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Esther Dyson: Journalist & Technology Entrepreneur

Interviewed at the offices of Meetup in New York, NY. August 19th, 2008
Born: 1951, in Zürich, Switzerland

 

“Many of the students one meets graduate from these outstanding universities without any clear sense of what their life mission is. Moreover, they don’t have any real idea of what is out there, of what real world career paths look like… They don’t have the vaguest notion as to how real people move from post to post.”

— David Brooks, from “Making it, Love and Success at America’s Finest Universities” Vol. 8, #5, Dec. 28, 2002

 

“Rejoice in that which is present, and be content with the things that come in season. If you see anything that you have learned and inquired about occurring, in your course of life, be delighted at it.”

    Epictetus, Discourse 4, Chapter 4, (Greek Philosopher, c. 55 – 135 AD)

 

ED:

The best learning has always been outside of school. I worked very hard in high school in order to get out. I went to college when I was 16, and then I suddenly stopped working hard because I no longer had a goal. I wanted to graduate but that was about it.

 

I felt my college work was fundamentally useless because I was reading stuff that had already been written, and writing stuff that people already knew. I did have one or two classes I really liked, but I spent most of my time working at The Harvard Crimson. I wanted to be a journalist, and to ask good questions. I didn’t almost flunk out, but I definitely graduated without distinction.

 

Then I had these two jobs in New York that I really hated. I had a headache every day until 5 o’clock. Then I got a job I liked, and ever since I’ve been working seven days a week, learning new stuff, and sometimes writing it down.

 

 

LS:

How did you find what you liked?

 

ED:

By getting lucky. I knew I wanted a writing job, and I liked to write about stuff that was new, or that people didn’t know - rather than going to the encyclopedia and recomposing something that already exists. That is the essence of news,

 

So I loved the job at Forbes. I was a reporter, actually a fact-checker, and I loved it. I checked facts and if I came up with a story idea that was good enough, then I got to write a story instead of checking someone else’s. Checking facts is God’s work. Before you write stuff down you need to make sure it’s accurate. I think that should be one of the Ten Commandments. There really is no better way to learn stuff than to have to write it down for other people and stand by your work.

 

 

LS:

Where’s the meaning in all of this?

 

ED:

I ended up writing a newsletter that wasn’t really news; it was more insight, and that’s where the meaning was. Thinking, “Well, what does this mean?” Selecting the particular two facts that would make people understand the broader meaning.

 

I could sit and interview you for an hour, I could take accurate notes, and I could make you look like an idiot or like a brilliant man. I could make you look kind and thoughtful, or mean and careless, and quote you accurately in either case. There’s a meaning, as you say.. In order to tell a true story, I have to pick the right anecdotes that are indicators of your character.

 

 

LS:

So, do you want to tell me your character?

 

ED:

Umm… no.

 

 

LS:

(Laughs) That’s obvious, but I thought I’d ask anyway!

 

ED:

Smart, trying to be kind and thoughtful, and self-confident but not obnoxious — I hope.

 

 

LS:

I’ll let you run with that one.

 

ED:

Now you have to ask another question.

 

 

LS:

Well, I’m looking for the meaning there. All those adjectives, they sound meaningful but they don’t necessarily have import to a person.

 

ED:

So you need to call for some useful anecdotes.

 

 

LS:

I’d ask for anecdotes from when you were young, but maybe that’s not where the insights really happened.

 

ED:

There are things that you can learn anytime that are always true: how it pays to be nice to people, how it’s better to be a sucker than a jerk, that you need to think before you talk. You can learn those kinds of things anytime, and they’re always true.

 

And then there are things that are new, like what’s happening in social media, or what’s the implication of the internet, things like that. Those things unfold, and if you see them before other people see them, then it’s fun to explain them to people who say, “Oh, I knew those little things, but I never really understood what they meant.” That’s a second kind of learning, where you learn something that’s new as opposed to learning something that people already know. Like you might watch what’s going in Russia and try to figure it out.

 

 

LS:

Tell me for the record, because I don’t really know, do you travel a lot?

