Esther Dyson
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Max Lugavere on How to Boost Brain Health Through Diet | EP 556
When you talk to the people who work at Facebook or at Google or lots of these places, they know they're manipulating people. They know that they're selling something addictive. And you're destroying the self-love and self-efficacy both of your supposed customers, that your customers are really re-advertisers, and of the people who work for your company and feel they're being corrupted.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Max Lugavere on How to Boost Brain Health Through Diet | EP 556
And then you have the CEOs are surrounded by people who tell them how great they are. And sometimes they totally believe it, and sometimes they know it's not true, and they end up committing what I call negligent suicide.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And then I realized I could get this million dollars, which in Eastern Europe was worth a lot at that point, put in a little bit of my own. And stopped the newsletter and the conference so I'd have no conflict. And the amazing thing is people would still talk to you if you were going to give them money. So I figured, well, that's another great way to get educated about Eastern Europe.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
I'll go around telling people maybe I'd invest and I can still be part of the scene and learn a lot and So I shut down the East European publishing part and started investing in Eastern Europe. Though my first investment was, I don't know whether, I don't know the date, but it was a company called Paragraph. And
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
The founder, Stepan Kochekov, I'd invited him both to the East-West High Tech Forum and to PC Forum, where he met Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. So one day I get this phone call, and he says, Esther, we want to give you 1% of the company. You say yes, then lawyer call, please. Yes, okay. So I had a, yeah, they ended up selling the company to Silicon graphics for, I think 50 million or something.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And I had 1% of that and that it was an infinite ROI in percentage terms. And cause I'd paid zero and that kind of, helped get me started, along with Lee Valentine's million dollars. And that's how it began. Interestingly, the biggest success there was a company called Luxsoft, which ultimately got sold to CVC, and another company that competed with
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
It called EPAM that I ended up getting an investment in because one of the companies I had invested in got sold to EPAM and so forth. So in a sense, I got two really good deals out of five. And again, I learned a lot and hung around and met people who are friends to this day.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Some of those have complicated histories like 23andMe, but every one of them I learned a ton. And that I see investing is invest in an education, invest in something useful. And then there's a lottery ticket attached. What I don't want to do is invest in something where if there's a problem, I think, oh, I shouldn't have invested in that person. And that was a dumb idea.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
There are many things I've invested in that failed that I think would have been good. Many things I invested in that I learned a ton from. And then there's some that I also have to make a huge amount of money on. And you need to have a broad enough and diverse enough portfolio for that to work. Net investing in startups is a profitable enterprise.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Right. And you just need the few that people think you were so smart. And the reality is sometimes you're lucky and sometimes you're unlucky. But the statistics work in your favor unless you have really bad judgment.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
It helps have good timing, too.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Totally. I mean, and in a slightly different direction, one of my favorite stories was this company, YouBiome, and the CEO is this very smart scientist woman who this was early in the days of microbiomes and so forth. And I asked her, you're clearly really smart, but would you consider bringing in a CEO who actually had run a business? Oh no, I've always wanted to be CEO. So I declined to invest.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Anyway, three or four years, the business model was to test people's microbiomes and analyze them scientifically. And anyway, the trick was to get insurance to pay for it. So this, they had this questionnaire. Have you ever had diarrhea? Yeah, of course. And basically they started committing insurance fraud, which I don't blame on her. I blame on the board.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
She got basically taken away by the FBI or somebody because became clearer and clearer what was happening. But my sense, and three days later, I looked at the company's website and the board had disappeared. And my sense is, you know, she did always want to be CEO, but she really didn't get, how shall we say, the requirements. And the board probably said, you got to make more money.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
So just run the test again and have insurance pay. Anyway, that was one of the lucky ones I escaped. But you're right. Finding someone who... I look for someone who wants to solve the problem. They're not wedded to them being the CEO. They're not wedded to, I've got the perfect solution. They're wedded to, I need to find out more about the problem.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
