Arianna Huffington: Why Willpower Fails — and What to Do Instead - Transcript
Arianna Huffington
Seven percent 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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Ariana Huffington is a global entrepreneur. Founder of the Huffington Post
Arianna Huffington
and Thrive Global.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Solutions are earned at the bottom of pill bottle.
Arianna Huffington
Nobody should be having their legs amputated because of diabetes, and hundred fifty thousand 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?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Before we jump into today's episode, I wanna 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 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 Hyman Hive, for live q and a's 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 at doctorhymen.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget you can enjoy every episode of this podcast ad free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap try free to start your seven day free trial. Well, Ioannis, 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 gonna be also using digital coaches.
Arianna Huffington
My goal, and I know your goal, is to democratize this coaching. Mhmm. You know, we don't want just to reach the people who are already interested in this. We want to reach everyone.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.
Arianna Huffington
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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.
Arianna Huffington
And the problem with a lot of health advice is that it's generic.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Arianna Huffington
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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, one of the things 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 Your story is great, you can share it but 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.
Arianna Huffington
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 02/2007, 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.
Yeah. So I started covering these issues pretty exhaustively. You know, my board kind of complained when I launched a dedicated sleep section
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Right.
Arianna Huffington
In 02/2007.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Arianna Huffington
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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.
Arianna Huffington
And and then, you know, 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. Yeah.
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 it's quite a hard decision to leave behind something successful Yeah. 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 pioneering work you've done is really becoming mainstream.
Dr. Mark Hyman
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. Yes. Where we eat, the way we move or don't, the lack of sleep or poor sleep, affects seventy million people's stress.
Arianna Huffington
Connection.
Dr. Mark Hyman
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 your and your connections and and that's what you focused on. And 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.
Arianna Huffington
Yes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right? Can you kinda pack that for us?
Arianna Huffington
So first of all, let us kind of make it very clear that everything we're saying about the impact of of behaviors on health outcomes is science based. This is not just like some warm and fuzzy wellness thing. Science of behavior very clear. Science of health. Mhmm.
That 7% of our health outcomes are dependent on our genes. Mhmm. But our daily behaviors impact, if we're healthy more than not just more than our genes, like 10 times more than our genes, more than medical care if we're healthy. Of course, if we're sick and need surgery
Dr. Mark Hyman
Rescue medicine, I call it rescue medicine.
Arianna Huffington
Then you you are living in the best country in the world for a sick health care system, but not a health care 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. Yeah. A lot of people don't leave their couches. Right. 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, nineteen sixty five, forty two percent of Americans Smoke. Yeah. Smoking. Yeah.
Now it's twelve percent.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's not too much, but yeah.
Arianna Huffington
Should be zero, but it's 12%.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Big change.
Arianna Huffington
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 Volpe at Wharton. And the key is to break it down into micro steps that we call too small to fail. Mhmm. Which is the exact opposite of New Year's resolutions.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Too big.
Arianna Huffington
New Year's resolutions. You know, I'm going to go to the gym an hour a day, I'm going to give up all sugar, And within two weeks, eighty percent of people give up their New Year resolutions. They feel like a failure Mhmm. And it's harder to get back on the horse.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Arianna Huffington
We want to build success muscles. Mhmm. We start really, really small. We have a lot of, say, sixty second resets, we call them, to reduce stress. Mhmm.
For sleep, you know, my favorite microstep is turn off your phone and at least one night a week, we don't say every night, charge it outside your room. Yeah. You'll see the difference. Yeah. The phone, you know, it's not really a phone.
Nobody calls anybody anymore.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's true.
Arianna Huffington
You know, it's a nuclear weapon that has all your projects and your Yeah. Problems, and you want to separate yourself
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Arianna Huffington
From it. Again, with food, we do a lot around swaps. We are working in Arkansas with Alice Walton and
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Arianna Huffington
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 Laissez Reveal and they have some they have a snack, know, is it as good as an apple or an orange?
No. But you gotta start somewhere. Somewhere. Yeah. And you can't make the perfect the enemy of the good.
That's Or beginning somewhere. That's right. At least the cheetah the swamp that lesser evil makes doesn't have dyes. Yeah. 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 judgment. You know, we're all works in progress. Yeah. And people have been so judged.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm. And they judge themselves.
Arianna Huffington
And they judge themselves. And they feel judged by the world. That's 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 in
Dr. Mark Hyman
your maps. If you make a wrong turn doesn't say you stupid idiot, why did you go that way?
Arianna Huffington
Exactly. Exactly.
Dr. Mark Hyman
You should just make a turn at the next left.
