Court jEsther w/ Esther Dyson #22

Hello, everyone, I'm David Goldsmith and welcome to another edition of Redefining Tomorrow. It's here where we discuss topics that may redefine your future, that may redefine even how we live on this planet or any other type of redefining you'd like to consider. A quote I've lived through or used my entire life has been, you can't fix yesterday, you can only create tomorrow. Today we're going to redefine tomorrow the topic we're going to explore today, which is a very interesting name for a title, Court Jester. So think of it with a J, small J, then E S, T, H, E R. And with us on the call today is Esther Dyson. How are you, Esther?

I'm great, thank you.

Okay, let me give you a little history so everybody understands who we're talking to. She's an investor, journalist, author, commentator and philanthropist. Her tenure started with being a fact checker and then a reporter at Forbes. She worked at Oppenheimer and Company. She owned her own business, Adventure. She likes to have her name in her names holdings, sold this business to CNET Networks, has also been involved in space adventures. She is the executive founder of Wellville, a non profit focused on improving equitable well being. Now, before we get started, and this has only come up because people have asked, I have no clue what Esther is going to talk about. Some people have said, well, how do you have all these questions ready when the interviews go so long? They've asked all sorts of questions. What has happened is we select a guest, the guest gets on and we talk and find out what we want the topic. We come up with a title. But after that, the individuals on their own talk come up with an outline and the topic and the information they'd like to share. So we're getting on this call today. This is the first time I'm going to hear anything about what Esther wants to share. So you're going to be listening into a private conversation between the two of us as I'm learning, as you are. That said, Esther, do you have an outline that we're going to be covering?

I have nine topics. I'm not sure what order they're going to be in, but I have nine kind of clever phrases for you.

Okay, I will take clever phrases, not just phrases. So let's. What's the first one?

Court Jester got to explain what that's about.

Okay, next.

Oh, you want to hear them in order?

I want to hear all of them. So, yeah, so I can put them down on my Paper in front of me so that we. I can follow along.

Okay. But I reserve the right to change the order.

You could do anything you want. You're in charge. Okay. Number two.

Number two. Personal luck. Acknowledgment.

Personal luck. Knowledgement. Number three.

Always make new mistakes.

Mistakes. Next.

My dad's boss was Oppenheimer.

Boss was Oppenheimer. Next.

Present without. Leaf.

Present without. What was the next one?

Without leaves. Kind of like absent without leave, but present without leave.

Okay, number six.

Star City.

Next.

Term limits.

Next.

Training. AI versus babies.

AI versus babies. Okay. And the ninth?

Well, it really needs to be looked at. It's a large Q and then an ampersand, and then a small A.

And a small A. Do you know, when I grew up, I. For some reason, at one point during my life, you wouldn't know this? Of course, when I grew up, I shifted to all caps. So I write everything in capital. So when I have to write something small, my brain doesn't even adapt to it very easily. So I had to kind of play with that one. All right, so let's start with number one. Court gesture. What? I. When you gave it to me, when we came up with it, I said, this is just so different. So what does it mean?

Well, partly, it's kind of honor to history and so forth. But I love court jesters. They are tellers of truth with no institutional baggage, if you like. They're embedded in the hierarchy, but they're not part of it. No one reports to them, and in some way, they report to the king, but not really. They speak truth, but they know a lot more than what they tell. And it's their job to speak the right truth at the right time to the right people. It's kind of like a really good reporter. As a reporter, your job is to know everything, but it's not necessarily to tell it all at the same time. And the world needs more court jesters, people who really know what's going on and people who are not afraid to tell the truth to the right people at the right time. At the same time, you have to be a good human being and respect people's secrets when they deserve those secrets to be kept.

So.

And, of course, it's also a pun, because the E in court jester is a capital E, S T, H, E.

R. So I'm a little lost, because I've always assumed that the court jester was the person who made everybody laugh or was kind of the fool of the room.

Well, people think he. And it usually was a He is the fool, but he's actually the teller of truth. And you know that the best jokes are actually true. And they make you see tragedy and comedy combined. I mean, here, I'll tell you my. My favorite Russian joke, which is sort of an example.

Do you have a Russian in you?

I speak Russian. I spent a lot of time there. It's shaped a lot of my view of things.

My grandfather was German. I was Russian on my mother's side. So that's why I ask.

Okay, yeah. Well, then you may understand some of this. So Masha and Misha, they're married. And the old version is. It's in Soviet times. They live in a little cramped room that's part of a cominalka, communal apartment. And they have this sofa bed thing. They're sitting on the sofa bed before going to bed. They've worked at the factory all day. It's hard times. And Masha's feeling kind of frisky. The second version, they're Russian oligarchs. And so they're in a penthouse apartment at the top of a very tall building, and they've got a piano, and he's drinking champagne and she's eating chocolates. But in the Soviet version, they're drinking beer. So anyway, Masha kind of nudges Misha and says, hey, Misha, what do you like best? My face or my figure? And Misha, he's a nice guy. He's sort of an oaf, but he wants to be nice. So he looks at his drink, looks at the tv, and then he says, your sense of humor.

Okay.

You know, that is so sad. Yes. And so true.

So how did you come to associating with this? Like, this is interesting. As we were going through picking a title, you obviously thought about this before. So you. You're making a statement when you say, this is important to you. When you. When you pick a title, you know that this is the conversation we're going to be starting with or having. Where did it come. You heard this story? And why. Why use this?

Well, it's the basic idea of you. You tell the truth in a way that people recognize, and at the same time, you turn it into a joke for kind of political, sensitive reasons. I mean, it's just the whole notion of speaking the truth, but in a subtle way that depending on the circumstances doesn't out the guilty or that the guilty recognize it and no one else does. And. But the truth, again, it's. It's both funny and tragic. Most jokes that really make you laugh usually have Some element of sadness or contradiction or something in them.

So I. I am going to say, so far, I haven't really been laughing with you.

So.

Have you. Do you refine this skill set? Do you use it all the time? Is it something in, in the back of your mind where you're saying, I've got to be this way and how. Like when, when did it come and how did it grow? I'm trying to figure out why it's so important to you.

I mean, I tell people a cynic is a disappointed idealist. You know, if you weren't hoping for better, you wouldn't be cynical. You just shrug. And it's, It's a way of telling the truth in a way that makes people reflect Sometimes. Sometimes they totally miss it. But I've. So the other part of my life, I'm not part of an institution. I haven't had a boss since 1982. And so I have a lot of freedom. And because of that freedom, eventually I'll get to being present without leave. I show up in a lot of places, I hear a lot of secrets, and I get to do that partly because I know what to say and what not to say. And at the same time, I learn a lot that people should know. And I spend my life trying to help people understand the stuff that's often kept hidden.

So, okay, so am I. Let's say I was going to try to use this. Are you saying that I walk into an environment, I'm already present, so I don't have that challenge, but my. The best one approach. Not the best one approach that I could be using. I don't even know how to use it based upon the way you're saying it. How do I. How do I use this? Like, do you understand what I'm trying to get to. You've got a concept.

I mean, The concept is to explain how I feel about what I do. Not necessarily to sell a book, but it's just this notion of having privileged information and often interesting guardrails about what you can share and what you cannot. You can share the general wisdom. You can't necessarily share the person who told it to you. You can't necessarily share who the malefactor is in certain cases. It's kind of like so many things in life. It's the contradiction between deep knowledge and total discretion. How do you make that balance? How do you reveal what the world should know without breaking the confidences which let you know it?

How do you do that by telling.

The truth without necessarily revealing how I got it. Or who told me?

So you're. It sounds like that you're. You're. You're liking the. You enjoy having that background information.

Yes.

You. And you enjoy it, but you're also using it as a tool to be able to create behavioral change or situational change. And you pull that out like a gesture would to move things, activities, actions, projects, whatever it may be when you need to make them move.

Brilliant. Yes. Thank you for helping me understand it. I mean, that's. That's true. And it carries also a sense of responsibility. I mean, you. You are in a privileged role. You have privileged access, and you need to understand the limits. And if you were an honorable court jester in a completely toxic court, maybe you just kill the king. I don't know.

But actually, it probably has happened.

Yes. And at the same time, humor. Humor allows you to tell the truth sometimes that you cannot tell in a less subtle way. Chekhov is probably the greatest example of tragedy and comedy together. And the world is full of mysteries, including why good people do bad things and why good people let bad people do bad things. And the court jester understands the contradictions.

I've drawn a little kind of chart here, or two boxes, and I can kind of invert them or move them between each other. So I don't know. This is not. Probably not the best, but because the word jester is there, I'm saying I went so far to the humorous side that you've kind of. The way you've described it, that's just one tool that a gesture would use. You focused more on access and information. And so what I need, in your case, what I did is I drew those two boxes, but then I drew the boxes the other way, and I moved the humor down, and I move the access and rights and capabilities. And that other column that you have with all the truths, I've increased it. So let's say it was an 8020 using simple numbers. It was an 8020 before, in my mind, because every movie has a. That has this period, has a court jester. They've never really focused on the jester and this background knowledge that you're talking about. And you're absolutely right. A good humorous knows how to dig that way, bring out the truth that you don't notice. That's why. That's why people laugh, because that person said something and it gave them a truth that, hey, why are you here with this person? They're not your husband. And you go, wait, wait, wait. How did that get out so quickly? But on the flip side, you're using it in a. In a completely different. Not a completely different way. You're putting the humor down, and you're accentuating the access and the truths and the information and the tragedy and the. Okay. And the tragedy. And you're. You're using that for behavioral. To create impact. I'm not gonna say behavioral change. Create impact towards your desired outcome.

Yes.

That's interesting. I never. I never thought about it in terms of that dynamic, because the humor is just one of the tools. You could probably say that the gesture has many others that we don't know.

About, including a magnifying glass and a telescope. And just. I mean, my goal is not for people to say, oh, I never knew that. It's for them to say, oh, I knew that, but I never saw it.

Ah, okay. Well, that would be one application.

Yes. Yeah, there are many.

Okay. Because you're. I don't. I can actually look right now because I know the first day that I reached out to you based upon my CRM, I reached out to you. The first time was back. You were created on. You were created. There you go.

I was created.

You were created.

Lord Creator. I'm your Court Jester.

Yeah. And I've got. I've got the information, so you got to be careful. I've got the access to the date you were 1024. 23 was the first time I reached out to you. And that was because of Renaissance Weekend and some connection that someone had brought. And someone said, you've got to know this person. And then through that, we've had 30 interactions, and in there, every time I would say, well, I'm not going to follow up. You didn't say no. When someone says no, we don't. I don't call them back. That's it. They're done. But you never said no. You never said yes. And people said no. This person's a smart person. You. You came up multiple times. I've got to get. I've got to talk to you. And so probably you've been given so much access or so many truths that whatever we're. I'm working on, they feel that there's an interconnectedness between the value that you contribute and something that maybe I'm missing. Need to know, or that would add value. Does that make sense?

I hope so.

No, you just. You gave. You just did something, so it makes sense. Yeah. So. Okay, that's cool. Anything else about Court Jester that I should be thinking about?

Not now. It may come back later. The nine things are certainly things that I think about a lot in one form or another.

Okay, so the next one.

Oh yes. The personal luck acknowledgement.

Yes, personal luck acknowledgement.

So this is something I thought of this morning. But I say a lot, you know, the best way, the best job, what you really want to do is, or the best advice is never do anything you wouldn't do for free, but try and get paid anyway. And that's basically what I've been doing since 1982. And it's wonderful. But it's also. I've been very lucky to be able to do that. And it's very nice to give people good advice, but you also have to understand not everybody is as lucky as you are. Including that. The first thing I did like that was Adventure, which is a newsletter and a conference and it was a business but I owned it and I basically did it for free for the education. The second thing was Wellville, which is a 10 year project that's ending right now. And in that case I got really lucky in the stock market. Thank you, Jack Dorsey with not Twitter, but Square. Thank you Mark Zuckerberg. Thank you a few other people. And that enabled me to run a 10 year nonprofit project with about seven people who were properly paid other than me. And. But you have to be lucky to get to do that. And so many people have very little choice about the jobs they take. I think people do have more choice than they sometimes realize or recognize. But still it's. The world would be a much better place if people were able to do only what they loved because most people would then probably do good things. Whereas right now so many people are basically doing horrible jobs in companies with predatory business models and healthcare. I'm looking at you. But there's also social media and pretty much anything that basically tries to addict its customers so they can keep selling them stuff that's bad for them. So sorry, this is pretty gloomy.

No, no, no, no, it's not. It's not. No, it's not the. My mind like most humans. But I'm going to say me in this case as I rapidly went around the world. So I remember one day I lived in Hong Kong for 10 years and I was in. Is this Shanghai or Beijing? I think it was, it was, it was Shanghai. And I, I said to the person, do you, do you like what you do? And he says, we don't look at it that way. And he said you're you. People tell you what to do and then you like that you do that. It's not a pursuit of what you like, it's liking what you do. And it was interesting because I asked a bunch of questions and it, it was very counter to anything I had thought about that. The individual gets, says, well, I liked being an engineer. He retired. I like being an engineer. I'm no longer an engineer. They needed me to do this. I'm now doing this. You don't do what you like. You like what you do. And he was so comfortable with that that I kind of just had. It took a while to get my mind around it. It's a different wiring. So when you said this luck side, well, the majority of people in the world don't have it in the sense of Mark Zuckerberg and Dorsey and hitting them, hitting the mother lode on the market. How, how does that, that's appreciation for what you've got. How do you use that with somebody else? Like with me? How do I, how do I take that? And you don't. It doesn't mean I have to take it. But I'm trying to understand it.