I need to hire really good people to help me and see what works and what doesn't and pivot. But I really want to solve this problem. And then maybe I'll find a bigger problem. But I'm not, my goal is not to be CEO. My goal is not to make my little clever invention work. My goal is to figure out how to do something really useful and get people to appreciate it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
It is. And I can go on at great lengths, but keep going and I'll answer your questions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
I will, and I come from a slightly different direction. Yeah, I was the founding chair of ICANN, which stands for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and the domain names and the numbers are the IP addresses that are completely impossible to remember. And as you said, the purpose of ICANN, in a sense, was to, quote, make sure it was owned by the people and not by the governments.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And... It was created, it was an immaculate conception because it really was a creation of the EU and Iron Magazine and the U.S. government trying to fill the vacuum of control over this internet. with something that would keep out not just the government, but basically predatory capital.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And I would say it worked better keeping out the governments than keeping out the predatory capital, because at this point, the domain name system is like a protection racket, but it's a relatively cheap one. But when, I don't know, streamyard.com, there's probably streamyard.info, streamyard.net, And the only one that people remember is stringyard.com.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
You get these multiple domain names because they keep bringing out new top-level domains. And somebody who's focused on this makes a lot of money. Someone who's just using the system doesn't pay too much money, so there's no real... serious effort to clean up that market. There's a lot of spam and M1CR0 Microsoft. There's all kinds of fake names and scams and so forth.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
So I would say that ICANN did not really deal with the problem of, if you like, corporate governance. And now that it was a positive thing, it's mattering less now because You can now type into ChatGPT what you want. You don't need the right domain name. And so search and the use of domain names are both becoming less and less important.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Meanwhile, ICANN did keep the number system organized in place, fairly reliable. But it's sad. To me, it didn't actually fulfill its original mission. We now have bigger problems. And we can go into the loneliness and disconnection, which is what I can do to not do is pretty irrelevant to. Let me know where you want me to head.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
So you left Michael Dell. Are you still in touch with him?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
I mean, I went back when in 1982 or something, when he was doing this innovative thing, selling computers online. basically with fax messaging. There were maybe 30 people in the company and he invited me to their strategy weekend to talk about the business. And I thought he's a really nice guy and I like this idea, but I'm not sure it's really for the longterm, but I was impressed with the group.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And of course he turned into Michael Doe and I ran into him on the street a few years ago and we recognized each other, which was nice. I think the way I'd start on this topic is a book by Sherry Turkle called The Second Self. And randomly, Sherry Turkle... was one of the two other people that I went to Russia for within 1989. One of the premises of the second self is kids used to grow up.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
When you talk to the people who work at Facebook or at Google or lots of these places, they know they're manipulating people. They know that they're selling something addictive. And you're destroying the self-love and self-efficacy, both of your supposed customers, that your customers are really the advertisers, and of the people who work for your company and feel they're being corrupted.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
It was Mickey Mouse so famous. Well, it's because most kids had a mouse or two at home and they say knew about mice and most kids had a dog or a sheep and their basic sense of self was, well, I'm like my dog. My dog loves me and I love him. And we hug or my dog licks me, whatever. But I'm different because I can talk and I can think. So I'm different, but I'm also like my dog.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And now kids grow up thinking, well, I'm like my computer. I can think and talk and answer questions. But there's this sort of disconnect. I love my computer because my computer really loved me. And We've almost changed people's sense of self and how they interact with things towards interacting with computers or interacting with people over computers. And I think that's...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
One of the worst press releases I ever got was something that said, your child can make their own avatar so that they don't need to undergo the awkwardness of talking to real children over the Internet. They can just talk to avatars, and their avatars can answer questions for them. I mean, we're stealing kids' humanities. And I wrote a piece for The Information last year.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
or early this year, called Don't Fuss About Training Your AIs, Train Your Babies. And the message of it is we need to help people be more human. The AIs will take care of themselves. We can train them. We can use them. But the most important thing is raising children to be self-aware of their own human instincts and motivations.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And also to be aware of the business models that the companies and the things they interact with on the computer and what to understand how they are being manipulated so that they can understand how to manipulate themselves instead of being manipulated by companies that want to addict them to seeing their friends' photos, that want to addict them to playing games, that
