zKid – Mykah  00:17

My zPod it helps me sleep.

zKid – Natalie  00:20

It’s easier for an autistic person to sleep in there.

zKid – Judan  00:23

A zPodhelps me sleep better.

Jeff Wade  00:25

So zPod allows for complete control of your sleep environment.

George Bailey  00:30

The big idea is how do we help people sleep better. I’m George Bailey and I’m the president of zPods.

Jeff Wade  00:35

My name is Jeff Wade, and I am one of the cofounders of zPods.

zKid – Natalie  00:39

I like that I can close the zPod, and that it’s around me so nothing can come in there.

Nickie – Mother of Mykah  00:44

Mykah is ten and she was stayin up for like three days at a time. We tried weighted blankets, melatonin and we’ve tried asleep study because we thought she has sleep apnea. My experience with the zPod has been wonderful. Mykah’s sleep has changed tremendously. I’m getting more sleep because she’s getting sleep.

Leah – Mother of Natalie  01:05

Because of her autism diagnosis and herschizophrenia diagnosis, she was up all night

zKid – Natalie  01:11

and I wasn’t doing well in school. I used to sleep in the closet.

Leah – Mother of Natalie  01:15

That was the only place that she was feeling comfortable at the time.  Since she started with the zPod, her sleeping has improved. The first night she was in bed on time and a sleep.

Jeff Wade  01:27

My son Judan… he’s neurotypical, it takes him two hours to get to bed at night. But with zPod, it’s completely transformed his sleeping

George Bailey  01:37

with Joseph, he’s autistic. He’s very high energy, high anxiety, Joseph and just bounced around his room all the time at night, Joseph has been using his bed now for almost two years, it has become like a real nook for him just a place where he just feels restored,

Christina – Mother of Joseph  01:54

helped him decompress helped him wind down

zKid – Joseph  01:56

reading in my zPod, I play games in my zPod

‍

George Bailey  02:00

now that he’s sleeping better, I think that all of us are sleeping better. We’ve taken all of the suggestions that we’ve received from parents about how we can improve this technology. And we’ve put together a really exciting new bed that we’re going to be releasing onto the market.

Jeff Wade  02:19

So we’ve partnered with a local manufacturer who’s invested into zPod,

Christina – Mother of Joseph  02:23

we’ve got speakers in the new zPods that will allow you to play nature tracks or meditation tracks,

George Bailey  02:29

we’re going to be creating what we call a sleep scaping where the sleep environment changes according to your individual preference. What we want to do is we want to give a name to sleep that gets kids excited to do this thing that is critical to their health

zKid – Joseph  02:46

I could recommend it to good people.  Have you ever slept in a zPod?

Karen Simmons  02:56

Hi, I’m Karen Simmons.

Vincent Dela Luna  02:58

And I’m Vince dela Luna. And today, we would like to welcome George Bailey, who has taken it upon himself to make the world a better place, creating a personal sensory space on top of a bed – a sensory bed. Welcome, George, can you tell us what got you into the autism world? And what inspired you to make such a difference?

George Bailey  03:23

Well, those are, you know, two separate questions I want to address, you know, separately. And the first is, you know, I got into the autism world, whether I liked it or not. And I do like it, you know, I love it. But my first son, my wife and I, he was born in 2007. And shortly thereafter, my wife and I moved to Germany for three years where I taught at a university I taught English phonetics, phonology, persuasive writing. And during that time, it became very clear to both me and my wife that we had an autistic son. And we never had him officially diagnosed during that time, because no diagnosis would be forthcoming until my son was much older, the you know, we are able to diagnose much faster within the United States. And probably also within Canada. Though, I admit, I don’t know the system out there as well as I should. I do know that we were excited to get back to the United States when my my son Joseph turned three because we knew that by then we could definitely get a diagnosis. So that’s what got me involved in the community.

