Arianna Huffington, born in Greece, moved to the US by way of Cambridge University in England and became a renowned broadcaster and nationally-syndicated columnist. In 2005, she launched The Huffington Post and was soon named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. Her latest book, Thrive, debuted at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list.
Rescu. sat in on Arianna Huffington and ABC’s chief online political writer, Annabel Crabb as part of the In Conversation series, held at Sydney’s Carriageworks. They discuss her new book Thrive as well as her rise to being one of the most prominent and important women in the world.
Annabel Crabb: […] By the age of twenty one you were in a love affair with the late Bernard Levin, a man who was at that point twice your age and I think…
Arianna Huffington: Half my size!
Annabel Crabb: Exactly! At the age of twenty three you published your first book, The Female Woman, which was a repost to Germaine Greer, who I think was, at that point, technically the most frightening person in the world to get in a fight with! Then you became a fixture on the British social and intelligence landscape. Then you married a world baron and moved to America. You wrote several more books, biographies of Callas, of Picasso… You became a spokeswoman for the Republican cause. You called for the resignation of Bill Clinton. When politics changed, you wrote more books and you became a very high profile broadcaster. You run for the governorship of California and in 2005 you established the Huffington Post and became an unbangable media baroness of the modern era.
Arianna Huffington: I’m exhausted!
Annabel Crabb: Which leads me, Arianna Huffington, to my first question to you, which is: When you write a book telling us all to take the load off, why the hell should we believe you?
Arianna Huffington: Well, first of all, thank you for doing this! I’m a big fan and it’s just great to have this conversation with you! Thank you all for being here and for making me feel so welcome! The truth is that if I knew then what I know now, I would have told twenty-something Arianna to just get just sleep and stop worrying!
Annabel Crabb: What were you worried about?
Arianna Huffington: Because I was perpetually worried. I had this voice in my head that I described in my head as the obnoxious roommate living in my head, telling me how I wasn’t good enough. After every speech at the union… you described my life like a sort of triumphant progression; it wasn’t anything like that! I didn’t leave London to marry an oil baron! I left London, because Bernard Levin would marry me and he broke my heart and I didn’t trust myself to stay in London and not go back to him and by then I was thirty and I desperately wanted to have children. So, in the same way that obnoxious roommate kept telling me: “Oh, you are never going to have children!” Every book I wrote was such an agonising process and I developed this way to cheat myself and keep putting question marks when I wasn’t sure if it was the right word on the right sentence on the side… and sometimes you would look at it and it would be filled with question marks, because I was second guessing myself so much.
Annabel Crabb: Isn’t that fascinating, the way careers (particularly very famous ones like yours) seem so clear in hindsight? In retrospect, they seem as though they would always going to happen like that. Even a life like yours, which is full of adventure and risk-taking and bravado. And yet, at the lift stage you’re full of uncertainty.
Arianna Huffington: Absolutely! And that is so important for everybody who succeeds: to keep talking about their failures! I’m a big believer in that, because many people look at you and they think that your life kind of just happened. The truth is that no life just happens. Every life is full of ups and downs and failures along the way and that’s why, for me, what is the most exciting thing about this moment is that for the first time we have the science to validate ancient wisdom about the best way to live our lives. We’re always told that it’s important to renew ourselves, to meditate or to pray and to not worry about little things. We’re always told about that by religion or just common sense, but, in fact, now we have an enormous amount of scientific findings that prove the importance of sleep and meditation and renewal, how to deal with worries and fantasies. And that’s why I have fifty-five pages of scientific endnotes, because I really […]
Annabel Crabb: I think that’s great!
Arianna Huffington: […] I really want to convince even the most stubborn skeptic that there is a better way to do life!
Annabel Crabb: Let’s backtrack to that anxious young woman at Cambridge – I’ll let her go in a minute, but there’s a couple more things I want to know about her. Particularly, what happens to that twenty-three year old woman’s mind when she decides to write a book, taking on one of her university’s most controversial alumnus, Germaine Greer. What’s it like to get in a fight with her, when you are a young lady as you were?
Arianna Huffington: Well, first of all, again, how this happened is that I did a debate at the Cambridge on the changing role of women and I felt very strongly that feminism should really mean that women should be respected and honored, whatever choice they want to make. Like, if they want to run a country, they should be given every opportunity to run a country. If they want to run a company, the same… if they want to be mothers and wives and are able not to work (or they are willing to make the financial sacrifices not to work), they should also be given equal respect. But at that time, long before you were born…
Annabel Crabb: Actually, that was the year I was born!
