Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett Arianna Huffington: I Was Lying In A Little Pool Of Blood! The Huffington Post, A $1 Billion 'Flop'! About this episode 3 world-leading companies, 30 years of never-ending evolution: there is only one Arianna Huffington
Arianna Huffington is the founder of The Huffington Post, Thrive Global, and Thrive AI Health. She is also the author of 15 books such as, ‘Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success’ and ‘The Sleep Revolution’.
In this conversation, Arianna and Steven discuss topics such as, Arianna’s burnout breakdown, why she sold The Huffington Post, the benefits of redefining success, and the dangers of social media and phones.
(00:00) Intro
(00:00) Childhood Experiences That Shaped My Success
(01:18) Having Ambition From A Young Age
(03:04) My Journey To Becoming Cambridge's 3rd Female Student Union President
(04:49) Overcoming Overthinking
(05:42) Breaking Gender Norms Without Fear Of Failure
(08:46) The Core Message Of 'The Female Woman'
(09:45) Balancing Career And Family: Is It Possible?
(11:06) The Power Of Listening To Your Inner Self
(12:15) My Early Career Aspirations And Dreams
(13:40) How Bernard Levin Influenced My Career
(17:31) Bernard's Death
(18:55) The Impact Of Michael Huffington On My Life
(20:15) The Transformative Power Of Forgiveness
(20:57) The Story Behind The Huffington Post's Creation
(23:51) How The Huffington Post Overcame Terrible Initial Reviews
(25:46) Lessons From Roger Federer's Commencement Speech
(27:44) Launching A Tech Company In My Fifties
(30:03) Business Mistakes To Avoid As A Startup Founder
(33:38) The Serious Health Risks Of Sleep Deprivation
(35:44) The Importance Of Self-Care While Working Intensely
(37:17) Is Sacrificing Your Wellbeing Worse For Men Or Women?
(38:49) The 3rd Women's Revolution
(39:54) Do Women Experience Burnout Faster Than Men?
(41:16) The Health Impact Of Stressful Jobs
(42:28) Why Volunteering Reduces The Likelihood Of Job Quitting
(44:01) How My Life Changed After A Burnout Diagnosis
(46:11) How A Large Financial Windfall Changed My Life
(49:18) How Small Improvements Lead To Big Positive Changes
(54:06) The Biggest Mistakes I've Made In Business
(57:15) The Most Important Lessons From My Career
(01:00:02) What's The True Meaning Of Life?
(01:03:47) Coping With The Loss Of My First Child
(01:04:44) How To Keep Faith During Tough Times
(01:05:52) My Partner's Heroic Endeavors During World War II
(01:06:35) What My Mother Would Have Thought Of The Huffington Post
(01:07:45) How Increasing Wellbeing Boosts Business Productivity
(01:08:50) The Day My Mother Passed Away
(01:11:00) Life After My Mother's Death
(01:12:45) The Most Important Life Lessons I'd Share With You
(01:19:03) The Importance Of Entry Interviews In Hiring
(01:20:59) How To Address And Overcome Your Own Prejudices
(01:23:50) Key Leadership Qualities That Drive Success
(01:25:03) The Role Of Luck In Achieving Success
(01:28:09) Is It Luck, Hard Work, Or Intentionality That Drives Success?
(01:31:55) The Best Advice I Wish I Had Received
(01:33:56) Using Technology And AI For Positive Change
(01:39:39) The Final Question Every Guest Must Answer
Follow Arianna:
Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/gpSw6nEYeMb
Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/lNli1BXofMb
LinkedIn - https://g2ul0.app.link/dYovh7bYeMb
Thrive Global - https://g2ul0.app.link/s7OL4QIYeMb
You can buy Arianna’s book, ‘Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success’, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/jIsyETRYeMb
Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes
My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACBook
You can purchase the The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards: Second Edition, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb
Follow me:
https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript 15,088 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 The biggest success of The Huffington Post happened after I collapsed and hit my head on my desk, broke my cheekbone and came to in a little pool of blood. That was the beginning of a journey to find out what was wrong with me.
0:13 Speaker 01 Arianna Huffington is one of the world's most powerful business leaders in media.
0:17 Speaker 00 And the co-founder of The Huffington Post.
0:19 Steven Bartlett? Which, under her innovative leadership, became the second most popular news site in the world before being sold for $315 million. What are the most important things I should be thinking about to be successful?
0:30 Speaker 00 One is when you overcome that fear of rejection, that fear of failure, we are much more likely to take bold moves.
0:36 Steven Bartlett? I mean, that's the story of your life. You got into Cambridge when only three colleges accepted women. You become the president of Cambridge Union and the third woman ever to lead the debating society.
0:44 Speaker 00 And also coming to New York and launching The Huffington Post, that happened because a man would marry me. Good to remember that. The next point, culture makes us think that I have to achieve everything before 30. But I launched The Huffington Post at 55, thrived global at 66, and now launched a new company with OpenAI at 74. It's never too late.
1:07 Steven Bartlett? I want to talk to you about mistakes that you made.
1:09 Speaker 00 I had bought into this delusion that in order to be super founder and super mom, I didn't have the luxury to take care of myself. And then I was literally diagnosed with burnout. It was unnecessary suffering. But as I talked to a lot of scientists, it became very clear that there are five daily behaviors that makes everything you're doing even more successful. And the first is.
1:35 Steven Bartlett? Arianna, what do I need to know about you and your earliest years to understand the woman that's sat in front of me today? What was those formative early experiences that shaped you most profoundly?
1:50 Speaker 00 The most important formative experience was my mother. And so we lived, my mother, my sister and I, in a one-bedroom apartment in Athens, Greece. We had very little money, but she always made us feel abandoned, partly by cooking.
2:14 Speaker 00 She was constantly cooking. I think she really believed that if you didn't eat every twenty minutes, something terrible would happen to you. And she created that sense of life as an adventure. And one story that kind of captures her is I was walking home from school one day and I saw a magazine that had a picture of Cambridge University on the cover. Something immediately connected with me and I got home and I threw the magazine on the kitchen table and I said, I want to go there. And my mother said, oh, let's see how we can go visit. I said, no, no, no, I want to go study there.
2:57 Speaker 00 And everybody else has said that too, said, don't be ridiculous. You don't speak English. We have no money and it's hard for English girls to get into Cambridge. My mother said, let's find out how you can go there. And the most amazing thing that sums her up and defines so much about my life is that she never made it seem onerous. She never made it seem like, oh, you must get there. You know, this is something that absolutely has to happen. It was more like, this is an adventure. We are going to give it a hundred percent. But if you don't get in, there's going to be another adventure. And I'm not going to love you any less.
3:38 Speaker 00 Because at the heart of everything was this unconditional loving. That made us feel, my sister and I, that we could aim for the stars, but if we failed, it was fine.
3:52 Steven Bartlett? Were you ambitious at that age?
3:54 Speaker 00 Yes, I was ambitious, but also I was willing to fail. Because she used to say, failure is not the opposite of success. It's a stepping stone to success. So I was never afraid of failing and I think.
4:10 Speaker 00 So often, people are reluctant to try something, to risk something, because anything really ambitious, anything really important you want to achieve, there are no guarantees. So if failure seems something overwhelming, you're less likely to try it.
4:31 Steven Bartlett? I mean, that's the story of your life in many respects, taking quite audacious leaps forward into the unknown. I mean, as I went through your career, you ended up getting into Cambridge, which is pretty incredible, because it's not only difficult to get into Cambridge, but back then, sort of pre 1970s, only three colleges at Cambridge actually accepted women. And you got into one of those colleges. So from a very early age, you were kind of breaking the rules.
5:00 Speaker 00 It was the most amazing thing. Like, if you if you look back on your life, I'm sure there's an event, something that happened, that led to a lot of other good things happening. And for me, if there was one thing, it was getting into Cambridge. Because then I became president of the Cambridge Union, which led to my being offered a contract to write a book when I had no intention of being a writer. So there was a cascade of positive events in my life and my career that happened because I got into Cambridge.
5:37 Steven Bartlett? It's quite remarkable to me that you got into Cambridge, because, you know, back in Greece, I think it was, that was just after the civil war. You didn't have money, you're in a one-bedroom apartment, your father had left, and you set your sights on Cambridge because you saw it in a magazine. You then get into Cambridge, you become the president of the student union.
5:56 Speaker 00 Cambridge Union.
5:57 Steven Bartlett? Union. How? How did you become the president of the union?
6:00 Speaker 00 So the thing that I loved from the beginning, you know, there are so many clubs and places you can get involved in at Cambridge. I immediately gravitated to the debating society, which is what the Cambridge Union is. I just was fascinated by the spectacle of people's hearts and minds being moved by words.
6:23 Speaker 00 And I had a few obstacles to overcome. I spoke with a heavy accent. I still speak with a heavy accent, but at the time it mattered more. And there was a lot of snobbery at Cambridge about accents. And there was a lot of ridicule. And it was super hard because on top of everything else, I had this voice in my head that I now call the obnoxious roommate living in my head that would put me down, judge me, the kind of negative self-talk. So it wasn't just that I wasn't successful as a speaker when I started.
7:07 Speaker 00 It was also that my own inner monologue was kind of devastating. But something made me persevere and learn and keep learning and learning and seeing some of the best speakers in the world speaking there.
7:23 Steven Bartlett? Your own inner monologue was devastating?
7:26 Speaker 00 Yes, I suppose I'm a ruminator. I've worked on it and I've dealt with it. But when I started in my career, being a ruminator was super hard. Like anytime I would make a mistake, I would ruminate on it and
7:40 Steven Bartlett? Overthink.
7:40 Speaker 00 Overthink it and beat myself about it. Now it's so much better because that voice, the obnoxious roommate, only makes guest appearances. Most of the time, I'm really good about making mistakes, learning from them and moving on.
8:04 Steven Bartlett? And you overcame the skill of public speaking, which is a pretty important skill to overcome for anybody. But that also is something that I think really shines through your career is that you learnt very early how to stand up and speak.
8:16 Speaker 00 And that I loved it. I mean, I I've written a lot of books, but I love nothing as much as speaking. Because there's that connection, that direct connection with an audience. And being able to see their eyes and being able to respond in the moment.