George Bailey  04:28

I’m not going to say that I was really engaged in the autism community from the start, because it wasn’t that I had a passion for autism. At that point. I had a passion for my son. And it just so happened that he’s autistic, and you know, but regardless of what was going to happen, I was excited about him. I was excited about learning about his story, his needs, so that at that point in my life, I was still very busy. We came here to St. Louis so that I could attend law school, and I got busy in my own job stuff, you know, it wasn’t like I was neglecting my children per se. But I’m not gonna say that I was just super engaged in what they were doing. And by that time, we already had another son. Now we’ve got three daughters to boot. And, you know, we’re our full house, here in the Bailey family.

George Bailey  05:18

But then there really was, you know, that that second part of the question is, like, you know, what about this, why, why this, why dealing with sleep and autism, you know. Why zPods?  And a lot of that really comes down to serendipity, and just plain dumb luck. You know, I was not involved in making like autism, my profession, that wasn’t really where I was going, as I was saying before, but I had a few friends who were looking to launch a number of small startups, this being one among many, and this wasn’t even the one that really excited me. You know, because I looked at this, I thought, you know, cool bed, but you know, like, what’s its practical use? Like I had no, we hadn’t been looking at autism, specifically, we just thought like, hey, there’s got to be a way to, you know, to market these beds in the United States, maybe airports, maybe, you know, truck, a truck stops, and we’ll still, we may yet go back to those points, if there’s a need. But for me, I don’t like really trying to sell something or develop a business unless there’s a real need. Which is why when I was asked, Hey, don’t you think that these would be great for autism?  That I kind of balked. I said, you know, I’m not sure about that. Because I, you know, my initial reaction was, as an autism parent, I get a lot of things, ideas pushed in my direction. And some of them are great ideas. And some of them, I don’t perceive to be really great ideas, and I didn’t want to be that guy. You know, I just thought, like, Look, if we’re gonna pursue this with autism, we’ve got to do some real market research, and determine if there’s a real need. But there area couple things that really changed all this for me,

George Bailey  06:59

Well, number one was that I couldn’t stop thinking of Temple Grandin. And if you’ve ever seen the movie that depict her and her squeeze machine, that was the thing that said to me, okay, Kay Kay, maybe there’s something about enclosures, maybe that plays an important role in soothing and comforting a child. And if that’s the case, that’s a pretty big deal, because I know that my son gets distressed when he’s feeling out of sorts, and he has a sensory processing disorder. But I still was not quite there. And then I brought my son to work. We had these beds set up, I didn’t tell him what Daddy was doing. And he just ran in, he saw the bed, and he made a beeline right for it. Got inside, closed the door. And then I gave him some minutes of total silence, just to see like, Okay, what’s going on, and she’s gonna get back out, as you get to just be like, Okay, I’ve had my fill, you know, but on the contrary, when I opened the door, I could see him in the bed with his hands, you know, just kind of his hands behind his back and just chilled out. You know, and if you know, a lot of kids with autism chilled out is not necessarily a word or phrase that you would associate with, you know, their kind of behavior. But he was so happy. And I was like, Okay, may be there’s more there. We did some more research, we brought in doctors, occupational therapists, and to a person, we got a lot of encouragement. And then finally, we did our first case study. And I’ll end it with this by saying that our first case study in which Natalie, a young woman with autism and schizophrenia, who was sleeping four hours a night in your closet, jumped from those four hours, if eight years she was sleeping four hours a night, probably eight years averaging four hours. So that’s incredible. And she jumped to over10 hours a night, literally overnight. And that was two and a half years ago, very first time. And that was it. For me. I was like, ah, you know, I can’t go back. You know. And believe me, there are times when I want to give up. It happens. It happens to all of us as entrepreneurs, we all kind of reach certain levels or, you know, grades of, of burnout. But I think about that, and I think about a number of the children we’ve helped, I just think like, we’ve got to see this through, we’ve got to make this available.