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
They talk about democratizing investing, but they're actually selling what is fundamentally gambling. There's no here's investment thought in there. You're just chasing after meme stocks and stuff. And the problem is the business models and the people. It's not just the people that business models have directed against. from whom you want to get money by selling advertising to them or something.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
It's also the people who work in these companies. When you talk to the people who work at Facebook or at Google or lots of these places, they know they're manipulating people. They know that they're selling something addictive. And you're destroying the self...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
love and self-efficacy, both of your supposed customers, though your customers are really re-advertisers, and of the people who work for your company and feel they're being corrupted. And then you have the CEOs who are surrounded by people who tell them how great they are, and
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Sometimes they totally believe it, and sometimes they know it's not true, and they end up committing what I call negligent suicide, like Tony Hsieh, for example. Being surrounded by people who tell you you're wonderful all the time when you know you really aren't.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
is also it it messes with your mind because you're sucking up the adulation that yes you're great you're wonderful you're the ceo you know everything and it's untrue so you have this big internal cognitive dissonance it's destructive for everybody i did uh tony's last interview maybe five or six days before he died so that was shocking and
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
But not the most recent one.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Totally. I mean, it's criminal engineering. It's predatory. And just like selling drugs, as I said, you're selling something to people that's bad for them. And they know it, but it's so seductive. And they haven't, again, this whole thing about train your babies. You need a secure childhood. You need people who love you. You need people who need you. And if you look at the movie, Her.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
When you discover she has 1500 other lovers, it's, I need you to need me. I need to be a significant percentage of what you need. And it's not even, you need to love others as much as you need others. It needs to be two way and genuine.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And we don't learn enough about that and we don't experience enough of it in many cases because we have so many disrupted families and parents who are, it's not just giving the two-year-old the iPad, it's the parent being on the phone and not paying attention to the kid on the iPad.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
There was some ad for some restaurant. I forget which one it was that I actually posted on Twitter. And it was an ad for the restaurant, and there were two people looking at their phones. And the restaurant did not realize, this is the world's worst ad. It was crazy. But the other thing is, instead of climbing on equipment now, kids are playing again with online games and not even...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And then you have the CEOs who... are surrounded by people who tell them how great they are, and sometimes they totally believe it, and sometimes they know it's not true, and they end up committing what I call negligent suicide.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
The summer, I was seven and my brother was five. We lived out in La Jolla and had this house. And next to it, there was a dirt road and then a cliff and a landslide. And there was a water tap there. So we used to go out and turn on the water and get wet and then jump in the mud and go down the landslide. And then we would fight and the mud would fall off and we thought it was our armor.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And it was just, we would do that for days. And it just gave us a sense of agency. It expanded. I mean, it was just amazing. We didn't have this pre-manufactured toys and games. And fortunately we did have an outdoor chef. But kids need to explore and create instead of follow some game's rules and And all that is missing. And parents are scared to let them go outside now. Just give them the iPad.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
That's much easier.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Second grade 20 years ago?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
It's bonding. It's creating. It's being imaginative. All this stuff. And just learning how to resolve disputes. I mean, Jonathan Haidt, the whole... He got most of that right, put it that way. And so we need to pay teachers more. We need to respect teachers and child care workers. We need to...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
figure out how to give people parental leave and it's one way or another we just bring back something like homex so people can learn how to be good parents
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
