The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Arianna Huffington (#274)

Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Arianna Huffington (@ariannahuff), the founder and CEO of Thrive Global and founder of The Huffington Post. Transcripts may contain a few typos—with some episodes lasting 2+ hours, it’s difficult to catch some minor errors. Enjoy!

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Tim Ferriss:   Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where each episode it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers from all different spheres of life, arenas of competition. This time around, it is entrepreneurship, business, and just general awesomeness. We have Arianna Huffington. You can find her on Twitter: @ariannahuff and elsewhere on the socials. She has been named to Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people and Forbes’ most powerful women list.

Originally from Greece, she moved to England when she was 16 and graduated from Cambridge with an M.A. in Economics. In May 2005, she launched The Huffington Post, a news and blog site that quickly became one of the most widely read, linked to and frequently cited media brands on the internet. In 2012, she won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. In August 2016, she launched Thrive Global, with the mission of ending the stress and burnout epidemic by offering companies and individuals sustainable, science-based solutions to wellbeing.

Arianna serves on a lot of Boards, including Uber and the Center for Public Integrity. She’s the author of 15 books, including her most recent Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating A Life of Wellbeing, Wisdom and Wonder and The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life One Night at a Time. This is a very wide-ranging conversation. We get into plenty of tactics. She is an expert storyteller and very funny to boot. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. Without further ado, here is my conversation with Arianna Huffington. Arianna, welcome to the show.

Arianna Huffington: Thank you, Tim. I love your podcast and I’m really happy to be part of it.

Tim Ferriss: I have had so much fun interacting with you over the years and also observing you in environments where you get to ask a lot of questions. I’m happy to have the change to turn the tables and actually dig into your story because you’re always highlighting people around you and now it’s my chance to turn it around and dig into a lot of the background that I haven’t heard. I wanted to start with a question about breakfast because we did it as a sound check. I think people will enjoy it. What did you have for breakfast this morning?

Arianna Huffington: Every morning, I have coffee, bulletproof coffee for breakfast which is, basically, as you know, coffee with organic butter. Then I don’t really like breakfast in terms of food. I was brought up in Greece and people don’t have breakfast. They have coffee. Like a good Greek peasant girl, I don’t really eat until lunchtime. If you want to know what is my favorite food at lunchtime, it’s breakfast.

Tim Ferriss: So what do you have at lunch? What is your go-to lunch?

Arianna Huffington: My go-to lunch is poached eggs or scrambled eggs or boiled eggs, any kind of breakfast food.

Tim Ferriss: We’re going to come back to all of your experimentation because you seem to have tried just about everything. I want to give people just a taste perhaps. You’ve tried fire walking, list making, journal keeping, infrared saunas. You’re very game to experiment. I’m curious to know if there are any particular practices like those that have stuck with you that you’ve found continually valuable? It could be part of your daily routine or it could be some type of object. It could be anything.

Arianna Huffington: The part of my daily routine that actually started when I was 13, which was 3,000 years ago, I can’t say I’ve done it consistently every day since, but I have in the last few years done it consistently, is meditate. I try to do it right after I wake up, before I engage in my day. It’s been absolutely amazing in terms of how much peace and strength and joy it’s brought me as I go through my day, no matter what the challenges and problems. I’ve tried other things, which I do intermittently but not everyday. Like writing down my dreams.

There are periods in my life when I wrote down my dreams every day. I have massive notebooks with my dreams. Now I do it sporadically, but I still keep a pen by my bed. That’s one of those things that light in the night so you don’t have to turn on the light. Because, as you know, the less intrusion of outside life you have, the more details of your dream you remember.

Tim Ferriss: So you have a pen that has a light on the front of it?

Arianna Huffington: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: I’m amazed that I’ve never seen such a thing.

Arianna Huffington: Okay, I’m sending you one.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, I’ll definitely try that. I want to dig into the details of the meditation practice for a second. What type of meditation do you practice or what does a session look like for you?

Arianna Huffington: I have tried every kind of meditation.

As you kind of already announced, I love experimenting. At first, when I was 13, I was, believe it not, initiated into transcendental meditation by Maharishi himself, who happened to be in Athens, Greece. I was this 13-year-old girl with this very eccentric mother who was doing yoga and meditating and had convinced my sister and me that if we meditated, we would be better at school. Since I was determined to get great grades, I thought this would help me.

Tim Ferriss: That is incredible. I had no idea. You’ve called your mother a hero before. I heard this. We’re going to dig into some of the lessons that you’ve learned from her. I’d like to hear about that. How did you end up getting in front of Maharishi and being inducted in that way? How did that come together?

Arianna Huffington: She was kind of amazing. She could make anything happen. I don’t know how she found out where he would be and how she got her daughters there, but that’s what happened. At the time, I didn’t frankly think it was a big deal. I have since also together with my two daughters, who are now 26 and 28, been reintroduced to transcendental meditation by Bob Roth, who is a fabulous teacher here in New York. But also in the meantime, I have practiced many other kinds of meditation: Buddhist meditation, compassion meditation, and also meditation taught by John Roger, who started the moving for spiritual inner awareness.

I basically meditate with a tone, but focusing very much on my breath. The inhalation and exhalation is just a big part of my meditation. On an everyday basis I do half an hour. But over the weekend or wherever I can, I may do one hour, I may do two hours. The other thing that is great, Tim, is that if I wake up in the middle of the night for whatever reason and I have trouble going back to sleep, let’s say I’m particularly stressed, overthinking something, I’m on a plane, I’m jetlagged, whatever, I just never worry about it anymore. I just say this is amazing, I have unlimited time to meditate.

Tim Ferriss: You were gifted the plane delay or whatever it might be.

Arianna Huffington: I’m gifted the time. Yes, and normally when it happens, it’s like 3:00 in the morning.

Which, according to the Dalai Lama, the optimal time to meditate. But hey, the Dalai Lama and I are meditating now. It’s very clear. All the new science on sleep shows that an experiment which they call paradoxical intention that if you take two groups of people and you tell one group to try and go back to sleep and another group to stay away, the group to whom you said stay awake falls asleep faster.

Tim Ferriss: That’s funny. I guess it’s one of those things where the key is to try less, not to try harder.

Arianna Huffington: Exactly. Especially around sleep because sleep is about surrender. Trying to surrender is really hard.

Tim Ferriss: It is hard. I think it’s especially hard for Type-A personalities. But you mentioned that your mother could make anything happen. You also mentioned that you seemed driven to get very good grades. Where did that desire to get good grades come from?

