It's my great pleasure to have this opportunity to do this interview chat with Esther. I brought a piece of paper because there's a lot that's happening that I have to read. So anyway, I can safely say that Esther really represents what ICE stands for, which is the idea of somebody who is really excellent and can do anything they want, and then somehow they choose to do things that benefit humanity. So in her own words, Esther, who is actually an actual astronaut if you want to say that...
Trained, not flown. She said when she decided to focus more on healthcare, somebody asked her why, and she said because doing things in space is not doing enough to help the people here. That's really the essence of our business. So anyway, mission-driven founders are really rare. They're unique because they want to change the world, and to change the world you need resources and you need power to effect that change. We have today a lot of entrepreneurs that have founded businesses, have a lot of money, asking for power, but they don't think about changing the world. So my first question to you is: tell me a little bit more about your background. Why, what kind of person has that level of success, can do whatever they want, and then suddenly decides that they want to do good for humanity? Why didn't you also want to ask for a trillion-dollar paycheck like Mr. Musk?
So you heard from Sean, my dad invented the Dyson spheres, which again was an idea he never built one, unfortunately. I grew up in a complete bubble at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. My dad's boss was Oppenheimer. I was surrounded by Nobel Prize winners, and you know, it was amazing but completely divorced from reality. Long story, I spent the year I was 13 in England with some friends of my dad's. I really wanted to get out and see the real world, so I went to college early. After my first year, they suggested maybe you could take some time off, so I went and spent a couple of months living with my boyfriend who was working with the Peace Corps in Morocco. And my parents were great. They said, 'Well, you know, if you get into trouble, we won't come rescue you. If you get pregnant, we won't take care of the baby. But go do what you want to do.' And since I spoke French, I actually did okay, except I wasn't supposed to be there and I had to hide under the bed when Tim's boss from the Peace Corps came.
Graduated from Harvard eventually and had worked for the Harvard Crimson. I never... So, a lot of people dream I'm back in college, I need to study for the exam. I dreamt I was back in college. I knew there was an exam, but I wasn't sure what courses I had signed up for because I never went. But I loved being a reporter and finding out new stuff as opposed to learning stuff people already knew. And that ultimately was sort of the arc. I spent 25 years with a tech newsletter and a tech conference. So we started with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. We ended with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman. And you know, it was magical watching this industry change. And you know, at the beginning there were a few of us, Kara Swisher, Walt Mossberg. By the end, this was 2007, I'd already started going to Russia in 1989, which is kind of the other big theme of my life. I learned so much about the United States by seeing it from outside, and especially from Russia, which is a whole different story.
Came back, got interested in healthcare, and then pretty quickly began to realize healthcare is a giant repair business. What about maintenance? How do we keep people healthy and resilient? Did... took the six months off to train at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center. Learned about space medicine and space plumbing. And also, I'd started going to Russia in 1989 just when things changed, when they got rid of Brezhnev and Khrushchev and Yeltsin came in and things were amazing. We thought it would be incredibly wonderful. The problem was, in a sense, there were two religions. There was communism and there's capitalism. But what you had in Russia was the corrupt church. And both those churches were corrupt. The religions are okay. So in the end, as we've all seen, it hasn't ended badly. It's just continuing badly. Came back, started a five-year nonprofit working in five small communities around the US. So yes, I wish the best for humanity, but in a sense, what's driving me is being useful, you know, and we'll get to that later, but I have no delusion I can save humanity. I can be useful for part of it. And the challenge is always figuring out which part are you best at being useful in. And because your life is fine, you know, can you have a little fun along the way? Not with yachts, but with people you love, people who love you. You know, hearing comedy at an investor meeting, it's great.
Wow. That's... it feels like you've lived many, many lifetimes.
Yeah, I'm pretty old, but...
Not in that sense, in terms of the experience. Which brings me to the idea of term limits. You sort of started to talk about that. You have a new book that's with the publishers, and you propose a philosophy, a framework that is pretty fascinating about being useful and not trying to do it all and live forever and dominate. Tell us a little bit more about this philosophy of term limits, and maybe in the context of the nonprofit that you founded, which is rare, which has a finite end date. Most nonprofits we know, they want to live forever so that the problem continues.
