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Daniel Erichsen, founder of the Sleep Coach School

Daniel Erichsen

Daniel Erichsen spent about a decade as a sleep doctor, primarily seeing patients who were struggling with sleep apnea and insomnia.

His career took a dramatic turn early last year, when he was fired from his hospital job in Oregon. Erichsen, 42, had stopped prescribing sleeping pills to patients and for the most part refused to refer them for expensive and time-consuming tests that he deemed pointless.

Erichsen didn’t suddenly turn anti-medicine. Growing up in Sweden, the son of a doctor and a nurse, he knew what he wanted to do from a very early age. He studied at the Karolinska Institute, a medical school in Stockholm, moved to New York for his residency in 2007 and then did a fellowship in sleep medicine at the University of Chicago.

But after years spent listening to patients describe their struggles with sleeplessness and their desperate efforts to find the supplement, essential oil, herbal tea, yoga practice or prescription pill that would fix their issue, Erichsen concluded that the patients weren’t the problem. Rather, the problem was the ways they were being treated.

“This wasn’t working for people,” Erichsen said in an interview from his home in Eugene, Oregon. “I was not a fit anymore. The system was not a fit for me.”

Insomnia is a big business. According to market research firm Imarc, the global insomnia market will hit $5.1 billion this year and climb to $6.1 billion by 2028. That includes spending on prescription drugs, over-the-counter sleep aids, medical devices and various types of therapy.

Imarc said in its report that the Covid-19 pandemic, which hit the U.S. in early 2020, “generated unprecedented changes in lives, including social isolation and innumerable work challenges and family obligations” and acted “as a major stressful event that impacted the sleep patterns of millions and strengthened the market growth.”

Even before the pandemic, the tech industry had found plenty of ways to capitalize on sleep and humans’ desire to optimize it. Sleep trackers are everywhere, embedded in the Apple Watch and Fitbit devices. There’s the smart ring from Oura, which said in April that it raised a funding round at a $2.55 billion valuation, less than a month after selling its 1 millionth ring.

Oura Ring CEO on growth of wearables during the pandemic

Numerous meditation apps like Calm, Headspace and Breethe contain content designed to help people sleep.

Other apps, including some backed by venture capital firms, promote cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBT-I. That therapy is meant to change the way people think about sleep and incorporates behavior changes like sleep restriction and stimulus control. Participants are urged to get out of bed after being awake for a certain amount of time.

CBT-I apps include Sleep Reset, developed by Simple Habit, and Dawn Health, which announced this month that it raised “strategic funding” from early stage firm Kindred Ventures.

Dawn said in its press release that insomnia affects 49 million Americans and results in $84 billion in health-care costs and $100 billion in “safety incidents and lost productivity.” CBT-I programs usually last two to three months. Dawn charges $249 for the first three months, while Sleep Reset currently costs $225 for the same amount of time.

What if insomnia is a phobia?

Erichsen said he had tried CBT-I with patients during his years as a physician, and it would sometimes work. Other times a patient would start the program and he’d never hear from the person again. For some people, strict sleep restriction imposed an important element of structure in their lives. For others, it created added anxiety and worry — another failed effort to find a cure.

After listening to hundreds of stories from people with sleep struggles, Erichsen came to believe that the medical industry was misclassifying insomnia as a sleep disorder, grouping it with depression, anxiety and psychotic disorders.

Erichsen had come to see it differently. People who showed up in his clinic were scared. They’d experienced a few bad nights of sleep from a sickness or stressful event. When normal sleep didn’t return, they fell into full-blown panic mode. They thought something was deeply wrong and that they’d forgotten how to sleep. The dark abyss of the internet contained limitless stories about the long-term health problems awaiting them if normal sleep didn’t return.

Fear was the common denominator. So instead of calling insomnia a disorder, Erichsen prefers to describe it as a phobia, thus reframing how it should be addressed.

“Think of the implications,” Erichsen said. “When we say, ‘Oh you have to take medications to sleep or exercise or do all these things,’ you’re actually worsening the phobia.”

