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

Today we have an extraordinary guest, Esther Dyson, a true visionary at the intersection of technology, health, and humanity. Esther is renowned for her transformative investments in groundbreaking companies like Square, Facebook, and Evernote, and for her bold initiatives in human well-being and systemic change. In this episode, we dive deep into Esther's journey from journalism to becoming one of the most successful angel investors. We explore her early career, her pivotal role with ICANN, and her insights into the existential crisis of meaning and disconnection in today's world. Esther shares her thoughts on the unintended consequences of technology, the importance of self-awareness, and the need for greater transparency and intelligibility in our increasingly interconnected, AI-driven age. We also discuss the critical role of parenting and education in fostering human connection and resilience. Esther emphasizes the importance of investing in health and well-being, rather than merely repairing damage, and the need for long-term thinking in both personal and professional spheres. 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. Link to the full show notes: https://passionstruck.com/esther-dyson-impact-technology-human-connection/Call to Action: Don't wait to take control of your brain health! Tune in now for invaluable insights and practical tips that will empower you to improve your cognitive function and overall well-being. Max Lugavere's expertise in diet and lifestyle can help you make informed choices for a healthier future. Whether you're looking to prevent neurodegenerative diseases or simply enhance your mental clarity, this episode is packed with wisdom and guidance you won't want to miss. Sponsors:Rosetta Stone: Unlock 25 languages for life at “ROSETTASTONE.com/passionstruck.”Prolon: Reset your health with 15% off at “ProlonLife.com/passionstruck.”Mint Mobile: Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at “MINT MOBILE dot com slash PASSION.”Hims: Start your journey to regrowing hair with Hims. Visit hims.com/PASSIONSTRUCK for your free online visit. Quince: Discover luxury at affordable prices with Quince. Enjoy free shipping and 365-day returns at quince.com/PASSION. In this episode, you will learn:The manipulation of individuals by tech companies can lead to a loss of self-love and self-efficacy, impacting both users and employees,The importance of fostering genuine human connections and understanding the motivations behind our interactions with technology,Investing in health and well-being should be viewed as a public asset, essential for a thriving economy,The need for transparency and intelligibility in business practices, especially for companies with significant power,Encouraging a long-term perspective on success that prioritizes community welfare over short-term gains,The significance of teaching children to be self-aware and understand how they are being influenced by...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John R. Miles?

  Coming up next on Passion Struck.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  When you talk to the people that 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. 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.

• 0:39John R. Miles?

  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 passion struck.

• 1:22John R. Miles?

  Hey, Passion Struck family. Welcome back to episode 557 of the Passion Struck 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. And together, we're creating a ripple effect of positive change. If you're tuning in for the first time, welcome. You've just joined a global community of game changers who are igniting their purpose and pursuing lives of boldness, meaning, and impact. We are so thrilled to have you on this journey. 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.

• 2:05John R. Miles?

  Max shared his deeply personal journey that began with his mother's battle with a Neurodegenerative disease and how it sparked his mission to revolutionize brain and body health. If you're looking to reclaim your health and vitality, it's an episode you don't want to miss. And if you're looking to explore more themes like mental and emotional wellness, spiritual healing, lifestyle, nutrition, and personal growth, don't forget to check out our episode starter packs, curated playlists designed to guide you through the best of our 550-plus episodes. They're available on Spotify or at passionstruck.com/starterpacks. For even more inspiration, sign up for my live intentional newsletter at passionstruck.com. It's filled with exclusive content to help you apply the wisdom from our episodes into your everyday life.

• 2:47John R. Miles?

  And don't forget, every conversation we have here is also available in video on our YouTube channel, where you can watch, share, and grow with others who are passionate about creating change. 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 Evernev, 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 Wellbill, a bold 10-year initiative proving the value of investing in human well-being, equity, and long-term systemic change.

• 3:32John R. Miles?

  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.

• 4:16John R. Miles?

  Get ready for an extraordinary conversation that will challenge you to think bigger and bolder. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin.

• 4:34John R. Miles?

  I have such a profound honor today of having Esther Dyson on Passion Struck. Welcome Esther.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Glad to be here.

• 4:42John R. Miles?

  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.

• 5:27John R. Miles?

  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.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Okay, just curious about your sister, is she still living there or doing anything? What's she up to now? Just curious.