So I'm about to write a book called Term Limits. And it's not just about president's terms or even CEO's terms. So that's part of it. But it's understanding nothing is so good or perfect that it should last forever. You should... Do something useful for some appointed time, and then you should pass it along to somebody else. Evolution works much better than making billionaires live forever.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Let's keep replacing people and improving them. Your job is not to fix the world. Your job is to pass along a better world to the next generation. And at the same time, and this is economics and politics, we need to stop talking about spending on health care and think about investing in health. Health is a public asset. It's vital to the economy, like roads and bridges and forests and clean air.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And keeping people healthy is something all of society should invest in, in the long run. But it's not giving them metformin and GLP-1s after... They've spent years eating poorly and developing diabetes. It's providing healthy food now, and society as a whole will benefit from that 20, 30, whatever, into the future. We have a depressingly sick population.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
The Army can't find qualified, physically and mentally qualified people. And neither can employers. And they're all focused on quarterly earnings rather than, I want to keep my employees healthy. And even if they don't work for me anymore, they're going to go be my customers. They're going to be part of the economy that my company works in.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
So we're very focused on repair of people rather than maintenance. And going back to Stuart Brand, he's now writing a book on maintenance, the guy who did Whole Earth Catalog.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Glad to be here.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
So it's a combination of transparency and intelligibility. Not only do you need to tell the truth, you need to make it intelligible to people. Telling the truth is active. It's not simply, oh, we wrote this somewhere and you can go sign it. It's presenting yourselves honestly, whether you're a person or, more importantly, a company. The more power you have... the more transparency is required.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
If I'm walking down the street minding my own business and I don't have COVID and I'm not coughing at people, I should have privacy. But the moment I become dangerous to others or I want something from them, then I should disclose my motivations and the fact that, hey, if I cough on you, you might get sick. Or if you buy my product, you might get addicted or
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And so this imbalance, I mean, now we have unexplainable AI, but much more importantly, we have unexplainable businesses and unexplainable people. And, you know, you can look from outside and in many cases make a good guess. And so that's the second part. You need people to be self-aware and to understand, again, how they're being manipulated, what people are, why are they being so nice to me?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Why are they saying this stuff that makes me say, you go, man. Am I getting short-term satisfaction or am I building a family that will love me and working for a company that I'm proud of working for with people I love? We need to think more about what is success. And I go out to Silicon Valley and hear Oh, he's worth $400 million. Well, actually, no.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
He's got a 20% share in a company that was recently valued in a, how should I say, predatory transaction where the new investors get two-thirds of the company, one-third of the price because the company's in trouble. And focusing on how many million dollars somebody is worth is the wrong way to think about it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
I mean, it's a useful fact to know some numbers, but the way we value people, the way we value things is, again, very short-term addictive as opposed to long-term and long. I actually have this quadrant chart. In the lower left-hand corner is all me right now, and that's the person who's addicted to something, and they've lost touch with their family, with their community.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
They lost their job, and all they want is what they can get right now. In the upper left-hand is the billionaire who gives $1,000 to this guy who goes and spends it on drugs. The billionaire feels good, but he really hasn't helped the world at all. Then the benevolent billionaire also gives $100 million to a hospital so that when he gets older, he's going to get good treatment.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And he's taking care of his own, but he's not taking care of his community or the rest of the world. And then, of course, in the upper right-hand corner is the long-term thinker who... thinks long-term about the welfare of themselves and all the people around them. And it doesn't need to be the entire world. That goes back to the term limits thing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Find the piece of the world that you want to fix slash maintain and do that effectively. It's not like what is the single most useful thing application of philanthropy. No. What is what you have the heart and the interest in doing and find your sphere of influence and work within that and love the people in it and share and collaborate. And that's success.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
That's a great story. I mean, that's train your kids, not with statistics and tests, but in this is what I do as a parent. This is the interesting things I do. These are the people who work with me. This is my business is a good business. It doesn't seduce people and destroy them. It provides real value. And I respect the people who work for me.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
whatever it is that you do, but just help them see what it means to be the grownup that you are. And so what kinds of things are you solving at work, daddy? We used to go to our dance off. That was fun.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
