Live at DLD with Esther Dyson | Investor and Philanthropist: Can Rules save the Internet?

Okay, so you don't want me to tell you why? No, no, it's about us. It's about us. Okay. It's a necklace, right? So it's different stones, and the stones are round. Okay, they're all round. Okay, and it's gold, gold and various minerals, and it's round. I mean, it's all round but all different sizes, right? So what is it all about? Why is it so important for you? Well, do you want to guess what it is first? Yeah. Do you get any sense of what these round things might be? They're spherical. Satellites, planets, satellites, planets, stars, planets, universe, planets. So I mean, one thing is, of course, my head is the sun. It actually was a goodbye gift when I finally left the board of WPP Group. I joined, I think, in like '99 or 2000, and in 2012 they put in a 10-year term limit, and they gave me two more years, and then they gave me this beautiful necklace of the solar system. And it's really not about WPP Group. It's about the fact that I spent six months training as a backup cosmonaut in Star City in Russia. And space travel and Russia are, if you like, two other pillars of my life. And Russia gave me a huge understanding of the United States and its vulnerabilities. It's turning out to be kind of useful right now. Space travel, you know, my parents were scientists, they worked for the OPA, and I always took it for granted that my parents started flying on airplanes, which they had not done as kids, and I figured I'd be going to space as a grown-up. And I still do hope to retire on Mars, but not too soon.

Yeah, that's the point. But not to go there and come back, it's long. But just when I'm really done. And we'll get to this later, I hope. But I'm about to write a book called Term Limits. When Jimmy Carter dies, don't mourn his death, celebrate his life. If you're a CEO and your company is public, you hope that when you retire, the stock does not go up, but you also hope it doesn't go down, because you want to prepare. Term limits don't mean everything ends. Term limits means you understand your role in something that you hope is bigger than you, that lasts longer than you, whether it's your children or your company or whatever else you contribute to. Ideally, you contribute something of lasting value.

Yeah, so honestly, I don't think they're trying to encourage what you said. I forget the exact words. They're trying to make money by the means of getting people excited so that they stay online longer and you can sell ads, and that's the point. The polarization is a bad side effect. And I mean, these guys are incredibly short-term oriented. They don't understand that they want their children to grow up in a good world with, you know, even if they're the rich ones, they want the poor ones to be better educated. But it's business models that encourage short-term thinking and short-term profits. You know, we've I'd like to talk about metabolism a lot. We've got a very short-term relationship with food too. Too much sugar, too much ultra-processed foods. They taste really good, we become addicted to them, but they're very unhealthy. Same thing with bad information, with content that keeps you scrolling. Very addictive, bad for you, and also unfortunately bad for the people who work for those companies. The people in our predatory health system, the people at Facebook. There's so many people leaving Google, Facebook, at all, because they no longer believe in their work. The CEOs are focused on providing profits for the investors and the board, but the people who work there, many of them came with some mission, and that's been polluted by the predatory business models. So I would blame the business models that both the internet and AI can accelerate, rather than a formal belief system. It's more about I want to be famous, I want to be surrounded by people who tell me how wonderful I am. It's not a formal belief system, it's something deeper.

The best insulin is self-awareness. Understanding what is it that motivates me. Why am I scrolling so much? Why am I so anxious? Why can't I focus on something meaningful? What is it that keeps me always seeking this relief that never comes from more bad short-term information? And once you have that awareness, then you also need to understand the metabolism of the people and the institutions you're dealing with. And they run on money. These institutions, sorry, we run on bad food and of course bad information. They run on the money they get by selling not the bad information itself, but the attention of the people consuming the bad information.

No, it could mean using Facebook to stay in touch with your family but not scrolling through it obsessively. How many likes did I get? Can I get more likes than the other guy? Or just, you know, again, having more purpose and a slightly more long-term horizon. How can I use my Facebook account to generate some interest in some thing of value? And you know, for each person it's different. But understanding what is it that motivates me, is that what I want to be motivating me, and how can I manipulate the world around me rather than being the manipulatable one?