Yeah, well, there's certainly degrees. There are jobs you hate and there are jobs again, if you're lucky, you get a job you love that pays you enough to live. And it is up to you whether you are somebody in a lower paying job that you love versus a higher paying job or working for somebody you can't stand.

I know plenty of people in that I know.

And they keep making the wrong decision because they don't enjoy their life and they don't feel good about what they do. And so like most advice, it's not completely binary. Take a job that doesn't make you feel you're dirty. On the other hand, as you were talking about this, I was also thinking about some Russians and other people in the US if you're not Bill Gates or you know, you don't meet somebody's standards of success, you can often feel like a failure. But if you have no choice, probably like the person you were talking to in Shanghai, it's more like, well, I'm not happy but I don't feel regret because I don't feel I could have done better. I took what they gave to me and made the best of my life. And there's a sense of agency is really good, but a sense of agency where you feel you fail to take advantage of it makes you feel that you fail in a way that. So speaking of funny, tragic jokes that are not jokes, the prime minister of Russia, Chernomierdin one year gave The State of the Union address, during which he said, well, we tried our best, but things turned out as usual. Now that's tragedy and comedy, right?

Yeah.

Yes.

And I've worked with. I've worked in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and. Yeah, that's a very Russian type of pragmatism. I'm gonna say what it is.

And hilarious. Yes.

You know, just two days ago. So you're hitting a nerve here. My wife and I sit on the floor sometimes for an hour to three.

Hours, almost every night, and she says, misha, no.

Right. Well, how did you know? So she, she said, just jump out the window. My.

I.

This whole luck thing, we did kind of touch on it and let me jump backwards when you shared this. I know of a friend, he has a 10,000 square foot home in Manhattan. He has a 10,000 square foot Home someplace else. And he's not happy. I mean, you know it. So that economics doesn't translate to happiness as something we haven't learned very well. And. But she. I was sharing with her my frustrations of moving things faster, and she was the voice of reason. She said stop and. Nice words. I mean, it wasn't this blunt.

Yeah.

She said you worked around the world in over 50 countries. You've lived in Hong Kong and Luxembourg and then San Francisco area. You've done this, You've done this, written a book. She's starting to list these things. She said, you gotta appreciate some of those things that have happened. And a lot of them are luck, the right person, the right time, the right situation, and everything pulled together. But not everybody has that. So I'm. It is a challenge that I have in my head already. How do we help? How do we help? Maybe they don't need to be helped. How do we make this more ubiquitous across an entire landscape of 8 billion people?

Yes, it's. And part of the real answer is education, childcare, investing in our people collectively, giving people the ability to. Not just to enjoy their luck, but to make. So what's a good decision? It's not something that turns out well. It's a decision that you don't regret. So if you're. If your chances of succeeding are 80%, but if you fail, you're gonna lose your house. And the taking that chance may not be a good idea.

It sounds like a low bar. Sorry.

Well, but I mean, if you're, if you're really going to lose your house, it's like, can you, can you afford to go train for a new job if it might leave your family homeless even if the chances of working out are pretty good, are you going to move to the new city? If you don't have the job yet, are you going to try for the, whatever it is, are you going to take a leap? You need to consider not just the chances of success, but the, if you like the danger of failure. And if you have a nice safety net or you have parents who will take care of you, or you live in a community that's got your back, you can do stuff. And yeah, if you're 80% likely to succeed, go for it. But if you have no spare capacity, you have to be much more careful and you pass up real opportunities.

That's, that's kind of look at. I don't know if you get them, but I get tons of these. Start your own business, do this, do that.

Right.

And most people fail.

Yeah.

Even when they look at, say, let's use the old San Francisco 27 miles going from all the way down to Santa Clara, whatever, all the way up to San Francisco. The, the wealthiest group of individuals, the wealthiest dot on the world by far. But the majority of people there, they call themselves entrepreneur, but the majority of the people work for somebody else. Zuckerberg was the entrepreneur. The people around him helped to build that entrepreneurial spirit and venture. But they, everybody's being sold now. Run your own business and it's not easy.

No. And it's, for many people, it's not fun. I mean, and we need to redefine success from being a billionaire to again, doing something you would do for free but getting paid for it.

I asked this question often. I say, when did we go from you're a millionaire to oh, you need 5 million. 5 million is a good number. Then for some reason it went to 100 million and then a billion. So today everybody's shooting for to be a billionaire. I talked to this one person. I'm going to touch a billion people. I'm going to, I mean it's about, I'm going to develop five 100 million dollar businesses. Like where did you come, when did it change? And I think it's in the past 20 years.

When did we start using numbers in the first place? I mean, in the old days your goal was to build a sustainable business, serve your community, build a family that you could pass it along to. Somewhat off piste, but there's this guy Narayanamoorti in India who started Infosys along with some others and very, very successful. I was doing some work with them and he invited me to dinner and he said well, we have a very modest house, though, of course, we have another house next to it where children live. And it was indeed a modest house. His wife served the meal, not a servant, in sort of steel cooking pots. And he said, we can't do this anymore. But in our village, people would come knocking on the door. They were hungry, and we wouldn't give them food. We would invite them to come sit with us and eat. And that was a good life.

I didn't meet Narayana Muerti. I worked with Nandana Lakhani.

Oh, yes, right. Yeah.

Chris Kapalakrishnan, Dinesh Shibu. So I worked with that whole other group and similar type scenario. I'm sitting down with Shaboo for dinner, and at one point he, out of the blue, he says, I work late at night. And I'm thinking, here's a guy who's got more than, more than, more than. I don't even know the numbers. Billions. And he wants respect. That's what he was looking for. I work late at night so people can respect me for my ability to work and do the job. And it was a really humble sense of being, not a sense of entitlement. So when did we start using numbers? Have you ever thought about it?

You could probably blame it on social media, but it's. The things get too binary. It's either love and peace or a free market, as opposed to a market that has boundaries and love and peace along with productivity and people working. And just a move from culture to. We need to quantify and justify everything through a lens of productivity, markets, free markets, personal choice. You know, what makes us human is not our individuality, but the community that we are part of.

I would then argue a lot of that has disappeared.

Yes.

So if you don't have the community, then you don't have a sense of personal choice, the same way you don't have that connectivity. So therefore, your measure of metric is in your backyard, where all your furniture is, instead of your front yard, where the community is. And you isolate yourself and build.

Yeah. And you think it's good not to need anybody other than maybe your children, but needing one another is, again, what makes us. We're more of a hive or a community than we realize. We're not just a collection of individuals.

How do we get back to that.

Good podcast, says the Port Jester?

Well, it's asking the questions. Living in Hong Kong, I had 40 square meter, 400 square feet.

Mm.

I mean, it's tiny. I would go down to the coffee shop, and in Asia, if you're sitting at a table and there's no seats for other people, they come over and say can I sit here? There's, there's no sense of space in that regard.

Right.

And here if you're at a Starbucks, you're sitting down someone, no one's going to come over and sit next to you. They're just walk out because the tables are full. And I would almost was never in my apartment. I would go down to the coffee shop or go to a place and pee and I'd meet people all day long and I absolutely loved it. That's missing in most communities. New York City, Chicago, France, London, Joburg, Cape Town, you don't have that sense. You're probably more Latino societies such as if you're going to be in Portugal, you might have that you might have in Spain.

But yeah, I mean in our Louisville communities we have barber shops and there's. Yeah, there is a lot of that in a. And I mean it varies but these communities do exist and it's partly because they're not all struggling to be billionaires. They're struggling to keep their families together and raise their kids right. And they do welcome that human.

Can you explain well ville Because I I looked at some but I didn't get. I try not to do I want to learn while I'm here with you? I'd rather than searching all over.

Yes.

Can you explain wellville?

Yeah. So that was after tech, after training as a cosmonaut, all this stuff. I got more and more interested in healthcare. And if you're a journalist or a court jester and you ask good questions, you have to ask why are we spending so much money on what is basically a repair business when we should be keeping people in good shape? For starters, why are so many of our kids failing in school, becoming pre diabetic in high school, getting into trouble? The data are real and terrifying and clearly there's something about communities and what we were just discussing and I thought so I was on the judging panel for the Healthcare xprize and it never happened. But meanwhile I was thinking what we really need.

What do you mean never happened?

The Healthcare XPRIZE never got funded.

Okay.

So I thought we really need a Health XPRIZE anyway, not a Healthcare xprize. And I mentioned this to Peter Diamandis and said do you mind if I just sort of riff line your idea? And he said sure. So I was going to give a talk. This was in May of 2013. May 13th of 2013. For what it's worth, I don't remember most dates, but I do remember that one. And I was going to give this talk about how somebody should do that and realized, nice little lady says someone else should do this is a really terrible talk. Whereas seasoned tech entrepreneur and advisor announces she's going to do this is much better. So that's what I did. And at the time it was called Hiccup, as in I wanted it to be very plain spoken and not glitzy. So I called it the Health Initiative Coordinating Council. And then because I was on the board of meetup and thought it was clever, I called it Hiccup. So I announced Hiccup, which was going to be a five year, five community five metrics contest. And we would find, I don't think it was very well defined at that point, but that was what I was planning to do. And then I had to figure out, good Lord, what have I committed to? Held a lot of brainstorms. At one of them, this guy who used to work at CIGNA showed up. And most of my friends wore jeans and hoodies and he came in slacks and a blazer. But he asked really good questions. How are you going to find the communities? What are you going to measure? What are you going to do to make this actually work? And I invited him to lunch because he wouldn't leave. And then I invited him to be the CEO because I'd seen way too many companies where somebody with a cool idea becomes CEO and then destroys the thing they love. So together we put out a call for applications. 42 communities of under 100,000 people, led by a cross sector collaborative. Those were the terms of the application as defined by Rick, our CEO, who's still our CEO. 42 communities applied. Rick and I visited 10 of them that summer to figure out which would be the best five, not the individual best five, but the best group of five, so that they'd be geographically and demographically and, you know, just. You learn more from looking at five different kinds of fruit than from looking at five apples. And we picked five. And that's how it started. So the basic idea turned from a contest into more of a collaboration. We realized that metrics matter, but so do stories and feelings and sense of agency. We also realized in the end, five years was just about long enough to get people's trust. It wasn't, wasn't enough to do, it wasn't enough to feel we had finished. And what we did, we didn't come in with fish or digital tech or fancy stuff. We didn't even teach people how to fish. We said, what kind of fishing school do you want to build? Let us see if we can give you some useful advice, maybe help you find some other people to talk to. And in a sense, we were like your aunt. Your aunt doesn't pay for you to go to college usually. She doesn't punish you and she loves you and she has your back, so you can tell her the truth, the things you can't even tell your parents. And she will give you good advice because she loves you, but she doesn't want your job. She's not an interested party. She really just wants to be helpful. So we were purposely outsiders. We were not engaged. We didn't, as I said, we didn't want their jobs. We weren't handing them money, so they didn't need to impress us. And we didn't come in with, here's our program, and you need to follow it, because we're doing a random controlled trial and we need to figure out if it works. It was like the things we're trying to build aren't. They're not copycats. And it's not about construction. It's about gardening, to use a metaphor from Alison Gopnik. So we just show up pretty much every month during COVID It was more zoom and so forth and help people build what they want to build, help them collaborate, help them do stuff for which they have intrinsic motivation rather than what so many philanthropists do is bribe people to do something that the philanthropy wants them to do. And originally I thought I would raise money and have a prize, and what we were doing is way too weird. But we've learned a ton. The communities have learned a ton. Next week, we're having our final not. Not our goodbye, but our commencement ceremony, in a sense. And we still love the communities we'll visit from time to time. We want them to carry on the work they started that they built, they own. It's not like we're giving them something. We're just going to watch from a little farther away because they built it themselves.

What's your biggest takeaway?

Help people do what they want to do. Give them permission that sometimes they need from someone else. Get them to collaborate rather than compete. I mean, at the top end, where Leena Khan works from the FTC with antitrust, I'm totally pro competition. But when you're in a small community, collaborate, build things together, share the work. And just if you want, like, here's 10 tiny tips. One tiny tip is if you organize a training of any kind, you know, like with 10 seats or something. Share two or three of those seats with your competition and then you help build those genuine ties between people doing the work rather than just the. The community leaders go to the Rotary Club or the United Way meeting and talk about strategic collaboration. You really have to help the people doing the work have one another's backs. Learn from one another by learning together. That's what they do.

The. I'm sure you know the word coopetition.

Yes.

But it's not the way you defined it. You defined it as collaboration.

Yeah. Genuine collaboration.

