The Brave Ones: Arianna Huffington, Online Media Mogul

everything that's happened in my life the good and the bad has led me to where I am now I saw the conversation moving online I was fascinated by blogs and bloggers I could say that the world was hungry for this conversation the founder game is not just a young person's game I don't ever look back and think oh why did that happen Arianna Huffington she's a force big one big energy we all know how increasingly addicted we are becoming to our phones to social media to games it is truly at this point pivotal to understand the benefits of the type of lifestyle that she is pushing without talking about technology Arianna Huffington is one of the few people whose identifiable just with her first name there's only one Arianna Arianna leads in the wheel if you were to look at this sort of wattage of her rolodex it would light up a city she's connected I mean everybody knows her if she likes you and if you become friends then you know that you've got a friend for life I grew up in Athens Greece my mother my younger sister and I lived in a one-bedroom apartment we felt that the world was a big stage a playground where you can really experiment you can try things we had very little money but my mother had always made us believe in ourselves beyond our circumstances my mother used to say failure is not the opposite of success it's a stepping stone to success we had also an amazing father that I must tell you about he was a journalist very gifted in the written word he fought the Germans in the Second World War through a paper that he was writing and he was caught and taken to the camps for a year and a half he survived the camps in Germany he wasn't Jewish but a lot of Greek people were taken in the Cubs because they were fighting the Nazis he and my mother met after the Second World War and had Ariana and me unfortunately things didn't really work out when my mother was very unhappy with my father ariana encouraged my mother to leave him I remember the conversation she was 12 and she had this wisdom and this insight that what really mattered was that you know we were able to be in an environment that was more peaceful I feel very blessed to have an amazing relationship with my sister we are very close we talk about everything we have no secrets from each other and we are there supporting each other through everything she was an incredible student so my mother found her this amazing teacher this professor the professor Sheldon I remember his name the dictatorship the hunter came over to Greece and you know the army occupied Greece the talk too loud they are blatantly is unhealthy and Athens nowadays it was a very scary time I remember it was an afternoon at 4 o clock Ariana had to go to her lesson and there was outside our door there were soldiers with with machine guns and the radio just announced that nobody's allowed to go out in the street or they'll be shot basically so I see her from our livingroom window she's walking down our street the soldiers say you have to come back you're not allowed out where you going said I have a class at 4 o'clock and I can't miss it it's such a gift to see yourself as a lifelong learner and to constantly be excited about learning she learns on the go and plugs it into that heuristic she walks around with and isn't afraid of taking a different approach to things based on what she's learned and how that fits into her view of the world I was coming home from school and I saw a picture of Cambridge University on the cover of a magazine and something made me really want to go there my mom didn't say don't be ridiculous you don't speak English we don't have money I'm sure it's hard even for English girls to get into Cambridge my mother said let's see how we can make that happen because you know when you were in a little apartment in Athens Greece Cambridge feels like it's the moon how he want to get there what was really special about my mother is throughout this journey of studying to get into Cambridge she never made me feel as though getting into Cambridge was the most important thing she always made me feel that it was a grand adventure and that if we didn't succeed if we didn't get into Cambridge life was still a grand adventure and there would be other things and that she wouldn't love me any less that sense of unconditional loving was the foundation of my childhood and remained the foundation of my life when I first went to the Cambridge Union I was just completely captivated by the spectacle of people's hearts and minds being moved by words and I just wanted to learn to speak and that was hard because I had an even stronger accent than now on Monday there is a debate on the English legal system I persevered just because I really loved it the exact motion is the present English legal system is incompatible with justice and also because again back to my mother it was okay by failure I started as an author accidentally I was debating the changing role of women at the Cambridge Union and British publisher happened to see the debate on television and sent me a letter asking me if I would write a book on the views expressed in the debate and and he took me to lunch and offered me a modest advance so that's how I became an author because the book was a success after that everybody wanted me to write more on women but I feel I had said absolutely everything I knew about women I was 24 I came to the United States when my biography of Maria Callas was published which was my third book the biography ended up being an incredible piece of work Simon & Schuster brought it here and then invited Arianna to come and launch the book here and that was the beginning of our American dream coming true because when she came here she was met with tremendous open doors tremendous I came to the United States because the men I was in love with that I had been with for seven years in my 20s at right after I left Cambridge and didn't want to marry me didn't want to have children and by the time I was thirty I really knew I wanted to have children so I put the Atlantic Ocean between us and moved to New York she's very infectious in her personality and that she has this thing warm charisma about her you know she introduces you to her daughter or to her sister agape and you feel like you become part of the family I have really always wanted to share what I was going through if it could help other people when I went through a divorce with two young children I wanted to talk about the importance of co-parenting my ex-husband and I we're really able to do that it wasn't easy Ariana's biggest dream always as a little girl she always wanted to be married and have children I was very blessed to be able to have two healthy little girls one when I was 38 and one when I was 40 so that was her treasures you can pick a name of like maybe Shannon or Sabrina it's a kid you always think you're the center of attention but I don't even think I knew my mom was like guys busy as she