surveyed executives<\/a> last September, it found many were stressed and sleep-deprived. CEOs are struggling to switch off, Ko says, and making high-stakes decisions while their mental batteries are drained. And that, he says, is affecting their companies.<\/p>\nThis interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n
Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson: What insight are you getting through your relationship with enterprises into how seriously they\u2019re now taking employees\u2019 mental health?<\/p>\n
David Ko: I gave a speech last year and afterwards all these CEOs came up to me and said, \u201cI\u2019m super stressed. I\u2019m having a tough time sleeping.\u201d So we polled over 250 C-suite executives last September. What we found was 87% said they were OK. We asked the question again, because when you ask it twice in a different format, people get a little bit more honest. And then 48% of them said, \u201cActually, I\u2019m feeling a bit overwhelmed,\u201d and 24% said they were feeling anxious or feeling some form of depression. <\/p>\n
When we kept diving into the numbers, only one out of four said they were sleeping well. Many of them thought they had to show the strength to shield their employees, but it was coming at the expense of their own health, because they had no one to go talk to. There\u2019s a struggle at the top, and it\u2019s being felt amongst a lot of the employees as well, because there\u2019s a trickle-down effect.<\/p>\n
So what are you telling CEOs?<\/p>\n
I often tell them, it\u2019s OK to talk about your own [mental health] journey, because it will build a more resilient workforce. And you\u2019ll seem more human, because everybody is struggling in their lives with mental health, because we built an always-on [work culture]. We can\u2019t turn off the phone, we can\u2019t turn work off anymore, and that\u2019s being felt pretty much by everybody. <\/p>\n
I was in a room with a number of execs not too long ago, and one of the execs said to me, \u201cIs this generation too soft?\u201d I [asked him,] \u201cWhen you were their age, were you on a laptop or desktop?\u201d And he said, \u201cDesktop.\u201d I asked, \u201cSo could you physically carry that home?\u201d And he said, \u201cNo.\u201d <\/p>\n
[Technology now] never turns off. It is on with us 24-7 for most execs. I ask [executives], \u201cWhat\u2019s the last thing you look at before you go to bed, and what\u2019s the first thing you look at when you wake up?\u201d Nobody says it\u2019s their spouse. Almost 100% say it\u2019s their phone.<\/p>\n
But they feel a sense of responsibility in a volatile world, so what\u2019s the alternative?<\/p>\n
One hundred percent. But it\u2019s about how present you feel. As CEOs, you\u2019re expected to make some of the hardest decisions in your company, but your battery, in terms of where your mental health is, is probably running at 20% if you\u2019re not recharging the right way. <\/p>\n
I always say, if you feel your battery getting lower, look out the window. Grab a glass of water. Take a walk. Three Ws. But most will just sit there. If you were a professional athlete, would you go out at 10% and expect to perform at the highest level? The answer is no. But we are making all these huge decisions, in the age of AI, and we\u2019re doing them with our batteries at 10% to 20%.<\/p>\n
Does the company stop for you to take a walk?<\/p>\n
No, it doesn\u2019t. But what I find is I\u2019m much more productive and I\u2019m much more present [when I return].<\/p>\n
Do you think technology is making us sicker?<\/p>\n
Well, I can answer this for us. People have often asked me, \u201cHow could Calm make more money?\u201d And I think if I were to open it up and have likes on it and create social pressure, I could absolutely make more money. But this is a product for you. I love the fact that when my kids or their friends use the product, they often tell me they feel better about themselves, not a little bit worse about themselves. And there are lots of apps out there today that make you feel a little bit worse about yourself.<\/p>\n
What is AI changing for you?<\/p>\n
AI has changed pretty much everything for most companies I work with. I think the more strategic questions are how will you create product experiences that leverage that technology, where people feel safe and trusted?<\/p>\n
Right now, people who are feeling fragile might turn to a chatbot, and the fear is they will get sucked into a self reinforcing cycle and something terrible might happen. Are you planning a Calm chatbot?<\/p>\n
At some point, when we know we can release a product that we have full confidence over, we\u2019ll do that. Right now, we\u2019re not there yet. What\u2019s one of the biggest barriers? I think with a lot of the [large language model] products, we find that we can get to about 80% to 85% efficacy. And for me, that\u2019s not enough.<\/p>\n
If the advice we\u2019re giving to somebody is about their mental health, I don\u2019t want to be just right 85% of the time. We\u2019ve had conversations with pretty much every [LLM company], [but] we want to make sure that we\u2019re in a position to do it the right way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cAs CEO of Calm, I would tell you, it\u2019s not very calm these days,\u201d says David Ko. His…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":296835,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[134,554,555,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-296834","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-mental-health","10":"tag-mentalhealth","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296834\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}