Arianna Huffington: Were you born in 1973?
Annabel Crabb: 1973!
Arianna Huffington: The year you were born… So, you are now fully aware of…
Annabel Crabb: I was still catching up on my reading!
Arianna Huffington: It took me at least six months to know what was happening. During that time, women who wanted to have children were dismissed as product of social conditioning. As imperialism had taken over and convinced them that they wanted to have children or that no sane woman would want to have a child, because all that mattered was the career. The women who were idealized were the women who were at the attaché case! What I wrote in the Female Women is completely conventional wisdom. It’s like we do think that; we do value what choices women make, even if they don’t involve the thinks that we thought would make women really successful in their lives! So, that was really what I said in that debate. And then I got a letter… Remember letters? You know, stamps…
Annabel Crabb: I’ve read about them on the emails!
Arianna Huffington: So, I got a letter from Germaine Greer’s publisher, Reginald Davis Poynter, saying: “I watched the debate” – and at the time the Cambridge Union, believe it or not, had its debates televised – and he said: “ I want you to write a book on the views that you expressed in that debate!” And I wrote back and said, “Thank you very much, I can’t write!” He wrote back and said, “Can you have lunch?” And I went to London from Cambridge, I had lunch with him and he offered me a very modest advance. He said, “I’m going to risk this advance and if you can’t write, I’d lost 5,000 pounds. Otherwise, if you turn out to be a good writer, you have a book!” And that’s what happened. That’s how I became a writer. It was a complete accident!
Annabel Crabb: What was that experience like? I mean, is that what fired you for your lifetime of writing and publishing?
Arianna Huffington: Yes! I mean, I always loved… What I loved about the Union and the debating, was I loved the spectacle of moving hearts and minds through words. But for me it was more of a spoken thing and this is still my favorite form of communication. It’s actually live and events like we’re doing now. There’s nothing for me like it, because it’s the immediate direct connection.
Annabel Crabb: One of the signifiers for a truly great debater is the ability to slip from side to side.
Arianna Huffington: Oh, no! I couldn’t do that at all!
Annabel Crabb: Politically, you’ve done a bit of that, haven’t you?
Arianna Huffington: That was when my views changed!
Annabel Crabb: Yeah!
Arianna Huffington: It was like… That was very specifically when my views about the role of government changed, because my views on abortion or gay rights or gun control were always really my views, even when I was a Republican!
Annabel Crabb: How could you be a Republican and hold those views?
Arianna Huffington: That was the ancient days! In those days, you could be a Republican and be pro choice and pro gay rights and pro gun control. The Republican Party of that time was a very different Republican Party than the Republicant Party of today.
Annabel Crabb: I saw George Bush around the 2012 elections and he said that the Republican Party of today is not a Party in which his father, George Bush Senior, would have won a nomination.
Arianna Huffington: Absolutely! Barbara Bush was openly pro choice! That would have been impossible nowadays.
Annabel Crabb: Why are those issues…abortion and gun control and so on…Why are they such top of mind issues in politics when in other democracies, like ours for instance, they’re not really included as part of the national political debate?
Arianna Huffington: Well, they are not top of mind in the minds of voters! They are top of mind in the minds of a very small minority that have managed to sort of highjack the Republican Party. In the case of guns for example, which you might find insane what’s happening in America at the moment, we have background checks and it’s approved by 90% really of the American elector and yet it will come pass at legislation.
Annabel Crabb: There was that fabulous moment where, at the same time, it was illegal to carry a 500ml Coca Cola into a cinema in New York, but legal to carry a sub automatic weapon into a cinema in Arizona! Very odd!
Arianna Huffington: I know! No wonder you live here!
Annabel Crabb: Anyway, I’m interested in this idea of changing a mind, because in this kind of increasingly divided political era in which we live, to change one’s mind is unthinkable, right? And yet you do! You were a passionate Republican voice…
Arianna Huffington: On a very specific area, which was… Again, how it happened was I’ve always felt in every one of my incarnations that created a responsibility to give back and we couldn’t just delegate that responsibility to government. And sometimes it sounded to me as though Liberals though that we would just delegate that to government.