 

ED:

I travel a huge amount. I have business interests in Russia, Europe, around the US, and I have little, odd business things in other places. I’m going to a conference in Tianjin, which is near Beijing, in the middle of September. I don’t really have any business interests in China but I’d like to know what’s going on. One of the best ways to find out is to go hear what people are taking for granted, not what they say.

 

I just got invited to go to Kampala in the middle of November to give a talk to the Ugandan Stock Exchange. How can anybody turn that down? It’s like, wow! You’re not just going to see Uganda and look at the animals, you’re going to go meet people who are trying to make things happen in Uganda. That’s really interesting.

I’m on two particular boards of directors that are interesting in this context. One is WPP Group. They have ad agencies all over the world. They probably have some affiliate in Uganda so I can go see them when I’m there and ask, “What’s happening to consumer lifestyles in Uganda? Are people buying shampoo yet, or are they still too poor and focused on getting enough to eat?”

 

The other board is the National Endowment for Democracy; they give grants to democracy organizations in countries that are often basket cases economically and politically.

 

There was this judge in Russia who just ruled on a sexual harassment case. So he says, “We need sexual harassment to keep the race going. If this didn’t happen our race would die out.” He let the (accused) guy off. This judge just had no interest in what the law was. I’m sure he views himself as a crusty curmudgeon with a sense of humor, but the guy’s a disaster. So the National Endowment for Democracy gives grants to people who train judges, and or help people organize politically or run honest newspapers

 

Last year I spent two and a half days in Kyrgyzstan visiting grantees — I don’t think that WPP has an office in Bishkek. One way or another, I’ve got most of the world covered.

 

 

LS:

How did you get such wanderlust?

 

ED:

Curiosity. As I said, I’ve been lucky. I’ve got connections so that I can go do interesting things, and I’m in a position where I can travel around the world and meet interesting people.

 

 

LS:

Do you remember a time when you were bored, and didn’t have this passion?

 

ED:

Someone asked me just the other day if I ever get bored… I never get bored unless I’m talking to someone who’s boring. If I’m alone I can think about what’s interesting, or watch something that’s interesting. The only time you get bored is when someone distracts you from what you think is interesting.

 

 

LS:

But when were you intrinsically bored, deeply bored. Were you ever?

 

ED:

Well yeah, when I was doing that job that was so boring.

 

 

LS:

No, I mean before that. I mean as a state of mind. Are you telling me that you were always enthusiastic about something?

 

ED:

I guess I was bored sometimes in school, but after school I was mostly reading.

 

 

LS:

How did you find reading?

 

ED:

Books.

 

 

LS:

What I mean is how did you become a reader? I have a 10-year old son, he wants me to read to him, but he hasn’t realized that books are a way to travel. Didn’t you grow up in a family that had lots of books?

 

ED:

I learned how to read, and I think my parents said, “Do it yourself.”

 

 

LS:

What did you start reading? What caught your interest?

 

ED:

I don’t know, everything there was. I was 8, or maybe I was 6, and I read books about magic, I read fairy tales, I read grown-up books. I read The Diary of Anne Frank.

 

 

LS:

Did you read these because they were in the house?

 

ED:

Yeah, and then I went to the library.

 

 

LS:

Were you one of those people who scoured the shelves for interesting things in the library?

 

ED:

Oh yeah. I loved the library. When I was very small I wanted a job in the library, but you had to be 14. The moment I turned 14 I went to the library and got a job as a page.

 

 

LS:

What does a page do?

 

ED:

Takes books off and put books back on the shelf; makes sure that they’re in the right place.

 

The first year I could work only in the children’s section. I loved knowing what the books were, and giving people advice. I pretty much knew every author in there, and I could give people advice on what they would like, what the books were about. That was much more fun than putting books back on the shelf. And the next year I got to do the adult section; that was fun in a different way. And then I went to college.

 

 

LS:

College wasn’t so good?

 

ED:

Oh, it was great, just the class part wasn’t: The Harvard Crimson was great. I was writing things that were new, as opposed to things that were already in a book somewhere. I did some news stories but mostly I did movie reviews, which was a lot of fun. I read some of them the other day and they were very pompous: “Catherine Deneuve, who failed to please in her last four roles, shines in this new film…” This was a 17-year old girl writing this stuff.