Arianna Huffington: I don’t really know where that came from. But I was a very sort of awkward kid. I was ridiculously tall for a Greek girl. I was literally 5’10” when I was 13 years old. Most of my classmates were 5’0”. I was literally towering over all of them. I was in a girls’ school. Just to give you an idea of how bad that was, I was excluded from the school parade, where they had the tallest girls because I was too tall. I would stick out too much.

I also had very frizzy hair and wore glasses. I just really spent a lot of time reading and studying, rather than having a lot of friends and being social.

Tim Ferriss: We’re going to bounce around on the timeline a bit, that’s just how my mind works. I’m surprised to hear that because you are one of the most, if not the most, socially adept person I’ve ever seen life. It’s really like watching Tom Brady playing football or something to watch you navigate and manage a room. I’m not kidding. It’s really impressive. When I’ve been at dinners with you, just observing how you weave everyone together is as enjoyable to me as the conversations that I have. How did you learn to be social?

Arianna Huffington: Tim, it’s kind of interesting because I know it’s hard to believe, but I am an introvert. The reason I know that is that I’ve experienced every emotion in my life, including rage and fear and disappointment and everything you can imagine, but I have never experienced loneliness. I need time alone and I long for time alone. I’ve never said this is too much time alone. I think that’s a pretty good indication that I’m fundamentally an introvert who loves people, provided I have enough time to refuel by myself. If I do, then I love bringing people together. I think that’s one of the things I most love is introducing my friends to each other and making sure they are connecting and setting people up. Numerous ways to really make sure that people I care about are connected to each other.

Tim Ferriss: Putting the pieces together slowly, kind of like the movie Memento, if anybody listening gets that, but what took you – I know that we’re jumping around, but I’m following the scent as we go – what led you to move to the U.K.?

Arianna Huffington: Again, that’s another mother story. Because I saw in a magazine a picture of Cambridge University. I absolutely fell in love with it. I have no idea why. I said to my mother without absolute conviction, “I want to go there.” Everybody I said that to – my Dad, my friends – said don’t be ridiculous. You can’t go there.

Tim Ferriss: How old were you at the time?

Arianna Huffington: I was 14.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it.

Arianna Huffington: They all said, “You don’t speak English. We have no money. It’s hard even for English girls to get into Cambridge, so forget about that.” My mother said, “Okay, let’s find out how you can get to Cambridge. I’m sure we can make that happen.” So she found out that I could take what they call GC, general certificates of education which you needed to get, and you still do, to get into English universities from the British Consul. But then I would have to take a special Cambridge exam, then I could apply for a scholarship. Of course, I needed to start learning English.

Up until then, I had learned French because in Greece, French was the official language at the time, the official foreign language. I had learned French at school. I immediately started learning English and to cut a long story short, I got a scholarship into Cambridge. Definitely that never would have happened without my mother saying, “Let’s make that happen.” She even said to me one day, “I got us these really cheap tickets and we can go and see Cambridge.” Not see anybody at Cambridge, just go see. It was like an early form of visualization. She and I flew to London, took a train to Cambridge, and just walked around and made it real for me. That was her. That was how she was.

Tim Ferriss: Let me just make sure I understand this. She took you to Cambridge so you could walk around Cambridge feeling like you were already part of it?

Arianna Huffington: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Wow. Did you find that helpful for you?

Arianna Huffington: I did. It just made it very real. It took it from a magazine picture to a real place where we walked around for hours and saw the different colleges and had coffee in the coffee shop and saw the river. Of course, by the end of the week, I wanted to go to Cambridge more than ever.

Tim Ferriss: Are there any particular parenting approaches or sayings that you use with your daughters that your mother used with you? Has her parenting style influenced how you parent?

Arianna Huffington: Completely. My parenting style is identical except I’m perpetually guilty because I’m definitely not as good as she was.

In any case, I think most mothers are guilty about something, especially working mothers. They say you take the baby out and they put the guilt in. But for me, I think the heart of it is unconditional loving. That is really her biggest thing. To love me unconditionally while at the same time making you believe that you could do anything you wanted to try but that if you failed, not a problem. Because as she used to say, “That is one of her favorite things. Failure is not the opposite of success. It’s a stepping stone to success.” She made my sister and me feel very comfortable with failing. It is not a big deal. Taking risks was part of life and failing was part of life. Then she was very funny.

She used to say, “Angels fly because they take themselves seriously.” Whatever happened, bad things happening, little bad things or bad, bad things. Bad, bad things like my father being a philanderer and her ending up separating from him. They never actually got divorced. How she turned that around and still managed to created an amazingly warm, loving home for us. Or little things like our favorite thing for our birthdays was to go with her to two movies and a play. So we’re ready to leave our apartment with my sister and we locked our keys in. So every other mother would have just dropped the problem and tried to get the keys, etc.

My mother said, “Okay, no problem. Let’s just go to the movies and go to the play. Let’s keep to our schedule and we’ll figure it out.” Of course, at that time we lived opposite the fire station, so when we got back, she went to the fire station and asked if they could help us. Because she was always such a giver, she would always bring everybody food and help them with anything they wanted, the firefighters put a ladder up and let us in through the window.

Tim Ferriss: It seems like just by watching your mother and experiencing that, that over time you would feel like you could figure out just about anything. Seeing someone being that adaptable I would think would really impact you. The question that I’ve been wanting to ask also about a few of these things you’ve mentioned, the failure as a stepping stone and so on.

You talked about not speaking English when you saw this picture of Cambridge in a magazine. But I read that you became really determined to excel in the debate society at Cambridge. I don’t know if that’s accurate or not, but if it is, can you walk us through your decision to do that and what you were thinking at the time? I would imagine that would be very intimidating.

Arianna Huffington: Actually, what happened is that I was absolutely fascinated by debate at Cambridge. I loved them more than anything at Cambridge. I was determined to learn to speak. To learn to speak publicly. I would literally stay at every debate until the bitter end. I would wait my turn to be called on to speak.

Because they would have the main speakers and then anybody could speak. But I was terrible and I had a very heavy accent, even heavier than now. I was normally picked last, like at midnight. But it didn’t matter. I just sat there and made notes; I learned. But I hadn’t really thought of competing to be elected to an office at the union. That seemed like not something I could ever achieve. What happened is that one weekend, when I was in London, a friend of mine put me down for the election to the standing committee, which was the first step before you became a secretary and a vice president and then the president. I was deeply embarrassed when I found out. I thought I would be humiliated.

