Esther Dyson on the Impact of Technology on Humanity | EP 557

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Coming up next on Passion Struck.

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. 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. Welcome to Passion Struck.
Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck.
Hey, PassionStruck family. Welcome back to episode 557 of the PassionStruck podcast.
I am so grateful for the incredible energy, enthusiasm, and dedication you bring to this community each and every week. Your commitment to living a purpose-driven and intentional life is what makes the Passion Struck movement so powerful.
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In case you missed my episode earlier in the week on Tuesday, it featured Max Lugavere, New York Times bestselling author, health journalist, and host of the Genius Life podcast. Max shared his deeply personal journey that began with his mother's battle with neurodegenerative disease and how it sparked his mission to revolutionize brain and body health.
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In today's episode of Passion Struck, we dive deep into the mind of Esther Dyson, a true visionary at the crossroads of technology, health, and humanity. Esther is best known as a transformative investor and entrepreneur with an extraordinary track record that includes early investments in groundbreaking companies like Square, Facebook, and Evernote, businesses that have redefined how we connect, transact, and create in the digital age.
But her impact doesn't just stop at technology. Esther is also the founder of Wellville, a bold 10-year initiative proving the value of investing in human well-being, equity, and long-term systemic change.
In this conversation, we explore not just her achievements, but the deeper philosophies and actionable insights that drive her work. We tackle critical questions like, how has technology disrupted our connection to ourselves and others? And what can we do to repair it? How can individuals be catalysts for meaningful change, even in deeply entrenched systems? And what can we learn from Esther's unparalleled experience as an angel investor, advising some of the most innovative minds of our time? Whether you're passionate about reshaping social systems, curious about the future of health and equity, or eager to lead with greater intentionality, this episode will leave you inspired to take action.
Esther's journey is a masterclass in harnessing vision, grit, and courage to drive innovation and create a better world. Get ready for an extraordinary conversation that will challenge you to think bigger and bolder.
Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin.
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Peloton. I have such a profound honor today of having Esther Dyson on PassionStruck.
Welcome, Esther. Glad to be here.
I love to start these episodes out by going into areas that people might not know about my guests. And as I was growing up, my sister was just full of life and full of wanting to make change in the world.
And she found this musical that she got very involved in called Peace Child. And it was an intersection of kids from the United States at that time and kids from the former Soviet Union who came together to perform this.
And they did performances in the United States, and then they did performances in Russia, as well as Eastern Germany. And this became a huge passion for her.
She ended up getting her undergraduate degree, one of them in Russian studies and ended up living in Russia, et cetera. And I understand you also have a backstory of speaking Russian.
I'd love to start out hearing what drove you to learn the language. Okay.
Just curious about your sister. Is she still living there or doing anything? What's she up to now? Just curious.
Well, it's unfortunately a tough question. She passed away earlier this year from pancreatic cancer, but she really spent some of her formative years working to reshape democracy and actually bring democracy to Russia and worked in various roles, but always loved the culture and the people and never saw them as the enemy.
I think she saw the institution of the Soviet Union as being enemy, but not the people. She always felt the people were so genuine.
I'm sorry to hear that. For all I know, we crossed at some point.
What was her name? Carolyn Miles. Carolyn Miles.
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.
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 Oppenheimer at the Institute for Advanced Study. One of our neighbors was Vladimir Zhorikin, 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 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. 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. 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.
And 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. 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, 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. It is so interesting.
I've traveled to probably 50 countries over my life, and I have always found it so interesting how when you're in another country, how they view the United States, how the news reports on it. And the way the United States is viewed has changed rapidly over the past 25 years.
I remember almost

when I was in my 20s, almost being like a superhero because I was from the United States,

and now it has a much different meaning on the world stage, for sure.

