S13E28: What CEOs need to know about mental health, with Jon Cohen (CEO, Talkspace)

Jon Cohen
Can tell you there's a $30,000,000,000 market, and I can tell you there's a $250,000,000,000 market because it's not like we're stealing market share or trying to take market share, we're building the market because there is so much demand. So if you look at the market, you look at the brand that's been around 13 years, you look at the platform, look where mental health is relative to where it used to be, which is not very far. I thought it was an extraordinary opportunity to do good. So that's the the essence of why.

Richard Medcalf
Welcome to the Impact Multiplier CEO podcast. I'm Richard Metcalfe, Founder of XQuadrant, and my mission is to help the world's top CEOs and entrepreneurs shift from incremental to exponential progress and create a Huge positive impact on our world. Now that requires you to reinvent yourself and transform your business. So if you're ready to play a bigger game than ever before, I invite you to join us and become an Impact Multiplier In this conversation, I speak with John Cohen who is the chief executive of Talkspace. TalksBest is a digital platform expanding access to therapy for millions of Americans, and it's brought to market innovative in the on demand tools and resources for people to take control of their mental health. He's also the author of the book called Swab, Leadership in the race to provide COVID testing to America. And what I've enjoyed about this conversation is that we get deep into many aspects Of the relationship between mental health and business impact. He gives us a real tour de force on what chief executives need to know about mental health And how he, as a leader, drives his own organization to achieve, great impactful goals.

Some of the key strategies he's learned over his lifetime of leadership in the medical and mental health areas. What I really loved is his idea of the anti permission culture, so watch out for that. And, enjoy this conversation. It's fascinating conversation Around mental health, business, and a lot more. Hi, John, and welcome to the show.

Jon Cohen
Thank you. Good to see you.

Richard Medcalf
So, John, what I know about you is that you have a purpose to solve the mental health crisis in the United States by democratizing access to mental health services. So my first question for you is, Is this your, is this Talkspace, it's your company, is that its purpose, or is it your personal purpose, or is it both?

Jon Cohen
Though, shit, I would say it's it's both, it's up my company, the Talkspace is publicly traded on the Nasdaq. It, was brought out, about 2 years ago now, as it's from, as a publicly traded company. I arrived about 10 months ago, and, not knowing much about, mental. I know you're broadly about mental health, but not certainly about the market and where things are going and the model that Talkspace offers, which is, you know, now we're in all 50 states, cover a huge number of lives. So, what has become a moral imperative for me and the company is, is on top of delivering mental health services across the board is make sure that we figure out ways to deliver it to teens. Though, as you may know, suicide is the number one is the number two cause of death in teenagers, and the mental health crisis in kids and teenagers is unprecedented. So that's layered on top of, what we do in terms of a quote, I'll call it a moral imperative.

Richard Medcalf
So going back to that sense of why did you get involved in in Taluk Space? I heard that after a let's just carry in the medical field. You were on the board, and then, you're offered the job and you just took it. So but first, take us back and see how did you end up in this role? And, again, like, why did you wanna get involved? You could put your your emphasis, your efforts in so many places.

Jon Cohen
Sure. So I was the CEO and executive chairman for BioReference, the 3rd largest commercial lab the US. I had been there, and then I got there in 'nineteen. Was there a year when COVID hit? Had a very, very successful run as we ended up doing the largest amount of surveillance testing in the US, we had all these since contracts for significant number of major entities, particularly sports teams, to cruise industry public schools, so I was very fortunate. We had a we just had an incredible run to deliver COVID testing, the US, of which I just wrote about, the book came out in June, which is, you know, the subtitle is, you know, leadership end the, you know, quest to provide, you know, COVID testing to critical Erika. But mostly my background was was, in addition to healthcare, was digital health. I had built a relatively large mobile health platform, at Quest before I got to BioReference, and then we built a really big digital platform at BioReference to deliver, laboratory services to the home, so I had a really, I've had a long interest in mobile health, digital health, and that's what Talkspace is. It's a digital health company.

