David Ko
speaker
161 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
David Ko’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, I mean, I think I had both of those. I'll start with the second one first because it comes up a lot. And what I often tell people is when, I'll just use calm as an example, more than half the people that use calm today come to us for sleep. And they're having moments where they just can't fall asleep. Most of that comes, as we know, because they're sleeping next to their devices.
The devices are constantly beeping. They don't shut them off. I talk about like it's hard, but I keep my phone outside my bedroom. Not everyone does that. When I travel, I don't do that. And sometimes it leads to not a good sleep. And we know when you have a number of those days that start to compound that It could lead to irritability.
It could lead to not being as productive the next day when you go to work because you're just tired, right? You couple that at times with potentially bad eating habits or some people drinking habits or other types of habits that aren't, and it creates kind of like what I call negative behavior. I had that when I was younger because I didn't understand some of these tools.
And I just wish I had some of these tools when I was younger, because I didn't do those things that created positive behavior change. When I was in banking, for example, and when I got stressed, I turned to smoking. And I was just a kid. And I was like smoking in the stairwell of Salomon Brothers. I shouldn't have been smoking in the stairwell. That's number one.
I talked about this with our employees saying, hey, I didn't have apps like Calm or tools to help me in the moment. I wish I did. I probably would have turned to other things and understood that's positive behavior that I could turn to, not negative behavior. And if I have enough of that, then it starts to kind of change the pendulum because I then ended up on a very slippery slope.
You know, you're smoking, you start to drink a little bit more, then I'm eating more at odd hours, and then I try to go to sleep. And you just know if you're trying to eat Chinese food at 11.30 and you want to go to bed at 12 or 12.30, you're not going to sleep well because there's just a lot of stuff just sitting there, right, keeping you awake.
And so for me, it's been this continuous kind of learning. And we talk about some of these things. And, you know, I think in the workforce, it's no different because people have got to shuttle the kids off to school in the morning and you've got to make breakfast, you've got to do all these things. So you kind of need good sleep at night. And it starts, I think, a lot there.
And then during the day, we need breaks. People think, and it's in the book, that our brain has endless capacity. It's just not true. We don't have endless capacity. Our brain, like everything else, needs to recharge. And if you can find ways to recharge, whether it's listening to you every day, congratulations on over 600 episodes.
We were talking about 50 million streams as our chief purpose officer, which I am so grateful for because there are times where Those seven minutes for me where I listen to you, whether it's in the car, driving my kids to school, takes 10 minutes. Some days it takes 30 with traffic. They're moments that I just cherish or when I'm driving back alone.
And it just helps me then as I start to recenter myself to be more productive during the day. Or during the day, I take a short break and I know how to recharge now, whether it's going outside, walking or others. And it makes me so much more productive.
Because what I find is if I work in a manner and I find myself falling below 50%, 25% of my battery, and I just keep trying to power through, my work gets, it's not very good.
It's embarrassingly bad, I would say at times. And no amount of AI is going to make it better. Yeah. You know, it's just not. Yeah. And so I then have to kind of take a step back And be like, okay, you're trending in the wrong direction. Take a beat. And I talk about this at a company and with many other companies that are out there today.
And I know so many employees I talk to resonate around this.
Right? Because they just feel it's an endless hamster wheel.
Right?
Short with people, right?
Why is that? Yeah. When I was younger, and I didn't understand this when I was 14 years old, and I think it was much younger. I wrote about in the book that I was 14. I actually think it happened when I was younger. I just don't recollect those times. When I got really stressed or nervous, and most of the time they're around like tests or speaking stuff or in front of the class. Of course.
I just started to get a tightness in my chest. I would get shortness of breath at times. I would sweat in my hands. And I didn't really understand what was happening. And I talked to my mom, you know, and like a very traditional Korean mother, she would be like, just power through it. And I'm like, okay, I'm just going to power through it, right? But she didn't know either what was happening.
And I don't blame her around that. She just didn't understand in the moment. The reality is when you think about your mental health, it's not about just do. And it's not about powering through the moment. For me, it's about powering up. And that's where the battery analogy keeps coming back in. And I didn't understand some of that. And then I didn't have the vocabulary.
It wasn't really until I started getting into healthcare that I started to understand, oh, wow, this is what you were going through. You've been able to kind of manage it through some unhealthy behaviors at times, and now you are doing it through healthy behaviors. but the vocabulary has changed, right? And you have a better command of that vocabulary.
Showing 81–100 of 161 · page 5 of 9
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