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, 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. And 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.
That is a very interesting point. Well, you mentioned being a journalist and you began your career as a journalist, a field that's often described as the first draft of history.
What drew you to journalism, and how has it shaped your ability to ask something that you talk about a lot, important questions, and think critically? 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 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.
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. So I wasn't, I worked really 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 is their paper. And I loved it.
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. Then, 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. 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, you know, one way or another, they thought were a threat to their manhood, whereas I was this cute little girl asking questions. So I met the CEO of American Airlines and American Motors and visited a coal mine in Wyoming, and it was great.
Well, I never thought I was going to be a journalist. Never in a million years thought it was going to be anything on my path in life.
And along the way, I met a gentleman named Ed Kopko. And Ed had been the publisher of Chief Executive Magazine and had started something he called Bold Business.
And he asked me to come on in a capacity where I would be the associate publisher, as well as I had a business role. And before I knew it, our editor-in-chief resigned and he asked me to fill in.
So I ended up doing that for about two and a half years where I played both the publisher and the editor-in-chief. And that had remarkable interviews.
I started this segment called the Bold Leader Spotlight and through it, I got to interview people like Satya Nadella, your friends Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey, Stan McChrystal and a whole bunch of others. But it really opened this world to me that I didn't know existed.
And it really showed me how powerful ideas and words and as you suggest, the questions we ask really are. And I don't think I'd be doing Passion Struck today had it not been for that.
I appreciate your background. So the question then becomes moving from journalism to becoming one of the most well-known and successful angel investors isn't a natural connection.
How did that transpire? Well, because there was a point in time where you couldn't mix investing with being a journalist. 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 that kept the name. So I went to Russia in 1989, started a second conference called REL East, which was based And each year it would go be somewhere in Eastern Europe, Budapest, Hungary.
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. 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.
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 save? 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. I'll go around

telling people maybe I'd invest, and I can still be part of the scene and learn a lot. 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 the founder, Stepan Pachakov, I'd invited him both to the East-West High Tech Forum and to PC Forum where he met Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

And 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...
You're hilarious. Yeah.
They ended up selling the company to Silicon Graphics for, I think, 50 million or something. And I had 1% of that.
But, but it was an infinite ROI in percentage terms. And because 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. I, interestingly, the biggest success, there was a company called Luxoft, which ultimately got sold to CBC.
And another company that competed with 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. well if i have a listener who is hearing this and they don't know much about you, I'm just going to give a little bit of detail.
So not only have you been an angel investor, but you have been an extremely successful one. You have invested in, you mentioned Luxoft, but there's also 23andMe, Meetup, Banff Help, Yandex, Evernote, Facebook, Square, and I can go on and on.
Some of those have complicated histories like 23andMe, but every one of them I learned a ton. and that I see investing as investing in education,

investing in 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, shouldn't have invested in that person. And that was a dumb idea.
And I want, there are many things I've invested in that failed that I think would have been good many things I invested in I learned a ton from and then there's some that I also have to make a huge amount of money on and it you need to have enough you need to have a broad enough and diverse enough portfolio for that to work net investing in startups is is a profitable enterprise it is but what i have learned from it myself is you can't just invest in a couple and think you're going to make it you really have to invest in a portfolio and hope that a couple of them become shooting stars and for for me, I was lucky enough to invest in ID.me and a couple others myself that became unicorns. But I've had 10 times as many that were complete flops.
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 that judgment.
That's absolutely true. It helps have good timing too.
Yes, timing and when you get in. And for me, the belief that I have in the leadership, I always look at leaders who I don't feel hold a ton of ego.
You want a leader who's going to be able to control all the different aspects because being an entrepreneur is not easy. But I am looking for someone who can convey messages, who can, who's going to be able to go out and talk to investors, but is also going to be empathetic to their employees, but has a huge drive, but isn't selfish about their nature for the problem that they're solving.
I don't know if that resonates with you at all. Totally.
I mean, 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.
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 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.
She got basically taken away by the FBI or somebody because it became clearer and clearer it 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 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.
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.