After being removed from his medical practice, last year Erichsen became a full-time sleep coach and evangelist for changing the way people think about sleep. He loads up his YouTube channel, The Sleep Coach School, with educational content several days a week and releases the same discussions in podcast form. He also has an app called BedTyme, which combines educational lessons with personalized coaching.

Apart from the free content he puts out to the public, none of this comes cheap. A group-oriented program called “Insomnia Immunity” costs $259 a month. A 45-minute call with Erichsen runs for $289 (or $169 for a call with another coach) and BedTyme costs $330 a month.

Mental health challenges are creating a second pandemic: Headspace

Erichsen hasn’t raised any outside funding, and said the business is hard to run profitably because it doesn’t scale like a tech company. There’s a lot of one-on-one coaching for each client.

“It’s very involved work,” Erichsen said.

The objective, Erichsen said, is to help people find their way without needing month after month of costly assistance. Within two to four months, most clients are ready to go it alone, he said.

“We celebrate when somebody graduates, and says ‘I don’t need you anymore, I can be my own coach,'” Erichsen said. “From a business perspective, that’s not a problem. They become an ambassador and we find somebody else to work with.”

Erichsen acknowledges that his approach is quite nascent. His YouTube channel has a modest following of 7,000, up from 4,000 at the start of the year, and his coaching practice is small enough that he doesn’t think the sleep medicine world is aware he exists.

“My friends who are doctors think it’s nice, but they don’t fully understand it,” Erichsen said. “We’re so far off the radar, that nobody in the medical establishment knows what we’re doing.”

CNBC reached out to another sleep expert to get an industry perspective on Erichsen’s approach. Michael Breus is a clinical psychologist and fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. He runs The Sleep Doctor website, which was launched in 2008 and describes itself as “a leading authority in the field of sleep health.”

Breus took a look at Erichsen’s website and offered his thoughts via email.

“This sounds like a disaster,” he wrote, adding that Erichsen’s methods “will give many people false hope.” Breus said he gives “little to no merit” to the idea that insomnia can be best understood as a phobia. After reviewing the site, Breus said Erichsen offers no data on the effectiveness of his approach, yet he “seems to feel just fine about now marketing himself with a new method, and new theory.”

Erichsen responded by saying that while he doesn’t provide data, his YouTube channel has an “abundance of interviews with people who have found benefits with the way we approach insomnia.” He said he avoids most of the industry metrics, because they “lead to the idea that sleep can be controlled and that we should achieve a certain sleep score or number after putting in a certain amount of work.”

‘The more I chased sleep, the less I slept’

Saniya Warwaruk and her husband, Edward Warwaruk

Saniya Warwaruk

Warwaruk, 33, was coming off a year of debilitating insomnia, which she chronicled recently in a first-person story for the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp.) website. In May 2021, Warwaruk had a few bad nights, waking up at 3 a.m., and was unable to get back to sleep. As the struggle persisted, she started using supplements.

“Then came the appointments — the blood work checking for tumours and hormones, the electrocardiogram, the sleep study,” she wrote. “Aggravatingly, the results showed I was perfectly healthy. Yet the more I chased after sleep, the less I slept.” 

As she described it in her TEDx talk, when she would try a new thing and it would fail, “you crank up the anxiety and the fear, which leads to more insomnia and so on and so on and so on.” She also tried CBT-I, which resulted in “the darkest days of my life,” she told CNBC in an interview.

After several months of near sleeplessness, constant anxiety and brain fog, Warwaruk, who’s married, briefly went to live with her parents in Calgary because she needed extra care. Soon after her return home, her husband stumbled upon Erichsen’s ideas online.

Watching Erichsen’s videos, Warwaruk said she quickly understood this was different. Whereas CBT-I forced her to practice sleep restriction, get out of bed if she was awake for 15 minutes in the middle of the night and avoid daytime naps, Erichsen was advocating gentler methods, designed to reduce the intensity level along the path to recovery.