So I had the opportunity to get on board, privilege to to, you know, be asked to join, and then from there became the the CEO. So there was no defined path, as I've told people, I have a my career path doesn't make any sense at all as a vascular surgeon, but, but I thought that, the opportunity in, to deliver mental health services is extraordinary in the US. And there were a bunch of reasons. 1st off, the telemedicine was accelerated. I think as you know, literally by 10 years because of COVID, and the the ability to deliver a mental health solution on telehealth is higher than any other delivery of healthcare services. The fact 65% of all mental health of 65% of all telehealth visits now are mental health visits. It's easy. You go online, you either could text or message or do live video, but you don't have to leave your home, you can, you know, have to spend a half hour, an hour going somewhere, sitting in a waiting room, get therapy and leave, so that convenience is extraordinary.

The other is the, you know, the platform for Talkspace is is turns out to be the right one, meaning we, we are, as I said, we're in all 50 states, so we have a very large platform with over 4,400 therapists. The most interesting part is we deliver therapy, at least half of it, and the amount that we deliver is through texting and messaging. So Talkspace actually did all the pioneering work and all the publications of research to to prove that you could text and message people and deliver adequate therapy. That's a big change because it means that, essentially, that our therapists are available 247. Now, they don't have to get back to you if you text them immediately, but they're gonna get back to you pretty soon. So now, not only is it accessible, but it's much more accessible 20 fourseven. So layer on top of that, the market from a business side is incalculable. I mean, I can tell you there's a $30,000,000,000 market, and I can tell you there's a $250,000,000,000 market because it's not like we're stealing market share or trying to take market share, we're building the market because there is so much demand.

So if you look at the market, you look at the brand that's been around 13 years, you look at the platform, look where mental health is relative to where it used to be, which is not very far. I thought it was an extraordinary opportunity to do good. So that's the, the essence of why.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. So, yeah, so you kind of got Attracted by that pioneering edge, and the fact that the the demand was just so, so great is what I'm really hearing.

Jon Cohen
The, the, the other is it's probably our biggest differentiator in the market is we are now the largest telehealth mental health company, that's what we call it in network provider. Meaning if you have, if you get therapy through Talkspace, we have 112,000,000 lives that are covered by the payers. So now what we do is we determine your eligibility, and if your insurance covers us, you don't have to pay or you pay $20 out of pocket. That's very different than the consumer model of therapy where you have to pay 2, $2.50 a month. So the, that change has been dramatic in the company. As you can imagine, people need therapy. Now they realize they basically don't have to pay for it.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. Okay. So thinking yeah. So there's a business model. I mean, there's Multiple things. There's the delivery model, but there's also the business model that goes behind that.

Jon Cohen
Right. You know, there's nothing like accessibility and affordability to get people to use health care, and that's where we provide.

Richard Medcalf
So obviously this is a podcast for CEOs, and I'm kinda wondering, you know, doesn't see any to bother with this stuff, Right? Is this like a public health issue that is going on and is all very good? What would you say to CEOs about this? What what do they need to know about mental health?

Jon Cohen
So there are, I call them different verticals. So if you look at, if you just look at employers, both large and small, no matter who you talk to, if you, if you go on right now and, and ask either Google or Chat TV or something and say, What is the number one issue in 2023 facing HR executives for employers? The answer will be mental health support, that the, the impact of mental health on employees is extraordinary, both in terms of decreasing absenteeism, increasing performance, increasing job satisfaction, decreasing costs overall to the big to the bigger picture of healthcare benefits. The data is very clear. It's been clear for years, so so any company, essentially, is gonna provide, needs to provide, and has it's not it's not a nice to have anymore. It's a must have mental health support to their employees. So we provide that for large employers, small employers, universities, colleges, and schools as a way because the platform is so accessible and and is easy to input. So so that's a really big deal right going on right now. I just did a huge conference last week and had the, again, the privilege to talk to about 3,000 hour executives, and it it is the issue, you know, is how do they get not only provide it as a benefit, but how do they get their employees engaged? How do they get them to actually utilize the service? So it's pretty the to the you know, the the data is just very clear on the employer side.