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

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Yeah, and I'm going to just respond to that with this past year I released a book, and the first chapter of the book was a profile of Jim McKelvey. And the reason I'm bringing him up is the whole component of this book is him talking about startups and working with tons of entrepreneurs.
And he was telling me that one of the biggest things that happens is people come up with a problem. They fall in love with it.
But he said, then what ends up happening is things get really tough and they start venturing farther and farther away from the problem that it doesn't become the problem anymore. And they lose sight of what they were doing to begin with.
And he gave all the citations for the things that happened with Square and how there were so many times that they had issues with the design of the reader. But more than that, they had legislative pushback and banks who didn't want them to enter the market and so many things.
He said, I had to solve 5,000 issues to bring this thing to fruition, but I never lost sight of being in love with the problem and making that the core thing that we were trying to solve. I love that you reiterated that.
Exactly. And there's a lot of problems out there.
We're really not in short supply. No, you're absolutely right.
Esther, I want to take this interview down a couple of different tracks. The first one I want to go into is I feel that we have an existential crisis of meaning in the world.
I call it the disease of disconnection. People are disconnected from each other.
They're disconnected from how they make others feel, but they're also growing disconnected from themselves. I want to approach this so the listeners understand where I'm coming from with this.
You played a very pivotal role with ICON. And if people aren't familiar with ICON, I'm going to tell a little bit of story about myself.
When I came out of the Naval Academy in the early to mid nineties, I worked for the National Security Agency. And back then, we had this classified system, which was a precursor to the internet that we couldn't tell anyone about.
But it was this huge, powerful thing. And ICON's mission, as I understand it, was to really try to ensure a stable, secure, and unified global internet that was owned by people, not by governments.
Is that a good way to think about it? It is. And I can go on at great lengths, but keep going and I'll answer your questions.
So my whole point of this is I think that anytime we unleash something like this capability into the world, it brings about so many tremendous things. I mean, I just think about how much life would be different if we didn't have the internet, if we couldn't search the way we do.
We would have never had AI. We would never have had software as a service.
So many things like that. But there are also unintended consequences from its use.
And I have to believe that the founders of Facebook very well never went into that thinking that it would have the ripple effect that it has from a negative standpoint of causing or being a layer of what's caused this connection. So I was hoping maybe is that as an introduction or maybe you can give your thoughts on this.
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 names are 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.

And it was owned by the people and not by the governments.

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.
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 StreamYard.com. 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. 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 chat GPT 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. 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 ICANN did or did not do is pretty irrelevant, too.
Let me know where you want me to head. I want to really go into this.
Part of the reason I started this whole podcast is I got this calling years ago. At the time I was working directly from Michael Dell at, and I get this message saying, you're supposed to help the beaten, broken, lonely, battered, helpless, et cetera, of the world.
And I am like, what? I am supposed to do what? And who are those people? And how am I supposed to help them? And it took me, I have to tell you, a long time to understand who these people were. And there are billions of them.
And to me, there's this existential crisis of, I was saying, meaning in the world. People are losing their sense of association with all the things that matter to us, the family unit, relationships, connection with themselves.
And it's having a cascading effect on so many people. So that's really what I want to explore.
So you left Michael Dell. Are you still in Torchism? I can be, yes.
I mean, I went back when in 1982 or something, when he was doing this innovative thing, selling computers, 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 long term.
But I was impressed with the group. 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.
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. 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 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 one of the worst press releases I ever got was something that said,

your Kyle 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 or early this year called Don't Fuzz 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 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 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 are directed against from whom you want to get money by selling advertising to them or something. 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-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 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 like Tony Hsieh from Zappos. Being surrounded by people who tell you you're wonderful all the time when you know you really aren't 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 Tony's last interview, maybe five or six days before he died.
So that was shocking. And I have

to say, when I interviewed him, he was, as everyone always said, he was such a joyful person, seemed like he was on top of the world. And I think we have this tendency to often wear masks, hiding who we truly are and not being vulnerable about the pain that we're going through.