She established a sleep window for herself, providing a finite period for sleep each night but without having to limit it to six or fewer hours at the start.

Warwaruk quickly started to learn that if she could train her brain that there was nothing to fear, the cycle could reverse. Instead of constantly seeking solutions, she woke up every day and lived as if she didn’t have insomnia. She exercised, hung out with friends and concentrated on her studies even if her sleep wasn’t great. She stopped trying to make sleep happen.

“No pills, no treatments, no therapies, no teas, no sleep hygiene, nothing,” she said at the TEDx event. “I was no longer to chase after sleep.” She would even watch TV shows during her middle-of-the-night wakefulness, “breaking the cardinal rule of no blue screens.” Her preference was “Seinfeld.”

That’s when she started to sleep. It wasn’t all at once, and there were speed bumps throughout her progress, but her sleep challenges were no longer paired with obsessive anxiety about not sleeping. She told her story over the course of 15 minutes to the small crowd in Alberta.

But unless you have the YouTube link for Warwaruk’s talk, you can’t find it. TED marked it as “unlisted,” so it doesn’t show up in search results. Here’s TED’s explanation, which shows up below the video:

NOTE FROM TED: Please consult a health professional and do not look to this talk for mental health advice. This talk reflects the speaker’s personal experiences and understanding of anxiety and insomnia. Therapies discussed in this talk require further scientific investigation. We’ve flagged this talk because it falls outside the content guidelines TED gives TEDx organizers.

TED didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Erichsen said TED’s action is “the first sign of friction” he’s seen in public involving his approach. While he’d prefer to have the material readily available for anyone to see, Erichsen said he understands why there would be resistance. The medical establishment has defined insomnia in particular ways, he said, and organizations like TED don’t want to risk promoting viewpoints that could be seen as anti-science.

One of his regular podcast segments is called “Talking Insomnia,” featuring people who made it through the struggle, whether using his program or another one. Earlier this year, he published a book titled, “Tales of Courage: Twenty-six first hand accounts of how insomnia ends.”

Beth Kendall teaching her online course

Beth Kendall

Warwaruk is one of the case studies in the book. Another is Beth Kendall, a 54-year-old Minneapolis native, who says she struggled with insomnia for 42 years, starting when she was 8 and her parents moved her bedroom upstairs to the attic.

Kendall’s insomnia was sporadic for decades. Through college and then her working life as a ballet dancer and flight attendant, sleep would come and go for extended spells, leaving Kendall exhausted, confused and desperate for answers. She describes the “medication merry-go-round” and how she ended up with a drawer full of every sleeping pill imaginable. Before that, there were all the teas, so many that “I could smell them right now,” she told Erichsen.

Kendall also tried CBT-I. In a blog post about why sleep restriction doesn’t work for everybody, she said the feelings of guilt and failure that followed her initial efforts made sleep even more elusive and turned her into a “walking zombie.”

“It was a bit of torture,” she said in an interview.

Before stumbling upon Erichsen a few years ago on social media, Kendall’s condition had started to improve. She was working in the mind and body space and was certified in tapping, a practice that draws on acupuncture. She started to see insomnia as a mental program, and that the coding just had to be changed.

Kendall began blogging about sleep. People would contact her because her ideas were resonating. That turned into casual coaching, and then real coaching, including work for some of the newer apps. (Kendall was my coach on an app earlier this year.)

In October, Kendall launched her own eight-week program — Mind. Body. Sleep. Every week, clients receive several short videos with lessons demystifying why insomnia happens, how our responses can perpetuate it or minimize it, and how people can learn to be OK with wakefulness, even in the middle of the night. She also includes individual coaching sessions and sends out regular emails, reminding clients that feelings of anxiousness are normal, progress is not linear and that thing that suddenly makes you jumpy at bedtime is called hyperarousal.

“The beginning of the journey is very educational, laying down the accurate knowledge,” Kendall said. “At the end of the program, I also talk about what leaving insomnia looks like and some of the patterns.”