 

 

LS:

Do you consider yourself a journalist?

 

ED:

Yes and no. Now: not really, but my trade is journalism. I think it’s a holy calling.

 

 

LS:

Funny, I would have thought you’d identify yourself as a computer person.

 

ED:

In any context I can be anything, but the trade I have is making people see stuff. I can’t program a computer, but I know the computer industry, and I invest in startups. The skill I have is seeing what’s going on and explaining it to people. It may be seeing that a CEO is behaving badly and explaining it to him, (laughs) or it may be seeing that the company is really great and explaining it to other investors.

 

Put me down somewhere and I’ll figure out what’s going on and explain it to everyone. I like to explain in whatever medium is appropriate. It may be by investing money, it may be by writing, it may be by giving a speech.

 

 

LS:

What do you mean by “explaining by investing money?”

 

ED:

I’m explaining this is a good company, I see opportunity here. People say I do investing, and I say investing is like having sex. The fun part is actually raising — well, the sex is fun — it’s the raising the children afterwards that’s the real commitment. I don’t like just putting money somewhere; I like growing the thing that I put money into.

 

 

LS:

Is that called “management?”

 

ED:

No, it’s called sitting on a board, or being an active investor. And, of course, depending on the person and the recipient, that can be called interfering or micro-managing.

 

 

LS:

That is a bizarre job description, if it is a job description: a board member.

 

ED:

There are actually two versions of being a board member. There’s a member of a board of a public company where you have a fiduciary duty to the stockholders, and you need to make sure that the laws are followed. You don’t get that involved in the activities of the company. Your main job is to hire and fire the CEO on behalf of the stockholders. You can tell the CEO what to do, and if he doesn’t do it, then you can fire him.

 

When you’re on the board of a small company it’s more like being a parent. You do whatever is needed: you help them write their press releases, you help them hire their sales guy, you point out to them, “You know, I think the sales guy and the marketing people don’t get along. Have you considered doing this or that?” There are ways to do this effectively, and there are ways to do it badly.

 

 

LS:

Can you give me an example?

 

ED:

Oh, I can give you hundreds. First of all, I help a lot of these companies write their press releases, or I edit their position statements, or their marketing materials. I help them find people. I say, “This guy just isn’t cutting it. I heard him give a pitch and he wasn’t listening to the customer. You’ve either got to get him to listen, or you’ve got to let him go.”

 

I’ve fired CEO’s. Ideally you don’t fire them; you get them to understand that they should resign. If you do it well they stay and become Chief Strategy Officers or something. I give support and encouragement, and also criticism. You try not to say, “You’re a stupid idiot.” Instead you say, “Gee, maybe we should do blah instead of blip,” or whatever.

 

 

LS:

How about taking criticism your self? It sounds like you’re out of the line of fire.

 

ED:

I got a lot of criticism when I was Chairman of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the domain name system agency. I try to be good at taking criticism; it’s hard, everybody knows that.

 

There are things that I’m not good at, and things I don’t want to be good at. So if someone comes in and says, “You’re not a very good singer,” I wouldn’t really mind. If someone said, “Your writing style is lazy,” or something, if it was, and sometimes it is… Criticism is much harder to take when it’s merited. If it’s not merited, you can say, “Well, you’re wrong.” But if it’s merited, and you know it, that’s the hardest.

 

I’m not perfect, but I try to… Once, when I still had my own company, I dropped my computer or something, and it took a long time to be repaired. My computer was broken and I was kind of bad-tempered around the office. My business partner came up to me and said, “You’re blaming everybody here for what’s going wrong. You have to understand we’re not trying to make things worse for you, we’re trying to deal with this as well as we can, and you’re making us all feel bad.” She was absolutely right. I felt terribly ashamed.

 

I think I apologized, and it worked. But it was clear that they should have told me that two weeks before, and I scared them off. This is a 5-person, 2-bit, dinky little company, and they were scared to confront me. Imagine what it’s like at the top of a big, billion-dollar company.

 

 

LS:

Are you now involved in those big companies?

 

ED:

In a few….

 

 

LS:
I don’t understand how you went from the bottom of the barrel to the top — to over the top of the barrel — without going through the barrel. Where are the years of fighting your way up, or somehow proving yourself?

