Arianna Huffington
Key Takeaways
- Arianna Huffington started news website The Huffington Post in 2005 and founded behavior-change tech company Thrive Global in 2016.
- Huffington says she does not separate work and life — as long as she has time to recharge.
- Here she explores “996” culture, partnering with OpenAI, and more.
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Arianna Huffington moved to England from Greece at 17, earning a master’s degree in economics from Cambridge University where she was president of its celebrated debating society. Best known as the co-founder of The Huffington Post (now HuffPost) — acquired by AOL in 2011, then by BuzzFeed in 2020 — she became a force in shaping the digital media landscape and a fixture on various “most influential” lists. She has also written 15 books.
In common with other seemingly indefatigable high-achievers, Huffington faced a physical reckoning in 2007, when burnout caused her to collapse “into a bloody mess.” Along with a fractured cheekbone she sustained a revelatory crack in her outlook on life and began to map out a significant pivot.
Now, as founder and CEO of Thrive Global, she has redirected her entrepreneurial focus towards well-being — and with Thrive AI Health, created in 2024 in partnership with OpenAI, she wants “to use AI to make expert-level health coaching accessible to everyone.”
Here, she joins Big Think to explore the public health crisis in the US, the women at the core of AI, why humans are the ultimate “agents,” and much more.
Big Think: What do you wish you’d known when starting your first business?
Huffington: The idea that burnout is the price we must pay for success is a delusion. Had I known that I would have spared myself a broken cheekbone when I collapsed from exhaustion two years after I launched HuffPost.
After that wakeup call in 2007, I became passionate about the science that links our health and our daily habits — food, exercise, sleep, stress management and connection with others. Fortunately, I was able to course-correct long before founding my second company. And when I started Thrive Global in 2016, elevating these daily behaviors as fundamental to our health and productivity became the foundation for the company.
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But as clear as the science is, it’s amazing how stubborn the delusions about burnout culture are. In fact, there’s been a wave of recent articles about the return of “996” culture, which has its roots in the Chinese tech scene and refers to working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week.
So unfortunately, more people are going to have to learn the same lesson I did. But culture change is possible. Look at cigarette smoking. In 1965, over 42% of American adults smoked. Today it’s around 12%. It can take a while for the culture to catch up with science — but the science between our health and our daily behaviors is as clear as the science between our health and smoking.
Big Think: You started The Huffington Post in 2005, with celebrity contributors as well as unpaid bloggers a central part of the content strategy. What do you make of the media landscape now?
Huffington: What I loved about HuffPost was the ability to have a direct connection to individual voices and how that could create community and a two-way conversation. And what we’re seeing with the rise of Substack, for example, is that it creates both a space for communities to coalesce and a viable business model.
There are, of course, huge challenges, especially among legacy media institutions, but the hunger people have to tell their stories, to have a direct connection to writers, and to be part of a community has never been stronger. It’s just finding and driving different models.
Big Think: You contributed to Big Think several years ago. What kinds of shifts have you seen in the business world since then — any epiphanies?
Huffington: We’ve reached this pivotal moment when we’re finally beginning to see our daily behaviors not as soft, fuzzy perks, but as medical interventions. And this is happening as employers are increasingly alarmed about the costs of healthcare, which are projected to go up by 9.5% next year.
What business leaders are seeing is that the chronic disease crisis is also a workplace crisis. The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that 58% of U.S. employees have a chronic health condition, and over three quarters of those employees need to manage those conditions during regular work hours.
There’s been a huge shift in the business world as leaders realize their importance as stakeholders in fixing our broken healthcare system. And given that over 60% of the population gets healthcare from their employers, and we spend one-third of our lives at work, the workplace can be a significant place to transform healthcare.
Big Think: Some people retire before they are 70, but you’ve chosen to continue to work. What’s your working routine?
Huffington: Actually, I find that in my 70s, I have many advantages over my younger self! One thing I learned is how draining all my worries were and how much energy you lose at the beginning of your career by looking over your shoulder for approval.
I’m also very blessed to love what I do. As long as I take enough time to recharge, sleep, meditate, exercise, be with the people I love, I don’t really separate my work from the rest of my life. I actually don’t remember the last time I didn’t work at all over a weekend!
Leaders need to ensure not only that their companies have a new technology infrastructure — they need their employees to have a strong personal infrastructure.
In any demanding job, it’s impossible to do everything you could have done in any one day. So I have learned to declare an end to my working day by being comfortable with incompletions and turning off my phone and making sure it’s charging outside my bedroom. Our phones are, after all, repositories of everything we need to put away to allow us to sleep — our to-do lists, our inboxes, the demands of the day.
And one place you won’t find me at is a breakfast meeting! My least favorite way of starting the day.
One of my favorite lessons when I was studying economics at Cambridge was about opportunity cost: when you say yes to something, it means saying no to everything else. It’s not just important in an economic sense — it applies to every decision we make in our daily lives. For instance, if I say yes to a breakfast meeting that drains me, I’m also saying no to the things that actually help me be productive and creative and engaged. Being able to say no — without apology — is an essential skill. As I often say: “No” is a complete sentence!
Big Think: Who do you admire and why?
Huffington: I love and admire [philanthropist] Alice Walton. For decades we’ve heard the mantra that nothing can be done to fix the healthcare system. But Alice is determined to prove that wrong. With the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine and the Heartland Whole Health Institute, she is transforming healthcare in the heartland by combining art, nature and a whole-human approach.