8:35 Steven Bartlett? And I I found um found this picture that you might recognize of you with all of these men. Believe that might be, do you know that picture?
8:46 Speaker 00 Yes, this is what they call like the the standing committee of the union.
8:50 Steven Bartlett? Ah, OK.
8:51 Speaker 00 So that was before each debate, there would be a picture. And at the time, Rajiv here was the president and and, you know, the the treasurer, the secretary, and then behind there were members of the standing committee. And that's how that's how I started, you know, you you go up the ladder, standing committee, secretary, treasurer, president, if you're lucky.
9:19 Steven Bartlett? It's striking because you're the only woman in the image. And, you know, for much of your career, you walked through doors that mainly men walked through. And becoming the, I think, president of the debating society is a is a role that very few women had ever occupied.
9:35 Speaker 00 I was the third.
9:36 Steven Bartlett? You're the third ever. Um, what was it about you at that age that was already showing early signs of being able to break through doors? That weren't supposed to be meant for women in particular at that time? Like getting into Cambridge University when there was only one college, that three colleges that would accept it? Or becoming the third woman ever to lead the debating society?
9:57 Speaker 00 Stephen, I really think it goes back to being willing to fail. And there was absolutely no guarantee at all and that I would get elected. And but I was willing to fail, and there was no guarantee that I would get into Cambridge. So I I like repeating that because often, you know, I have two daughters. And part of the thing that I've tried to impress on my daughters is that they can go for their dreams. And if they fail, there will be another dream.
10:36 Steven Bartlett? One of your first, I guess, dreams, but one of your first aspirations was in writing, because you met someone who, a guy called Reg Davis Pointer.
10:45 Speaker 00 I had not met him, actually. He was the publisher of Jermaine Greers, who had written a book called The Female Unic.
10:54 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
10:54 Speaker 00 And he happened to see the debate, which was televised, that I participated in when I was president of the Union, on the topic of women's rights and the changes in women's rights. And he sent me a letter and asked if I would write a book on the views I'd expressed in the debate.
11:20 Steven Bartlett? What was the message, the central message, that you were trying to communicate in this book?
11:25 Speaker 00 The central message was that you had to remember what life was like at the time. It was that women had to have a career.
11:36 Steven Bartlett? That was the movement.
11:37 Speaker 00 To be respected. That was the movement. It was a reaction to women not having careers and being stuck at home. So my message was really, was pretty much accepted now, but was pretty radical at the time, which is, yes, if you want to have a career, fantastic. Everything should be open to you. Equal opportunities, equal pay, everything. But if you want to bring up your children, and you can afford to do it on one salary, that should also be given equal respect.
12:19 Steven Bartlett? Where do you, the world has changed a lot, and it's funny because the world has kind of come back, especially in the last couple of years. It seems that there's been a real counter movement towards...
12:32 Steven Bartlett? People re, thinking more deeply about the trade offs.
12:36 Speaker 00 Yes.
12:37 Steven Bartlett? I think that's the best way to say it. The trade offs of pursuing a, you know, really, really intense career for forty years, then deciding in your, you know, in your early forties that, that you want to start thinking about children. It's funny because I was reading some stats around things like IVF. IVF is exploding now. Lots of the conversations I have on my podcast are about the fertility issues people are facing because we're waiting later and later and later and later to have kids because I think we kind of think we can have it all.
13:02 Speaker 00 Yes.
13:03 Steven Bartlett? So where do you sit now on these issues of feminism, but also, you know, this idea of can you have it all?
13:11 Speaker 00 I believe you can have it all, but maybe not at the same time. And, and I believe that there isn't one right way to do it. Like you may want to focus on your career and then have children later. Or you may want to have your children and then focus on your career. That's really what's changing, that there isn't one way to find fulfillment and contribute.
13:38 Steven Bartlett? How do you know which way is right for you though? Because with so much noise outside, you know, it's hard, isn't it? To, to really sometimes listen to that, that voice inside you that's telling you what you want.
13:49 Speaker 00 Well, that's why it's so important to, to build that pathway to your heart, to your own knowing yourself. I mean, in your book, you write about these four pillars and you start with a self, right? And you quote Leonardo da Vinci and so many of the wise men and women we admire talk about that. You know, know thyself. The unexamined life is not worth living. These are all ways of reminding us that if we, if we are not connected with our own centre,
14:28 Speaker 00 then we're at the mercy of every new fad and whatever is in social media that we're affected by. If we build that connection.
14:44 Speaker 00 And strengthen that trust, then everything changes.
14:49 Steven Bartlett? What did you want to be in terms of, you know, your career and your profession at that age when you met that young man and he asked you to write this book? What was your, what were your career aspirations?
15:00 Speaker 00 I wanted to be a journalist.
15:02 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
15:03 Speaker 00 And I had studied economics. And I think of everything I, I was taught in my economics degree, the thing that has still stayed with me is the concept of the opportunity cost. That anytime you do something, you are foregoing doing something else.
15:25 Steven Bartlett? Interesting. That's a term that my investment fund use a lot.
15:28 Speaker 00 Really?
15:29 Steven Bartlett? Never heard anybody really use it in the context of life.
15:31 Speaker 00 Yeah. And it's so important in the context of life, like friendships, relationships, obviously career choices. They are for, they are choices about what you're not doing while you're choosing to do this.
15:50 Steven Bartlett? And I mean, that's what makes them all so special, right? Because they come at the expense of something else that you could have done.
15:55 Speaker 00 Absolutely, yes. And you can't keep all your options open forever because then you have too many plans. I mean, I love what you said in your book about go all in to plan A. Don't kind of keep a back door open for plan B.
16:13 Steven Bartlett? You talked a second ago about how life is about choices.
16:17 Speaker 00 Yes.
16:17 Steven Bartlett? You know, relationships, everything is about choices. And one of the choices that you made was, I guess it wasn't a choice, but was to be in a relationship in your early twenties with a guy called Bernard Levin. He is a special character in your life, your life story, isn't he? For many, many reasons.
16:37 Speaker 00 Yes, I fell in love with him before I met him. He was, he was a famous columnist for the London Times. And I used to cut his columns and literally underline them, read them by heart because he was a phenomenal writer. He really taught me how to write. I mean, even before he knew me. And.
17:01 Speaker 00 He was twice my age and half my size.
17:06 Speaker 00 But love is blind. And then there was a show on the BBC called Face the Music. And when I was the elect president of the Cambridge Union, I was invited to take part. I was a classical music buff. So was he. And that's where we met. And he invited me to dinner.
17:27 Speaker 00 Two weeks later, and I prepped for dinner. Like, I read everything he was writing about Northern Ireland and the Soviet Union. Trust me, we didn't talk about any of that, but I had done all my prep. And we were together for seven years.
17:42 Steven Bartlett? Wow.
17:43 Speaker 00 And I definitely wanted to marry him and have children with him. He wanted to have cats.
17:50 Steven Bartlett? Cats.
17:51 Speaker 00 He had no intent, he didn't want to get married. He would have been happy to stay with me for the rest of his life. But I really wanted to have children, and he didn't.
18:01 Steven Bartlett? How do you do that? How do you leave the situation where you're in love with someone? So you were with him from twenty-three to thirty?
18:07 Speaker 00 Yes.
18:08 Steven Bartlett? And at thirty, you leave him because he doesn't want to have children with you?
18:11 Speaker 00 I was very clear that I wanted to have children. I have a lot of great friends who don't want to have children, and they're perfectly happy. Not everybody wants or should have children. But I knew I wanted to have children. I knew that this was part of a fulfilling life for me.
18:30 Steven Bartlett? Did you try and persuade him?
18:32 Speaker 00 I did, failed.
18:35 Steven Bartlett? What was his reason?
18:37 Speaker 00 He just didn't want to have children. He just, he really, he was very stuck on his life, you know? Writing, opera, travel. A lot of things we loved doing together.
18:54 Speaker 00 So I took the decision and because I didn't trust myself to stay in London, I knew I wouldn't, I wouldn't stay away. I literally left London and moved to New York.
19:06 Steven Bartlett? To get away from him.
19:06 Speaker 00 To get away from him. And again, you know how sometimes something in life that goes wrong leads to a lot of amazing things that go spectacularly right. And that's in over what happened with me. I mean, obviously, it was incredibly hard and painful. I'm not minimizing it. But coming to New York led to meeting my husband, having my children, launching the Huffington Post, you know, launching Thrive. So basically, so much that happened to me. So many great things that happened in my life happened because a man wouldn't marry me.
19:51 Speaker 00 Good to remember that.
19:54 Steven Bartlett? Were you, were you kind of grieving the relationship when you came to New York?
19:58 Speaker 00 Yes, definitely.
20:01 Steven Bartlett? He passed away of Alzheimer's.
20:03 Speaker 00 Yes.
20:05 Steven Bartlett? Which is a particularly evil disease.
20:10 Speaker 00 Yes, the last time I saw him, when I, when I was in London, I arranged to see him and it's a terrible disease. Because no matter what I said, there was absolutely no recognition.
20:33 Steven Bartlett? He didn't recognize you? How does that feel?
20:42 Speaker 00 You know, it has gotten me extremely interested in.
20:47 Speaker 00 Any form of cognitive decline and learning a lot about it. Because millions of people are suffering from it and it's affecting everybody they love and who loves them. And what is so interesting is to see the impact that how we live has on cognitive decline. Obviously, there are genetic factors. But behaviors, how we live, how we sleep, the stress levels in our lives, what we eat, also have a huge impact on dementia, Alzheimer's, any form of decline.
21:28 Steven Bartlett? Hmm. Michael Huffington. He's the man you met when you went to New York that became the father of your two wonderful daughters?
21:37 Speaker 00 Yes. And our marriage lasted for 11 years. Nora Ephron, you know, who was this wonderful writer, who was also an editor at the Huffington Post, she used to say, "Marriage comes and goes, but divorce is forever." And what she meant by that is that if you have children, the relationship never ends because you're still parenting together. And our marriage didn't work, but we have a great divorce. Like, we go on vacation together. We are really good friends. We are close as a family.
22:20 Speaker 00 So I think this is kind of really important, given that 50% of marriages end in divorce. And the hardest thing is what happens to the children. And so, anything we can do to...
