I'm Working with OpenAI to Make Work Better for Humans w/ Arianna Huffington | EP #126

We have a health care crisis, I think is the way that you put it.

It isn't just a US Crisis, it's a global crisis.

It's infinitely preventable and or reversible.

We're not going to change hearts and minds through numbers. We need to tell stories. I wanted to do something more. I wanted to help people change behaviors, elevating these issues from the warm and fuzzy nice to have to kind of business imperatives. We call them productivity multipliers.

What CEO wouldn't want to maintain productivity multipliers, even when you're cutting budgets? Ray's belief is that we are going to merge with AI.

I completely disagree with you. I think that human beings have a soul and AI does it.

Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. On today's program, I'm going to be interviewing an incredible female CEO, a dear friend, Arianna Huffington. She is the founder and CEO of Thrive Global. We'll be talking about how she's looking at revolutionizing the entire healthcare industry. She was also the founder of Huffington Post, which she started in 2005, leading to winning a Pulitzer Prize. She sold that company to AOL in 2011, then went on to start Thrive Global in 2016. She's the author of 15 books, Thrive in the Sleep Revolution. She's incredible. Then went on to partner with Sam Altman and OpenAI to create Thrive AI Health. By the way, Arianna Huffington is going to be with me on stage at my private event, Abundance360 next March. I usually don't open it up to the public, but if you're interested, I do reserve five tickets for Moonshot listeners. If this is you and you want to talk to my team about it, click on the link below or go to abundance360.com all right, let's jump into the episode. Hi, Arianna.

Hi, Peter Tikanis. You know this is going to be conducted in Greek, right?

We're going to translate, you know, this podcast, this moonshot podcast goes out in Portuguese and we're going to put it out, this one in particular in Greek, so we won't have to translate that part. But it's great to see you. I'm in Santa Monica this moment, yourself in New York.

And I'm in New York, but as you know, I spent quite a bit of time in la. I still have my home there.

How long have we known each other now? It's been a while.

We met shortly after I launched the Huffington Post at a dinner that Larry and Sergey had for you in San Francisco. You invited me to Join the board of X Prize.

Yeah. It must have been 2004. Larry joined at the end of late 2004, which is probably one. I invited you as well. We had quite the board. We had you and Larry Elon was on the board. We brought Jim Giannopoulos. James Cameron had joined. It was quite a rock star. The board grew to like 25 people to the point where I couldn't call a board meeting anymore because it was impossible to get everybody's schedule aligned. It was crazy.

Amazing board meetings.

Yeah. You know that this year, Arianna, is our 30th anniversary. So we've known each other for 20 years. Happy anniversary. I'm not sure it's longer.

Our friendship has lasted longer than my marriage.

That's good.

It only lasted 11 years. Your marriage has been much more successful.

It's tough. Marriage is tough. It's part of the stressors in our health. But it's an important part of our health as well. It's interesting. This is our 30th anniversary, Arianna. We've launched 30x prizes, about close to $600 million in cash purses, driving nearly $10 billion in R& D. So very proud of what we all created together. It's been quite the journey.

I'm very proud of you. It's been really incredible.

And I'm proud of you, man. You are quite the entrepreneur. Young lady. It's amazing. In your intro, I was just noting all of the different successes you had. And one of the things we're going to get into, health care, how insane our healthcare system is, how broken it is, the importance of using tech and AI to bolster us and what you're doing with Thrive Global. But I want to hit something else. A lot of our listeners around the world are entrepreneurs and we're so driven and in our early entrepreneurial careers, you at Huffington Post, myself at XPRIZE and my other space ventures, where you've got this insane dream, this moonshot you're going after and you're willing to work at it 247 and sacrifice everything to it, relationships and health. What advice do you have for entrepreneurs in that mind?

Well, my advice came from my own experience and from tons of science and data. You know, two years into building the Huffington Post in 2007, I had bought into this collective delusion, as I call it.

I love that collective delusion.

In order to be this super founder and super mom of my two little girls, I didn't have the luxury to take care of myself, sleep to eat right, exercise, et cetera and I literally collapsed. I hit my head on my desk, broke my cheekbone. And that was the beginning of my journey to not just change my own behavior, but become an evangelist about encouraging entrepreneurs and others to really look at the data and the science. You know, it's kind of ironic, Peter, because as entrepreneurs, we are very data driven. We look at all the metrics. And yet when it comes to the unequivocal science, that we are going to be the most productive, most creative versions of ourselves, if we also take care of ourselves, we tend to ignore it.

Yep, you think of it for somebody else and not for myself. And in fact, if everybody else is doing it but I push a little bit further, I'll be able to get ahead.

So, you know, at the Huffington Post, after my own collapse, I started covering these issues exhaustively. And I remember sitting at a dinner with Jeff Bezos, and he said to me, you know, I had just written my book on sleep. And he said, you know, I sleep for eight hours a night. I said, you do? He said, yes. He said, I have analyzed my decisions, and when I'm sleep deprived, my decisions are not as good as I have gotten a good full night's sleep. And he said, as a CEO of Amazon, which he still was at the time, I'm judged by the quality of my decisions, not the quantity of my decisions.