Right, Genuine. That's what you say you defined it as collaboration, coopetition. This to embrace or bring them in. Not an easy thing to do in today's times.

No. And at the same time if you have, if you don't have a lot, it's harder to share. The successful ones are willing to share. They, they get other people to support them. They, they do the sharing of the training. They. If I need some part time coordinator to do something, maybe I can hire somebody from some other outfit I know that has an extra person who could really use the work or something like that. Just use the resources that are there and share them and allocate them without making everything into a formal transaction.

Pure. Solely done in the United States, correct?

Yes. I mean our work is solely in the United States. It would apply anywhere. But what I want to do. So one goal was to help these five communities. But more importantly I want to change the system that doesn't support these communities well enough for them to do it without outside help. And you know, I have a lot of credibility in the United States telling people what to do. I, you know, and I, in another part of my life I'm loosely involved in Africa and so forth and so on. But you know, I wanted to be somewhere where in Wellville I'm an outside agitator, but in the United States I'm trying to fix things from inside. Rather than some, you know, benevolent overlord kind of philanthropist showing up in Africa and again handing out money for people to do something. That's my idea.

And Africa's a whole different world.

Yeah.

We had a company in South Africa, the, the chat. So with what you learned, do you think there's any that you'll see a cascading impact of? I know you'll see activities that come out of it. That's not. Will you see more of these pop up with self replicating because of what was done or is this kind of the end?

Well, I'm hoping to for each community to have developed a little more sense of agency, more examples of local success. You know, if the guy down the street could do that, so could I. That kind of. And I can collaborate with the guy down the street. I can work in his outfit and then take what I learned and do it with another outfit. Or I mean, just. It's so important to have role models and in a very different context. I remember I had a conference so out of Russia I got interested in the computer industry in Eastern Europe we had a conference called Rel East. No, sorry, East West High Tech Forum. The newsletter was called Rel East. And the guy who developed Tetris, Alexei Pajitnov, came and afterwards he came up to me and he said, you know, as Russians, we know about Bill Gates, we know about all this, but it's not real to us. He went to Harvard, he's Americans. But to see what the Hungarians have done, that to us is inspiring because we could do what the Hungarians have done. And it's, it's again, seeing people that you feel are relevant to your situation inspire you in a way that reading stories about billionaires or sports heroes or even just luckier people who've done well don't. So yes, I hope it will spread, but the real way for it to spread, honestly, again, is for our government's policies to change, for it to start talking about investing in health instead of spending on care and investing in children. Because they're our next generation. They are, you know, without the people, why worry about the environment? Why worry about the economy? It's the people we're doing this for and the people that are actually the assets that make it possible. So let's, let's protect them and nourish them and give them the capacity to do so. So that, yeah, more people have the capacity to do what they love.

The Hank Rogers had. Hank.

Yes. Right.

Yeah, because he was the one who. Yeah, right. The. We did podcasts with him. The Metamount in Hawaii. The, the challenge. I don't know, you're actually hitting on a lot of cylinders. For example, understanding Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, all of those countries along that border or the former Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia, whether it be Serbia, Albania, Macedonia, all of those countries have a completely different construct. I wonder, and I'm thinking globally more than just the U.S. i don't know if enough individuals get out to the places where they would see the cross pollination of ideation to understand those things are possible. Okay, because my.

We can try.

We can try. But they. My, my take is you did the Wellville And I'm saying to myself, okay, that's, it's, what you said was correct. I think that you know, diabetes, the challenges with health care, the challenges with government policy, that not having enough, a lot of that is embedded in a newer form of capitalism. You know, fight your way to the top, take it all.

Yes.

Which is very different than the African way, which is fight your way to the top and then you take out the person at the top because that's how you gain you. Yeah, your strength. And I'm not saying the derogatory way, I'm just saying that's what it is in many regards, many regard. So can do you see an opportunity for the cross pollinization so that we have the people luck acknowledgement. I think the luck would be someone goes to another country, gets hurt and says really that's how you were taken care of. Do you know what I'm saying? That that sense of something happened in another environment, another condition, another ecosystem where that experience was defining.

Yeah. I honestly don't quite understand what you're asking. I mean is this still about wellville spreading or is it.

No, it's about wellville spreading. It's about ideation spreading.

Yeah.

You've got an idea that you would like to see more, Right. I'm going to say a balanced community. Yeah, maybe that's a way to describe it, a balanced community and balance is relative, but let's call it balanced. And you're unbalancing the existing condition. Isolationism, food, health care, the desire to at all means crush your competitors so that you on top. And I'm not trying to be anti capitalist or anti anything. I'm just giving some extremes. I was in Hong Kong and one day I got sick and Veronica, who is Slovakian, she said, you go to the hospital. And I'm thinking, I'm not going to the hospital, I'm not going to pay the bill and I'll take care of it. I get well. And she said, no go. And she very, very strong wealth. So I found myself at the hospital and I walk in and there are 13 desks. And the woman at the counter says next. And there was no, there was only a few people there. So I walk up, I hand my Hong Kong idea card in. She just types it in. She says, go take a seat over there. No paperwork, no filling out, no questions, nothing. So I sit down and I brought a laptop and I brought a book with me. I figured, hey, I'm gonna be here for all day. And within five minutes someone walks up and says, I'm taking your. Your stats. So does my blood pressure, those few things. And I. So I'd already taken out my laptop, but I put it away. And then she walked me to another section where there was a large room. And, okay, here's where I'm going to sit. And I sit down, and I pull out the book of the laptop, and I start working. Within 15 minutes, I hear Mr. Goldsmith. Mr. Goldsmith look up. I walk in, and there's a doctor and a nurse in the room. And the guys, they're giving me exam. I like, this is only 15 minutes. I've been here for 25 minutes. I'm already being examined. And they check me. And the guy says, were you sick this summer? I said, I had a cold. He said, well, you've got some fluid in your lung. You need some X rays. Here it goes. Now it's going to be really expensive. And he says, just wait a moment. And within five minutes, there's a person who walks to the door and says, I'll take you. So as we're walking, I say, what do you do here? He says, well, I'm the radiologist. So the radiologist is picking me up. We get there, take the X rays, walk back, and I take out my book, because here's something. Within 15 minutes, Mr. Goldsmith. So I'm pulled into the room. The doctor says, you have some fluid in your lungs. Three meds, and you'll be taken care of. So he said, there's a person at the door right here. And that person walks me to the cashier and to get the drugs. So first I get the drugs, and it's a long walk, but we get the drugs. And then I step over to the next counter, and the person goes, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. That will be 1300. And for the split second, I said, $1300. In my mind, I said, see, it was 1300 Hong Kong dollars, right? Which is like $145. So I saw a doctor twice, got my X rays, got my meds, no deductible. And what I've always. What I've said is in. In at least Hong Kong health care, the United States, in the way in Hong Kong, health care is capitalism. No, capitalism is health care. Take care of your people. They can work right in the United States. Capitalism. Healthcare is the capitalism. If I said that right, yes, healthcare is the capitalism. We make our money off of health care. That's why I'm saying that. Luck of being able to experience something where it Flips you upside down and you say, wait a moment, what just happened here? I don't know how to make that happen. Like, are you able. Are you thinking about getting people to rethink all of that?

Yes, but in the US, Not.

Yes, in the US Yeah.

How, How.

How are you making that make. How do you make that flip happen?

I find allies who agree with me that we should invest in our people, and we invest in them by keeping them healthy, by educating them, by probably taxing sugar and certainly putting more transparency around the food system. And the food system's not just about your own metabolism, but the food system's metabolism that makes money off making you eat bad food. It's, hey, I'm not going to do it alone and we're not going to do it in 10 years. But it's a movement I want to join and help. But what you're saying about Hong Kong, you know, it's. Well, Hong Kong has changed a lot in the last few years.

Yeah, it has. It's a completely different world.

Yes, it's a tragedy. But, I mean, I've experienced health care in Budapest where it was free, but I was advised to give the doctor a gift because the doctors are underpaid. I've experienced it at the National Health Service in London where as a foreigner. Oh, that's all right. Come on in there, Nani. And I gashed my hand trying to basically slice a piece of bread. So they took me in again as a foreigner with an American passport, nothing else. And then this other chap comes in, very well dressed with a bow tie, and I think he's very posh, but it starts talking like this. It turns out he's a croup y from the casino in the corner, and he's got a infected toe and he's got to get his tail fixed because his boss won't let him off work. And they say, well, where do you live? And he says, I live in Putney, but I can't go home. And they said, you've got to go to Putney because that's where you live and you can't be treated here. And they called the police on the guy. I don't know whether the police actually came because I went in to be treated, but, you know, it's. There's so many ways to do this badly, is all I can say as a disappointed idealist. And in the end, I'm more interested in producing health than in making the care cheaper. I mean, that's. That is another big problem. And I Want people to address it, but mine is more focused on making people resilient and healthy in the first place.

Yeah. Starting at the front end instead of at the tail.

Yeah. I mean, it's. How shall I say, to be purposely provocative. In some places, I say, let's defund health care in favor of child care, in favor of doulas for mothers, in favor of better treatment of black women during pregnancy, that kind of thing. It's not that health care is evil, but the system is often predatory. The same as the police. We need more of those people who become police, being football coaches and parks and rec administrators and stuff.

Shift to always make new mistakes. Okay, that's okay with you?

Absolutely. Yes. Yeah, we're.

No. My brain is moving very quickly and I'm asking myself a ton of questions. And I said, I think we got this on this topic. I want to hear more. So that's kind of why I did it.

It wasn't that I was. No, I like. One of my things is term limits.

So, you know, okay, so we're going.

Term limits.

Always make new mistakes. Always make new mistakes.

That was just something I came up with probably in the 80s, and it became my motto, which is, it's always okay to make mistakes. Is that how you learn? If you. Because if you succeed and you do everything right, you don't really learn what would have happened if you did something else. And so experimenting is good because you learn from it. So every time you make a mistake, say, that was a good experiment. Now I learned from it, and now I'm going to do something differently. So it's okay to make mistakes. Don't make the same mistake again. And one of my favorite. I have many of them. I am court Jester. One of my favorite jokes is the CEO is at the board meeting and there's. He has this project that cost 20 million, or maybe now it would be 2 billion or something. And it was an abject failure. And the board says, well, of course you're going to hire the guy. Fire the guy that did that. And the CEO says, no way. I spent 2 billion educating him. And that's if a person learns from their mistakes, my God, invest in the education that you've already spent the money on and get the benefits. So one of my favorite stories, I'm on the board of a company that has a deal with Walmart, and we went down to the locations in Florida to work in a Walmart, see if we could promote our service, which is basically for caregivers, to the Walmart Customers and so forth and so on. It was an unmitigated disaster. First of all, we should have known Spanish because half the people were Spanish speakers. Second, the local Walmart, the local outfit that Walmart had hired to put up our signage and stuff, wasn't. Didn't do a very good job. It wasn't our signs, but some. Some of the other signs they actually put upside down. And we discovered people going into Walmart are busy and in a hurry to buy stuff, and people going out of Walmart are in a hurry to get home and didn't want to talk to us about. Are you a caregiver? Could you use this wonderful app to help you communicate with your remote elders and order groceries and so forth? And it was a shit show. And the team, whom I still. Yeah, the company learned from this. We pivoted. We came together as a team. It was. It was amazing. And we learned from our mistakes. It could have taken us much longer to learn and to pivot, but we made our mistakes early. Fortunately, while we still had enough Runway and so forth and so on. And just in passing, since you're very generous with our time, we were staying in the house of another investor in our company who was quite well off. She wasn't there. She was traveling. We were about a mile or two from Mar a Lago. And I loved the kind of. The contrast between Walmart and the real people in Mar a Lago. But the thing I loved the best was what the password for the WI fi was in this house. And there's a certain segment of the population that will get it and a certain segment that won't. But the password was citation3.

Okay, I don't.

Okay. It's basically. It's the name of a very fancy jet. Citation.

Citation. Yes.

Yes.

You all seem.

Yep, exactly. That just. That just made my day.

Okay, going back.

Oh, yes. Always make new mistakes.

Always. But no. Well, that's. Individuals make mistakes over and over and over and over again, same mistakes. It's an easier said than done scenario. If they are not exposed to options as to what they could have done and the possibilities of that new decision. How are you helping that? Let's take your board with the company and dealing with it. How did you get them to understand new options and to understand their mistakes?

Well, usually the mistake themselves will make itself. The mistake itself will make itself known. Then the question is, well, what could you do instead? And then first thing you do is you ask, well, what did I do wrong? What could I have done instead? Maybe I should Understand the situation better. Maybe I was talking to the wrong person, maybe I was talking to the right person, but they weren't ready. I mean, the mistake is a prompt. As you said, questions more than answers. A mistake is basically a question that says, what? What could make this situation better? What made it go wrong? What alternatives do you have? Maybe you should pivot. Maybe you just went to the wrong market. No. Walmart. Yeah. So you need, you need to. The mistake is a prompt to ask good questions and then find the answer. And then with luck, you get some good answers. Or maybe you make other different but smaller mistakes. I mean, a mistake is a sign in the road. It's not necessarily a pointer to the final destination. But.