was because we always were the focal point she took us to school from 6 to 12th grade yes our lows drove my girls to school and she's a horrible driver so it's a very stressful experience school in our home were not far from each other so there's not not much that can go wrong and you know the five-minute span it takes to get there they probably told you what a terrible driver I am one day she was picking me my sister and a good friend of ours up from school and she rolls up to school with like a tree on the Prius and the emergency light flashing and it's cracked but this is truly my mom she didn't want to miss picking us up from school the Huffington Post was it was a radical idea that abuse initially were really negative she started with just about a million dollars in financing and the fact that it became such a success that it could sell for 315 million dollars means that she did something right [Music] I wrote 15 books and there are very different topics and behind all these books is kind of my own curiosity my own passion about a subject and going all in the magic of Ariana is that she connects the dots I call her like the goddess Athena which is the the strategist her ability to bring people together to see that oh this one can help this one and put those things together to make something else happen is an absolute talent she brings the people together and then she pulls something else from here and something from there and suddenly you feel she's able to make something happen I met Arianna it felt like divine intervention I was in Vegas we're all good partnerships happen and she was sitting across the table from me at a dinner she looked at me directly in the eye I was like who are you you look interesting and like they say the rest is history we just fell in love we even took a photo that night to mark the occasion of the beginning of our friendship what does he mean by the current circumstance well it was clear that there were conservative Republicans in the caucus Arianna Huffington had really built a name for herself as a political columnist and then she became a political pundit she was everywhere on television you know John I hope you would agree with me that there's been far too much demonizing going on I've always been fascinated by politics in ever since I was a little girl growing up in Athens I would watch political news that were happening in faraway countries that had nothing to do with me we're at a time now where everybody's a political commentator but she was doing it before it seemed sort of like the thing to do and really put herself out there and and tried to make change in every way and wanted to impact the conversation I'm not to say the least a conventional candidate but these are not conventional times when I ran for governor I decided to do it because it was a fairy and you election I run as an independent it was a recall election it was a very short experience less than two months and when I dropped out arnold schwarzenegger became the governor but i learned an enormous amount i I learned a lot especially about the power of digital news at the time the web was an aggregate of some bloggers and you know places for you to go to shop and all of that you know Facebook was like a year old twitter was not yet born I saw the conversation moving online I was fascinated by blogs and bloggers and I saw how vibrant and that community was becoming that was one of the motivations behind launching HuffPost which candle air my co-founder and I launched in May 2005 well if you like surfing the web you have definitely checked out the Huffington Post at one point or another I begged her not to use our last name when she was starting this this site the Huffington Post was it was a radical idea the idea that you could have a front page to the Internet and so you have this real new game changer come in out of nowhere [Music] the Huffington Post was not a traditional newspaper the way we thought of it it was a next generation digital platform which would serve as an aggregator for colonists from all over the world elevating the idea of blogging which at the time was seen as something that people who couldn't get jobs were doing in their parents basement in their pajamas it was this whole crazy new thing she was so ahead of her time they all were and there was so much negative press when it launched the reviews initially were really negative I remember one of them by heart it said the Huffington Post is an unsurvivable failure a year later the person who wrote the review reached out to me and said I was wrong half person has become an indispensable part of the Internet and I'd like to write for you and I said yes because one thing that I always remember my mother taught me is never to hold grudges instantly it became clear that here was a new model it wasn't just drawing traffic he was drawing an audience and so I think that much of old media realized they had to sort of jump into this game and I'll read a quote from The Huffington Post The Huffington Post The Huffington Post The Huffington Post she was a true leader there she loved having you know the platform and allowing people to write about things that they really cared about and what I think really made Huffington Post successful was the fact that it became a social community people could comment some of these blogs would draw thousands of comments she wanted it to be legitimate she wanted to be recognized and it changed the whole industry around News from the beginning we had a very ambitious roadmap of doing original investigative reporting of launching and video streaming of going global so these were all ambitions that we had at the beginning and the main reason I decided to sell her furs to AOL in 2011 was because I was going to have much more funding to be able to do these things at once AOL Huffington Post purchased causing big moves in the media space she started with just about a million dollars in financing and the fact that it became such a success that it could sell for a three hundred and fifteen million dollars means that she did something right I love talking about the fact that I launched the Huffington Post at 55 so the founder game is not just a young person's game I think that you know in this era of everyone wanting to be super successful when they're 25 she didn't do that until she was in her mid 50s it really shows who my mom is that you know at the height of that success she said this I want to be doing something else she filled out hit her head bunch of stitches near her eye I had zero intention in 2014 to leave half first I loved it like a third child we realized that there was nothing wrong with her health that it was really a burnout and stress [Music] two years into building HuffPost by then a divorced mother of two teenage daughters I had really bought into the collective delusion the way to succeed the way to be super mom and super founder was to burn out she was working 24/7 actually that particular day she'd come back