22:40 Speaker 00 Give up our grudges and resentments because obviously if there were no grudges and resentments and problems, we would still be married. It's so interesting, Stephen, to look at the science of forgiveness. When we forgive, our stress levels go down. Can you believe our cholesterol levels go down? You know, the connection between forgiveness and our physical and mental health is enormous. And that's why I'm so much against cancel culture. Because it's a culture that gives up on forgiveness, on redemption, on giving people a chance to learn from mistakes and evolve and grow, which is, after all, what life
23:25 Speaker 00 is about.
23:26 Steven Bartlett? While you were in New York, before you, I guess, discovered and started leveraging the internet with that website, which I think your first website was resignation.com, what were you doing in New York? What was your job?
23:39 Speaker 00 I was writing books. I've written 15 books altogether.
23:43 Steven Bartlett? I mean, I've got 10 of them here or something. Yeah, sort of 10 of them on the, three of them on the table and seven of them with me on the floor here. What was, you know, you're a writer, you're writing physical books. And at the time, I think you're 55 years old?
23:57 Speaker 00 Yes.
23:58 Steven Bartlett? And the internet is this fairly kind of new thing that's starting to take off. It just seems to me to be slightly unusual for someone who's writing physical books to make the decision to investigate this new technology called the internet, because most people are scared of new technologies. They run away from it, they criticize it, they say it'll never work, they attack it, and they bury their head in the sand. But for some reason, you leaned in.
24:24 Speaker 00 Because all my life, I've been fascinated by what we call the zeitgeist, like the spirit of the times. And I could see that everything was moving online.
24:39 Speaker 00 And that conversations were moving online. And yet, people were making fun of it. You remember, it was the early days when people were joking about people who couldn't get a job blogging from their parents' basements. And I wanted to bring my friends, people who were writing physical books, who could be published by the New York Times or the London Times, I want to bring them online. And so I actually wrote an email to 500 friends, close and not so close, and invited them to write blog on the Huffington Post.
25:20 Speaker 00 And I said, on any thought you have, any idea you have, you wake up and you want to react to the news of the day, you can just publish it on the Huffington Post. And we promise that we're going to treat it with respect. We had moderators from the beginning, so that people couldn't just trash each other. What happened with the internet down the road. And so when we launched, day one, we had Larry David and Ellen DeGeneres and Nora Ephron and Walter Cronkite. We had like an incredible lineup of people on the news of the day, on things they cared about.
26:03 Speaker 00 And also, on the same day, we had a review, which was so devastating, I learned it by heart. It said, "The Huffington Post is an unsurvivable failure. It is the movie equivalent of Gile, E. Star and Heaven's Gate rolled into one." I don't know if you know any of these movies, but they were all flops. So that was kind of the opening review. A year later, the writer of this review emailed me and said, "I was wrong. The Huffington Post changed how we consume news, and I would like to write for you."
26:45 Speaker 00 And again, going back to no grudges, no resentments, I said, "We would love you to."
26:52 Steven Bartlett? When they wrote that review, how did it feel when you read it?
26:56 Speaker 00 Here's the thing, it felt bad.
27:02 Speaker 00 It felt really bad, but I think it's okay to feel bad. Again, going back to your book, we want to be comfortable all the time. So what's wrong with feeling bad occasionally? I love the way children are. Do you notice how a child is upset about something? It could be as important as not being allowed to have this ice cream cone or as equally important as falling, whatever. They cry, they rage, and two minutes later, you look at them and it's over. I don't believe in growing a thick skin.
27:47 Speaker 00 I want to be permeable. Something bad happens, something upsetting happens, experience it, feel it. Don't do what I call a spiritual bypass. You know, people who consider themselves spiritual, as I do, often like act as though nothing is bothering them. And that's not true, that's not human. So experiencing it, feeling it, and moving on. You know, Roger Federer gave a commencement speech recently. I don't know if you saw it, which was amazing.
28:20 Steven Bartlett? I saw it on your LinkedIn.
28:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, because he talked about how he only made half the shots, half the points, you know, and with here's this great tennis player, and you're not going to get them all right. He said, "The most important thing is to be 100% focused on the point, and then the next point, not to carry it with you."
28:46 Steven Bartlett? It was so powerful that actually saved it.
28:48 Speaker 00 Yes, it's really powerful. It's really powerful when it comes from a master, somebody who's so incredibly successful at his.
29:00 Speaker 00 Game.
29:01 Steven Bartlett? It was shocking to me because he says he won eighty percent of the matches he played in tennis, but only fifty four percent of the points. And I found that really, really interesting. My brain almost like struggled with the numbers there. You're winning eighty percent of the matches, but you're only winning fifty four percent of the points, which means you're only, you're basically still winning half of the points.
29:19 Speaker 00 But you win the match.
29:21 Steven Bartlett? But you win the match because you just, now that's mindset.
29:24 Speaker 00 But you win the match because you don't carry the points you missed with you to the next point you are playing. And a lot of the best athletes, I'm, we have a lot of athletes who are investors in Thrive. Because I believe athletes are a great role model for what we are teaching, which is that recovery is part of peak performance. And like Andre Iguodala, who is an investor, he talks about the same thing that Roger Federer talks about. It's very important when he makes a mistake, when he misses something, not to ruminate about it.
30:09 Speaker 00 Because when you ruminate about it, then you are not fully present.
30:14 Steven Bartlett? For the next opportunity.
30:14 Speaker 00 For the next opportunity. So you're more likely to miss it.
30:20 Steven Bartlett? Huffington Post, was that the first, your first big foray into business?
30:25 Speaker 00 Yes.
30:26 Steven Bartlett? I think, I think this is one of the things that, you know, from speaking to a lot of people in my life that they find exceptionally inspiring about you was typically, and this is being very intentionally stereotypical, people that build tech companies, which is what you did.
30:40 Speaker 00 Do it in their twenties.
30:41 Steven Bartlett? And they're men. They're young men in their twenties typically, especially at that time. You know, it's changing a little bit now, which is great, but it, but especially at that time, which was two thousand and five, it was very atypical for a fifty five year old woman to build a tech company.
30:57 Speaker 00 Yes.
30:59 Steven Bartlett? Did you see that as, did you feel that resistance at all?
31:04 Speaker 00 I didn't actually. And I think what happened is that.
31:12 Speaker 00 We made it work. We showed it worked very quickly, despite that bad review.
31:19 Speaker 00 And and we kept experimenting. I think the mistake often is you build something successful and you stay there, and we never stayed there. Like, we launched with politics and news. But very quickly, we had a dozen other verticals, including sleep. We had a vertical on sleep. We had lifestyle verticals. We had sports verticals. We had gay vertical. So we we kept expanding. And then we built our journalism operation. We won a Pulitzer. We launched
31:59 Speaker 00 in eighteen countries. So it was a constant expansion. And what happened is that, again, you know that Clay Christensen book, The Innovator's Dilemma?
32:11 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, it's one of my favorite books.
32:12 Speaker 00 It's amazing. So, you know, if the New York Times had done then what it's doing now so successfully, you know, having a great digital presence, there would have been no room for the Huffington Post.
32:26 Speaker 00 So basically, that's the innovator's dilemma. Super successful incumbents miss the moment because they're super successful incumbents.
32:36 Steven Bartlett? Yeah. And you were young, you were scrappy as a company, so you could you weren't encumbered by an old way of doing things and old revenue models. You could come into the market with a fresh new idea and off it went. And it went so far, went to the UK. And I was eighteen years old when I applied to write on the Huffington Post.
32:56 Speaker 00 No, that's amazing.
32:58 Steven Bartlett? I got accepted. And I submitted how many articles, maybe four or five articles that got published on there. But I want to talk about business. I want to talk about building a business. And what you learned about building a business from the rise of the Huffington Post. What are the most important if I was one of your daughters and I came to you and I said, Mom, listen, I want to build a business, and I want it to be even bigger than the Huffington Post grew to be. What are the most important things I should be thinking about to be successful?
33:28 Speaker 00 So I would now start.
33:32 Speaker 00 With the founder or the CEO,
33:37 Speaker 00 which is,
33:39 Speaker 00 put your own oxygen mask on first. Very often, you know, you're a founder, you think I need to stay up.
33:49 Speaker 00 Stephen, is that you?
33:50 Steven Bartlett? No, what are we talking about? I don't know what you're talking about. I get to sleep every day.
33:54 Speaker 00 I need to stay up all day and night, sleep with my phone in case something happens in the middle of the night. And all the science now makes it very clear that when we are depleted, we are going to make bad decisions. It's so funny because one night I was at a dinner and Jeff Bezos, I, that was when I was writing my book on sleep. And so I was asking everybody about their sleep habits. So I asked him about his sleep habits. And he said, I sleep eight hours a night. And I said, you do? Tell me about it. Why? He said, because I'm judged by the quality of my decisions, not the quantity of my decisions. And, and I have noticed the difference.
34:40 Speaker 00 Because he's very data driven, when I have six hours of sleep, my decisions are not as good. So I said to him, you must write about it. He said, which I used to say to everybody when I was, and, and he said, no, no, no, no. He said, I'm a private man. I don't need to write about it. I said, please write about it. It's not for you. It is going to help so many people who want to be you to realize that they don't need to be sleep deprived and exhausted. So I literally bugged him, texted him for like three months, until finally he wrote about it, I think to get me off his back. And it was amazing. He wrote about it on Thrive, that we had just launched Thrive.
35:25 Speaker 00 It was everywhere, CNBC, The Wall Street Journal. He was one of the first CEOs to write about sleep as a performance.
35:35 Speaker 00 Multiplier, a productivity multiplier. Since then, you know, Satya Nathella has written about it. A lot of CEOs have written about it. A lot of founders in Silicon Valley now. People have gone from bragging about how sleep deprived they are. I'm wearing my hour ring.
35:53 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, I was looking there, yeah.
35:53 Speaker 00 You're wearing your hoop and you're an investor. I love hoop. It's fantastic. So everything has changed, but it's changed very fast. Two thousand sixteen, when I wrote the book, people were still bragging about sleep deprivation.
36:12 Steven Bartlett? You know sleep deprivation well.
