Andrew Sullivan’s Dishcast has always been one of my favorite podcasts, so I loved going from listener to guest. Some of what Andrew and I dished about included my time as the president of the @CambridgeUnion, the power of maternal love, what most people have gotten wrong about Maslow’s pyramid, the need for more grace in our discourse, the dark side of our supposed meritocracy, and reclaiming our humanity in the age of AI: by surpassing us in intelligence — which we’ve long thought was our defining attribute — AI is forcing us to ask the question: Then what defines us? What’s being exposed is not our limitations but our limitless possibilities.  Plus, I give Andrew some tips for his insomnia. I will be listening to future episodes to see if they’re working! You can listen to two clips here:

What if getting back on track felt as straightforward as following a GPS? For Arianna Huffington (@ariannahuff), that’s the idea behind her ideal health coach: miss a turn, adjust the route and keep moving without judgment. The Thrive Global founder and CEO sees an opportunity for AI to bring that approach to everyday well-being through personalized coaching. Her perspective connects AI to a familiar challenge: following through on healthier habits when life doesn’t go according to plan.

Yesterday afternoon at @Dreamforce with @Salesforce President and Chief People Officer Nathalie Scardino and a group of people leaders talking about AI, work, and what it means to be irreplaceably human. AI is now saving managers nearly three hours per week. But 36% of them say they waste more than half of it. It's called the AI Efficiency Trap — when productivity gains create pressure to simply do more, feeding the very stress and burnout the technology was supposed to relieve. Avoiding that trap is the real opportunity for leaders — and it's much bigger than deploying new tools. It's being intentional about the time AI gives back: reinvesting it in recharging, in creativity, in connection, in the work that requires our full attention and judgment. And it's making clear to your people that their value is measured not in additional output for its own sake, but in their capacity to think, create and connect. The companies that thrive in this era won't be defined by how much time AI saved them, but by how deliberately they reinvested it.

Love this poem from @McConaughey's "Poems & Prayers" that’s now on my nightstand. Looking forward to my conversation with Matthew and @Salesforce CMO Erin Oles tomorrow at @Dreamforce.

We talk a lot about how to succeed in a job we love. But how we navigate a job we don’t love matters too. As I shared with @WSJ, “You approach staying in a job you don’t love very differently if you don’t operate from a place of fear and despair.” Our wellbeing is not just about helping us thrive when things are going well. It gives us the resilience and perspective to see new possibilities and make decisions from a place of strength. Read more in @AllisonPohle's WSJ article, “The 24 New Rules for Succeeding at Work”:

Serving on the @WilliamsSonoma, Inc., Board of Directors has given me an up-close view of the imagination behind GreenRow. So wonderful to see its first store named one of @HouseBeautiful's 33 Best New Stores! GreenRow's first brick-and-mortar home in SoHo brings a joyful and layered world to life through a mixture of textiles, textures, color and whimsy. Huge congratulations to Jaimee Seabury and the entire GreenRow team and to Laura Alber, WSI's CEO, for championing this vision and a commitment to sustainable design.

Love this piece by @OriannaRosa in @FortuneMagazine about the dangers of overidentifying with our jobs. This is what can make success a trap. I know CEOs who don’t love their job but can’t see who they would be without it. Being in a position where we think, who would I be if I’m not CEO, or Senior VP of Whatever, leads us to miss opportunities to grow. That’s when labels become a ceiling on who we can be. Job titles tell us what we do but they don’t tell us who we are. As @TIAA's CEO @Thasunda_Brown put it, “I rent my title. I own my character.” Read more here:

Loved joining @jainarvind, Rena Fallstrom and Natasha Bhat to launch @thrive at @glean with a Q&A centered around women's health, redefining success and the importance of recharging and renewal in achieving peak performance.

Brain health is the next frontier of healthcare, and we don’t have to wait for a miracle drug. The breakthrough at our fingertips, which is scalable and available to everyone, is applying what we already know: daily behaviors can improve our brain health, and small daily changes can transform what’s possible for our brains now and decades from now. "We cannot talk about the future of healthcare without talking about what it means to not only care for the growing aging population but to help them proactively plan for a healthier, longer life," writes @MikhailAlexa for HLTH Inc. And as @AARP's Amelia Hay says, "The conversation around aging often focuses on what happens later in life, but aging well starts much earlier than most people realize, and the decisions we make throughout life matter." By taking the science we have about how our behaviors — what we eat, how much we move, how we sleep, how we manage stress, and how we connect with others — impact our brains, and incorporating it into our daily lives, we can have a profound impact on our overall health. The future of aging well isn’t simply living longer. It’s living better, for longer. Read Alexa's latest article:

From top to bottom, here are the books on my nightstand. As you can see, I have fallen in love with Loren Eiseley and his books. He was introduced to me by the brilliant @JRMoehringer. Loren Eiseley: Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos The Star Thrower — Loren Eiseley All About Love: New Visions — bell hooks The Invisible Pyramid — Loren Eiseley All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life — Loren Eiseley The Fifth Season: Creativity in the Second Half of Life — Mark Nepo Finding Beauty in a Broken World — Terry Tempest Williams The Art of Loving — Erich Fromm Religion Around Virginia Woolf — Stephanie Paulsell Yes, And...: Daily Meditations — Richard Rohr The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley — Loren Eiseley

Americans are divided on many things, but not on maternal health: nearly eight in ten voters say they're more likely to support candidates who back maternal health reform. The poll comes from @HMHBAmerica, founded by Olivia Walton and part of @HeartlandFwd, a “think-and-do tank.” The poll also found that 77% of voters believe maternal health in America needs improvement. When told there are 17.9 deaths per 100,000 births in the U.S. and that most of those deaths can be prevented, support rises to 86%. Yes, Americans are polarized, but there is broad support on a critical issue: like maternal health. You can read more from @axios here:

Is AI God? Some in Silicon Valley seem to think so. @TheTimes of London reports that a number of AI developers are asking themselves questions like, “Should we be allowed to develop God-like powers?” and “What does it mean to be human if we can play God?” @WIRED calls this “an ethos of techno-theology that’s become pervasive in Silicon Valley.” So with AI, is the Supreme Being making itself known to its faithful flock one frontier-model progression at a time? (“For God so loved the world, that he beta-launched his only begotten AI agent…”) The answer is a categorical no. AI is not divine. But it can paradoxically force us to have the conversation we’ve neglected since the Enlightenment: Who are we, and what truly defines us? Acknowledging our defeat to AI in the game of intelligence can push us to the far more rewarding playing fields of wisdom, intuition, generosity, giving, and our pursuit of the transcendent. You can read more in my latest On My Mind newsletter:

A 2025 study in Nature Medicine found that following a Mediterranean-style diet can help offset a person’s genetic risk for Alzheimer’s. Because “Mediterranean diet” can mean different things to different people, the researchers defined it precisely. Participants who ate more vegetables, fruits, fish, nuts, legumes, whole grains, and monounsaturated fats (like those in olive oil), and who consumed less red and processed meat as well as saturated fat (such as butter), showed greater resilience to the disease despite their genetic predisposition. The authors concluded that long-term adherence to the Mediterranean diet was “strongly associated” with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s and Alzheimer’s-related dementias. Now new preliminary research suggests that avoiding late-night meals may help protect cognitive function as we age. It's one more example that our daily behaviors are among the most powerful tools we have to support long-term health. On the nights I leave at least three hours between dinner, I can see in my @OuraRing how much better my sleep is. It's no surprise that in New York 5:30 dinner reservations are increasingly popular. (Though maybe I shouldn’t be broadcasting that — now they’ll be harder to get!) 😎 Read more in The @Guardian:

In his Quarterly Review for Q2, @GeneralCatalyst CEO @htaneja writes that the quarter was largely about scale and concentration of power and access, with three deals — @OpenAI, @AnthropicAI, and xAI — drawing around two-thirds of all AI funding.  And that’s why, he argues, we need a counter-move to build toward greater access to spread the benefits wider.  In healthcare, that’s going to require more public-private collaboration. “No government can transform healthcare alone, and no technologist or health system can do it alone either,” writes Taneja. “Building an affordable, accessible system takes all of us. And the stakes reach well past medicine. A health system is the largest employer in most American towns, the anchor of its local economy as much as its care. Get this right, and you deliver three things at once: better health, lower cost, and the jobs with agency that a community needs.” I couldn’t agree more. And given that we spend one-third of our lives at work, the workplace can be a critical part of that collaboration to transform healthcare. You can read it in full here:

Went on a great SoHo walk with Tim Junio ending in the office of his new cybersecurity startup Ultra, For All Mankind and in their conference room is his product failure cabinet as a stark reminder of the hubris of many founders. Failures of once very successful products and brands like BlackBerry (of which I was a power user), Microsoft Zune, Snap Spectacles, and Blockbuster. Failure has many lessons to teach us, not only about when to adopt and innovate but also about when to persevere. One of the low points in my life was when my second book was rejected by 36 publishers. By rejection 25, you would have thought I might have said, “Hey, you know, there’s something wrong here. Maybe I should be looking at a different career.” Instead, I remember running out of money and walking, depressed, down St. James's Street in London and seeing a Barclays Bank. I walked in and, armed with nothing but a lot of chutzpah, I asked to speak to the manager and asked him for a loan. Even though I didn’t have any assets, the banker — whose name was Ian Bell — gave me a loan. It changed my life, because it meant I could keep things together for another, yes, 13 rejections! And then I got an acceptance. It makes the point that failure isn’t the opposite of success, but, as my mother often said, a stepping stone to success.

For many of us, our feelings about food are intertwined with guilt and judgment — coming not just from the outside but also from ourselves. We may hear the voice I call the “obnoxious roommate living in our head” telling us that we’re bad or weak for making the choices we make, that we should be ashamed of ourselves. That’s why our approach at @Thrive Global is all about taking Microsteps, which really are too small to fail. For example, you might know that chronic inflammation is bad for our bodies. But you might not know it’s linked to mental health issues as well, including anxiety and depression. It’s also recognized as the underlying basis of a number of age-related diseases, including Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia. (Researchers sometimes call it “inflamm-aging.”) When we reduce inflammation, we set ourselves up for better mental health over time. And what we eat is a key factor. One Microstep is adding just one high-fiber food to your meal. Foods like spinach, collard greens, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, avocados, flaxseeds, chia seeds and hemp seeds can help calm both our body’s and our brain’s inflammatory response. Tess Bredesen, our Director of Nutrition, breaks it all down for us.

We’ve all been living under this delusion that to succeed, we must burn out. Recognizing the warning signs of burnout and taking steps to reduce it is important — something I found out the hard way in 2007 when I collapsed from exhaustion and broke my cheekbone. It put me on a course to change how I work and how I live. Stress and burnout affect every aspect of our health and make us worse, not better, at our jobs. Stress is unavoidable. But cumulative stress is avoidable. If we’re going to truly thrive, we must begin with sleep. It’s the gateway through which a life of wellbeing must travel. The science is clear on all of it. The mission now is to heed the science and keep changing the way we work and live. You can read my take, along with insights from nine other business leaders, on how to prevent burnout in @HennessyGeorgia's latest @BusinessInsider article here:

Obesity is a chronic disease, and Medicaid beneficiaries deserve access to the same evidence-based care as anyone else. This isn't a choice between medication and healthy habits. For eligible patients, GLP-1 therapies should complement—not replace—nutrition, physical activity, sleep and ongoing clinical care. The federal BALANCE Model gives states a practical path to deliver that comprehensive care. While the negotiated cost is $245 per patient per month, states pay only a fraction of that because Medicaid is jointly financed by state and federal governments. For most states, the actual cost is approximately $58–$122 per patient per month, depending on their federal matching rate. At a time when Medicaid budgets are under real pressure, it's especially important to invest in interventions backed by strong evidence and with the potential to improve every aspect of health. As states weigh whether to participate, the conversation should be grounded in both the evidence and the full financial picture. Patients deserve access to clinically appropriate obesity care regardless of their income or ZIP code. And policymakers deserve an honest accounting of what participation actually costs. With the July 31 application deadline approaching, raising awareness with @thrive founder and CEO @ariannahuff:  Governors and Medicaid leaders should give the BALANCE Model careful consideration so that access to evidence-based obesity care is determined by medical need—not income or ZIP code.

From the special on @BillMaher's Mark Twain Prize now streaming on @Netflix. Comedy is ultimately all about calling bullshit, and Bill Maher's been calling bullshit his entire life. For Mark Twain, satire was a way of keeping citizens from being shriveled into sheep. And Bill has taken on that mantle — never relinquishing his drive to speak his brilliant and funny mind.

Some news worth raising a cup to! The @American_Heart Association says up to five cups of coffee a day is safe for most adults — and may even support heart health. More than 99% of people who suffer a heart attack or stroke have at least one known risk factor beforehand — but many don’t know their numbers. Prevention starts with awareness — blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, and emerging markers like ApoB — and continues with daily habits like food, movement, sleep, stress management and connection. The science is clear: our daily behaviors are powerful medical interventions. And the incremental is monumental. Start with small, tiny steps that cumulatively become healthier habits. Just remember: know your body, skip the sugary extras and protect your sleep! Cheers.