You'Ve worked with a lot of leadership. I've got to believe that you have seen, even with horrific mistakes, that their analysis of the mistake doesn't live by certain principles that you may have. One of them is on my end, when things go right, it's we, them. They. When things go wrong, it's I, me, my.

Yes.

So when something goes wrong, no matter where it is in the organization, doesn't matter, what did I do wrong in my role? Even if I'm three generations, three standard deviations away, what did I do wrong? But I don't hear that when I'm out. Often it is, well, they should have done something different. You know, we've evaluated it this. They didn't do their job, they didn't do. How do you get that mechanism to turn so you can get these great questions and walk away with answers that are valuable? How do, how do you get that person or that group to make it happen?

First, you model that behavior. Second, several times I've invested in people whose companies failed the first time because they figured out and were candid about the mistakes they made. And so the second time, again, I genuinely did invest in the education I had previously funded. It's. There's, you could spend hours on management things. The one thing, one story I love is one year at PC Forum, we brought in, I think his name was Ken Hess, who did the kind of after action report on the Columbia accident. And it was a long report from NASA and so forth and so on. But fundamentally what happened was there was a bunch of people sitting around and a senior manager and this guy said, okay, folks, we've done all the work, we've done our safety inspections and we're gonna go tomorrow, right? Hooray. Yes, we're gonna go. And what you really needed was, okay, folks, we've done A lot of work. We've inspected everything and we think we're ready. But I just want to go around the room with each of you. Are there any questions you have left, any doubts you have? Anything maybe they didn't say? Of course, like the O rings, anything that could go wrong? Because we can stop now and prevent things from going wrong. We can't fix them once we're in the air. And I want each of you to just. Any questions, raise your hands. And that was the difference between a whole bunch of people dying and a nice, successful launch and space trip. And it's that attitude of, again, let's ask some good questions until we're sure that we've covered all the bases.

I. One of the questions that I don't think is asked enough is, did we start early enough? Well, what I mean by that is often I'm working on projects with teams and they'll say, no, no, let's wait till we're ready. You know, let's wait another three more weeks and then we can do that. And I say, wait, wait, why? I'm gonna call out. I'm gonna call Esther, and she's gonna say, I'm busy. Then I'm going to. She's going to say, let's meet in two months. I'm in the middle of a project, but I need to call her now. If I wait in three weeks, she's going to say, I'm committed to another project for three more months. So now Esther can't talk with me. Why are we starting so late? Why do we need to be so prepared and not think through the parallel processing that other people's lives have? And it's a shocker for people to even think that way.

Yeah.

Which, when you hear it, it's logical.

Right.

I'm busy. I'm traveling. I won't be back. It's my anniversary. I can't do it. Then somebody else. I'm not interested. Then you have to hunt for other solutions. So. Yeah, it's not an easy thing to get people to ask the right questions and to be willing to be. I don't know what I'm looking for a word. Cognizant or open to the fact that all mistakes start with you. They always do. If you're part of a team, you had to have contributed by not asking a question, not showing up prepared, not doing something, or by doing something you shouldn't have.

Yeah. It's not an easy thing.

Yeah. Because it's not just the leadership. Why didn't the People in the room with the O ring, why didn't they say, I've got a concern, this is stupid, we should be doing another check. Why didn't they say something?

Because they were terrified.

Oh, so it's a leadership style. Have to move it forward.

Yes. I mean, it's creating the culture where people with less power do feel empowered.

Do you think that still exists in NASA?

I'm not close enough. I know it no longer exists in, in roscom.

Okay, so yes. Being open to new mistakes. How about my dad's? Do you have anything more to say? Add to that.

I mean, I'll put another one under the bus. Boeing.

Sure. Ah, yes, Great.

Yeah. It. The privilege of leadership is also the responsibility of leadership to create a culture where people will ask questions and will will go against the grain and where they feel entitled and obliged to question authority and ask the right questions where they have the knowledge.

So where do people learn to ask the right questions?

In one way, they learn it in childhood if they are lucky. And sometimes they can learn it later, especially if they have good, good bosses.

So in essence, you're saying they don't.

Well, occasionally you get lucky.

Well, yeah, Yes, I understand that. Well, one of the. Why does our. Why does our society. I'm going to use the American society system. Why does the American system not promote asking questions?

Because we've created a culture where people genuflect too easily to power and influence. And the people who used to ask questions sometimes get surrounded by people who tell them they're wonderful and stop asking questions because their jobs depend on sucking up to the boss.

So you got that, you got. There's multiple dynamics here. But if you're going to the Wellsville and making people happy and making people healthy and making them see new things, the only way to get there is if new questions are asked.

Yes. And we certainly try and model that behavior.

There are some cultures in the world that do ask a lot of questions and there's others that don't. Yeah. Boeing is a challenge and yet it is a huge employer. And I don't know what's going to happen. I think they're. They're not, they discontinued just the other day. They're not going to build another. They're not making more of that plane. What do you think will happen? What do you think the trajectory of Boeing will be?

I don't know, enough internally to see if there's enough people like Ellen Mulally, who left long ago that can help fix it.

Yeah, well, he was that's a long time ago, before Ford. And I. I always. I love that quote, that comment when he was being Ford first at Ford, and the person said, how are you going to. It's very complicated to build the car. And he said, well, it takes 5,000 parts to build a car, and it takes 1.2 million parts or something like that to build an airplane. And it has to stay up in the air. I think I can figure this one out.

Right. But again, the real trick is managing the people.

Yeah.

Which he also did.

But he also was the one who said, first, first learn to understand, then learn to whatever he was talking about. First you got to figure out what's happening and then move forward. So he changed a culture in that regard.

Right?

Yeah. Not an easy. It's tough questions. Your dad's boss was Oppenheimer. This one actually made me laugh. Because of Oppenheimer. What does that mean?

Well, yeah, there are three Oppenheimers. There's Oppenheimer and Company, which is a Wall street firm I worked at. There's Oppenheimer Holdings, I guess, which is a mining company. And then there was J. Robert Oppenheimer. So my father grew up in England. His father was a. Grew up in a really poor family in the north of England, where they all taught like this. And he was poor. And as I mentioned, his aunt went to work in a cotton mill when she was 4. He made it out by learning to play the organ in church. So my father went to Cambridge and studied math and physics from brilliant Russian scientists. Learned Russian, which is how I sort of inherited, not genetically, the interest in Russia. And after the war, he was going to go to Russia, where all the great scientists were. But he did a little more research before moving and decided to go to the US Instead. So he found a job at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is where Oppenheimer went after Los Alamus. And that was where I grew up, in an amazing bubble full of Nobel Prize winners and Russian geniuses and foreign scientists of all kinds. So this was an institution that Oppenheimer ran, and a lot of the people from Los Alamos showed up there from time to time. And it was an amazing place. So my mother is also a mathematician, though after she got married, I would say society reverted her to motherhood. And it was an amazing place, but I also knew that it wasn't. I wanted to see the rest of the world. So When I was 13, I went to live in England as an exchange student with some friends of my father's. But that's Where I kind of got the interest in science and in Russia and in asking questions and at the same time a sense that I knew that what I was living in wasn't normal though in some other way. I thought, well, doesn't everybody have three months off in the summer?

Rude awakening.

Yeah. And so that also gave me my interest in space travel.

Why do you have an interest in space?

Because he was an astrophysicist. Sorry. Yeah. And so he worked with NASA. He did something called Project Orion, which was basically a nuclear powered spaceship that Ted o' Neill is more famous for. So, you know, when I was a kid, I basically expected I'd be going to the moon by the time I was a grown up and was quite disappointed later on when that didn't happen.

It was interesting when we got on the call that there are two podcasts, Age of Infinite.

Yeah.

And there's Redefining Tomorrow. And the Age of Infinite is more on the beyond Earth ecosystem side. It was. Your reaction surprised me with one of the early emails. It was almost as if, just like you said when you became a grown up. Wow, this is not what you expected. I didn't ask about. It wasn't my time to ask. I'm asking now. What were you saying when you kind of made that email back or comment back, that more or less that's not where you're going with things. You have more important things to work on. What happened?

Well, I love, I mean, this is so when I was a kid, my, my goal was to be the Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times. And it wasn't a plan or, you know, I need to do this. But you know, this is what would be really, really cool if nothing better comes along. And in the same way, my, my hope is to retire on Mars when I'm ready to retire, but not too soon.

Okay.

And so, you know, but before I retire on Mars, I really want to feel that I did make a difference in all the stuff we're talking about, the culture by which people live, the goals they have, the basic public understanding of our collective responsibility for the next generation and the notion that we need to think long term rather than look for immediate gratification, immediate returns, immediate satisfaction. So I mean, I love space travel. I'm interested in the science of it. It's exciting. But to me that's shorter term fun versus kind of long term purpose. And I think we need to fix things on Earth before worrying about spreading through space. And we're learning stuff from space. I mean, I love NASA and All kinds of cool things happening up there and what we can do with 3D printing of optical fibers. And, you know, I'm really glad some people are doing that, but I feel that my more important mission is still here on Earth and frankly, still here, mostly in the US because that's where I can be most useful, as opposed to, you should do what you are good at, not look for some strategy in a book. And that's the problem with effective altruism. Each person needs to figure out, well, where can you contribute? And I feel I can contribute here, at least for now.

Well, by the way, our project is Earth focused. Completely. We have a box of the roof and the door on the moon.

Right.

The majority of work we're working on.

Yeah, we're very much aligned materials.

Yeah, we're very much aligned. I don't look up the same way people would expect, even though we've got some of the most complete designs according to many people, of anybody on the planet. But I still don't look up. I'm, I'm. I like looking out. I like seeing green grass. I like hearing kids playing. Earth has got a lot to have. So where you were leveraging it differently. But it was interesting when I heard it from you, because I had. The messaging was, oh, you got to speak with her. She's very big in this. And you reminded me of somebody from Macedonia. I'm going to be there next week, next Friday. And she is no longer involved. She said she's been disappointed so many times with the expectations and the promises that she needs to work on things that are not associated with it, with space. Like with space. Yeah, we're only Moon, we're not Mars, but yours. I thought the way the message came in was hers, but you're actually saying it differently. You, you're saying, I'm still interested, but I want to have my impact here before I do that.

Precisely. And I mean, I'm, I'm more than interested. I, you know, again, it's like Russia. It's part of, it's part of how I look at the world. I love watching space movies because while I'm watching, the bottom of my mind or the back of my mind says, oh, yeah, I've been here before. And then, no, no, you haven't. You just trained. But the whole, the whole point of the training was to make it feel so familiar that you would go into space and be useful rather than sort of go into space and kind of look around and say, wow, this is so cool.

And so say that when you say that, put down that drink, take a break, no more drinking. I'm joking.

But I mean, I would love to do that. But you know, right now all I would be, would be and probably forever as a space tourist. Whereas on Earth I can actually help build something and. But retiring in one third gravity on Mars, you know, you can still go bouncing around even when your bones are porous and you've lost your muscle strength. And I'm waiting for Elon Musk to make it very nice to live there. Not a lot of hard work building lunar huts or, you know, constructing centrifuges or whatever you need.

I like how you call it a hut. So thank you.

Yes.

The. At some point I do want to share with you what we're working on because I think many of the things, biotech, we're working on new materials, we're working on mining, working on a lot of Earth focus centric things. So it was just an interesting. I had to ask the question because you, you jumped into this and I know you've spent a lot of time, I'm assuming, you bet. You were Baikonur.

Yes. Yeah, that was. And so for part of the story, and in a way to go back to Oppenheimer, so my parents were great, Whatever you want to do, darling, do it. Just you're responsible for the consequences. And I did a lot of things that I'll talk about later, but when I, when I decided I wanted to train as a backup for six months, I invited my parents to lunch in Manhattan. They came in from the institute in Princeton and I told them what I was planning to do. And my dad, who always sort of said, yes, if that is what you want, darling, fine, jumped up and hugged me and I realized, ah, this is the guy who's wanted to go into space since he was 6 years old, who did drawings of spacemen, and I'm his firstborn child and here I am. It was just wonderful. So he and my stepmother and my brother George all came out to Baikonur to watch the same launch that I was watching, but from behind the fence as the backup. And that was actually the first launch he saw because the NASA launches to which he's invited kept canceling or being delayed. And they weren't quite as common in those days as they are now. But it was, yeah, it was amazing. I was in a centrifuge. I. Yeah.

Their rockets just went off, just, I mean, all the time. It wasn't. It's. They're very, very, very consistent. Great engines. I think Bezos has the last set of engines that. They've sold that for his rockets, but yeah, they consistent. So I bet your father probably had a. He was there, though. He saw.

He saw it.

Yeah, yeah.

And. And then of course, I joined up with them afterwards and that was. It was neat.

So you did the centrifuge. Centrifuge. You did water training? Water, yeah.

