The following is a conversation with Arianna Huffington. She's the founder of the Huffington Post in 2005 and the founder and CEO of Thrive Global in 2016. She's the author of 15 books, most recent to being Thrive and Sleep Revolution, both international bestsellers. These books explore how to both work hard and keep a lifestyle that seeks well-being, wisdom and wonder.

We got a chance to sit down for this quick chat after a conference we both spoke at and got right into the big topics of mortality, obsession, meaning, happiness and love. This conversation is part of the Take It Uneasy podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman spelled F-R-I-D.

And now here's my conversation with Arianna Huffington. You tell a story of getting recognition for your first book, The Female Woman, when you were 23 and sitting in a hotel and wondering is this all there is? The old question of meaning and purpose. So now, just a couple of few years later, let me ask from your perspective now, what is the purpose?

What is the meaning of life? - Well, if you believe as every major philosophy and every major spiritual tradition argues that life does not end with death, but that there is another dimension of consciousness, then clearly a full life, a meaningful life includes exploring that dimension. And for me, that exploration has been part of my life from my teenage years.

I went to Shantaniketan University in India when I was 17 to study comparative religion. And I always wanted to understand what life was about because I never believed that all this whole experiment ends with each individual death. So that's for me at the heart of my life. I mean, I've always been very active with books, with The Huffington Post, now with Thrive Global, but that's been an underlying dimension that I think gives real meaning to life.

- So mortality is a really interesting question at the core of all of these philosophies. So you mentioned also memento mori, the Latin remember death, the idea that reflecting on one's own mortality puts things into perspective. - Yes. - In a tough question, perhaps, perhaps not, do you often think about your own mortality and what perspective does that help you gain?

- Yes, I think about it a lot. And it does give me perspective and it does help me focus on the things that matter to me in terms of my children, my close friends, the impact I want to have through what we're doing at Thrive. I have zero interest in what is known as legacy because since I don't think life ends with death, I'm just much more interested in what happens to my soul and then what happens to my legacy on earth.

- Do you have a sense of what happens after you die, of soul, is it more of a feeling or do you have a more concrete sense spiritually? How do you see the world or what happens to your soul to whoever the heck you were while you were here on earth?

What does that become in time? - So my sense is that who we are, our personality, the body, the mind is like a car that we rented and we return at the airport and get on a plane. - And go to another city and rent another car? - No, well rent another car if you believe in reincarnation depending on where you are in your state of evolution.

But definitely that what survives is the soul. And that's why how we live our lives and the choices we make and how we treat others is so central to what happens after our death. - All of those elements you believe kind of feed the soul. - Yes. - So you've also mentioned that on the harsh, challenging part of life that failure is an essential part of life.

So what may be a major failure that stands out to you for yourself? One of the toughest ones for you psychologically to have bounced back from if you ever did bounce back from? - Yes, well first of all, I don't think there is an if. I don't think there is a single successful person who has not failed along the way.

I mean, I challenge you to find one. If you do, let me know. But in my experience, everybody has failed along the way. And I think it would be great if successful people talk more about their failures. The difference is resilience and how quickly do you get discouraged. In my case, actually, probably the hardest failure was when I was 28.

And my second book, you mentioned my first book, which did very well. My second book, which was on the crisis in political leadership in the West, was rejected by 27 publishers, you know, one after the other after the other. And by that time, I had run out of money.

I had been living off the proceeds of my first book. And I remember walking kind of depressed down St. James Street in London where I live and thinking, well, maybe my first book was just a fluke and I'm not really a writer and I have to go get a real job.

And then I saw Barclays Bank in the corner and I walked in and asked to see the manager and asked the manager for what the Brits call an overdraft, which is a loan. And I had nothing, I had no assets. And for some reason, the manager, whose name is Ian Bell, gave it to me.

And that kind of changed my life because it made it possible for me to keep things together for another 13 rejections. And at that point, I got an acceptance and I sent Ian Bell a holiday card every year. And he's a little bit like, you know, in fairy tales, when the hero or the heroine gets lost in a dark forest and suddenly a helpful animal comes out and guides them out of the forest.