I tried to get my name off it, but it was too late. The ballots had been printed. To my immense surprise, I was elected to the top of the standing committee, which was a complete surprise. I would really never, ever have guessed that this would happen. But that’s how I ended up then being elected secretary and vice president and then president. The decision to learn to speak was very deliberate. The fact that I ended up become president of the union, which actually was a defining moment in terms of my career was completely accidental and dependent on this friend of mine who took matters in her own hands.

Tim Ferriss: Why was it a defining moment for you?

Arianna Huffington: It was a defining moment because it’s hard to understand how much at the time it meant to be elected president of the union. There was this kind of mythical place that the Oxford and Cambridge unions have in the history of England.

Tim Ferriss: That’s a big deal. I visited campus once and walked through the hallways. It’s a very big deal. I guess you were the first foreign and only the third female? Is that right?

Arianna Huffington: Yes. What happened is that when I was elected, it was front-page news. It’s hard to believe, but The Times, The Guardian, they had front-page pictures of me on this throne that the president sits on. I was invited to do every show you can imagine.

That’s when, in the course of one of the debates at which I was speaking as president, which was televised – because all of the debates were televised – a publisher saw the debate and asked me to write a book based on the views I expressed in the debate. So it truly was defining because I had no intention of being a writer. It sounds like everything that happened to me was not intended. I got this letter from Reg Davis-Poynter, who had just actually published Germaine Greer’s book, The Female Eunuch. He asked me if I would write a book expressing the views that I had expressed in the debate. I wrote back and said, “I can’t write.” He said, “Can you have lunch?” He took me to lunch and offered me a modest advance.

He said, “If it turns out you can’t write, I’ll have lost, [I think it was] £6,000 for a year.” Otherwise, he said, “I will publish the book.” That was my first book. It changed the trajectory of my career because I had just gotten into the Kennedy School of Government to do a post-graduate degree there, which I dropped in order to write the book.

Tim Ferriss: What was that first book? What was the title?

Arianna Huffington: The title was The Female Woman. The message of the book was really very matter of fact now because it was, in fact, my belief that women should be given equal respect for whatever they choose to do in their lives. If they choose to have a career, everything should be open to them. If they choose to be mothers and they can afford to do so and not have a career, they should be given equal respect for that.

That now seems like no big deal. At the time, it was very controversial. It was published in 1973. I was 23 years old. At the time, it was at the height of what was known as the Women’s Liberation Movement, when only career women were respected. If you chose, and you were able to financially, not to have a career, you were dismissed as having succumbed to social conditioning or the patriarchy. I interviewed a lot of women who made a lot of difficult choices. I remember a woman saying, “I haven’t had a new coat for three years, but I want to bring up my children myself.

Then I can get back into the workplace.” I wasn’t saying that one choice was better than another but that part of equality was equal respect for whatever choices women made.

Tim Ferriss: You’ve had so many opportunities to interact with so many people who you could potentially guide or mentor. Just given that we’re somewhat on the subject, if you were looking at one piece of that equation, so you’re looking at the professional choice, going into the business world, is the advice you would give a young man or young woman the same or is there different advice that you would give to young women who are considering really focusing on charging headfirst into the business world?

Arianna Huffington: Absolutely the same advice. The only thing that’s different for women if they want to have children is to be aware of that. Now, of course, people can freeze their eggs so it gives them a longer timeline for becoming mothers. Or they can choose to adopt. That’s great because it gives women more flexibility. But I think the most important thing is to really be honest with yourself. I would not have been happy if I had not had my work. I knew that was very important to me and I actually have never not worked. I also would not have been happy if I had not had children. But I have many friends who don’t want children and they’re perfectly happy.

That’s why I’m saying this is very individual and all that matters is to be ruthlessly honest with ourselves. Basically making sure that the life we’re following is the life we are choosing for ourselves, rather than the life that has been chosen for us by society, our parents, our friends.

Tim Ferriss: You have told us about one defining moment, which was this appointment, I guess, on the throne, and everything that came out of that. If we then look forward after that, what would you consider the next defining moment or defining decision in your life? Or the next that comes to mind for you.

Arianna Huffington: I could say the next defining decision was deciding to leave this man that I was very much in love with.

Because he didn’t want to have children. By then I was 30. I’d been with him since I was 23, seven years. He was twice my age and half my size. He was an amazing writer. His name is Bernard Levin and he was a great columnist for The London Times and also very much a writing mentor to me. But he kept saying, “I don’t want to have kids; I only want to have cats.” He was perfectly happy to be with me for the rest of his life, but without children. I was very clear that I wanted to have children. I made the decision to leave him.

Because I didn’t trust myself not to go back to him if I had stayed in London, I left London and moved to New York. So everything that happened to me after that, the rest of my work, launching The Huffington Post to having my two daughters, all of it happened, Tim, because a man wouldn’t marry me and have children with me. It’s good to remember that.

Tim Ferriss: It’s kind of like if you have insomnia at 3:00 in the morning, right?

Arianna Huffington: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Maybe it’s a hard moment, an opportunity or a gift disguised as a very hard moment. For those people don’t know, how did The Huffington Post come to be? You landed in New York. How did The Huffington Post come to be?

Arianna Huffington: The Huffington Post is many years after I landed in New York. I was born in 1950. I’m 67. I left London in 1980, when I was 30, and moved to New York. I then continued writing. I’ve written 15 books. After the book that we discussed, The Female Woman, I wrote a book on political leadership called After Reason, which nobody wanted to buy but that’s another story. Then I wrote biographies of Maria Callas and later Pablo Picasso. When I came to New York, I had just published my biography of Maria Callas, who is an opera singer best known among people who don’t love opera as the woman who was very much in love with Aristotle Onassis, but Onassis left her to marry Jackie Kennedy.

Just to put it in context. When I came to New York, my book on Maria Callas has jut been published, which made it easier to move to New York because I was here publicizing my book. The book turned out to be a big bestseller. It led to my doing journalism and writing more books while, by now, moving and living in New York.

Tim Ferriss: 15 books is a lot of books. What is your writing process? What helps you to be so prolific? I’m always impressed and have been impressed when I’ve considered how many books you’ve written. What helps you to achieve that type of volume?