Vincent Dela Luna  09:24

That’s fantastic. You know, I’ve got two kids, as you know, on the spectrum, and what you’re doing has a special place in my heart, because while very much like most kids on a spectrum, they have sensory processing disorders. My daughter has a sleep disorder, you know, which can take you know, weeks months before things get resolved. So any kind of solution that might help that is amazing. I think we need to explain to our audience that you are not actually in the Starship Enterprise right now. You need to show us… This is such… you’re sitting in a bed in a zPod.  It’s huge. Can you can you take us on a tour and show us what it’s about?

George Bailey  10:08

Would love to, you know, and as you can see, you know, the future is here. Okay. We’re excited about it, we get a lot of jokes, of course, about the appearance and, and, but and yeah, everybody kind of like loves it, it’s kind of like the geek out joke. And we all know we’re like, yeah, it’s sleep in that, you know. And so just to give you a short tour, the bed in terms of size is actually rather large, it’s six feet, five inches, So I’m six feet two inches. And, you know, I can lie down in here pretty comfortably. And as you can see, you can see my feet down there. And that’s the other end, you know, you have a door for entry and exit. And then we have a control panel. And that allows us to control the lighting, the LED lights, like if I want to change up the combination, you know, right here, I can do that. And then it has a fan system as well, which allows me to, you know, just cool down a little bit because it can get a little bit muggy in here. You know, that’s one of the concerns that comes up as airflow is always one of the big ones. And so it’s not, you know, I don’t want to play it off like this is some hugely advanced technology, I think that we want to take it in directions over time, that will be very exciting for people who, you know, invest basically in one of these beds, because we want to make sure that those people who get on board and try this out that we continue to pipeline them with other ideas, ways to expand and just make this more soothing. That’s really the the main goal. So that’s a bit of a picture of the bed right there.

Vincent Dela Luna  11:48

That’s great. And from our discussion, previously, the way I understand it, this is already the fourth iteration of the bed. So when you have ideas or improvements to make it safer, more secure, stronger, you you change the versions to make improvements as we go, whether it’s, you know, monitoring, as a parent to know that it’s it’s not overheating inside, you know, whether it’s the door not closing fully because of blankets is getting tied in how do we handle these things, the you, you take real time issues and feedback from parents, and you adjust the bed to make it better.

George Bailey  12:30

Absolutely. And, you know, so where it came from, you know, as I mentioned earlier, like the beds, we already we had them there were not our invention. And I make that, you know, full disclosure, that this was a concept that was started even as early as like the late 70s or something like that in Japan. And then it developed over time to you know, like micro hotels and airports and such. But when we brought it here, we actually started looking at it. And you know, as we were working with families, we’re very transparent with them saying like, look what you know, we don’t make any medical promises, but we would love your feedback, what are some things that we can do better. So this is the first version of the made-in-China bed that we’ve been using, and then the next version that’s coming out, that’s going to be ours, we stopped all of our production in China, all of our orders, and which was good. I mean, it was the timing was actually quite fortuitous. Because if any of you follow the news, you’ll know that supply chain issues from China are currently abundant. It’s very unfortunate, but we managed to you know, sell the last of our made-in-China beds, right as all this was happening. And we had enough to be able to say, Okay, now let’s do this next big jump to the Made in USA version. So the made in USA version, it’s almost done, it should be finished by next. sometime next month, we’re still getting closer and closer to that date. We’re all excited. But we are going to be changing things. You know, you mentioned for example, the door like what if you know, a blanket gets caught in the door or something like that. And that was actually one of the first concerns that came up. Actually, it probably was the first concern by a buyer. And that was Natalie’s mother said, you know, that always kind of worries me a little bit. And so I thought to myself, Okay, you know, what can we do about that? And then our engineers said, you know, what we should do is we should do two doors. Because that way, you know, if one stuck you still have the other or we can make it possible for the doors so that we can grab both sides of the door, lift it, tilt it, remove it. Like you cannot stick a child in here. You can’t lock them in there. It’s not a lockable system. We’ve really, you know, worked through that because safety like I’m a parent, you’re a parent, you know that those concerns are real and they deserve to be taken very seriously. So every single time that we’re improving the bed and there are other improvements, you know, that we can talk about talk about along the way. It’s all With an eye of like, how can we build the best widget? You know,

Vincent Dela Luna  15:05

and you have a version that stackable. So it is actually strong enough to carry the weight, even if the doors are not there.