Well, sometimes helpful animals in our lives are in the form of a bank manager. They take funny disguises. - A modern fairy tale. So I spoke with Elon Musk recently on the podcast and you've had a friendly exchange with him on Twitter last year about work hours and sleep.

So I, myself, as an engineer, I'm obsessed with the work I do. I keep a schedule closer to one that Elon does, I would say. Plus I'm Russian, so I believe suffering is good for the soul. So how does a singular obsession in the sort of the turmoil of innovation fit into a lifestyle you discuss and thrive?

One focused on wellbeing, wisdom, and wonder. So how do you score that with like singular obsession? - Oh, I think singular obsessions are wonderful. All my favorite people are addictive and obsessive personalities. But if you're obsessed about whatever it is you're looking to achieve, whether it's in research or electric cars or going to the moon or anything, you need to look at the science and the data that shows that you're going to be more creative and more productive and more likely to achieve the results of your obsession if you actually take some time to recharge.

That's really what we're talking about. - So your senses, so science and data, these things you talk about, are things of rational people. So you think the impossible can be achieved by rational people or does madness play a role? - Madness plays a role. But also looking at the results needs to play a role.

And listen, I have huge admiration for Elon Musk and I wrote the open letter to him with that in mind, kind of lovingly and admiringly. And helping him, I hope, look at the laws of human energy. Because if you violate the laws of human energy, it's like violating the laws of gravity.

There are consequences and he's facing the consequences. He's being distracted from his amazing obsession. - And you think there's a way to do better? - Absolutely, I mean, I think he should look at what happened. The results of tweeting in the middle of the night because his cognitive impairment makes him do things which he knows he should not be doing.

And ending up having to step down as chairman, pay 20 million, having to go to court to deal with the SEC. Who needs that when you are building something amazing for humanity? - You think a more balanced sleep cycle? - It's not really about balance. I hate that term.

Because I agree with you that there's no balance when you are trying to achieve something big. I mean, there are times when I've pulled all-nighters. There are times when people at Thrive have pulled all-nighters to ship a product. In fact, we make that very clear when we hire people.

We're not a nine to five operation where you just balance things. But you need to, after that, take time to recharge. And the faster you do it, the more effective you're going to be. We call it Thrive time. So let's say you pulled an all-nighter, take some time the next day to recharge before your exhaustion becomes cumulative.

Either you do stupid things or you fall sick, or all the things that we are seeing around us. - Catches up to you. On another topic, you have evolved throughout the years, your political views from, maybe you can correct me, but from right of center to left of center.

Can you take me through your journey of political thought and how you see the evolution of the greater political landscape along with your evolution throughout the last several decades? - So my evolution was from being a kind of Republican that's practically extinct now, kind of pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-gun control Republican.

(both laughing) To someone who realized that my understanding of the role of government was limited. I really was a Republican because I thought that the private sector would step up and address inequalities and the need to take care of people at the lower socioeconomically ranks. And I saw firsthand this wasn't going to happen and that you needed the raw power of government appropriations to be able to achieve that.

So it was my shift in my understanding of the role of government that led to my shift in political views. I think what's happening right now, we're at this moment when the chickens are coming home to roost. Like a lot of problems that we've seen coming, that we've been discussing at endless conferences.

I don't know how many conferences I've been at with titles like inclusive capitalism, the dangers of growing inequalities. We talked about them, but didn't really do anything about them. And so the results are different forms of right-wing or left-wing populism. And it's a very serious moment, but I don't think it's going to be solved by living in a perpetual state of outrage.

- So you've also launched this incredible platform in 2005 of Huffington Post, HuffPost as it's now called. What impact do you think it had over the past 14 years on the nature of public discourse? So if you look at what that discourse is today, the divisiveness, what impact does the digitization of our conversation, the online, of Twitter, and then of more journalistic type of content like Huffington Post contains, what do you think it has done for our discourse?

Was it been a positive thing? Was it been a catalyst for the divisiveness? Or did it simply reveal the divisiveness that was latent there already? What do you think? - Well, the Huffington Post helped democratize the conversation. It helped elevate what blogging was. When we launched the Huffington Post in 2005, blogging was dismissed as something that people who couldn't get a job were doing in their parents' basements.

