Arianna Huffington: Why Willpower Fails — and What to Do Instead

Coming up on this episode of the.

Dr. Hyman Show, 7% of our health outcomes are dependent on our genes. But our daily behaviors impact not just more than our genes, like 10 times more than our genes, but more than medical care if we are healthy.

Arianna Huffington is a global entrepreneur, founder.

Of the Huffington Post and Thrive Global Solutions aren't at the bottom of a pill bottle.

Nobody should be having their legs amputated because of diabetes. And 150,000 people have their legs or toes amputated every year. Just think of it for a minute, what that does to somebody's life, to their family, how close we are to feeling good. Isn't that sort of a wonderful thought.

When I'm working with my patients? The gut is ground zero for health. It's where we absorb nutrients, regulate inflammation and support immunity. When your gut is out of balance, everything from energy to skin to heart health can suffer. That's why I take seeds DS01 Daily Synbiotic, a precision formulated probiotic plus prebiotic that goes far beyond digestion. With 24 clinically studied strains and a unique pomegranate based prebiotic, DSO1 supports gut barrier integrity, immune function and even heart and skin health through the gut, liver and gut skin axes. What's especially exciting is that DSO1 is clinically proven to promote short chain fatty acid production. These are critical compounds that help maintain a strong gut lining, reduce systemic inflammation and support healthy aging. As a member of SEEDS Clinical Board, I've reviewed the science firsthand. This is not your average probiotic. It's a foundational part of a truly functional approach to wellness. Ready to support your gut from the inside out? Head to seed.comhyman and use code 25hyman for 25% off your first month of DSO1. That's seed.comhyman code 25hyman I'm constantly searching for the most effective ways to support my health from the inside out. And one of the most exciting discoveries in the last few years is urolithin A. It's a postbiotic produced when your gut bacteria break down compounds in foods like pomegranate. But most people don't make enough of it on their own. That's why I take mitopure by timeline. It's the first and only clinically tested pure form of urolithin A and it's become a cornerstone of my daily longevity routine. Urolithin A is like a cleanup crew for your mitochondria, helping your body get rid of old dysfunctional ones and build new, more powerful Energy generators. I've noticed improvements in my energy, my muscle recovery and even my focus. And now they've released it in a sugar free strawberry gummy, same dose, no pills and amazing flavor. Timeline is offering a special discount just for my community. You can try it for yourself@timeline.com Dr.

Before we jump into today's episode, I.

Want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one on one, there just isn't enough time in the day. So I've built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education and community, check out my private membership the Hymenhive for live Q&As, exclusive content and direct connection. For real time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health. You can also Explore my curated doctor trusted supplements and health products@doctor hyman.com and if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget you can enjoy every episode of this podcast ad free with Hymen plus. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap try free to start your seven day free trial.

Well Ariana, it's so good to have you back on the podcast. You've created something called Thrive Global and Now Thrive Health AI partnership with OpenAI to really get people to shift their behavior. That's revolutionary because you were using live coaches and now you're going to be also using digital coaches.

My goal, and I know your goal, is to democratize this coaching. You know, we don't want just to reach the people who are already interested in this. We want to reach everyone.

That's right.

And you can't do that. It's prohibitive, cost wise. But AI can help. It's not just the cost. It's also that the power of AI is personalization.

That's right.

And the problem with a lot of health advice is that it's generic.

Right.

And it's very hard to move the needle when the advice is generic. You know, you can have some impact, but the more personalized, the better.

You know, one of the things that that is really hard is we know what to do. I mean, if you ask me how to reverse diabetes, no problem. I can tell you how to do it in a week. But to get people to do the behaviors is really hard. And that's something you focused on because you, you know, your story's great, you can share it, but you know how you basically ran yourself into the ground, crashed, and then woke up and realized you had to take care of yourself, and you started to make those changes for yourself.

And also, like you, I'm an evangelist.

Yeah.

So, in fact, that's what happened. You know, Thrive started very much as a political site. And then after my collapse in 2007, that's when you and I started working together, because I wanted to bring to the world everything I had learned about sleep and food and exercise and stress. So I started covering these issues pretty exhaustively. You know, my board kind of complained when I launched a dedicated sleep section in 2007. Why are we launching a section on sleep? Because, remember, that was the time when everybody thought, I'll sleep when I'm dead.

Exactly.

You snooze, you lose.

That's right.

And then I wrote these two books, Thrive and the Sleep Revolution. But by 2016, I really felt exactly what you said. I don't want to spend the rest of my life raising awareness. I want to help people change behaviors. That's hard, but doable. And in order to do it, I had to stop running a media company and launch a behavior change technology company. So that's what I did in 2016. And, you know, it's a hard decision to leave behind something successful to start again, But I'm so happy I did it, and I'm so happy that we're at this moment now when a lot of the pioneering work you've done is really becoming mainstream.