That's amazing. That's actually brilliant of him.

It is amazing. And I said to him, you must write about it. He said, no, I'm private. I don't want to write about it. He said, it's not about you. It's about. It's about teaching people who admire you, admire your success, how to do it. And finally, after I kept texting him for three months, he did it, I think, to get me off his back. And then CNBC picked it up, different business publications. It became a part of the culture. So Satya Nutella is another one who talks about how much sleep he gets. I was at a Microsoft CEO summit, and he came up to me and he said, I didn't get all the sleep I wanted last night, so I won't be my best. So these are people who are incredibly effective, incredibly successful, who also knows that if they take time to unplug, recharge, they're going to be the best versions of themselves. And also, Peter, we see that from athletes, right? Elite athletes know that recovery is part of peak performance.

It is. And, you know, I changed my tune, you know, all through medical school, all through graduate school, and the first 20 years of an entrepreneurship. You know, I'll sleep when I'm dead was my motto.

Yeah, I know.

And it was like minimizing.

I remember having lunch with you at the Crosby Hotel in New York. You could barely finish your lunch because you were rushing to get a plane. And I was trying to convince you of that and you were like on the edge. I think soon after that you were convinced. But you know, you are really a hardcore I'll sleep when I'm dead guy.

Yeah. My dad used to say, your fork is on fire. You know, it's like it was. I was judging everything incorrectly. And today I'm in bed at 9:30 and every night and consistency of sleep cycle and 8 hours is my objective. Every single day may not always get it, but it's my objective and I can feel my next day if I don't. And in particular, it's not just the eight hours. It's trying to get an hour of deep sleep at least, which is when the.

I think what you said is very important. There are going to be nights when we don't get it. This is not about doing this perfectly. We are all works in progress and the worst thing we can do is judge ourselves when we don't get it.

You know, judgment. And we'll talk about this later. We judge ourselves. Humans around us inherently judge us and we each other. And the beautiful thing about AI is it doesn't judge you. That's one of the most spectacular things. There's not that sense of, oh no, I have to lie to it because it will think badly of me. You can be completely honest and it's going to be empathic and sympathetic and we'll get to that in a little bit. I want to start with you and I have a common passion and belief that we need to completely destroy, obliterate, burn down and sprinkle holy water on the current healthcare system. And it needs to be reinvented because it is. And I wouldn't say that as dramatically, but the health care system is broken and the numbers. And it's not just health care, it's the food system and it's many different elements of our society. We have a healthcare crisis, I think is the way that you put it. Right. And I wrote down a few stats and I know you have some of your favorites too. And again, because we're speaking to entrepreneurs going after moonshots, I think one of the biggest opportunities on the planet is the fixing this health care crisis and delivering new systems, new capabilities. And I'd like to give Some of the stats as motivations. If you don't mind, I'm happy to go first. If you have your favorites, you can go as well. I've written things down. I don't know if you have these memorized or not, but it's crazy.

Well, first of all we should stress, because this is a global audience.

Yes.

That it isn't just a U.S. crisis. It's a global crisis.

Correct.

We have over 8 million people in line for health care in the United kingdom. We spend 18% of our GDP, $4 trillion in the US on health care and outcomes are getting worse every year. I mean, we work at Thrive with many self insured employers and they are alarmed at the increase in health care costs every year. So this is a universal crisis. But you know what, Peter, from my days in the media world, I have learned that we're not going to change hearts and minds through numbers. We need to tell stories. And there is a story which actually the New York Times covered.

Please.

In Austin, Texas, which has become the amputation capital for people with diabetes. You know, last year there were 150,000 people with diabetes who had their legs or toes amputated.

It's crazy. That's an alarming number.

It's alarming, it's barbaric. And also it's not to mention the incredible cost in dollars, these operations, prosthetics, infections, the cost in human lives and.

Human hope and human well being and belief that life is a better tomorrow. I mean if you've had part of your body cut off, that's gotta be soul crushing.

Exactly. Everything you've said about optimism and how optimism helps us be healthier. But the story in the New York Times was the story of one man, Robert Perez, 39 year old record producer. Not an old man.

39. Yeah.

And he was shown in a picture being fitted with a prosthetic. And he said, and he was diagnosed with diabetes four years earlier and he said he could never believe that it would get to this point. So how come that people don't know what's available to them, not just in terms of medication, but in terms of behaviors, in terms of what they eat, their stress levels, their sleep and how all that impacts the progression of the disease.

And the sad thing is it's infinitely preventable and. Or reversible.

Yes, or manageable. You know, that's the thing. As you know, Thrive works on these five behaviors. Sleep.

Actually let's take a second and give the overview of Thrive Global because I think it's important for context, for the rest of our hour here. So when did you start Thrive Global and what does it do?

I started thrive in 2016. And the reason I did is because I wanted to go beyond just raising awareness, which I could have continued doing through a media company at the Huffington Post.

You had sold Huffington Post to AOL.

But I sold it in 2011.

Right.