Annabel Crabb: So, it’s still a small government…
Arianna Huffington: On the contrary, I think the government has a big role with so many problems that they need to address that need the raw power of government appropriations. And I also believe, and that’s part of “Thrive”, that giving and making that part of our lives is like an essential part of a good life, as well as essential to building a society and a culture where people really come together. So, I gave a speech at a conference called “Can Conservatives have the social conscience?” urging Conservatives to do that and Newt Gingrich happened to see that speech and invited me to speak to the Republican Conference. Again, when Newt Gingrich became a speaker, he was a very different person. You know, he gave his first speech as speaker praising FBI and talking about how our responsibility was to address poverty and it’s a greater priority than balancing the budget… So, it was a very different world and that’s how I started working with him on this specific issue, of how to we actually grain the better agents of our natures out of people. I still believe that (in the media for example), we are not doing a good job…most of us in the media…in putting the spotlight on good things happening. We see the role of media…
Annabel Crabb: She will write something very nice about you on her blog!
Arianna Huffington: We see that all of media (newspaper, television, everything!) is speaking truth to power and corruption and all these things are incredibly important… Pointing out all that is dysfunctional! But I also think that we have a responsibility that we are neglecting, to put the spotlight on what is working! And we are doing this relentlessly at Huffington Post! For example, we have a dedicated section, called “The Good News” section, which only has good news and which is one of our most popular sections. We have a section called “The Impact”, where we cover… You see, in every newspaper and every television show covers these things occasionally! You know, in America around Thanksgiving and Christmas! I’m talking about covering them every day, many times a day with the same relentless that we’re covering about what’s happening in Parliament or what politicians are saying. Because, often, solutions are found from what human beings and companies and individuals and communities are doing! I mean, if you get a spotlight on an entrepreneur who has started a business and has created two jobs, it may help him/her create another ten jobs! Because that’s how it works! People find out about it. And we had many, many examples of that! So, I think very passionate about that. This is a kind of constant in how I see the world and, therefore, when we launched the Huffington Post, it was very part of an idea of mine from day one.
Annabel Crabb: I’m going to read you a little passage. I don’t do this very often, but it’s about your experience of modern media. Page 189 for anyone who’d like to read along: “[…]I used to walk into my apartment or hotel room and immediately turn on the news. And then one day, not too long ago, I stopped! And I realized two things. First, that I didn’t miss anything. Not even anything helpful in running a 24/7 media operation, except hearing the same talking points being repeated again and again by different people. The second and more important thing is that I allowed some silence into my day, in which I could hear that still small voice that we rarely give our time and attention to. Almost nothing…But I gained a lot[…]” It’s kind of incredible cheat on your part – isn’t it? – to sit up and build a huge force within the Tower of Babel that we understand to be modern Digital Media, and then urge everybody to switch the damned thing off!
Arianna Huffington: I’m not saying to switch the damned thing off forever! I’m just saying to actually take time off TV, the Internet or whatever. I mean, that is completely consistent with also taking time to go online and update yourself on the news – or a blog or whatever you want to do! I think the problem we are facing right now is that we are becoming enslaved by technology, instead of being liberated by it. And I think it’s time that we all sound the alarm. I mean, you have young children! You don’t want your children to grow up and be more comfortable with their iPad than with human connections. I mean, I have my younger daughter here, who actually has completely revolted…she’s twenty three…She has completely revolted against any social media presence. She’s not on Facebook. She doesn’t do Twitter. She has no Instagram. Whenever these devices became so dominant that we would find ourselves at home over dinner, I or my sister or my ex-husband, going to then during dinner, she would cry! She was the conscience of the family that made this really, absolutely, ground rule of no devices during dinner, which really sounds so basic, right? It’s not like, “Oh my God! What an amazing family! They don’t have devices during dinner!” Yet, it’s like…Just ask around! Maybe you are one of the people who doesn’t allow devices over dinner, but it’s not by any means the norm!
Annabel Crabb: You write so beautifully, in the course of the book, about the experience of wonder and the usefulness of wonder and the productiveness of wonder. But for those of us who have lived through this sort of technical revolution and watched this efflorescence of communications platforms around us, in my case the space is half a life time, there’s so much wonder involved in that. The wonder of being able to getting in contact with somebody in Wisconsin, because of a shared interest in whatever…You know, there’s so much wonder that’s contained in that world! And it draws us in! I think we lose control of the point of which we start behaving abnormally. Like lying in bed with two devices or, you know, emailing a partner whilst watching television… That’s happened to me! Luckily, I realized that that was abnormal and I shut of the email exchange. How do you separate genuine wonder from unimportant wonder? That’s a clumsily asked question, but you’re just going to interpret it any way you like and answer it!