Arianna Huffington
Yeah, well let's recalculate. Alright,
Dr. Mark Hyman
reroute it.
Arianna Huffington
Let's reroute, let's start again. Yeah. 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, we've worked with a lot of associates who've had, you know, a lot of problems, prediabetes, 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
Dr. Mark Hyman
Which having is the the most powerful medicine by the way.
Arianna Huffington
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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. 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 were my relationship with my husband is better.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Arianna Huffington
I can now take my baby up the steps. You know, they are like human stories.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right. Yeah.
Arianna Huffington
You know, they are not just focusing on the the medical result Yeah. Or the weight. It was their life. Yeah. 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's a lot of suffering in the world that we can't do something about right You know, that's not in our hands. But this is in our hands.
Dr. Mark Hyman
A 100%.
Arianna Huffington
We can actually change the suffering. What got me so passionate about it, actually, at the next level of passion, there's 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, a 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 hundred and fifty thousand people have their legs or toes amputated every year.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.
Arianna Huffington
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. Yeah. Surgery, prosthetics, complications, infections.
No wonder, you know, our
Dr. Mark Hyman
Health care bills are high.
Arianna Huffington
Care bill is so high now, $4,900,000,000,000.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Getting worse every year. It's true. And I think we live in a world where our healthcare system doesn't really provide healthcare, provides sick care. And what you're talking about is a platform, in fact, Global and now through Thrive AI Health, where you're actually being able to support people to make the changes. What you said before was really important about behavior change.
In community, it's a lot easier. Chris Stakis from Harvard, he's done a lot of the key work around this by looking at the Framingham data, which is the biggest dataset 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 the genetics were less important than your social network. And so when I heard that, I was like, Wait a minute.
We call these diseases non communicable diseases, but that's not 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 AI 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 why these stories are so important. Because the point isn't to not be able to take your medication or have diabetes.
The point is to be able to live more fully.
Arianna Huffington
Absolutely. And be
Dr. Mark Hyman
that's able why show up in your life.
Arianna Huffington
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?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, did. Good memory. I love pathological optimists.
Arianna Huffington
Think I'm a pathological optimist too, a kind of, you know, Greek optimist, American optimist.
Dr. Mark Hyman
But the good news is optimists live longer even if they're wrong.
Arianna Huffington
Okay, but we are going
Dr. Mark Hyman
to be right. This
Arianna Huffington
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 we work with want to get directly involved. They don't want just to pay their insurance bill because
Dr. Mark Hyman
They're seeing it doesn't work.
Arianna Huffington
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 are sick, how can you be productive?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. There's actually a study on this that presenteeism, which is being at the job but not on the job, accounts for $2,000,000,000,000 in lost productivity globally. So when you feel like crap, you don't perform, 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.
Arianna Huffington
So that's one big force. The other is that that people are now much more engaged in their own health. As you know, over 60% of people, you know, Google or chat GPT things online. They want to be empowered. Mhmm.
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. Mark Hyman
Doctor. Isgod era has passed, I think.
Arianna Huffington
Yes. I think it has passed. And you know, they are great doctors and thank God for them. But also, one of our mottoes is health is also what happens between doctor visits.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Arianna Huffington
You know, the idea that you go and have a an executive physical once a year and that's it. Yeah. It's like, what are you doing every day? Are you sleeping? What are you eating?
Are you stressed out? Are you exercising? These are now the questions that people are more engaged 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, design of the experience, in healthcare.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. We're good at making people addicted to everything except their health.
Arianna Huffington
Except their health. I was talking with Neil Lindsay who who runs Health at Amazon. And I said, you know, you talk about being customer obsessed. When it comes to health, you know, we're like customer hoster. Yeah.
Yeah. At best, customer indifferent. Yeah. Now, there is that recognition that we need to engage people in their own health. And that includes making everything kind of delightful.
You know, I was showing you the cookbook that we published. Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
This one here.
Arianna Huffington
Which basically, we publish to give it away for free. It's not like a profit center. Mhmm. Because when we tell people about eating healthier, which involves beginning to learn and enjoy cooking Mhmm. 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 and then we made the book delightful with pictures and easy recipes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Arianna Huffington
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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, you have to show them how.
Arianna Huffington
But you have to show them how and you have to to 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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
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 how do we do this? What are the the mechanisms by which, you know, Thrive and Thrive Global and soon Thrive AI Health is gonna be helping people make those changes?
Arianna Huffington
So many ways. You know, 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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Are you using real life coaches?
