Rented Cars, 27 Rejections and the Love Quotient: Arianna Huffington on Obsession and Recharging

Lex Fridman opens with a story Arianna Huffington has told about winning recognition for her first book at 23, then sitting in a hotel room wondering whether that was all there was. He asks what she thinks the meaning of life is today. Her answer is rooted in the claim that every major philosophy and spiritual tradition holds that life does not end with death and that there is another dimension of consciousness.

For Huffington, a full life therefore includes exploring that dimension. She says the exploration has run through her life since her teens, when she went to Shantiniketan University in India at 17 to study comparative religion. She never believed, she says, that the whole experiment ends with each individual death, and that conviction runs underneath her work on books, the Huffington Post and now Thrive Global.

Asked about *memento mori*, the Latin reminder to remember death, she says she thinks about her own mortality a lot. It gives her perspective and helps her focus on her children, her close friends and the impact she wants Thrive to have. She claims zero interest in what is usually called legacy, since she is more concerned with what happens to her soul than to her legacy on earth.

Pressed on what she thinks happens after death, she offers an image: our personality, body and mind are like a car we rented, which we return at the airport before flying to another city and renting another car. Depending on one's view of reincarnation, she says, what definitely survives is the soul. That is why she sees how we live, the choices we make and how we treat others as central to what comes after.

Fridman asks about a major failure that was psychologically hard to bounce back from. Huffington first says she does not believe any successful person has avoided failure and challenges anyone to name one. She wishes successful people would talk more about their failures, because the real difference between people is resilience and how quickly they get discouraged.

Her own hardest failure came at 28. Her first book had done very well, but her second, on the crisis in political leadership in the West, was turned down by 27 publishers. By then she had run out of money and was living off her first book's proceeds, and she remembers walking through London wondering whether the first book was a fluke and she should get a real job.

Instead she walked into a Barclays bank on the corner and asked the manager for an overdraft, though she had no assets. The manager, Ian Bell, agreed, which let her keep going through another 13 rejections until an acceptance finally arrived. She has sent him a holiday card every year since, comparing him to the helpful animal in a fairy tale that guides the hero out of a dark forest.

Fridman, who describes himself as an engineer obsessed with his work, brings up Huffington's friendly Twitter exchange with Elon Musk about work hours and sleep. He asks how a singular obsession and the turmoil of innovation fit with a lifestyle built on well-being, wisdom and wonder. Huffington replies that she loves singular obsessions and that her favorite people have addictive, obsessive personalities.

Her point is that anyone chasing something big, whether electric cars or going to the moon, should look at the science showing that people are more creative, productive and likely to succeed if they take time to recharge. She says she wrote her open letter to Musk lovingly and admiringly, asking him to respect the laws of human energy. Violating them, she says, is like violating the laws of gravity.

She argues that Musk is facing the consequences, citing his middle-of-the-night tweeting, having to step down as chairman and having to deal with the SEC in court. In her view these distractions pull him away from the work he is amazing at. Huffington says she hates the word "balance" because she agrees there is none when you are trying to achieve something big.

At Thrive, she says, people have pulled all-nighters to ship a product, and new hires are told plainly that this is not a nine-to-five operation. The key is to recharge soon afterward, and the faster you do so the more effective you are. The company calls this "thrive time", and she says skipping it lets exhaustion build until you do stupid things or fall sick.

Fridman asks about her move from right of center to left of center. Huffington describes herself as having been a pro-choice, pro-gay-rights Republican, a type she calls practically extinct. She says she realized her understanding of the role of government was limited.

She had been a Republican because she thought the private sector would step up to address inequality and look after people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Seeing firsthand that this was not going to happen, she concluded that the raw power of government appropriations was needed. That shift in how she understood government, she says, drove the change in her political views.

On the present moment, she says the chickens are coming home to roost. Problems that were foreseen, and discussed at endless conferences on topics like inclusive capitalism and the dangers of growing inequality, were talked about but not acted on. She sees different forms of right-wing and left-wing populism and calls it a serious moment, but insists nothing will be solved by living in perpetual outrage.

Fridman asks what impact the Huffington Post, launched in 2005, has had on public discourse, and whether online media created today's divisiveness or merely revealed it. Huffington says the site helped democratize the conversation and elevate blogging, which at the time was dismissed as something people did in their parents' basements. By bringing in people such as Walter Cronkite, Nora Ephron and Larry David, who could have written for *The New York Times*, it gave blogging more standing.

She stresses that the site had careful guidelines: everything was curated and ad hominem comments were not allowed. Before she left, she says, anonymous comments were ended altogether because they had become too hard to police. She wanted democratization side by side with investigative journalism, while recognizing that toxicity can infiltrate conversations that are not monitored or curated.

She rejects the label of "left" for the site, saying it had a viewpoint and that it called its journalism "beyond right and left". Caring about inequality, law and order, or climate change is not inherently a left-wing position, she says, and viewing the world through right and left simply polarizes the conversation. Fridman responds that a strong gravitational pull sorts outlets into red and blue teams anyway, and asks whether she sees a path to healthy disagreement.

Huffington says she does, and names two essentials. The first is a reverence for facts: everyone has a right to their own opinions but not to their own set of facts. The second is ending what Jay Rosen calls the "view from nowhere", where journalists present one person who thinks climate change is real and another who does not and stay in the middle. She says the Huffington Post had a viewpoint but one based on facts.

Fridman's last question is how she balances love and ambition, given an obsession with work alongside deep love for family. Huffington says Thrive Global is an obsession, with a mission of ending the stress and burnout epidemic, which she sees as hurting health, mental health and performance. At the same time, she has two daughters she adores, and everyone in her office knows she will take a call from either of them at any moment.

She does not think that conflicts with being obsessed about the company's growth, calling the choice a false dichotomy. When we nurture the part of us that is about love and connection, she says, we also nurture the deeper parts of our humanity, which is where wisdom and creativity come from. Fridman suggests that love strengthens every part of life and improves productivity, and she agrees.

She closes with a point she attributes to Jack Ma, who said in Davos the previous year that winning the future will take not just IQ or even emotional intelligence but the "love quotient". Huffington finds it a notable thing to hear from him but sees it as part of a wider shift. While AI and machine learning will take over big parts of life and destroy many jobs, she says, the distinctly human things, loving among them, are what AI cannot do.