Esther Dyson Podcast.mp4: this mp4 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Speaker1:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to another edition of Entrepreneur X, where we help health care professionals own their future. Hey, everybody, and welcome to another edition of Entrepreneurs. Today, I am more than excited to be interviewing Esther Dyson. I have followed her honestly for decades because she is a complete luminary. She's a founder of Wellville, a ten year five community non-profit project dedicated to showing and realizing the value of investing in equity and health as opposed to spending on care and repair. Wellville advises the five Wellville communities and accelerating their own health and equity initiatives. There's five of these counties across the US. Dyson is a Wellville advisor for Muskegon and is actively involved in policy and visibility for the project as a whole. Well, those overall mission is to inspire society to think and act long term and more broadly from self to community by illustrating benefits of collective investment in human infrastructure. Overall, Esther works to leverage new business models, new technologies, and new mindsets to social, economic and political. From October 2008 to March 2009, she lived. Now this is really cool. She lived in Star City outside Moscow and trained as a backup cosmonaut for the space station. Apart from that brief sabbatical, she's an active board member for a number of companies, including factual Good Data 23 and Me, which we'll talk about, meta safe in just a whole number of them. She's invested over 150 companies as an angel investor. She sits on the boards of several nonprofits, including the Long Now Foundation and expanded schools, and is a patron of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation from 1998 to 2000, which is where I first learned of her.
Speaker1:
She was a non-executive chairman of ICANN, and that's the group that oversaw the Internet's domain name and address system. So the.com and.org and dot net at the time and before that, she was a chairman of the Electronic Frontier Organization. She has a BA in economics from Harvard and started her serious career as a fact checker and reporter for Forbes magazine from 1974 to 77, from 77 to 82, she worked on Wall Street as a securities analyst covering companies such as Federal Express, Apple Computer and Electronic Data Systems from 82 to 2007. She wrote and edited Release 1.0. It was a monthly analysis of the PC and Internet business and ran the yearly PC Forum, which was a luminary forum for industry leading executives. No sponsors. As head of her own company at Venture Holdings, she sold that venture to CNet in 2004 and worked there for two years before going completely independent. Along the way, she served as founding non-executive chairman of ICANN, as we mentioned. In addition, she wrote the best selling widely translated book Release 2.0 A Design for Living in the Digital Age, published by Broadway Books in 1997, which is still to this day, 25 years later, an amazing book. I'm really excited to have her on the show, so please welcome Esther Dyson. Esther but I'm over the moon that you're here. Thank you so much.
Speaker2:
Glad to be here. Glad to be with you. And not on the moon.
Speaker1:
There you go. Well, speaking of that, I was over at Zhukovsky Air Base in 95, flying a MiG 21 and 39. You were over there in 2008, Correct. How did you get started in that?
Speaker2:
So it's a long story, but my father was a physicist and grew up in England and studied at Cambridge, and all the brilliant mathematicians were Russian, so he learned Russian in order to translate their papers. And being English, he read and wrote Russian. He didn't really speak it that well, but his plan was after the war. He would go over to Russia and hang out with all these Russian scientists, and then he did a little more research and decided to come to the US. But over the years he was very engaged with Russian scientists and our family. We knew the Russians were good, the Soviet government was bad, and he was involved in the space program. So as a kid I thought, Oh yeah, they'll take care of it. And then in the late 90s, early 2000, I began to realize, Oh, we got to the moon. And then we didn't do anything. So I got more and more interested, invested in a company called Space Adventures. They're the people who go to the edge of space, which is what's been going on lately. But then there were seven civilians who actually went and stayed on the space station, which is where you stay for a week or two and you get used to zero gravity. And I was an investor and they said, you should be a client. I said, You know, I don't have the 40 million. They said, Well, you could train as a backup for a lot less. And I ended up doing that in 2008, 2009. The separate thing is I'd be going to Russia since 1989 and got quite involved with their tech sector and was in fact there the week before the war on Ukraine resigning from the board of Yandex, which is the Google of Russia. So I speak Russian. I learned it in high school. And anyway, so this was a way of getting to know the space community as well as the tech community in Russia. And they're very different. I would not go up on a Russian spacecraft now.
Speaker1:
No, I think a lot's changed. There's no way I'd go to Zhukovsky Air Base and fly Omega over Moscow anymore. But it was in 95. I was welcomed and had a lot of fun doing it.