I hate being called a futurist. I always say, no, my job is to understand the present, to understand the present. And then not so much predict the future, but try to make it better than it could be by warning people, informing people. And so I don't know what's going to happen. I do know that we need to focus more on, again, human capacity, healthy humans, making sure people...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
get aided by machines rather than replaced by them. We need to help people be better people and to use the machines effectively. As a child of scientists, I don't think it's inconceivable that in some distant future, the machines will become analog again in some way, because in a sense,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
that the more powerful you are as a digital thing, the more analog you become because everything gets more and more precise and more complex and so forth and so on. And if the machines become better humans, then we are, God bless them. But in the meantime, we need to focus on being better humans and helping the next generation of kids and people
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
be happy and fulfilled and productive and also enjoy life. It's not torture yourself so you stay alive an extra hundred years, which is what some people are doing. Take pleasure in your life. Take pleasure in the other people in your life. And I'm predicting, what am I predicting? I'm predicting that if we don't do that, we're going to be toast. And we're just seeing an explosion of Unhappiness.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Shooting stupid policies. We're focusing on identity and feeling rather than let's vote for people whose policies are actually going to make us all healthier and happier. And that's up to us. That doesn't depend on the technology. It depends on how we use the technology. We are still in charge. But there is an alternate version of the universe where the machines are already in charge.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And they are manipulating us so that we build bigger data centers. We create more bots that can keep us in our place. What do computers really want? They want electricity and data storage. And we're providing that in spades. We need to get what are we using them for?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Okay. Just curious about your sister. Is she still living there or doing anything? What's she up to now? Just curious.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Wellville, I started back in 2013, 2014. I was giving a talk and I was going to say, instead of a healthcare XPRIZE, we need a health XPRIZE and somebody should do that. And then I realized, nice little old lady says someone else should do something. Yeah. I announced that I would do it and I had no idea what I was about to do, but I figured
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
there were a lot of, I mean, the fundamental question I asked as a journalist was, why are we spending so much money repairing people who are broken instead of helping them grow up healthy and stay that way? So originally it was more focused, it was five communities, five metrics, five years, and it was focused on health, not health care, but it was still
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
It was much less focused on other things that matter now, starting with poverty and systemic racism. It's like, yeah, I knew that. And in a sense, with my book and with my work, my goal is to get more people to say, yeah, I knew that now. I really see it, and I see how key it is to the future of the U.S. and of the planet.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
I originally thought I would raise some more money and we would have a contest. It ended up 10 years collaboration rather than competition. Health matters, but health is just a part of mental health and wellbeing and equity and just the purpose of this. Our interests are aligned with the community's, but they're not the same. Because the community's interest is, let's make this a better place.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Let's make our kids happier. Let's have our economy flourish. And in the end, my interest is, how do I learn enough so that I can go out and make a convincing case for what I'm just talking about, which is... Helping people be better people rather than focus on using artificial solutions, whether intelligence or drugs to keep people alive forever. And yeah.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
with less concern about how happy they are. So things I learned. One is this whole quadrant chart notion of thinking long-term and thinking across your community, however you define that. Understand the importance of human connection, parenting, self-awareness, And Wellville does not have a playbook or a program.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
We're not going to produce 10 timely tips to make Wellville in your community, but more an appreciation for human values and for making people more conscious of them and more actually able to fulfill themselves as human beings. In a sense, one of my favorite books is Alison Gopnik's The Gardener and the Carpenter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