36:14 Speaker 00 I do. I mean, I collapsed, but from sleep deprivation and from buying into this collective delusion that in order to succeed, it was two years into building The Huffington Post. I was the divorced mother of two little girls. And I had bought into this delusion that in order to be super founder and super mom, I didn't have the luxury to take care of myself.
36:39 Steven Bartlett? Take me into that moment. If I was a fly on the wall, what would I have seen in that moment?
36:44 Speaker 00 So I literally woke up that morning, went to CNN to do a news hit, came back and sat at my desk, felt cold, got up to go get a sweater and collapsed and hit my head on my desk, broke my cheekbone and came to in a little pool of blood. And that was the beginning of a journey of going from doctor to doctor, from echocardiogram to MRI to find out what was wrong with me.
37:29 Speaker 00 Because literally people thought that she have a heart defect, a brain tumor. Why did she just collapse? And then I was literally diagnosed with burnout. Now, two thousand seven, burnout was not a term much in use. But it turned out to be an incredible gift because I decided.
37:55 Speaker 00 That I really now wanted to make this part of my life, help the world, see that this epidemic of burnout that I started seeing was everywhere, was completely unnecessary. It was unnecessary suffering that we didn't need to buy into this collective delusion in order to succeed.
38:17 Steven Bartlett? Could you have become successful without that high intensity work?
38:21 Speaker 00 Absolutely. I think the biggest success of the Huffington Post actually happened after that. And let me just make that very clear, Stephen. Taking care of yourself doesn't mean you don't work with intensity. In fact, when we launched Thrive and we were interviewing people to hire, we realized early on that there are people who thought, oh, they could go work for Thrive and it would be like chilling under the mango tree. So we had to explain to them, no, no, we're a very ambitious, high-charging company. And if you want to chill under the mango tree, that's not a good place to be. And we tell everybody, there will be times when you have to
39:06 Speaker 00 deliver a product or meet a deadline and you may have to work late or work a weekend. But what we do then, we give people Thrive time immediately after. Like if you've worked extra hard to meet a deadline, then take Thrive time to recharge. And you know, Stephen, that's actually good for the business because very often people get sick or make their biggest mistakes when they are completely depleted. So it's not about lack of intensity. It's about taking time to refuel, recharge, and be at your best.
39:50 Steven Bartlett? Do you think this collective delusion that you described, which I'm defining as this notion that you have to sacrifice your wellbeing to be successful?
39:58 Speaker 00 Yes.
39:59 Steven Bartlett? Who is it letting down more, men or women?
40:03 Speaker 00 Okay. Obviously, there are more men who've succeeded, and therefore there are numerically more men who believe and practice that. But I think a lot of women too,
40:18 Speaker 00 who want to make sure they are not seen as being on the mommy track or not being as passionate or intense about their work, have bought into that delusion. But what I found very interesting is to try and and see what was the beginning of that delusion. And I trace it back to the first industrial revolution, when people started revering machines. And after machines, software. And what is the
40:52 Speaker 00 what is basically the essence of machines and software? No downtime. You know, you have sales force bringing out a new piece of software and saying ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine nine percent uptime. Well, the human operating system is different. For the human operating system, downtime is a feature, not a bug.
41:18 Speaker 00 And the science is so clear and unequivocal about it.
41:22 Steven Bartlett? Is that why you called your you came up with this notion called the Third Women's Revolution? What is the Third Women's Revolution?
41:32 Speaker 00 The First Women's Revolution was about giving us the vote. The Second Women's Revolution was about equal pay and equal opportunities. The Third Women's Revolution
41:46 Speaker 00 was about making it clear that we can succeed without burning out, that we don't have to sacrifice our well-being, our relationships on the altar of success. And I believe that as we are doing it now, we're in the middle of it, and a lot of men are a big part of it, that it's good for everybody. I mean, look at the number of men who end up with heart attacks,
42:19 Speaker 00 high cholesterol, hypertension, all because they think that's the only way to succeed.
42:28 Steven Bartlett? The traditional models don't work for women because women burn out faster than men. Is that true?
42:33 Speaker 00 I don't think women burn out faster than men. Most women, first of all, still do the bulk of work at home in terms of children and child. That we theoretically believe that
42:51 Speaker 00 men are equally engaged, but the data doesn't bear that out. But what I was saying in Thrive, I see you're holding the Thrive book.
42:59 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
43:00 Speaker 00 Is really about that third metric of success. I obviously like thirds. You know, if you think of the first two metrics of success, money and power slash status, and most people think that's life, but it's not. It's like trying to sit on a two-legged stool. Sooner or later, you fall off. The third leg of the stool is everything else. It's our health and wellbeing. It's our capacity to connect with ourselves and our wisdom. It's our capacity for a sense of wonder and the mystery of life and the small joys of life,
43:41 Speaker 00 and then giving. So these four other areas are what make a complete and whole life.
43:49 Steven Bartlett? In Thrive, there's a stat which stood out to me. It says, women in stressful jobs have a 40% increased risk of heart disease and a 60% greater risk of diabetes, which is a pretty shocking stat.
44:02 Speaker 00 Yes.
44:02 Steven Bartlett? And it begs the question, why?
44:04 Speaker 00 One of the reasons is that women internalize mistakes more. What I said about myself is true about many successful women. We are ruminators. We tend to.
44:19 Speaker 00 Go over and over in our minds, any mistake we made. And men have a much easier time just moving on. They have a much easier time being Roger Federer. So that's a big problem. The other is this perfectionism. And the fact that they still have a larger percentage of work at home. And even if they get a lot of help from their partner, they mind share. You know, they're still thinking, oh, my partner is picking up the child for the doctor's appointment. But I still think about it.
45:01 Steven Bartlett? You're still holding that burden, whereas maybe men don't always hold it in such a way. It's interesting that you reference giving as being one of the most important elements of the third metric. I read a study in the book that says, a 2013 study by the University of Wisconsin found that employees who give back to society, for example, through volunteering, are less likely to quit their job, which I thought was really interesting as an employer, as a way to drive retention in the team. But I also pondered why that might be. Why is it that when people give, they're more likely to stay in their job?
45:41 Speaker 00 Well, if you think of what makes a fulfilling life, what gives you meaning and purpose and all the things that make it more likely that a company culture will succeed. If you're in a company culture that encourages giving, I mean, at Thrive, we have giving days, we match donations. And this creates a kind of giving culture, which makes it more likely that people working in that company are going to feel fulfilled. Because fulfillment is not just a function of your job. It's a function of everything around it.
46:21 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, and so if you feel fulfilled, you'll just be happier in your life and you'll be less likely to want to change things.
46:25 Speaker 00 Exactly, because very often, you know, if you are unhappy in your life, changing the job might be the easiest thing that you think may change outcomes.
46:35 Steven Bartlett? When you had your burnout diagnosis, did that change anything for you?
46:40 Speaker 00 Everything.
46:41 Steven Bartlett? Did it, how quickly did it change?
46:43 Speaker 00 So quickly.
46:44 Steven Bartlett? Really?
46:44 Speaker 00 You know, it's pretty dramatic when you break your cheekbone and it's equally dramatic when you spend a lot of time in doctors' waiting rooms, wondering what's wrong with you. So, yes, it changed a lot of things. The keystone habit that it changed was sleep.
47:05 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
47:06 Speaker 00 And then, as I studied the phenomenon of burnout and talked to a lot of scientists and wrote a sleep book, it became very clear that there are five critical behaviours. Five daily behaviours that affect our health, both physical health and mental health. Sleep, food, what we eat, you know, again, just keeping it simple. Can we reduce ultra-processed foods? Can we reduce sugar? Movement, exercise, stress management and connection.
47:50 Speaker 00 Connection to ourselves, connection with each other. So, these five behaviours now, Stephen and I are seeing are more critical to our health and our longevity than genes and medical care.
48:10 Speaker 00 Genes, you know, there's nothing we can do about it.
48:16 Speaker 00 Medical care obviously is imperative when we're really sick. But health is really what happens between doctor visits. Like what we do every day, because just think of it, the idea that you have your annual physical and that's your health care. What are you doing every day? Are you stressed out? Are you sleep deprived? Are you eating junk?
48:45 Steven Bartlett? It's interesting because you you're speaking from a place of someone who was wildly successful in a monetary sense as well, because you have that sort of breaking point. I think it was in April 2007 when you collapsed. And then The Huffington Post continues to grow and continues to become successful all over the world. It expands across the world. I think in the year when you had the you collapsed on the desk, you had 3.5 million users accessing the website roughly around that time. It expands around the world. It's ranked as the most powerful blog in the world in 2008. By 2009, Huffington Post integrated into Facebook.
49:25 Steven Bartlett? And by 2011, you sold Huffington Post to AWOL for $300 million?
49:34 Speaker 00 315.
49:35 Steven Bartlett? Oh, and the rest, and the rest. $315 million and became president and editor in chief of the newly formed Huffington Post Media Group. Now, at that point, that's a lot of money, right? However much money you made from the deal, that's a lot of money. And you get the forbidden fruits that many people in their lives right now think they're chasing. You get that, you know, that big financial freedom windfall. What does it change?
50:04 Speaker 00 Nothing really, because my books have been very successful. And I feel there is a certain amount of money that changes your life. And after that, there isn't really much change. I mean, I remember that the first time I felt rich was when I could go into a bookstore and buy a book without looking at the price.
50:35 Speaker 00 You know, when you would go to a bookstore and, you know, I'll wait for you to come out.
50:42 Speaker 00 And there are different levels like that.
50:46 Steven Bartlett? But are you happier now than you were then in that bookstore when you didn't have to look at the price?
50:50 Speaker 00 Oh, I'm definitely happier, not because of money. I'm happier because I'm much more connected to myself, because I'm constantly growing as a human being. And that's for me the key, you know, that that sense of evolution and growth is ultimately what defines my life. It's not my work. I think that's so key, Stephen, because so many people stay in jobs they no longer love because they are big jobs. They have a big title. And they feel if I give up that job, who am I going to be? I mean, listen, when I left the Huffington Post, I left a very successful multimedia company all around the world
51:33 Speaker 00 with eight hundred and fifty journalists to start again, literally, to raise money, hire people. But I was so clear that what I wanted to do is to help people lead healthier lives.
