ARIANNA: No. I don’t think so. There’s no evidence that she would have any intention to overthrow Roe vs. Wade. I think there’s a little paranoia here.

LESLEY: Let me ask you about one more person, Elizabeth Edwards. My friends are still sitting around talking about why she wrote this book. Now some think it’s just purely revenge against her husband. But I heard someone the other day – and I found this very curious – say, "Look, if you have cancer you don’t need to explain your motives."

ARIANNA: Well I understand that if you … we all know we’re going to die and in her case, though, you know she has advanced cancer. And as she said on one of the interviews, it came back on her side. So she’s constantly facing her own mortality. So if she wanted to write a book where she put forward how she saw what happened, what the impact was on her and on her family, and if she felt that was something that she wanted to have on the record, I feel that it’s really her choice.

LESLEY: Who are we to question someone in her position?

ARIANNA: Exactly. Yes.

LESLEY: Right. Let’s talk about you. What a great idea.

ARIANNA: I was just so happy we were not talking about me. I was thinking, "I like this interview."

LESLEY: Well, let’s talk about you briefly, and then we’re going to talk about the Huffington Post. How’s that?

ARIANNA: OK.

LESLEY: You like talking about that. But I read something that’s somewhat amusing, by Michael Kinsley, who once said of you, "She’s had at least nine lives. Someone’s going to turn it into an opera. Probably her," which is pretty cute. But you have had many lives and —

ARIANNA: And I’ve known you through many of them.

LESLEY: Yes. But … well, I didn’t know you when you were the head of the Debating Society at Cambridge.

ARIANNA: No.

LESLEY: No. I don’t even think I really did know you when you were a Conservative commentator. And now you’re a Liberal commentator. You’ve been a self-help writer, you ran for governor of California. Now you’re a media mogul and a digital pioneer. That’s a lot of lives. And I wonder what you think the thread is that ties your career together. Do you see it as a straight line yourself?

ARIANNA: Um, the thread, if you look at my books, too – you know I’ve done 12 books now – is that I’ve delved into what I’m passionate about. That’s why, in a sense, if you look at my books they range from biographies to, as you said, a self-help book on fearlessness, the political books. So I think it’s really throwing myself into whatever I really want to explore. And in the course of exploring it and delivering something, I also learn. When we launched the Huffington Post four years ago, I just knew that what was happening online was incredibly important and that I wanted – as you also decided to do when you launched wOw – that something very important was happening online and yet a lot of interesting voices were still not online because of habits. And so that is really the original motivation, but I learned so much in the course of launching the Huffington Post and the evolution of the Post. And the same way with a book. You know, I start with an idea and then by the end of it I, myself, have been exposed to a whole new subject.