Arianna Huffington: My writing process changed dramatically. At the beginning, my writing process was painstaking and incredibly slow because I had this inner censor. I would write a sentence and then the inner censor would step in and say, that’s not the right word. I would spent a long time arguing with myself about what the right word was. Gradually, I realized that I was able to speak without notes for an hour or longer and that I should use that skill to create first drafts. I started dictating my first draft. Ideally to somebody I work with because I live having that kind of response from someone.

If you’re in the same room and you are speaking and they are typing. But the smile or the guffaw or they show whether they liked or didn’t like something. That has dramatically accelerated my writing process. It’s so much easier, as you know Tim, to edit a first draft and edit it extensively and go through multiple editing processes, than it is to write a first draft.

Tim Ferriss: Is the person you’re speaking to interacting with you or asking you questions? Or are they just listening and transcribing?

Arianna Huffington: No, they’re just listening. I mean, you know, they’re perfectly free to interrupt and say anything, but largely it’s just listening. But just, you know how people listen but they show you they agree or if they like something or if they didn’t get it. It’s very subtle, but obvious.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, for sure. I mean, you can see – that’s one thing I always pay attention to when I have proofreaders reading my material. I like to be there when they read it because if they laugh, I always say, “Okay, what was that?” They’ll say, “No, it was nothing.” And I’m like, “No, no, no. What made you laugh?” I always want to know what provokes the response.

Arianna Huffington: Yes, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: I asked about the interaction because I remember with The 4-Hour Workweek, in particular, I hit a point where I was really stuck and I was stuck not for a day but for about two weeks. I didn’t know how to tackle this chapter. I had the intention of having someone investment me so they could ghostwrite a first draft that I could then use as a jumping off point. I learned as they interviewed me over the course of about 90 minutes, that they had actually helped me figure out how to fix the chapter just by interviewing me because I was too close to the material.

I’m really fascinated by using those types of tools to jumpstart or, like you said, to get a first draft out because that is so difficult at times.

Arianna Huffington: That’s great. I’m glad to hear that you have a kind of similar process.

Tim Ferriss: Interviewing, I find, is a great way to take a step back from the material. If I need someone to interview me to figure out a given chapter or aspect of a book, I never give them any background because I want them to come in fresh like a reader who just picked it up off the shelf without any type of context. You’re writing and working on all these books. When was the decision made to turn The Huffington Post into a company or to create that company?

Arianna Huffington: By 2000, I started seeing that a lot of very rich conversation was moving online. A lot of people that I loved and admired were not going to be part of it because they were never going to start a blog. At the time, bloggers were seen as people who couldn’t get a job and were blogging – remember the cliché – from their parents’ basement, right?

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Arianna Huffington: I started writing in my column. I had a syndicated column at the time about bloggers. I really loved what blogging was, which was being more conversational, being more intimate, responding to your readers, they respond back.

The whole interactive nature. I decided, together with my co-founder, Kenny Lerer, to launch The Huffington Post in 2005 as two things. One was a collection of bloggers commenting on anything from the events of the day to food to movies, anything at all. One of our sayings was, “If you have something to say, say it on The Huffington Post.” It was also a journalistic enterprise, where we practiced conventional journalism, investigative journalism. At the beginning, the blogging part was the dominant part until we started raising and making money to be able to hire journalists.

The first day we launched was kind of a new day for blogging. Because suddenly, we had on our front page people like Nora Ephron and Walter Cronkite and Joan Cusack and Larry David, people who had never blogged before. It began the process of elevating blogging to something that, of course, we all do. There’s no journalist who isn’t blogging at the same time. Gradually, we started adding journalists. We ended up winning a Pulitzer for investigative journalism. From the beginning, I saw HuffPost as a combination of the best of the old and the best of the new.

Tim Ferriss: How did you get all those known names to participate during the launch? What did you say to them or how did you convince them to do that?

Arianna Huffington: These are the kind of people I had met and I wrote them and basically my pitch was, “You wake up in the morning and you have something to say, I know you do, about the events of the day, about a movie you saw last night, about anything. But you’re busy, you have a book to write, you have a company to run. Sure, you could write it for The New York Times, but you have to deal with editors and processes. You don’t really bother. Just send it to us.

Put it in an email and send it to me and we’ll publish it exactly as you sent it to us and you’ll have entered the cultural bloodstream. You’ll have entered the conversation. You don’t have to do anything else. Then people can comment, react, take it to the next level. It was amazing. That’s exactly what happened. I remember the day that it was revealed who Deep Throat was. I don’t know if you remember that, Tim, or if you were still in kindergarten.

Tim Ferriss: No, I should say I’m aware of it, but I don’t want to say I remember it because maybe I was in kindergarten, but I’m not sure.

Arianna Huffington: It was actually in 2005.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there we go. Then I was a few years after kindergarten.

Arianna Huffington: Nora Ephron called me and said, “Listen, everybody wants me to comment on that. The New York Times asked me to write about it. CNN wants me to go speak about it.” Because she was, at the time, married to Carl Bernstein and so everybody wanted to know did she know, what did she think, etc. She said, “You know what? I’m instead going to write it for The Huffington Post.” She did. It was a big moment for us.

Tim Ferriss: Why did she choose to do that?

Arianna Huffington: She and I were friends. She believed in what I was doing. She was Nora Ephron. She wanted to try new things. As she said, “I don’t want to put makeup on and go to CNN. I’m writing another book and I don’t want to spend time arguing with New York Times editors about a sentence. I want to spend 20 minutes, write this down and you publish it.” But what was amazing, Tim, was what happened afterwards. Because Nora Ephron’s piece was everywhere. It was in The New York Times. It was on CNN. Suddenly, people began to realize that it no longer mattered where you wrote something. If it was interesting or newsworthy or important in some way or another, it would be everywhere.

Tim Ferriss: I’m going to pick that up in a second, but as you were recalling the rough pitch that you gave to these people and you mentioned “entering the cultural bloodstream,” I’ve seen you in action talking to people, brainstorming ideas, suggesting ideas. You’re very good at pitching and persuading. Where did you pick that up? Is that from debate or is it from something else? Are there other ways that you develop that skill? Because you’re very good at it.

Arianna Huffington: I think for me, persuasion is about what does the other person want? You remember, you and I were at the dinner a month ago and there was a famous designer there. We will not mention his name. As you know, I believe that it’s great if people wear dedicated sleepwear when they go to sleep, unless they like to sleep naked.