And I continued running it. And my intention was to continue running it. But after I started covering these issues exhaustively on the Huffington Post, writing two books on the subject, Thrive and the Sleep Revolution, I wanted to do something more. I wanted to help people change behaviors. I didn't just want them to know that they need to get a good night's sleep or not eat a lot of sugar and ultra processed foods. I wanted to help them do that. And I couldn't do that through a media company. I had to build a behavior change technology company. And that's why I left the Huffington Post in 2016 to launch Thrive. And frankly, I'm grateful to my mom, my amazing Greek mom, who had taught me.

What was her name?

Her name was Ellie. She had taught me not to be afraid of failing. And that's something for all entrepreneurs here. You know, when you leave a very successful media company in 18 countries with a Pulitzer, it was amazing and a great newsroom to start again. There are no guarantees of success. My mother used to say, don't be afraid of failure. Failure is not the opposite of success. It's a stepping stone to success.

Smart woman.

So I literally left Sophia. Sophia started raising money, hiring people, et cetera. And the goal was to be a B2B company where we could go into enterprises and help them reduce stress and burnout and make the connection between improving well being and health, reducing stress and burnout, and improving business metrics, kind of elevating these issues from the warm and fuzzy. Nice to have two kind of business imperatives. We call them productivity multipliers.

I love that reframing, you know, because who, what CEO wouldn't want to maintain productivity multipliers? Even when you're cutting budgets.

Exactly. Otherwise it becomes the first thing to be cut.

Yeah.

In tough times and uncertain times, which is what we have all the time now.

Yeah.

So, you know, we were very lucky. We brought in some great partners, you know, Accenture, Salesforce, Walmart, AT&T, ET cetera, and started seeing the results. And the results that got me to move more and more towards health are the results at Walmart. Because we are in our sixth year there working with many of their associates, as they call Their employees who are minimum wage, who through these five behaviors that we work on, sleep, food, exercise, stress management and connection, started having real health results. Reversing hypertension, reversing diabetes, without obviously any medical interventions that would be.

This is all digital. What you call these micro steps.

Micro steps, yes. Our behavior change methodology. We have a great scientific board. BJ Fogg from Stanford is the chairman. Great behavior change economists like Kevin Volp and David Arch from Pennsylvania. Everything is broken down into micro steps, tiny daily incremental steps that become healthier habits. And you have a great quote by Aristotle in your book that basically our habits are who we are. Here it is, we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.

I love that.

One of my favorite quotes. If we repeatedly do small incremental things that are good for our health, we are going to build cumulatively healthier habits.

I love this. I think one of the things that's been a great insight for me and I wrote about this, I added a chapter to my upcoming book, Longevity Guidebook, on. On routines. Because I realized that it was the single most important thing I was doing was learning these routines, learning these habits. And a great habit is something you do. So you don't negotiate with yourself. It's just something you're going to do. Right. So if you are, you know, if you're warm and cozy under the covers in the morning and the alarm goes off. Cause you've scheduled yourself to go work out, if that's your habit, you're gonna do that versus negotiate yourself out of it. Well, I'm gonna just. I'll do it tomorrow.

Exactly. And I love another thing you have in your book, which I'm halfway through and loving your new book.

Thank you. It's coming out in December, so. Yeah.

Yes. You say win the morning to win the day.

Yeah. Truly, it really is. It's the most controlled time in most people's schedule where you wake up with a very clear mind. You've processed while you're sleeping a lot of the issues you've had. You have an infinite potential in the day. Yeah. It's a beautiful time to take control. Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs, that they spent billions on biodefense weapons, the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their rna? Well, a company called Viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood. Now, VIOME has a product that I've personally used for years called Full Body Intelligence, which collects a few drops of your blood, spit and stool and and can tell you so much about your health. They've tested over 700,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members critical health guidance like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age, and other deep health insights. And the results of the recommendations are nothing short of stellar. You know, as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, after just six months of following Biome's recommendations, members reported the following. A 36% reduction in depression, a 40% reduction in anxiety, a 30% reduction in diabetes, and a 48% reduction in IBS. Listen, I've been using Viome for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities. Best of all, VIOME is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to viome.com Peter I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine who's the founder and CEO of viome, to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it@viome.com Peter. You know, Arianna, those five elements are so critically important. And I do want to hit just a couple of points on the numbers. And you're right, it is. We learn in story. And for any entrepreneur, it's like giving numbers is one thing. Telling Great Stories is 100 times more powerful, which is why Ariana is such a great entrepreneur. But I am going to hit a few numbers here. And the thing that is so scary is the health care obesity epidemic. We're at 41.8% obesity in the US and rising. And it's causing diabetes and heart disease and cancer. And there are multiple causes, but small changes, small micro steps, as you teach, can change that. The other element here is the numbers that I pulled were like 400,000 deaths per year are preventable because of diet or tobacco. I haven't seen a, I haven't seen a tobacco carton in a long time. And I saw one in the trash the other day. And I don't know how can they be more explicit. It says this package will kill you. It's like skull and crossbones. It's crazy.

But you know, what we are finding is that people are more likely to change behaviors if you focus on what they are looking forward to.

Yeah.