Speaker2:
You know, the space and tech were the places where the two it's not so much the countries collaborated, but the people did. It was an amazing experience. For six months I learned space, plumbing and space medicine and came back and got in touch with somebody from NASA and said, you know, we should genotype all the astronauts because we have genotypes of sick people, but we don't really have ones of healthy people. And they said, no, we don't really want that because that's going to mean we can't fly because we're going to discover problems.
Speaker1:
That's too funny. Speaking of that, I owe you a debt of gratitude about which you know nothing. So I was a very early 23 and me person, and I know you were an early investor and board member and a board member. And because of 23 and me, I was in the last some adopted started life in an orphanage in the last year and a half, discovered I had a half sister through 23 and me I was working on the reservation, got an email. I happened to be in South Dakota. She lived in Des Moines where I went to college, oddly enough, and I flew down to see her the next day and it was all because of 23 and me and life changing because then I then I learned just by making connections who my birth father was. Still was in the morning when I was there in college and had no idea of any of this past, but it was all 23 and me generated. So thanks for being an early believer because it definitely changed my life.
Speaker2:
Wow. If you ever want to talk to them, let me know because as you can imagine, they love those stories.
Speaker1:
Yea, we had to get choked up talking about it, but think did the initial swab it had to be ten years ago. It seemed like forever ago. And then subsequently I've done my whole genome sequence, but 23 was my starting off point in it. You invested and became a board member. How were you prescient enough to see that was going to be really the future of personalized medicine?
Speaker2:
Well, I'm not sure it is. It's certainly very, very important. So, oddly enough, got introduced by Sergey Brin.
Speaker1:
Yeah, it was his wife, right?
Speaker2:
Yes. So I went to him and Larry Page and said, You guys are doing health care stuff. I'd love to talk with you about what you're doing and how you should do it and so forth. And Sergey said, I have this friend who knows a lot more about health care than we do. Do you mind if she comes to our meeting? And that was an. So basically it's like going to Russia for space travel invested because I knew I could learn something. I wasn't sure what and I did. It's given me a great perspective and I love wearing my 23 andme t shirt on airplanes because for some reason I think it's because they travel a lot and so they're interested in heritage and so forth. But pretty much every flight I go on, at least one flight attendant comes up to me and asks some question about 23 and me. I love it.
Speaker1:
That's really cool. Well said. For me, it was life changing. So you just said something that I learned was a quote from you. And it's never take a job for which you're already qualified. And it sounds like that's kind of how you've lived your entire life.
Speaker3:
Yes.
Speaker1:
How did that start? I mean, your father was Freeman Dyson. Your mother was a renowned mathematician. So your DNA is pretty solid in that respect.
Speaker2:
Yeah, but it's the family. It's the habit of asking questions. The questions are more important than the answers. And it's sort of trite, but it's in a way it's true. Now, with the rise of AI. People are realizing, Oh yeah, the AI can do the answers, but it's asking good questions that takes you beyond where you are now. My family, we were always asking questions and then I became a journalist. And that's the basic thing you do as a journalist is to ask questions. Once when I was writing for Forbes, back when it had fact checkers, I interviewed this guy. He had a little business selling toys or something. It wasn't that amazing of a business, but I asked him good questions. He was a really interesting guy. I wrote it up and I ran into him a few months later at some event, and I don't think it was actually toys. I hope it was something else. But he was actually pretty boring because I was no longer in my ask good questions mode. The trick you learn as a scientist is to keep asking questions till something interesting turns up. Well, it.
Speaker1:
Sounds like where you grew up, it was on the grounds of Princeton, is that correct? Institute of Advanced Learning.
Speaker2:
The Institute for Advanced Study. And so watching the movie, Oppenheimer made me cry not because I was sad, but probably just like you're finding out your sister. You're not crying because it's sad. You're crying because you're happy. Most of Oppenheimer happened at Los Alamos, but then he went and ran. He was my dad's boss. And so half the people in that movie were people I knew.
Speaker3:
You knew? Wow. Yeah.
Speaker2:
Not intimately. I was more interested in my second grade teacher than in Albert Einstein.
Speaker3:
But he had great hair.
Speaker2:
Yes, but it was a complete bubble that I grew up in. But it was a very interesting bubble.
Speaker1:
I was reading about your dad, and he sounds very Feynman esque. I mean, I read where your dad was reading James Joyce riding in a bus and came up with basically the way to solve these things at Feynman and others were working on. Just mind boggling.