• 5:52John R. Miles?

  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 well, 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.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  I'm sorry to hear that. For all I know, we crossed at some point. What was her name?

• 6:33John R. Miles?

  Carolyn Miles.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  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 US instead. And he ended up working for Robert Oppenheimer at the Institute for Advanced Study. One of our neighbors was Vladimir Zorykin, a Russian guy who developed color TV for RCA.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  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 basically 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,

• 7:59Speaker 01

  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

• 8:33Speaker 01

  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,

• 8:45Speaker 01

  got chased down and executed. And I'm watching TV in Hungary and feeling this strange sense of nostalgia and homesickness. And I realized I was homesick for Russia, which made no sense at all. And but 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.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  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 US.

• 9:38John R. Miles?

  This 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 twenties, 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.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 10:45John R. Miles?

  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?

• 11:08Speaker 01

  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. It didn't last for too long. Then I worked for my high school newspaper.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  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 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 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,

• 12:18Speaker 01

  proofreading before the copy would go downstairs and then go onto these Liner type 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, I learned about business by interviewing CEOs. And I was this cute little

• 13:01Speaker 01

  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 CEOs of American Airlines and American Brothers and visited a coal mine in Wyoming. And it was great.

• 13:33John R. Miles?

  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.

• 14:16John R. Miles?

  And through 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 asked 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

• 15:01John R. Miles?

  and successful angel investors, isn't a natural connection. How did that transpire? Because there was a point in time where you couldn't mix investing with being a journalist.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Ironically, it's Russia again. So I had the newsletter and I had an annual conference called PC Forum. It started out as Personal Computer Forum and ended as Platforms for Communication Forum that kept the name. Ran nineteen, 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. 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.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  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 Relise was really a labor of love. I talked to all these interesting people, but there was no business model to it at all.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  A labor of love and, again, desire for education. And then this guy called Lee Valentine, who had a fund,

• 16:37Speaker 01

  said to me, "You keep talking about how people should invest in Eastern Europe. If 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?" 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

• 17:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  So I shut down the East European publishing part and started investing in Eastern Europe.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  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, Stupan Katchakov, 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, "Sister, we want to give you 1% of the company." You say, "Yes, then lawyer call, please. Yes, okay." So I had a...

• 18:07John R. Miles?

  That's hilarious.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. They ended up selling the company to Silicon Graphics for, I think, 50 million or something, and I had 1% of that. And, 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. 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

• 18:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:17John R. Miles?

  Well, if I have a listener who is hearing this and they don't know much about you, I'm just gonna 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, BanffHelp, Yandex, Evernote, Facebook, Square, and I can go on and on.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Some of those have complicated histories like 23andMe, but every one of them I learned a ton. And that, I see investing as invest in an education, invest in something useful.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  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. 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 you need to have enough, you need to have a broad enough and diverse enough portfolio for that to work. Yeah, investing in startups is a profitable enterprise.

• 20:43John R. Miles?

  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 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.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 21:28John R. Miles?

  That's absolutely true.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  And it helps have good timing, too.

• 21:35John R. Miles?

  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 is 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.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  Totally. I mean, and in a slightly different direction, one of my favorite stories was this company, Ubiome. And the CEO is this very smart scientist woman who

• 22:33Speaker 01

  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? And, "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. 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.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  I blame on the board. She got basically taken away by the FBI or somebody because it became clear, clear 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, 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 gotta 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.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  They're not ready to, them being the CEO, they're not ready to, "I've got the perfect solution." They're ready 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 and, 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.

• 24:39John R. Miles?

  Yeah, and I'm gonna just respond to that with this past year I released a book and the first chapter of the book was a profile of Jim McElvy. 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.

• 25:22John R. Miles?

  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.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. And there's a lot of problems out there. We're really not in short supply.

• 26:06John R. Miles?

  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 feel, I call it the disease of disconnection. And people are disconnected from each other. They're disconnected from how they make others feel, but they're also growing.

• 26:40John R. Miles?

  Disconnected from themselves. And 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 90s, 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.

• 27:19John R. Miles?

  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?

• 27:32Speaker 01

  It is. And I can go on at great lengths, but keep going and I'll answer your question.

• 27:39John R. Miles?

  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

• 27:53John R. Miles?

  things. I mean, I just think about

• 27:57John R. Miles?