Like on the fact that they want to take their grandchild to the park or celebrate their daughter's wedding or be able to still go on a hike as they age. These are much more likely to get them to do what's good for their health than if you tell them you're going to die. And that's why behavior change methodology is so important. And, Peter, we have been doing it wrong for so many years. You know, first of all, we've been focusing on New Year resolutions, which tend to be abandoned within two to three weeks in general because they are so big. You know, they're like, I'm going to go to the gym first thing in the morning for an hour every day, or I'm going to completely give up sugar. I know you and I have completely given up sugar, but it was gradual for me. I didn't wake up one day and did it. And now it's like, effortless.

It is effortless. And for me, it was doing it in a group setting, going through it with a community which is supportive.

Yeah, yeah. You got to find your. We call them accountability bodies.

Yes.

People who will support you. And then you begin to feel better. And it becomes easier and easier until there is no more self negotiation. It's like you don't have the dessert put down in front of you, period.

Yeah, it's my hack. Just, I don't want to see it. I don't want to be negotiating with myself. I don't want to be tempted.

Just know, you have to know yourself. I have an addictive personality. Like, there are people who can say, I'm just going to have a bite of this dessert. I'm just going to have a bite person.

Right.

Like, I'm not going to have any or I'm going to have the whole thing. The other thing is that I found that what has changed all my habits around exercise was what we call at thrive, habit stacking. You add a habit you enjoy or you do regularly on top of another habit, which it's harder for you. So I have added watching my favorite shows only when I'm on my treadmill or on my bike.

Love it.

It's amazing. You know, when I wanted to see the end of succession or recently, what was the Maison and Apple show? I literally was on my treadmill for two and a half hours. I didn't want to stop.

Yeah.

What is it that you need that's going to end the self negotiation?

Absolutely. You know, for me, I do my board calls. If I'm not presenting on my. It's right over here. My technogym bike. Just because I think of sitting as the new smoking and we spend so much time sitting down. It's insane.

I know. So exactly. You found your own way to combine something with something else.

Talk to me more about a user coming onto Thrive, onto Thrive Thrive platform. So, I mean, I think I want to understand where it is today and where you're going with it and how it collects the data so that, you know, we can give people a vision of the future here.

Great. So to give you the vision of the future, I need to also tell you that we launched a new company, which is.

I was going to.

Which is funded jointly by Thrive Global and OpenAI with two strategic investors, Eli Lilly and the Alice Walton Foundation.

Perfect.

The purpose of this company is to just create an AI health coach, and.

That'S called Thrive AI Health.

Thrive AI Health, yes. So the original company, Thrive Global, is focused on meeting people where they are at work. Like, if you spend a lot of your day on Microsoft Teams, Thrive will meet you on Microsoft Teams. If you spend a lot of your day On Slack or WebEx, will meet you there.

By the way, you've got an important stat there which I'd love you to share because I've heard this and it's again, a really important entrepreneurial tip on meeting people where they are versus trying to get people to come to you. Could you describe that?

Yes. Let me give you an example. Pfizer is one of the companies we work with. The numbers on engagement, Thrive colleagues, as they call their employees, engaging. Pfizer colleagues engaging with Thrive on the Thrive app is 14%.

14. Okay.

Pfizer colleagues engaging with Thrive, exactly the same content, the same micro steps on Microsoft Teams is 76%.

Because they're there already.

Because they're there. We come to you. We eliminate friction.

Yeah. I think that's such an important lesson for entrepreneurs to realize. Don't expect the users you want to always come to you. Where are they hanging out? What water hole are they in already? And how do you present yourself there? In easy, small micro step, as you say, to get to you.

Yes. But also at Thrive, we have what we call a cultural activation, so that when we start a partnership, we have a fireside chat with the chro or even the CEO or a business leader that sets up what we are doing and why, so that people at every level of the company have cultural permission to engage. As you know, culture is changed at the top.

Yes, for sure.

I have done so many amazing fireside chats with CEOs who talk about their micro steps, what they are doing, how they learn, for example, to put their phone away at night as you have Peter. Are you still doing it? Remember?

Yeah, I'm like one of the hacks. I learned from Matt Walker, who wrote also an amazing book on sleep is I will only look at my phone while I'm standing up before going to sleep. And then when I lie down, the phone goes away and I get very tired at night sitting there like last few texts or emails and then it's gone. Yeah.

You know, this is the most important sleep microstep.

I do remember you built these little beds for our phones to charge.

This is the only physical product we have produced at Thrive is the little phone beds that we sell at cost on Amazon in mahogany and light wood.

Love it.

And the idea is to live outside everybody's bedrooms and be the place where everybody's phones go. Yours, your wife's, your twins, your twin bodies.

The twins don't have phones yet. They're not gonna have phones till they're 16. Okay, I've drawn the line.

But once I'm going to send you the new version, the new improved version of the phone bed. So when the twins get the phone, they learn phone hygiene.

Yeah.

From day one, your phone doesn't sleep with you.

Yeah. Because that is an issue for a lot of teens right now. You know, they bring their phone to bed and they're under the covers on social media, which will steal two hours of sleep. And people need to realize you get your deep sleep at the beginning of your sleep cycle. Right. Which is so critically important. If you wake up too early, you're going to eliminate some rem, but you'll have gotten your deep sleep already.