Kendall’s message, which mirrors much of Erichsen’s teachings, is that sleep is simple, but insomnia makes it seem complex. We try to fix it by doing more and then follow failure by doing even more. But what we should do is less.

Attention is the oxygen that insomnia needs to survive. Starve it, she says, and see what begins to change.

“Sleep is a passive process that happens in the absence of effort,” she writes in one of her emails to clients. “There is nothing you need to do for it to happen.”

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How Elon Musk’s plan to slash government agencies and regulation may benefit his empire

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How Elon Musk’s plan to slash government agencies and regulation may benefit his empire

Elon Musk’s business empire is sprawling. It includes electric vehicle maker Tesla, social media company X, artificial intelligence startup xAI, computer interface company Neuralink, tunneling venture Boring Company and aerospace firm SpaceX. 

Some of his ventures already benefit tremendously from federal contracts. SpaceX has received more than $19 billion from contracts with the federal government, according to research from FedScout. Under a second Trump presidency, more lucrative contracts could come its way. SpaceX is on track to take in billions of dollars annually from prime contracts with the federal government for years to come, according to FedScout CEO Geoff Orazem.

Musk, who has frequently blamed the government for stifling innovation, could also push for less regulation of his businesses. Earlier this month, Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy were tapped by Trump to lead a government efficiency group called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

In a recent commentary piece in the Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramaswamy wrote that DOGE will “pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings.” They went on to say that many existing federal regulations were never passed by Congress and should therefore be nullified, which President-elect Trump could accomplish through executive action. Musk and Ramaswamy also championed the large-scale auditing of agencies, calling out the Pentagon for failing its seventh consecutive audit. 

“The number one way Elon Musk and his companies would benefit from a Trump administration is through deregulation and defanging, you know, giving fewer resources to federal agencies tasked with oversight of him and his businesses,” says CNBC technology reporter Lora Kolodny.

To learn how else Elon Musk and his companies may benefit from having the ear of the president-elect watch the video.

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Why X’s new terms of service are driving some users to leave Elon Musk’s platform

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Why X's new terms of service are driving some users to leave Elon Musk's platform

Elon Musk attends the America First Policy Institute gala at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, Nov. 14, 2024.

Carlos Barria | Reuters

X’s new terms of service, which took effect Nov. 15, are driving some users off Elon Musk’s microblogging platform. 

The new terms include expansive permissions requiring users to allow the company to use their data to train X’s artificial intelligence models while also making users liable for as much as $15,000 in damages if they use the platform too much. 

The terms are prompting some longtime users of the service, both celebrities and everyday people, to post that they are taking their content to other platforms. 

“With the recent and upcoming changes to the terms of service — and the return of volatile figures — I find myself at a crossroads, facing a direction I can no longer fully support,” actress Gabrielle Union posted on X the same day the new terms took effect, while announcing she would be leaving the platform.

“I’m going to start winding down my Twitter account,” a user with the handle @mplsFietser said in a post. “The changes to the terms of service are the final nail in the coffin for me.”

It’s unclear just how many users have left X due specifically to the company’s new terms of service, but since the start of November, many social media users have flocked to Bluesky, a microblogging startup whose origins stem from Twitter, the former name for X. Some users with new Bluesky accounts have posted that they moved to the service due to Musk and his support for President-elect Donald Trump.

Bluesky’s U.S. mobile app downloads have skyrocketed 651% since the start of November, according to estimates from Sensor Tower. In the same period, X and Meta’s Threads are up 20% and 42%, respectively. 

X and Threads have much larger monthly user bases. Although Musk said in May that X has 600 million monthly users, market intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimates X had 318 million monthly users as of October. That same month, Meta said Threads had nearly 275 million monthly users. Bluesky told CNBC on Thursday it had reached 21 million total users this week.

Here are some of the noteworthy changes in X’s new service terms and how they compare with those of rivals Bluesky and Threads.

Artificial intelligence training

X has come under heightened scrutiny because of its new terms, which say that any content on the service can be used royalty-free to train the company’s artificial intelligence large language models, including its Grok chatbot.