Arianna Huffington
Real life coaches, yeah. And we work in multiple countries, know, 12 languages, everything is translated, which is so easy now with AI. And that's both like executives and contact center operators. You know, we've had incredible success with contact centers, which is very interesting because there aren't many professions where you are regularly yelled at.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Arianna Huffington
So the levels of stress are through the roof, including attrition, health problems. So we developed this sixty second reset, 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. Yeah. There isn't anybody who doesn't have stress in their lives.
But cumulative stress is avoidable. And in sixty to ninety 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 to bring them to the contact center operator's dashboard. Some of them are super sophisticated, like voice recognition, when you know somebody's very stressed.
Some some of them are super simple, like if a call was longer than twenty minutes or elevated to a supervisor. Yeah. 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. Yeah.
You know, we can't even do you know that we have served sometimes a sixty two second reset and we've been asked to shorten it to sixty seconds? Because it's all about handle time and Yeah. And my favorites, I mean, they're amazing data that we've collected. Yeah. 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?
Yeah. And 78% Wow. Shows the resets. And the reason is that if people are given a five minute break, what do they do?
Dr. Mark Hyman
They've gone
Arianna Huffington
through sugar,
Dr. Mark Hyman
they go online.
Arianna Huffington
Or they go online and they doomscroll the news or they go on social media and compare our messy lives with somebody's highlight reel.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Arianna Huffington
And they feel more stressed. While this is like designed to help you connect with something deeper in yourself, you know. Yeah. 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, we've had this conversation many times.
I profoundly believe that every human being, whether they call themselves spiritual or atheist or anything in between, has this center, this place of peace, strength, wisdom, harmony, we all have it. It's our birthright.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Most of us is locked away pretty hard.
Arianna Huffington
Most of us is locked away. Dick Natham 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 unbearing it.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's amazing. I mean, I think most of us don't realize how close we are to feeling good.
Arianna Huffington
With just love some
Dr. Mark Hyman
small, simple steps in every day and they get cumulative, it creates a cascade effect.
Arianna Huffington
That's a great day. I'm going to endlessly quarantine You on
Dr. Mark Hyman
could steal it.
Arianna Huffington
How close we are to feeling good. Isn't that sort of a wonderful thought?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. See it all the time when you just guide people into how to 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 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 and they and they see the results and then they lean in more.
Arianna Huffington
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 how do they move? What do they like to do? Their calendars if they give us access. So as much information as possible.
Dr. Mark Hyman
You want my calendar?
Arianna Huffington
Calendar. Oh my god. I need to take hold of your calendar and feed you lots of resets between meetings.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Don't think I need it.
Arianna Huffington
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. Yeah. Easy.
And you can create it on our platform in five minutes with pictures of the people you love, your wife. I don't know. Do you have a dog?
Dr. Mark Hyman
I do have a dog now. I just got a dog.
Arianna Huffington
Oh, Six months old. What's the dog's name?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Lenny. Lenny.
Arianna Huffington
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 sixty seconds of what you love about your life.
Maybe during a moment when your life sucks. Yeah. You know, we all have those moments during the day. Yeah. So how can we help you get out of that quickly?
Dr. Mark Hyman
And, you know, the the the power of AI is that it's so intelligent and that it has a 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 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 all these incredible applications that were never possible before to help guide people.
Arianna Huffington
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 and as you know, I'm talking with your team about also starting this program called Know Your Numbers.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.
Arianna Huffington
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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Here we go, I'm curious.
Arianna Huffington
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 a one c.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.
Arianna Huffington
So you know, obviously there are tons
Dr. Mark Hyman
of You had somebody good advising you.
Arianna Huffington
But if you can know these numbers, and we are friends, so we'll say how are you doing Mark? And how are you doing Ariana? And then you check them, and you see the trend lines. Yeah. 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.
Don't access,
Dr. Mark Hyman
the doctor can't track it over time, you're looking at
Arianna Huffington
And the whole thing is over time. Yeah. That's the key. What are you doing and how are you how are you monitoring how your behaviors are affecting your health. In the same way we do I'm wearing an aura ring, you know.
Dr. Mark Hyman
The nice one.
Arianna Huffington
The nice one, yes. They don't make them anymore. They did a partnership with Gucci Oh. 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
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Arianna Huffington
On your body. And and I prefer how I feel. Exactly. It's not a sacrifice because 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 it's the kind of data you can collect through an Oura Ring or a hoop or whatever you are wearing.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And that and that really helps you understand the impact of your choices on how you feel. At the end of the day, for me at least, 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 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. I think, 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 gonna 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 knew Paul Farmer, think. He's an incredible man who helped reverse TB and AIDS in 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 and essentially, you're creating a sort of a 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 10,000,000 or however many we need in America, it's a it's a big lift and it's very expensive. But now with technology
Arianna Huffington
Yes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
We can actually humanize That's
Arianna Huffington
what I'm most excited about with AI. You know, when we talk about AI in health, most people tend to think of, oh, it's going to accelerate drug development. A remote
Dr. Mark Hyman
radiology scan.