So that's where I got this notion of term limits. Wellville was originally five years, and two, three years in, it became clear we couldn't really do what we wanted to do quite that quickly. And I got lucky in the stock market with Square and Facebook, which basically paid for the 10 years. So we extended it to 10. And the idea was not, 'Oh, we're going to go to these five small US communities and bring them fish.' It wasn't even, 'We're going to teach them how to fish.' It was, 'We want to help you build your own fishing schools, but we're more like the grifter, the stone soup guy.' Do you know that story? That I've got this magic stone. You give me a pot, put in a little bit of water and some vegetables, and it will cure cancer. It will let you live forever. And basically, the villagers make their own soup in their own pot with their own vegetables and a bit of beef. And of course the guy collected a lot of money and they left. But that basic idea, you've actually got the ingredients. What you need is the talisman and sort of the permission from someone to do what you know what you want to do. And so much nonprofit is about, 'I've got this great idea. I want your community to do it.' And they do it for three years and then you want to go do something more innovative. And you go off with your money and a nice little report to your funders. But so 10 years later, we were ending Wellville, and we had, you know, little ceremonies and people would come up, 'Oh, it's a little awkward, Esther, but I hear Wellville is ending.' Yes, it's supposed to end. It's a project. It wasn't meant to live forever. And if anybody here remembers the Lone Star Cafe on 13th and Fifth in New York, sort of Rodney Dangerfield-like thing, a bar. Over its roof there was this giant statue of an iguana and on the side it said, 'Too much ain't enough.' And the notion here is too much is too much. Enough is perfect. Do what you need to do. Do it effectively. Anyway, term limits. Jimmy Carter died. Oh, how sad. No, it's not sad. Celebrate the man's life. On the other hand, Joe Biden refused to resign. That was sad. And kind of everywhere I turned, it was term limits. Term limits are not, like so many things, they're not good or bad. They are good, but the right term limits are good. The bad term limits get rid of somebody too early or too late. It's kind of knowing when enough is enough. And along all along this, I've been getting, as you can imagine, I started out when AI was basically logic models, and AI is basically whatever we haven't quite figured out yet. So it's moved, but certainly LLMs really are a sea change in what we use it for. I mean, one argument in the book is it's not really an 'it' or a 'they'. We need a new pronoun for AIs. Anyway, so I thought I would write this book called Term Limits and talk about fundamentally the dynamic tension between humans who are finite and die but are also unique and each one is irreplaceable, versus a culture of 'too much ain't enough', a culture of exponential growth and the quantification of everything. And the purpose of this book was not, 'Oh, I know all this stuff, I want to write it and then sell a book.' It was, I really want to understand this better. And in order to do that, write a book. So I went down numerous rabbit holes of all kinds and discovered how much religion, folk tales, you know, this notion of the tension between unique, lovable humans whose life is precious and then the quantification of money and its abuse to gain power and so forth and so on. I wanted to understand that better and make it clear to people. So ask some more questions. I could talk for way too long. I need my own term limits.
No, no, this is fantastic. I think we are kind of zeroing in into the more technical details of the individual actors. So here we have mission-driven founders who are excited and want to change things and want to bring good to the world. But in your book you said, in your own company when you came back and your computer was dead, you realized somebody had to come to you and say, 'Hey Esther, I think you're kind of becoming an a**hole.' So how do individual actors and founders who are driven manage power? So we heard today from Raj, he talked about collaboration, and Andrew talked about community. So how do we think about keeping ourselves accountable and grounded?
You need to surround yourself. I mean, you fundamentally need to be willing to listen. And that's the problem. If you're lucky, it happens early. Or you're married to Melinda French or MacKenzie Scott and they keep you in line until you escape the reservation. And that is really... I mean, but it is really sad. I've seen so many people who started out mission-driven, you know, DNA, 'Don't be evil.' You get seduced first, then you get corrupted by power, by people. I mean, one of the saddest stories is Tony Hsieh, who everybody could see he was kind of going off his own reservation and doing drugs and basically committed what I call negligent suicide. You need to surround yourself with people who will tell you the truth. But of course, what happens is you surround people whose jobs and status depend on you and they won't tell you the truth. I mean, do you know about the two Elon Musks?
Good, good prompt. So, there's the Elon Musk at Tesla and Twitter. Everybody knows him. He's a maniac. He does drugs. He impregnates women. And he gets trillion-dollar, not guarantees but promises, and is completely off the reservation. He's unsupervised and fully self-driving and ultimately dangerous to himself and everybody, wonderful and brilliant as he is. I mean, his spaceships work. And so there's also the Elon at SpaceX. The difference there is Gwynne Shotwell, who's the president, who, you know, this is not inside information. It's just what I believe. You just can imagine him walking to NASA with Gwynne and she says, 'Okay Elon, just keep quiet, don't say anything unless I poke you. No drugs, just okay.' He's been working with her since 2001, and she is not afraid of him. As far as I can tell, everybody else around him is terrified. You know, 'Oh, I don't want to lose access to Elon Musk.' I mean, there's one other elephant in the room that people don't want to lose access to.
Okay, I want to tell... it's Trump.
Yeah, tell us more. Keep going.
Well, I mean, the same thing is happening there. People don't want to lose the favor of the emperor who has no clothes but is carrying bags of money.