If you look at people in general, at least in the US, one in 4, 25% of people in the US have a diagnosable mental health condition. Antianxiety, you know, anxiety, depression, etcetera. We don't do hardcore psych. We don't do bipolar. We don't do schizophrenia. We do therapy. But, but just the amount of people that have the need for therapy is, is, is extraordinary. So, so that's how we look at the business.

We look at the, the people in general who need coverage. And we look at people who are in these verticals, meaning employers, universities, colleges, students, who are looking for therapy.

Richard Medcalf
Got it. And so if you're a CEO and looking at this issue. So first of all, when the, is there a demographic where it's most likely to prop up. Like, is it Mo you know, is it most likely to occur in your executive ranks, most likely to occur in your junior people, in white color, blue color? You know, I'm sure it's kind of everywhere, but but is there other particular pockets or particular trends that you see?

Jon Cohen
So actually it is everywhere. I would say the, you know, one of the greatest threats, unfortunately, is teens. And remember, all your employees have teenagers, so I I like to tell people the time, as a CEO, you walk in the room, you have a meeting with your senior executives, right? And let's say there's 10 people sitting around the room. You have to remember, every single one of those executives is bringing something else personal to the table that you do not know about. Did they have a fight with their spouse? Is their kid having trouble in school? You know, are you having other family issues with your brother, your sister, or your parents are having trouble, and then you're if you want them to perform, they're gonna perform much better if they're happier and satisfied. Buy. And the way to do that is it turns out a lot of people find that if they're talking to somebody on the outside, a therapist, it really, really helps them get through the days. We found, you know, we looked at a bunch of focus groups for, for teenagers, and the number one issue they'll tell you, it is we just want somebody to talk to, I mean, it doesn't have to be my parent or whatever, but I want somebody to confidentially talk to when I have a problem, right? So so it's a really it I tell them I tell people all this all the time is, is in you really have to think about what people are thinking about when you're in the room.

And if you could help them, you're going to have an unbelievably more productive workplace.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, that's, that's a great point. Right? So there's that second order effect there's stuff themselves, but then also what are they going through? What else are they juggling and thinking about when they're at work? So, John, I wanted to dive a little bit to our own secret sauce. As you do this, I know you've, you've said that you are driven by tackling challenges head on and leading people through difficult crises. You said you run-in the direction of the fire to help solve a problem. And you had almost described your genius as, as precision, relentless commitment to goals, the ability to drive an entire organization against those. So those are great, focus strengths. Can we get about like, how do you deploy them so that, you know, perhaps, perhaps within, in talk space when you came in or, you know, in a hypothetical situation, right, if, like, if there was some key goal that you feel you had to address, but how do you bring that energy? What would you actually do to, to mobilize?

Jon Cohen
So mentioned, you know, each of the chapters of the book has a section on leadership relative to what we were doing at the time. And and a part of that was really about crisis management because the, the COVID crisis was not like any other crisis because there, to me, the and I'll get back to, you know, what, what we did, what I did on the leadership side, but, it's important for people to understand that there's a, there's a fixed crisis. I, I like to say like 9/11, it happened, and then we had to deal with what happened COVID was different. It the, basically, the crisis kept changing every day, every week. So it made it even more challenging. Like, how do you figure out when you're it's basically the fog of war. Like you things on the ground are changing every day. It's not a, a one event, so that's a very different crisis management issue than you have an event and you have to deal with it.

So I just want to and that's why one of the quotes, my favorite quotes is COVID was where intuition goes to die because every time I thought I knew what was gonna happen, something else happened. Right? I everything I can ask, well, what what's gonna happen next? And I literally started telling people, I have no idea, right? I wish I could tell you, but every time I think something's gonna happen, something else happens. So anyway, so on the leadership side, you know, there's there's a bunch of things. One is, in no particular order, You need to make sure that you and your team are really empathetic, and I hate to say this to the people that you're serving, and it's sort of the same thing as your employees, but I used to tell people all the time, we, I mean, we went from 5, we were test, we, we got up to the ability to test a 100,000 people, but I used to tell people, remember, every single one of those people is a patient. Every single one of those people had their nose swab and they're sitting around waiting for result because they're so anxious about what's gonna happen. So it's very important to, to keep that in mind relative to what you're doing, because it's very easy to forget that. You know, you're in the middle, and how are you gonna pick up specify how you're gonna do this or a mental health, how are you gonna deliver the services and are the therapists gonna be available? You need to re to remind everybody every day that at the end of all this, there's a patient, and so that that empathy to serve is very, very, you know, is really important. The other is, is the key what I I like to say is to keep current.