You know, we really have a problem, too, because most of the diseases that people are suffering from are either caused or worsened by our behaviors when we eat, the way we move or don't. The lack of sleep or poor sleep, which affects 70 million people. Stress, lack of social connection, relationships. It's an area of medicine that's been massively neglected. We're really good with technology, with a, you know, drugs and surgeries and procedures and interventions, but those things don't solve the why of why we get sick and actually don't even reverse the problems. Right. So if you have these chronic illnesses which are bankrupting our country and creating suffering for hundreds of millions of people, the solutions aren't at the bottom of a pill bottle. You know, they're. They're found at the end of your fork or on your pillow or in the gym, you know, and you're in your connections, and that's what you focused on. And I think I'd love you to talk about, you know, how you think about behavior change, because you talk about it as the miracle drug.

Yes.

Right. Can you kind of pack that for us?

So, first of all, let us Kind of make it very clear that everything we're saying about the impact of behaviors on health outcomes is science based. This is not just like some warm and fuzzy wellness thing.

Science of behavior change.

Science is very clear science of health. That 7% of our health outcomes are dependent on our genes. But our daily behaviors impact, if we're healthy, more than. Not just more than our genes, like 10 times more than our genes, but more than medical care. If we are healthy. Of course, if we are sick and need surgery.

Rescue medicine, I call it rescue medicine.

Rescue medicine. Then you are living in the best country in the world for a sick health care system, but not a healthcare system. And that's what really we're trying to change. So it starts for me with people realizing this is all science based. And the five behaviors that thrive works on are food, sleep. We don't even call it exercise. We call it movement. A lot of people don't leave their couches. So you need to start somewhere. Stress management and connection. And these are the foundational daily habits that affect our health. The second point is to convince people that you can change behaviors. I mean, look at smoking, Mark. Yeah, look at smoking. You know, 1965, 42% of Americans smoking. Now it's 12%. Yeah, it should be zero, but it's 12%.

Big change.

You know, you have drunk driving, you have seat belts. The key. And we've worked with an incredible number of scientists to develop our behavior change methodology over the last eight years, including BJ Fogg at Stanford, Kevin Volp at Wharton. And the key is to break it down into micro steps that we call too small to fail, which is the exact opposite of New Year resolutions. Yeah, too big New Year resolutions in our I'm going to go to the gym an hour a day. I'm going to give up all sugar. And within two weeks, 80% of people give up their New Year resolutions. They feel like a failure and it's harder to get back on the horse. We want to build success muscles. We start really, really small. We have a lot of, say 60 second resets we call them to reduce stress for sleep. You know, my favorite micro step is turn off your phone. And at least one night a week, we don't say every night, charge it outside your room. You'll see the difference. Because the phone, you know, it's not really a phone. Nobody calls anybody anymore.

That's true.

You know, it's a nuclear weapon that has all your projects and your problems and you want to separate yourself from it. Again, with food, we Do a lot around swaps. We are working in Arkansas with Alice Walton and she said to me, I love Cheetos. I said, I get it, you love Cheetos. Let me show you some alternatives. You know, there's this company called Lesser Evil and they have some, they have a snack, you know, is it as good as an apple or an orange? No, but you got to start somewhere.

Yeah.

And you can't make the perfect, the enemy of the good of beginning somewhere. So at least the cheetah swap that Lesser Evil makes doesn't have dyes, doesn't have as many chemical ingredients. People need to feel that they have some support on the journey. The other thing that's key for behavior change is no judgments. You know, we're all works in progress.

Yeah.

And people have been so judged and they judge themselves and they judge themselves and they feel judged by the world where AI, you know, the AI health coach that we are developing is so great because the AI coach does not judge you. No, it's a little bit like a gps.

When you Google Maps. If to make a wrong turn doesn't say, you stupid idiot, why did you go that way?

Exactly, exactly.

Just make a turn at the next left.

Let's recalculate, let's rerouting, let's reroute, let's start again. So I feel that we know so much now about behavior change around micro steps. And also our healthy habits are developed in community. We work with self insured employers. That's a community. The place where you work is a community. So we do a lot of things like challenges, role model stories where people write about what they are doing, which inspires others accountability bodies, you know, a whole system of community support and storytelling. You know, storytelling is amazing. In our work with Walmart, which is now in its seventh year, you know, worked with a lot of associates who've had, you know, a lot of problems pre diabetes or diabetes, obesity, hypertension. And we don't give medical advice. We're not doctors like you. Yeah, our advice, our micro steps, everything we do is purely around lifestyle changes.

And which is the most powerful medicine by the way.

That's, that's all we do. Yeah, but just with that. And then Walmart had given us a million dollars a year to spend in financial rewards when people change, when they meet their goals. And it was so moving to read people's stories. In order to participate in this project, they had to tell a story of what they did and how they did it. And the stories, Mark, were not just by I lost Weight, or I reversed my diabetes, or I'm no longer dealing with hypertension. The stories where my relationship with my husband is bad. Yeah, I can now take my baby up the steps. You know, they're like human stories.

That's right. Yeah.

You know, they were not just focusing on the. The medical result or the weight. It was their life. And that's why I. I don't know what podcast I heard you on, but I absolutely loved it where you said, there's so much suffering right now. And, you know, there is a lot of suffering in the world that we can't do something about right now. You know, that's not in our hands, but this is in our hands 100%. We can actually change the suffering. And what got me so passionate about it, actually, at the next level of passion is an article that I have on my desk in New York in the New York Times, showing a picture of a man called Robert Perez in San Antonio. Record producer, 43 years old, being fitted with a prosthetic because he had his leg amputated because of diabetes in America in 2025. Nobody should be having their legs amputated because of diabetes. And 150,000 people have their legs or toes amputated every year. And he said, he said, when I was diagnosed with diabetes four years ago, I never thought it would come to that. And, you know, just think of it for a minute, what that does to somebody's life, to their family. But also think of what it does to costs, surgery, prosthetics, complications, infections. No wonder, you know, our health care.