Arianna Huffington: I think that I totally understand what you are saying! I think that what modern technology has done is absolutely stunning! And also what it has made possible in the sense democratizing the conversation, giving voice to people who wouldn’t otherwise have a voice…I mean, I get all that and it is amazing that you can talk to somebody in Wisconsin! But, nevertheless, we are missing out on the wonder of just everyday connections and the everyday beauty around us and I think one of the problems is the misguided belief that multitasking is the way to productivity and a lot of scientific findings have proved that multitasking actually does not exist. It’s really task switching, it’s one of the most stressful things we can do. I learned for myself, it’s like I used to walk down the street of New York, where I live and I’d be on the phone, or worse, texting while I am walking. Have you noticed that phenomenon? It’s really astounding.
Annabel Crabb: That’s really heading for injury doesn’t it?
Arianna Huffington: It’d be more dramatic.
Annabel Crabb: One of the books starts with a catastrophic head injury.
Arianna Huffington: Yes, collapsing and hitting my head and breaking my cheekbone. But I don’t recommend it as you know, wake up call. When I stopped doing that, when I am not collapsing and not on the phone while walking or texting while walking I discovered that I was missing so much. I remember literally walking by this beautiful building next to my apartment, and telling a friend, this is beautiful, all these details, and when did this go on, she said 1819. And you know the times when I would be at an event but it wouldn’t be that, I think this is something that a lot of parents face. I will be there and I will be there in body only. I was giving a speech at Google and there was this public relations woman at Google, was telling the story openly and it was online so I am not disclosing any secrets. It was about how she was reading a story to her young children, and while she was reading the story she was composing a blog post about something that was happening at Google at that time, earnings or whatever. She was finished and her children were asleep and she realized she had not remembered a word of what she told her children, and did not remember a word of the blog post that she had composed. So the whole thing was a complete waste. And yet we felt that we are being productive. You know something funny like that, when you read to your children in the morning, and you escape to a stage voice because would you counter that story, will you turn the table somehow?
Annabel Crabb: I love it that you can remember the story about which I have, can you provide me with more detail at this stage?
Arianna Huffington: Because you want to watch something or listen to something or.
Annabel Crabb: Oh yeah, sometimes I have the radio loud and you read this and you read this in a very slow voice so I can yeah, be in a political interview or I will introduce large pauses…into the gruffalo, which is meant to be read that way, and it’s ridiculous. I do those stupid things like that all the time. The best…
Arianna Huffington: But you set up your children that catch you on for that right?
Annabel Crabb: Yeah, I’ve gotta take, a now, I get into shower that’s why I listen to am because I am sometimes alone in there, you know. The best multitasking story I ever heard was a woman I interviewed for a book that I just finished. She conducted an international high level teleconference while the family guinea pig was giving birth and children squealing, they didn’t even know the mom was pregnant. She managed to keep that teleconference going even through the experience of the dad guinea pig eating the new born. That’s the best multitasking I’ve ever heard. She’s learned from that. These days she apparently just says, here’s where I am, the guinea pig is giving birth, deal with it people, which I think is a very good way. When you started the Huffington Post, I mean, you were already an intensely famous person in the US. You had been a gubernatorial candidate in the year 2003, you’ve endorsed various presidential candidates including (Warren Bating), I think it’s a considerable loss to the presidency.
Arianna Huffington: Yeah he absolutely would have been much better than the people who made it to the presidency. That’s another story.
Annabel Crabb: What’s the story with actors in American politics? I was there in 2008 covering the election and I went to an event where Obama was on stage with Jimmy Schmidt, mainly because Jimmy Schmidt had played a democratic candidate. Therefore it was considered something more of a fare in some ways. What’s that cross-over? Why are the actors somehow more credible?
Arianna Huffington: We are a young country, we have no royalty. Hollywood is royalty. And also I have often said, famously: politics is all about casting. And Ronald Reagan you got.
Annabel Crabb: He certainly did. I often wondered whether Barack Obama’s biggest problem is really (Jet Babbit). Because Australia had, I mean America had, thanks to the West Wing, this sort of Hollywood version of what a democratic president would look like, and you know, always doing the tough thing, always doing the right thing, and then the next democratic president just didn’t turn up like that at all.
Arianna Huffington: But people wanted them to be like that. That’s probably fascination with Obama, because he made people believe that he could be the West Wing version. Don’t you know the way she goes from the guinea pig Obama, it’s kind of flawless. I love it.