“You agree that this license includes the right for us to (i) provide, promote, and improve the Services, including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type,” X’s terms say.

Additionally, any “user interactions, inputs and results” shared with Grok can be used for what it calls “training and fine-tuning purposes,” according to the Grok section of the X app and website. This specific function, though, can be turned off manually. 

X’s terms do not specify whether users’ private messages can be used to train its AI models, and the company did not respond to a request for comment.

“You should only provide Content that you are comfortable sharing with others,” read a portion of X’s terms of service agreement.

Though X’s new terms may be expansive, Meta’s policies aren’t that different. 

The maker of Threads uses “information shared on Meta’s Products and services” to get its training data, according to the company’s Privacy Center. This includes “posts or photos and their captions.” There is also no direct way for users outside of the European Union to opt out of Meta’s AI training. Meta keeps training data “for as long as we need it on a case-by-case basis to ensure an AI model is operating appropriately, safely and efficiently,” according to its Privacy Center. 

Under Meta’s policy, private messages with friends or family aren’t used to train AI unless one of the users in a chat chooses to share it with the models, which can include Meta AI and AI Studio.

Bluesky, which has seen a user growth surge since Election Day, doesn’t do any generative AI training. 

“We do not use any of your content to train generative AI, and have no intention of doing so,” Bluesky said in a post on its platform Friday, confirming the same to CNBC as well.

Liquidated damages

Bluesky CEO: Our platform is 'radically different' from anything else in social media

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The Pentagon’s battle inside the U.S. for control of a new Cyber Force

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The Pentagon's battle inside the U.S. for control of a new Cyber Force

A recent Chinese cyber-espionage attack inside the nation’s major telecom networks that may have reached as high as the communications of President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance was designated this week by one U.S. senator as “far and away the most serious telecom hack in our history.”

The U.S. has yet to figure out the full scope of what China accomplished, and whether or not its spies are still inside U.S. communication networks.

“The barn door is still wide open, or mostly open,” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee told the New York Times on Thursday.

The revelations highlight the rising cyberthreats tied to geopolitics and nation-state actor rivals of the U.S., but inside the federal government, there’s disagreement on how to fight back, with some advocates calling for the creation of an independent federal U.S. Cyber Force. In September, the Department of Defense formally appealed to Congress, urging lawmakers to reject that approach.

Among one of the most prominent voices advocating for the new branch is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a national security think tank, but the issue extends far beyond any single group. In June, defense committees in both the House and Senate approved measures calling for independent evaluations of the feasibility to create a separate cyber branch, as part of the annual defense policy deliberations.

Drawing on insights from more than 75 active-duty and retired military officers experienced in cyber operations, the FDD’s 40-page report highlights what it says are chronic structural issues within the U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), including fragmented recruitment and training practices across the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines.

“America’s cyber force generation system is clearly broken,” the FDD wrote, citing comments made in 2023 by then-leader of U.S. Cyber Command, Army General Paul Nakasone, who took over the role in 2018 and described current U.S. military cyber organization as unsustainable: “All options are on the table, except the status quo,” Nakasone had said.

Concern with Congress and a changing White House

The FDD analysis points to “deep concerns” that have existed within Congress for a decade — among members of both parties — about the military being able to staff up to successfully defend cyberspace. Talent shortages, inconsistent training, and misaligned missions, are undermining CYBERCOM’s capacity to respond effectively to complex cyber threats, it says. Creating a dedicated branch, proponents argue, would better position the U.S. in cyberspace. The Pentagon, however, warns that such a move could disrupt coordination, increase fragmentation, and ultimately weaken U.S. cyber readiness.

As the Pentagon doubles down on its resistance to establishment of a separate U.S. Cyber Force, the incoming Trump administration could play a significant role in shaping whether America leans toward a centralized cyber strategy or reinforces the current integrated framework that emphasizes cross-branch coordination.