Bill is so high.

Health care bill is so high now. $4.9 trillion getting worse every year.

It's true. And I think, you know, we live in a world where our healthcare system doesn't really provide healthcare, provide sick care. And what you're talking about is a platform through Thrive Global and now through Thrive AI Health, where you're actually be able to support people to make those changes. And what you said before was really important about behavior change in community. It's a lot easier.

Yes.

Chris Stockis from Harvard has done a lot of the key work around this by looking at the Framingham data, which is the biggest data set of people tracked over decades from Framingham, Massachusetts. And he found that people were much more likely to be overweight if their friends were overweight than if their family members were overweight. So, like, the genetics were less important than your social network. And so he, you know, when I, when I heard that, I was like, wait a minute, we call these Diseases, non communicable diseases, but that's not accurate. They're not infectious, but they're contagious. And just as though disease can be contagious and obesity or diabetes, depending on the community environment you live in, health is also contagious. And that's what you're talking about with the types of interventions you're making through Thrive Global and now through Thrive Health where you're able to help people understand how to build community, connection, relationships, share stories, build connection and inspire each other to actually make a difference. That's what these stories are so important because the point isn't to like not be able to take your medication or have diabetes. The point is to be able to live more fully.

Absolutely.

To be able to show up in.

Your life stressing that is key.

Yeah.

And also that's where we now have this amazing convergence of a lot of forces that make me incredibly optimistic. Did you call yourself once pathologically optimistic?

Yeah, I did. Good memory. I'm a pathological optimist.

I think I'm a pathological optimist too. A kind of, you know, Greek optimist, American optimist.

The good news is optimists live longer even if they're wrong.

Okay. But we are going to be right. This convergence of forces is really the healthcare costs that we are mentioning, which also among self insured employers are raising alarm bells. So more and more self insured employers that we work with want to get directly involved. They don't want just to pay their insurance bill because they're seeing it doesn't work. They're seeing, they're seeing their health care costs going up and health outcomes getting worse. And we all talk about productivity. Well, the biggest productivity multiplier is health.

Yeah.

You know, if you're sick, how can you be productive?

Yeah. There's actually a study on this that presenteeism, which is being at the job but not on the job, accounts for $2 trillion in lost productivity globally. So when you feel like crap, you don't perform, you can't focus, you can't concentrate. And what you're talking about are these small simple nudges around behavior that make a difference and add up over the long term.

So that's one big force. The other is that people are now much more engaged in their own health. As you know, over 60% of people Google or ChatGPT things online. They want to be empowered. And that's why I love function that empowers people. They don't want just to go to their doctor and Hand their fate over to the medical system.

Dr. Asgard era has passed, I think.

Yes, I think it has passed. And you know, they're great doctors and thank God for them. But also one of our mottos is health is also what happens between doctor visits. You know, the idea that you go and have an executive physical once a year and that's it. It's like, what are you doing every day? Are you sleeping? What are you e stressed out? Are you exercising? These are now the questions that people are more engaged with. And consumer engagement is kind of key here. If you think of it in every other industry, we're obsessed with consumer engagement. You know, the ux, the design of the experience. Except in healthcare.

Yeah, we're good at making people addicted to everything except their health.

Except their health. I was talking with Neil Lindsay who runs health at Amazon, and I said, you talk about being customer obsessed. When it comes to health. We are like customer hostel. At best, customer indifferent. But now there is that recognition that we need to engage people in their own health and that includes making everything kind of delightful. I was showing you the cookbook that we published, this one here, which basically we published, we give it away for free. It's not like a profit center because when we tell people about eating healthier, which involves beginning to learn and enjoy cooking, we wanted to deal with the fact, oh, it's so expensive. So we invited famous chefs like Ina Garten and Jose Andres to donate recipes with five ingredients or less and everything affordable. And then we made the book delightful with pictures and easy recipes. And the reason for that is that if we want people to eat healthier, we can't just tell them to eat their broccoli. Although I love broccoli.

Well, you have to show them how.

But you have to show them how and you have to make it compelling and interesting. And so that's really another big force right now, this recognition that users, consumers, patients want to be engaged in their own health. And our job is to make it easier.

When you say our job, I think you're talking about people who are involved in healthcare and Thrive Global really has worked with big employers to get changes in people's health through these behavior changes. How do we do this? What are the mechanisms by which thrive and thrive Global and soon thrive? AI Health is going to be helping.

People make those changes so many ways.

Over the last eight years, we've done it by working with employers, bringing in this behavior change support around these five behaviors, doing webinars, seminars, group coaching, individual coaching, challenges, the whole Gamut.

They're using real life coaches.