I'll be honest, I don't remember what those rules were. So if you tell them to me... You forgot about that? I'm sure I'll remember them, but I did not. I don't read the book every year, and the world has certainly changed. I mean, what I do know is I was much more optimistic about people's ability to be self-aware, to manage their own privacy information. But tell me a rule or two.

Um, that I was overly optimistic. I mean, clearly, you know, the notion of everyone has access, but there are still large monopolies with predatory business models, not controlling the access but controlling again the information substances that addict people. And yeah, it's which is why I need to write another book.

My thoughts, I mean, obviously it's complicated. When you look at the US, we have a government that seems to be under very corporate control. And the real problem is whether it's government or business, you want... What's happened in the US and in some form or other in a lot of countries, people are voting not for policies but for personalities. And it's ironic but not very, it's more like duh, no surprise. Trump was a TV star, and people voted for his show because they liked this man speaking up to power, being aggressive, being masculine, whatever it was. And it's fine if you're voting for a TV character, not so fine if you're voting for somebody who not only wants to head the government but wants to set all its policies without too much attention to what Congress might want. So the challenge, whether it's Elon Musk or Trump or whoever, is how can we make again the public more aware, self-aware of its own behavior, but also self-aware of how these policies are actually going to apply to their daily lives. Is this actually going to get a better education for my children? Is this going to pay more to people who do hard work versus let people make a lot of passive income? And when you get to the content thing, in the United States, the law forbids government censorship. It does not forbid online platforms from moderating what's on their... I mean, there's something called Section 230, which is about the issues around the specifics. If you do moderate it, then you're responsible, and it gets quite complicated. But I don't particularly want... There's a really good book, it's called Fearless Speech, and there's speech. It really matters who makes the speech. Is it someone who has no power who's telling the truth, or is it someone who has too much power who is basically fostering harmful speech and telling special truth? Well, just social truth. I mean, it's invidious, it's invidious non-truth, but it's speech. And it's speech that says, you know, black people are stupid, poor people are lazy, immigrants should go home, homosexuals are dangerous. Yes. And somehow we need policies that make that distinction, and people who understand that distinction. It again comes down to both intellectual education: how does the world work, how do the laws work, what is science. But also, I'm a human being, I love people, people love me, I'm needed, I'm important. As opposed to, I have no power, I'll just eat food that's bad for me because I don't really care. I'll consume this bad content because it makes me feel good, but I feel awful later. You know, people are smart and they sort of know the difference between this makes me feel good now but I'll regret it later. And yet so many people's lives are consumed with exactly that kind of short-term.

Absolutely. You would be in favor of measures like that? I'm yeah, I mean, I am very much in favor of competition among the successful and collaboration within communities. Where I've spent 10 years working in five small communities in the US, and you know, this small community organization competes with another community organization for a short-term grant from some philanthropy that has a program, and they do the program for two years, and then the philanthropy goes away, and they've done this for the money, not because they believe it's really good for their community. So it's like so many things, it's a question of the context as well as the principle. But when you're big and successful and you suck all the air out, that's when we need anti-monopoly policies and a bit of competition, and again some notion of limits. You should neither own the entire market nor should you last forever.