And because we brought in people who could have written for the New York Times like Walter Cronkite and Nora Ephron and Larry David, we elevated the opportunity afforded to all of us to express ourselves. But we had very, very careful guidelines. So for example, everything was curated. We did not allow ad hominem comments.

At some point before I left the Huffington Post, I even ended anonymous comments altogether because it was becoming too hard to police them. So from the beginning, I wanted to democratize the conversation side by side with investigative journalism and all the things that I loved and honored. But at the same time, I saw the dangers of the toxicity that can infiltrate these conversations if they're not monitored and if there is no real curation.

- So one of the core things that emerged from the Huffington Post is, I mean, there is a little bit of a viewpoint underlying it, it is left of center. - I don't call it left. There's definitely a viewpoint. In fact, we called our journalism beyond right and left.

I think the right-left divisions, the way of looking at the world in terms of right and left is incredibly obsolete. Being concerned about growing inequalities is not a left-wing position. If you are somebody who cares about law and order, you should care about that, unless you want the country to be turned into a banana republic with rich people living behind gates with security guards.

If you care about climate change, does that mean you're on the left or does it mean that you want to preserve the planet? So I think by looking at the world in right or left, we're simply polarizing the conversation. - But, so that's a beautiful idea and I share it, but nevertheless, it seems that there's a strong gravitational field that pulls people into left and right.

And no matter what, they will place different venues into those polars. So it seems that in the public perception, Huffington Post kind of gets into the left and there's these opposing forces, Breitbart and so on, that get placed somehow into the right. And then there's the red team and the blue team.

I guess my question is, do you see, do you notice this? And do you see a path forward in the coming decade in the era of our current president of maybe bringing us back together and having a healthy disagreement on the issues as opposed to having teams and tribes of red and blue?

- I absolutely do. I think there are two things that are essential in order to achieve that. One is a reverence for facts. - Hmm. - You and I have the right to our own opinions, but we don't have the right to our own set of facts. - Yes.

- So that's number one. And number two is to end the view of journalists that Jay Rosen has described as the view from nowhere. Like I think climate change is not a matter of opinion. So a lot of journalists feel that their position is to have one person who thinks climate change is real and another person who thinks it's not, and their job is to stay in the middle and play Pontius Pilate.

To me, that's like not at all great journalism. And the Huffington Post definitely had a viewpoint, as you said. - Mm-hmm. - But it was a viewpoint based on facts. - And I actually recommend that people listen to your podcast with especially conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson that kind of emphasizes, it talks about science and the importance of that people have in terms of the seriousness amongst our leaders towards science as a thing that you shouldn't politicize.

Well, last question. How do you balance love and ambition? Thinking about your work with Thrive, this obsession towards whether it's building electric cars, going to Mars, building Huffington Post, obsession with your work life, and a genuine deep obsession with your family or people in your life that you love.

How do you balance that time and energy? - Well, let me give you an example. Right now, Thrive Global is an obsession, ending the stress and burnout epidemic is our mission. And I see it as having a huge impact on our health, on our mental health, and on our performance.

But at the same time, I have two daughters that I adore. And everybody in my office knows that when I get a call from one of my daughters at any point, I will take it. And that they are a priority. That doesn't mean that I can't also be obsessed about what we're doing and our growth.

I think this is sort of false dichotomies because I think when we nurture the part of us that is about love, that is about connection, we also nurture the deeper parts of our humanity. And it's from those parts that wisdom and creativity come. - So more love will strengthen all parts of your life and improve productivity in all aspects.

- Exactly. And interestingly enough, Jack Ma, hardly a wilting violet in the obsession department, said in Davos last year that what's going to win the future is not just IQ or even EQ, emotional intelligence, but LQ, the love quotient. Which is something surprising coming from Jack Ma. But I think it's part of the shift that's happening where we recognize that while AI and machine learning are going to take over huge parts of our life and destroy many jobs, the things that AI is not going to be able to do are the distinctly human things.

And loving is one of them. - And so I think it's a beautiful place to end on is love. Arianna, thank you so much for talking today. - Thank you so much. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)