Real life coaches, yeah. And we work in multiple countries, 12 languages. Everything is translated, which is so easy now with AI. And that's both like executives and contact center operators. We've had incredible success with contact centers, which is very interesting because there aren't many professions where you are regularly yelled at. So the levels of stress are through the roof, including attrition, health problems. So we developed this 60 second resets again based on science, the neuroscience that shows us how we can move people from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic nervous system because stress is inevitable. There isn't anybody who doesn't have stress in their lives, but cumulative stress is avoidable. And in 60 to 90 seconds, as you know, by focusing on conscious breathing, focusing on images that bring you joy or gratitude, music, quotes, you can change how you show up in your life. We have hundreds of them. Different employers choose different moments to bring them to the contact center operators dashboard. Some of them are super sophisticated, like voice recognition when you know somebody's very stressed. Some of them are super simple, like if a call was longer than 20 minutes or elevated to a supervisor and then you have no idea the impact they have. We only do three a day because, you know, contact centers are run like a military operation. You know, we can't even do, you know that we have served sometimes a 62 second reset and we've been asked to shorten it to 60 seconds because it's all about handle time. And my favorite, I mean they're amazing data that we've collected. But my favorite is actually Synchrony. A financial group that we work with did a survey and asked people who are served these resets three times a day, would you prefer to continue being served these resets or instead get three five minute breaks? And 78% chose the resets. And the reason is that if people are given a five minute break, what do they do? They go online. They go online and they doom scroll the news or they go on social media and compare our messy lives with somebody's highlight reel and they feel more stressed. While this is like designed to help you connect with something deeper in yourself, you know. You know, I say that Mark, because ultimately everything we're talking about is hinges on how we see human nature. I mean, as you know, I've had this conversation many times. I profoundly believe that every human being, whether they call themselves spiritual or atheists or anything in between, has this center, this place of peace, strength, wisdom, harmony. We all have it. It's our Birthright.

Most of us have slocked away pretty hard.

Most of us locked away. Thich Nhat Hanh said it's never been easier to run away from ourselves, but it's there. And the reason why these resets work is because there's something you can tap into. You're not creating it, you're just kind of unburying it.

That's amazing. I mean, I think most of us don't realize how close we are to feeling good with just small simple steps in every day. And they get cumulative. It creates a cascade effect.

Oh, that's a great day. I'm going to endlessly quantify.

You could steal it.

How close we are to feeling good. Isn't that sort of a wonderful thought?

Yeah, we see it all the time when you just guide people into how to take care of their biology, which most of us don't learn. I mean, most of us don't learn how to take care of our bodies. We don't get an operating manual when we're born, and we don't have any instruction book. And we kind of aimlessly find our way through life trying to do the right thing. But most of us don't really understand the basic functioning of our body and how to get it to function better. And what you're delivering is at scale, a solution that helps with tiny little nugget bite sized pieces of, you call them micro steps to help people advance towards and lean in towards more healthy behaviors. And they see the results and then they lean in more.

Exactly. And it's really. How do you reduce the friction? How do we make it easier? When we onboard a user, we onboard everything about them that they give us access to, you know, their biometric data, their lab data, their medical data, but also their preferences. What foods do they like, how do they move, what do they like to do? Their calendars, if they give us access to as much information as possible.

I don't want my calendar.

Calendar. Oh my God. I need to take hold of your calendar and feed you lots of resets between meetings.

I don't think I need it actually.

Actually, joking apart, we're going to make you a personalized reset. That's my favorite thing. That's like the one that has the most impact. And you can create it on our platform in five minutes with pictures of the people you love. Your wife. Do you have a dog?

I do have a dog now. I just got a dog, six months old.

What's the dog's name?

Lenny.

Lenny, A song you love, quotes you love. I mean I'll send you my personal reset so immediately. As you know, gratitude and stress and anxiety cannot coexist. So Suddenly you have 60 seconds of what you love about your life, maybe during a moment when your life sucks. You know, we all have those moments during the day, so how can we help you get out of that quickly?