Annabel Crabb: In many cultures that’s viewed as the perfectly legitimate progression. Alright that’s the Huffington Post. Are we going to divert it back by way of the guinea pig giving a wide birth, I am not going to say anything more about the gruffalo, I am going to get back to the Huffington Post because, you know when you started that up, there’s a lot of, ho ho ho, centralized sets up front blog, it won’t last. And of course it did, and it was empowered by enthusiasm and your famous friends writing things and you writing things, and enthusiasm, and let’s just see how far we can take this thing, and of course it went miles and miles. Are you surprised by the degree of success by that enterprise?
Arianna Huffington: Well I actually, first of all, it was greeted with a lot worse commentary than what you mentioned. I remember one, which I learned by heart, because my masochist must be intense. And it was said that the Huffington Post is an answer by its failure. We were about five hours along.
Annabel Crabb: Five hours?
Arianna Huffington: She said that it’s the movie equivalent of the Gillie’s Heavens Gate on Robin. For those of you who are not movie buffs, these are gigantic flops. And a year later she rang me and she said, I was wrong, how have things become and it is essentially a part of the internet and I would like to write for you. And I said great, we would love you to because you know one of the things I learned early on through my mother? She said holding grudges is the worst thing you can do. And I brought (Carry Fisher) in the book who said resentment is the poison you drink thinking the other person is going to die.
Annabel Crabb: It’s such a great line.
Arianna Huffington: And then I absolutely love it, it’s so true.
Annabel Crabb: Did you learn that from your mother who, it sounds like she’s an amazing woman. Is it hard to practice? I have read that you invite people to dinner when they are awful to you. Is that right? You invite Bill Keller around for dinner, your critics for dinner?
Arianna Huffington: Yeah. I am not saying that for others it is the absolute truth, I don’t even remember what Bill Keller said. It’s not just about not holding grudges, it’s just so insignificant. I wasn’t always like that. I consider this the barometer of my spiritual progression. How I deal with criticism.
Annabel Crabb: And not get offended or crossed.
Arianna Huffington: No. I don’t believe at all in not having a thick skin. I want to be permeable. I want the upset to go in and out. How old is your youngest child?
Annabel Crabb: One.
Arianna Huffington: Perfect.
Annabel Crabb: I cry a lot.
Arianna Huffington If you tell your one year-old he can’t have ice-cream he might throw a tantrum. He will be upset.
Annabel Crabb: Probably because I had eaten it.
Arianna Huffington: Or the guinea pig ate it. And then two minutes later he’s all smiles. I don’t think they even remember that they were upset. That’s my role model. Little children. And the way that they are upset is my role model. I am a huge cry-out. Ask my daughter. I cry a lot. It’s very cathartic, I love crying. I mean my children now no longer worry that I cry. They realize it’s fine.
Annabel Crabb: This is going to be your next book isn’t it? Just cry it out, by Ariana Huffington.
Arianna Huffington: Well celebrate, my dad did talk about sleep your way to the top. Maybe I can do crying your way to happiness?
Annabel Crabb: It’s got a lot of potential. Obviously you have confounded your critics and you’ve already forgotten them anyway, that’s good. Given the massive success that is of the Huffington Post, in an era where new digital startups always sort of viewed with suspicion by, particularly among legacy media, and you sold Huffington Post obviously for millions and hundred of dollars to AOL, terrific. But you then became this sort of whipping post for criticism on the basis that you know a lot of your writers are unpaid, and I think the interesting part about the digital media world that we’re having is that there are many threats and uncomfortable things for those of us who have worked as paid journalists in the legacy media. One of them is that people now expect to read for free. The other risk is that people are prepared to write for free. I wonder if you could tell us what your experience of that circumstances being, how do you deal with criticisms, and whether you think it is reasonable not to pay people, why?
Arianna Huffington: I just really have to say that, I think the people who make that comment do not have a clue what the internet is. The internet has made possible platforms. It’s like saying, facebook had an IPO worth like trillions of dollars, whatever it was, and they don’t pay the people for their facebook profiles.
Annabel Crabb:: They sell them though.
Arianna Huffington: You can say Yahoo bought Tumblr for a billion dollars and these people are writing for free on their Tumblr blogs and they don’t get paid. People write Yelp reviews for restaurants, people write Wikipedia entries. Why don’t people wake up and realize what the internet is? It has made possible, it’s the explosion of self-expression.