 

ED:

Well, that’s what you get to do as a journalist. You get to stay on the outside.

 

 

LS:

Then how did you get hired as a board member? Is it because you distinguished yourself for your insight?

 

ED:
Yeah, fundamentally. Yes.

 

I have different versions of my autobiography. In one of them I’m a court jester, which is someone close to the king but who has no formal power, except he can get the king to listen on occasion. People tell the court jester everything because they know the court jester is extremely discreet, and maybe will point things out to the king, but won’t tell him where he learned them. That’s what I like to do.

 

 

LS:

So what about computers? They seem irrelevant. They haven’t come up in this whole discussion.

 

ED:

Well, you didn’t ask about it.

 

The computer business is, other than the unfolding of history and politics, the most interesting thing that has happened to the world in the last 40 years. I think the next 20 is probably going to be genomes and health care, and information about human bodies and minds and things. So I’m doing a lot more in that and less in computers.

 

You know there’s a great saying, “The remainder of the proof is left as an exercise to the reader.” And that’s where I think the computer industry is now. There’s a lot more to do in the computer business, but fundamentally the first blinding flash, the understanding that this really, really matters… it’s done. Now we need to carry it forward. But I think the real visionary stuff is happening in genomes and understanding life, and things like that.

 

 

LS:

What else, what other things?

 

ED:

Well, the other thing that I’m doing is space travel. Which is different, but exciting.

 

 

LS:

What is space travel?

 

ED:

It’s the same as the internet: it’s the privatization of what had previously been a government enterprise. I think with privatization will come a lot more commercial energy, a lot more trial and error, and better results.

 

 

LS:

What’s the objective, or a couple of the big ones?

 

ED:

Well, there’s three things. One, let’s have a backup world, which would be Mars.

 

Two, let’s try stuff on Mars that we can’t try on Earth, like mucking around with the climate. On Earth, first of all you have a lot of politics, and second, if we screw up the Earth we’re really in trouble. But if we screw up Mars we can learn from it and try again. So, what we want to do is try climate change on Mars, and learn enough to do it right on Earth.

 

And third, there’s lots of minerals and energy, and all kinds of scientific and commercial reasons to go in the short run. And there’s an exciting tourism business, which is kind of like the internet. Well, probably not to Mars very soon, but maybe to a moon of Mars, who knows?

 

 

LS:

How much of your time does this take up?

 

ED:

It may take up 4 months next year, because I might go into astronaut training in Moscow, but I don’t know yet.

 

 

LS:

It does sound like computers were never the focus of your work, they were just the vehicle of your interest.

 

ED:

They were what I wrote about, not the computers themselves but the things they made possible: the businesses, the people, the social change, the business models, and to some extent how people spend their day. But no, I’ve never written a review of a hardware product.

 

 

LS:

Here’s my problem: kids are not allowed to grow up. They’re kept childlike forever, and Mommy and Daddy are being replaced by institutions, to which they remain beholden for the rest of their lives — if things go according to plan. But this doesn’t really work because people do need to grow up.

 

ED:

So are you thinking of employers as “in loco parentis?” [Latin for "in the place of a parent." — Ed.]

 

 

LS:

Employers, or government. The family is weak; the parents are weak. The parents are replaced by teachers; the relatives are replaced by political institutions. Ceremonies of transformation and maturity are washed into meaninglessness and replaced by things like graduation, or getting a job. Even marriage has lost its sense of community place.

 

What I find in talking to people, and from my own experience, is that people who’ve found transformation, people who have experienced transformation, find it for themselves, somehow. It’s often a mysterious process.

 

People say, “I woke up one day…” or, “All of a sudden people took an interest in me…” and then everything shifts. You shift your environment and all of a sudden everything looks different: people relate to you differently, there are new opportunities, there is movement where previously there was no avenue for movement. It’s an abrupt, sort of discontinuous transition. It’s like falling in a hole, you don’t know what’s happening as you’re falling into it, but you know it as you hit the bottom. The world looks different.

 

I would like kids to know that there are transformations that are available to them, but perhaps impossible to describe, and to know that only they can find them.