Yes, but not just at school. I mean, ideally it's a world in which your parents not only know... I mean, I would say more and more parents are aware of these dangers, but they don't know what to do about it. They're too busy, they themselves are on their cell phones, and not really paying attention to their kids. And so the kid feels, I'm not important, I'm going to go online where I have all these friends who, you know, half of them are now bots, they tell me how great I am. So it starts honestly with educating the parents, but also with a world in which the parents earn enough so that they have time to spend with their kids. And my hope is probably as diluted as my hopes in the earlier book, but we'll keep trying. You know, if we save this much money and become so much more efficient having AI do the tasks of so many people, whether it's insurance claims or banking or, you know, having better signage in a conference place so you can show up at your podcast on time, it's to take those savings and then use AI to do the counterfactual. Imagine if we paid these parents enough, these working parents who are doing various kinds of jobs, that they could either afford child care or provide that care themselves. Because that investment will pay off in the future health and productivity of the next generation of human beings. And in the United States, we keep talking about spending on health care, and we really need... And health care, so much of it is a repair job for damage that shouldn't have happened. We need to talk about investing in health and investing in emotional resilience and again that self-awareness I mentioned. But it's less putting three-year-olds into class, it's more fostering parent-teacher associations so that the parents get training in training their own kids. Because who's the best person to train a kid? It's a grown-up that loves them. I mean, maybe it's their aunt, maybe it's a neighbor, but that community. So we're sitting here. If one of you left, you know, Analise, I know you, but otherwise you would not be missed. But if you were a community, when you're gone, it's noticed. And that's what really makes a community: each individual is part of it, rather than just an audience or a spectator.

But the internet is just a conduit. It's the quality of the information, the sourcing. So the whole point of this is there's no one single solution, and there's no one single company. And in a sense, you know, look at effective altruism. There's some, I think, deluded notion that there's this scale, and you know, there's a single scale. The reality is the way to fix the world's problems is for more people to solve more specific problems, than me saying, well, I know the solution and this is the one problem that everybody needs to solve. But specifically, I mean, I was excited to hear about Prata yesterday from Bill Gross, and I'm also an investor in a company called SourceBase. And they're both concerned with, if you like, creating healthy information food, ultra instead of ultra-processed info, artisanal info. And actually applying LLMs to lawsuits, to policies. Imagine if somebody in Congress comes out with a policy, and you could just ask Claude or something for a description of what does this mean for the particular concerns I have. And creating... You know, there's been a shift in the US and here, and then you look at what they serve for breakfast and you wonder. But there is a notion of we want healthier food, we want healthier information, and we need to do this in a way that doesn't make half the population feel they're stupid for not being interested. We want them to understand it's important for their kids, rather than you're a bad parent. And so there needs to be more attention paid, podcasts like this, but some notion that there is a way to assess quality. There are tools out there that will help you, there's people you can trust and people you can't trust. And on the information diabetes thing, Prata is part of this, and also SourceBase. You know, let's have an ingredients list. But also, I would love to see on the ingredients list for the food and the information, what so I'm buying this food. Is the cost of the food itself, the fruit, the apples, the fish, 80% of what I'm paying, or just 20%? How much is marketing, and how much is like fake ingredients or processing or the plastic wrapper? And just understanding again not just the business model but the business data. You know, what's actually in this thing? Well, 25% of what I spent was spent on telling me that eating this is cool, and another 25% was spent on adding sugar so that it tastes better.

Yeah, cigarette packs and, um, what's the new one? Alcohol. And yeah, yeah. I mean, warning labels are part of it, but again, just the better understanding of what's in this thing. I mean, and honestly, five-year-olds are curious. They're the ones who should be telling this stuff to. So there's a lot about how parents are making their... sorry, kids are making their parents more conscious of environmental impacts and more conscious of what it is that they're eating. And so that's warning labels that are not stigmatizing, which is of course a challenge.

No, I totally... I went to college. I went to Harvard because I wanted to be a teenager. And growing up at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, they didn't know what teenagers were. And the internet was not there, but you know, I would read about it, I knew about it somehow. But it just so I left and passed as a teenager at Harvard. It was great. Joined the Harvard Crimson, which was the student newspaper. And I'd already... So it's not in my bio. At the age of eight, I started the Dyson Gazette, which was, oh really? On carbon paper, a newsletter about our family. George went to such and such a place or whatever. You've been the only writer there at the Gazette? Yeah, yeah. Okay. And so much as I want to retire on Mars, I wanted to be Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times. It's sort of this is a nice goal, but it's not the center of my life. It's just something I thought I wanted to do. I never did it, but I did end up going to Russia. Anyway, probably too long of an answer.