It's part of the leadership thing. It's, is to really be knowledgeable about the field, and I don't want to be glib about it, but the fact is, is that most of the great ideas and everything that we've done. A lot of them came from out of industry. You know, I'd read something, or we'd read something or read something about something and say, Hey, how come we're not doing it? But that's like a great idea. How do we apply that? So reading and being current and keeping your orbit really big about where you're getting information is really, really important for leaders because they're you will bring ideas to the table, but you need to get them from sources that are outside of your, your usual, or the other is, listen, you have to be comfortable living with uncertainty, you know, meaning just stuff's gonna happen, right? You have to be able to live with uncertainty and be able to make decisions without adequate data, you're gonna put it together. And basically when I say, you know, you're gonna make a call and you're gonna be wrong and you're gonna be right, but you can't, you can't put yourself in a situation where you're paralyzed, right? Where you can't make a call. And that means you need to live with an uncertainty, which is some people can't, and some people can't. You can probably pretty much look around your executive team and figure out who's gonna be good at that and who's not.

There are people who just cannot deal with making decisions without all the data.

Richard Medcalf
So let me ask you actually, John, on that. You mean, obviously you medical professional, you've had to be very data focus and many, you know, or whatever, lots of training. Right. And then, and then you have to get into these situations where, yeah, it is very uncertain and you don't have the data. How how did you learn to to make those calls?

Jon Cohen
So first off, as Renee, so as I said, I'm a surgeon by training, and surgeons are a little bit different than the other medical people because they, they, they're usually good at making decisions. I, I, I tell people all the time, what you need to know, our surgeons are frequently wrong, but never in doubt, right? Like, we'll always make a decision bear in Iraq, but, but more so I use a metaphor. I call it the little man syndrome of this little person that is sitting on your shoulder all day long. And what this person is doing is he's whispering you, he's whispering your ear. And what, invariably, that voice is telling you is usually the right thing to do, and you have to train yourself to listen to that voice. It is very hard for people in difficult situations to to do that because you have a tendency to want to not make a decision or not really listen to all the facts because of prejudices that you bring to the table. And then and then use the surgery thing as an example. You, you, you'd operate on a patient and you see the patient 2 days afterwards, and patient may have a fever, not feeling well, and you sort of know that something's going on, and you don't want to take that patient back to the operating room.

You don't want to intervene, but your inner voice is telling you something's amiss, and that happens a lot. You know, we had in business, you just know what you think you should do, but there's all these factors that are coming in trying to prevent you. And I, and the best example of that is, is in a real crisis that, that threatens your reputation. It's very, very easy to get diverted by your finance people and your legal people who are telling you all these things you should never do because you were gonna get sued or it's gonna have a negative impact on the company, and, you know, we're gonna go under, and, and that's where you need to listen to your voice because you know in the end what you probably should do. And I've had this a whole bunch of times in my life where where you need to come out and make the right decision to protect the reputation of yourself and the company company, usually despite what the financial or legal implications are going to be down the road. That's a very difficult position for a lot of CEOs when they face it. Right?

Richard Medcalf
How do you still have the courage to do that? Because that's, that's the point of courage, right? You have to say, I hear, you know, a finance is telling me this, legal's telling me this, telling me that it's a bit risky, that there's, you know, issues, and yet it's the right thing to do. We can do it. How do you kind of like steel yourself if you like mentally to say, I'm gonna go out here on a limb.

Jon Cohen
It's a, as I said, it's, it's, it goes to the issue of doing the right thing. Right? And if you, if you stick to doing the right thing, at least in most cases, it's, it's, it's worked out. But it's not it, but it is, you know, we we had a I talked about it. We had an episode where we we we had the exclusive contract for the NFL. We were testing every player and staff every day to to get them through the COVID through the season, which was a huge deal. And we had an episode where we we we tested 84 players tested positive, and we knew that something was wrong. It couldn't have happened. And we were accused of having a, contamination.