But that's why, you see, by having this cultural activation, these fireside chats, these webinars, leadership journeys, who have over 50 facilitators, by having all that in an ongoing way, we actually create a culture where the platform and the digital products can be embedded. If you just accept and accept it and practice. And then we collect stories from the CEO down. How are you doing it? What micro steps are you using which inspire others to join?

You know, one of the things that you did as part of this is your reset program.

Yes, right.

Which I found fascinating. Can you explain what that is? And I think we have teed up a 60 second Ariana reset.

So it's actually kind of one of my absolute favorite features, thrive, because in 60 seconds you can have such an impact. It's based on the neuroscience, as you know, that While stress is unavoidable, there is nobody who has a stress free existence. Cumulative stress is avoidable. And it takes 60 to 90 seconds to move from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic nervous system. Away from the fight or flight response.

Yes. To the rest and digest. Yes.

Right, Exactly. So whether you are on teams or webex or Slack or on the Thrive app, you have access to hundreds of Thrive resets that have a breathing bubble so that you can breathe consciously because as you know, our breath is our superpower. Music, images, quotes and you can pick what you like. One of my favorite illustrations of the power of research is we've brought them into dozens of contact centers around the world and you know, contact center agents are among the most stressed populations. And because time is so precious, we only give them three resets a day. The employer decides what the triggers are. The results have been amazing. The results in productivity and customer success. But my favorite data point is synchrony. The financial company did a survey and ask their agents, do you prefer continuing to get three Thrive resets a day or get three 5 minute breaks?

So 15 versus 3 minutes and 76%.

Said we'd rather get the resets because if we get the five minutes they talked about, what are they going to do? They're going to go doom, scroll the news or go on Instagram and get more stressed out comparing the their lives to somebody else's life. And this is like a 60 second reset.

It's a fuel for your soul.

Fuel for your soul. Exactly. And we've now created a system where you can go on Thrive and build your own personal reset with things that give you joy and remind you of what you are grateful for in your life. And I love that. And I built my own 60 second reset and we made a partnership with Universal Music so that you can take 60 seconds of universal Music songs and you can update them. Mine was recently updated with a picture of my grandson Alexander.

Congratulations. Yeah, yeah.

Thank you. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Oh yeah, yeah. Huffington when he stirred.

Well, why don't we take a look at your reset video so people can see what this is and how the power with imagery and music to calm your soul and to put you into that parasympathetic mode. We've talked about this before of just taking a a few deep breaths and in particular before eating your lunch or dinner so you can put yourself into a rest and digest situation instead of a fight or flight which is the wrong place, first of all to be making decisions from and secondly to be consuming your Nutrients. So if we could. Let's play Ariana's reset. That's beautiful. It worked for me as well, which is amazing. Would you like to see mine?

Yes. Oh, my God. I'm so happy you made one.

I could not not make one.

That's so fantastic.

Yeah. It's an early draft, but, you know, I think this shares a little bit about who you are in an intimate fashion. So let me share a little bit about who I am. All right, let's roll my reset. Sam Sa.

Wow. This is amazing. I absolutely love it.

Thank you.

Seeing your twins and your parents and your wife and favorite quotes. I mean, it has an impact on me.

Yeah. I was so excited about it when I saw yours, and I was like, there's so many times during the day that I'm stressed because I'm running nonstop. And again, many entrepreneurs are in the same mode where it's like back to back to back to back to back. Who creates this crazy schedule? Who can I blame yourself? Having just the ability to know that you're stressed into play that. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life, and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists until that day when you have a pain in your side. You go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but. But you have this stage three or four going on, and, you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time, but because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today, and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body mri, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, DEXA scan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive, 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. You might as well Find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com Peter when Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller LifeForce, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com Peter will put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my Entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com Peter it's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. I want to get a little bit now. Well, I'll say one other thing, which is these are intimate and they share what is the most meaningful part of your life. Right. So, you know, every night when I go to sleep, I will do my best to focus in on what, what I'm most grateful for. The three things I'm most grateful for, for the day, from the day. And typically it's 90% things that an entrepreneur doesn't think about. It's your kids, it's your friends, it's the hugs and all of that. And so that realization is really sort of amplified in this. And so it can ground you once again very quickly.

And also, again, it's based on the science that gratitude is an antidote to stress and anxiety. So, you know, stress and anxiety are part of life. But when we remember what we're grateful for, that's more powerful. And you know, the other thing we do is we start team meetings with the spinning a wheel and one of us plays the reset.

That's amazing. You get a little bit of an insight into everybody's lives.

Yes. You get a little glimpse.

I want to do that for my team meetings for sure. I think what I really want is my AI to be measuring my cortisol levels and my heart rate and the tenor of my voice and to say, Peter, excuse me a second. Watch this video.

Yes. Well, that's what the coach, that's what we're training the coach to do. The thrive AI coach is trained only on peer reviewed literature, not on the whole of the web.

Yeah.

On our behavior change.

