In the premiere episode of the CNBC Changemakers & Power Players podcast, CNBC Senior Media and Tech reporter Julia Boorstin spoke with Thrive Global Founder and CEO Arianna Huffington about her career, leadership style and longevity.
Listen to the full episode here. New episodes drop every Tuesday.
All references must be sourced to CNBC Changemakers & Power Players podcast.
HUFFINGTON ON LONGEVITY CRAZE
JULIA BOORSTIN: I thought it was so interesting to see you weigh in on this question of the longevity competition that’s going on right now, especially in Silicon Valley, among a lot of these tech companies. There’s this longevity movement. A lot of people have made a lot of money in the tech industry, spending fortunes to try to live forever or to live for hundreds of years. You came out against this.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Well, here’s the thing, it’s such a complete delusion that we’re going to live forever. There’s truly zero scientific evidence that we’re going to live forever. We can expand our lifespan and we can definitely dramatically improve our health span but we’re not going to live forever. I think one of the problems with this longevity craze is that people are wasting so much time every day doing things that are both unproductive and unfulfilling, that I think instead of trying to live forever, how about trying to improve how you spend your day?
HUFFINGTON ON SOCIAL MEDIA
BOORSTIN: What advice would you give to young people now trying to navigate this crazy world with AI and social media and all these different things.
HUFFINGTON: Pick a time at the end of the day that you declare as the end of your working day, because, let’s face it, there is no end to our working day. And if anybody listening has an end to their working day, they need to change jobs, because it means their job is not interesting enough. Nobody with an interesting job has an end to their day, right? You could spend all night answering emails, texts, prepping for interviews. So you have to declare an end to the working day. And the way I declare the end to my working day is taking my phone and my iPad and my laptop outside my bedroom. And it isn’t just about blue lights, etc. It’s about the fact that these are the repositories of every problem and every project that we are dealing with. And in order to be able to sleep and deeply recharge, we need to separate ourselves from that. And so in bed, I only read physical books, and I read poetry, I read fiction, I read history, nothing to do with media, health care, geopolitical issues, and I feel this is so important, because we all need to build pathways to that centered place in ourselves.
HUFFINGTON ON DEALING WITH FAILURE & REJECTION
BOOSTIN:What was your biggest failure and what did you learn from it?
HUFFINGTON: The most painful failure was my second book. My first book I wrote when I was 23 and it was a big success about the changing role of women, and then I didn’t want to write anymore about women. I had said everything I knew, so I locked myself up and wrote a book on leadership, believe it or not, and I got 37 rejections, by which time I had run out of money, the money I had made from my first book, and I started thinking that, hey, maybe the first book was a fluke, and I need to go get a real job. And I remember, literally, I lived in London at the time, walking down St James’s Street, kind of depressed, and seeing Barclays Bank in the corner. And something made me go into the bank and ask the manager if I could have a loan, or what the Brits call an overdraft, and I had no assets. For some reason, he gave it to me, and that kept me going until I got an acceptance for the book.
HUFFINGTON ON HOW HER LEADERSHIP STYLE HAS ENABLED SUCCESS IN DIFFERENT INDUSTRIES
BOORSTIN: What is it about your leadership style that has enabled such success in varied worlds?
HUFFINGTON: Well, let me tell you what is my top leadership book. It’s a book by Marcus Aurelius called “Meditations.” Marcus Aurelius was the emperor of Rome for 19 years, but he was also a stoic philosopher, and he wrote this book about how to lead from a place that we could now call the eye of the hurricane. You know, he faced invasions and betrayals and a 13-year plague. So for me, leadership is about knowing how to move in to that centered place of wisdom, peace and resilience in us, because that’s the place from which you can also not just make great decisions, not just look at where the icebergs are before they hit the Titanic, which is one of the most important functions of leadership, to look At the future and see where the world is going, but also to communicate that to your employees, to the people you lead.
HUFFINGTON ON AI AS A “GPS FOR THE SOUL”
BOORSTIN: You wrote in one of your pieces about AI that it can be used as a sort of GPS for the soul. Unpack that for us. What does that mean?
HUFFINGTON: Well, what it means is that now that we know that AI will be more intelligent than humans. I did a conversation with Sam Altman at JP Morgan’s Tech 100 conference, and I I said to him, so what is the world that your children, he has a little son, will inherit what’s the world because of AI that’s going to be so different. He said, “My children will never be more intelligent than AI,” and we are now all coming to believe that, and because of that, human beings have to ask the question, so if we’re not our IQ, if we’re not defined by our intelligence, who are we? And that’s where we are going to have to actually come to terms with the fact that we are not just material beings defined by our intelligence, that we have consciousness, or you prefer to call it soul or spirit or Atman, the word you use doesn’t matter. What matters is to recognize that we are more than intelligence.