So what we did is we said, okay, we had a contamination, we'll accept responsibility to move on, and that was a way of protecting our reputation, meaning we agree that we needed to do the right thing by the, buy the customer and what was out there, and then eventually figure it out. So there's there's circumstances like that where, you need to do the right thing for the business, and you need to do the right thing for the client, and, of course, you need to do the right thing relative to the to the to the press. I mean, I had I had a situation once where we had a possible contamination where a surgeon had a infectious disease that he could have communicated, that he could have transmitted to literally thousands of patients. And I found out through a, through a different route. And I, you know, my, my finance and legal team says that either you can't, you know, you gotta protect your reputation, the company and all this other stuff, and you can't go out and talk about it, we're gonna get sued. And I basically said, I don't care. And I went out and told the public, this is what happened, and told anybody that that we would test everybody for free, and if anybody had the disease, everything else, we would take care of them, and it turns out that's what we did, and that was the right thing, because despite the lawyers have decided, despite the finance people saying it was gonna kill the company, but it turned out it was the right thing to do, so the I guess the big issue here is is in the end, doing what's right, protecting the reputation of the company, and eventually things will work out. But these are not easy circumstances.

I'm not telling you, by any...

Richard Medcalf
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Yeah. And, and perhaps let's double down a little bit on this, this point of, of tackling these, these crises and these challenges, and running towards the fire. Cause I'm sure as you were doing the, on the front lines of the pandemic, you, you having to deal with this on multiple, multiple stages. Right. It would keep coming up. Yeah. How did you, I mean, I, I get them. You must do their own empathy, not letting the process crowded out, innovating by kind of looking beyond your narrow confines as to what's going on elsewhere and dealing with uncertainty.

I think that'd be great news for us. Was the situation just that everybody was almost instinct to be mobilized in that situation because of the pandemic and everyone was kind of freaked out? Or was there like a specific way that you kind of brought that, got people to really focus and to really, you know, push hard at things perhaps they felt they couldn't do?

Jon Cohen
So, you know, there's an interesting there's a lot of analysis around how people respond to crises. I was very fortunate. I had an amazing team of people who really worked 20 fourseven, and the rest of the company to deliver, and and it was a it was a COVID crisis, right? And now it's the mental health crisis, and so, you know, people like to talk about, well, if they don't get paid enough, they're not gonna be happy, or, you know, the salary side, whatever it is, I will tell you that is almost never the issue. If people really do their job or are happy because they're working for something they want to work for, that's a 1000 times more important than what they're getting paid. You know, anytime someone says they're moving a job because they want to get more, they want to get paid more, I always tell them they're, you know, good luck with that, because you're going to be pretty unhappy in a short period of time. You've got to be able to get up and go to work every day and be happy. And unless if you really don't like your job, you should leave. If you really like it, you need to stay.

So that so that's in the context of you have a team of people or you know, employees that are driven by the desire to be helpful. I mean, the reason we talk about the the reason that people do firemen run into fires and police help people when they're in trouble, and good Samaritans stop at the side of the road to help people, and people who, who do CPR people they don't know. All of this is because there is absolutely some, I believe there's some innate function in humans to help other people. And there's, there's certainly some other probably dopamine surge that occurs when you feel good about helping people. But there's no question that there, there is that desire. You know, people have all these other perceptions about who they like and who they don't like and prejudices, but when there's a crisis, all of that goes away. It's interesting, right? Just it just all goes away, and and I think that's what, that's what, that's really what moves teams to really, really be helpful, to really, to really drive to do the right thing. More than anything else is a, is a, is a common goal, a common goal that they could see that they're actually making a difference.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. I think so you're so right. So often we we focus on The externals, and it's always purpose that motivates people deep down.