Arianna Huffington
Or It's going to give us, you know, better diagnostic tools. And these are all very important considerations. But I think the mother lode, the most important thing is how it's going to help us change behaviors. Yeah. Because that's at the heart of the chronic disease epidemic.
Dr. Mark Hyman
A 100%.
Arianna Huffington
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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Arianna Huffington
And build that success muscle around what they're doing, and see the impact it has and feel constantly supported and not judged, it it's going to be revolutionary. And that's what I'm most excited about. You 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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
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 sort of uses it as virtual AI therapist. I was like, wow.
That's really interesting. I hadn't thought of that, you know.
Arianna Huffington
I think what people love about AI therapists is that they don't feel judged.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Arianna Huffington
I like AI therapists. I don't like AI friends.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. No.
Arianna Huffington
You know, the idea that people don't have enough friends so they're gonna have bought us friends, I don't like that at all.
Dr. Mark Hyman
But if you're learning how to deal with a difficult situation Yeah.
Arianna Huffington
That's it's a medical problem or a human problem, you can be helped. But human connections cannot be replaced with AI connections.
Dr. Mark Hyman
One thing I wanna 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.
Arianna Huffington
Yes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
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 that the micro steps add up to macro steps and Yes. Bigger changes over
Arianna Huffington
And you 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, you know. People have lost hundreds of pounds cumulatively and put them back and lost them and keep them. So what micro steps 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
Dr. Mark Hyman
Or adversely affect your relationships.
Arianna Huffington
Exactly. But even if we take food as the central determining factor of a lot of diseases.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Arianna Huffington
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. Yeah. And if you don't move from your couch, that's going to affect what you eat too. Yeah.
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, you know, and
Dr. Mark Hyman
eat That's gonna be friend, right.
Arianna Huffington
So that's I think what we are discovering that even when you make food primary, need to surround it with what you are doing with the other behaviors. Mhmm. 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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah.
Arianna Huffington
It's like
Dr. Mark Hyman
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, because it was a cake there, and we, like, both were pretending to eat this, you know, very big piece
Arianna Huffington
of But we didn't eat it.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Didn't eat it.
Arianna Huffington
So then basically what happens is that if I had tried to give up all sugar
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.
Arianna Huffington
When I started on this journey, I would have failed. Yeah. 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 Braderson.
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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Cheese.
Arianna Huffington
Like if you left me alone, I could live on cheese. You know, forget you can take everything That would
Dr. Mark Hyman
be the worst thing.
Arianna Huffington
No no, for me, again, because I've I've done all these tests genetically, I'm what they call a high absorber.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Of cholesterol.
Arianna Huffington
Of cholesterol.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, fat, yeah.
Arianna Huffington
So you know, you may eat cheese and and absorb 10, I observe 90%. Yeah. So you know, it was not working for my genes. That's the 7% of genes, right? Yep.
So she gave me like honestly probably 40 substitutes. You know, plant based, nut based Yeah. Cheeses that didn't have the same impact. Yeah. And I hated like 90% of them.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's what was gonna say.
Arianna Huffington
I found, you know, one or two that I liked.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Arianna Huffington
And it's like the eighty twenty rule. Yeah. Occasionally if I want to have a treat, I'll have a piece of great Parmesan cheese Yeah. Or feta cheese Yeah. But it's really it's what you do chronically that matters.
That's It's not what you do occasionally.
Dr. Mark Hyman
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 and I've seen you in years, I don't know what you're doing, but like it's working.
Arianna Huffington
Well, I think it's the food, which now, you know, through again, it didn't happen overnight. You've known me for over twenty years. So you've seen progressively
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Arianna Huffington
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. Right. That's right. But now I love it.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Arianna Huffington
You know, got into my daily strength training, and here's also the other thing I did. Habit stacking is one of the things
Dr. Mark Hyman
Habit stacking.
Arianna Huffington
Habit stacking.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Tell us about that.
Arianna Huffington
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 or their favorite shows, I made this rule for myself, 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 Mhmm. Or my elliptical
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's good.
Arianna Huffington
Or on my machines. Yeah. 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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's good. That's a good habit stacking.
Arianna Huffington
And you love it because you are like, some people like music. Whatever it is, just don't make it so hard on yourself. Mhmm. See how can you make it easier because we are willpower is a diminishing resource. Yep.