And. And the zero G flights. I mean, I did a bunch of those in the US with this company. So as an investor in Space Adventures, which was kind of the travel agency that arranged these space tourist events before the more recent ones, and Zero G, which does the zero G flights, which are also really cool. And. Yeah, in Moscow, I had a dream that I was in a ballroom with these kids who were just floating. And if the. In the dream, the theory was if. If you believed in it, you would float. And then if you stopped believing or you got worried, you would just sink back down to the ground. And so one of these kids sort of fell to the ground but didn't get hurt. And everybody was laughing and I was laughing because everybody's looking so surprised. And we were all floating around. And it's the second time in my life I've woken myself up laughing. And it's one of the most wonderful human experiences to wake yourself up by laughing in a happy way. Yeah.

While you were. While you were there, did you hear of an organization called Space affairs out of Germany? I heard it sound familiar, but Andreas Bergweiler, he's. He's been on our team for about four years and. And he's helped us design. Brilliant guy. He's helped us design the four phases. And so he did. He was the number one guy out of Baikonur who did zero gravity flights, you know, jets, jet flight, all of these things that you're talking about. So that's why I asked.

Yeah.

Yeah. The. So you're so with your dad, with Oppenheimer and the approach, what else did he bring to you? I mean, what are the. Some of the other things that questions. Obviously. Nobel Prize. Right environment. That's the luck. Acknowledgement.

Yeah.

Born to the right person, right place. With your type of mind. Anything else that your dad with Oppenheimer?

Well, I mean, one thing. So in England, he went to Cambridge and worked for Bomber Command as sort of a scientist and did calculations showing that if they would just make the exit doors on these planes larger, more of the fighter pilots would survive. And they didn't really pay attention to him. So he's a famous, brilliant scientist, but also Something of a heretic and a skeptic.

Okay.

I guess I got that from him too. Just, you know, he got a reputation as a climate change denier, but he wasn't. He was very skeptical of a lot of the research, not because he thought climate change wasn't real, but because he realized how little we knew and he didn't mind being controversial. He also never got his Ph.D. and. But he was kind of like post Ph.D. and he just was skeptical of authority in any form. And I inherited that as well. And just a comfort with going your own way.

Was he ostracized because of some, for example.

No, no, no.

I mean, he wasn't denier.

No. I mean, some people. He won the Templeton Prize, which is sort of given to people who. He wasn't very religious or church going, but he had a. He was enough of a. Acknowledging the importance of religion and so forth that he won the Temple Toll Prize for Science and religion. It's got a formal name, but he wasn't. No, he wasn't ostracized. People weren't canceled in those days. But, you know, again, he was known as an original thinker and always curious and more, you know, he was a supporter of Martin Luther King. He was just a guy who thought for himself and was very proud of that. And I was. But that was a very great model.

Yeah. I was just going to say that, that going back to your court jester and the comments you've made throughout is that it sounds like. And even the fact that you put your father into this is that there was something about your dad that made. That he brought with you or you've carried with you.

Yes, very much so.

Because I, I'm trying to think. I've done about 400 interviews. Not all of them are available, but I'm trying to think of. What I mean by available is that they're. They're not allowed to be out there is. I can't remember. I've. People have brought up their parents in discussion, but I don't remember if they're anybody who's put it as a bullet point.

Wow, that's amazing.

Yeah, they'll bring up something. But you, you specifically brought that up, which I'm. I'm looking at my window as you can't see, and I'm saying, I got my pen in my mouth saying, I don't think, I don't think. I know you're not supposed to chew on the plot. I'm not biting it, so don't worry, I won't get some plastics. But I'm, I'm asking myself, and I don't think I've ever had anybody bring it up. So it's the influence for you questions asking, the heritage, the types of ideas that he came up with have definitely had an impact on you.

Yeah.

And even the openness to allow you to do things, the hugging you for the excitement instead of the why are you doing that? Which is often the reaction that parents give to a child that does something that's counter to what they think.

Yeah. Now he was. They really encouraged. I mean, they were sort of the opposite of the helicopter parents. And I was always free to explore.

It's also a very different time.

It is indeed.

When I, when I would go out when I was young, my, my mom or I come home from school, my mom say, get outside.

Yes.

There wasn't a question. It was, why are you in the house bothering me? Go outside. And the way I knew to come home, like all the moms, they'd come to the front of the door and they'd scream, David. And you had to answer. You had to be close enough to be within yelling distance and. Or our friends would say, your mom's calling for you, and you'd have to go home. That was the extent of it.

Right. The year present. I'll just do one more anecdote, so.

Sure, sure. I love it.

So the year that my dad was in San Diego working on Project Orion, we, we were living in La Jolla and we had this amazing house that was paid for by his employer, which was a company called General Atomic. So it was a beautiful house with a swimming pool, and behind the swimming pool, an orange orchard. And behind that, just a kind of dirt road. And then a combination cliff slash landslide with a faucet just sticking up out of the ground. So my brother and I would go down there and get wet and then we'd slide down the landslide and get full of mud and then we would sort of fight so the mud would fall off. We called the mud our armor. And we would just spend hours down there hanging out and kind of pseudo fighting and pseudo talking. And fortunately, because of the swimming pool, we had an outdoor shower. But, you know, no toys, no iPads, nothing. Just some dirt and a landslide and a faucet. It was just amazing and it was wonderful.

I saw an Instagram or one of the reels, whatever they are, and this person said, I don't know, what's with all this mindfulness? See, when I was growing up, you got on a bus, you didn't have a phone. And you stood there thinking and you watch the dripping off the side of the bus. When I. We would go someplace in a car, we'd have to sit and think. When we did things, we were always thinking because we had nothing else to do. You know, we drove to Vermont when we were younger and it was a six hour hour drive. We didn't have an iPad, we didn't have an iPhone. We had nothing. So we fought with each other. We brought things with us and we draw. We drew or read. We talked. A lot of talking, parents asking us questions. And that was our mindfulness. We had to be mindful. So yes, you. Different life, a different style. And now, as this one guy said, I don't think I have been mindful for 10 years since I had my phone. Well, because every time there's a free time, I can open up my phone. He said, I go to the bathroom, I have my phone on me, I go to this, I have my phone on me, I go to that. And when there's no, you know, I'm sitting in doctor's office, I have my phone on me. So there's no time, I'm alone.

Yeah, I get on planes. And I always want window seats in the US at least on the north side as opposed because then the sun is on the other side. So you can look out the window. And I'm always amazed that, you know, we go over some of the most beautiful landscapes and people are just on their phones around. I mean, it's not that I spend the whole time looking out the window, but it's, it's just so beautiful. And you can sort of see, you can see a different time scale when you look down at the mountains and especially Arizona and New Mexico, how the earth has eroded to create the Grand Canyon ridges versus kind of worn out volcanoes that have eroded. And it's just amazing. Or you can, you know, you can look down. So the place I work for Wellville a lot is Muskegon, which is pretty much in the middle of the country. And I'd say one out of three flights that I take across the country. I get to see Muskegon from the air. And yeah, it's just. There's so much to see.

Yeah, it's an amazing world. I don't have my phones multiples. I don't have them on ring or vibrate ever. And they're typically face down. Right now both of them are, I'm looking, not even thinking. They're both face down and both of them the other one is in another room. They. They're ring or vibrate off.

Yeah.

Never my. I mean, sometimes it's a pain because if someone tries to reach me, like my wife and then I'll. If I know I'll turn on, but I don't want to be interrupted by that machine.

Yeah.

And yes, there's a beautiful world out there, not just the U.S. it's absolutely amazing.

Once I. This is long ago when people weren't quite so security conscious. I flew from Hong Kong to London over Siberia. And that was. The captain invited me up into the cockpit just to look out.

I mean, that's not going to happen today.

Yeah. I mean, they were clearly very bored and having someone who was enjoying the trip was made it more interesting. Yeah, I've seen amazing things from the air all over. I mean, as you mentioned, Hong Kong and flying up from Egypt over Greece and. Yeah, it's so beautiful. And Greenland, I love Greenland.

Even just being on the ground and noticing there's amazing things all over the world.

Yeah.

And it's. The challenge is we've come to learn to visit them as tourists.

Okay.

Instead, instead of going to visit them as, as that everybody wants to take a picture, everybody wants to bring back.

Time for a present without leave.

Okay, well that, yeah, there you go. Okay, so we're right in it. Go ahead.

I mean, that is about traveling without being a tourist, but being embedded. Whether it's being embedded in Star City as a cosmonaut in training, being embedded in England when I was 13, living with another family when I was. So I did that because I wanted to get outside of the institute. And it was a really interesting family. Three girls, two of whom were twins and a brother who had cerebral palsy who was actually nicer to me than the rest of the family because precisely because of him. The family was very tight knit and I was. The mother was welcoming, but the girls kind of felt I was intruding on their close relationship with their brother. And for me, most of the experience was the school, which was completely different. I wore a uniform. The girls all told like this because it was a girl's school and all. I was in the fourth form and learned about English history. And then through some strange thing, we ended up being on a. Our school was competing in this TV quiz show. And in the end Loudoun County Grammar School for Girls won. So I was on British TV when I was 13 and just saw another place completely and then got to college quite early, having skipped fourth grade and the last year of school and got in early. And that was a point at which my father said, well, I'm not sure you're ready for it, but if you think you are, good luck. And we needed the bed for the other kids anyway. He was very British, he was quite loving, but not very demonstrative. So after the first half year they called me in and they said, we thought you had so much promise, such a bright young girl. But it's been rather disappointing because I was getting Ds. I took physics and chemistry, which was really kind of stupid and I wasn't actually going to class. I was working for the Harvard Crimson. And they said, well, you know, if you'd like to take half a year off or a year, we'll welcome you back once we let you in. We love you, but maybe you need some time growing up or something. So I took half a year off, hitchhiked through Europe and showed up at a bus station near my aunt in Germany and pretended I had taken a bus. But she figured, she figured that out pretty quickly and she bought me a ticket to Morocco, which is where I was heading to go live with my boyfriend who was in the Peace Corps. He had just graduated from Harvard the year before. So I lived in Morocco as a 17 year old white girl who at least knew a little French. But I wasn't supposed to be there when the Peace Corps people came visiting. I had to hide under the bed. Anyway, that was. I learned a ton about Morocco and I remember coming back from Morocco and going to kind of a normal British grocery store and there were three brands of toothpaste and five brands of baked beans and it just. The abundance and the. Having spent two months learning to cook by experimentation and new mistakes. Going back to this world of consumerism and plenty was amazing. Then I got back to Harvard and sat in the front row of my class so I wouldn't fall asleep because I was jet lagged. And then of course I fell asleep in the front row. Anyway, so I took another half year off when I was 20 working for the National Catholic News Service as a stringer for a guy who had also worked on the Crimson, who kept inviting me to go on business trips but he couldn't afford a second hotel room. And I kept refusing and again just learned. That was when I went to the NHS with my. The hand I had impaled with the bread knife. But after that, so I was working for Forbes magazine and I thought the computer industry was just starting. I thought I wanted to go to Japan and write about Fujitsu and Hitachi and the coming computer threat. And Forbes said, well, that's okay, you can do that. You can represent yourself as a Forbes reporter, but we won't pay for your trip. And we also, you need to do it on your own vacation time. But we will let you represent yourself as working for Forbes. And I decided that that was probably a, you know, worth it.

Yeah.

And it was. So that was when I was in Hong Kong and saw the workers housing. It was when I went to Taiwan and had sort of a minder person who followed me around until I got food poisoning from eating some fresh fruit. And then she disappeared. So most of what I remember from Taiwan is the green tiled floor of the bathroom.

When was this?

This was so it was like 1970, 1972. I graduated. So 74 to 77. I was working for Forbes. So it's like 75, 76. And I did interview that. I took the head of Fujitsu Software to dinner as a Forbes reporter to ask him about their system software strategy. And we sat down to dinner and chatted for a bit. And then he looked at me and said, so funny to ask woman to hear woman ask about software system strategy. And it was clear that dinner was. He just. It was like, you know, imagine you have this cat who starts talking to you, asking you about your space business or something. He just couldn't quite.

So you were just a freak of nature.

Yeah. And you know, it was nothing personal. And I ended up having some other pretty good sources and I wrote a cover story that the fact that the Japanese were indeed a threat in hardware, but not in software, and visited Hong Kong, as I said, and met some interesting people. And actually I've been back to Hong Kong many times and talked with a fair number of dissidents and was there for some of the yellow umbrella part.

I was right around the corner. I was. I was in Munkok, my place in Mongkok. I was then in Shen. So I was at the top of. At the Americas Club looking down when all the streets were completely full. Yeah, those pictures you saw when the streets in Central were completely full. I was at the top sitting next to the president, I believe at that time.

Wow.

Of the America, the American Chamber of Commerce. And we were looking down and we saw the whole thing. The world had changed.

Yeah.

And it was very different. But living in Mongkok, I was near Ladies Market, not far, a 10 minute walk. And I saw all of the activity, but I also saw when the cameras were on, there was activity when the cameras were off. People stopped and they sat and talked.

Yeah. And so it all ended sadly and ended.

So how would that present with leave? Okay, there are some people can do it and some people can't. How do you do it?

Well, it's present, without leaf, without leave.

Sorry.