Because it rekindles their romance with sleep and it makes it clear to their brains that they’re going to sleep. I thought it would be great to get a big designer designing not just clothes, but sleepwear. But he had already told me that he liked breaking rules and doing things differently. So for me, when I pitched the idea of designing sleepwear, I knew what the opening was. That he liked to break conventions and doing things differently and that he was asking his team to do the same.

It turned out to be a really fun conversation and we are talking about him designing sleepwear, but for me, the key is to find out what is the common point of what I’d like to see happen and what the other person would like to see happen.

Tim Ferriss: You have a very good portfolio of skills for many of the things that you’ve ended up building. If you were, for instance, teaching – you can choose the year. Let’s just call it either freshman year in college or senior year in college you’re teaching seminar. It’s a small group of students. Let’s call it 20 students. You’re trying to get them ready for professional life or business life. What would you focus on teaching them in this seminar? Let’s just say it’s once per week. You have two to three hours with them for a single semester. What would you teach? What would you focus on?

Arianna Huffington: Right now, I would absolutely focus on them prioritizing their own human capital. A lot of people think that success is about what we get from the outside.

But the truth is that success is so based on what we can create from what we have inside us and how we can access that place of creativity and resilience and peace inside us. I’m so convinced of that now. It’s getting harder and harder because the distractions, the invasiveness of technology are so overwhelming. I don’t think there’s anything more important. It helps you come up with the best ideas. It helps you not burn out, which makes you more resilient in terms of facing those no’s and failure. That would definitely be my seminar.

Tim Ferriss: What tools or suggestions or practices would you try to impart to these students? Because let’s just say if we’re talking about Cambridge, they’ve almost prequalified already as Type-A personalities, probably.

These are very ambitious kids. So what would you, are there any particular tools or philosophies or books or anything that you would recommend to them to arm them in a way for defending against burnout later?

Arianna Huffington: Yes, I would recommend that they read the latest science around the importance of sleep and pauses in the course of our day. We claim to be data driven, but in fact we are living our lives ignoring the data. The prevailing culture still believes that being always on is the way to succeed. That cutting down on sleep means we are more productive because we have more time available.

I would show them the latest science and then I would bring together new role models. People in the arena that they admire. If they admire business people, people like Jeff Bezos, who wrote on Thrive Global why he gets eight hours of sleep a night. As he put it, “It’s good for Amazon shareholders.” He broke it down. He said, “When I get six hours, my decision making is 5 to 20 percent less good than when I’ve had eight hours. My value is entirely dependent on the quality of my decisions.” That’s entirely based on science and on his personal observation of how he makes decisions.

Or if people are more likely to be swayed by cultural icons, I would quote Selena Gomez, who wrote for us why she does a regular digital detox. Because, as she put it, when she does a digital detox, she reconnects with herself and is much more present in everything she’s doing in her life.

Tim Ferriss: What does a digital detox look like for her or for anyone else who might want to try it?

Arianna Huffington: People can pick their own way of doing it, but it could be anything. From a day, a weekend, an hour away from their phones. Thích Nhất Hạnh said “It’s never easier to run away from ourselves.” The human attention span is now shorter than the attention span of the goldfish. It’s down to eight seconds.

Anything we can do that helps us disconnect from the distractions, reconnect with ourselves. Whatever form it takes. I’m a big believer in micro-steps. If the idea of a one-day digital detox is overwhelming, just try an hour. Try half an hour. Whatever. Whatever your entry point is, just take it.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll mention a few maybe micro-steps that I’ve found helpful for myself and then I’d love to hear some of yours because I’ve noticed, for myself at least, that I always put my phone on airplane mode typically after dinner and it stays in airplane mode until I’ve meditated the next morning. That is one practice.

Arianna Huffington: That’s fantastic. That is really great.

Tim Ferriss: I’ve been doing that for probably two years now because I’ve noticed that if I do not have it on airplane mode, No. 1, there will be lights and so on in my bedroom, which is not ideal.

I know that you have quite a bit to say on that. I also find that if I am barraged by any type of inputs in the morning before doing my meditation, the meditation is of very low quality. The second thing that I do on a weekly basis is I try to take what I call screen-free Saturdays. It doesn’t mean that I’m totally avoiding electronics. I don’t own a car currently and I’ll use my phone for Uber, Google Maps, and so on. But otherwise, I’m not using a laptop and I’m not using social media of any type. On Saturdays, that is a weekly sort of Sabbath away from a lot of the distractions. Are there any other micro-steps that you might recommend to people or that you found personally helpful?

Arianna Huffington: That’s fantastic. I know how many people have been influenced by you doing that. For me, another little micro-step is not charging our phone by our bed. The reason for that is that we are all slightly addicted to our phones. Even with the best intentions, if we wake up in the middle of the night and we can’t easily go back to sleep and our phone is right by our bed, we are going to be tempted to pick up the phone and look at our texts or look at Instagram. That will dramatically interfere with our ability to go back to sleep and truly recharge. That’s one little micro-step. Another micro-step for me, which is similar to yours, is never rushing to my phone at the beginning of the morning, the first thing I do.

I have my own ritual, which includes meditation and which includes setting my intention for the day before I get on my phone. I love doing my stationary bike in the morning, I’m perfectly fine being on my phone and answering emails while on the bike.

Tim Ferriss: I’m going to ask you about your morning routine and then I’m going to come back to why all of this became so important to you. What does your morning look like? Do you have any particular routines? Could you walk us through the first 90 minutes of your day when you wake up and then what happens after that?

Arianna Huffington: First of all, I want to say I don’t believe in having the same time to go to sleep at night and the same time to wake up in the morning.

My life doesn’t work like that. I don’t like setting up rules which I’m going to break every day. My goal now is to wake up eight hours after I went to sleep. I have found out that eight hours is what I need to operate optimally. Also, it happens to be what a lot of people need. Scientists have told us that unless we have a genetic mutation, in which case you can do great on three or four hours – and about 1.5 percent of the population has that – the rest of us need seven to nine hours to have a fully restorative sleep. That’s my ground rule to myself. 95 percent of the time, I do it.

I don’t do anything perfectly. I’m a work in progress. I think 95 percent is pretty good.

Tim Ferriss: So you wake up eight hours after you’ve gone to bed and then what happens after that?

Arianna Huffington: And then the first thing I do is meditate. Then after my meditation, I set my intention for the day. What do I want out of the day in terms of my work or my being or my family. The reason why I think it’s so important is because I used to just go straight to my phone or my laptop. That’s what the world wants of us, right? Every email and every text. I feel it’s very important for us to be clear about what we want. You can’t really run your life from your inbox.