Speaker2:
Yeah. And precisely because he was so brilliant, I decided not to try and be a physicist.
Speaker1:
Those are big shoes to fill. Okay, let's talk about that. So you went to Harvard at 16? Yeah. And majored in originally history.
Speaker2:
So I got in early after my first term. They called me in and they said, You know, Esther, we were so excited when we accepted you. You were such a bright little girl, but your grades are pretty terrible. And which they were because I joined The Crimson, the newspaper right at the beginning of my freshman year and spent all my time writing for the newspaper and not going to class anyway. Once we accept you, we really want you. But you can take half a year off or a year off and come back. So I ended up taking off half a year and I spent the summer hitchhiking through Europe. And then I lived with my boyfriend in Morocco for two months.
Speaker1:
Weren't you like 16 and 17 then?
Speaker3:
17?
Speaker2:
Yeah. I'm eventually going to write a book called Present Without Leave, and that's what a journalist gets to do. They get to observe without being part of the institution. And I've also climbed over a few fences in my day. But, you know, and certainly the experience in Russia was basically being embedded not just with the Russian program, but actually with the NASA astronauts and did not go up just for the record. But just being on campus for six months was amazing.
Speaker1:
Yeah, that would be a lifelong dream for me since I love everything aviation. I heard you quote it once where you said you started your education two years after you finished college. Do you think your lifelong learning was just embedded with your DNA or was that basically a nurture just because everything you witnessed growing up with your family?
Speaker2:
I think it was mostly nurture. There's always a I think persistence or stubbornness is probably more genetic than what you are persistent or stubborn about.
Speaker1:
Yeah, it's Duckworth's book on grit certainly speaks to that. So let's chat a little bit about you've invested over 150 companies as an angel investor and some really huge name companies when you're looking at companies to invest in. First off, talk about the founders. What are you looking for in them? Because now you've made tons of mistakes along the way, I'm sure. And so you've probably narrowed your lens a little bit as to now you know who and what you're looking for. Give people a sense of that.
Speaker2:
The first thing is, one of the mistakes I avoided was this company Ubiome, sort of, you know, not as glamorous as Elizabeth Holmes, but it was using your microbiome, which I really liked. And I talked with the founder, very bright, smart scientist, but not a business person. I asked her, would you consider bringing in a co founder and having them be the. Oh, no, no. I've always wanted to be CEO. To me, that's a real danger sign as opposed to this is the problem I want to solve. This is the solution I've got also not so good because somebody coming up with the right solution is pretty unusual. Somebody having an idea and then fixing it over time. Like what should the business model for 23 and me be? And was totally willing to learn and try and figure out? In the case of Ubiome, they started committing not medical fraud, but insurance fraud. And I suspect it was more the board than the founder, But the board probably said we need more revenues, we need more revenues. Since this is a medical shows, did my bio fecal samples send it in, got some results. Then 3 or 4 months later, they write to me again and they say, We want to reanalyze you and just fill in this little form. Have you ever had diarrhea? Well, yes. And suddenly I realized, oh, what they're trying to do is present me as having IBD or Crohn's so that this will be reimbursed by insurance. And that's great. I get it for free, but it means insurance is paying for something I genuinely don't need. So I mentioned it to a few reporters. I don't know if they were the ones that eventually brought in the FBI, but that's how that one ended.
Speaker3:
Wow. Yeah.
Speaker2:
And within two days, the name of the board was no longer visible on the site. Ironically, the DNA of the founder gets overridden by the metabolism of the venture capital or private equity industry. So look out for things like that. What I do look for is interesting problems to solve. What's the business model? Is this something that is not just for nice rich white people who can afford it? Is there some way to make it valuable? More generally, my own personal interests are very much around mental health and fixing the system, which is a challenging one.
Speaker1:
Yeah, we have a long way to go with our mental health system. Let's talk a little bit about Wellville this totally fascinating me give people an overview of what Wellville is.
Speaker2:
There's a number of origin stories, but one of them was I was going to be an advisor to the X Prize Foundation's health care and thought there really should be a Health X Prize. And another one was I interviewed this guy, Charlie Silver, who created the site Real Age, which still exists. He sold it to Hearst and they sold it to Sharecare. And it was basically asking social determinants of health sorts of questions. Are you married? Do you have pets? Do you eat healthy? Do you smoke? Do you have a good relationship with people? And then it would give you your real age as opposed to your chronological age. And its business model was vitamin supplements, which was fine. But I think asking those questions and having people see their real age and wrote this in what I wrote, I think that probably did more good for people than a whole lot of doctors and meds. But the thing that was really interesting was whom he had sold his previous business to, and that was Jiffy Lube.