Annabel Crabb: Your enterprise looks a bit like a newspaper but it…
Arianna Huffington: Our enterprise is a hybrid. It is a journalistic enterprise with 850 on the payroll, very well-paid. And it’s a blog form and for the blog form people write what they want to write. It’s not like they are forced to write. They are not our writers. We don’t know what someone’s going to blog. We don’t depend on them. They range from very well-established people, politicians, artists, and writers. There are people who are writing because there is something they want to express. When somebody comes to this show, do they get paid? Yeah, they don’t get paid. Is that fair?
Annabel Crabb: Lots of people don’t get paid for things that we used to get paid for.
Arianna Huffington: People come to your show because they want a platform for their views. I go on TV because I want the additional platform for my views. Blogging is the same thing. Anybody who blogs on the Huffington Post or anywhere else owns the right to the blog. They can republish it and a lot of people who blog on the Huffington Post have already produced that on their own Facebook or for their own blog or for another blog. We are not looking for exclusivity. We are offering an additional distribution platform for people who want to use it. And if they don’t want to use it it’s not a problem at all because we have tens of thousands of people clamoring to use it. And because we are not a free for all, and that gives you the sense of prestige. We are not Tumblr where everybody can have their own blog. So I am kind of being intense about it because I want people to understand something that is like, here to stay.
Annabel Crabb: Is this evolution, industrial, I mean one of the discomforting elements of this media revolution for professional writers, journalists and communicators and so on is that everyone is discovering that writing is really fun, and doing it, in some cases, better than us, for free. That’s a panic-inducing moment when you realize that someone is really good at something, is prepared to do it for free. And that kind of undercuts your own ability to make a living.
Arianna Huffington: If they are really good at it, they are going to make money differently.
Annabel Crabb: It’s like Tellus, lots of people like to tell us, but only if you are paid for it.
Arianna Huffington: But I think what happens is for other people who write, and write as well as the story they tell, and whether expressing, for that is incredibly polished, it’s very conversational, that people would turn out to be really good writers. We have so many people who are discovered through their blogs. One of our favorite things is getting calls from publishers saying can I talk to so and so, we love the way they write. We have people who get TV shows based on their blogs, we have a homeless teenager who wrote a beautiful blog. And the Harvard admissions office read it and he is now his third year at Harvard. And that is the magic that the blogs have made possible. And it’s not wholly inconsistent with professional journalism. We want a ten-part series on the life of returning vets that took our media correspondents 9 months to do. But again, everything we do includes bringing in, let’s say one person is researching that and he would agree and say do you have any stories in returning vets in your community, can you send us, so that extend really, what the argument is about.
Annabel Crabb: What about your relationship with your fellow media moguls? Because I guess Rupert Murdoch is your fellow media mogul now, he has many media properties, he has different approaches, his twitter account is slightly more entertaining than yours, and I mean that in a good way. He’s really on the case of these media aggregators who nick-copy, copies of outlets that have a payroll, or pay their journalists, and group them all together, and you are nothing but a terrible parasite, I mean that’s kind of what the Murdoch analysis is, we get it too in public broadcasting because…
Arianna Huffington: You can’t steal stories without failing fair use rules as we call it, I don’t know what the term is here. That is wrong. I think for us, aggregation means linking the creator of the content so that traffic is driven back to them and they can manage their traffic. We get hundreds of requests every day from legacy journalists to link to their stories because it drives eyeballs to their stories. This is the three different ways that we produce Huffington Post. Original reporting, aggregation, and blogs, and comments, like the public commenting on the stories. And incidentally the Wall Street Journal has bloggers they don’t pay. It is now owned by Rupert Murdoch so this is like a red herring, and guinea pig maybe.
Annabel Crabb:: I sense a theme rapidly emerging.
Arianna Huffington: Guinea pigs are very important in my family too. My oldest daughter had a guinea pig and they adored it and then the guinea pig died when she was at school.
Annabel Crabb: My guinea pig got murdered in front of me. Mine was free range.
Arianna Huffington: Wait, mine may beat yours. What happened is that our son said, this is going to be so devastating. I was getting divorced from my husband at the same time, so she was in a vulnerable position I thought because the guinea pig died. So I went and got another guinea pig, I couldn’t say this is the same guinea pig so I said this is the sister of the guinea pig.
Annabel Crabb: Probably technically accurate.
Arianna Huffington: She didn’t really believe it did she, there was something about it and she didn’t really believe it that it was the sister of the guinea pig.