So I am not sure if you've ever read Malcolm Gladwell's books at all, but he's got- Long ago, yes. Yeah.
But not the most recent one. I've been reading Revenge of the Tipping Point, which is him revisiting Tipping Point 25 years after it was originally created.
But he doesn't really, he touches on the old book, but he's really going into the concept of social engineering. And he really explores two of the biggest epidemics of our day, COVID and the opioid crisis.
But in some ways, what we're talking about here with this disconnection people are facing is another form of social engineering. Wouldn't you agree? 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,

when you discover she has 1,500 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.
And we don't learn enough about that. We don't experience enough of it in many cases because we have so many disrupted families and parents who were 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.
It is really interesting. My kids are now older, they're 20 and 26, but when I was younger, one of my favorite things to do was to go to the park.
And when my son was growing up in Atlanta, there was this amazing wooden, those big, huge playgrounds that, and I just remember chasing him all around and it was so much, it was so much fun. And now as I go around playgrounds, it's as if the kids are playing and the parents are all sitting on benches, looking at their phones and not even interacting with the children.
And we learned by example. So we've got these kids growing up observing their parents doing that.
I mean, and all you have to do is go to any restaurant you live in New York and you let at least half of the patrons, if not more, might even be sitting across from another person and they're sitting there looking at your phone instead of talking to the other person there was some photo you know 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 while 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 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's 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, go down the landslide. And then we would fight.
The mud would fall off and we thought it was our armor. 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 shop. But kids need to explore and create instead of follow some game's rules.
And all that is missing. And parents are scared to let them go outside now.
Just give them the iPad. That's much easier.
It really is crazy. I mean, you barely ever see kids in my neighborhood.
I don't even see kids playing outside anymore. And I remember growing up, the second we got home from school, after we did our schoolwork, it was come back at when it gets dark for dinner.
And after that, we would just, we would go and explore and make forts and play football and baseball and just, we do whatever we need, we did. And there's so much learning and community that you build from that.
It's why I can see a friend that I've known since second grade and not see him for 20 years. And then when I do see him, it's as if we're right back there 20 years ago and no time has passed.
Second grade 20 years ago? Well, I'm thinking high school. So 30, 35 years from high school.
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 childcare workers.
We need need to figure out how to give people parental leave.

And it's one way or another, we just bring back something like Home X so people can learn how to be good parents. So when you think about what's happening in society with this, and it does seem like a disillusion, well, a destruction nature of the family unit, where do you think change has to happen to reverse what's occurring? 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.
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 healthcare 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. 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.
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.
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 Holder's catalog.

So you're writing this new book. For those who aren't familiar with you, you wrote a great book called Release 2.0, which discussed at the time how the internet gives individuals immense power while also demanding greater responsibility to just build upon what you just said.
if you were to write Release 3.0 today, what new guiding principles would you include for living in this increasingly interconnected AI-driven age that we find ourselves in? 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. 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.
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.
But, 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? 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? And 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. He's got a 20% share in a company that was recently valued in a, how shall I say, predatory transaction where the new investors get two-thirds of the company at 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. 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. They lost their job.
And all they want is what they can

get right now. In the upper left hand is the billionaire gives a thousand dollars to this

guy who goes and spends it on drugs. And the billionaire feels good, but he really hasn't

Thank you. hand is the benevolent billionaire gives $1,000 to this guy who goes and spends it on drugs.

And 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. 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. 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 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.
Yeah, going back to Michael Dell just for a second. So here you have someone that people probably refer Michael Dell.
He's worth $27 billion. I never thought of Michael like that because I got to know him on a very personal level.
My favorite times with him, or he sat in this area at Dell that we copped the God pod, or I guess the employees called it because it had him head of HR, head of legal CFO, et cetera. But I'd go in there because they had free coffee.
Typically typically if Michael was in town, he'd be in there and I'd walk into him and half the time just wearing a t-shirt and

didn't even have a shirt on yet. And we would have just these vulnerable conversations.

99% of the time had nothing to do with Dell, just about life and things that were going on.