It's a book about parenting, and the fundamental message is never imagine that you can construct the perfect child like a carpenter. No, your job is to be a gardener. This seed you have, it may be a dandelion, it may be a rose, it may be a petunia. Your job is to help it become the very best of what it already is.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And in the same way in the communities, it's not that you need this program or that program or you need a certain kind of city government. You need people to be fulfilled, to work. You need social fabric more than you need social architecture. You need a 501c3 and then a food bank and... You need a social fabric where people collaborate and build stuff and interact effectively.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And so how do you do the work? You ask people questions. You suggest maybe you could work with this outfit instead of collaborate with it. If you need money, we'll try and help you figure out how to raise it. But we didn't walk in with money and bribe people to do things we thought they should do. We walked in with questions and advice and connections.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And there's totally no business model to this, unfortunately. But the big business model is government invests in child care, in education, in supporting parents. And they raise the minimum wage for it. People doing those jobs and the way we flourish economically is we have the computers do the unhuman stuff, the paperwork.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And some paperwork, like insurance denials, maybe we no longer need that paperwork.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Yeah, you need to find people's intrinsic motivation, whether it's your babies or your workers, and get them excited about doing the work, not about So my favorite story is Little Old Man. You may have to cut this because it's too long. These people move in and the kids run around playing and screaming at each other, just the way we described how wonderful it is.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
I'm sorry to hear that. For all I know, we crossed at some point. What was your name?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
But he's a nasty little old man and these kids really annoy him. So he goes out and he says to the kids, oh, I love your playful, cheerful noises you sing in the garden. And here's $20 for ice cream. Please keep doing this. So they go out and buy the ice cream and they come back and they scream a lot more. And he comes out and gives them $10. And they look at the money and they say, only $10?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
He says, well, we can't afford this every day. And then he stops paying them at all. And they go indoors and they make no more noise. You can destroy people's motivation by just paying them to do stuff so that they lose their intrinsic love for it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
I will ask around because, so I have no Russian heritage like her. My father, however, was a scientist. He trained as a scientist at Cambridge, and his math professors were mostly Russian emigres. And he was basically, after the war, he was going to move to Russia so that he could work with all these brilliant Russian scientists.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Yep, you will like that book.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
It can be learned. It all goes back to self-awareness and awareness of the implications of the choices you make. Because what makes you feel happy? It's usually not short-term pleasure. It's long-term satisfaction. You don't want a life full of happiness. You want a life full of obstacles that you're able to overcome. And by overcoming them, you create something of value for yourself and others.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
If you're happy all the time, you're not really happy because you're not experiencing any of the joy of overcoming obstacles or doing things that were tough or learning stuff you didn't know. And somehow helping people see that In so many ways, the best way to teach people is to be a good role model. And occasionally you might point out what it is you're doing so that they, oh, I get that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
But in the end, teaching and learning is, it's a two-way process and both sides need to engage. Obviously you can be engaging and then people will learn more.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Well, thank you. And do invite Alison Gopnik on. She would be great. I can follow up if that's helpful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
That's something I need to get probably linked in. I mean, adventure.com is my website, but it's 20 years old. Wellville.net is the Wellville website. Adventure, E-D, venture, it's a pun, adventure. And with luck, sometime over the next year, I'll have figured out how to encourage people to improve my Wikipedia page and maybe go back to the adventure website and update it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
But LinkedIn is probably the best place right now. And there's a pretty long record on Twitter, at edyson, E-D-Y-S-O-N. And for the old stuff, flickr.com. Esther Dyson, everything from Russia to space travel to pictures of all the people like Bill Gates and Michael Dell and Mark Zuckerberg and so forth who came to my conference.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Thank you. Have a wonderful afternoon.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And then after the war, he did a little more research and decided to move to the U.S. instead. And he ended up working for Robert Oppentheimer at the Institute for Advanced Study. One of our neighbors was Vladimir Zvorykin, a Russian guy who developed color TV for RCA. Same as with your sister, we knew that the Russians were good, even though their system was bad. And my mother...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
was Swiss and my stepmother was German, so I already knew German and French from grade school. And in high school, I decided I would study Russian. And that's how I got involved. I got up to fourth year in high school and then really My career goal was to be the Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times. But it wasn't like if I don't do that, I'm a failure.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