Speaker3:
Jiffy Lube.
Speaker2:
Yes, we maintain our cars better than we maintain our bodies.
Speaker1:
God, that is true.
Speaker2:
Yes. And interestingly, I was Googling around in this area and it turns out that a year ago some facial oil cream company was trying to make that same point. Maintain your skin the way you maintain your car. And they actually did a co-marketing thing with Jiffy Lube. If you just Google Jiffy Lube and Health or something, you'll find it.
Speaker3:
That is.
Speaker1:
Classic.
Speaker2:
So that led to Wellville. Slowly. I was going to give a talk announcing that I was going to do an XPrize for health. I got Peter Diamandis permission to say that and then I realized that's not so good. Nice white lady says that you should do this. No nice white lady says, I'm going to do this. And that was in May of 2013. And the idea was originally five communities, five metrics, five years and a prize, and it ended up being five communities ten years. And the communities themselves could never we don't want to focus on the metrics and we don't need a prize. We want to collaborate. So that's what it ended up being. It's ending at the end of 2024, and at that point I want to take everything I've learned and share it and both inspire people to do things, but also inspire them to vote for a government that pays for the basic services that keep people healthy so that children don't get damaged before they hit grade school.
Speaker1:
Yeah, not only pay for you when you're sick, but pay to make you can keep her. I'm in the business of taking care of you when you're sick. I personally live with the I want to keep myself well, so I'm a life span sort of person, so I totally get that. What were the five metrics that these communities were, quote, judged by or looked at? No, no.
Speaker2:
As I said, we didn't.
Speaker3:
Know none of them.
Speaker2:
We're more focused on a sense of agency, community fabric. Don't focus on architecture, focus on connections. And we don't do any of this. We're the coaches. We come to the communities. And one thing we learned is how long it takes to earn trust. And by the beginning of the fourth year, people were beginning to trust us and we realized, yeah, we need another six years. So there's lots of programs maternal health, diabetes prevention, early childhood childcare, all that. It varies in each community. It's very much go in and see who wants to talk with us. We're not paying anybody. We're not being paid. So it's voluntary in both directions. We're kind of free coaches who come in, earn your trust. I spend a lot of my time in Muskegon, which is the community I work in, introducing people in Muskegon to one another, believe it or not. But they know I don't want their job and I'm not engaged in local politics, and that helps a lot. I really just want to make things work better. And then we help the leaders in the communities learn from one another, which is much better than learning from outsiders who haven't dealt with the same problems.
Speaker3:
Right.
Speaker1:
I heard you mention that you were speaking with a sheriff and he said, Hey, we've noticed a correlation between people we arrested, we continue to arrest and those who are in the mental health system. And I guess when I heard it, I was like, well, of course. But it's funny that yeah, unless you have that lens on, you may not necessarily make that connection. Yeah.
Speaker2:
And he was great. And at the same time he was so great that basically he lost his job at the jail because there were a lot of people in the community who made a lot of money off that jail.
Speaker1:
Not okay. So I spent a considerable time working in indigenous lands in the folks that live on these lands don't quite have one foot in the grave, so to speak. But boy, talk about some disparities of where they live, how they live, and the health care provided. How do you impact that? Because you know, my narrow focus, these folks have been getting screwed over for 400 years. Yeah. Take a sea change to get out of that system. What have you learned from the Wellville experience that can help move the needle? Because I haven't seen it.
Speaker2:
Well, first, there's so many different things. One is to recognize them. It's interesting. Black people are discriminated against and indigenous people are often just not recognized, ignored, and people need a sense of identity. And one thing indigenous people in particular used to have was seven generations back, seven generations forward, and so much of that got erased by Anglo newcomers or the European newcomers just taking over and erasing them. I mean, I read Laura Ingalls Wilder when I was a girl. I had no idea all the indigenous people that were basically swept away. And it's a complicated problem because some tribes are quite active and visible and some are dispersed. There's growing up on a reservation is tough being taken away from the reservation and. Using all your connections is tough. And ironically, early childhood has such an impact on the rest of your life. It either sets you up for being secure and comfortable, and then if you have enough, if you have a safety net, you can afford to take risks. Mean I'm not a great investor but invested enough that I can get lucky. If you invest in the time to go learn a skill and get a job, it's the same thing. But people who can't afford to make those investments don't get the chance to be lucky. And if you invest either in training or in startups, you know the odds are in your favor. But you need to have the underlying capacity to recover from your mistakes. And for both indigenous people and poor people in general and black people, it's that same problem of once you fall in the hole, you really can't climb out.
