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Arianna, a decade ago we were in London together celebrating the launch of your book Thrive, which documented the response to your wake-up call when you collapsed from exhaustion.
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What happened and how did it change your life?
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Well, it changed my life dramatically.
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Um, it happened 2 years into building the Huffington Post.
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I was that divorced mother of two little girls and I had bought into the collective delusion that in order to be um, super founder and super mom, I didn't have the luxury to take care of myself.
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So, I literally collapsed from burnout as I was diagnosed with um, sleep deprivation, exhaustion, and it set me on this journey um, of recognizing this delusion that so many of us have been living under that that's the only way to live life and to succeed.
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So, I started covering these issues at the Huffington Post.
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I wrote two books on the subject, Thrive as you mentioned, Tommy, and The Sleep Revolution.
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And um, by 2016, I didn't want just to raise awareness, which I could have continued doing through a media company.
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I wanted to help people change behavior.
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Because people had started recognizing that there are other ways to live and to succeed, but it was difficult to change behavior.
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So, uh, that's when I launched Thrive, you know, a behavior change technology company uh, based on um, the methodology of microsteps.
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The head of our scientific advisory board is BJ Fogg from Stanford, who wrote a book called Tiny Habits.
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And it's all based on the idea that we got it all wrong when we thought that New Year resolutions are the way to change behavior.
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New Year resolutions tend to be abandoned, you know, in the second or third week in January.
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And the way is to really build on these daily incremental small changes that we call too small to fail and that gradually become healthy habits and our um philosophy is that there are five daily foundational behaviors, sleep, food, movement, stress management and connection.
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And those behaviors affect not just our health, but our creativity, our productivity, and the whole of life. Amazing. Amazing.
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I'm going to ask you a question in a minute now Ariana about sleep and and the original big sleep idea.
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So, coming out of that experience, what is your giant idea that can change the world that everyone else underestimates?
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My giant idea is that health is what happens between doctor visits.
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And that our health is really driven by these five daily behaviors of how we sleep, what we eat, how much we move, how we manage our stress, and how we manage our connection with ourselves and others.
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And yet, our health care system, not just here, but all around the world, is now breaking under the burden of chronic diseases that are skyrocketing, like diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, and also mental health.
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And yet, all these are directly affected by our daily habits.
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In fact, Tommy, the numbers, the data um is so clear, you know, we 10% of our health is driven by our genes, about 20% by medical care, and over 30% by our daily behaviors.
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And yet very little attention is paid on these behaviors by the medical establishment.
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And often by individuals themselves because we think either they're too soft or too hard to achieve.
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And there's so much saying science that makes it clear that these behaviors are connected not just with preventing disease, but with optimizing the management of disease.
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If you already have cancer, how you sleep and how you manage your stress is going to affect the growth of cancer cells.
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Same with cardiovascular disease and any other disease you want to look at.
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You've had one of the most successful careers in modern American history.
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We've got a lot of people who are under-slept, stressed CEOs.
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In your experience, how did you navigate some of the most extreme stressful experiences, whether it was Huffington Post or the Uber board drama, for example?
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How did you navigate those experiences?
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Well, Tommy, it all comes down to the need for a mindset shift.
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Uh, if you believe that the way to navigate challenging times is to uh, stay up all night and kind of manage the frenetic challenge with a frenetic pace, um, you're just simply scientifically wrong.
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And you may wonder why so many really smart people believe something which is fundamentally false.
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Um, but you know, look back to the time when believed the earth was flat.
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And all the laws of navigation um were based on a false premise.
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Well, in a sense, the way we run our lives is based on the false premise that we need to change.
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For the CEOs and founders in the room, do you think it's realistically possible to achieve truly great things, remarkable things, without some kind of sacrifice either to mental health or to physical health?
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Not only is it possible, you're going to come up with better ideas.
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Uh you're going to be able to be productive and creative sustainably if you also invest in taking care of yourself.
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Um it's not like on the one hand you take care of yourself, on the other hand you are creative and successful.
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That's kind of the delusion that we're changing.
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And you know, we are in the middle of Tommy of this big cultural transformation.
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And um some people have already um transformed themselves and their companies.
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Others are lagging behind, but the transformation is happening, and it's also driven by AI.
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You know, we are working on building an AI health coach.
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And AI, because of hyper-personalization, is going to make this behavior change much easier.
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Because the more the coach, the AI coach, knows about you, um your preferences um the more it is trained on your biometric data, your lab data, your medical data, uh the more targeted uh the nudges and recommendations are going to be.
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You talked recently about this potential for AI to completely supercharge healthier behavior change.
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What's the What's the vision there?
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How How big a difference can that make to the global health crisis?
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Oh, uh a huge difference.
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And the the global health crisis is very real.
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Um just to take the crisis in in here in the states.
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Uh we are spending over $4 trillion a year uh in health care. Um 70% of the GDP.
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And and um health outcomes are getting worse every year, especially when it comes to chronic diseases. So, the crisis is real.
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And um we have solutions.
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AI is going to super uh absolutely dramatically affect the solutions.
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Um especially uh because we can also train these models on the best science, peer-reviewed literature, not on everything on the web.
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Because we want to make sure uh that the nudges and the answers are all scientifically driven. Fantastic. Re- really exciting.