  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, who I 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 as that as an introduction, or maybe you can give your thoughts on this.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  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."

• 29:08Speaker 01

  And it was created, it was an immaculate conception because it really was a creation of the EU and our Magaziner and the US 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,

• 29:52Speaker 01

  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 makes a little, 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

• 30:19Speaker 01

  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 ChatGPT what you want. You don't need the right domain name. And so, search and the use of domain names are both

• 30:59Speaker 01

  becoming less and less important. Meanwhile, ICANN did keep the number system organized in place, fairly reliable. But it's a 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 to. Let me know where you want me to head.

• 31:30John R. Miles?

  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, etc. 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, it's, there's a, there's this existential crisis of, I was saying, meaning in the world. People are losing

• 32:12John R. Miles?

  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.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  So you left Michael Dell. Are you still in touch with him?

• 32:37John R. Miles?

  I can be, yes.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  I mean, I, way back when, in 1982 or something, when he was doing this innovative thing, selling computers, basically with fax messaging. There were maybe thirty 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 Dell. And I ran into him on this week a few years ago, and we recognized each other, which was nice.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  I think the way I'd start on this topic is,

• 33:24Speaker 01

  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 with in 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 looks 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.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  And now kids grow up thinking, well, I'm like my computer. I can think and talk and answer questions. And but there's this sort of disconnect.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  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. One of the worst press releases I ever got was something that said, here's 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.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  And I wrote a piece for The Information last year 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 and also to be aware of the business models that the companies and the things they interact with on the computer and what.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  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 have directed against,

• 36:27Speaker 01

  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 to 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.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  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 messes with your mind because you're sucking up the adulation, the 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.

• 37:40John R. Miles?

  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.

• 38:07John R. Miles?

  So I am not sure if you've ever read Malcolm Gladwell's books at all, but he's got-

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Longer ago, yes. Yeah, but not the most recent one.

• 38:18John R. Miles?

  I've been reading Revenge of the Tipping Point, which is him revisiting Tipping Point 25 years after it was originally created, but he didn't, 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 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?

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Totally. I mean, it's criminal engineering, it's predatory.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  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-

• 40:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:15John R. Miles?

  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 I, and we learned by example. So the, we've got these kids growing up observing their parents doing that.

• 41:00John R. Miles?

  I mean, and all you have to do is go to any restaurant, you live in New York, and that 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.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  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 a cliff and a landslide.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  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. Yeah, 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.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Gave us a sense of agency, it expanded. I mean, it was just amazing. We didn't have this pre manufactured toys and games. Fortunately, we did have an outdoor showroom. 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 and just give them the iPad, that's much easier.

• 42:46John R. Miles?

  And it really is crazy. I mean, you barely ever see kids and my neighborhood, I don't even see kids playing outside anymore. And I remember growing up. 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

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Whatever.

• 43:11John R. Miles?

  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.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Second grade 20 years ago?

• 43:34John R. Miles?

  Well, I'm at I'm thinking high school, so 30, 35 years from high school.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  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

• 43:56Speaker 01

  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 to

• 44:07Speaker 01

  figure out how to give people parental leave. And it's one way or another, we should bring back something like HomeX so people can learn how to be good parents.

• 44:22John R. Miles?

  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?

• 44:40Speaker 01

  So I'm about to write a book called Term Limits. And it's not just about presidents' terms or even CEOs' 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

• 45:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  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 Whole Earth Catalog.

• 46:47John R. Miles?

  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?

• 47:20Speaker 01

  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 find it. It's presenting yourselves honestly, whether you're a person or more importantly a company. The more power you have,

• 47:44Speaker 01

  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, or... And so this imbalance, I mean, now we have unexplainable AI, but much more importantly, we have unexplainable businesses

• 48:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  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 2/3 of the company at 1/3 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

• 49:52Speaker 01

  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 benevolent billionaire 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. 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

• 50:35Speaker 01

  long-term about the welfare of themselves and all the people around them. Yeah, 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.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  And that's success.

• 51:17John R. Miles?

  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 were he sat in this area at Dell that we called the God Pod, or I guess the employees called it because it had him, head of HR, head of legal, CFO, etc. But I'd go in there because they had free coffee. And 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.

• 52:01John R. Miles?