Your mitochondria, those tiny engines inside your cellsplay, a big role in how you feel, how you age, and how your body functions. Sunlight and Saunas use infrared light to support healthy mitochondrial function, which may help you feel more energized, recover faster, and build deeper cellular resilience. No pills or powders required. Every body is different. Healing isn't one size fits all. That's why sunlighten offers a range of infrared saunas to meet your unique goals, from the Mpulse Smart Sauna to the Solo System. The Solo System is a portable infrared sauna that's perfect if you're short on space but still want the benefits of regular infrared therapy. Backed by third party studies, decades of innovation and multiple US Patents, Sunlighten is a trusted name in infrared therapy. It's a key part of my own wellness routine and one I truly believe in. Visit sunlighten.com and use code HYMAN to save up to fourteen hundred dollars higher on your purchase. That's sunlighten.com, code H Y M A N. As a functional medicine doctor, I know skin health is often a reflection of what's going on inside, like inflammation, gut issues or oxidative stress. That's why I use and recommend Sun Goddess Matcha from because it works from the inside out. This isn't your average matcha. Sun Goddess Matcha is a clean, organic ceremonial grade matcha rich in egcg, one of the most powerful antioxidants for supporting skin clarity, gut health and inflammation response. Since it's made from whole ground tea leaves, one cup is like drinking 10 cups of regular green tea. It's also shaded longer to increase L theanine and chlorophyll, which help deliver calm, focused energy and support natural detoxification. Peak only uses the highest quality ingredients, so you get unmatched purity and peace of mind with every sip. Sun Goddess Matcha is creamy and has a naturally sweet umami flavor. I drink it every morning and it's become a foundational part of my skin and wellness routine. Peak also offers a powerful combination called the Radiant Skin Duo. Sun Goddess Matcha paired with their BT Fountain Drink for added skin benefits and deeper cellular support. Right now you'll get up to 20% off for life plus a free frother and glass beaker@peaklife.com Hyman that's P I Q U E life.com try it risk free with their 90 day guarantee. Trust me when I say I know how hard it can be to find healthy food options when life gets hectic. That's why I love Paleo Valley's Meat Sticks, a clean, nutrient dense protein snack that fits into any busy day. Unlike most snacks loaded with sugar and artificial ingredients, Paleo Valley Beef Sticks are made from 100% grass fed and grass finished beef by US family farmers on chemical free pastures. That means more vitamins, minerals and omega 3s to support healthy inflammation and overall vitality and they're naturally fermented instead of artificial preservatives. Paleo Valley uses Old World fermentation to keep their sticks shelf stable and gut friendly thanks to naturally occurring probiotics with five delicious flavors like Original Jalapeno and Garlic Summer Sausage, they're perfect for the Pegan lifestyle. Plus they're individually wrapped and ready whenever you need a clean protein boost. Paleo Valley also offers pasture raised chicken sticks and 100% grass fed venison sticks. I make sure to always have these beef sticks in my car, suitcase or in my kitchen. Head to paleovalley.com hyman to get 15% off your order of 100% grass fed beef sticks today.

And you know the power of AI is that it's so intelligent in that it has the capacity to learn over time and it has a capacity to store memory and understanding of you and then can use that knowledge to create more nuanced nudges for you that that are truly meaningful to you rather than some abstract piece of information. And you're also able to sort of get not just people's personal lifestyle habit data, but actual other hard data, whether it's wearables Now Function Health and Thrive AI Health. They're partnering to be able to be able to upload your lab data, which you might not know that that person is on their way to diabetes, but you can find out and then you can personalize it.

So.

So all these incredible applications that were never possible before to help guide people?

No. I think it's an incredible moment and I'm loving our partnership with Function Health and the fact that people again are empowered to take charge of their own health to get all their biomarkers. And as you know, I'm talking with your team about also starting this program called Know youw Numbers. That's right, so people can Know again, you won't be able to know or remember everything that you learn from your function. Blood tests, which are fantastic because you go deeper. But I mean, we are working with three numbers, and I'm sure you probably will add more or maybe not agree that these are the most important, but here we go.

Here we go. I'm curious.

CRP as your inflammation marker. APOB as your lipid cholesterol number and apob. Now there's a lot of evidence is a more powerful marker than LDL and HDL and then A1C.

That's right.

So, you know, obviously there are tons.

Those are good.

You had somebody good advising you.

That's it.

But if you can know these numbers and we are friends, so we say, how are you doing, Mark? And how are you doing, Ariana? And then you check them and you see the trend lines. And this is like the exact opposite of what's happening now. When a lot of people don't even have access to their blood tests.

The doctor can't track it over time. You're looking at.

And the whole thing is over time. That's the key. What are you doing? And how are you monitoring how your behaviors are affecting your health in the same way we do? I'm wearing an aura ring.

The nice one.

The nice one, yes. They don't make them anymore. They did a partnership with Gucci and produced these aura rings. So I'm sorry, they don't make them anymore. But I love it because if I don't get a good night's sleep, I can see. What did I do differently? I stopped drinking, so that's not an issue. But, you know, I mean, people who. And I stopped drinking because I think over a certain age, it has a bigger impact on your body. And I prefer how I feel.

Exactly.

It's not a sacrifice because I like the feeling of going to sleep more easily, waking up with clarity. Are you saying that if you have three glasses of wine, it affects your sleep compared to two glasses of wine? These are the kind of. This is the kind of data you can collect through an aura ring or a hoop or whatever you are wearing.

And that. And that really helps you understand the impact of your choices on how you feel. Because at the end of the day, for me at least, it's. It's really how people feel and their quality of life and their quality of energy and their quality of attention and their quality of relationships and the quality of the effort they're able to put in their. Their life and their work. I mean, those things are kind of more nebulous, but they're all determined by your health. If you don't actually have a pathway to get better because you don't know what to do or how to do it, or there's too much conflicting information out there, or your doctor doesn't really understand lifestyle medicine, you're going to be kind of wandering around in the dark and here, take this pill to treat your diabetes, or take this pill to treat your high blood pressure, or you're too stressed, here's some Prozac. But that's not the way we should be treating people. And it's creating accelerating costs and increasing burden on our economy, increasing suffering, because people are not actually resolving the problem, they're just mitigating it slightly or maybe not at all. And so I'm wondering from your perspective how you think these kind of shifts in AI driven behavior, first interventions are going to reverse this trend of chronic illness. Do you think it's key? Because I, I, I think I remember talking to Paul Farmer before he answered the question. I'm just gonna just say one thing is, you know, Paul Farmer, I think he's an incredible man who helped reverse tbn, AIDS and some of the worst places in the world through the power of community. And he said, you know, we need to create a million community health workers to solve our chronic disease problem in America. We need people helping people, neighbors helping neighbors. And essentially you're creating a sort of a digital neighborhood where people can be neighbors to help each other change. You know, having that much infrastructure and a million community health workers, or 10 million, or however many we need in America, it's a, it's a big lift and it's very expensive. But now with technology, yes, we can actually humanize that.