Tim Ferriss: No. As a friend of mine put it, he put this to me and he learned it from someone else, a billionaire who said to him, “Your inbox is everyone else’s agenda for your time.”

Arianna Huffington: Yes, I love that.

Tim Ferriss: That’s a very good way to think about it because it’s extremely reactive. You seem to have very proactive programming in a way. You do seem to have certain routines or rituals. I’d love to talk about – this will tie into a lot of what we’re talking about – walking. I’ve read in doing research for our conversation that one of your favorite phrases – and I’m going to mess this up because this looks like Latin.

It is “solvitur ambulando,” meaning “it is solved by walking.” Could you please talk about walking and what role it has in your life?

Arianna Huffington: I lived in Los Angeles for many years. My two daughters went to school there. I lived in Brentwood. It’s kind of amazing that there are hikes everywhere. Literally five minutes in the car from my home there are the most beautiful hikes. The Mandeville Canyon hike and the Cantor hike. I got into the habit of having all my meetings, “lunches,” etc. with friends during hikes. Instead of going for a lunch or a meeting with friends, we would go on a hike. The one who was in better shape would talk on the way up and the one who was in the worst shape would talk on the way down.

Some of the best things happened on these hikes. I remember telling all my girlfriends about my idea of launching The Huffington Post and Lauri David, who at the time was married to Larry David, immediately said, “I’ll invest.” In fact, Lauri and Larry invested together. Then when they got divorced, they split the investment. Kimberly Brooks became my first art editor. It was just like a great way to talk about everything, whether it was work or personal life. There was something about being in nature that made us all more willing to be authentic and vulnerable. Still now when I get to L.A., I see my friends on hikes or walks around the block or whatever we have time for.

But I love it. Of course now, being in New York, it’s fantastic because I can walk everywhere.

Tim Ferriss: It’s a great walking city. New York is really a fantastic walking city. I’ve noticed a number of what I would consider my most productive friends, which is saying a lot because I have a lot of productive friends, but for instance Naval Ravikant who is really a very soulful and intelligent person who’s been on this podcast before, does walk-and-talk meetings. He’ll have someone come and meet him in San Francisco. It might just be a walk around several blocks and doing a few laps of that route, but he will do walk-and-talk.

I’ve also noticed that a few of my friends who I would also put in that top-performing category, they’ll do walk-and-talks, but they’ll do it with video FaceTime so that they can look at the other person as they’re walking, which I thought was quite clever.

Arianna Huffington: Well, actually, walking meetings is another great thing to do. We do and we do a lot of it here at Thrive. Especially if it’s one-on-one. It gets harder navigating the streets of New York if it’s more than two people. You can do it up to three and then it gets really hard.

Tim Ferriss: If you don’t mind, and this will perhaps lead us into Thrive, but could you talk about one of the harder or darker periods during The Huffington Post years and what helped you to get out of it? Just walk us through a story of one of those times.

Because I think that it’s very easy for people listening to this podcast to put the people being interviewed on a pedestal and assume they’ve always had everything figured out and they just step up to the plate and always hit homeruns. Is there any particular tough period or time at The Huffington Post that you could tell us about and what helped you get thrtough it or get out of it?

Arianna Huffington: Yes, absolutely. I’m so glad you’re focusing on that. Because the worst thing we can do is give people the delusion that everything has been plain sailing. For me, the hardest time was two years into building HuffPost when I was literally working around the clock. I also had two daughters who at the time were teenagers. That’s probably the hardest time for a mother and her teenage daughters. I was divorced so I was bringing them up on my own.

My oldest daughter was at the time when we did the college tours to decide to what college she was going to go. Basically, what would happen is she had made that rule, which is very legitimate, no Blackberries when we’re together. It was Blackberry time. She and I would be together going from college to college during the day and then at night we would check into a hotel. She would go to sleep and I would start working. I got back to Los Angeles and I was completely exhausted.

Without even realizing I was completely exhausted and running on empty until I got up from my desk that first morning back because I was feeling cold to get a sweater, and I collapsed and hit my head on my desk, broke my cheekbone, and got four stitches on my right eye.

That was the beginning of the journey that led to the Thrive book and the Sleep Revolution book and the Thrive company. At the time, it was a very dark time because first of all, when something like that happens, nobody knows what’s wrong with you. Do you have a brain tumor? Do you have a heart problem? So it was literally two weeks of going from doctor to doctor, from MRI to electrocardiogram to check what was wrong with me.

At the end of these two weeks, I feel if this was a movie, I would’ve had all the doctors in one room in their white coats basically giving me the diagnosis, which is “Arianna, you are suffering from civilization’s disease, burnout. There is nothing we can do for you. You have to change your life.”

It really took that painful wakeup call for me to realize that I had to change my life. That’s why now I feel like such an evangelist about this topic because I feel people can make incremental changes in their lives before they hit the proverbial wall. What is funny, Tim, is if that you had asked me that morning, “Arianna, how are you?” I would have said fine. Because I had forgotten what being fine really was.

Tim Ferriss: I get it, yeah.

Arianna Huffington: You get it? Being perpetually tired had become the new normal. I had literally forgotten it. So much so that I wasn’t even aware of the fact that I was running on empty.

Tim Ferriss: I’m really glad we’re talking about this. I just want to reflect on one thing you said, which is how you would’ve said you were fine because you’d forgotten what normal actually was. I remember a few years ago, I hit a point of complete burnout during and then right after The 4-Hour Chef, for many reasons. I won’t bore everybody with them right now. What I ended up doing after that, as part of my attempt to recover, was agreeing to do my first meditation retreat of only two or three days.

There were a number of rules. Rule No. 1 was you can’t use an alarm clock. If you need to sleep and that’s all you do this weekend, then that’s what you do. I felt like that was going to be a huge waste because I knew I was tired.

But that was part one. Part two was they recommended that everyone cut back on caffeine intake, which is one of my compounds of choice. Fortunately, I’m not drawn to opiates, but stimulants are unfortunately something that have often been right at my side. My body seems to crave and respond to that with a certain degree of addiction. I had been, in my normal routine for months prior to that, going to a Thai restaurant that would let me sit down and work on my book. They would give me the unending cup or glass of iced tea. I would end up drinking two or three gallons probably of iced tea.

That was my normal. That’s just what I assumed baseline felt like. For the first time in probably six months, I went completely off of caffeine in preparation for this retreat. I proceeded to sleep almost the entire weekend and felt rejuvenated.