That's a good thing. Not on the whole of the web. There's a lot of shocking recommendations out there.

Our behavior change methodology are thousands of micro steps, videos, articles, resets, and also a very, very thorough onboarding. So when we onboard you, we'll get all your biometric lab data, medical data, but also all your preferences, the foods you like to eat, the time you like to go to sleep, the exercise you like, everything. So that our recommendations and nudges and microsteps are going to be hyper personalized. I think that's really the superpower of AI. The level of hyper personalization would not be possible without the context window of AI. Billions and potentially trillions of data points.

And the multimodal version we're all going to have. I speak about this a lot, the notion that we're all going to have some version of Jarvis from Ironman, call it a copilot, call it your coach that knows everything about you. You're going to give it permission to know anything and everything about you so that it can maximize its support of you. Right. It's measuring your sleep. You'll give it permission to listen to your conversations, to read your emails, and at least I believe there's gonna be a future where it heard my conversation with somebody. I walk into the room, it knows I'm stressed, the music changes, my reset video comes up on the screen and I'm psychologically reset. At the same time, my AI is measuring my blood sugar, my vitamin levels, my MRNA's, whatever, and it's telling the robot in the kitchen what meal to prepare needed for my blood, you know, my blood markers at this moment.

And you know, I love the fact that there is so much that's possible right now and then there are things that are going to be possible maybe sooner than we think, like a robot in the kitchen preparing our meal. But I think it's important to know how much is available right now.

Yeah.

Because people are hurting.

Yeah. And I love the fact that you've really come. I mean, you and I have approached this from two different ends of the story spectrum. But Thrive Global and Thrive AI has really made this possible on a de minimis cost. Right. And I think the fact of the matter is this is a price that an employer is willing gratefully to pay because of increased productivity and less days missed and reduced health care costs. And it's a win, win, win. And I'm sure the numbers are pretty dramatic. I quoted you in the book about some of the numbers. Do you have them there accessible?

Well, the numbers are Dramatic. And thank you for quoting them in the book, both in terms of productivity, absenteeism, recruitment, all the metrics that matter to an employer. But also, Peter, what we are doing now, and that's kind of the additional new part for Thrive, is working through big companies like Eli Lilly. So neither Thrive Global nor Thrive AI Health are going to be a consumer product. At some point, maybe Thrive AI Health will launch a consumer product. But right now the model is B2B and B2B2C.

Yeah.

And just to give you an example of the B2 B2C. Eli Lilly wants to go directly to consumers. They want to have a direct relationship with consumers. So they launched Lilly Direct. Thrive is already a partner. So you go to Lilly Direct, you have a telehealth appointment, you get your obesity, diabetes, migraine soon, Alzheimer's drug, whatever drug you're on, and then you are given the coach for free.

Yes.

Now, as you know, as an amazing entrepreneur, incentives are superpowers.

They are. I built a whole X prize around that.

Exactly. So we need to understand why would a pharma company give you a coach for free? To improve your daily behaviors while you are taking your drug. And the reasons are so clear. One of the biggest problems pharma companies have. Exactly. Is adherence.

Yeah.

25% of people do not even fill the first prescription. Now, if they have a coach that is involved in their daily behaviors and their relationship is not just transactional, but much deeper and more intimate, you are improving adherence. Categorically. Also, another thing is pharma companies, PBMs, payers, providers are dealing with a reputation problem at the moment. Yes, they are for sure building a relationship. It's not just transactional, it's a huge reputation. Hello. So we are just always looking at what are the incentives here so that we can scale. And the goal of the coach is to democratize access to what the people you and I know and you work with are already doing. People with resources are already optimizing for these five behaviors.

Well, the more wise you get and the more you, the older you get, bluntly, the more you realize that these things are fundamental. I love life. I want to see as much of it as I can. And it's not going to happen without optimization.

Exactly.

And the things that you can do today are sleep, diet, exercise, mindset. Those are literally free and low cost things that you can alter, but people don't because it's easy to continue doing what you've always done.

And also because the majority of people don't have access to that Expert level coaching that so many people with resources do have access to. That's really the reason why Alice Walton invested in the company is because her whole goal is to bring the power of AI to the heartland, to basically democratize and scale everything that we know scientifically that AI makes possible. That's really what I'm so excited about. Health inequities for me are the biggest inequity.

Yeah, I get it. You and I are going to be on stage together at the Abundance Summit in March and going into depth on this and excited to see you personally. Give you a big hug hopefully before then, but at least in March me too. I'm going to have the team from Fountain Life that will be there, which is of the part been my diagnostics and therapeutics center. We're taking a different part of the sector where we're really gathering 200 gigabytes of data about your current state of physiology. It's full body mri, brain brain vasculature, coronary ct, DEXA scan, lung scan, microbiome metabolome, all of that. And then through a functional medicine lens, answering the two questions, is there anything going on inside your body you need to know about right now? Because sadly, we're all optimists about our health and we actually have very little idea of what's going on inside our body. Unless you look and then what's likely to happen to you down the line and how do we prevent that from happening and optimize you in that way? But what you're doing is so important as the upfront portion of that at scale. I'm super thankful and I really want to see if we can deliver Thrive Global to all of our members there. Can I ask you, you got Sam Altman involved as a co founder of Thrive AI. How did that materialize? I know that Sam is interested in longevity. I've had those conversations. I've had him on the Abundance stage as well and I know he partnered with Jovets Lacroix to create retro biosciences. Like looking at epigenetic reprogramming. Was this something that he approached you on or did you approach him on? How did it materialize?