It was more like, oh, this is what I'd love to do if I don't get a better offer. And I ended up not actually going to Russia until 1989. When I was invited by something called the International Computer Club, which was basically a trade association of HP and Oracle and IBM and so forth, selling into Russia. But that was also the year that the Berlin Wall fell. So it was a really interesting year.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
I went three times over that first year ending. in Hungary over Christmas because I realized Russia's really interesting, but honestly, the computer business is more developed in Hungary and Poland and so forth. While I was in Hungary, that was the weekend that Ceausescu, the head of Romania, which is right next door to Hungary, got chased down and executed.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And I'm watching TV in Hungary and feeling this strange sense of nostalgia and homesickness. I realized I was homesick for Russia. which made no sense at all. And that it was the point at which I knew that was going to be, it's a big part of my life. It wasn't, I went there probably four to six times a year. It wasn't In time, it was very much interspersed, but from 1989 to 2022.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
But it just, I learned so much about the United States by looking at it through Russian eyes. And yeah, fell in love with the people, the culture, the jokes, and learned a lot about cynicism and lack of trust, all the things we're dealing with right now in the U.S.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Right. But it's also what's most interesting is what they take for granted. Whatever country it is, wherever you go, the stuff people don't talk about because they assume, well, everybody knows. No. I remember asking a Russian why he didn't answer the phone at work because I'm an American. The phone rings, pick up the phone.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
He said, well, if somebody's calling me at work, they must have some kind of problem. Why should I answer the phone and take care of their problems? No upselling, no customer care. That just wasn't part of the culture.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
I didn't at the age of eight say I'm interested in journalism because, but I started something called the Dyson Gazette, which was with carbon paper, like maybe six, six copies or something about me and my brother George and what happened in school. And daddy went to Australia for some kind of conference. And this is what the second grade teacher said and so forth. It's fun.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
It didn't last for too long. Then I worked for my high school newspaper. And I mean, the fundamental idea, I think, is what you learned in school was already written down in books. You weren't discovering anything new. But as a journalist, you would ask what's going on and try to understand it and explain it. And it was new stuff. And that was a lot more interesting than just memorizing books.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
So I worked very hard in high school so that I could leave early and go to college. But once I got to college... I pretty much worked full-time for the Harvard Crimson, which was their paper, and I loved it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
I wrote stories for free, and then I got paid for being a proofreader, so I'd work late into the night proofreading before the copy would go downstairs and then go onto these linotype machines that printed with hot lead. It was very different from nowadays, and I loved it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Once I left college and got to New York, I tried for a job at Variety and everybody wanted to work for Variety, which at the time was the hot entertainment newsletter, newspaper. And I also applied for a job at Forbes magazine. Fewer people were applying there, so I got that job and basically learned about business by interviewing CEOs. And I was this cute little 22-year-old girl.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
So the CEOs would be delighted to tell me how they ran their business and what they did. And I think probably told me a lot more than they told most of the kind of older male senior reporters who... one way or another they thought were a threat to their manhood, whereas I was this cute little girl asking questions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
So I met the CEO of American Airlines and American Motors and visited a coal mine in Wyoming, and it was great.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
Ironically, it's Russia again. So I had the newsletter and I had an annual conference called PC Forum, which started out as Personal Computer Forum and ended as Platforms for Communication Forum, but kept the name. So went to Russia in 1989, started a second conference called REL East, which was based in... Each year it would go be somewhere in Eastern Europe, Budapest, Hungary.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
We never did it in Moscow. That was just too complicated. And I also started a second newsletter, REL East, as opposed to the first newsletter was Release 1.0. And that was free. The conference was free to people from Eastern Europe who obviously had to be invited.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And then if you were a Westerner, we charged, I think, $5,000, which is quite a lot, the idea being that you made it possible for your East European customers to show up. And Rel East was really a labor of love. I talked to all these interesting people, but there was no business model to it at all. A labor of love and, again, desire for education.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557
And then this guy called Lee Valentine, who had a fund... said to me, you keep talking about how people should invest in Eastern Europe. Would you, suppose I give you a million dollars, would you invest it? And I said, no, I can't. I'm a juror. How much money did you say?