51:52 Steven Bartlett? What age were you when you left Huffington Post?
51:53 Speaker 00 I launched, as you said, I launched the Huffington Post at fifty five and I launched Thrive Global at sixty six.
52:04 Speaker 00 And now, I'm now seventy four, we launched a new company with Sam Altman and OpenAI that is Thrive AI Health to help democratize everything we've brought to thrive. You know, about these five behaviors?
52:25 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
52:26 Speaker 00 Because that's kind of the ultimate inequality. Like, as you kind of were alluding, people with resources know about these five behaviors. They may not know all the science behind it. But now we see it. We see people prioritizing their sleep, what they're eating, exercise, stress management, listening to Peter Attia and Andrew Huberman and...
52:55 Speaker 00 And we need to democratize this knowledge and also help people adopt these healthier habits. And over the last seven years that I've been building Thrive, working with a great group of scientists, I really believe we've cracked the code on behavior change. You know, behavior change is supposed to be very hard, right? But the way to make it achievable is through what we call microsteps. And interestingly enough, you write in your book about making everything small.
53:35 Steven Bartlett? The progress principle and yeah, yeah, and the one percents, yeah.
53:39 Speaker 00 Kind of small little improvements. If you think of it, behavior change in our culture was seen as New Year resolutions.
53:47 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
53:48 Speaker 00 I'm going to go to the gym an hour a day. I'm going to give up all sugar. Two to three weeks later, these resolutions are abandoned. People have a sense of failure. They feel shame. So the alternative is what we're doing, which is microsteps, too small to fail. We'll never tell people, meditate for 20 minutes in the morning. No. We say, when you wake up in the morning, can you take 60 seconds before you go to your phone to breathe consciously? Or to remind yourself what you are grateful for? Or to set your intention for the day?
54:33 Speaker 00 The point is, can you break it down into the smallest possible component? And what happens? People build a sense of success. And we see that, you know, working with Walmart, Walmart is one of our customers. They have 1.6 million associates, as they call their employees, in the United States alone. And we work with them. And they actually give us also a million dollars a year to spend in financial rewards, to help people have another incentive, because incentives are superpowers. And we've had people reverse diabetes, reverse hypertension.
55:17 Speaker 00 But it was all one little microstep at a time.
55:21 Steven Bartlett? It's remarkable how small steps done continuously can really change your life. But nobody believes in them because you don't see huge rewards from a micro step in life.
55:31 Speaker 00 Cumulatively, you do.
55:32 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah, which requires faith.
55:35 Speaker 00 Faith, but also what helps is when you see other people having achieved it.
55:40 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
55:40 Speaker 00 So we, part of it is the storytelling. So we take all the stories and all the companies we work with and publicize them. We put them on the platform. So if you see that somebody who has a similar job to you can do it, you feel more optimistic that you can do it. And also removing judgments, you know, often self judgments get in the way of behavior change. And if we say this is a judgment free zone, you're going to fall off the wagon, you're going to make mistakes.
56:16 Speaker 00 But one little step at a time, BJ Fogg, who is the chair of our scientific board and from Stanford, he wrote a book called Tiny Habits. And it's the same idea, tiny habits, micro steps, making small progress that becomes cumulatively healthier habits.
56:40 Steven Bartlett? I want to talk to you about mistakes. The Huffington Post becomes, I think, at its peak, and correct me if I'm wrong here, the second biggest news website on the earth. Is that correct?
56:54 Speaker 00 I don't know, it sounds good.
56:56 Steven Bartlett? I read in 2014, when you were 64 years old, the Huffington Post became the second most popular news site in the world. That was an article written by The Guardian that it said that in. But it sounds, I mean, it sounds great, but I'm sure along the way, you know, you said you talked about failure earlier. There was a lot of mistakes made in that journey. Now, as a person in business, and I'm 31, so I'm in my.
57:19 Speaker 00 Think what you're going to build by the time you're 66.
57:22 Steven Bartlett? If I'm still alive, if I start putting that phone away. What are the mistakes that you made in that, in that business?
57:28 Speaker 00 I don't think there are bigger mistakes for a founder than hiring mistakes. So I've kind of created a little, a little rulebook about hiring.
57:42 Speaker 00 Like number one, never interview when you're tired.
57:49 Speaker 00 I find that when I interview and I'm tired, I just really want to say yes. I want to just kind of cross one more thing of my to do list. I don't want to go interview one more person. So that's subconscious. It's not that you're consciously thinking that. But so increasing the chances of not hiring, not making hiring mistakes is huge. Also, there were times when I
58:24 Speaker 00 kind of knew instinctively that there was something wrong about this hire. But mentally, I could not give myself reasons. You know that time when you feel that's not quite right, but the resume is amazing. The references are incredible. My board likes them.
58:46 Speaker 00 But something in me, no.
58:51 Speaker 00 Follow that. Because it's so much more important not to hire the wrong person than to miss someone.
58:59 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
59:03 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, I mean, there's the phrase, isn't there, that a bad apple spoils the barrel or something?
59:07 Speaker 00 Yes.
59:08 Steven Bartlett? And that's certainly the case in business, that one bad apple can really ruin a great culture of people.
59:15 Speaker 00 Yes, and, and listen, when I was on the board of Uber during the height of the bad culture problems, I saw how a culture is really the company's immune system. You know, there are always going to be bad apples. You know, it's humanity. But if you have a good, thriving culture, the bad apples can be removed without infecting the culture. If the culture is not strong, it's the other way around.
59:49 Steven Bartlett? Are there any other decisions that if you could go back in time with the Huffington Post, you would have made differently outside of just purely who you hired?
59:59 Speaker 00 I would say that.
1:00:07 Steven Bartlett? You're hesitating.
1:00:08 Speaker 00 No, I'm hesitating because what came to me is an amazing decision that I was that everybody thought I was wrong on. And I don't want to say that because it's also something else that's very important, I think, for anyone starting a business, which is my incredible belief in partnerships.
1:00:29 Speaker 00 You know, very often when you are building a company, you think that you have to do everything. But speed is incredibly important. Being a first mover is incredibly important. And it's very hard to do that if you want to do everything yourself. Yourself as a company. So when The Huffington Post was bought by AOL, the CFO, the board, everybody wanted us to go internationally alone. And I wanted to do it through partners. I felt that it's going to, we're going to be able to move so much faster.
1:01:12 Speaker 00 If we go as we did to France in partnership with Le Monde, that means we don't have to learn about French labor laws. We don't have to find an office space. You know, we kind of, there's so much the partner would bring. Plus, of course, the reputation. So I prevailed, which was touch and go. And within
1:01:40 Speaker 00 just over a year, we're in 18 countries.
1:01:45 Speaker 00 That would never have happened. Everybody who wanted to do it after us, BuzzFeed, Business Insider, it was too late. We had already established ourselves in these countries.
1:01:57 Steven Bartlett? Did you sell The Huffington Post at the right time?
1:02:01 Speaker 00 Absolutely, absolutely. Look at what's happening now.
1:02:07 Speaker 00 I would say that I sold too soon, but I'm a big believer in selling too soon rather than too late. You know, if you're going to pick something, sell too soon.
1:02:19 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:02:20 Speaker 00 And also, I'm a big believer in good acquisitions. You know, a lot of acquisitions fail. The acquisition by OL was a huge success because we suddenly had all these resources to grow a lot faster.
1:02:36 Steven Bartlett? What um, what have you come to learn that the point of life is? Because you've lived such a varied life. You've traveled all over the world. You've climbed many, many mountains. And I wonder now, as you sit here, like, what is the, what is the thing that you know that I don't know? I'm thirty one, so there's clearly some things that you really, really know well, that I'm gonna unfortunately have to find out through failure, painful failure, that maybe I can avoid, if you tell me.
1:03:04 Speaker 00 Um, okay, just a few things.
1:03:07 Steven Bartlett? Okay, I'm gonna get my, I'm gonna write down, so I don't forget.
1:03:11 Speaker 00 But one is not to look over our shoulder for approval. Not to indulge in unnecessary worries and negative fantasies. When I look back at my journals, you know, I like to journal a lot. And when I look back at my journals, so many of my worries were truly negative fantasies.
1:03:34 Steven Bartlett? Negative fantasies.
1:03:35 Speaker 00 Meaning imagining the worst about the future.
1:03:40 Speaker 00 And one other little saying I have on my desk is by the French philosopher Montaigne, who said, "There were many terrible things in my life, but most of them never happened."
1:03:55 Speaker 00 So that's just as depleting, believe it or not, as things, really bad things that do happen. Because that's how we process information. And so.
1:04:11 Speaker 00 Trust. One of the things that my mother totally instilled in my sister and me was the sense that we are living in a benevolent universe.
1:04:24 Steven Bartlett? What does that mean?
1:04:25 Speaker 00 It means that life is on our side. You know, there are people who go through life and think that at best we are living in an indifferent universe.
1:04:38 Speaker 00 That the higher power or God or whatever you want to call it, you know, the the order of the universe doesn't care.
1:04:46 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:04:47 Speaker 00 There are people who think it's a hostile universe. I believe profoundly that it's a benevolent universe. I trust that whatever happens has a reason and a purpose. And that's the Rumi quote, "Live life as if everything is rigged in your favor." Now, that doesn't mean only good things happened. Absolutely not. A lot of bad things happened in my life, starting with losing my first child that was born stillborn. You know, so it's, it's not like
1:05:26 Speaker 00 bad things didn't happen. But it's like, what is it teaching us? Like, life is a schoolroom and we are constantly learning.
1:05:37 Speaker 00 And that's for me, in the end, that sense of evolution and growth
1:05:46 Speaker 00 that in one of the books I wrote, I called "The Fourth Instinct." You know, the first three instincts being survival, sex, and status slash power. The fourth instinct being an instinct for meaning, purpose, transcendence. And that's something which...
1:06:12 Speaker 00 When it's integrated in our lives, it gives life so much more depth and richness.
1:06:20 Steven Bartlett? That first moment of struggle you cited there, when your child was born still, how old were you?
1:06:28 Speaker 00 Thirty-six.