 

 

ED:

OK, everything you say is true, but I’m still not really sure what you’re talking about. Are you talking about becoming a responsible adult?

 

 

LS:

No, I’m talking about becoming a self-actualized person, a thinking person, a person who has a passion.

 

ED:

OK, I’d call that a responsible adult. You’re saying that not everybody reaches that, obviously.

 

 

LS:

Most people don’t have a passion. Put them on a desert island with a chance to start over, or give them an opportunity to forge their lives the way they want, and they wouldn’t know what to do. But I think you have this — you haven’t fully disclosed your character, but OK. Can you comment on that, about how a person finds this passion?

 

ED:

I feel self-directed. I would do a lot to avoid a nuclear war, but if there was one, and if I was still alive afterwards, I would say, “OK, let’s get to work.” I don’t know if that’s what you mean, but I have a sense that I want to do what’s useful. Not that I never sit around and experience pangs of regret, but in general I feel I’m doing things that are useful. I do things that I can learn from, and that’s what I like to do.

 

 

LS:

Does the reward come from outside? Do people need to reward you, or do you just know it?

 

ED:

I know it. But I also like it when other people notice. I like it when people say, “Oh gee, you told me this and it turned out to be true and these nice things happened.” It’s nice to be noticed, but it’s also nice to just watch it happen.

 

I mean this seriously, and people laugh, but I’m lazy in the sense that I’d much rather do something with little effort and achieve something, than kill myself doing it. I don’t want to get a million dollars for nothing, I wouldn’t enjoy that, but if there’s a way to earn a million dollars by making a machine that makes the job easier, I’ll always do that. I don’t see any virtue in vacuuming by hand if you can build an automatic vacuumer.

 

I’ll tell you one of my favorite books: it’s called “Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine.” [written by Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams, published in 1958 — Ed.] I must have read this when I was 6 or 7. Danny was a nice, fair-haired American boy. He had a thin, gloomy friend called Joe Pearson, and there was this family friend called Professor Bullfinch who worked at the university. Somehow this Professor Bullfinch had a computer — although it was called something else in the book because this was in the 50’s — and Danny and Joe decided that they would avoid doing their homework by programming this computer to do all their homework for them.

 

They had to work far harder, learn far more, and just about kill themselves to program this computer to do their homework. It was a great story, and I would always love to program a computer if after that the computer would do all the homework.

 

 

LS:

But doesn’t that contradict your not wanting to vacuum if there was a vacuuming machine, because it would have been easier if they just did the homework?

 

ED:

But then the homework machine was ready to do it forever. So it’s building the vacuuming machine…

 

 

LS:

Have you built any of these “vacuuming machines?”

 

ED:

Yeah. I do so with every company that succeeds: I have other people do stuff that I don’t do. It’s all about leverage.

 

 

LS:

You know, you’re different than other people; you just won’t admit it.

 

ED:

No, I admit it totally. I’m very self-directed.

 

 

LS:

Let me ask this: were you always clear about what you wanted to do? When you came to decision points, were you always clear about which choice to make?

 

ED:

Pretty much. I don’t make many decisions.

 

 

LS:

Well, you made a bunch between the ages of 10 and 20.

 

ED:

Well, this is the point: I don’t really feel that I did. I felt that everything was almost… Well, yes, I decided to go to Harvard over Cornell, and I decide whether to make specific investments, but, in the end, I don’t really. In most important things, I feel I didn’t have to make a difficult choice.

 

 

LS:

So you were never at a loss for a choice.

 

ED:

More or less.

 

 

LS:

So given kids today — and all that jazz about life and work and love — can you say anything about how to find what you think is a good state of mind?

 

ED:

You have to figure it out for yourself. A lot of unhappiness comes from people using someone else’s ladder. You need to design your own ladder and climb that one. Otherwise you get to the top of someone else’s mountain and you don’t really want to be there.

 

It’s very simple, and it’s hard for a lot of people because they have a lot of people giving them advice. They have things that are expected of them, and they don’t have the opportunity to read widely and to talk to lots of people.

 

In the end, you need to figure out what interests you. Then, and this is the important part, you need to have something in particular that you want to accomplish, because that’s what makes you feel good.