A lot of people think they're going to get healthier through willpower.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's be fun. That's You be
Arianna Huffington
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 don't move. 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. I'm religious at home.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah.
Arianna Huffington
Then I would travel.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And your schedule's full and you gotta early.
Arianna Huffington
So what
Dr. Mark Hyman
do do?
Arianna Huffington
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 and 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? Yeah. You know, how do we make it available to millions of people? Because right now, the 1% is actually in on this.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. They're doing it.
Arianna Huffington
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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Because it's mean, 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 her body heal, as opposed to making them sick. I mean, this is what most people are doing. 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 the food industry wants us to believe that it's difficult, it's time consuming, it's expensive How much I have many
Arianna Huffington
do you hear that?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And it's just propaganda. And and they're they're like, well, you know, you deserve a break today. Propaganda machine is very big. 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 that we a little bit of support, 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, the new Thrive AI Health platform, which I'm so excited about. Because it has been a 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 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, the unhealthy choice, and the hard choices, the healthy choice. That's all got to change. And so these little beautiful things that 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.
Arianna Huffington
And you know who there are many companies and people that want to help when you engage them. Mhmm. Like, we are working with Shark Ninja 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 Yeah. And they didn't have any equipment
Dr. Mark Hyman
No, no cutting board, knives, nothing.
Arianna Huffington
In their kitchen.
Dr. Mark Hyman
They never cooked.
Arianna Huffington
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's 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 65, they were not Medicare patients. She describes the first patient, She had diabetes and and heart disease, and she arrives to check her.
And the woman has just finished her breakfast, which was two Pepsis
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Arianna Huffington
And peppermint combos,
Dr. Mark Hyman
Nice.
Arianna Huffington
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 we can 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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, no, it's imperative because it's taking humanity down. I think there are 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've been a doctor for almost forty 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 ever before we go, the overproduction of food and calories, the fact that we don't even up over our couch and do anything anymore. And so we've kind of created a culture which is not helping people at all.
Arianna Huffington
But on the other hand, a good news is when people use the argument that there are all these food deserts where people are going to find food. We work with Instacart. Yeah. Instacart can deliver 95% of food deserts.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. That's right.
Arianna Huffington
So again, how do we use technology to serve food deserts? How do we just use technology to guide people on this journey? That's really what's exciting right now.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So what 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?
Arianna Huffington
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. And 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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Arianna Huffington
We are more than our cognitive abilities. You know, 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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Totally. Yeah.
Arianna Huffington
It's like health. Yeah. And I would say even spiritual health. And I use it very broadly because when we throw out religion, we threw out the baby with the bathwater.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. That's true.
Arianna Huffington
And so bringing all that together is what excites me.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, think that that's a really important distinction you just made. I wanna double down on that, is intelligence is not wisdom.
Arianna Huffington
No. Intelligence we're we're at the moment drowning in data and starved for wisdom. And when people talk about AI and they tend to focus, oh my god, you know, 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. You know, it's like we are not just productivity machines.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So what is a world that looks like in the future ten years from now where you've actually facilitated the behavior change that you want through Thrive AI Health, but also cultivated a culture of wisdom?
Arianna Huffington
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. You know, it's not like these are the good people and these are the bad people. I mean, Solzhenitsyn said there is a line between each human heart that separates within each heart good and evil.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm. Mhmm.
Arianna Huffington
And so if we recognize that, right now most technology, social media companies have focused on tapping into what's worse than us.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.
Arianna Huffington
Our addictions, our biases Mhmm. 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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
You can do well by doing good.
Arianna Huffington
Yes. And it doesn't have to be just not for profits because we want this to scale. Yeah. 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.
Dr. Mark Hyman
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.
Arianna Huffington
Yes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
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 is going to create a more generative world, a more connected world, a more engaged world, a world where people feel good and wanna 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 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.
Arianna Huffington
Well, let's make it happen.
Dr. Mark Hyman
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 without a lot to say in a loud mouth, and I started writing articles in the mid two thousands.
The only place I could get them published was Huffington Post. And they actually were quite popular and it
Arianna Huffington
Because was it's actually amazing.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Without Huffington Post and publishing literally hundreds of articles, I would write every week an article or two and it 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, it was really consequential for People my loved it.
Arianna Huffington
Oh Mark, thank you for everything you've done and for so many lives that you've touched.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Thank you. So good. We'll keep keep working together and making a difference. 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 Doctor Mark Hyman.
Please reach out, I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the doctor Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Doctor 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 doctor 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. 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, 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 health care 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.