1:06:28 Steven Bartlett? Thirty-six.
1:06:31 Steven Bartlett? How does one process that?
1:06:34 Speaker 00 Well, it's enormous pain and grief and staying with it and living with it. And also, I was thirty-six, I didn't know if I could have a child, you know, nobody quite knew why I lost that child.
1:06:54 Speaker 00 But also that trust again, underneath the grief, there was that sense that
1:07:05 Speaker 00 I would have a child, that I would move beyond this pain, that the pain would not define me.
1:07:17 Steven Bartlett? Is it hard to have that faith and that perspective in the moment?
1:07:22 Speaker 00 Well, the people that I most admire, you know, the writers that I learned so much from are writers who have that faith. I mean, look at Holocaust survivors.
1:07:40 Steven Bartlett? Wasn't your father?
1:07:43 Speaker 00 My father was in a concentration camp because he was publishing an underground newspaper
1:07:51 Speaker 00 during the German occupation of Greece, and he was arrested and spent the war in a concentration camp in Germany.
1:08:02 Speaker 00 My mother was in the Red Cross, hiding Jewish girls during that occupation. So they both had this kind of extraordinary life. And faith, you know, that kept them going in the middle of incredible horror.
1:08:26 Steven Bartlett? Your mother.
1:08:32 Speaker 00 Yes.
1:08:34 Steven Bartlett? She's beautiful.
1:08:36 Speaker 00 And strong. She definitely brought us up with this fearlessness. But she would always say, fearlessness is not an absence of fear. It's like going ahead and doing what you think you should do even while you're afraid.
1:08:55 Speaker 00 It's like a muscle that you exercise.
1:09:00 Steven Bartlett? She passed away before the success of The Huffington Post.
1:09:03 Speaker 00 Before it existed, yes. She passed away in 2000.
1:09:09 Steven Bartlett? "There's not a single day that I don't feel my mother's presence with me." Quote you wrote onto The Huffington Post. What do you think she would have thought of The Huffington Post had she been able to see the success that it became?
1:09:24 Speaker 00 You know what is interesting, Stephen? When people would say to her, "Are you proud of your daughter?" She would always say, "I don't use that term. I'm not proud. I just love what she's doing and contributing." You know, she didn't see it as pride. She saw it more as that journey. And that's kind of really important to understand what I learned from her. That it isn't just about achieving. It's about joy while you're achieving. And now that's kind of my barometer. Like, it's not just about being productive. Kind of, I proved to myself that I can be productive.
1:10:08 Speaker 00 But if I don't feel that joy,
1:10:13 Speaker 00 it means there's something off that I need to recalibrate.
1:10:19 Steven Bartlett? It's interesting because that's kind of what the mission of Thrive is about from what I was reading when I was on the website. It's not the idea of becoming unproductive, which is sometimes associated with well-being. It's sometimes thought that if you focus on your well-being, you become an unproductive person.
1:10:35 Speaker 00 Which is completely false. I mean scientifically false. And that's what... I'm so passionate about convincing more and more people about. And that's why I love using examples of athletes.
1:10:51 Speaker 00 Who prioritize their well-being because it improves their performance. So if we see well-being as a productivity multiplier.
1:11:01 Speaker 00 If we see what we are doing now, for example, is optimizing the health of executives in companies. You know, we talk about longevity. And we talk about health span. If these are optimized within a company, productivity is going to increase.
1:11:24 Steven Bartlett? She was a very interesting woman, your mother, from everything that I read and researched about her. On the day that she died, she demanded that you leave the hospital to go to a food market to prepare lunch for the family. And I read that she fell over in the evening, but didn't let anyone call an ambulance.
1:11:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, she, in the evening, you know, after she had prepared this feast for everybody.
1:11:48 Speaker 00 She fell. And she said, let's all gather around with her on the floor. And she said to me with this incredible authority, do not call the paramedics.
1:12:07 Speaker 00 And she said it with such authority that I didn't. I called the nurse who had taken care of her at home. And we sat around and she said, let's open a bottle of wine. And we opened a bottle of wine and we sat there and talked. And my two daughters were scootering around inside the house. And then she killed over and died. She had told her housekeeper earlier that she knew the time had come and she wanted to die at home, surrounded by her family.
1:12:45 Steven Bartlett? How did you know?
1:12:48 Speaker 00 I believe we know. I believe when we are connected with our own truth, we know.
1:12:59 Steven Bartlett? So she fell. She told you not to call the paramedics and the ambulance. She asked all of you to gather around and to bring some champagne.
1:13:09 Speaker 00 Red wine.
1:13:10 Steven Bartlett? Some red wine. And she passed away shortly after. They're on the floor.
1:13:14 Speaker 00 Yes.
1:13:17 Speaker 00 And the way she said to me, "Do not call the ambulance",
1:13:22 Speaker 00 made me not call the ambulance. You know, there was so much authority behind it that that's what she wanted. And of course, I didn't know she would die.
1:13:34 Steven Bartlett? Had you have known, would you have called the ambulance?
1:13:36 Speaker 00 I would.
1:13:37 Steven Bartlett? Even though she told you not to?
1:13:39 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:13:41 Speaker 00 It's hard not to.
1:13:44 Steven Bartlett? How did that change things for you? What's the aftermath of the loss of a woman that meant so much to you like?
1:13:53 Speaker 00 It was incredibly painful because she really was the foundation of my life. And, you know, she lived with me. She helped me bring up my children. She was an integral part of everything in my life and my sister's life.
1:14:14 Speaker 00 But what you just read is true. I mean, I do feel her presence so much and and I really
1:14:27 Speaker 00 I really feel that when we integrate death in our lives, it enriches our lives. You know, Socrates said, "Practice death daily", not in a morbid sense, but in the sense that the Romans would carve "mm", "Memento Mori", remember death, on statues, on trees.
1:14:48 Speaker 00 Not in order to
1:14:51 Speaker 00 Be obsessed with death, but in order to put life in perspective. And so often, we just worry about trivial things. We get upset about minor things. And if we kind of remember that life is a terminal condition
1:15:09 Speaker 00 and that death is the one certainty, it just changes how we perceive what happens in our lives.
1:15:20 Steven Bartlett? What else then for me? So you gave me two pieces of advice there for my life.
1:15:25 Speaker 00 I think you're going to be a great dad, Stephen.
1:15:29 Speaker 00 I really do.
1:15:32 Speaker 00 And I think having children also puts everything in perspective. Because there's something magical about these little beings and the continuity of life.
1:15:47 Speaker 00 And
1:15:49 Speaker 00 I mean, you are so creative and constantly launching new projects, which is fantastic.
1:16:00 Speaker 00 But
1:16:02 Speaker 00 learning also to disconnect from that and fully connect with yourself, your loved ones, your children when you have them, I think is game changing. And and I I believe it also makes us better at our jobs because it gives us that perspective. You have these moments, these flashes of intuition and new ideas that are so much easier when we are recharged and not running on empty.
1:16:42 Steven Bartlett? In terms of those different seasons of life that we go through, how have you had to show up differently in the different seasons of your life? And I've been thinking a lot about this lately because someone said to me when they likened it to doing a triathlon, they said in a triathlon, what you want to do, because there's 400 people jumping in the water for the initial part, is you want to swim like crazy at the start to just get ahead. And then you can kind of calm down a little bit once you've got away from the crowd. And he was making the analogy that this is very much like life in your early twenties, you kind of want to go for it a little bit, say yes to a lot of things. And then as you kind of go through these different seasons of life, you play a slightly different game. I don't know if you can relate to any of that.
1:17:22 Steven Bartlett? Really, at the heart of what I want to know is, you know, it's atypical for a... When did you launch your most recent company?
1:17:33 Speaker 00 You mean the Thrive AI Health?
1:17:35 Steven Bartlett? Was like this week, wasn't it? I saw it online.
1:17:38 Speaker 00 Yeah, like two weeks ago.
1:17:38 Steven Bartlett? Two weeks ago, right. So you're launching an AI company at 74 years old.
1:17:44 Speaker 00 I was 73 at the time.
1:17:45 Steven Bartlett? Seventy-three.
1:17:46 Speaker 00 Big difference.
1:17:47 Steven Bartlett? Which is atypical, right? And this is what I want to get to is you're in a different season of life.
1:17:54 Speaker 00 Yes, but in whatever season of life, you can keep creating. And that's partly what I'd love people to look at. There is definitely something in our culture that makes us think that we have to achieve everything before we are 30 or maybe before we are 40. You know, you have the 30 under 30s and the 20 under 20s, and soon we're going to have the 5 under 5s. And the fact is that if you take care of yourself, and that's the big if, you know,
1:18:32 Speaker 00 if you focus on these five behaviors and your health is sustained and you feel vital, then you can keep creating.
1:18:46 Speaker 00 Until the end, you know, I cannot imagine retiring.
1:18:51 Speaker 00 Because I love what I'm doing and because I love building.
1:18:58 Speaker 00 And there's no end
1:19:02 Speaker 00 to when you build.
1:19:05 Speaker 00 So the one thing that I don't think I've convinced you about, but I want to have one more go, is that you really think that
1:19:15 Speaker 00 taking care of yourself is kind of a luxury for later in life. It's like a little bit of a luxury for when you're not like launching new companies and
1:19:30 Speaker 00 being all in, swimming really fast. And what I I want to at least take on trust for a minute, but explore it, is that that's not true. That I a thousand percent believe that when you prioritize these five behaviors, not in any
1:19:56 Speaker 00 dogmatic way.
1:19:59 Speaker 00 We're all works in progress. I mean, I talk about it all the time and am I doing it perfectly? Of course not, nobody is. But if you really prioritize these five behaviors, how you sleep and what you eat and how you exercise and how you manage your stress and how you stay connected with yourself and your loved ones, I promise you that everything you're doing will be even more successful. That is an absolute guarantee.
1:20:30 Speaker 00 It doesn't mean that you wouldn't be successful the other way. Of course, I mean, there are a large number of burnt out people who have succeeded.
1:20:42 Speaker 00 But they...
1:20:45 Speaker 00 What else could they have done? If they were more connected with their creativity, their intuition, if they didn't spend as much time ruminating over mistakes or making bad hiring decisions, as I did, or making bad decisions generally, or refusing to delegate, that's another issue.