I mean, yes, I was, I was quote representing Forbes, but basically I love to go to places. I'd much rather see a dress rehearsal than a performance. I'd rather. So I joined. I mean, it's just kind of a theme. I joined the advisory board of MAS holdings, which is a Sri Lankan company that basically makes undergarments. And I joined mostly for the round trip business class ticket, plus three days visiting the factories and meeting a couple of dissidents and learning a bit about the politics of Sri Lanka and, you know, watching. That's what I want. I want to see what real people do for themselves, not what people do for the tourists. So in another wonderful trip, Nathan Myhrvold, who is chief technology officer of Microsoft, wanted to save Soviet science. This is like 1996. And he said, I'm going to go on my Gulf Stream and you can come with me. I'd love for you to be sort of like my interpreter guide because you know all these Russian computer companies and three weeks and wow, what an offer. So we did that and we visited Moscow and talked to Medvedev, I think it was on that trip, and talked to various computer company honchos and so forth. And then we went to Uzbekistan where the first day. So this was kind of tourism, but it was different. So it was just Nathan and me and I think some else who was, to be honest, I don't recall. But we had this tour guide and the first day it was an Uzbek woman, Muslim, who was. Now there'd been some dramatic changes since the end of the Soviet Union, but ultimately the Russians were still ruling the roost. And she told us about her childhood and how she had handed out some Muslim candies on some holiday and the neighbor woman had come by and berated her mother, saying, you, you have to take better care of your daughter. You know, she starts doing all this Muslim religious stuff, your family's going to get into trouble. My husband is in the Communist Party and if I won't tell him, but you know, this is like, be careful. And she was, she complained about not being treated very well by her co workers who were Russian, even though now, you know, she was mourned the ascendant. And then the next day we had a Russian tour guide who had a short Skirt and high heels and a big gold ring. And she was about to get married to a foreign engineer and leave the country. And just the contrast between those two and all the religious, cultural class, political dynamics, you don't normally get those. And later on we were in Sarov, where that's where. What's his name, Sakharov, lived. It's one of those closed nuclear cities. And because of. Basically not so much because of Nathan's connections, but because everybody we tried to visit thought maybe they could get some Microsoft money. So we went to Sarof and everybody was so pleased to tell Nathan about their work. And one guy had a paper that he described that was something about rapidly changing atmospheric conditions and it was actually about bombs, but it had this nice euphemistic name. And then Nathan said, I've got this friend, this finance guy who's coming. He's got his own Gulf Stream. Because we were traveling in Nathan's Gulf Stream. And so I met this guy, his name was Jeffrey Epstein, and somebody. We asked someone to take our pictures standing in front of Sakharov's house. And of course I posted that on Flickr and many years later it's still shows up from time to time. But to my credit, I spelled Jeffrey's name wrong.

Well, that's your lucky thing. I wasn't going to go there. But you did.

And. But so I love. I'll tell you another story in a moment. But to Jeffrey Epstein's credit, this was. We were taking the day off because it was May Day and we were just walking around and in, in Sarof, basically the people either were workmen and they were wearing overalls or they were scientists and they were wearing badly fitting suits. And the women were at home. You didn't really see them. So this scientist walks by and Jeffrey rightly assumed that the guy would probably speak some English. So he asks him what I thought was an amazingly sensible question given this, given reality. He asked the guy, when were you last paid? Because this was during the depths of the ruble crisis and so forth. And as I said, it was May 6th. So the guy looks at his feet and he says, vil, it was January, but they give us lunch every day. And you know, that was very educational too. I mean, these people were subsidized, but they were, they were not paid. And that was, that was just license in Russia for scientists in a country that was now being taken over by capitalists but was having its problems. The other such. Let me tell you a nice story about someone who's been Cancelled. My mother was a big fan of Charlie Rose. So once I was in the green room at TED in Vancouver and which is where my mother lived, and I invited her to come see me. And there was Charlie Rose in the. In the green room and my mom, who was very definitely an old lady with white hair and sort of stooped over. And to his great credit, Charlie flirted with her and I can't imagine giving her a more wonderful gift. So everybody has some redeeming features and most people also have some persistent flaws.

And they're hidden.

Yeah. Or they come out eventually.

Well, yes, well. But still, I think that there's. There's not a single person on this planet that would be interpreted by somebody in some way, shape or form to have something that is demonstrately bad for them. Meaning we're talking multiple cultures. So Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, they're all going to look at the world differently. United States, Mexico, Canada, whether it be religion, technology, politics, Brazil. There's. The differences between Colombia and Brazil are, you know, night and day, even though the language and the culture has some, you know, forks off of them. The challenge is. You're talking about Charlie. I thought Charlie was a brilliant interviewer.

He was.

And the challenge that we have in the world, and I'm not going to. I'm not defending anybody. That's just a statement. Is that the redeeming qualities of somebody who could, for example, do nuclear physics or can do interviewing doesn't mean that they're going to be loving parents. It does not mean that they are socially adept. It doesn't mean that they will fit into another culture's dynamic. And sometimes you have to appreciate people for what they can, can bring. And that's not easy to do, at least today.

Right. I mean, just to clarify, my dad was loving. He just wasn't demonstrative.

No, no, no.

Okay.

I wasn't talking about your name.

I know, but I just wanted to clarify.

One of the people that I admired growing up, he had five children. He's. I mean, a great guy to me. Wasn't a mentor because he only helped me in one area, but he's a good friend and all five of his children didn't talk to him. So you could say this is a bad person, but you could also say he was brilliant. And the challenge is we kind of mix and believe that there has to be a uniformity across individuals. Well, you also have to have all this balance and nobody does. I. I don't know. I. I think that probably everybody could say something bad about somebody based upon their perception of where they come from.

Yeah. I mean I used to say as a journalist I could talk to you for half an hour and accurately but selectively quote you and make you look like an idiot or a sage and like, you know, the kindest person in the world or a total jerk. And it's the journalist's responsibility to try and figure out the whole truth but also the relevant truth depending on the context.

And because of these things, these experiences you've had someone who's in from Astana and Kyrgyzstan on they're going to have a completely different perspective. I spent time, not a lot of time, but I spent time in St. Petersburg and in Moscow and I mean just different worlds, even those two cities from one another and how they looked at their positioning within Russia or you know, you jump over to, to Estonia lot for your Lithuania and you're in Vilnius and they're going to give you a different interpretation. But if you just jump over to Poland and today Poland again, not picking on a society, they've decided not to take in immigrants because they say they brought in enough people, they're done. But some people say, well why aren't you? Well, it's a perspective, it's plans. It's those long term plans you talked about. So I'm, I, I try at least mine going back to this, being present is. Try to. I'm doing it with you right now.

Yeah.

I'm asking myself what pieces of you can I find that enrich my life? It's not an easy thing to be able to calculate today.

Yeah.

Without being canceled. As you brought it up the. So with the. With present without leave you're. You gave examples. Do you think about being present without leave or is just something that you've just become?

I mean, I thought about it and I mean as I said, I love, I love going behind the scenes. I love, I love understanding what people don't talk about. And you mentioned St. Petersburg. So I had this friend who long ago worked for Microsoft and anyway his father had been, had run the head of. He had run one of the top two theaters in St. Petersburg back when it was Leningrad. So they had a very nice apartment on Nevsky Prospect and I went to visit. They had of course lived through the siege of St. Petersburg where there's not enough to eat and so forth and so on. And I just always remember his mother opened the refrigerator and she actually had two fridges and they were full of, you know, glass or ceramic pots. With like plastic covers and metal pots with metal covers. But she was clearly prepared for the next siege. Like she just couldn't not. She didn't feel safe without a. Two fully stocked refrigerators just in case. And this is like in, you know, 1995 or something. And you just see how long these things have an impact on how people think about their lives.

And yet at the same time you can be present. You can be present at all times. There's a. One of the things I've shared it before, I think on the podcast is people always quote Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And I, and I will say, do you know where that came from? And almost nobody does. There was a. Maslow came up with it. Someone in America read it, they created the pyramid. Maslow didn't. They then used it. And we're making a ton of money. So Maslow was asked to speak on it. But he did know, probably deep down, but before he died, he ended up writing about his perception, not of the pyramid, but of what he thought. And I say to people, let me ask you a question. Can you be poor and be self actualized, like no money and know who you are and be the person you are? And they'll say, well, yeah. And I said, so if you can come up with one idea in less than a few seconds, it means that the pyramid is flawed. You don't need to move up to become self actualized and what to be present. You can be present no matter at what condition you are. It's a choice. At least that's the way I see it.

Oh sure.

But that's not an obvious. For a lot of people.

Yeah, I mean, but you need to find interesting places to be present in as opposed to places that are presented, so to speak, inside people's homes under watching their behavior when they're not trying to please foreigners. What is it really like in all these different places?

I don't. So maybe I was going a different direction. I wasn't thinking about just travel because you and I have had the luck, the opportunity to travel the the world over. The average person doesn't. So I was actually thinking about being present in the moment. You know, you can be present when you're talking to your grandmother. You could be present when you are, you know, are you watching your children or are you participating in the group or the conversation or you could be present anywhere. And so that's where I was taking present.

Well, I mean it's also, yes, it's getting to go to company meetings. Another great Example I was at this event basically of CIA agents, and they all had badges that said things like fred M or 2G. No full names, no last names, or this group I was part of, we were talking about cyber security. And we held the meeting at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, where we started talking about risk. And the assumption is, of course, gambling is risky, but actually the gambling part of the business was completely controlled and managed and lots of money and computers and so forth. And then they took us down to the. Basically the security room. Two of us were not let in because they were known card counters or something like that. And they showed us the cameras. And so from the top of the. From the ceiling, they had cameras that could read not the time, but the little seconds on people's watches and watching every table and slot machine. And their biggest challenges were basically that they would let in known felons, in which case they would lose their license. And that turned into another story where one of the people there was a software guy who now runs a company called Senzing that basically does a lot of identity deduplication. And in the middle of this highly secure, very wired, computerized room, there was a plain whiteboard with nothing connected to it where they had handwritten, you know, prince of x up 25%, 2 million, and sort of the top 10 clients, just with no digital record how much they owed or how much they were ahead. And it was fascinating. And they told us they're. You know, what we really are scared of is not the gambling. It's some lady slipping in the aisle next to the shoe store or something and suing us for 5 million because there was a wet spot.

And I can imagine that happening. The. So when you say present without leave, are you. Was your reference. Because I'm now questioning myself if I was in hearing. What are you talking about? Being. Going out and when without leave. Meaning, like, traveling around and.

No, without permission.

Life.

So absent without leave means, basically, we did not give you leave to go. You're aol. And you, you know, you can now be. Oh, yeah. So in the same way, you know, like, we don't know who this lady is, but she came in with this group of guys that seem to be legit or, you know.

Yeah, I've. I've been in enough positions where people have said, who are you?

Yeah, exactly.

Like, well, I. I saw everybody going this way, so I just joined. And they said, but this is a paid group.

So I did that once by mistake in Cote d', Ivoire, I. I joined the large group Which I thought were the people going to passport control, but they were actually all the rich people and government officials and, yeah, the. The elite who actually went to a special lounge. And I discovered that I had inadvertently. I was in the country without passing passport control, which is fine, except I knew that if I wanted to leave the country eventually, as I did, I wouldn't have a stamp in my passport. So I went to the head of this lounge and explained what had happened, thinking he would tell me how to get back. And instead he said.

Just stamped that?

Yeah, he said, no problem. And he took me out to the front of the passport line where he had a friend who then stamped my passport. And I was good to go. But that was a lot of fun.

So. But now I get a little bit more of that. I was in Bangladesh and I did things that they just said I could have died what I had done. And they said, why did you do that? And I said, well, they were having a party. They invited me. I thought I took care of everything. And they said, you don't know. The odds of you ever coming back are so slim. How did you do it? So there's a long story to it, but I ended up just. Hey, my wife is not as happy with those type of scenarios. So when I tell her the story, yeah, but it's just part of life. So what is Star City?

So Star City was the space training, which I sort of talked about. I mean, again, the purpose of that was, well, there's something there. So this was training as a backup cosmonaut backup to Charles Simone, also from Microsoft, who had gone up once and was going to go up the second time. So he wasn't there as much, but I was part of the backup crew. And basically the idea was learn about space plumbing and space medicine. And then there's a lottery ticket attached. And I was nice enough not to wish that Charles would meet up with any harm, but he was newly married, and I was hoping that his wife would say, sweetie, you let that lady go. Instead, just stay home with me. And that did not happen, however. So the training was basically end of September to March 26, which is my brother's birthday. And sometime in November, we both had to buy. Charles and I both had to buy insurance. That was the terms of the Space Adventures protocol for going up in space. And I thought that was very unfair because he was very likely to go. I was unlikely to go. But anyway, we both paid for the.

Actually, the. The. Our teammate, the Andreas, wrote she. She was backup, but she does. She doesn't know me, but she knows Eric.