from a speech she was on a red-eye and she went to CNN to do an interview and when she came back she went straight to her desk processing you know her paperwork and the emails and she got up and she collapsed she fell down hit her head you know really clocked herself had a big gash they're a bunch of stitches near her eye and she went to the doctor to figure out what had happened and no one could point to any specific thing that was wrong with her over the course of the visitations with the doctors we realized that there was nothing wrong with her health that it was really a burnout and stress that was the wake-up call that was the moment when I realized that not just I but a whole world had bought into this delusion and that the consequences were really catastrophic both in terms of our health our performance our relationships and we now see increasingly our mental health I think after her collapse I think she became very interested in how can you be in the world but not get completely burned out it doesn't have to be one of the other and that's when it she realized that this was a an epidemic in the country showing her own vulnerability showing where she made a mistake and it was a mistake you know and what she was doing that had been a physicalness day I mean that's the ultimate vulnerability so part of my sense of mission is to stop people from having their wake-up calls and you know Becky a lot of the wake-up calls are much worse she realized that now there was a mission to bring this awareness to other people and that's when she wrote thrived redefining success the third metric I was in Hangzhou in China speaking at Jack Mars first Women's Conference and I spoke about thrive and I spoke about all these issues and the dangers of the way our cultures globally were fueled by stress and burnout her ability to spot a trend in the future and drive that trend before it becomes mainstream is him incredible Jack Ma said to me if I were you I would leave the Huffington Post start a company based on the views that you expressed in your speech and in your book then he ended by saying and if you decide to do that and invest in it and at the time I really thought he was crazy I had zero intention in 2014 to leave half first I really thought it was going to be my last act I loved it like a third child but it was also he had planted the seed I think the fact that she's been able to change and evolve over time is absolutely impressive creating her company and then stepping down from that company and creating another one it's it's it's amazing by 2016 I decided to actually wanted to do that I thought at first I would do it as a carve-out from my rhyming HuffPost but as I started raising money and Jack my notes I actually did invest I realized that I wanted to do it a hundred percent tribal is a behavior change technology and media company we have this perception you know business certainly does that human beings are machines and you want to try to minimize the downtime and get the most productivity that you can out of them and what she discovered was this is a myth you can and indeed you should you probably must focus on the health and well-being of a workforce in order to achieve a highly performing productive organization what Arianna Huffington is trying to do with thrive global is help companies and individuals understand that if they can take care of themselves and make sure that they're healthy they will be more productive at work she came in and ran for all of our staff a session on meditation with her sister agape one of our staff members actually put up his hand and said he needed a new bed and she bought him a new bed that's what's so crazy about this is that when your doctor told you that you should get eight hours of sleep and drink a lot of water what I need eight hours for Arianna had told me and I was like it's time to go to bed let's go to sleep right now [Laughter] as what thrives trying to do is take all this science and all this understanding and move it into the real world where it goes into practice where it actually helps human beings all the changes recommend our micro steps meaning small incremental daily steps that lead to big changes a big eye-opener was I was out to dinner with my brother-in-law and I realized I left my phone in his car I couldn't email anybody I couldn't go to sleep cuz I was all stressed out when I got home and I had nowhere to serve and so that kind of realization that I was absolutely addicted to my phone you know that was an ariana moment when you start to see you know the real her really is beautiful she cares she cares about each interaction and she cares about the global picture ariana is doing this because she wants to make change but the mission is to help people realize that there is another life another way to live it is possible to be rested and productive and successful you know thrive is risky you know going in and telling corporations I want to change the behavior of your employees and it's in your best interest to do that and we'll show that is radical and she took it on when people are willing to put their arm around you and say you know what I know what you're trying to do I know what you're trying to achieve and I'm willing to back you it's extraordinary and Arianna is one of those rare people that's willing to give you the love support care wisdom guidance that you need the thrive movement has given her sort of a freedom to be able to do more she didn't need to do thrive she was all set but you know here she has gone off on other adventure go to admire her for that [Music] you talk about a wonderful life well she's a life of wonder first of all a describer is the sister that I love so much we've always had each other's back and we have each other's hearts to care for I've learned so much from my failures I've learned so much from the most challenging moments in my life sometimes I just felt I would just close my eyes and jump she's fearless and strong and driven and brilliant I think my mom is a really interesting mix because I think she's so warm on one hand and so forceful on the other hand and he's very very first to be able to operate in those spaces I think there are areas of my life where I've been fearless but I define fearlessness as not the absence of fear by doing something even while you're afraid you you

Channel: CNBC International TV

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Keywords: CNBC international, arianna huffington, arianna huffington documentary, arianna huffington interview 2019, arianna huffington interview cnbc, arianna huffington cnbc, arianna huffington 2019, arianna huffington wisdom, arianna huffington thrive, arianna huffington thrive global, arianna huffington story, arianna huffington how to succeed, arianna huffington success, arianna huffington success story, arianna huffington leadership, arianna huffington biography

Id: Bau4_O9hc1c

Length: 26min 0sec (1560 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 01 2019