  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 him to do a number of talks. And oftentimes, he would bring his kids with him. 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,

• 52:45John R. Miles?

  but wanting to connect in any way that he could, as an example.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  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 helps them see what it means to be the grown up that you are. And so what kinds of things are you solving at work, Daddy? We used to go to our dad's. That was fun.

• 53:27John R. Miles?

  Yeah, I mean, I'll just spend thirty 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.

• 53:54John R. Miles?

  So, one of the things, Esther, I wanted to ask you is, since the time your book came out, there have been huge

• 54:01Speaker 01

  changes in the digital landscape, like we've talked about.

• 54:05John R. Miles?

  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?

• 54:14Speaker 01

  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 scientist, or the child of scientists,

• 54:57Speaker 01

  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,

• 55:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  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. We create more bots that can keep us in our place. And what do computers really want? They want electricity and data storage, and we're providing that in space. We need to figure out what are we using them for?

• 56:56John R. Miles?

  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?

• 57:30Speaker 01

  Wellville, I started back in 2013, 2014. I was giving a talk and I was going to say, instead of a healthcare express, we need a health express. And somebody should do that. And then I realized, nice little old lady says someone else should do something.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  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 healthcare, but it was still,

• 58:28Speaker 01

  it was much less focused on other things that matter now, starting with poverty and systemic racism. We, 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 US and of the planet.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  So 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 well-being and equity and

• 59:17Speaker 01

  just the purpose of this.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  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. Understanding the importance of human connection, parenting, self-awareness. And Wellville does not have a playbook or a program. We're not going to produce ten timely tips to make Wellville in your community. But more an appreciation for human values and for making people more conscious of them

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  and more actually able to fulfill themselves as human beings. In a sense, one of my favorite books is Alison Gottmick'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 cutunia. 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.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  You need social fabric more than you need social architecture. You need a 501(c)(3) 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 we're, there's totally no business model to this, unfortunately.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  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, we maybe we no longer need that paperwork.

• 1:02:31John R. Miles?

  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.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:02:42John R. Miles?

  But I want to tell you about something on a similar note. 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

• 1:03:23John R. Miles?

  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 is a cheerleader guiding them on and course correcting when you need to. And I don't I I just find, especially with so many remote workers and

• 1:04:05John R. Miles?

  everything else, that the past types of leadership models that we had are the right ones going forward.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  And they go indoors and they make no more noise. You know, you can destroy people's motivation by just paying them to do stuff so that they lose their intrinsic lung for it.

• 1:05:19John R. Miles?

  I remember someone in the 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

• 1:06:03John R. Miles?

  in the way that it best fits their personality and learning and action style, so to speak.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Yep, you will like that book.

• 1:06:16John R. Miles?

  So Esther, the last question I have for you is, a lot of what I talk about here is the importance of choices 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, et cetera. Do you think intentionality is something that can be taught? And if so, how do you think we should be approaching it?

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  It can be learned.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  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. That, 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.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:07:55John R. Miles?

  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, 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.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. And do invite Alison Gopnik on, she would be great. I can follow up if that's helpful.

• 1:08:39John R. Miles?

  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?

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  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 venture website and update it. But LinkedIn is probably the best place right now. And there's a pretty long record on Twitter, @E Dyson, D Y S 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.

• 1:09:43John R. Miles?

  We didn't even get a chance to explore today, you going down the path of becoming cosmonaut, which I wish we had more time to do, but it's been such a pleasure having you. Thank you so much.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  Thank you. Have a wonderful afternoon.

• 1:09:58John R. Miles?

  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 a 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

• 1:10:41John R. Miles?

  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 passion-struck 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 johnarmiles.com/speaking. Let's work to Together to create intentional change and ignite growth. You'll find links to everything we discussed today, including Esther's work with Wellville and her groundbreaking book, Release 2.0, in the show notes at passionstruck.com.

• 1:11:26John R. Miles?

  Don't forget to check out the video version of this conversation on YouTube and explore our sponsors and exclusive deals at passionstruck.com/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 wellbeing. 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

• 1:12:08John R. Miles?

  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.

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:12:55John R. Miles?

  Remember, the fee for this show is simple. If you found value in today's episode, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And as always, take what you've learned here and put it into action so that you can live what you listen. Until next time, live life, Passion Struck.