Speaker3:
Yeah, they have.
Speaker1:
Very little margin of safety. The last they need some old white guy coming in and saying, I'm here to help. And so what I've learned and what we've taught and discussed with folks who are coming in is we're here to listen. And if we can help in any way count us in. But we don't pretend to understand your 400 years of historical trauma and think we're going to impact that overnight.
Speaker2:
Yeah, we are in Wytheville to help them do what they want to do. It's like raising children, not parents, but more like your aunt. We want you to do something with your own intrinsic motivation. We'll ask you awkward questions like, Is that going to work? And have you considered this or that? But in the end, so much of charity revolves around bribing people to do what the charity wants. And people get addicted to drugs, alcohol, food, community organizations get addicted to short term grants. And every case it's the sort of cycle of craving. If I just get this thing, it will relieve my pain in the extreme. You lose your friends, you lose your past.
Speaker3:
And your focus, well, you have.
Speaker2:
Total focus.
Speaker3:
On.
Speaker2:
Something that's never going to change the future. What people really want in a sense of purpose, is it's not so much loving people, but other people loving you, people that need you and you feeling that you are a blessing to the people around you and you have a sense of agency for the future. You have enough security that you can take those risks. It's very hard too, because a lot of people who get addicted, who are most vulnerable, they're right. They can't afford to take these risks. And it's one thing to go through rehab and you go back to a world with a job and with families. But if you come out of jail, why not just take drugs again? Because you can't get a job, which is why educational programs and continuing medical support after incarceration is so important.
Speaker1:
Yeah, we're clearly not addressing the root cause of a lot of these problems. I mentioned that book earlier. What happened to you? And it just was a real eye opener for me to think we've got to be thinking more of the long game and think like you just discussed. Many of us are in, in God knows startup founders or the worst for this like next funding round but trying to figure out to play the long game with these communities because these short term fixes aren't fixes at all.
Speaker2:
Yeah I mean one thing we're looking to support a lot is collaboration among the community organizations rather than competition. And again, that's what philanthropy comes in and sort of makes them compete against one another. And the best philanthropists say, okay, I'm watching with delight as the folks in Muskegon are putting together a grant proposal that requires a lot of collaboration around building an economic opportunity hub and all the different organizations, West Michigan works and a manufacturer and the Goodwill and Access Health, which is a local. They all have to come together to write the grant proposal instead. And there were some other people who were thinking of doing their own and no, no, let's do it together. They're going to be so much more effective when they combine their forces.
Speaker1:
Absolutely. Now, looking at your career, you've been prescient so many times in your career on so many different subject matters. I mean, you're clearly a polymath. What surprised you in this nine years of wellville so far? What has been like, Wow, I didn't see that one coming because I think most things I could probably argue that you probably saw coming.
Speaker3:
Yeah, I.
Speaker2:
Walked in knowing just like 23 and me, boy, I'm going to learn a lot. I mean, in many ways I learned listen more than you talk, which, yes, I sort of knew, but now I know it even more. Well, I'll tell you, one of my favorite things that didn't work and I still hope it will, it's basically the idea of helping kids to learn about their bodies using an aura ring and learn about their own metabolism as they learn about the metabolism of the food system, which is their own metabolisms, are run by nutrients, including way too much sugar. And the food system is run by the metabolism of money and helping them to understand how to manipulate themselves rather than being manipulated by advertising and so forth. And the outcome measure was going to be a sense of agency. It didn't work because the organization we were doing it with lost their building and there were lots of complications. It wasn't an inherent failure. But that sense of agency is so important to any kids and then ultimately any adults well-being that you control yourself. You understand how to manipulate yourself. And when we talk about AI, the business models are going to be accelerated not by AI, but by businesses using AI to manipulate people, to buy things and consume things they don't really need.
Speaker1:
Yeah, I'm not sure as far one way as Elon Musk professes to be regarding, you know, the doom of our civilization. But I do understand there's a lot of scary stuff that can happen with AI.
Speaker3:
Well, Elon.
Speaker2:
Musk is his own worst example.
Speaker3:
Yeah. No.