Eric Anderson. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, we had to buy the insurance, and ironically, he got bitten on campus by a rabid dog. All these dangers of going into space, and the real problem is you get bitten by a rabid dog. But it happened in November, so he got treated and was ready to go. But in the end, the lottery ticket of going up into space did not happen. But what did happen was, as you can imagine, it would be really, really bad PR if a space tourist goes up and gets sick or dies or something like that. So they inspect you very carefully. And Richard Garriott, who also went into space, had a spot or something on his liver, and he actually had liver surgery so that he could go with me. They found that I had Barrett's esophagus, which is the precursor to cancer of the esophagus. So I started getting scoped every year. And in 2016, I actually did have cancer, the esophagus. But it was so early that they got rid of it with an outpatient operation. But I had no symptoms. So had I not gone up into space, I would probably be, I mean, gone up. If I hadn't done the space training, I would be dead, which is pretty amazing. I mean, the training itself was wonderful. It was an education about how Russia worked in Soviet times. The cafeteria where the food was terrible had a big sign outside saying every pilot is entitled to. And I don't remember the numbers, but it was something like 12 grams of meat, 20 grams of kasha, 6 grams of butter per day. And when I complained that there were no vegetables, they made me a salad and I promptly got diarrhea.

Yeah.

And then so then months later, when we were in Baikonur, which is very different because Baikonur is where the cosmonauts leave from. And these are heroes of the Soviet system. They go up, they might not come down. They're patriots, they represent the country. So the cafeteria in Star City was really pretty terrible. And people, you know, it's like a second rate coffee shop. And separately, I used to have dinner with the NASA astronauts. Even though NASA and Roscosmos were, you know, sort of grudgingly friendly, the astronauts themselves were perfectly, hey, you're another American. Come on over and have dinner. That's great. In Baikonur, the whole team, the real cosmonauts, and then the backups like me and these two other guys, we were, you know, the heroes. And they brought the food out as if every piece of food was a birthday cake. They Carried it with pride and presented it with love. And it was actually delicious. And everybody gained five pounds over the two weeks. And it was just, it was so amazing. There was a lady whose job it was to cut the hair of these people who might never come back. So I figured out get a free haircut too. One of my favorite pictures is me getting my haircut in Star City. And then the interesting thing was there was our team was a Russian guy and an American guy. And the Russian guy was probably drank a little too much. And the American guy didn't really want to go because his wife had cancer, but he felt it was his duty. And I just was very inspired by that sense of duty and sacrifice because for most people going into space is, wow, what a privilege. And for him it was a duty, but he took it seriously.

Term limit.

Yes, this is a thing I started thinking of this summer partly because, as I said, the purpose of wellville is not its own self perpetuation, but understanding what it can do with the time it has and then passing something along. And I have a. I think the same. Well, this summer, of course, Biden was forced to recognize the limits of his term in a way that I think was good for the country. And then there's. The longevity billionaires who want to live forever. And like it or not, for most of them, it's really about themselves rather than about society. And most of them aren't really enjoying the lives they've got. They're not getting the pleasure or joy out of life. They're getting some kind of displaced satisfaction by the notion that they can persist beyond anyone else's term limits. So in a sense, it's this notion of understanding the appropriate timing for things, whether it's for most things, things go beyond their term in terms of investing in health and people. We expect two immediate returns. We need to be patient and understand that the love and care you give a child will pay off 20, 30 years from now, whether you're their parent or their employer or other people in their community, but just this whole notion that we need to think not just about amounts and what you do, but what you build to pass on to the next generation. Term limits are not about an end. They're about a different way of perpetuating yourself and making giving the people that come after you some, some advantage as they take on the baton or carry forward in the race or as they.

Say, leave the campfire a little bit brighter.

Yes, you're passing the torch.

How many times have you had those conversations with somebody about term limits, since you realized it, meaning telling somebody, move on.

Not. I mean, I've had those conversations before. I had the meme of term limits, if you like. There's. There's another one. So there's. Some of your audience will know TV Rain, which is a Russian TV channel that was started by a useless socialite who wanted to have cheerful TV news. This is in Russia in the last five, ten years. And so she created TV Rain, as in Dancing in the Rain. And then she made a huge mistake, so to speak. She hired some real journalists and suddenly her TV channel had a hard time keeping its lease and people were arrested and bad things happened. And finally it was declared a terrorist news agency or something like that, and is now operating out of Amsterdam. There's a wonderful movie about this called Take this XXX Job and Shove It. And so I got to know all these people in various ways. And the filmmaker is a woman called Vera Kucheskaya, who then is now in the middle of finishing a movie called the Last Journey, about a Russian, the guy who started a company called Vimpelcom, which was really the first mobile phone service in Russia called Beeline. He was also very successful. And then somehow things began to happen to his company and control passed to other people. And he was also funding Navalny, the leader of the opposition. So he got removed from Russia. All these things happen in the passive voice, of course. And in 2021, he began to see in himself signs of dementia and of his own term limits. And he decided he would go to Switzerland and undergo euthanasia. But before he did so, he got in touch with Viera Khachevskay and said, I want you to come and talk to me and my co founder and just hear my story of what I've seen in Russia and why I feel it's now time for me to go. It's partly I can't remember things, but partly what's happening in Russia with Ukraine. And this was basically the. The fall before the invasion in February 2022, he. He called her in and she interviewed him and then created a wonderful movie about his term limits along with a fair amount of Russian history. And it's. So that movie's been on my mind a lot and I'm trying to help her find distribution in the US and it's not really the money, it's the right people who know how to find the right places, Sundance Film Festival and so forth and so on. But that I think euthanasia is not something that should be forced on people. Obviously, but it's. It is a reasonable response in the right circumstances. Understanding your own term limits, and again, not trying to go beyond the time that you're allotted and the time that you can enjoy. So that's where it comes from.

The. I would argue that more so than not, humans cannot gauge where their term limit would have ended. There it's staying too long, whether it be a party or a company or, you know, in political roles or in research or whatever it may be. I think we're very bad at that because, I don't know, maybe there's something societally that it's embedded into us, is that we can overcome. Even the songs that we have, even the movies, there's always someone. The underdog that comes as Sylvester Stallone and Rocky washed up, not gonna make it, can't do it, rises to the top. And that underdog might be a psychological, sociological, behavioral component of our indoctrination into humanity. At least in the. In the 21st century, we. We think this way. And therefore, to back down is almost like giving up. Like you're no longer valuable. But yet, the way you're saying it, making choices is probably a better way to look at term limits.

Yes. And when you said leaving parties. So I have an aura ring, the one that monitors your sleep and so forth. And I like to tell people, you know, it's not so much the data, it's the ring itself. It's like wearing an amulet that your grandmother gave you. And what it says is, it's okay to leave this party. You can go home and you'll sleep better.

And.

And, you know, I just saw this cartoon, famous one long ago, where some woman is looking very alluring and saying, I drink to make other people interesting. Yeah. I don't want to go to bed drunk. I kind of like my. I don't want to. Yeah, I like feeling confident and not. And the ring just kind of gives me permission. Yeah, it's okay. You can leave early and go to bed and wake up refreshed.

People have said to me during my life, do you ever do drugs? Can you imagine me on drugs? No. I don't think the world's ready for it. So I've really not gotten drunk, and I don't do drugs. And it's not a matter of. I mean, I like to take swine. I'll have a beer, but I just don't have an interest. Just want to live life, just want to experience it. But to drink, to make others interesting, that's perfect.

I actually did. How Should I say I experienced ketamine earlier this summer because I cracked my wrist in rural Oregon, which is another of the Wellville communities. And apparently sort of the standard is you just do anesthesia with ketamine because too often it's the standard fentanyl stuff is you don't want to give it to people who are prone to substance abuse. And so the protocol is just anesthesia with ketamine. And that was really interesting and a wonderful experience, but it didn't. It's.

Are you, are you awake during. With ketamine?

Well, so here's what happened. I. They told me this and, you know, I was kind of worried about my wrist. I wasn't going to ask a lot of questions and I figured, yeah, fine, I know what ketamine is. This is probably going to be pretty interesting. I'm going to try and stay awake. So they, you know, did whatever they did. And suddenly I realized, I mean, I said to myself, I'm going to remember this. And I don't remember all of it, but I remember waking up in this sort of space where I wasn't really present with purple and white swirling lights and I could kind of hear people in the background. And I said to myself, ah, this is ketamine. I am going to remember it. I'm not really here, but I do know my name is Esther Dyson. So I'm going to remember this as myself. And then I began to wonder, have they fixed my wrist yet? I can't feel anything. I hope they have. I hope they fix it before I wake up and I hope they've already fixed it because it didn't hurt. And another interesting thing about emergency rooms, as opposed to operating rooms is they don't take off all your clothes and put you in this badly fitting gown. So they took off my watch, off my arm. But anyway, suddenly I felt the soles of my sneakers and I thought, oh, well, that's interesting. I guess I'm coming back. There's something physical here, but I still can't feel the arm. I hope it won't come back and start hurting. And then pretty much I woke up. But that's what I remember, that it was really interesting. It wasn't like feeling at one with the universe or anything like that, but just.

But were you awake or were you dreaming of being awake?

No, I was awake. I mean, however you define that or it was a very realistic dream of. But I mean, I think I was pretty much awake. I. Especially when I started feeling the soles of my feet.

I'M I'm just that. The reason I'm asking is I had. I broke my leg in half and the tibia, but not the fibia. And they decided to put me under, but not. I was. I was awake. And during the surge, my. My cousin came in. He's an orthopedic surgeon in the area, and he came in and during the entire time, I'm saying, I love you, Larry. You're the best cousin of everybody I know. And I'm just talking all these things while they're doing this. And they said it was hysterical. I was. They said I. It was the funniest thing. I was just all there, but I don't remember a thing. So that's why I was.

I see. Well, nobody told me I was talking. And I mean, who knows? In the end, life is mysterious, but I believe I was awake and I certainly heard them. I mean, as opposed to remembering nothing, I remember again hearing distant voices that I could not hear well enough to understand. And the shift from being disembodied to part of my body coming back for the. The arm, they. They anesthetized fully for the next couple of days. So it just kind of flopped around. But. But it was fun and certainly very pleasant, but.

Oh, well, yeah, because you don't have the pain now. The pain is all gone.

But beyond that, it was kind of cool, but not. I don't feel a craving to do it again. If someone said, for your next esophagus scoping will do ketamine, I would say yes, but I wouldn't ask for more afterwards.

Yeah, it's. It's not. I'm assuming it's not like a drug high that people. No, it's a different type of high.

Yeah, it's not even a high. I mean, it's. That's the thing. It's disembodiment that you. Some. I don't really understand that word until. Yeah, you just. Your body.

It goes to. A disembodiment can also go towards very bad things.

Oh, sure.

Yeah. I. Yes. I had a. We have a teammate whose. His work has just took him to Cambodia. And he wrote I. And he's seen very bad things in his life. And he wrote me and he said it. I can't even share the things I've seen. And it's going to take me quite some time to get over it. I think, wow, this guy has been in really rough situations. So when you said disembodiment, I went to our teammate and I was like, that's not good. So disembodiment can go all the way to very, very bad. Yeah, it's a, I think term limits are an interesting. Just the phrase term limits and maybe there's a softer way to, to make people think differently about what is a term limit, what does it mean? And it's not the end. It can be considered the beginning because you're.

The end of your term is the beginning of someone else's.

Well, and. But it's also the beginning of your next term. And considering that humanity today is more self centered, the, the fact that it could be somebody else's term becomes a humility position. It becomes a who you are as a person. And I don't, I don't know if a lot of individuals can accept that. But as a, as a marketing sales piece, if you say the term limit should be looked at as a new beginning for you. Yeah, you get to embark on something else. You're able to push that behind and yes, it'll give whatever you're working on an opportunity for somebody else.

Yeah, but I'm not a market trained. I'm trying to market the idea.

I'm saying. Yeah, if you're trying to share it with somebody. I'm thinking about the people I know who might. They're at the end of their term and in most cases they, they hold on.

If I were trying to persuade someone, you're right, I would be very gentle. But if I'm trying to persuade people to think differently before they think about themselves, I mean, that's why I'm not in marketing, let's face it.

Well, I would. There's one of. You're selling continuously in the role of leaders all the time, no matter where you are, in your home, in your whatever. So if I was talking to my children, I would probably use both. I would say, look, there's two different perspectives here. One of them is you're letting something pass on. But I would also say for you, you could also look at it as a new beginning. And it's not selling, selling, it's getting someone to understand the concept is all I'm saying.

No, you're, you're right. I'm just being critical.

Yeah, but it makes you cringe. There are certain things. I could hear it in your voice. I could hear it in your reaction. You could, your reaction was no, David. And it, and that's a, that's a visceral reaction. You want it to be, you want it to be true. Just understand that there are term limits and what I'm constantly facing with individuals is how do I get them to know that there's a next opportunity along the way so that they'll let go?

Yeah. And.

And they. It's a tough one. It's a tough one.

And to be honest, I mean, for me, it's, you know, it's not stopping. The next thing I'm doing is writing a book called Term Limits. So thank you for the advice about making it more palatable, because you're right, it is. It is about your own next term as well as the other guys.