1:21:08 Speaker 00 Definitely, when you ask me about mistakes, I think it took me a long time to learn to delegate.
1:21:16 Speaker 00 And that's partly because we feel nobody can do it as well. And maybe that's true. But then there was one day when I realized, you know, if somebody does it 60% as well, and I can be freed up to do higher-order things, fantastic, let them do it 60% as well and learn two more things on the business side.
1:21:40 Speaker 00 If you're going to build this culture that I know you believe in,
1:21:46 Speaker 00 that can be game-changing for the success of a company, one thing that we recommend is the first day of somebody's new job in your company, have the manager conduct an entry interview.
1:22:04 Steven Bartlett? An entry interview?
1:22:06 Speaker 00 We conduct exit interviews. But what about entry interviews? And it doesn't have to be long, it can be 15 minutes. And the first question of the entry interview, "Steven, welcome.
1:22:22 Speaker 00 What's important to you outside of work? And how can I support you?"
1:22:28 Speaker 00 Suddenly, you hear about what matters to them. They feel if what matters to them is to take their kid to school at 8:00 in the morning, or they have an elderly parent they're taking care of, or whatever it is, or they have a flute lesson they want to go to at 7:00 on a Thursday, they don't have to hide. It can be baked into their job. The manager knows. It creates more intimacy. It creates more connection, especially since so many of us are in hybrid environments.
1:23:04 Speaker 00 And the other thing is...
1:23:07 Speaker 00 Compassionate directness is our number one value at Thrive, which means encouraging people to speak up when they are not happy, when something is a problem. So often, people sit on that and it festers. And if they have permission to express it, to express dissatisfaction, to express something that's not working, it's so much easier to solve the problem.
1:23:33 Steven Bartlett? Amen.
1:23:35 Steven Bartlett? Amen.
1:23:37 Steven Bartlett? You're an icon for many, many people.
1:23:41 Steven Bartlett? And specifically, when I spoke to some of the people in my company that you were coming, and I was going to speak to you today, there was a lot of excitement from everybody, but particularly a faction of women who are high-performing businesswomen and are doing exceptionally well in their careers. And I spoke to one of those women, and she said that she really looked up to you because you were able to achieve so much in spite of prejudice. Prejudice, that is inevitably there. It's funny, interesting that you say you didn't really think about it or notice it in that way. But a prejudice towards women in business that is still prevalent today,
1:24:23 Steven Bartlett? but was certainly more prevalent when you launched The Huffington Post. Is there anything at all that we should be thinking about? Whether it's because I was a young black kid or whether it's because I'm a woman that's building a technology company, what relationship should we have with our prejudice?
1:24:40 Speaker 00 Well, there is no question that even though
1:24:44 Speaker 00 none of that stopped me, the language used towards me or towards some of the women I'm sure that you are talking to who are building successful businesses is different. Like, a man is much more likely to be called bald or audacious when a woman is going to be called pushy or aggressive
1:25:08 Speaker 00 or bossy. And these are definite prejudices in our culture.
1:25:19 Speaker 00 The question is, are we going to let them stop us? While we are trying to change the culture for everybody,
1:25:29 Speaker 00 how can we move on and not let these things derail us?
1:25:36 Steven Bartlett? You don't strike me as a person that spends much time caring about things that might stand in your way.
1:25:42 Speaker 00 Well, that's what I said earlier about not looking over our shoulder for approval. You know, it's been very easy historically for women to be liked and admired if they
1:25:57 Speaker 00 didn't try to build something, if they were kind of pretty and well dressed and
1:26:09 Speaker 00 didn't break with conventions. But is that something that we want to do? I think, I don't really know any young women who wanted to be in that place now.
1:26:23 Steven Bartlett? What kind of leader are you in business? If I asked your team members, if I said, what is she like? If I, because I've got some of them in the back there. We're actually interviewing them as we speak. So we're going to get their answers, then we're going to play it against your answers.
1:26:33 Speaker 00 Okay.
1:26:34 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so they're being interviewed right now. What do you think they're saying in there?
1:26:37 Speaker 00 I, I feel that we're a bit of a family.
1:26:46 Speaker 00 Which means that I'm going to express what I'm going through. They will express what they're going through. We work hard. We celebrate small victories. I think that's really important. We don't wait for just the big breakthroughs. And because everybody's so much younger than me,
1:27:08 Speaker 00 I do have that maternal sense
1:27:13 Speaker 00 for the people I'm working with. And a lot of the people I'm working with have been with me since The Huffington Post. Like, our chief brand officer joined me as an intern from Princeton at The Huffington Post. Helped me build The Huffington Post, came with me to Thrive. So these are sort of very long relationships.
1:27:37 Steven Bartlett? You said family. I can confirm in my earpiece, they've likened it to Guantanamo Bay.
1:27:47 Speaker 00 But they love it, right?
1:27:49 Steven Bartlett? Well, they have no choice.
1:27:50 Speaker 00 But it's Guantanamo Bay, but great food.
1:27:54 Steven Bartlett? Great food. Was there luck in your journey? Was there moments of luck that you look back on and say, that was truly outside of my control, but if that hadn't have happened, I wouldn't have been the success that I am?
1:28:08 Speaker 00 Oh, my God, so much luck.
1:28:10 Steven Bartlett? What is the piece of luck that comes to mind?
1:28:13 Speaker 00 So, after my first book, which I wrote when I was 23 and was a big success, I wrote a book on leadership.
1:28:28 Speaker 00 I was 27. I took a lot of time writing it and I ran out of money. All the money I had made from The Female Woman, my first book. But I was determined not to write another book on women. After that first book, everybody wanted me to keep writing on women. And trust me, I had said everything I needed to say, everything I knew and beyond on women. And I wanted to move on. As you can see from the topics of my books, I like to move on because I learn through writing a book and that's very important to me. So I ran out of money and so I remember being really depressed, walking down St.
1:29:13 Speaker 00 James's Street in London and thinking, well, you know, maybe my first book was a fluke. This book has been rejected by 37 publishers. So.
1:29:22 Steven Bartlett? 37 publishers rejected your book?
1:29:24 Speaker 00 Yes. Rejection after rejection after rejection.
1:29:28 Steven Bartlett? Why didn't you give up?
1:29:29 Speaker 00 I said, maybe it's time to give up and go get a, go get a real job. And I went, I was going by Barclays Bank in the corner of St. James's Street. I don't know if it's still there. And something made me get into the bank and ask to see the bank manager. And the bank manager, whose name was Ian Bell, came and I told him my story and I asked for an overdraft. I had no assets and he gave it to me. Now that's luck, right? He had no earthly banking reason to give me that overdraft. I still send him a holiday card every year.
1:30:14 Speaker 00 But it reminded me of fairy tales, you know, when the hero or the heroine is stuck in a dark forest and then these helpful animals come out to guide them out of the forest. Well, that's back to trust. I believe in life, there are these helpful animals in the form of a bank manager or whatever. And you can call it luck, but I also call it part of the benevolent universe we live in, Stephen.
1:30:43 Steven Bartlett? Can you influence the benevolent universe? Because you point at these moments and say luck, but in there I see so much intention. And I also see someone who I imagine, from meeting you today, in there we've spent two hours together, has an ability to win people over.
1:31:02 Steven Bartlett? I want to know how you can influence the benevolent universe.
1:31:05 Speaker 00 Absolutely. We influence the benevolent universe by taking action. Like I took action. I went to the bank.
1:31:15 Steven Bartlett? The bank didn't come to you.
1:31:16 Speaker 00 The bank didn't come to me. But beyond that, it was out of my hands. And very often, people don't go to the bank because they're afraid of rejection. So when we've overcome that fear of rejection, that fear of failure, we are much more likely to take bold moves. And also, if you look at your life, and if I look at mine, there are so many so-called coincidences, serendipity, you know, somebody you meet. I mean, I loved your conversation with Whitney Wolf. You know, she was at a dinner and they offered her a job.
1:31:58 Speaker 00 Sure, she called them to follow up on the job. But that, you could say, was just a coincidence, that she met that person at a dinner. And I call coincidences the miracles that God performs anonymously. And if you don't like using the term God, it doesn't matter. Whatever term you use, it's basically that benevolent universe. There is a phrase, there is a verse in the Bible that I love, which is "Not a sparrow falls, but God is behind it." Like, nothing happens. Nothing happens, however trivial, that doesn't have some divine purpose behind it.
1:32:44 Steven Bartlett? Do you believe that?
1:32:44 Speaker 00 I do.
1:32:47 Speaker 00 Actually, Stephen, I don't believe, I know.
1:32:52 Steven Bartlett? How can you be so sure?
1:32:55 Speaker 00 I bet there are many things you are sure of.
1:33:00 Speaker 00 Aren't you sure of the impact you are having with your work? Don't be modest.
1:33:09 Steven Bartlett? Am I sure of the impact? No, I don't think it's possible to be. I know that we're doing good work, for sure, for sure, because people come up and tell me.
1:33:17 Speaker 00 Well, isn't that impact?
1:33:18 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'm sure, yeah, I'm sure that that's a positive force, for sure.
1:33:24 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:33:27 Steven Bartlett? But that's because someone's come up and told me.
1:33:29 Speaker 00 Right, but...
1:33:30 Steven Bartlett? Nobody's come up to me and told me that, you know, there's divinity, there's something divine in everything that happens. Because the minute you say that, I think of all the bad things that happen. I think it's, I'm just going to be honest. One of the first things that I thought about was what happened in Nazi Germany.
1:33:43 Speaker 00 Of course.
1:33:44 Steven Bartlett? I thought about the suffering.
1:33:45 Speaker 00 Absolutely, there is an enormous amount of suffering. But the question is, do you trust that it's not because there is an indifferent or malevolent force in the universe?
1:33:58 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:33:58 Speaker 00 But because so much of what happens is beyond our understanding, that we cannot comprehend the mystery of the universe just through our minds alone.
1:34:10 Steven Bartlett? I do trust that.
1:34:11 Speaker 00 And so the more we can connect with our spirit, our soul, the more we can be in touch with meaning and purpose. But if we try to comprehend everything through our minds, they're so limited.