George Bailey  15:13

Yes, that’s so that’s the version that’s coming out, there is this current version, there is a gen one, one, double. But it’s not stackable, because you either buy a single frame with a single pod, or you buy a double frame with two pods. And so it’s all built on one frame. Now, that’s great, but it had a couple of huge drawbacks. Number one is that if you bought the single, you were stuck with the single, okay, unless you had sold it and then bought a double, you know, and that just costs you more money, the new one, you can buy the single and then later on, you’re like, you know what, let’s just get the rest of the parts. So we’ll build the double. So you don’t have to do anything else. Number two is that the main China double is extraordinarily heavy. Like I mean, the the single is extraordinarily heavy for the Made in China, the double was just like, wow, this, you know, I built it. Once I’ve only done one of the doubles, that I’ve built many of the singles. And it was just like, oh, you know, it was it was really hard to do. My friend and I he actually purchased it, we stayed up half the night. nailing that, you know, just getting that done, and it felt good when we got it down. But it was a lot of work. And the The other disadvantage is that the weight of the old one? Well, I said the weight. I think that the you know, the way that we’ve got it now, it can sustain all of that, because of the quality of the material that we’re using and all that it’s got about a 300 pound limit per bed, you know, so it’s durable, it’s pretty, you know, hefty stuff. And we’re excited to do some stress testing with it. We have some ideas of maybe more dramatic ways that we can demonstrate its durability. But it’s exciting.

Vincent Dela Luna  17:02

That’s great. And, and with the new development of the new bed where you used to take two people a few hours to put it together. I heard you can one person can do 30 minutes.

George Bailey  17:14

Not gonna say one person, I still would recommend that, you know, it’s possible that one person could do it. That’s, you know, theoretically possible. I’m sure that my business partner would do it alone. Like he’s that kind of guy. I wouldn’t recommend it just you know, to make sure. But yeah, it used to take two people three to four hours to set up. But now it’s only going to take two people about 30 minutes to set up. Great. Great. Yeah, that was another big thing. And the thing is that what I like about that is that when you buy this thing, there are a lot of plenty of our customers who ask, well, you know what, if I move, you know, I don’t want them bound to the same house if they want to be able to, we got to be able to move. And so the second one is going to be a lot more convenient from that perspective. Both disassembling reassembling, but also just transportation and durability of parts, we think that it’s overall, the all of the parts we think are a lot more durable. That’s great. I own it, just you know, that’s not like a confession. Now there’s servers. That’s it’s great. But it’s, I think that the second one that’s going to ship better.

Vincent Dela Luna  18:16

And more good news for our audience is with Autism Today Foundation, we’re going to find places where we can place the beds, so that they can actually go and experience them, you know, and they can, they can decide if it works if it engages their children, and then they can go straight to you. Once they know it works. That way, you know, they can try it out first. And at locations we’re going to find across North America. And hopefully we help you out because you’re doing such a wonderful job. It’s great that you’re giving people a safe space, so that they can really be comfortable and happy, you know, lose the anxiety, I would love to see how this works. Like my kids, you know, like you said, you know, having them relaxed with their head back is. It’s so rare that you see that. You know, it’s usually there’s anxiety stress, if they if they know that in the house, they have a safe space in the school in the clinic, there’s a safe space that they can go to and just calm down and it just come out when they’re good. I mean, that’s game changer.