As much as 80% of medical education focuses on biology, while 60% of premature deaths are due to behavioral factors. So by training a new generation of doctors on prevention and the health impact of our daily behaviors, she’s changing the healthcare system from the inside.
One thing I especially love about Alice is how when she’s excited about something, she has to share it. That can be on an individual level, or, given her love of art, it can mean building a world-class museum in rural Arkansas and making admission free. And she brings a sense of urgency to her most important mission: fixing our healthcare system.
And it’s hard not to mention my mother. Her motto was that failure is not the opposite of success but a stepping stone to success. And that idea of embracing failure, combined with her unconditional love, made it possible for me to take many risks throughout my life. There isn’t a single corner of my life that isn’t filled with her spirit.
Big Think: What do you think leaders need to focus on in the age of AI, and why — how are they doing with that?
Huffington: Leaders need to go into the age of AI with eyes wide open. We now have the benefit of hindsight and we should use it. That means recognizing the negative downstream effects of previous technologies.
There’s growing anxiety about AI in the workforce. A recent Pew poll found that in the U.S., only 10% of people are more excited than concerned, while five times that number — 50% — are more concerned than excited, up from 38% in 2022.
One place you won’t find me at is a breakfast meeting! My least favorite way of starting the day.
Leaders need to ensure not only that their companies have a new technology infrastructure — they need their employees to have a strong personal infrastructure. The core of that is resilience, which is really the most important skill we are going to need to navigate the age of AI.
The limiting factor of AI won’t be data centers, or energy, or chips, or computers. The limiting factor will be what it has always been throughout human history: human nature.
Big Think: You partnered with OpenAI to launch Thrive AI Health in 2024. How is that going, and what can we expect from the company in 2026?
Huffington: Our mission has always been simple but ambitious: to use AI to make expert-level health coaching accessible to everyone. We want to help people know what to do to live healthier, longer lives, and follow through on it.
Since launch, we’ve gone from early alpha testing to a live beta. Every day, people are using the Thrive AI Health Coach to build small, sustainable habits — such as taking a stretch break after a meeting or a short walk during lunch, actions that fit seamlessly into everyday routines, including work. People are also giving us valuable feedback that’s shaping the next generation of the product.
As we move into 2026, the focus will be on deepening engagement and preparing for scale. That means translating the data and goals people get from their wearables or healthcare providers into daily micro steps they can do with the right nudges and support.
We’re also building with our partners — including Eli Lilly, Hilton, the University of Pennsylvania and the Yale School of Public Health — to ensure the product works across different populations and contexts.
Big Think: Silicon Valley is primarily accelerationist when it comes to AI; Europe is more precautionary — where do you stand?
Huffington: I’m still placing my bets that AI can be a force for good. But it remains an open question. Right now, we’re at a fork in the road, where two different futures are possible.
One is that AI turns out to be just a more powerful version of the technologies that have come before — a more effective way to mine our attention, polarize us, and distract us from what matters.
The other scenario is that now that AI has dethroned human intelligence, it becomes a forcing mechanism for a question we’ve been avoiding since the Industrial Revolution: what does it mean to be human?
I’m still placing my bets that AI can be a force for good. But it remains an open question. Right now, we’re at a fork in the road, where two different futures are possible.
Now that Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” no longer holds true, this dethronement could be the greatest gift, finally forcing us to rediscover the possibilities of our full humanity and reconnect with the infinity of our inner selves — soul, spirit, consciousness — and the awe and wonder of who we are: “spiritual beings having a human experience” as [philosopher Pierre] Teilhard de Chardin put it.
So the question is: how can we use what AI can do to augment what it can’t do? That, to me, is the ultimate possibility of AI. The real existential threat of AI isn’t that it turns on humans and destroys the human race, it’s that humans won’t keep pace with AI by investing in our own growth and evolution.
[Author and historian] Yuval Noah Harari summed it up: “If for every dollar and every minute that we invest in developing artificial intelligence, we also invest in exploring and developing our own minds, it will be okay. But if we put all our bets on technology, on Al, and neglect to develop ourselves, this is very bad news for humanity.”
Agents are the AI concept of the moment, but we’re the ultimate agents, and AI will be what we make of it.
Big Think: Does the dominance of the tech “broligarchy” jeopardize a safe and prosperous AI future?
Huffington: There are of course many players from the classic Silicon Valley bro culture who dominate the headlines, but there have also been many pieces recently about a resurgence of spirituality in Silicon Valley — something I’ve seen first-hand among friends I have there, including on the Thrive board.
And there are many amazing women building AI. There is, for instance, Fei-Fei Li, who’s sometimes called the “godmother of AI” and spent 20 years doing pioneering work in AI. She’s now a professor at Stanford and the co-founder of Stanford’s Raise Health program, which is helping to establish a framework for how AI can be used in health safely and equitably. As she wrote in her memoir The World’s I See, “I believe our civilization stands on the cusp of a technological revolution with the power to reshape life as we know it. To ignore the millennia of human struggle that serves as our society’s foundation, however — to merely ‘disrupt,’ with the blitheness that has accompanied so much of this century’s innovation — would be an intolerable mistake.”
And there’s Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s new CEO of Applications. She published an internal manifesto recently outlining how AI can be used to empower people, especially in improving their health, writing, “Every major technology shift can expand access to power—the power to make better decisions, shape the world around us, and control our own destiny in new ways… We can start by making sure the keys to empowerment and opportunity — knowledge, health, creative expression, economic freedom, time, and support — are widely available.”
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