No gadgets or devices. Then I went back to San Francisco, where I used to live, and what did I do? I went back into my routine and I went to the Thai restaurant. Then I remember after maybe two or three glasses of iced tea – keeping in mind that before that I was drinking 20, 30 and not feeling anything. That was just status quo. I had maybe three glasses and I felt so agitated and so unpleasant, that I realized, ohmygod, this X10 was what I assumed was normal just a week or two ago. It was just mind boggling. It was such a wakeup call for me.

I feel like I’m giving a confessional. I just wanted to share that. What were some of the first things that you did after you hit your head, saw all these doctors and they say that you need to change your life? Say in the week that followed, what did you do?

Arianna Huffington: Well, first of all, I love your story because it’s the same message that we both want to impart, which is how often we’re not even aware of what we are doing to ourselves. That’s why by listening to each other’s stories, we can increase our own awareness. For me, first of all, those first two weeks were spent going to doctors and asking questions. I’ve always been drawn to philosophy. I’ve always loved reading the Greeks and the Romans and everyone in between. The one question that really every philosopher asks is, “What is a good life?”

I feel that what we’ve done is we’ve reduced the answer to that question to “What is success?” We’ve reduced the good life to a successful life and we’ve reduced success down to money and power/status. So we’ve shrunken the definition of a good life. I found that during that time, I went back to books I loved and had read before so it’s not as if this was a new journey for me. I had always been drawn to that quest. But this was something that had a new urgency and a new determination to actually live differently and not just read great books.

Tim Ferriss: Were there any particular books you remember having a renewed impact on you? Were there any particular steps that you took after that?

Arianna Huffington: Yes, actually a book that I read that I had not read before, which was recommended by a friend, was incredibly powerful for me because it was written by a man who was in the arena and yet lived life the way I wanted to live my life. That was Marcus Aurelius.

Tim Ferriss: Ah, yes. Meditations?

Arianna Huffington: Meditations, exactly. He was the Emperor of Rome and that is a pretty big job. He had faced invasions and plagues and betrayals and an unfaithful wife. Yet he was able to be imperturbable. That is my favorite word at the time. He was very connected to that centered place in himself from which he wrote this amazing book called Meditations. I loved that because it’s easy to read books by Buddhist monks and Christian mystics and I wanted to hear from something who was in the arena.

Tim Ferriss: Right. Someone who was on the frontlines actually having to deal with the difficulties and messiness of the real world.

Arianna Huffington: Yes. I’m not suggesting that my life was anything like Marcus Aurelius’ life but nevertheless I was in the arena. I had to deal with the daily challenges of life and work. There was one quote, in fact, which I have laminated and carry with me that I love so much in the book.

It goes as follows: “People look for retreats for themselves in the country, by the coast, or in the hills. There is nowhere that a person can find a more peaceful and trouble-free retreat than in his own mind. So constantly give yourself this retreat and renew yourself.”

Tim Ferriss: That is a great quote. That is a really great quote. I’m amazed we haven’t talked about this. That we’re only talking about Marcus Aurelius – and I’m not going to go off on a crazy Stoic trip.

Arianna Huffington: Please do. I would love you to go off on a crazy Stoic trip. I’ll come right with you.

Tim Ferriss: I also have a quote from Meditations. I tend to be a Seneca guy, which is controversial, but he’s a beautiful writer. People very often if they get bitten by the bug of Stoic philosophy, tend to go to Marcus Aurelius or Seneca, often like both.

Then I would say there’s maybe 10 percent who love Epictetus for any number of reasons. There’s this quote from – and I don’t recall it exactly because it’s actually on my refrigerator and I’m not near my refrigerator. In effect, it says when you are taken away from the harmony, do what you can to return to it as easily as possible or as effortlessly impossible. It is a reminder to me that it’s not so much the goal to never be off-balance. It’s to regain your balance.

Arianna Huffington: I love that. I couldn’t agree more. In fact, it is impossible to always be in that centered place. There’s no human being on earth that I have ever met. Maybe there’s some enlightened saint somewhere who can be in that centered place all the time.

So you’re absolutely right. It’s all about how quickly can we course correct.

Tim Ferriss: You mentioned the arena. You have certainly been in the arena in many different ways in your lifetime so far. No doubt you will continue to be in the arena because I think you enjoy the full-contact sport of it. I want to ask you a question about hiring at Thrive. What I’m about to read comes from a piece in Inc. magazine. I’d just love to hear you either fact-check it and just correct it or elaborate on it because, of course, quotes are not always accurate on the internet. Sometimes they are.

What is says is, “Now during interviews there’s a speech I give to everybody.” This is quoting you. “The speech is something like this for potential new hires. I give you full permission to walk into my office and scream at me but I want you to consider this as my last warning. If you complain about any of your colleagues behind their backs, you will be let go.” You then go on to comment on how it makes a difference when you tell people this. I had never known this, but can you tell us more about whether this is accurate and then what the speech is and why you give it?

Arianna Huffington: I really believe that we are moving away from what is seen as traditional HR practice, which is you go and complain to HR about a colleague, HR goes to the colleague and says “somebody,” not naming who, complained about them. It becomes this game shrouded in secrecy that creates a very toxic environment. I believe where HR is moving to now and certainly this is what we both practice and teach in the work we are doing with corporations is authentic transparency.

I believe that people who trust themselves and trust each other are willing to have difficult conversations. Relationships are not easy, whether they are work relationships or personal relationships. We may upset each other. We may say something the other person takes the wrong way. We may do something that upsets someone. I give everybody complete permission, starting with me, to come and tell me directly that I did something they didn’t like, I said something they didn’t like. When I say scream, I want to make the point of say it in as raw a way as you want. You don’t have to figure out how to say it. You can say it while you are angry. You don’t have to wait to calm down. Whatever.

But if you’re incapable of doing that, if you’re only capable of passive-aggressive behavior, which is always being nice to your managers or your colleagues while badmouthing them behind their backs, consider this your last warning. If we say that as clearly as we have said it, and not just I but everybody here, but you can’t do it, then this is not the right place for you.

Tim Ferriss: I love that. I wish more people did this because I feel like – I’m trying to hold myself back. I’ve had too much caffeine maybe. But I feel like the handling of everyone with kid gloves and infantilizing of the workplace is, in the short term, the avoidance of pain, but guaranteed to create much larger problems and much greater pain in the long term.