George Bailey  19:23

We’ve seen it. So out of my five children, my six year old daughter is also also autistic. And we’ve seen her multiple times now, you know, she’ll run into her room screaming, having a real rough time and coming out like I’m cool. You know. That’s a wonderful experience to see that and we’ve actually gotten anecdotal data from some customers who have talked about that same effect, you know, where they just need sometimes a place to getaway and escape space. You know, but to your point about you know, having in places where people can experience it. I mean, that’s one of our big goals. And we, we certainly appreciate you, as partners. And we I feel like that’s one of my goals is to make it so that more and more people are just they’re able to evaluate first. Because it’s a commitment, you know, and you don’t I really want people to feel good about their decision, I recognize that not every body is going to, you know, but we try our best in good faith to just say, Okay, well, you know, we’re not making promises. But if you feel like, you know, this is something that your child could benefit from, then we would like to help make that possible. And we’ve had the good fortune of getting it funded innumerous states. We are working on that in other places, you know, for example, California, Ohio. Let me see Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, we’ve had some really good fortune, even in Canada with one of the… I think the native Canadian programs up there. You know, just it was so exciting, because that alleviates so many burdens. Right there. You know, the just the financial piece,

Karen Simmons  21:08

If you can get kids to sleep, and get the parents to sleep that alleviates so many problems in the autism community. Yeah, that’s a big, big problem. Even my son, you know, we had a hard time getting him to sleep. And he’d say the bed squeaks that means the springs need to be oiled. At least he verbally said that. And we can solve that. Right? Yeah. But when kids are non verbal, non speaking, you know, they can’t necessarily articulate that. We don’t know what the problem is.

George Bailey  21:42

Yeah, I totally agree. And, you know, it’s one of the wonderful things with working within the autism community, even my son who’s fairly articulate now and fairly verbal, he wasn’t verbal, in the first several years of his life and not very verbal. And it, it made me have to kind of, you know, it forced me to be attuned to his needs. And, you know, everybody has kind of different feelings about, you know, the way that you communicate with your nonverbal child, I just, I tried my best to make sure that, you know, I was always sensitive to that. And he’s always been, you know, such a sweet kid, and my daughter is just such a kick, I love her, you know, but that the all learning all the feelings, you know, a big deal.

Vincent Dela Luna  22:30

And to help our audience, let us know what states you’ve talked to, that will help with the funding, and in what countries and whatnot, and we will, we will keep it updated on our page. So they can find, when it happens, we’ll update our audience and say, hey, it’s now available here. And in this in this state is also willing to help out, I think it’s a great product. I hope a lot of people get a chance to experience it. I would love to see how, how it changes people and how it just makes them comfortable. Because if you can, if you can keep them calm. The rest of life is easy, right? They eat better, you know, they learn better.

George Bailey  23:12

It’s it’s incredible. You know, there’s a great book, I think it’s called Sleep Smarter by Shawn Stevenson. He’s a very big health podcaster. And his book on sleep in terms of practicality, I think is one of the best easily. But he talks about, you know, this kind of stereotype like, you know, imagine there’s this, this thing that you can do that would you k now, produce greater amounts of human growth hormone, and would tend to rejuvenate your body and make you smarter? And all these things like, what is this wonder drug? Oh, my gosh, tell me more, Shawn. And you know, it’s sleep. Yes. So it’s, we, I think that we need to understand within the autism community, the degree to which our children are suffering on account of sleep, up to 80% of kids with autism have a chronic sleep disorder. Okay, that’s a big deal. Now, that number may be slightly smaller. But that’s still a pretty sizable number. My personal belief is that that is caused by the fact that up to 90% of kids with autism have a sensory processing disorder. So when you have that kind of a challenge, being able to take in your surroundings, then of course, you’re gonna have a harder time sleeping. Because sleeping really relies on the ability to just let go.

Karen Simmons  24:33

Think about what that does to the parents.

