ARIANNA: A bit of a turning point for me was when I took Christina, my oldest daughter, around to colleges when she was a junior in high school. And our ground rule was no BlackBerries, and I would go into the hotel with her at night, she would go to sleep and I would start working. And I came back here absolutely exhausted. And I remember getting up from my desk the first morning and fainting from exhaustion, hitting my head on my desk, breaking my cheekbone and having five stitches on my eye. And it’s one of those amazing, teachable moments, because I just knew immediately that I had to change the way I was trying to do things. And that is part of what I mentioned earlier, you know, putting more priority on sleep, on making time to work out, meditate, all the things that we now, in the Living section, are calling "unplug and recharge." You know, how do we unplug and recharge ourselves so that we can keep going through the day and through our work in a way that’s —

LESLEY: — graceful.

ARIANNA: Yes, exactly. In a way that’s much more graceful.

LESLEY: Before I ask you a couple more questions about the Huffington Post, I want to ask one more personal question: What is the dumbest thing you’ve ever done?

ARIANNA: The dumbest thing I’ve ever done? Um, hmm, let me see … picking the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. I think the dumbest thing I’ve ever done has to do … that’s why there are so many examples – it has to do with overcommitting, has to do with not framing my life. I find that, you know, you look at a painting and it needs a frame, it needs poses, it needs gaps in between, it needs interruptions – and that’s what I haven’t been very good at. And that has led to getting to a date or a moment in a day when I’m committed to doing something, and I wish I wasn’t. And that’s what —

LESLEY: We’ve all been there.

ARIANNA: We’ve all been there.

LESLEY: OK, here’s what I thought you were going to say.

ARIANNA: What?

LESLEY: Running for governor against Arnold Schwarzenegger.

ARIANNA: You know what? That was such an amazingly hard experience, but I learned so much.

LESLEY: So it wasn’t wasted?

ARIANNA: No. I learned so much. Part of what I learned about the power of the Internet, which got me to understand why I … I mean, that’s why I tell people that was one of my most visible failures. But at the same time, on the sort of foundation of that failure was built such a deep understanding of how communications were changing, that I don’t know if I would have known how important what was happening online was had it not been for that. I remember we launched a little animated sort of — I don’t know if you can call it cartoon . We called it "The Hybrid Versus the Hummer," because I was driving a hybrid and Arnold was driving a Hummer, and because his campaign was a juggernaut and mine was a little campaign. And it was just a little animated feature that somehow went crazy viral, it was all over the state, and I literally wake up one morning and there’s this, like, three-quarters of a page in the LA Times about this campaign, which had cost, I think, $10,000. So I just said, "Wow, that’s a new reality." And there are many, many examples like that, that helped me understand that there was a new digital reality that I, coming from a very different world, had no idea about its power.