Jon Cohen
Absolutely. I mean, it's, the other, which I don't wanna figure out is, is to be effective. You also have to do what I, what I like to call is walk the walk, right? You can't just talk, meaning you really need to understand what's going on on the ground to be effective with your, your leadership group or whoever you're dealing. So you can't, you can't be an armchair surgeon. You can't be, you know, the, the leader that doesn't really understand. So the reason I talk about that is I frequently we'll go out in the field and understand what's going on so that I can be part of the conversation. That's a really important issue, you know, there because you you'll know right away when you're in the room with people who understand what's going on, who don't, because they just haven't been out there understand, you know, we had a, we had a circumstance where we were, and we were gonna be the fur, we were gonna launch, relaunch the cruise industry for COVID testing. And it was a really complicated set of events to get people tested on cruise ships.

I won't get into all get it between the employers and the employees and how often, and whether they, you know, needed it to be restricted or not, and how often you test them, and all this stuff. So, but I have never, honestly, I've never been on a cruise ship, so I'm not a big cruise fan. So, you know, I got on a plane, I went down, and I, you know, walk through the entire process, you know, soup to nuts, how they were gonna get there, how they were gonna lose, how they were gonna board the ship, where they were gonna test it, how are we gonna end the results? What, and, and that was enormously helpful to me to understand all of the complexity of Figurate. I, they could have tried to explain it to me, but, but walking the walk is really important when you're in a situation to understand what your people are talking about.

Richard Medcalf
Got it. Yeah. So that will, yeah. So walk through and to get that kind of situational awareness, I guess, of what's really what we're really talking about. Right. It's easy to make business decisions from a kind of an elevated Effective.

Jon Cohen
Yeah. There's nothing worse than trying to be an armchair surgeon, just so you know, that you could you could put 5 surgeons in a room, and they'll know immediately the person who's never not been in the OR can deal with that problem. Right? No credibility.

Richard Medcalf
Exactly. Okay. So, John, let's shift gears a little bit. One of my favorite questions to ask people is is how do you wanna multiply the impact of your business, right, of TalkSpace, over the next coming years? What would be an extraordinary outcome, for you guys?

Jon Cohen
Yeah. I I think the, the answer The answer to that is to get as many people as possible onto the platform, which will be the big multiplier. And in general, those are some of them are going to be relatively large populations who will be able to access dog space. Thousands of people at a in other words, thousands of potential customers at a time. Cities, states, well, very, very large groups. Those kind of things would be the really big accelerator for us, that's 1. The 2nd will be. I met you earlier.

We have 112,000,000 covered lives, which mean there's 112,000,000 people in the US who now have insurance that have complex covers. That number is gonna grow substantially in the next year. There are 330,000,000 people in the US, we're gonna we're gonna bump that number up, which means that many, many more people will have access, because many, many more people have access, you can imagine the multiplier effect for us is gonna be really big, so I only need a small percent of utilization to have a really big impact. And so so those are the 2 those are the 2.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. And and so what were you talking about? Like, how what's, what would that scaling look like? Is it 10xing the number of people on the platform might be 50%, you know, What what does it look like?

Jon Cohen
No. You know, I think it's less than that. I think it's could be, you know, 3 x the number of people on the platform out of 4. It's, it. It's all a matter of, as I said, is how many people use it with the benefits that are out there, plus the bigger the bigger buckets of of large populations, so and we're working simultaneously on both of those to increase the number of big populations and at the same time, increase the number people who are eligible based on their insurance. The other, which I wanna make sure we at least at least I mentioned, as a you know, the leadership side is, is that the customer is king. Again, a little bit rhetorical, but and I hate to tell people, if you don't have the customer, you can't, you can't make them better, you can't upsell them, you can't you can't do anything unless you have them, which means you have to win. So, you know, my view is always like, tell me what you want and we'll give it to you pretty much, right? That's, you know, and that's, sometimes there are people that you, that you'll bump up against, who do not exactly understand on your team. So, you know, I always I know that's gonna be critical of lawyers, but, I always say there's 2 types of lawyers. There's the, there's your, there's your lawyer who will figure out how to not to do a deal, and there's a lawyer who'll figure out how to do the deal.

You want the lawyer who could figure out how to do the deal because there are a lot of the other types around who will figure out every single which way to Sunday about why you shouldn't do this, or we'll put so many things in front of it, you'll never get it done.