1:34:27 Steven Bartlett? What was the the advice that you wish you'd got when you were that young woman who wrote her first, you know, around the age twenty, in your early twenties, when you wrote your first book? What is the advice that you wish someone had given you that you weren't given?
1:34:41 Speaker 00 Definitely, definitely not to worry so much.
1:34:48 Steven Bartlett? Was that really the the sort of bane of your?
1:34:51 Speaker 00 Because so many of my worries were so unnecessary and so depleting.
1:35:00 Steven Bartlett? It seems that you took a lot of action in spite of your worries, though.
1:35:03 Speaker 00 I did.
1:35:03 Steven Bartlett? Kind of comes back to your mother's advice.
1:35:05 Speaker 00 Yeah, but I think.
1:35:06 Steven Bartlett? Fail in spite of fear.
1:35:07 Speaker 00 There would have been more joy if I had worried less, acted as I did. But the rumination that I mentioned and the negative fantasies about the future, these are the things that most depleted me when I was young.
1:35:32 Steven Bartlett? Thrive AI is just launched in partnership with OpenAI, and you've worked closely with the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, on this. So I highly recommend everybody goes and checks it out. I was rummaging around the website earlier on, and I found it to be truly, truly fascinating. It is an AI-powered health app that encourages people to make healthy habits across the five areas that you talked about, from connection to sleep to stress management and food and so on. A really, really interesting application of AI. There's so much negativity around AI. So it's so wonderful to see people doing positive things with the technology, a technology that does stand a chance of really changing our lives. Ariana, what is the most important thing that we haven't talked about, that we should have talked about?
1:36:13 Speaker 00 The one thing we haven't talked about is what you alluded to right now, which is
1:36:22 Speaker 00 We have the opportunity now to use technology for our good. You know, technology, so much of technology, through algorithms and the early, more primitive forms of AI, has led to bringing the worst out in us.
1:36:42 Steven Bartlett? Well, I actually have this, which I found.
1:36:45 Steven Bartlett? Do you know what this is?
1:36:46 Speaker 00 It's from the...
1:36:48 Steven Bartlett? It's the Cambridge Union Society Seventh Debate on Tuesday, the 12th of May, 1970, at 8:00 PM. It's a little flyer, and it says, the quote is, "This House believes that technological advance threatens the individuality of man and is becoming his master." And I believe, if I'm not mistaken, there you are.
1:37:10 Speaker 00 Prince Charles is speaking.
1:37:11 Steven Bartlett? Proposed by Arianna Stasinnopoulos.
1:37:17 Speaker 00 Very good, Stephen.
1:37:18 Steven Bartlett? Thank you so much. So that was a leaflet from the 1970s, where you were proposing...
1:37:23 Speaker 00 Good research.
1:37:25 Steven Bartlett? That technological advancement threatens individuality of man and is becoming his master.
1:37:30 Speaker 00 Yes.
1:37:31 Steven Bartlett? That was your proposal.
1:37:31 Speaker 00 I've changed my mind.
1:37:32 Steven Bartlett? You've changed your mind. Okay, you're building an AI company.
1:37:37 Steven Bartlett? Fifty years later, you're building...
1:37:39 Speaker 00 But isn't it funny that you had Prince Charles speaking from the cross benches, meaning neither side, because that was the royal prerogative?
1:37:51 Steven Bartlett? His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, will be in attendance.
1:37:55 Speaker 00 He actually spoke.
1:37:56 Steven Bartlett? Oh, wow.
1:37:58 Speaker 00 But because he was at King's College at the time when I was there. But I actually believe that we now have the opportunity to use what AI makes possible, which above all, in terms of health, is hyper-personalization. Like, it can have what they call a context window of billions and billions of data points. So it can know everything about Stephen. Not just your biometric data, your lab data, your medical data, but your preferences, what foods you like. How you like to sleep with your phone? And how are we going to change that?
1:38:39 Speaker 00 But also, what poems do you like? Are there any sacred texts that you like? Is there any music that you love? Any nature? And at the right moment, give you the right nudges and recommendations to move you towards the best version of yourself. And one of the things I'm focusing a lot now at Thrive, this company I founded after I left The Huffington Post, was how to help people make that connection. And one of the ways we are doing it is through the 60-second resets.
1:39:16 Steven Bartlett? 60-second
1:39:17 Speaker 00 Second resets.
1:39:18 Steven Bartlett? resets.
1:39:19 Speaker 00 Stress is an unavoidable part of life. Like, there is nobody who doesn't have stress in their lives. But cumulative stress is avoidable.
1:39:32 Speaker 00 And the way to avoid cumulative stress is to read the neuroscience that tells us that in 60 to 90 seconds, we can go from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic is fight or flight.
1:39:49 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:39:50 Speaker 00 In 60 to 90 seconds, Stephen, that is kind of amazing. And the reason that is true is because we all have that place in us. We don't have to invent it or create it. And our breathing is a superpower. You know, most of us forget that we breathe all the time. So how do we breathe consciously? So we now have hundreds of resets on our platform that focus on conscious breathing, gratitude, images. But my favorite thing is creating our personalized reset.
1:40:28 Steven Bartlett? Well, as you say that, I am...
1:40:33 Steven Bartlett? I've actually found your personal reset. I have it here on my iPad, which is a video that I guess, which is this video here. I can put it up on the screen for anybody that doesn't have it. This is the video, right?
1:40:43 Speaker 00 And it's 60 seconds, exactly.
1:40:45 Steven Bartlett? 60 seconds long?
1:40:46 Speaker 00 Yes.
1:40:47 Steven Bartlett? Did you make this video yourself?
1:40:49 Speaker 00 Yes, we can make it very easily on our platform. It takes five minutes because everybody has pictures they love, stored together, music they love. And we also offer different quotes if you want to use quotes.
1:41:04 Steven Bartlett? So I'm going to put this video on the screen so everybody can see it. That's watching on video, but this video, could you explain it to me then? What is it?
1:41:12 Speaker 00 So basically, it has pictures of my children at different ages, my dog. It has favorite quotes, like be willing to be a beginner every single morning. That means something to me. It has music that I love. And it ends with my absolute favorite quote, which is Rumi. Live life as if everything is rigged in your favor.
1:41:43 Steven Bartlett? Love that quote. And how many times have you watched this video?
1:41:48 Speaker 00 I would say hundreds and hundreds. It could be a thousand times. And it never fails to have that impact on me. Now, a lot of people create multiple videos, you know, different music, different moods. But the point is bringing together things you are grateful for and based on the science that gratitude and stress and anxiety cannot coexist.
1:42:16 Steven Bartlett? Interesting.
1:42:17 Speaker 00 So what I love about this is that it may sound like a warm and fuzzy thing, but it's based on hardcore science.
1:42:29 Speaker 00 And that's very important to me because if we are going to help people adopt these healthier habits, we need to convince them that they're based on rigor and data. And they are not just random things that we came up with.
1:42:47 Steven Bartlett? We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. And the question left for you is, when was the last time you were so proud of yourself that you could have thrown a parade?
1:43:03 Speaker 00 What an amazing question.
1:43:08 Speaker 00 I think actually, very recently, and we talked about it.
1:43:18 Speaker 00 But I was proud that we were addressing a big hairy problem, which is healthcare.
1:43:29 Speaker 00 That so often this problem seems so intractable that we shy away from looking at solutions. And so the fact that we brought together a great team, the fact that we found a great CEO and that we convinced him to leave Google to run this project, that he's building an amazing rock star team, and that we may be able to have a real impact on the lives of people who don't have the resources to actually take care of themselves in a way that so many people with resources are already doing.
1:44:14 Speaker 00 I'm just really excited about it. I don't know if my mother would like me to use the word proud, because she didn't like that word, but I'm really excited and I want to devote the rest of my life to that.
1:44:28 Steven Bartlett? I'm so excited to watch that journey play out and for you to be the spearhead of such an exciting project along with people.
1:44:34 Speaker 00 At 74.
1:44:36 Steven Bartlett? Is the most incredible thing.
1:44:37 Speaker 00 And I want everybody listening and watching to realize how much time, guys, you have left and how much you can do during this time.
1:44:49 Steven Bartlett? You don't think people realize that?
1:44:51 Speaker 00 I think a lot of people feel that there are deadlines.
1:44:56 Speaker 00 That I have to achieve X by thirty and Y by forty. And and that creates a certain pressure. And I know you say pressure is okay. And pressure is okay, but not when it comes with a lot of stress.
1:45:13 Speaker 00 And not when it robs us of joy.
1:45:17 Steven Bartlett? I'm going to ask you to finish on your favorite quote. Of all the quotes that you've, because you're a fan of quotes, I can tell. And you can't use any that you've used thus far. It can't be the one about life being rigged in your favor by Rumi. Has to be a different one. What is your favorite quote? We'll end there.
1:45:31 Speaker 00 So it can't be Rumi and it can't be Montaigne. So it's got to be be a beginner every single morning. The fact that we can start every morning fresh.
1:45:45 Speaker 00 So, you know, every day is a mixture of good things and bad things. And often we wake up in the morning and we carry the burden of the bad things that happened the day before. So if we can wake up every morning and have that sense of
1:46:06 Speaker 00 new beginnings, you know, like the first morning of creation, whatever term you want to use, fresh.
1:46:15 Steven Bartlett? Ariana, thank you. Thank you for being such an inspiration to me and so many other people. Thank you for your wisdom and thank you for your unrelenting energy towards solving some of society's biggest issues. And maybe society's biggest issues, which is our health and our happiness, which is exactly what you're doing through the work you've done with Thrive and continues to do with Thrive AI now. And it's a service to humanity that is very much needed at this particular time as we find ourselves in society. So thank you so much, Ariana. You're an absolute wonderful force in the world and I'm so honored to have met you today.
1:46:46 Speaker 00 Thank you so much, Stephen, and thank you for all you are doing to have this remarkable impact.
Previous Moment 175: How To Build A ROUTINE You’ll ACTUALLY Stick To!: Navy Seal Jocko Willink Next Moment 176: 5 RED FLAGS Of A Secret Narcissist: The Narcissism Doctor Page updated September 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