And what I really appreciated about him was I got to travel with them to do a number of talks and

Thank you. nine percent of the time had nothing to do with Dell, just about life and things that were going on.
And what I really appreciated about him was I got to travel with him to do a number of talks. And oftentimes he would bring his kids with them.
And what I really liked was just how much focus he would put on the kids and being with them. And he wouldn't take business things because he wanted to spend the quality time with them, but was also trying to introduce them to other circles to expand their knowledge.
And I really valued that in Michael, that even though he had this huge persona, he was just a real person, quiet at times, very inquisitive, very smart, but wanting to connect in any way that he could, as an example. 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 whatever it is that you do but just help them see what it means to be the grown-up that you are and so what kind of things are you solving at work daddy we used to go to our dance on was fun. Yeah.
I mean, I'll just spend 30 more seconds on this. I remember one of the things that we were preparing for is he and I were giving a joint talk at Oracle world.
We were doing one of the keynotes and his daughter was with us and he had her sit out in the audience and asked her like, how do you think John and I should approach this? Like how from someone your age, would you want to hear us discuss it? It was nice that he tried to involve them like that. So one of the things, Esther, I wanted to ask you is since the time your book came out, there have been huge changes in the digital landscape, like we've talked about.
What do you see as the next major

societal transformations that are going to be driven by technology and how can we start preparing for them? 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 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 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, and 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 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, shootings, stupid policies

were 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, and they are manipulating us so that we build bigger data centers and we create more bots that can keep us in our place.
And what do computers really want? They want electricity and data storage and And we're providing that in spades. We need to get what are we using them for.
Thank you for sharing that. And I wanted to ask you just a few questions on the topic of being a systems catalyst.
As the founder of Wellville, you've taken on the challenge of catalyzing systems change in health equity, if I understand what the nonprofit is doing. What lessons have you learned along this journey, which is many years now in the making, about what it takes to spark meaningful transformation when it's in entrenched systems? Wellville, I started back in 2013, 2014.
I was giving a talk and I was going to say, instead of a healthcare X-Prize, we need a health X-Prize 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 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, 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.
So I originally thought I would raise some more money and we have a contest. It ended up 10 years collaboration rather than competition.
health, but health is just a part of mental health and well-being and equity. And just the purpose of this, our interests are aligned with the communities, but they're not the same.
Because the community's interest is, let's make this a better place. 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, you know, 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'd assign that. Understand the importance of human connection, parenting, self-awareness.
And Wellville does not have a playbook or a program. 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

it's beings. In a sense, one of my favorite books is Alison Gopnik's The Gardener and the Carpenter.
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.
The 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.
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.
You need a social fabric where people collaborate and build stuff and interact effectively. 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, connections, and there's totally no business model to this, unfortunately.
But the big business model is government invests in childcare, in education, in supporting parents, and they raise the minimum wage for people doing those jobs. And the way we flourish economically is we have the computers do the unhuman stuff, the paperwork.
And some paperwork, like insurance denials, maybe we no longer need that paperwork. Well, I just want to just mention that I love that you brought up that book, The Gardener and the Carpenter.
I have never even heard of it. I am definitely going to read it.
But I want to tell you about something on a similar note. But When I wrote my book, it's based on 12 principles to create a passion struck life.
But the last one that I wrote was on this concept that we need a new type of leader. I was raised under construct that you need to be a servant leader and there's nothing wrong with that.
I just didn't think it applies to where the workforce is going. And so in the book, I lay out that I think what we need are gardener leaders.
And so I'm going to have to read this book and see how it connects because as I've, I devote a lot of my time to behavior science. And as I'm looking at this, what I'm really calling for is that you need to be a leader that's eyes on, but hands off.
And I think we have too many micromanagers, too many of this, too many of that. You need someone who nurtures, but allows their employees to experiment and be creative and do the things that make people magical and give them autonomy to make mistakes.
But be there as a cheerleader guiding them on and course correcting when you need to. And I just find, especially with so many remote workers and everything else, that the past types of leadership models that we had are the right ones going forward.
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 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? He says, well, I 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 loan for it.
I remember someone in a job interview asked me one time, what's your style of how you work with employees? And I said, well, it's situational. And they go, what do you mean situational? I go, well, no five employees are the same.
So the way I have to interact with each one is different. You've got to relate to them on their level.
Some want you to connect with their whole family life. Others want you to be more a parenting style.
Others want you to be very precise and directive in what you're telling them to do. And if you try to use a one size fits all model, you're going to lose three quarters of your employees along the way.
And so you've got to bring them with you on the journey in the way that it best fits their personality and learning and action style, so to speak. Yep.
You will like that book. So Esther, the last question I have for you is a lot of what I talk about here is the importance of voices that we make in life and the power of intentionality.
And I often say that you can make the choice between good or bad, altruism or selfishness, etc. Do you think intentionality is something that can be taught? And if so, how do you think we should be approaching it? 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.
I mean, 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. 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.
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.
Absolutely. Because when psychologists and behavior scientists talk about happiness, they're not talking about a fleeting emotion.
They're talking about how pleasure, engagement, and meaning come together like gears in a well-oiled machine. And I recently did an episode on this where I talk about Richard Branson through this lens of how he's lived his life.
Well, Esther, it's been such an honor to have you on the show, and I just feel an immense privilege for spending time with you. Thank you so much for joining us here today.
Well, thank you. And do invite Alison Gopnik on.
She would be great. I can follow up if that's helpful.
Oh, that would be phenomenal. Thank you so much.
And last question for you would be, if people want to learn more about you, your investments,