Richard Medcalf
Sounds like a joke, doesn't it? Like, you know, for the 2 sorts of lawyers. I think, like, you should make it make that into a joke somehow.

Jon Cohen
The second is your finance person. Sometime every yeah, I I fight. I would argue with finance people all the time because, you know, they are always gonna look at something and say, Okay, you know, where what's the margin on this? Or, you know, how much are you gonna make? Or is it really worth it? There are other factors that go into doing deals, so you can do you can do 1 deal where you're gonna barely make margin or break even, but your ability to get other deals because you did that deal is enormously, impact it has a huge impact have the ability to do others. So so sometimes it's not just about the margin, it's about the bigger picture, and that's where the CEOs really have a big they need to see you need to see the big picture. You know, we want some, you know, this, I'll just say it happens all the time, right, with the finance people. Like, you can't do this deal because you get a, it's not gonna be enough margin, or it's gonna have this impact than it's without seeing the bigger picture of how much more business you're gonna get because we do.

Richard Medcalf
For sure. And so, John, my related question is, how do you need to shift yourself to multiply your impact? Because as CEO, you, you always, you know, we're always a a cap, alright, a a lid on our own business in some ways. Right? If but if we change, our business can change. So I'm wondering, Yeah. What might be what your next evolution might be on your long long and steep journey as, yeah, as you help the company scale.

Jon Cohen
So, you know, which gets back again to the the thing that people do talk about about, you absolutely have to have talented people around it, right? And and so the the first, literally the first thing I told the team that I arrived when I arrived in Talkspace, first time in the room together, I told them that you're all you're all here for a reason, you're all incredibly talented as far as I can tell, but here's the important thing, is you need to, you need to develop what we, for what I call an anti permission culture. There are a lot of people who are waiting around, waiting for somebody to say okay. You cannot have a bunch of senior executives who are waiting around just to for you to see or someone to say it's okay. What they need to understand is they're there, they need to do their job, you're gonna back them up. They may make mistakes, which is fine, but they can't not move forward without be asking your permission. And I came, I was in that circumstance at one point where everything I did, the person, the CR reported to want to improve it. And then, you know, then you just you're paralyzed, right? Because you just, so you can't exist in a permission culture. It has to be an anti permission culture, and you have to, and you have to act that way so that people who are reporting to you understand that you're real about that, which means you have to trust that they're gonna do it, and and they're gonna make wrong decisions.

People are just, it's just gonna happen, but it's not like they're gonna make a wrong decision and you're gonna berate, you know, you're gonna berate them take them over the coals. You're gonna say, listen, it happened. It's fine. Let's move on. I understand why you made the decision. So they need to understand that you're supportive of them. Yeah. That's a really big deal in terms of leveraging your ability as a leader because if you think you're gonna make yeah, otherwise you're, like you said, your capacity is shrinking, right? You just can't I, and that was the 1st discussion I had with Kievan, and, and I will tell you it's hard for some people.

There are some people who really have trouble making decisions without getting approved. Now maybe it's a child of thing, whatever, I you know, whatever, but there are you don't you you gotta get away from you you can't have those people in the organization. You need people who can decide.

Richard Medcalf
And, Deshaun, if you bring that back to you, like, what's what's your stretch in that? What's gonna be a bit edgy for you? Where'd you go? You might be able to, yeah, shift how you do things to create a new level of results for yourself.

Jon Cohen
I would say the biggest thing for me is to continue to to bring new ideas to the table, continue to read, continue to get outside information, continue to understand the space. I'm really far along or than I was 10 months ago, but there's more for me to learn. But I think, you know, the the most important thing that I can do right now is the a couple things. 1 is certainly bringing new ideas, and then the other is, is to continue to keep people focused on what we've decided strategy is go work. But I do still read a lot. I do audiobooks. I read, those are very helpful to me, to what I bring to the table. I have to tell you.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. Well, I tell you, we just the leaders and leaders, the readers, right? It's a phrase and,

Jon Cohen
That's true.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. And, and I think you're right. That that's a great, that's a lot of wisdom and then that and, and stretching and, and bringing innovation. Right. What a great thing. Yeah. I'd like to, to see your stretch as agreeing my creativity, right, to my or I'm innovation. And I find a lot of leaders, they do get they get bogged down in the operational stuff. And And I, do you know, I I had a I ran a session yesterday with a whole bunch of CEOs and I, yeah, one of the things we've discussed, but I said to them, like, you've gotta optimize for creativity and not for productivity.