Speaker2:
I mean, the guy is clearly in emotional pain and he needs people around him who love him, who will tell him to get some sleep. No one's really interesting. There's Elon at Twitter and then there's Elon at NASA and at NASA. He walks in. I mean, this is my imagination. But Gwynne Shotwell is with him and she sort of pokes him and says, okay, Elon, just keep quiet. This is NASA. I'm going to do the talking. You stand there and look good, and they are selling great stuff to the US government that works. He needs he needs more people like Gwynne.
Speaker1:
You've been exposed to a lot of founders who are clearly well off the spectrum and we'll just leave it at that. Do you think that make these universe altering, You know, the Steve Jobs, they want to put a dent in the universe. Do you think you need almost that extreme of personality to achieve those levels? Because it seems to be I think Bill Gates kind of morphed back to the normal. But, you know, reading books about him, probably when you knew him better, he was pretty far out there as well, was he not?
Speaker2:
People sometimes tend to confuse charm with brilliance and each one is different. But the ones that end up being long term successful have somebody around them that will just say, okay, dude, calm down and don't want to speculate about too many people, so I'll tell my own story instead. I had a company of six people. I had a CEO who was actually running the company, but at the same time, I owned the company and I brought my computer in Moscow somewhere and it broke the hard disk, brought it back, and they said, We'll take it to the repair shop and get it fixed. So after two days, my CEO comes up to me and says, Esther, this is a little awkward, but we really are trying to get your computer fixed. And it's like you seem to believe that we're doing it on purpose. You know, just be nicer. I know I was not saying you guys are idiots, but clearly I was being grumpy and it took her two days to come up to me and say, Esther, be a little nicer. Imagine what it's like if you're worth billions of dollars. And this whole notion that you are worth billions of dollars versus you own an X percent share of a company that is currently valued by the market as billions of dollars, you're not worth that intrinsically. But seeing how terrified she was has always reminded me, You know, make sure you're listening to the people around you because people are going to tell you the whole thing about power and who's paying your salary. It's just it's so easy to lose sight of that. And there's lots of crazy people who are not as successful as Elon Musk or.
Speaker3:
The Dreamers are.
Speaker2:
Great, but the best dreamers are smart enough to bring in a CEO that will keep them in check.
Speaker1:
Well, it's like you said earlier, if you come up with a novel solution to a problem that may be right in your wheelhouse, however, it probably is not right in your wheelhouse to run and scale a company because they're totally two different skillsets.
Speaker2:
And the reality is, honestly, running and scaling a company is pretty boring. Being Steve Jobs, there were a lot of people around him, including at one point John Sculley Right. It's a lot more fun working with partners and sharing responsibility and so forth.
Speaker3:
When I look at.
Speaker1:
Entrepreneurs and when we look at making investments, we look for a few things. So definitely creativity number one. Number two is resilience. I always look for kindness and the willingness to ask questions and learn. What else do you look at when you're looking at these founders and their enterprises?
Speaker3:
There's some.
Speaker2:
Humility. I mean. Yeah, same thing. Are they willing to learn? Are they willing to pivot? And frankly, do I find the problem interesting? So I talked about addiction earlier, and I think that is what I call short term self-centered thinking. Addiction is kind of the essence of that. And when people talked about Facebook addiction 4 or 5 years ago, I thought, yeah, cute metaphor. And then more and more I realized, no, addiction is not about the substance. It's about the relationship. And so two of my favorite companies now are about, I call them couples counseling for you and your money and you and your food. There are others, but those are two of the most common. There's, of course, you and your loved one or, you know, whatever. But in all these cases, there's this toxic relationship that's this sort of combination of craving for affection, for validation, craving for satisfaction, craving for the high. A lot of women have that with clothes slash appearance. It's harder to put that into an app, but it's in a sense almost one of the worst ones because let's face it, there's no way you're going to be as cute and gorgeous when you're 70 as when you're 30.
Speaker2:
And addiction to Botox, again, the Botox is the the promise of I'm going to be cute and young again. And now you see it interestingly happening to more. This is this longevity. I want to live forever. You and your relationship to mortality. Somehow it's people get fixated on something they can never achieve. So going back to science and the universe and so forth, why have we never discovered other intelligent life? I mean, you know, the whales, they do something. I really have to wonder if it's because when you get smart enough to make rockets and communicate across the universe, you cannot deal with your own short term obsession one way or another, whether it's the climate or the nuclear bomb or just this addiction to short term results. It's a cancer is consuming so much of our society, and poor people come to it one way. You know, they have tough childhoods and rich people come to it another. But we've forgotten how to think long term, and that's where the indigenous people actually could teach us so much.