your future book, et cetera, where's the best place for them to go? 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,Venture, it's a pun.

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.

But LinkedIn is probably the best place right now.

And there's a pretty long record on Twitter,

at E-Dyson, 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. we didn't even get a chance to explore today you going down the path of becoming a cosmonaut, which I wish we had more time to do, but it's been such a pleasure having you.
Thank you so much. Thank you.
Have a wonderful afternoon. What an enlightening and thought-provoking conversation with Esther Dyson.
Today's episode took us deep into the intersection of technology, humanity, and systems change. Esther's insights into how technology has disrupted our connections with ourselves, with others, and with the systems we rely on challenges us to rethink not just how we innovate, but why.
Her work with Wellville and her profound understanding of long-term equity remind us that real transformation starts with intentionality and willingness to tackle the entrenched systems that shape our world. As we close, I encourage you to reflect on some of the powerful questions Esther posed.
Are you a catalyst for change in your own life and community? How do your daily actions contribute to or disrupt social contagions? What steps can you take to create a ripple effect of positive transformation in your corner of the world? If this episode resonated with you, please take a moment to leave us a five-star rating and review. Your feedback helps us continue bringing these life-changing conversations to the PassionStruck community.
And if you know someone who could benefit from Esther's profound wisdom, share this episode with them. Because one idea can spark the change we so desperately need.
Before we close, I want to remind you that I'm passionate about sharing these insights with organizations and teams through speaking engagements. To learn more about this, go to johnrmiles.com slash speaking.
Let's work together to create intentional change and ignite growth. You'll find links to everything we discussed today, including Esther's work with Wellville in her groundbreaking book, Release 2.0, in the show notes at passionstruck.com.
Don't forget to check out the video version of this conversation on YouTube and explore our sponsors and exclusive deals at passionstruck.com slash deals. Supporting our partners allows us to continue delivering impactful episodes like this one.
Now, here's a sneak peek at what's coming up next on Passion Struck. I'll be joined by Dr.
Rick Hansen, a renowned psychologist, New York Times bestselling author, and one of the world's leading experts on resilience and well-being. Dr.
Hansen's work bridges cutting-edge neuroscience with ancient wisdom to help us cultivate a brain and life wired for happiness and purpose. In this episode, we explore insights from his groundbreaking book, Hardwiring Happiness, and his latest work on neurodharma.
We'll discuss practical ways to rewire our brains for greater resilience, emotional balance, and inner peace, especially in the face of life's challenges. Plus, we'll dive into the science of belonging and how fostering compassion can create a more connected, meaningful life.
I think that autonomy is crucial. Autonomy is the foundation of intimacy.
We can't be connected with others if we don't feel that we're coming from a kind of an internalized secure base inside ourselves. And without mindfulness, we lack autonomy.
We're pushed around by this or that, including the internalized impact of life experiences going all the way back to early childhood that we don't even remember. Those forces are like strings pulling us as a puppet.
With mindfulness, snip, snip, snip,

we start cutting those strings

and we become more and more our own person

at home, in ourselves, in charge of ourselves.

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