That's what I'm most excited about with AI. You know, when we talk about AI and health, most people tend to think of, oh, it's going to accelerate drug.

Development or read my radiology scan, it's.

Going to give us better diagnostic tools. And these are all very important considerations. But I think the mother load, the most important thing is how it's going to help us change behaviors, because that's at the heart of the chronic disease epidemic, 100%. And if we can help people realize that through these nudges and recommendations that are personalized to them, they can have a real impact on their lives and build that success muscle around what they're doing and see the impact it has and feel constantly supported and not judged. It's going to be revolutionary and that's what I'm most excited about. You mentioned AI superpower being memory. And that's another thing. Personalization is one thing, memory is the other. My Greek compatriots, you know, put on the temple of Apollo in Delphi. Know thyself AI will help us know ourselves and also know us better than we know ourselves.

Yeah.

So that it can feed us.

Yeah. It's interesting. I, I, I was talking to a friend. He said he uses ChatGPT for therapy. If he's got issues with his wife or he's trying to deal with a tough problem, he uses it as virtual AI therapists. I was like, wow, that's really interesting. I hadn't thought of that.

You know, I think what people love about AI therapists, that they don't feel judged. Yeah, I like AI therapists. I don't like AI friends.

No, no.

You know, the idea that people don't have enough friends or they're going to have bots as friends, I don't like that at all.

But if you're learning how to deal with a difficult situation, whether it's a.

Medical problem, but it's like whether it's a medical problem or a human problem, you can be helped, but human connections cannot be replaced with AI connections.

One thing I want to ask you about is the micro steps and how they lead to cumulative changes. Because at the end of the day, if you want to reverse diabetes, it requires bigger change. And it's not just not having that one cookie or not having that one soda, it's a bigger change. So are you seeing in your work the micro steps add up to macro steps, bigger changes over time?

Yes. And it's really about, you have to start somewhere. And if you start small, you are more likely to sustain the change. And we want sustainable change. People have lost hundreds of pounds cumulatively and put them back and lost them and killed them. So what microsteps does, it makes the changes in your life sustainable. And the key for me, from all the data we're collecting, is that it's not just food. If you are sleep deprived, you are going to crave bad carbs and sugars. You know, just physiological. Yeah, because I think what we've done is we've siloed these behaviors and we need to integrate them. If you are stressed out, you are going to be more likely to binge.

Eat or binge drink or adversely affect your relationships.

Exactly. But even if we take food as the central determining factor of a lot of diseases, the other habits are incredibly important. They Impact how much you're going to eat and what food you're going to eat and the so called comfort foods. And if you don't move from your couch, that's going to affect what you eat too. You become sluggish. Right. Your metabolism goes down and if you don't have connections, you're going to get a Haagen Dazs ice cream bucket.

That's going to be your friend. Right.

So that's I think what we are discovering, that even when you make food primary, you need to surround it with what you are doing with the other behaviors. And the changes do become cumulative. And you pick your favorite micro steps, you know, out of the hundreds and hundreds and then they become bigger and bigger steps and then you begin, listen, I ended up completely giving up sugar. It didn't happen overnight, but now like even at my daughter's birthday party and I have like two spoonfuls, I feel like I poisoned myself.

Yeah, yeah. It's like I remember there's this funny picture we took of ourselves at your apartment where it was during that one of the events you had around health. And then we were joking and it was a cake there and we like both were pretending to eat this very.

Big piece of cake, but we didn't eat it. So then basically what happens is that if I had tried to give up all sugar when I started on this journey, I would have failed and I would have felt like a failure. I just started gradually. And we have a great nutrition director. I want to introduce her to you called Tess Bredesen and she is the expert on swaps. So you know, I gave up sugar relatively easily because you know, we all have different things we are more prone to be addicted to. Right. Mine was cheese. Cheese, like if you left me alone, I could live on cheese. Forget you can take it.

That would be the worst thing.

No, no. For me again because I've done all these tests. Genetically I'm what they call a high absorber of cholesterol. Of cholesterol?

Yeah. Fat. Yeah.

So you know like you may eat cheese and absorb 10%. I observed 90%.

Yeah.

So you know, it was not working for my genes. That's the 7% of genes. Right. So she gave me like honestly probably 40 substitutes, you know, plant based nut base cheeses that didn't have the same impact and I hated like 90% of them. But then I found, you know, one or two that I liked and it's like the 80, 20 rule. Occasionally if I want to have a treat, I'll have A piece of great parmesan cheese or feta cheese. But it's really. It's what you do chronically that matters. It's not what you do occasionally.

That's right. And so. So you're able to sort of get off sugar and see the changes that happen in your health. And I mean, you look healthy than I've seen you in years. So I don't know what you're doing, but, like, it's working well.

I think it's the food, which now, you know, through again. It didn't happen overnight. You've known me for over 20 years, so you've seen progressively things, you know, getting more optimal, working out.