You know, we got to know each other. We met at a conference three years ago and during the time we spent together we found an alignment around behaviors for him for two reasons. One is that personally he talks about how he was dealing with crippling anxiety and how he started prioritizing his sleep, his meditation. You know, he's a meditator, he's Been to retreats to just actually connect with a deeper part of himself. Food, exercise, all these things that we are talking about, how he brought them to his life and how it changed outcomes and made him infinitely more productive and also able to be in the eye of the hurricane to deal with multiple stresses and crises and problems as he's dealing with everything.

He is in the eye of the.

Hurricane for sure, but learn how to be in the eye of the hurricane. And also he wanted to tell a fuller story around AI because right now the story around AI is either around productivity, it's going to make us more productive. You'll have an assistant who can do anything. Great, fantastic. But it doesn't affect millions of people or it's about razzle dazzle features. You know, this text will become a.

Video, a movie, a feature movie.

A feature movie your wife will tell you about a podcast she loves. Not give you the name, but AI will find it great. Fun. Fun, okay. But you know, I'm struggling. 130 million people are struggling with their health, chronic diseases. Can you do anything for me? I think being able to tell a story for what OpenAI describes as everyday people is a very important part for all of us who care and believe in AI. It can't just be a tool for the elites, while millions of people are simply anxious about AI taking their job.

If I might, you are very much in the eye of this AI hurricane as well. You know, most of the tech elite, to use that term. How do you feel about the future of AI? I had Elon and Jeffrey Hinton and Ray Kurzweil on stage with me at the Abundance Summit last year. And the sense was, in summary, there's 80% chance AI is going to be amazing and we're great. 20% chance we're screwed. It's like, how does the public think about. How do you think about that? What's your advice for people thinking about that?

Well, my advice, and actually, I just wrote a piece about Yuval Harari's new book, Nexus, and he is a bit of an AI doomsayer, but in a very, very interesting, fascinating way because he's brilliant and an amazing public intellectual. And my piece focused on certain things he has said that I totally believe in, which is while AI has a long way to go, so do humans. We are also a work in progress. If you don't acknowledge that, if you don't acknowledge that AI can help us become the best versions of ourselves, then I think we are doomed. Because ultimately what we do with AI depends on Humans. I know that AI is not just a tool, it's an agent, et cetera. But ultimately, we can't be deterministic about technology. And, you know, Yuval said something actually, not in his book, but on the Daily show that I end my piece on his book with, and which I want to read it to you if you don't know.

Please, I'd love to, yeah.

Because I think it's everything I believe about the future of AI. He said, 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 AI, and neglect to develop ourselves, this is very bad news news for humanity.

I get that. And of course, there are two points of view here. Ray's belief is that we are going to merge with AI definitively. We're giving birth to a new species. AI is our progeny. We're feeding it on our data, and it's becoming godlike with a small G. Omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent in so many ways. But there is a sense that we will be able to merge with it into the future. I like to say, quote one of the Singularity faculty, Neil Jacobstein, who said, I'm not worried about artificial intelligence. I'm worried about human stupidity.

But my point is that human stupidity is obviously a fact of history, but it doesn't have to be. And I love Ray. I think Ray is totally brilliant, But I completely disagree with him. I think that human beings have a soul and AI doesn't. And the more we can connect to our soul, we will connect to our own wisdom. When we connect to our own wisdom, we can yet use AI to be the best versions of ourselves. Solzhenitsyn had this great quote about how every human being is a mixture. He actually said, the line between good and evil goes through every human heart. How can AI help us activate the best part of us? That, for me, is the greatest hope of AI. And AI doesn't have a soul. It doesn't have consciousness. And we do. And we need to access it more. Why do you think reset works, Peter? It works because we all have a place of peace, wisdom and strength in us. Most of the time, we're disconnected from it. The more we can connect to it, the more we can tap into it, the better everything is. The wiser we are, the more compassionate and empathetic we are. And I believe that whether people call themselves atheists or not is irrelevant. They still have that place in them.

Real quick. I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously. Called One Skin, it was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10amino acid sequence that is a synolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin. And I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. I want to pick up something we mentioned earlier, which is the notion that will AI be empathic? Will it be. It will be infinitely patient. The notion, it was an interesting study, I think it was in Jamaica, looking at how if you compare empathy of physicians versus empathy of AIs, the AI is one by 10 to 1 that the AI was infinitely patient, infinitely there to reflect back on you what you said while a physician. I was talking to a doctor yesterday who has transitioned in her practice, but she says, I had an iPad with a countdown timer. The patient would walk in, I would hit it, and it would count down from seven minutes. And by the time it was zero, that patient was out the door with or without all the questions being answered. And that has been American medicine, filled with paperwork and insurance forms and all of that stuff. How do you think about AIs being empathic and being therapists who don't judge you and will take all the time to help you?

