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.”
Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, has filed for an initial public offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The S1 lays the groundwork for Circle’s long-anticipated entry into the public markets.
While the filing does not yet disclose the number of shares or a price range, sources told Fortune that Circle plans to move forward with a public filing in late April and is targeting a market debut as early as June.
JPMorgan Chase and Citi are reportedly serving as lead underwriters, and the company is seeking a valuation between $4 billion and $5 billion, according to Fortune.
This marks Circle’s second attempt at going public. A prior SPAC merger with Concord Acquisition Corp collapsed in late 2022 amid regulatory challenges. Since then, Circle has made strategic moves to position itself closer to the heart of global finance — including the announcement last year that it would relocate its headquarters from Boston to One World Trade Center in New York City.
Read more about tech and crypto from CNBC Pro
Circle is best known as the issuer of USDC, the world’s second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization.
Pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar and backed by cash and short-term Treasury securities, USDC has roughly $60 billion in circulation.
Circle is best known as the issuer of USDC, the world’s second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization.
Pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar and backed by cash and short-term Treasury securities, USDC has roughly $60 billion in circulation. It makes up about 26% of the total market cap for stablecoins, behind Tether‘s 67% dominance. Its market cap has grown 36% this year, however, compared with Tether’s 5% growth.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said on the company’s most recent earnings call that it has a “stretch goal to make USDC the number 1 stablecoin.”
The company’s push into public markets reflects a broader moment for the crypto industry, which is navigating renewed political favor under a more crypto-friendly U.S. administration. The stablecoin sector is ramping up as the industry grows increasingly confident that the crypto market will get its first piece of U.S. legislation passed and implemented this year, focusing on stablecoins.
Stablecoins’ growth could have investment implications for crypto exchanges like Robinhood and Coinbase as they integrate more of them into crypto trading and cross-border transfers. Coinbase also has an agreement with Circle to share 50% of the revenue of its USDC stablecoin.
The stablecoin market has grown about 11% so far this year and about 47% in the past year, and has become a “systemically important” part of the crypto market, according to Bernstein. Historically, digital assets in this sector have been used for trading and as collateral in decentralized finance (DeFi), and crypto investors watch them closely for evidence of demand, liquidity and activity in the market.
More recently, however, rhetoric around stablecoins’ ability to help preserve U.S. dollar dominance – by exporting dollar utility internationally and ensuring demand for U.S. government debt, which backs nearly all dollar-denominated stablecoins – has grown louder.
A successful IPO would make Circle one of the most prominent crypto-native firms to list on a U.S. exchange — an important signal for both investors and regulators as digital assets become more entwined with the traditional financial system.
The Hims app arranged on a smartphone in New York on Feb. 12, 2025.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Hims & Hers Health shares closed up 5% on Tuesday after the company announced patients can access Eli Lilly‘s weight loss medication Zepbound and diabetes drug Mounjaro, as well as the generic injection liraglutide, through its platform.
Zepbound, Mounjaro and liraglutide are part of the class of weight loss medications called GLP-1s, which have exploded in popularity in recent years. Hims & Hers launched a weight loss program in late 2023, but its GLP-1 offerings have evolved as the company has contended with a volatile supply and regulatory environment.
Lilly’s weekly injections Zepbound and Mounjaro will cost patients $1,899 a month, according to the Hims & Hers website. The generic liraglutide will cost $299 a month, but it requires a daily injection and can be less effective than other GLP-1 medications.
“As we look ahead, we plan to continue to expand our weight loss offering to deliver an even more holistic, personalized experience,” Dr. Craig Primack, senior vice president of weight loss at Hims & Hers, wrote in a blog post.
A Lilly spokesperson said in a statement that the company has “no affiliation” with Hims & Hers and noted that Zepbound is available at lower costs for people who are insured for the product or for those who buy directly from the company.
In May, Hims & Hers started prescribing compounded semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk‘s GLP-1 weight loss medications Ozempic and Wegovy. The offering was immensely popular and helped generate more than $225 million in revenue for the company in 2024.
But compounded drugs can traditionally only be mass produced when the branded medications treatments are in shortage. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced in February that the shortage of semaglutide injections products had been resolved.
That meant Hims & Hers had to largely stop offering the compounded medications, though some consumers may still be able to access personalized doses if it’s clinically applicable.
During the company’s quarterly call with investors in February, Hims & Hers said its weight loss offerings will primarily consist of its oral medications and liraglutide. The company said it expects its weight loss offerings to generate at least $725 million in annual revenue, excluding contributions from compounded semaglutide.
But the company is still lobbying for compounded medications. A pop up on Hims & Hers’ website, which was viewed by CNBC, encourages users to “use your voice” and urge Congress and the FDA to preserve access to compounded treatments.
With Tuesday’s rally, Hims and Hers shares are up about 27% in 2025 after soaring 172% last year.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg holds a smartphone as he makes a keynote speech at the Meta Connect annual event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.
Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters
Meta’s head of artificial intelligence research announced Tuesday that she will be leaving the company.
Joelle Pineau, the company’s vice president of AI research, announced her departure in a LinkedIn post, saying her last day at the social media company will be May 30.
Her departure comes at a challenging time for Meta. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made AI a top priority, investing billions of dollars in an effort to become the market leader ahead of rivals like OpenAI and Google.
Zuckerberg has said that it is his goal for Meta to build an AI assistant with more than 1 billion users and artificial general intelligence, which is a term used to describe computers that can think and take actions comparable to humans.
“As the world undergoes significant change, as the race for AI accelerates, and as Meta prepares for its next chapter, it is time to create space for others to pursue the work,” Pineau wrote. “I will be cheering from the sidelines, knowing that you have all the ingredients needed to build the best AI systems in the world, and to responsibly bring them into the lives of billions of people.”
Vice President of AI Research and Head of FAIR at Meta Joelle Pineau attends a technology demonstration at the META research laboratory in Paris on February 7, 2025.
Stephane De Sakutin | AFP | Getty Images
Pineau was one of Meta’s top AI researchers and led the company’s fundamental AI research unit, or FAIR, since 2023. There, she oversaw the company’s cutting-edge computer science-related studies, some of which are eventually incorporated into the company’s core apps.
She joined the company in 2017 to lead Meta’s Montreal AI research lab. Pineau is also a computer science professor at McGill University, where she is a co-director of its reasoning and learning lab.
Some of the projects Pineau helped oversee include Meta’s open-source Llama family of AI models and other technologies like the PyTorch software for AI developers.
Pineau’s departure announcement comes a few weeks ahead of Meta’s LlamaCon AI conference on April 29. There, the company is expected to detail its latest version of Llama. Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, to whom Pineau reported to, said in March that Llama 4 will help power AI agents, the latest craze in generative AI. The company is also expected to announce a standalone app for its Meta AI chatbot, CNBC reported in February.
“We thank Joelle for her leadership of FAIR,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “She’s been an important voice for Open Source and helped push breakthroughs to advance our products and the science behind them.”
Pineau did not reveal her next role but said she “will be taking some time to observe and to reflect, before jumping into a new adventure.”