George Bailey  24:35

Yes, absolutely. And it really does. You look at I can’t quite remember the numbers on on the parents of problem sleepers, but their levels of anxiety and depression are well above the norm. And if you have a problem sleeper, chances are you’re going to suffer as well. And so this becomes a whole family issue. You know, that was actually some of the greatest joy is getting back hearing back from parents things like, I slept for the, you know, the whole night through for the first time, you know, in whatever ages now, and I want to I want to reiterate though, what I said at the beginning that I never want to kind of prey on the hopes of parents, this is not going to work for everybody. And so it’s really important that you consult with your OT, your pediatrician, your therapist, you know, any of those things to get a feel for like, hey, is this this really good for my kid? Or, you know, as what you guys are mentioned, being able to make possible being able to experience the bed, what does that tell you, you know, when you see your child kind of interact is, does it look like it’s kind of having a soothing effect? Or does it look like it’s just a big jungle gym, and they’re gonna get hyper and they’re gonna, you know, we want this to really work and we plan on developing more technologies that we’re going to be adding to this to make it a more comprehensive sensory decompression chamber, to be able to enable sleep, or the reinitiation of sleep, or somebody wakes up in the middle of the night, which they sometimes do. You know, I there’s one other thing I want to make sure that listeners know it really to it’s one is that, when you decide like… Okay, this might be a good idea… talk to us. We have a lot of dealers and distributors that we’re working with now, who are very savvy, to the disability waivers and insurance markets and such, they understand how to get this passed, if it can be passed at all in your state, you know, and that’s actually, we just got lucky, because we didn’t know what we were doing. I know nothing about disability waivers, I know nothing about insurance. But then these people jump in, like these moms and dads are like, I’m gonna get this and I’m gonna get it funded. And they are hustlin. Like, hats off to the parents, because they just, they’re determined, like, I’m going to do this for my kid. And then they do it. And then they work with these dealers and distributors who understand the systems. And they do it and then we sit back and kind of twiddle our thumbs, you know, like, hoping that we can build the next, you know, the cool thing. I feel very grateful, is what I’ll say.

Vincent Dela Luna  27:12

That’s fantastic. That’s great. That’s fantastic. We’re gonna see if we can get it out there in large clinics, so people can experience it. So they know it works before they engage, like you said, but I know I know, the power of good sleep. My daughter recently didn’t sleep for nine weeks at night, nine weeks. So for me, you know, I work with Karen, we’re running two foundations, and I’m awake all night. And then I’m trying to work during the day. And slowly as time goes on. I mean, I can only imagine how the other parents survived this, it gets really rough. And when the moment we’re able to flip her back and get her into a night schedule. It’s it’s like I won a lottery. You know, it’s kind of like, the way you feel after you shower. It like… wow! That’s what awake feels like.  So I mean, it’s not just for the children, it’s also for the parents. Yes.

George Bailey  28:11

Well, our goal is to your point, our goal is to expand this out to other populations. I mean, we have worked with some young adults, we have a dentist who up in Missouri, who bought one of these just to place in his office space. So that in between, you know, on his lunch break, he’d go into his office, and then he just grabbed a quick 15-20 minutes. You know, as because, you know, it really does shut out the light, you know. And that’s, I think, a very important part. But now, to your point about, you know, parents, I’ve talked about a lot about the benefits of sleep, but there are some drawbacks to not getting enough sleep, and I don’t want to play, you know, scare people here, you know, but we know that sleep has a high association or lack of sleep has high association with heart disease, with diabetes with stress, and you know, innumerable very bad things. So you want to take sleep seriously. And it’s a third of our lives, you know, and here I kind of feel like I’ve become this sleep preacher, you know. But it really is that important thing. And maybe you don’t need you know, we consider ourselves more or less like the elephant gun of, you know, sleep solutions. You know, it’s we were very serious about that. But there are things that you can do and we’re going to be putting out other sleep aids that we think are going to be really helpful to creating a very soothing environment for your child and for other sleepers who are having a rough time. I I really want to make this more possible for more people.

Vincent Dela Luna  29:47

George Bailey keep doing what you’re doing, trying to make the world a better place for all of us. You can never deny the drive and the passion that comes from parents of children with disabilities. You know, it makes us do the most amazing things. And you are an amazing person. Thank you for what you’re doing. If there’s any way we can support you, we will.

George Bailey  30:10

You guys are a marvelous support and I thankyou so much for this time.