I completely agree with that. That's not AI having a soul, it's AI having a. And I totally agree. It's what you said. The key thing is that you are not being judged. It's a little bit like the GPS in your car. If you take the wrong turn, the GPS doesn't say, oh, Peter, you're such a niche. How did you do that? It simply recalculates. And that's what AI does, which is great and empathetic, but it doesn't mean that it's a transcendent being. I mean, I happen to be a deep believer in a transcendent reality. Whatever religion, you are at the heart of it in its esoteric form, whether it's Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Judaism, there is that truth that unites us. And as I said, most of the time, we're not connected to it.

Yes, our mind is whizzing away.

Our mind is whizzing away. We are driven by fears Anxiety. The more we can connect to that, the wiser and the healthier we'll be and the more empathetic. And, you know, that's one of the things the coach is going to do, let's say it will find out from you. Peter, what are some of the things that most connect you to the deeper part? It could be a piece of poetry that you barely remember. It could be a song that you heard in Greece. It could be a hymn, because a lot of people who are atheists may have gone to church early on and there is a hymn that evokes something in them. And we feed you these things. You know, our Greek compatriots said, know thyself. Nobody's going to know us better than AI.

No, Sefton. Yes, yes. So some people who are cynical will say, oh, so you'll just get manipulated by AI to be. But you're choosing to ask the AI to help get you into a better state of mind, because no one likes being stressed.

And also, Peter, we are being manipulated all the time right now by the.

News media for sure, but we are.

By social media, news media. But we are being hacked, you know, to be the worst version of ourselves. We are being hacked by tapping into our biases, our outrage, our anger. I believe companies can make a lot of money by hacking into what's good in us.

You know, I believe that, Arianna, and, you know, grateful to you for this third act in your entrepreneurial life. I want to bounce an idea off you, which is the idea of wisdom. Sophia, you know, if you were to ask the question, what makes a person wise or people who are on a sort of a wisdom council, I would imagine it is because they've seen enough things to have experienced them to be able to say, young woman or young man, if you go down that path, it ends in a poor fashion. This way has a possibility, but this way, while it's more difficult to. And they have that wisdom through experience in their own lives and passed down from previous generations. And I think of that as wisdom. Do you agree with that?

Absolutely.

So here's the question. I think we're going to see a world in the very near future where AIs are able to simulate billions of scenarios in society to be able to say probabilistically for the situation that you're in, this is the path that is the greatest probability of a positive outcome. I do think we can see wisdom from that definition coming out of AI simulation systems.

But I think there is more to wisdom. First of all, can we all agree that at the moment we are drowning in data. There's nothing more data in the world and we are starved for wisdom.

I would say those are both true statements.

And it's not because we don't have amazing technology. Wisdom is something more. Wisdom is connected to the deepest part of ourselves, to our intuition, to our sense of wonder about the universe, to the ability to forgive and to love. You know, it's connected with the deepest things that make us human. It's not just about deciding what road to take. It's about, you know, if you take Marcus Aurelius, who I believe is the greatest leadership philosopher. I have his book Meditations on my nightstand and read a page before I go to sleep because he was in the world. He was the emperor of Rome for 19 years. He dealt with every crisis, plague, betrayals, invasions, and he was able to be unflappable. He epitomized wisdom. And his philosophy was that I can, I, Marcus Aurelius, I, Ariana, Hugh, Peter, cannot control events. The only thing we can control is how we respond to events.

Yes.

And if we learn to respond without being reactive, angry in reality, I don't mean not showing it, I mean not feeling it.

Yes.

Then we have what Yuval Harari in his book calls the self correcting mechanisms. You know, we all need sharper self correcting mechanisms because we are human. We are going to make a lot of mistakes. How quickly can we course correct and how quickly can we forgive? I think forgiveness is at the heart of, of wisdom.

I agree. I've got, you know, one of. Never mind, please. It's, it's. My mom will love you for saying all of this for sure.

But that's it. The wisdom of your mom and my mom.

Yes.

That's wisdom, you know, and it's different than your mom or your mom giving us advice as to what decision to make, which a AI can absolutely help us do. But what your mom and my mom taught us was deeper.

Yep. Which is the root of family as foundational in society, as important. Exactly. Arianna. Moo. I am so grateful for this time. I want to say thank you for all you do. It's not a surprise that you're the number one woman on LinkedIn. The fifth most followed person on LinkedIn in general. They can find you at arianna Huffington on LinkedIn. Is that your social. And then to learn more about Thrive Global, where should they go? Should they go to their companies and ask their companies?

They can go to thriveglobal.com.

All right. Ask your CHRO to to get your company on Thrive Global so that your company can make more money and have happier employees and healthier employees for sure.

And Peter, I just loved this. I treasure our friendship. My God, 20 years. And I love how we are both constantly learning, improving, doing all the things that we care about and I look forward to being together on stage.

Yeah, for sure. Tavma thank you Yasu Arena.

Bye Yasu Yasu.