Known for his assertive national security measures, Trump’s 2018 National Cyber Strategy emphasized embedding cyber capabilities across all elements of national power and focusing on cross-departmental coordination and public-private partnerships rather than creating a standalone cyber entity. At that time, the Trump’s administration emphasized centralizing civilian cybersecurity efforts under the Department of Homeland Security while tasking the Department of Defense with addressing more complex, defense-specific cyber threats. Trump’s pick for Secretary of Homeland Security, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, has talked up her, and her state’s, focus on cybersecurity.

Former Trump officials believe that a second Trump administration will take an aggressive stance on national security, fill gaps at the Energy Department, and reduce regulatory burdens on the private sector. They anticipate a stronger focus on offensive cyber operations, tailored threat vulnerability protection, and greater coordination between state and local governments. Changes will be coming at the top of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which was created during Trump’s first term and where current director Jen Easterly has announced she will leave once Trump is inaugurated.

Cyber Command 2.0 and the U.S. military

John Cohen, executive director of the Program for Countering Hybrid Threats at the Center for Internet Security, is among those who share the Pentagon’s concerns. “We can no longer afford to operate in stovepipes,” Cohen said, warning that a separate cyber branch could worsen existing silos and further isolate cyber operations from other critical military efforts.

Cohen emphasized that adversaries like China and Russia employ cyber tactics as part of broader, integrated strategies that include economic, physical, and psychological components. To counter such threats, he argued, the U.S. needs a cohesive approach across its military branches. “Confronting that requires our military to adapt to the changing battlespace in a consistent way,” he said.

In 2018, CYBERCOM certified its Cyber Mission Force teams as fully staffed, but concerns have been expressed by the FDD and others that personnel were shifted between teams to meet staffing goals — a move they say masked deeper structural problems. Nakasone has called for a CYBERCOM 2.0, saying in comments early this year “How do we think about training differently? How do we think about personnel differently?” and adding that a major issue has been the approach to military staffing within the command.

Austin Berglas, a former head of the FBI’s cyber program in New York who worked on consolidation efforts inside the Bureau, believes a separate cyber force could enhance U.S. capabilities by centralizing resources and priorities. “When I first took over the [FBI] cyber program … the assets were scattered,” said Berglas, who is now the global head of professional services at supply chain cyber defense company BlueVoyant. Centralization brought focus and efficiency to the FBI’s cyber efforts, he said, and it’s a model he believes would benefit the military’s cyber efforts as well. “Cyber is a different beast,” Berglas said, emphasizing the need for specialized training, advancement, and resource allocation that isn’t diluted by competing military priorities.

Berglas also pointed to the ongoing “cyber arms race” with adversaries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. He warned that without a dedicated force, the U.S. risks falling behind as these nations expand their offensive cyber capabilities and exploit vulnerabilities across critical infrastructure.

Nakasone said in his comments earlier this year that a lot has changed since 2013 when U.S. Cyber Command began building out its Cyber Mission Force to combat issues like counterterrorism and financial cybercrime coming from Iran. “Completely different world in which we live in today,” he said, citing the threats from China and Russia.

Brandon Wales, a former executive director of the CISA, said there is the need to bolster U.S. cyber capabilities, but he cautions against major structural changes during a period of heightened global threats.

“A reorganization of this scale is obviously going to be disruptive and will take time,” said Wales, who is now vice president of cybersecurity strategy at SentinelOne.

He cited China’s preparations for a potential conflict over Taiwan as a reason the U.S. military needs to maintain readiness. Rather than creating a new branch, Wales supports initiatives like Cyber Command 2.0 and its aim to enhance coordination and capabilities within the existing structure. “Large reorganizations should always be the last resort because of how disruptive they are,” he said.

Wales says it’s important to ensure any structural changes do not undermine integration across military branches and recognize that coordination across existing branches is critical to addressing the complex, multidomain threats posed by U.S. adversaries. “You should not always assume that centralization solves all of your problems,” he said. “We need to enhance our capabilities, both defensively and offensively. This isn’t about one solution; it’s about ensuring we can quickly see, stop, disrupt, and prevent threats from hitting our critical infrastructure and systems,” he added.

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