Speaker1:
Yeah, absolutely. They were long term over the horizon thinkers and we are in an immediate gratification society. And when you're talking about intelligent life, I do wonder if you get to the point where you extinct yourself because of these short term needs, cravings, addictions, what have you.
Speaker3:
Yeah, it's not.
Speaker2:
Like you build the thing that will destroy you, but your whole society destroys itself. You know, as long as I'm alive, I might as well be optimistic and see how I can fight against that.
Speaker1:
Yeah. No, I'm a die hard, ridiculous optimist on most things in my life. However, the one where I see us continue to struggle is I started a business called AMD, which is a telemedicine business, but I really did it for tele behavioral health. In 2010, I couldn't get any takers. And so we we pivoted to tele urgent care, which ended up ultimately working. But I don't see a clean end in sight or any end at all for our behavioral health treatment that we're currently not using having in the US. I mean we see more and more people suffering and it shows in levels of addiction and all the things you discussed. I mean, addictions, addiction, it's, you know, there's all these different things on top. But addictions, addiction, do you see an optimistic outcome for that? Because I'm failing on this one.
Speaker2:
Yeah. Ten years ago, I used to say if I were McKinsey not ten years ago, she didn't emerge until a little later. But Nurse Family partnership was the original care of pregnant women, and it's a nonprofit. They studied these kids for 20, 30 years after they were born, and basically a nurse was like a doula for pregnant mothers. And then afterwards, for a year or two, the results were something like, depending on how you count it, a five plus times, not 5%, but you got a five times turn on the money you invested in this. The problem, of course, was the money didn't go back to whoever invested in the nurse family partnership. Again, if those nurses had been wearing red shoes, they would still have to wear red shoes because it was a protocol. But doulas and just better maternal care in general. And you know, girls used to have home ec and learn how to take care of babies and now they don't and they're more likely to have missing mothers. So again, if half the kids in the country are eligible for Medicaid and so many of them have mothers who don't get training and there's so many of them whose babies are brought up by their grandmothers, if we could, universal prenatal, postnatal child care that was paid for enough so that the caregivers delivering it were respected and didn't have their own challenges. So my solution to AI is going to steal our jobs is great, have it do the work and then give those people jobs. Being humans, whether it's football coaches or doulas or nurses or grade school teachers, but change the salary and respect equations. And yeah, if you have a job denying insurance claims, wouldn't you rather have a job raising children? Yeah.
Speaker1:
And even parenting classes. But it sounds obvious. Yeah, but I see people in the emergency department and I cringe at the way they talk to their kids and I'm like, God, how? That, you know, that's the way they were talked to as well. So yeah.
Speaker3:
Yeah. It's not that.
Speaker1:
Not that they're bad.
Speaker3:
Yeah.
Speaker2:
So the first person I heard about this from really was Jim Barksdale. Wow. In Mississippi. Then a few days later, I got on the New York subway, and there's this woman next to me with a kid in a stroller and looked down at the kid and he's got a really terrible haircut. Let's be real. And he looks up at his mom and he says, Want a cookie? And she looks down and says, You shut up. The kid sort of winces and shrinks and he says, Please, Cookie. And she says, You already had one. So I looked at the kid again, and beneath the terrible haircut, he had these beautiful eyelashes. So I said to the mother, Your little boy has beautiful eyelashes. And she just looked at me sort of like that piece of trash. And there's nothing you can do but.
Speaker1:
And no hope for that poor kid.
Speaker3:
No, I.
Speaker2:
Mean, that's minor, but it's real. If we could raise our kids to be resilient and have a sense of agency, everything else can solve itself. Right.
Speaker1:
And teach him to play the long game. Right.
Speaker2:
And so my favorite project in Muskegon is Doulas. The state of Michigan did a medicaid waiver this year along with a bunch of other states to reimburse doula care. Now it's just like Medicaid redetermination. The paperwork is terrifying. The requirements for certification are complicated and you have to buy insurance and they're not reimbursed enough. But it does one amazing thing. Despite all his deficiencies, when the doula shows up in the hospital, she's certified and she gets respect from the medical system. I mean, you know, there are still jerks, but that validation of the role that they are playing is so important to their role in the community, their role in the hospital, and just society's understanding that they do that.