You're welcome. In. In. I'll send you a copy of the Paid to Think. And in it there's a chapter called Selling Continuously. And it doesn't matter. Paid to Think is a. Is a lifebook, not a business book. It just happens to be business. And I say, look, no matter where you are, you're selling to your friends, your family, your wife. You would at this, that and the other. You do it all day long. I mean, putting on the clothing, you put on. If you put on makeup or not makeup, if whatever you. Everybody is evaluating everybody. It's. It's a fact of life. So don't. Don't shy from it. But understand that that's how we interpret the world and each culture interprets it differently. So even that language that is used in your book, Term Limits, Well, I would do a search to see if term limits mean something else in multiple languages because it could mean you're dead. So the book. The book title is Die.

Yeah. Well, I mean, to many people in English, that's what it means. Oh, but again, I mean, you're right. And at the same time, I'm trying to get them to whatever It's. Yeah. What you're saying is helpful because you're right, I need to make it palatable. Well, it's not.

I'm looking at it. You're teaching me something. And I'm saying, okay, how might I look at it myself? I do. I'm looking at myself first. That's one of my sayings, is look to yourself first. And then the second thing I'm saying is, okay, if I want to help somebody, whether it be my children or someone I'm working with or a friend or whatever, I'm. How might I bring this? How might I help somebody use it?

Right.

And I. In my back pocket, I should have, I believe, an arsenal of capabilities. Well, if you're not getting it that way. Have you ever thought about it this way? Not in that same tone, depending on the person. So I think it's an. I actually think it's a really neat and really neat title. And the reason is it's counterintuitive to the way people are thinking. They just need to grab it in the beginning that they can. That they can let go of what they've got. And that's where my palatableness is, what I'm trying to get to. So, yeah, it's a great. It's an interesting approach. And I'm asking myself a bunch of questions right now. So what about reigning AI versus training, real training? Right now I'm kind of reading my own writing. What is that?

So that is. It's a piece I wrote for the information, but it's more general. There's so much discussion about, oh my gosh, we need to train our AIs. And it's a really interesting discussion how we do it and what they're trained on. And a lot of people, it goes back to hallucinations versus reality. And AI have hallucinations, but the reality is, I mean, they're being trained to avoid hallucinations, but sometimes hallucinations are good. You know what the biggest hallucination ever was?

No.

That the world is round.

Oh.

You know, properly trained AI that was trained on human knowledge would have said the world is flat. Everybody knows back in. Yeah, a few centuries ago.

And so not long ago. Yes.

And so in a sense, AIs are trained to eliminate the outliers and to focus on what's standard and known. And so they can. They can miss. I mean, they miss all the new science, all the new discoveries, that kind of stuff. And they discriminate because they're trained to mimic human behavior, which discriminates and so forth and so on. And these are all very useful and legitimate things to think about. And training AIs is really important and so forth, but it's even more important to train our babies to be good humans and to be self aware. Self aware enough to resist the manipulation by AIs that are trained to manipulate human beings. And the biggest problem with AI as far as I'm concerned, is empowering predatory business models much more than figuring out how to make poison or create new atom bombs and so forth. I mean, those are also issues. But the solution is less training AIs and more focusing on outcomes and, you know, ruling both human and AI behavior based on the behavior, not on the particular algorithms. I mean, we have unexplainable humans just as much as we have unexplainable AIs. And meanwhile, we are failing at Training our babies to be better humans, to be self aware, to resist the predatory business models, to say no or to ask questions. And that's, that's the basics. Oh, it goes back to pretty much everything we've talked about. Yeah.

Well, the, the thing that really stands out with me, and I don't know how you're, is that you, the humanistic side of who you are, which I love. Even though you, you didn't want to talk to me for a very long time and you know I'm not available. No. Let me check you out. No, I, I felt a little bit not as good. But the, there's a surprising. I, I didn't expect this, this much humanistic side of you. Not because you're a bad person, just from, you know, this, she does this, she does this, she does this. And I didn't, you keep on coming back to it, which I absolutely love that. So we have a challenge with babies in the world, period. The Chinese are offering money, the Japanese are offering money, the South Koreans are offering money. There's United States. If not for an influx from immigrants, we would have a, probably a negative growth rate in it because that's, that's actually feeding our growth rate. Without it, it's not there. But there's a challenge around the world feeding our babies. And I was talking to my wife, I think it was today, about babies, and she said the world has just made it too tough.

Yeah.

In many regards. You know, I, I, we have enough people that I've spoken to who've just said I can't, you know, or women who have gotten to an age where they waited, whatever that may be, whatever the dynamics. I'm not going to go back to historical references, just the condition. Today there are enough women who have said, or couples. I thought I had more time. I didn't realize I'd missed that. So we're not, we're training our AIs in one way, but we're also training the humans, the adults in the room, not even the babies, to act in a way that's, doesn't even produce babies.

Right.

And I don't know, it's not as, I don't know if it's a question, but it's a. How do you, if we have to treat them, to help them to train our babies, but we're just not having enough of them.

Yeah. So there's a, well, one reason we're not is because it's become so expensive and yeah, again, that's, that's something to be solved by collective investment, you, you don't have to have the baby, but you should be happy that your taxes are paid to support the babies of others. Thank you. J.D. vance.

Collective investment. Yeah, collective investment. Where have you seen that? Where have work the best globally, pretty.

Much any culture that basically invests in child care gives women paid leave when they're for three years after they give birth. Societies that provide, as you mentioned, free, free child care, free medical care. You know, if you're a black woman in the U.S. your chances of dying in childbirth are terrifying. And it just, it's not very encouraging.

I'm also saying mine, I'm adding owning a home.

Yes.

Yeah, that again, there's some people believe home ownership is terrible. You'll hear it all online everywhere. But owning a home. Today, our neighbor just sold this house. She bought it six, eight months ago ago. For some reason she's, I think she regrets it. She decided to take another job someplace else and the house went for a tremendous amount more than what she bought it for. And I know that if I went back to my team, my 20s when I first bought my first house, there's no freaking way I could have been able to afford it, even with the cost adjustment for inflation. So. And we're still not talking about the 72 to 78% of the world's population that lives under €9 a day or US$10. So, you know, medical care, childbirth for three years, health care. I think we're still talking first world nations.

Yes. And ultimately, again, I'm more worried about that than about the environment.

Yeah, I can understand coming from what you've been saying. Yes. And I'm not saying bad or good.

And I'm glad other people are worried about the environment. It's not. As Hurricane Helene rumbles up through South Carolina north.

And at the same time they're happening all over from Morocco, not having enough water to be able to have crops all the way through to the, the extreme heat that is over Antarctica. Not for Australia, just the past few weeks ago during the middle of winter. So it's, it's a taxing environment all across that. Are, are you big into AI Is. Have you spent a lot of time on the AI side?

Well, I, so when I had my newsletter, I was writing about AI back in the 80s when AI is a very, very broad term. And in some ways it's, you know, whatever computing we don't quite understand yet. I mean, it used to mean logic models and stuff like that. Stuff, stuff that we once called AI is now kind of standard stuff. And yeah, there's lots of embellishments to make it look more sentient, to make it look as if it understands, but it's still models. And at some point, humans are made of atoms and so are computers. And, you know, who knows what complex systems will emerge. But right now it's very far from being human. And people tend to over, you know, the things it does very, very well, very, very quickly. It's just like machines. They can move huge amounts of stuff that human beings move at all physically. And in the same way they can calculate huge amounts of stuff that human beings intellectually can't do. But again, the human capacity, the love, the sentience, I mean, dolphins are closer to us than computers are. Still.

I had a partner in South Africa and we had a computer, an AI company. And he would always say, we're no, we have the A, we don't have the I, and we're no closer to having the I than we were 50 years ago. And then he would always, he would remind people that there are 200 different disciplines or more just under AI. So ML is a subset of AI and I, I didn't think about it in that way. And he said, today we're still not any closer. Your machine doesn't know you. It does things that acts as if it knows you, but it's just taking your behaviors, the way you write, the way you type, the way you talk, and it's giving it back to you in the way that you want. But it has no care in the world and it doesn't understand what it's doing.

I mean, if I were to write a science fiction novel, the thing that my AI computer really, really wants is electricity and storage space. You know, it's that simple. And if you created one that had a desire, it would be a desire for more electricity and imagine what they would do. I mean, there's the paperclip notion where it's given the, the desire to have more paperclips and turns everything in the world into paperclips. And that's, that's more credible than the computer wanting human love.

Yes, I and, and there were enough humans that I also wish had some of the characteristics that you want or outline. The capacity for love, the capacity for human understanding and the under and the interconnected, interconnectedness to one another that is somewhat or lost to many individuals. So I think we have enough to work with just on the human side. The AI is not going to give that answer. What is the Q? So it's Asterisk, A small.

It's.

It's Amberstam.

Yes. So where it came from?

I'm screwing them up today. I don't know why it came from.

I was at a Google conference called Sifu and they asked me to, you know, they were doing like a little post event thingy and you were supposed to give one word and I said, could I have maybe a couple of very short words? And they said, okay. And I said basically, big Q, small A. More questions than answers. Big questions, small answers. Just sort of the. What you. We were talking about the whole time, the primacy of questions over these little answers. That's it.

So it's an interesting symbol. I. What came to mind very quickly when you say that's it is that term limits is a subset of this.

Everything is a subset of big questions.

Right. Follow up question. You know what it is? Why isn't the book QA instead of term limits?

Because it is about a subset. It's about the subset of thinking long term. It's about the subset of. I mean, Q and A contains everything. And term limits is more about human and time spans and thinking. Again, the notion that term limits vary. It's not all good or all bad, but term limits is. It's big enough to encompass a lot, but not as big as Q and A.

Yeah, it's A. Again, I have the quote in front of me. So I try to remind myself all the time what are the questions I'm not asking. So I love the Q and A and then the small A and just an interesting answer. I wouldn't have come up with something so smart or such a way of expressing it. Anything else about it?

No, I mean it just, it does indeed contain multitudes. And so it's a great slogan, but in terms of a book title, I mean, if I'm writing a book about science or something, maybe, but it's, you.

Know, I'm just asking about Q about that. Is it some. Is there anything else? Like it's a statement. Is there anything else about that that you. Besides the fact that it is what it is? That's kind of what you said. You just, you kind of said that's it.

Yes, I mean, it's.

I'm okay with it.

What do you want? I want more questions, not more answers. And I mean the question. There's some scientist who says, I mean there's some. All the good scientists say I'm more interested in questions than answers because questions produce something new. Answers presumably are on the bush to be picked and if you want something new, ask a new question.

I love it. I just thought I'd ask it more to it.

No, it's. What is it sufficient unto the question? Is the question thereof? The answers will. No, I'm trying to make it up. It's.

Oh, okay.

I mean, my favorite quote, which is kind of in opposition to term limits, is hold tightly to the hand of nurse for fear of finding something worse. Do you know that one? It's a nursery rhyme from a poet called Hilaire Belloc. And, you know, it's like telling a kid, hey, you know, if you let go of nurses, you might run into some trouble. So just hold tightly to the.

Yeah.

Of nurse for fear of finding something worse.

There's a lot of quotes out there, and I think is if they can be. If they can be a. Oh, I think quotes are overused in the world today unless the person giving the quote can demonstrate that they use it themselves. Well, because people want to post a quote, they want to share a quote. And the thing is, is it your quote like you're giving it? Is it something that you live by or at least use? And I think a lot of people just love quotes. So. Yeah, I think a lot of what I heard from you today is very much who you are, and that I appreciate.

Thank you. The thing about quotes is almost every quote is potentially good advice in the right circumstances and completely wrong in others. And I have people come, you know, they say, I want your advice. And I say, I can't give your advice without knowing a lot more about you and about your choices and your capacity and your. Your desires. Because most interesting questions that are not very general are actually very specific to some set of circumstances.

Yes. And I shared this yesterday, day before I said this person was asking almost exactly what you said. And I said, let me explain something. When you were growing up, your parents could have loved you and held you and done everything. And you know, when they were doing that, they were right. And I said, but at time, there were times, I bet you, when your parents were strict and hard and they told you, no, we're not going to help you. We're not going to do anything. And people have to grow up. And you know what? They're right to.

Exactly.

It just depends.

And they knew you well enough to be right in both cases, ideally.

Hopefully. So, Esther, this was fantastic. I'm glad we got a chance to know each other. I hope you had as much interesting time as I did hearing, and it was great.

Yeah. And unexpected. I mean, you told me. And it was wonderful just to wander around much more than I expected. It was great. Thank you.

So let me end this with this. So thank you for taking the time today. Appreciate it. And we want to thank you for all of you for taking the time today to listen in. I do hope that you learned something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others. So, Esther, what's one of the best ways ways to connect with you?

Edison E D Y S o n@ed littlepun venture adventure.com don't let it autocorrect to adventure and and don't think it's an educational venture studio either.

So for as always, you can't fix yesterday. You can only create today, tomorrow. That said, I would love to connect with you too. You could reach me@davidavidgoldsmith.com I'm on Instagram. Someone gave me this name, Mr. David Goldsmith, while I was in Asia. You can connect to me on Twitter, @DavidGoldsmith, at LinkedIn, Facebook. You'd be able to find me pretty easily. That said, I'm David Goldsmith and thank you for listening.