Most CEOs are still locked into operating for productivity, but there's so many hours in the day, and they've got so many big organizations, and that's not really gonna move the needle.

Jon Cohen
It's only when they're creative that they're gonna yeah, I saw, they'll give you a great example of that. I mean, honestly, I would tell you 6 months ago, you know, the favorite topic of of course, for everybody is AI, right? And, you know, I would tell you, 5, 6 months ago, I really had 0 knowledge about AI, right? I mean, you know, and then, you know, chat GBT and these other things came out, it goes interesting, it was it sure, and then, you know, I like, I made a decision, right? I, this is something I probably need to know so I dug pretty deep, figured it out, looked around what's going on, you know, read, listened to, and did a whole bunch of stuff, and then, and basically force the team to develop an AI strategy for Talkspace, and it's had a huge impact. Now, I could blame the team and say like, Why did you guys not do it? But my view is is, you know, they're busy, they're doing their thing, and that's my job. So we've now, you know, developed a whole AI strategy. We launched a bunch of initiatives now, and that's how I think that's how one of the things how I think I contribute is is is that's right, is I can't be in the room on operational issues every day to make make business perform better. That's just not, that's not the best use of it. By any stretch. Right?

Richard Medcalf
Doctor Yeah, absolutely. Again, it's one of the, It's one of the reasons I created my CEO, program, Rivendell, because I realized that when you've got these very, very high level leaders, What they crave actually is to get into rooms where they're not the smartest person in the room, where they're faced with very divergent, thinking from eclectic, leaders who are very successful in their own right. And it's why actually we decided, I first tried to create the model to actually based around a couple of retreats each year, because it's in the rooms when you get away from the day to day, you go to some different locations, you kind of see people you don't spend much time with or, but although actually you trust them. I find that's where innovations really can double up, and it's really thrilling to see. So I think, yeah, creativity.

Jon Cohen
One of the best meetings that I do attend, is a, is the same thing you're talking about. There's a CEO forum that I go to, and it's it's cross industry, right? It's it's mostly, but it's but it's truly across industry across health care. And yes, I think that's why the best meeting you guys. I hear more interesting things there and learn more there than any business.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, exactly. Perfect. Well, Hey, this is a great, If I had any conversation really around, Leah, leading through, through trying to change and turbulence and crisis, and understanding the impact of mental health on individuals, you know, their employees, their families, as well as how Talkspace is kinda building this platform, add a different business model, in order to to kind of open up things to people that don't have access to that, we'll not be able to afford it in the past. So thank you for this discussion. John, I know you've got your book out. Do you wanna just remind us what that's called, let people can find it? So just if they wanna get in touch with you or or Talkspace, why do they do that?

Jon Cohen
Sure. So the book is called The Swab, s w a b, of course, get a big picture of somebody getting swabbed, that picture. If you go down, you know, listen, 80% of books are bought through Amazon. You know, if you go to Amazon and you put Cohen and Swab, and it'll come up immediately, and so that's, you know, as I said, it came out the end of June, and we we have had, fortunately, a bunch of companies buy it, bulk sales and distributed, and they asked me to smoke about leadership, etcetera. So, the, and then if they wanna if you wanna find me, it's it's pretty easy. It's it's my name at talkspace.com with a dot. So it's j o n dot co and see it. So it's j0n.cohen@talkspace.com.

Yeah. Yeah. And I'm really good about responding to you guys, tell you know, I I'm one of those guys that may email update. So, you know, that it's an easy way to find it.

Richard Medcalf
Perfect. So, John, thanks once again. Thank you for, tackling this particular burning fire of mental health and all the insights you shared. Before I proceed with you. Thank you.

Jon Cohen
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Richard Medcalf
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