Yeah.

You know, I'm not a naturally athletic person. You know, I'm not a natural, like, marathon runner. I would rather curl up on the couch and read a good book. But now I love it. You know, I got into my daily strength training, and here's also the other thing I did. Habit stacking is one of the things.

Habit stacking?

Yes, habit stacking. So I started it during COVID You know, during COVID when I saw a lot of friends putting on weight because they would sit on the couch, binge watching the news or their favorite shows. I made this rule for which I have not broken since, which is I do not allow myself to watch any show unless I'm on my treadmill or my bike or my elliptical.

That's good.

Or on my machines. It's been incredible. I remember when Succession was on and I was obsessed with it. I ended up being on my treadmill for two and a half hours because I wanted to get to the end.

That's good. That's a good habit stacker.

And you love it because you are like some people like music, whatever it is, just don't make it so hard on yourself. See, how can you make it easier? Because willpower is a diminishing resource. A lot of people think they're going to get healthier through willpower.

That's be fun. That's be easy.

You have to make it fun. You have to make it delightful. You have to forgive yourself when you fall off the wagon and you eat something you wish you hadn't eaten or. And then you have to learn what are the obstacles along the way. So my biggest obstacle when it came to exercising was when I traveled.

Yeah.

Like, I'm religious at home.

Yeah. Yeah.

Then I would travel.

Then your schedule's full and you got up early.

I started getting a trainer in the hotel. And I remember, you know, I was in London, and I meet my trainer in the gym of the hotel, and I had to deal with something in my office. So I get on the bike and I'm on the phone for half an hour. So he looks at me, he says, why did you book me? I said, because if I had not booked you, I would be in my room. So whatever you can do, you know, whatever is possible. But also, again, to go back to our mutual obsession, how do we democratize that? How do we make it available to millions of people? Because right now, the 1% is actually in on this.

Yeah, they're doing it, and people are.

Doing it in different degrees of success, but people know about it and they're doing it. And I feel that it's our job to spread it.

Yeah, because it's. I mean, I agree, because there's so many people suffering out there who don't know or don't have the resources. And I love the fact that you created this cookbook for people who have, you know, not big budgets for food, who can learn how to make simple food that's delicious, that feels good, that tastes good, that makes their body heal as opposed to making them sick. And this is what most people are doing, and this is democratizing food and food in a way that I don't think most people realize is possible. And that is honestly very subversive, because the food industry wants us to believe that it's difficult, it's time consuming, it's expensive.

You hear that?

Yeah. And it's just propaganda. And they're. They're like, well, you know, you deserve a break today. The propaganda machine is very big, and it's kind of. It sort of blames the individual for being overweight. You just eat less, exercise more. There's no good and bad foods. It's all about moderation. But there are good and bad foods. I mean, eating ultra processed food affects your brain differently, affects your metabolism differently, your microbiome differently. And so the foods that, that you kind of have in this book are just simple, real food that are created by top chefs to help people eat simply and deliciously and in the way that's good for them and good for their body and good for their wallet. And most people don't really understand that the things that actually make the most difference for your health are scalable and available to everybody and are not expensive, are not difficult. And, and that we. A little bit of support, a little bit of nudging, a little bit of guidance through different tools, whether it's Thrive Global's tools Or the work you're doing with employers to get their employees healthier. Or the new Thrive AI health platform, which I'm so excited about because it's been a big thing to think about. How do we unlock the help that people need to make change? Because it's hard to do on your own. It's hard to do just on your own merits. Because there's so much in our culture that fosters us to actually not have good behaviors, that supports unhealthy behaviors and unhealthy choices. And the easy choices, that unhealthy choice. And the hard choice is the healthy choice. That's all gotta change. And so these little beautiful things you've created seem so common sense, so obvious, but they're not employed by healthcare. They're not employed by most large corporations who have employees. They're not thought of as real medicine. But I think you're right. I think these behavior change strategies are the miracle drug.

And you know, there are many companies and people that want to help when you engage them. Like we are working with Sharkninja, that produces a lot of kitchen equipment and they donate it to people who are trying to change their habits. Because you talked once about a family, you were helping change their habits. And they didn't have any equipment.

No. No cutting board knives, nothing in their kitchen. They'd never cooked.

They never cooked. So helping people in every possible way is really our dream. Making it as easy and as engaging as possible. And again, back to the alternative, which is the suffering people are going through. There is another story in the New York Times recently which chronicled the day of a nurse in West Virginia going from home to home visiting her patients. They were all under 65. They were not Medicare patients. She describes the first patient. She had diabetes and heart disease. And she arrives to check her. And the woman has just finished her breakfast, which was two Pepsis and peppermint combos, which I checked. I don't know how many chemical ingredients and dyes were there. Now, is this woman ever going to get well?

No.

No. Her movement was like from her bed to the bathroom. So how can we address what is going on around the world? It's not just around the country millions of times a day. If we want to really change the chronic diseases that we are suffering from.