Annabel Crabb: How did we get here? I almost can’t remember how we got to swapping lots of guinea pig stories. I am pretty sure I had a dream like this once. We were talking about guinea pigs and I turned off my microphone. Comments are plenty on Huffington Post. And it creates this vast, multi-directional conversation. Have you ever thought about rolling it back, it’s such a huge amount of content.
Arianna Huffington: Our comments sections are moderated, through 40 human moderators because we want to keep it a civic discourse, but a few months ago we ended it altogether. So now if you want to comment on the Huffington Post, you have to disclose who you are unless a whistleblower or something and you demonstrate to our comment managers with a valid reason, because I think we found out that being able to hide behind anonymity could become vicious, especially towards women. And that in fact, if you don’t have a reason to be anonymous, why wouldn’t you give up that right?
Annabel Crabb: Anonymity is a privilege that many, many people online stand by and defend.
Arianna Huffington: And abuse.
Annabel Crabb: I agree. Have you found that asking people to identify themselves have changed the tone of the discourse?
Arianna Huffington: No. We found that it has made easier for us to be able to make…
Annabel Crabb: In your book the moan, I guess, and lament…The decreasing opportunity for surprise. You told a lovely story of your daughter Isabella, as part of an art school assignment, going to study a painting, “The Fighting Temeraire” by Turner for two hours. She had to stare at this painting for two hours. You found it kind of a transcendental experience, but just that time and the capacity for the surprise of what you find in a painting when you gaze it for so long, is something that you think we miss out on in modern life.
Arianna Huffington: Yes, I think we are always rushing. And one of the things that Isabella found was that after an hour of standing in front of the painting, the guard came up to her and asked her what she was doing. Because this was sort of suspect! People don’t stand in front of paintings for more than thirty seconds! And normally they have an app in front of them to explain what the painting is… So, they might as well stay home. So, that’s another intrusion of technology into the way we absorb the art.
Annabel Crabb: But…The way that we broadcast our details and our preferences to the world every time we interact with the network…I mean, our phones are broadcasting more information to the world about us than never before. I mean, Google customizes itself to your preferences. How are we eliminating the capacity to be surprised or to come across material that we didn’t know we were going to like?
Arianna Huffington: I think that’s a very valid question, because it’s one of the problems with personalization. Because personalization is based on where you are right now, but we’re constantly evolving.
Annabel Crabb: Huffington Post was a pioneer in search engine optimization, where you take advantage of what you sense people are going to be interested in. I mean, there’s an increasing tailor made aspect, isn’t there to multimedia?
Arianna Huffington: What we love to do is to keep adding sections that appear to all our interest. I remember when we launched a section on divorce, for example. I mean, we already had a section on divorce.
Annabel Crabb: Not in the good view section I’m guessing…
Arianna Huffington: Sometimes it should be in the good view section!
Annabel Crabb: Is it true that you divorced your husband because he tried to give you voice training?
Arianna Huffington: No, I was joking about that! He did give me…
Annabel Crabb: He’s a great voice!
Arianna Huffington: He did give me a passive-aggressive present once, of a dialect coach for two weeks. And not just any dialect coach… but Jessica Drake, who is a famous Hollywood dialect coach who taught Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump!
Annabel Crabb: Was that what he was looking for in a wife? Sorry… Guinea pigs! Let’s go back to guinea pigs! I think we’re okay now, aren’t we.
Arianna Huffington: Absolutely!
Annabel Crabb: More like Forrest Gump?
Arianna Huffington: Or just less like me! Where were we?
Annabel Crabb: Oh, we were at your divorce pages!
Arianna Huffington: My divorce page…So, Noah Efron came to me… He was an editor at large at the Huffington Post…He came to me one morning at he said: “You know, we must launch a divorce section, because, you know, marriage comes and goes but divorce is forever!” Now, we launched that divorce section which has been phenomenally successful and the divorce section actually has been co-parenting, because one of the hardest things – I don’t know if any of the people here were divorced, but – that’s one the hardest things! And yet, if we prioritize our children, co-parenting becomes the most important thing.
Annabel Crabb: And you’ve remained on fabulous terms of…
Arianna Huffington: Yes, we have vacations together. And I’m not saying it’s easy…I’m just saying that it was a big priority for us. But, to go back to personalization, I found that every time you go back, I would be really interested in something new. Like sleep seven years ago, after my collapse, it becomes a Huffington Post section.
