Speaking to me, though, he worried the episode had accidentally been a little too spiritual, a little too “metaphysical”: he worried he’d stumbled onto meaning. The ending was building a birdhouse in your soul. He feared listeners would complain. (It also featured an appearance – fictional of course – by Jason Statham). 

They didn’t. “And again, it’s ridiculous, right? And so when I get stressed, I’m like, ‘Oh, wait. It’s just: is this going to put people to sleep?’ Then it’s OK. I’m overthinking it.” 

The pandemic, however, is now causing him to introduce the real world – albeit briefly – into his podcast flights-of-fancy. 

“It’s something I’ve struggled with,” he says. “I mean, I’ve been doing the podcast for a while and I’ve seen other events, though not of this magnitude.” And so he worried: how much should the podcast be a safe space from the real world? And how much would it be strange not to mention it? In the end, he settled on addressing it at the start of each episode and pointing people towards mental health resources before the story section starts. “The mission of the podcast is still to take your mind off stuff and help you be distracted.” 

He still, he says, finds it hard to explain exactly what the podcast is. He moved apartments not so long ago and when his new neighbours asked what he did for a living, he would simply say he worked in podcasts and hope they’d leave it there. But if they asked a follow-up, it started to get tricky. He'd start to explain that it's a bit like a bedtime story and they'd ask, “Like, for kids?” Not really, he'd reply. “Like guided meditation?” they'd say. Not exactly, he'd say.

Countless people write in to tell him their problems: here’s what’s going on with them, here’s why they can’t sleep, here’s why he helps. “Some of their stories are heart-breaking, some are heart-warming." An actor dealing with ALS, people dealing with chronic pain. “I had no idea about those things when I started the podcast.” 

And, of course, people dealing with loss – ones that he's in no doubt will only increase as the weeks and months go on. 

He has even found people are using Sleep With Me not simply to sleep. More and more people are listening in the day-time, he says. Not to drop off – but to zone out. 

“Just because the anxiety comes in waves, right? We’re looking at the news and we’re wondering what’s happening or wondering what’s happening financially. So people are listening, maybe just while doing the dishes or just for some mental escape of being in a house with other people. Just to get away.” 

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