- In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady talks to Tom Hale, CEO of Oura, the smart-ring company.
- The big story: The State of the Union (and its tariffs).
- The markets: The bloodbath continues.
- Analyst notes from Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, CIBC, Citi, and UBS — all on the effect of tariffs.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. These can be sleepless times. But one hallmark of leadership these days is a determination to be well-rested. Jeff Bezos has long prioritized getting eight hours of sleep, while Elon Musk raised the head of his bed by three inches. However, the most common sign I’ve seen is the number of CEOs wearing Oura rings, from Mark Zuckerberg to Jack Dorsey.
In this week’s podcast, Oura CEO Tom Hale talks about the health tracker and what’s next. On the day we spoke his sleep score was 93 and his “readiness” was 87—similar to cohost Kristin Stoller. Mine was worse, thanks to a late night in Miami.
“If you want to perform at the highest level, sleep is one of the foundational elements of your health regime,” says Hale. What’s different now is the ability to measure it—and see the impact of our actions, he said.
Several CEOs have told me they now consume less alcohol because it lowers their sleep scores. “Alcohol plays havoc with your REM sleep,” Hale says. Maybe that’s why Oura wearer and Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO Michel Doukeris is now heavily promoting nonalcoholic beer.
While Oura recently launched a fourth-generation model, it faces a lot of rivals in the smart ring category. Features like fertility tracking have also raised unfounded fears that such data could be weaponized against users in states that ban abortion.
There are limits to using health trackers as enterprise tools. Hale once experimented with people putting their scores in a company Slack channel. “It was a terrible idea. We rolled it back, literally within five days.” Employees worried their data might be used against them when seeking promotions or a new job. And they balked at the boss having insight into what they did outside work.
Information is power. While I don’t love the app’s Orwellian habit of lowering my suggested activity level on days where my “readiness” scores are down, it does prompt me to make better choices. Hale, of course, is a fan: “I am handling what I would consider the peak amount of stress and difficulty in my life with the most grace and the most capability and the most cognitive strength that I have ever had in my life. I attribute that to the Oura ring.”
You can watch the podcast here or listen on Spotify.
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Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
