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.
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.
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’
Some controversy has emerged in public.
In May, Saniya Warwaruk, who’s studying to be a dietician at the University of Alberta in Canada, gave a TEDx talk at her college. The topic of the event was “Finding light in the darkness.”
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.”
Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.
Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.
The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.
The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.
Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.
Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.
With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.
CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.
“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”
CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.
“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”
‘Cave rapidly’
During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”
A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.
Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.
Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”
That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.
At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”
However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.
“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.
Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington.
Stephen Brashear | Getty Images
Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.
When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.
Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.
C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.
Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.
“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”
— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
Elon Musk has been promising investors for about a decade that Tesla’s cars are on the verge of turning into robotaxis, capable of driving themselves cross-country, after one big software update.
That hasn’t happened yet.
What Tesla offers is a sophisticated, but only partially automated, driving system that’s marketed in the U.S. as its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) option, though many Tesla fans refer to it as FSD. In China, Tesla recently changed the system’s name to “intelligent assisted driving.”
Full Self-Driving, as it was previously called, relies on cameras and software to enable features like automatic navigation on highways and city streets, or automatic braking and slowing in response to traffic lights and stop signs.
Tesla owner’s manuals warn users that FSD “is a hands-on feature” that requires them to pay attention to the road at all times. “Keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times, be mindful of road conditions and surrounding traffic,” the manuals say.
But many of Tesla’s customers ignore the fine print and use the system hands-free anyway.
Tesla’s partially automated driving systems have been a source of inspiration for its stalwart fans. But they’ve also caused controversy and concern for public safety after reports of injurious and fatal collisions where Tesla’s standard Autopilot or premium FSD systems were known to be in use.
FSD does a lot of things “amazingly well,” said Guy Mangiamele, a professional test driver for automotive consulting firm AMCI Testing, during a recent long drive in Los Angeles. But he added that “the times that it trips up, you could kill somebody or you could hurt yourself.”
The pressure has never been higher on Tesla to elevate the technology and deliver on Musk’s long-delayed promises.
The Tesla CEO is the wealthiest person in the world and was the biggest financial backer of President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Since Trump’s January inauguration, Musk has been leading the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency effort to drastically slash the federal workforce and government spending.
The DOGE team has been connected to more than 280,000 layoff plans for federal workers and contractors impacting 27 agencies over the last two months, according to data tracked by Challenger Gray, the executive outplacement firm.
Musk’s work with DOGE – along with his frequently incendiary political rhetoric and endorsement of Germany’s far-right, anti-immigrant party AfD – has led to a tremendous backlash against Tesla.
Protests, boycotts and even criminal acts of vandalism have targeted the electric vehicle maker in recent months and led many prospective Tesla customers to turn to other brands. Meanwhile, existing Tesla owners have been trading in their EVs at record levels, according to data from Edmunds.
Tesla’s stock dropped 36% through the first three months of 2025, representing its steepest decline since 2022 and third-biggest slide for any quarter since the EV maker went public in June 2010. Tesla also reported 336,681 vehicle deliveries in the first quarter of 2025, a 13% decline from the same period a year ago.
Product unveilings and a “robotaxi launch” expected from Tesla in Austin, Texas, this year could revitalize investors’ sentiment about the company and hopefully lift its share price, Piper Sandler analysts wrote in a note following the worse-than-expected deliveries report.
On Tesla’s last earnings call, Musk promised investors that Tesla will finally start its driverless ride-hailing service in Austin in June.
To see whether the company’s FSD technology is anywhere close to a robotaxi-ready release, CNBC spent months riding along with Tesla owners who use Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and speaking with automotive safety experts about their impressions.
Auto-tech enthusiast and Tesla owner Chris Lee, host of the YouTube channel EverydayChris, told CNBC that Tesla’s system “definitely has a ways to go, but the fact that it’s able to go from where it was three years ago to today, is insane.”
Many experts, including Telemetry Vice President of Market Research Sam Abuelsamid, remain skeptical. There’s been “no evidence” that FSD is “anywhere close to being ready to be used in an unsupervised form” by June, said Abuelsamid, whose firms specializes in automotive intelligence.
Tesla FSD will “often work really well, particularly in daytime conditions” but then “randomly, in a scenario where it did fine previously, it will fail,” said Abuelsamid, adding that those scenarios can be unpredictable and dangerous.
Watch the video to learn more about the evolution of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and whether it will be robotaxi-ready this June.
Microsoft owns lots of Nvidia graphics processing units, but it isn’t using them to develop state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.
There are good reasons for that position, Mustafa Suleyman, the company’s CEO of AI, told CNBC’s Steve Kovach in an interview on Friday. Waiting to build models that are “three or six months behind” offers several advantages, including lower costs and the ability to concentrate on specific use cases, Suleyman said.
It’s “cheaper to give a specific answer once you’ve waited for the first three or six months for the frontier to go first. We call that off-frontier,” he said. “That’s actually our strategy, is to really play a very tight second, given the capital-intensiveness of these models.”
Suleyman made a name for himself as a co-founder of DeepMind, the AI lab that Google bought in 2014, reportedly for $400 million to $650 million. Suleyman arrived at Microsoft last year alongside other employees of the startup Inflection, where he had been CEO.
More than ever, Microsoft counts on relationships with other companies to grow.
It gets AI models from San Francisco startup OpenAI and supplemental computing power from newly public CoreWeave in New Jersey. Microsoft has repeatedly enriched Bing, Windows and other products with OpenAI’s latest systems for writing human-like language and generating images.
Microsoft’s Copilot will gain “memory” to retain key facts about people who repeatedly use the assistant, Suleyman said Friday at an event in Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to commemorate the company’s 50th birthday. That feature came first to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has 500 million weekly users.
Through ChatGPT, people can access top-flight large language models such as the o1 reasoning model that takes time before spitting out an answer. OpenAI introduced that capability in September — only weeks later did Microsoft bring a similar capability called Think Deeper to Copilot.
Microsoft occasionally releases open-source small-language models that can run on PCs. They don’t require powerful server GPUs, making them different from OpenAI’s o1.
OpenAI and Microsoft have held a tight relationship shortly after the startup launched its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, effectively kicking off the generative AI race. In total, Microsoft has invested $13.75 billion in the startup, but more recently, fissures in the relationship between the two companies have begun to show.
Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors in July 2024, and OpenAI in January announced that it was working with rival cloud provider Oracle on the $500 billion Stargate project. That came after years of OpenAI exclusively relying on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Despite OpenAI partnering with Oracle, Microsoft in a blog post announced that the startup had “recently made a new, large Azure commitment.”
“Look, it’s absolutely mission-critical that long-term, we are able to do AI self-sufficiently at Microsoft,” Suleyman said. “At the same time, I think about these things over five and 10 year periods. You know, until 2030 at least, we are deeply partnered with OpenAI, who have [had an] enormously successful relationship for us.
Microsoft is focused on building its own AI internally, but the company is not pushing itself to build the most cutting-edge models, Suleyman said.
“We have an incredibly strong AI team, huge amounts of compute, and it’s very important to us that, you know, maybe we don’t develop the absolute frontier, the best model in the world first,” he said. “That’s very, very expensive to do and unnecessary to cause that duplication.”