Yeah, no, it's imperative because it's taking humanity down. I think there are a lot of existential threats. There's nuclear war, there's the threat of generative AI. All this sort of scary things that people talk about. Cybersecurity But I think the decline in the health of the human population is just staggering. I mean, I've been a doctor for almost 40 years and just in my lifetime we've seen cataclysmic change in our health globally, the rise of chronic diseases, the amount of suffering. And these are mostly caused by the changes in our society and the behavioral nudges in the wrong direction. Right. Making available ultra processed food everywhere we go, the overproduction of food and calories, the fact we don't have to even get up off our couch and do anything anymore. And so we've kind of created a culture which is not helping people at all.

But on the other hand, a good news here is when people use the argument that there are all these food deserts where people are going to find food. We work with Instacart. Instacart can deliver in 95% of food deserts.

That's right.

So again, how do we use technology to serve food deserts? How do we use technology to guide people on this journey? That's really what's exciting right now.

So what's coming up in the world of health and wellness and this whole revolution that you've been such a pioneer in, what most excites you that's happening now?

So what most excites me is to go back to what we said at the beginning, which is that using this AI revolution as a forcing mechanism to have a conversation about human nature. I did a fireside chat with Sam Altman recently and I asked him, what is the world your children are going to inherit going to be like? And he said, my children will be the first generation of people that will never be more intelligent than AI. And there is a sort of consensus among AI leaders that in the next few years, if not in the next year, because everything has accelerated so much, AI will be more intelligent than we are. And my point is good for the machines. Let's let them be more intelligent and let us be more wise. We need to stop defining humanity by our intelligence. We are more than our cognitive abilities. We have a soul. We have the capacity to love, to feel compassion, to be resilient. You know, all these human qualities that AI will never replicate. That's what I would like us to focus on. And this is all very connected to our health because, you know, you've talked recently a lot about we need to stop separating physical health and mental health.

Totally.

Yeah, it's like health, and I would say even spiritual health. And I use it very broadly because when we throughout religion, we threw out the baby with the bathwater.

Yeah, that's true.

And so bringing all that together is what excites me.

Well, I think that's a really important distinction you just made. I want to double down on that, which is intelligence is not wisdom.

No, intelligence. We are at the moment drowning in data and starved for wisdom. And when people talk about AI and they tend to focus, oh my God, your PowerPoint presentations are going to be so much easier. But I said, great, good, fine. But that's not the best thing about it. It's like we are not just productivity machines.

So what is the world looks like in the future, 10 years from now, where you've actually kind of facilitated the behavior change that you want through thrive, AI, health, but also cultivated a culture of wisdom?

If I can wear my pathologically optimistic hat, please, that you and I share, I'll pass it on to you afterwards. That's a world where we have companies that recognize that human beings are a mixture of good and bad. It's not like these are the good people and these are the bad people. I mean, Alexander Solzhenitsyn said there is a line between each human heart that separates within each heart, good and evil. And so if we recognize that right now, most technology, social media companies have focused on tapping into what's worse than us. That's right, our addictions, our biases, our rage, our anger. I believe profoundly that companies can make big profits by appealing to what's best in us. You know, right now, most companies have hijacked kind of the operating system of civilization, tapped into what has led to this incredible polarization. Depression, anxiety, suicides, deaths of despair. But I want companies for profit companies to prove that you can make a profit by appealing to what's best in people.

You can do well by doing good.

Yes, that it doesn't have to be just not for profits, because we want this to scale. And so that's kind of my hope for the future and my belief that we'll do it if we approach it this way. And when it comes to health, you know, having both doctors and self insured employers and families all together on this, learning from each other, starting with small steps, habit stacking, you know, making it as easy as possible and supporting each other on this journey because we're all works in progress.

That is so true. And I think, you know, what you're sharing is a vision of a very different kind of world where the things that divide us will be sort of put aside.

Yes.

And then we'll be able to sort of leverage the humanity's wisdom to bring us together in ways that we haven't before. And that the work you're doing, particularly around engaging people with their health, is going to create a more generative world, a more connected world, a more engaged world, the world where people feel good and want to do good and not in this sort of doom spiral that we're in right now, which it feels scary to, I think a lot of people. And your optimistic vision is powerful because it gives us hope that we can actually do something differently. And I think the, the ability to actually lean into a vision of a world where the tech can do what tech does, but we're facilitated to be more human and to learn the simple things that can actually help us feel better and be more alive, which is what it takes to be more human, is just such a beautiful vision.

Well, let's make it happen.

Thank you, Ariana. This is such a great conversation and thank you for getting me my start in this world of health and health communication. Without you, I don't think I'd be sitting where I am today. And I was just sort of this nobody doctor who had a lot to say and a loud mouth. And I started writing articles in the mid 2000s and the only place I could get them published was Huffington Post and they actually were quite popular. And it sort of.

That's actually amazing.

Yes. Without Huffington Post and publishing literally hundreds of articles, I would write every week an article or two and would get out there and it really led people to know about the work I do about functional medicine. It drove my practice. It was like, was really consequential for my life day.

Oh, Mark, thank you for everything you've done and for so many lives that you've touched.

Thank you. So good. We'll keep, keep working together and making a difference.

Don't forget there's a way to listen completely ad free with Hyman on Apple Podcasts you can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap try free to start seven day free trial. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman.

Please reach out.

I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll See you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health where I am Chief Medical Officer Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic Clinic the Ultra Wellness center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public, so I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.