This approach I think is just so refreshing. My question is, when you are hiring people and many of those hires, I would imagine, are younger. Perhaps they’ve only known the environment where you would go to HR and report. They’re not accustomed to having uncomfortable conversations with co-workers where they try to address things directly. Do you try in any to coach them or provide them with guidelines for how to have those conversations?

Arianna Huffington: Yes, absolutely. In fact, actually, Tim, it’s interesting. We hire a lot of people straight out of college. That’s great. It’s so easy to tell them that and they get it and they practice it. It’s people who come to us from other companies that need more coaching. I think we are able to do it by often having difficult conversations at our leadership meetings and repeating that in our team meetings.

Repeating that again and again. We encourage people to have difficult conversations. We encourage people to communicate when they are not happy with something. I always prioritize that. People know if anybody texts me or management says I have a problem, something has happened and I need to talk to you, I drop everything to address it. People know there’s always a forum, including with me, where they can address problems. I think we’ve really created that atmosphere and that space here. We also make it part of hiring, which helps hire people who are more comfortable having difficult conversations.

Tim Ferriss: Your sister, who I love.

Arianna Huffington: Who loves you.

She has said that you are like Athena, I believe. But on the flip side, I’ve also read that your favorite Greek god is – I don’t know if you would pronounced it Hermes or Hermes?

Arianna Huffington: Hermes. Unless you want to refer to the scarves.

Tim Ferriss: The scarves, right. Which confuses me as a Long Island boy with no culture. All right. Hermes. Why does she think you’re like Athena and why is your favorite Greek god Hermes?

Arianna Huffington: Well first of all, I wrote a book on Greek gods and goddesses, where I approach them as archetypes. I believe that we all carry all the gods and goddesses in us. The question is who is the most dominant god? Athena is the goddess of wisdom. I’ve very flattered my sister thinks my dominant goddess, but I aspire to Hermes being my dominant god because he’s my favorite god of Greek mythology.

Because he’s so multifaceted. He’s both childlike and playful and wise. He’s mystical and comfortable in the marketplace. He represents everything I love about our humanity in his very godlike way. He is my favorite.

Tim Ferriss: You really have struck me in all of our interactions and as I’ve observed you as someone who’s really made a conscious effort, as you said, to be honest with yourself and to see reality as it is. There’s one anecdote which I think falls into this category. It’s kind of related I think. I’ve never heard it from you. Again, I read a lot on the internet. I have to be careful sometimes with that.

Did you have a conversation with Henry Kissinger about your accent at one point?

Arianna Huffington: I did.

Tim Ferriss: Can you please tell the story?

Arianna Huffington: I have been very conscious of my accent for a long time. I did try to change it. In fact, my ex-husband gave me as a birthday gift, which you may consider a very passive-aggressive birthday gift, a dialect coach for two weeks to follow me around and give me notes. It wasn’t just any dialect coach, it was Jessica Drake, who is a very famous Hollywood dialect coach who coached Tom Hanks in Forest Gump.

She literally followed me around. At the time my children were young. She would put diphthong symbols on Dr. Seuss books so when I was reading to my children I could practice. She would put Lifesavers on my tongue so I could pronounce my long Es like long Es, and my short Es like short Es. By the end of it, I was paralyzed. I knew exactly what I was doing wrong, but I could not really be an authentic, functioning human being and speak proper English. I guess gave up reluctantly the hope of speaking the Queen’s English. Soon after I gave up my husband, though the two things were not related. Then around that time, I was talking to Henry Kissinger.

I told him, “You’re so comfortable with your accent and I’ve been so uncomfortable with it.” He said, “Arianna, give it up. In American public life, you can never overestimate the advantages of complete and total incomprehensibility.”

Tim Ferriss: So you learned to embrace it. Was it easy?

Arianna Huffington: I learned to embrace it. I think it was the combination of seeing how I could never speak like Jessica Drake wanted me to speak unless I just measured every word and lost all spontaneity. Also the fact that Henry Kissinger seemed so completely comfortable with his heavy German accent. Now, honestly, I don’t think about it. But for a long time, it really weighed on me.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I wanted to hear you tell that story, which I really own knew a tiny piece of. I’m glad you told the full story. I think you live life very proactively and it’s been inspiring to watch in our interactions and also as I see you converse and interact and help other people. I really encourage people, obviously, to check out Thrive Global. I’ll mention in a second where they can find you on various social platforms. First and foremost, I want to thank you for taking the time. This has been so fun. I’m sure we only found the very tip of the iceberg in terms of the stories that you could tell. Maybe we’ll do a Round 2 sometime. I really appreciate you making the time to have the conversation.

Arianna Huffington: Oh, Tim, I absolutely loved it.

I would love to invite your listeners to tell their own stories. Their stories of burnout, their wakeup calls, their life hacks. We can toss them on your site and on Thrive Global and social them. I really believe that our stories can help others in a way that goes beyond science and data. I love collecting the stories. I love inviting people to participate.

Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s point them to thriveglobal.com. People should absolutely check it out.

Arianna Huffington: Actually, I’m going to make it even easier. I’m going to give you my email address and they can email me directly. That’s how The Huffington Post started, remember?

Tim Ferriss: Okay, so before you do that, Derek Sivers once did that because he said, “No one’s listening after 2.5 hours.” He has his inbox explode to the point that it became very difficult to manage. I’ll leave it up to you.

Arianna Huffington: I am ready to take the risk.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, all right. Then proceed.

Arianna Huffington: It’s AH@ThriveGlobal.com.

Tim Ferriss: All right. Well, you seem to be a masterful surfer of technology, so I will leave you to contend with what comes out of it. But everybody heard it. AH@ThriveGlobal.com. You can send your stories to Arianna and you can say hello to her on LinkedIn: Arianna Huffington. Facebook: Arianna Huffington. Twitter and Instagram: AriannaHuff. Is there anything else, Arianna, in terms of asks or suggestions or parting comments that you’d to make before we finish up?

Arianna Huffington: No. That’s my ask. Let’s share our stories and change the culture so we can reduce all the unnecessary suffering people are experiencing. Thank you, Tim, so much for all you are doing to make that possible.

Tim Ferriss: Well, thank you for sharing so much and doing what you do. I’m absolutely thrilled to have you on. For everyone listening, you can find links to everything we’ve talked about in the show notes, as usual, at tim.blog/podcast. Arianna, thank you so much. To everyone listening, be safe, get your sleep, pay attention to your body and how you feel. As always, thank you for listening.

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