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And And sort of broadening out to the wider population, how do folks, whether it's in the US or Europe, if we broaden things out to the to the wider population, how do how does behavior change really drive health outcomes?
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What What are the tangible things that people can take away and go and do in their everyday lives?
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Well, first of all, um recognizing that each of these five behaviors can be broken down into micro steps.
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Let me give you just a few examples. Um sleep.
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The most important micro step around sleep is not sleeping with your phone.
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Tommy, are you sleeping with your phone? I'm afraid I'm guilty. You are. Okay, but not a problem.
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This is a judgment-free zone.
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Uh but even if you can begin turning off your phone and charging it outside your room one night a week and seeing the difference it makes, you can see that if you put your phone away and you get a deeper quality of sleep, you're going to wake up more fully recharged and more able to deal with whatever challenges your day brings.
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Um same with the stress, you know, we have developed um a tool that we call resets, which is based on the neuroscience that stress is inevitable.
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There is nobody doing anything interesting who doesn't have stress in their lives.
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There's probably nobody ever at all.
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Uh but cumulative stress is avoidable.
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And it takes 60 to 90 seconds to interrupt the stress cycle and move from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic nervous system.
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So, um we've created those um 60-second resets that come to you directly in your workflow, whether it's on Microsoft Teams or Slack or of course on the Thrive app or the web.
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And you focus consciously on your breathing, inhaling and exhaling, um and with images of gratitude um joy, um you counteract the feelings of anxiety and stress.
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And it shows you things that I'm grateful for in my life, you know, my children, my dog, quotes I love like Rumi's live life as though everything is rigged in your favor.
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And we made an an agreement with the Universal Music to be able to use 60 seconds of uh Universal Music songs because again music is an incredible way to recharge and focus on what gives us joy. Fantastic.
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We have in the audience today as well as start-up founders and CEOs, we have CEOs of some of the largest businesses in the world.
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And I know that Thrive is increasingly working with corporates to increase improve health, direct better behavior change.
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I'd love to hear for them just a little bit about some of the partnerships that you've led with some of the biggest corporates in the world.
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Well, with so many of the companies work with whether it's Salesforce or Accenture or Pfizer we find that when leaders themselves model this behavior it has a huge impact in accelerating cultural transformation.
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Mark Benioff, for example, is a meditator at Salesforce and when he talks about it it gives cultural permission to others.
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When we launch Thrive in any company, we like to launch in a fireside chat with someone from the C-suite and myself so that people know that this is not just another tool, another product, but something that has buy-in from leadership and we find that makes a huge difference.
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And um we launched, for example, um a curriculum on mental health in partnership with Stanford and their latest brain research and when we launched at Accenture it was launched with a video from Julie Sweet, the CEO
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saying my leadership team and I are doing this, we invite you to participate and it had um incredible rates of engagement because one of the problems, Tom, is that um employers bring a lot of tools to their employees, but the engagement is not great. And in order to
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And in order to really engage employees, they need to have the sense that this is a an offering that is endorsed by leadership.
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Arianna, I'd love to, just for the final part of this interview, talk a little bit about history and and your past because you have worked with some extraordinary people in your time across your various businesses.
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Um you work with many extraordinary leaders.
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Are there any in particular that you feel have mastered the ability to achieve great things, but also achieve balance in their lives?
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Well, I know you have read Arianna Huffington.
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And Ray, who is a dear friend as well as an investor in Thrive, uh demonstrates, as he has said himself and I write about him in Thrive the book, that when by meditating, he has been able to come up with great ideas and and um also remain centered in the eye of the hurricane, if you want, in the middle of a lot of challenges.
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And I would say, Tommy, that the leader who most epitomizes what I'm talking about is Marcus Aurelius.
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I love Marcus Aurelius because not only was he emperor of Rome for 19 years, uh 13 years of which he had to deal with a terrible pandemic, uh plague, but also he was a stoic philosopher.
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So, he wrote a book called Meditations, which I really believe is the best leadership manual.
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Because he explains how the only thing a leader or frankly anyone can control ultimately is our own attitude to what happens.
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And how quickly we can um respond and come come with giant ideas to address whatever is happening.
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We cannot control events and the leaders who think they can control events.
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Um, really end up feeling perpetually frenetic and underwater.
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I think Marcus Aurelius might be the only person you can compete with you Arianna in terms of longevity on the bestseller list.
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He seems to last for thousands of years out there.
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Um, but that's fantastic.
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And and maybe just a final question if I may.
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I'd love just to understand from a personal perspective.
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If you think back to the sort of pre-Wake Up Call days for you, you know, just your level of happiness and fulfillment in life and you compare that to, you know, the last decade or so when you've been living a very different life and achieving just as much.
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How would you compare and contrast, you know, life as as Arianna Huffington before and after?
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Well, actually I love this question, Tommy, because um I actually think that the barometer of how I'm doing is joy, not productivity.
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It's like you reach a point in life when you know you can get things done.
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You know you can be productive and definitely I was productive before the collapse.
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But what was lacking is that sense of joy, of gratitude.
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And you know, this is not a dress rehearsal.
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So if we are living our lives and producing things without finding joy and gratitude, it's really a huge waste.
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And that's what I now judge my days by.
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What a lovely way to end.
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Arianna, thank you so much for joining us at Giant Ideas. We really appreciate it.
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Thank you so much, Tommy. Great to be with you.