Speaker1:
And it's the ultimate pebble in a pond approach that small for months. They may be involved or hopefully longer. That child's going to benefit.
Speaker3:
Yes. And the mothers and the mothers, too.
Speaker2:
The mother learns because it's scary being a mother. If you don't know how the kid is crying, you don't know why are you a bad mother? And you may well have postpartum. I mean, just all the stuff. There's lots to learn and having someone to lead you through it. That's what so much of the next generation is either going to get or not get.
Speaker3:
Right.
Speaker1:
And a lot of it I look at go, this is kind of one on one stuff. How do you not know this? But then you think back, okay, I get how you don't know. So what can we do to move that needle? So the next generation has advantages that you didn't unfortunately have when you were growing up? I love that concept. So you've had an incredible existence to date. When people are going to listen to this and they're going to read about you and say, I want to be her when I grow up. What advice do you have somebody starting out to live this interesting, amazing dent, the universe, sort of life that you've had?
Speaker2:
Ask questions, find the people that will support you. In my case, I was just thinking of her. My aunt I mentioned. Well, we're like your aunts. My parents were great. But you're not dependent on your aunt. She always has your back. She doesn't pay for you, but she doesn't punish you. And to the extent you can find people like that in your life. My aunt, as it happens, worked as a almoner for the National Health Service in England and an almoner is now called a medical social worker. Oh, her charge was unmarried mums, so she was a doula for her day, except her unmarried mums were considered shameless hussies. But you know, it's like history repeats itself. So find somebody, ideally not some famous people you'll never meet, but somebody that you know can help you with that kind of supportive relationship. Just someone who's there for you, who's not the person you have to curry favour from, but rather the person you can confide your problems to. And then don't plan your life because you plan your life. You have to plan your funeral. So just keep moving forward. When you make mistakes, which you will inevitably learn from them and move on. Don't make the same mistake. Or, as I would put it, always make new mistakes.
Speaker3:
I love that.
Speaker1:
Quote, but it seems like there are so many folks now who are so afraid. I always call them the fragile perfect. They're so afraid to be wrong or to make mistakes that they never venture out of their comfort zone. That clearly has not been you.
Speaker2:
Yeah, I'm a very fearful person, as you can tell. But don't consider committing suicide. But some people are so afraid of imagining the terrible things that could happen. The reason they don't make mistakes is they're afraid of even considering it. What you need to do is, well, if things go wrong, what happens if I lose my job? Can I get another job? And for some people, that's a tough question. That's real. But it's kind of like, But will you die? No. What would be a fate worse than death? You have to think, what is the worst that could happen? And yes, people do die. So, no, I'm not going to do stupid things with my baby, but I'm going to take a new job. I'm going to ask an awkward question. I'm going to try something. I don't know if I'll succeed, but if I don't succeed, do I have a plan B? Do I have a plan C? But people who just think if I don't succeed, I can't imagine that. No, no, I got to succeed. That's where the danger lies. It's more like, have a plan B, It doesn't need to be thought out, but just enough so that you're not too terrified to move ahead with Plan A.
Speaker1:
At my one of my mantras is, if no one's dying, how bad can it be? I grew up failing in most things in life, so I never really feared failure. There was a quote that I'm sure you've heard that it was attributed to your father. He wrote, It's more fun to be contradicted than ignored. So I've espoused that without knowing where it came from. So that's a great quote to live by.
Speaker2:
Yeah, I've been fired. And it's good for people to be fired once. And you survived. Then? Oh, well, okay. That happened. I survived. And again, I don't want to be too glib. You know, accidentally killing somebody is probably the worst thing you can do.
Speaker3:
Absolutely.
Speaker2:
I mean, other than doing it purposely.
Speaker3:
But yeah.
Speaker1:
Yeah. As a physician, that living with that and knock on wood, to my knowledge, I haven't done that. But yeah, but.
Speaker2:
You fail to help people survive, but you have to do your best because that's your job.
Speaker1:
Yeah, well, sir, this has been amazing. Thank you. I've enjoyed every second of it.
Speaker2:
You too. It was a lot of fun.
Speaker1:
Folks, we'll have everything in the show notes, sir. Thank you so much. Again, we'll link to Wellville and other companies that you're involved with all in the show notes. So thank you very much.
Speaker2:
Thank you, John. Thanks, Esther.
Speaker1:
Thanks for listening to another great edition of Entrepreneur to find out how to start a business and help secure your future, go to John Shufelt Webmd.com. Thanks for listening.
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