Annabel Crabb: Tune in and nap out!
Arianna Huffington: I found that the latest science about how sleep is a miracle drug that helps us be more creative, more productive, healthier of course, and yet man especially have tended to despise sleep!
Annabel Crabb: It’s not sleeping as a status symbol!
Arianna Huffington: Yes, it’s a status symbol…It’s a macho thing! I had a dinner recently with a guy who bragged that he had slept four hours the night before.
Annabel Crabb: We had a prime minister like that one!
Arianna Huffington: I hope he is no longer your prime minister!
Annabel Crabb: He is no longer our prime minister! I think he wants to be UN Secretary General! I’m not even joking about that!
Arianna Huffington: Bill Clinton, I quote him in the book, saying that: “The most important mistakes I made in my life, I made when I was tired!”
Annabel Crabb: What?
Arianna Huffington: He did not specify what mistakes! The bottom-line is that when you are sleep deprived and exhausted, you are likely to make more mistakes. And, therefore, you should not be running a country or driving a car, or doing anything important, or saving a guinea pig.
Annabel Crabb: Winston Churchill used to do it and he was also drunk a lot of the time. He did! What happened with the guy at dinner?
Arianna Huffington: Thank you for remembering! You’re such a good interviewer! No, I thought to myself, but I didn’t say that to him. I thought to myself that: “You know what? If you had gotten five hours sleep, this dinner would have been a lot more interesting! And something might have happened!
Annabel Crabb: So, okay! It’s easy to say… It’s easy for you to write because everyone will publish any book that you write, but you wrote a very convincing book about changing the metrics of success. I found the whole book highly convincing. How do we convince the people who are currently working on the old metrics of success – you still think that it’s a sign of productivity and value as an employee to work your ass off around the clock and fall over and hit your head periodically.
Arianna Huffington: First of all, it is changed! We’re now in this amazing time of transition where more and more companies are recognizing the connection between stress reduction practices, taking care of the well-being of their employees, giving them predictable time off… And the bottom line… They’re actually bringing in universities to study and produce data, as Edna just recently did, and they found a 7% reduction of health care cost and 69 minutes per week improvement in productivity! So, then when you have heart for data… you don’t have to have a big heart! You can just say: “Hey! This is good for the company!” I think that’s what’s going to accelerate that. Not to mention, recruitment and retention. I mean, increasingly people are saying, “Why should I go work in a company that thinks working around the clock and being available around the clock is the way to advance your career? Why not go and work for all of these enlighten companies that have already realized that these are not performance enhancement?”
Annabel Crabb: Do you think you would be successful as you are without having…
Arianna Huffington: Thousands of times! Thousands of times! A thousand percent as successful and also having damaged my health less and my relationships and having enjoyed my life infinitely more, because I didn’t have the obnoxious roommate annoying me and all these negative fantasies. I quote Montaigne in the book, who said: “There are many terrible things in my life, but most of them never happened!”
Annabel Crabb: Did you write about that in the book or is it the story… Oh! Ester! That’s exactly the one I was hoping you’d tell! Tell it in a funny voice! Sort of…
Arianna Huffington: That’s the only voice I have! Don’t worry… So, there was this couple and they had just started their relationship and the boyfriend went to buy a sandwich at Subway. Do you have Subway here?
Annabel Crabb: Yes, everywhere!
Arianna Huffington: And in the change he was given there was a dollar bill and on the dollar bill was the name Ester, which is the name of his girlfriend. So, he was kind of surprised! When he went to see his girlfriend, he told her the story and the girlfriend didn’t say much. A couple of years later they were married and after they were married she said to him when he presented her with a dollar bill he framed, that in fact what have happened is that she was kind of asking God: “How do I know that the man I’m dating is the right man that I should marry?” And she thought to herself, “Okay, I’m going to put my name on a dollar bill and if a man gets it, then that would be the right man to marry! But when he told her that he had gotten that bill, she didn’t think that she could tell him the story, because they had just started dating! He would think: “Wow!” And that was like a story that doesn’t have any cosmic significance, but the odds of that happening are so kind of astronomical that you wonder. What are the connections, you know, that are there invisible. And it just gives us a little glimpse that there is such huge mystery in the universe. You don’t have to believe anything more than that, but kind of acknowledging the mystery of the universe puts us in a state of wonder and takes away the kind of prosaic nature of everyday life!
Watch Arianna Huffington talk the power of a good night’s sleep below: