Podcast appearances and mentions of Esther Dyson

What do angel investing, cosmonaut training, and funding a 10-year health community project have in common? Esther Dyson. Obviously. In our latest episode #164 of #TheShot of #DigitalHealth Therapy, Jim Joyce and I had the pleasure to catchup with Esther. We covered:

While we're on our season break, we're sharing some of our favorite podcasts. Today, we're playing an episode from Passion Struck. Hosted by John R. Miles, Passion Struck features some of the world's most insightful voices, offering practical advice on how to bring intentionality and purpose into your career, well-being, life, and relationships.In this episode, John talks to Esther Dyson, a respected angel investor, author, and pioneer in the digital space. She shares thoughtful perspectives on how technology is shaping human connection in both positive and challenging ways.If you like this episode, make sure to follow this link to subscribe and listen to more episodes:https://passionstruck.com/passion-struck-podcast/Views and opinions expressed during the podcast are those of the individuals expressing them and do not necessarily reflect those of System Catalysts or Hueman Group Media Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

361Firm Zietgiest Panel at the...Tech Summit (Feb. 25, 2025)   SUMMARY KEYWORDSAI innovation, venture capital, early-stage companies, technology revolution, market uncertainty, geopolitical shifts, consumer spending, debt management, leadership challenges, educational access, technological race, global alliances, investment strategies, productivity increases, existential risks.SPEAKERSZoe Cruz, Mark Sanor, Barbara Doran, Christopher Birne, Stephen Burke, Joe Mancini Mark Sanor  00:00I'm going to make a prediction if Eddy will give me his attention. Eddie and Maisy are doing a deal right now. That's the whole point, yeah. My prediction is that this might be one of the most educational five to six hours of your life. There are so many interesting things happening in the world. Again, we were talking this morning. It really is like a new world order. And what gives us hope is always technology, productivity and all those things, those great things. So we're going to talk about these aspects, and hopefully these are the things that we in this room can control, but we all don't know how to navigate, so we have specialists who that's what they focus on, you know, whether it's health tech or dual use. So let's all learn together. So I asked the panels a classic question, what scares and excites you, and share some insights. And I like to to do the following, and sometimes the what scares and excites you, of course, can be insightful. But by way of very quick introduction, introduce yourself, and then you'll be you about clean up. David, you'd like to clean up. Share it, you know, introduce yourself and share. Share an insight with the view of, we're in this, this very, you know, rapidly transforming world, and the rapidity is only increasing. So with that, I'm gonna, you know, I always like fund the funds, so I raise money. So a lot of people don't want to raise money for fund the funds, because you're like, you know, you don't get paid much. You have to long term journey, but the intelligence that you get from fund to fund. So I let Joe kick off, Barbara, we all, you all know from pickle ball or or CNBC, or the like. Zoe is new to us, maybe not to some of you, but she was the president of Morgan Stanley. Who else has been president of Morgan Stanley here? Not too many of us have been your perch, right? Your view, your vantage point. So and you're on to new frontiers, you'll share some of that. And everyone should know Stephen. Who does not know? Stephen Burke, has anyone has not been to our Tuesday briefing? It okay if you haven't, Olga, you haven't made it. Have you a Tuesday briefing of 361 firm? Has anyone not made it to one of them? You probably made it to 100 but it's 256 next Tuesday, our anchor man. So you'll anchor the panel. So I'm going to pass it off to you, Joe, and truly be inside tell us something we don't know.Joe Mancini  03:22Well, I'll start by just telling you what you don't know, which is who I am. My name is Joe Mancini. I'm one of the founding partners of a hybrid venture fund called front porch Venture Partners. About half our capital goes into early stage venture capital on the fund side, via kind of a classic Fund of Funds approach, and about half directly into companies at the early stage. Companies at the early stage. Super excited to be here this community as I've started to engage with it more and more. It's just a really authentic and interesting group of people. So I think it's going to be an amazing day. Is this the scares and excites? Part? Mark, or no? Mark Sanor  03:54Well, insights and or scares Excite? Yeah. I like an insightful perspective. Joe Mancini  04:01Yeah, insightful. I would say, you know, I mean, it's, obviously, it's a more dynamic world, I think, right now, than we've lived in in a very long time. It feels like every other day there's some new piece of news that's throwing us all for a loop. I focus on early stage venture. I would say I when we get to the scared and excited part, I both worry as well as I'm excited about the state of venture as an asset class and the state of early stage innovation. It's been a primary driver of the US economy for a very long period of time, and American ingenuity and innovation has put us, you know, at the top of the heap globally for a long period of time. And there's an interesting where, an interesting intersection in the asset class right now, where, you know, LPs are frustrated about liquidity, assets are being concentrated among some of the biggest managers. And meanwhile, innovation is happening globally. That's starting to put, I think, American innovation on its on its heels a little bit. So I can talk about. A more inspiring version of where I think we go from here, but that's where I sit today. Barbara Doran  05:11Hello, yeah, hi. Besides playing pickleball, and there were two women who won, by the way, will be defending next year. Anyway, I'm Barb Duran. I wear two hats. I'm here, really, on the investment Council of Penn State. I'm not staff member, volunteer. I've been on the board of Penn State for nine years, the Board of Trustees just after the Sandusky scandal was elected by the alumni, and have been on the Finance Committee ever since. So on the investment Council. And so I want to talk a little bit about the things that we do there. But also, excuse me, my other hat is I have my own firm, wealth advisory, asset management, and so I invest in public traded equities, and that's really my specialty as an independent professional, the things that excite me most really goes along with what Dan was saying are Bill Joe. Oh, jeez. Anyway, David. David anyway is really about technology. I don't think that should come as any surprise. There's lots of talk all the time about AI and what that means. We had a market sell off about three weeks ago because of deep seek. You know this Chinese competitor, potential competitor, to Nvidia and lots of other semiconductor players, but there's so much going on, and we're already starting to see the productivity increases that will come from businesses adopted it. And so far, in terms of businesses adopted, probably, you know, not even you know, only maybe 10% have really adopted, and we're not talking about the service now. So the salesforce.com but the businesses will actually implement to make their businesses run more efficiently, their sales, all that sort of thing. So that's just beginning, because everybody's looking at, how do we use it, working with consultants, etc. But there's going to be a lot more to come, and more new companies that we don't even know about yet, and that's why, like, for instance, at Penn State, we're doing we don't invest directly and anything, we're just not big enough. Our end down is maybe six to 7 billion, if you include our operating cash. So we have a great staff, but we invest in funds, you know. So that's the fund of funds who really have the expertise to dive deep. And we've been investing in in different venture capital funds that have different areas of expertise in technology. Some of them are AI. Others are other areas of technology, but AI has been a big one recently, and we're continuing to look in that space. And the publicly traded side at Penn State, we just do index is which I'm always the one speaking up like, why we should do some active managers. But for my own clients, I do a lot in technology. Like, for instance, I've own Nvidia since 2019 which had no idea it would happen as it has. But I looked up at that time, like, why did I buy it then? And it was really because they were one of the first actually using AI to help their clients run their business. And so that was, this was the beginning of and this is just the beginning, still, even despite everything that's happening on So, and I know I'm getting the look, but the things that I worry about really have to do with the current administration and the uncertainty being created by not knowing what's happening with tariffs. Is it more bark than bite? We don't know. We just had a pronouncement today about Canada and Mexico, or maybe it was late yesterday. Who knows? And also about the deportations. We don't know. Even company managements are worried about what that could mean in terms of labor shortage and the inflationary pressures there. So there's a lot we don't know. And right now, what's happened? Sure you've noticed, the last three days, we've had a market sell off, including today, in the equity market. 10 year yield has come down, and I think it's we're now having a growth scare, which we haven't seen for a while, and we'll see how that plays out. My view it's probably a buying opportunity somewhere in there, because the economy is still strong. It's consumer driven, and it's the mid to high income consumer that's driving it. And people have made trillions in the stock market. Their home prices are high, and they're employed. So despite all the noise in the frights of the last few days, I'm still, you know, optimistic on the market. Thank you. Zoe Cruz  09:09Thank you. My name is Zoe Cruz. It's actually Zoe Papa vimitrio Cruz. I was born and raised in Greece. I am what you call the American dream. Three years before I went to Harvard on a full scholarship, I didn't speak a word of English, and if it weren't a public school teacher that took an interest as to why I wasn't applying to Harvard, I probably wouldn't be here. And I joined Morgan Stanley right out of business school. It was a small investment banking boutique with 1800 people in three offices, Tokyo, London, New York. When I left in 07 it was 65,000 people. They had offices everywhere. That's a revolution. Finance was globalizing. Overnight, rates were 21% on their way to zero 30. Interest rates, the risk free rate of return for treasuries were 15% on their way to 1% as I say to people, a monkey could do what we did at Morgan Stanley, and we were not monkeys. So you have to recognize paradigm shifts. And I actually think right now we're in a massive paradigm shift. There is way too much in being spilled. Whether the Fed is going to use 25 basis points. Who cares? The world is de globalizing, fragmenting. The biggest assumption the markets are making is that we beat inflation. It's going to go back down to 2% I could be wrong, but I believe we're not going to save 2% in my lifetime. We should worry more about hyper inflation than deflation. The US government has $36 trillion worth of debt, and so for me, what I worry about is there is not enough talk about, how do you hedge your portfolio if it is a paradigm shift, and interest rates actually, the cost of capital keeps on going up, and availability of it keeps on going down. If I'm right about that assumption. A lot of your portfolio is in deep trouble, because that's the assumption most people are making. So what scares me at the moment, I'm an optimist by nature. I love you know, we are the lucky sperm club here, actually, most of us. What scares me is we are in the middle of an amazing technological revolution. But unlike what so it is amazing in the sense that when I look at the power of that thing, I downloaded all four perplexity, Gemini, grok, chat, GPT, all four of them, and I asked them the same question, all four. And by the way, they have their own biases. Just excellent. I don't need 12 research people. It's just in a second, I get the most complex answers to a question that's exciting. I mean, I can get a PhD basically, just, you know, asking that's exciting. Unlike other revolutions, you don't get the extreme risk of Elon, a brilliant man, whatever you want to think about his character. This is a brilliant man who has changed the world. Now everybody's talking the game, but he, I remember, if you look at his interviews only a few years back, he said there's a non zero possibility humanity ceases to exist. Well, that's kind of a big risk. So, so the mirror image of that exciting, exciting revolution is more of us should think about humanity is a wonderful thing, and how do you preserve us being masters of this revolution, as opposed to the other way around? Stephen Burke  13:14I'm done. First of all, I agree with most of what you said, and the stuff I don't agree with, I don't understand. So thank you, Zoe for that crash course. I worry about debt too, and I worry about debt being the current consumption of our future earnings, and we've gone way over our skis on that all over the world, and how we get that back is going to be a real problem. And the other thing I worry about is the lack of leadership that will make the hard decisions that we have to make to put the pain on the system that we have to go through to get the excesses out that we built up over the years. I also share the view that the move down in rates is going to be much more challenging the market is hoping for as investors, if we don't get our mind around that change that the last 15 years are done and we're back to a normal interest rate level on the low end of what we've historically seen, you're going to have problems valuing all your assets if we don't get that right. So I think we have to change the mindset there. I do think there's elements of this administration that are not getting credit for the positive outcomes because of the delivery on it, but if we can get digitize a lot of our government expenses, you only raise the level of trust in how our taxes are being spent, they can give you a whole different mindset towards government and deliver much better outcomes for our country, but I think it will be the same for other countries. Europe has a massive fiscal problem where their needs are far greater than their ability to spend to meet those needs, and that's not just on defense, it's on their regular day to day living. So I think the transformations that are going. On. I do think this is one of those periods where we've slowly walked into, over the last decade, big, secular, mega trends, whether it's demographics, whether it's the tech boom. You can go through the list. There's several other areas where we're seeing these mega trends. I think the anti immigration bias that we're starting to say is another worry, we're going to have a brain drain problem. We've already seen it in a lot of countries. The US cannot afford to lose the opportunity the edge that we've had in immigration, and we're on our way to doing that. So I think we're going too far in the pendulum all the time. I think we have to get back to a more moderate way of seeing how we deal with all the problems that we have. So I'll stop there more. Mark Sanor  15:42What do you think about the risk of of humanity? So arm and Sir keys on. He did this conference. He how long wasn the question of existence? Do we can, you know, sort of existential, the ultimate existential question. I'm surprised Stephen Burke  15:58they made it this far, so that's not a priority for me, but I do have four kids that it is a priority for. And I would say that I worry about our kids. I worry about the we called sending the bill to the kids table with the debt and the strains on the system, but I also worry what we've done to their future. I think their their ability to have hope is not the same that we had when we were growing up. And I think that's a real problem, because without hope and hope in our leaders, it's very hard to get out of the problems and deal with the problems Mark Sanor  16:32that we have fair enough. Well, I want to open up because I asked insights and scares and excitements, you sort of answered those questions, but did you hold back a scares and excites? Answer? I held back and excites. Okay, let's Yeah, and that Joe Mancini  16:46was really interesting. I appreciate this is a really smart crew up here. You know, like I said, I play in the early stage venture world, primarily in the US. I spend all day, every day, with fund managers and founders. I would say something that excites me with as concerned as I am about certain things, is how many founders are starting businesses right now in an AI native way. And what I mean by that is, you know that they're building these businesses now with AI tools in their pocket that are going to dramatically, I think, decrease the amount of capital needed to build a great company, right? Which means that, as an investor, there's an opportunity for great returns. Peter Walker, at carta has a great stat around the average series A employee count. Two years ago was 18. Last year was 13. It's ready to be under 10 within the next 12 months. So in terms of productivity, kind of carrying us out of this, I think there's a huge opportunity with this next set of tools, not just as a system layer for a lot of things that we do, but for founders and people who are creating and building things, and for our kids as they're creating and building things. So Mark, that's the more optimistic. So Mark Sanor  17:51do you know Esther Dyson? Does anyone know Mr. So she was we had this discussion about this time last year about companies that are the founders being an AI and the board members potentially being a is you guys have thought through that scenario, but it's they would Love to replace you too. So so it goes both ways. Joe Mancini  18:23I mean, some might as well be AI in certain cases, right? I mean, particularly at the board level, we work with a lot of boards as well, and, you know, there's some sleepy boards that might be better served being AI, right? We try to avoid those types of situations. Mark Sanor  18:39So, let's, let's open it up. Will Speaker 4  18:46First off, this was awesome. So far, I really enjoyed what you guys all said, a lot of brain power up there. We've talked a lot about, you know, uncertainty of geo politics, Global War, where interest rates are going. I'm curious, you know, from an investment perspective, it's sometimes easier to think about, what are the things that are not going to change amidst all this, and what will continue to just make sense. And I'd love to hear what you guys think about, what's not going to change, and how we could invest in slow, boring things that aren't going to change. Mark Sanor  19:18Who wants it? Zoe Cruz  19:22Great question. Sorry, yeah, it's a Mark Sanor  19:27girl he was being coached by the Pender, right? Zoe Cruz  19:30It's a great question. I'm not sure I have the answer that to the question you're asking. One thing will never change is basically, if you have short term clarity on what's going to produce cash, you know, even if inflation takes 5% of it, who cares? That's never I mean arithmetic, simple arithmetic is so good businesses, but I. Say what's also not going to change. Some of the best money I've made is after the crash, one of the best trades I've made, because I know how to read bank balance sheets in oh eight after the war fell apart, you could have bought if you had enough cash saved aside and not prematurely invested all of your portfolio and things you could have bought bill based stock at 50 cents of its book value. This is a company that was still making billions with an S every quarter. So what's not going to change is we know after major and I think we are in a paradigm shift. You don't need to be a great investor. You're going to pick up great companies. You're going to make me investments that give you a symmetry of risk reward. Most Great Investors basically have, so yes, you can lose half of your money, or you can make 100x that's a symmetry of risk reward. You should do the trade every day. I think right now, the asymmetry of risk reward is against the traditional portfolio, stocks and bonds. You know, when you can actually save there is inflation, the huge debt that the market, sovereign in particular, the US of A everyone is actually printing money, including even Germany. Basically, when there is huge debt, as I say many times, people forget there is only two ways of big debt, repudiation or inflation, we're choosing the latter, so that should guide your portfolio. Now the Argentinians don't have a reserve currency. So if you choose inflation, your currency goes down 98% Turkey 60% we are in a wonderful world of America with the reserve currency. The question is, we better be careful. I Barbara Doran  22:06just want to make a quick comment on that. We better be careful about the reserve currency, because when 22 when we used we froze central bank in Russia. You know, it suddenly woke up a lot of other central bankers to say, hey, maybe the treasuries aren't so safe after all. So it will be a long term process, but we can't take for granted. I mean, the near term, yes, will be the world's reserve currency, but over many years, and depending how it accelerated or not, by various administrative policies, current or future presidents, that is something to watch. And I share the concern over the deficit, which looks like it's going to be even higher, but what will not change? I mean, there's so many ways to answer that. One is about consumer spending. You know that Americans love to spend through thick and thin and and also market psychology, which we addressed in which Zoe said, back in it was oh nine in February, I remember looking at those bank stocks because a friend said, bar, what can I invest in, and I don't give friends ideas. But I said, if you really want to invest, because she knew nothing. I said it with Hank was bank America and city, which were like $2 stocks. I said, I don't know. The only thing I know is they're not going out of business when will return. It wasn't one, whatever it was. It was crazy. But the only thing I knew they weren't going out of business. So, Mark Sanor  23:23all right, yeah, what's Joe Mancini  23:24playing in my head, as you all are describing these situations, which I think are really good examples, is just, I mean, supply and demand, as far as I can tell, is always going to, you know, rule quite you know, rule every market and just about every transaction. So knowing where you sit in terms of, you know, where is demand, where is supply, and ultimately, where is price, right, can help you make really good decisions. Simple, but I think we go back to it all the time, Mark Sanor  23:52by the way, I'm gonna is amazing here. Of course, you stepped up. But we'll talk about pricing perfect timing, because we're gonna talk about talk about large pricing models. That's the next open AI that we've been looking at. Lots of hands were going up because you guys have asked lots of questions. I'm going to let Speaker 5  24:16Dave Thanks. So regarding rare and critical minerals, we're sort of hearing now that if you haven't already got any, gone into them, you're late, that they're not going to be very rare in a very short period of time. Do you guys have views on that? Mark Sanor  24:31I mean, Greenland and Ukraine? No views from the panel on that Speaker 2  24:40one? No, I don't know enough either. Don't forget the ocean too. Oh, Mark Sanor  24:44the ocean. We have two people in Alyssa. Where's Alyssa and Lisa on ocean research. We know so much. We spend so much more in space, not in the ocean. Chris, Christopher Birne  24:58thank you guys for your time. I guess. First, I would say, both my dad and I went to Penn State for our undergrad. So we are and I'm Greek. So CI do elada Go Blue? Yeah, oh, wow. So, I guess a lot of discussions I've had with other family offices, and I think Stephen You had mentioned this idea of, you know, a lack of leadership and its effect on making crucial decisions. You know, I think that the Obama administration was the last two year term we had for a president. And, you know, I guess you could argue that Trump is a two term president one time, separately, this political climate that we're in now and this shit, this paradigm shift politically, I think, where, you know, every four years to different president with a completely different outlook. What effect does that have? Like, kind of, some of the things you guys are discussing about the deficit and being able to make crucial decisions, Mark Sanor  25:48we do have elections every two years too, that impact Stephen Burke  25:52this. I'll start I think the I think the ping pong match of the party's policies is a terrible waste of money for the US, consumer and taxpayer. And I think we need to separate the budget out to a maintenance budget and investment budget the same way you would in a corporation, and then you would evaluate the return on your investment for like the infrastructure plan that was absolutely necessary. But you do that in a way that you actually look for an ROI the way you would in the business, and I think if we did that, the people would have a lot better response to the government spending and new government projects. So I think that's the kind of leadership that you need. You also need people to step up and say, I'm going to be a one term. Er, because what we need to do is the stuff that is the hard stuff, we're going to have to have to raise taxes and we're going to have to cut spending. You can't avoid the deficit problem that we have. You can't grow out of it. We tried that for the last 15 years, and all we did was make the debt worse. We avoided a financial crisis, but we just might have prolonged it instead of completely avoid it. Zoe Cruz  26:56I would say that we're focusing on the wrong the politics, the Democrats, Republicans. I think the Democrats pretend they care. The Republicans say they're going to do the right thing for the economy, but neither one, neither of the major parties, really focus on the one thing, the economy is no longer working for large swaths of the population. And if you read history, they pick up the pitch forks at some point. That's what's happening to me. Donald is the pitch fork saying he's a disrupter. We're going to throw a bomb. Tabula rasa. Let's start all over again. So the again, the amount of ink that's being spilled on Obama versus Donald versus at the end of the day, the reason Donald won is he had a great story line. I care. I listen to you. We've globalization eviscerated your town, your middle class America, your poor. I'm listening to you. That resonated now. What's going to happen if two years from now, he's not listening? Is what I worry society is fraying, not because Republicans did the wrong thing, or Democrats did the wrong thing. We're not focusing on fundamentally, when you have I think I read a statistic that's, again, I believe in capitalism, but we're not practicing it any longer. When you have three guys, bez, I think Zuckerberg and Elon, the three are worth more than the bottom 50% of us of a think of that statistic that's crazy. Yeah. So I think, you know, I talked to a couple of you, I think the caucuses we should have is, What is the purpose of leadership, but to actually get to our children, leave our children. I have three amazing children. I'm ashamed of the future I'm leaving them. My generation is the most self est generation of them all my dad fought in World War Two. They were starving, and here we are, my generation. I need, I want, I have to have. So I think that's what has to change, not Obama versus whatever. Barbara Doran  29:24Well, all very interesting. But I think your question was, was, really, how does it affect your investing, and how to think about it? So in a more granular, granular level, it does affect, I mean, you had leading up the election, you had the Kamala plays in the stock market. You had the Trump plays, you know, and after Trump won, then you had, you know, all his the areas, whether it was financials, materials, everything running. And so you do have to be cognizant. And of course, now, as I mentioned earlier, there's all this policy uncertainty, which certainly is, you know, impactful, because the Fed is on hold, and probably may hold a little longer to there more clarity, because they are. Worried, you know, if you deport too many people, you know could hurt labor, inflationary and tariffs and so we don't know yet. So there is uncertainty that you have to build in. Now, interestingly, there just was out yesterday, the second Consumer Confidence Report from the Conference Board, and last week with senior University of Michigan, a big drops in consumer confidence in terms of inflation expectations. But interestingly, there was quite a disparity, as we've seen in other surveys, between the Republicans and the Democrats. Democrats were much more pessimistic about it all, and Republicans, even though that number went up, they were not so very interesting. How either they're hearing separate facts or they're interpreting or focusing on different things. So this politicization that Zoe is talking about, you know, is real and is is harmful, you know, in terms of making informed decisions. Mark Sanor  30:47Question Tony, hold on one second, Speaker 7  30:55Zoe, I want to go back to something you said. I think you touched on concentration, concentration of wealth. Most people are focused on chasing the return based on what's happening in the market, and a lot of that has to do with technology. How do you, how do you properly address that concentration? Speaker 3  31:14You know, I hope this time around, it will be different. When you look at the history, when you look at, you know, this time, it's different. When you look at the history of capitalism again, the best system, on a relative basis, you have huge growth plateau, collapse, start all over again. That's how it so you look at, you know, the 1920s I'm rereading the great crash in 1929 you look at the parallels of what we constant, robber barons, concentration of wealth, gold, Gilded Age. I mean, so you look at the pattern. And my hope again is that we don't have this collapse, if people say, if you put your money in equities, you'll make money, yes, over the long decades, if you put your money in equities, right before the crash in 1929 it took you 40 years to make your money back. Let's pick or 30. So to me, I would say, right now, there's not enough, really, risk management these. How do you change the concentration of wealth? I hope it's not by, you know, I hope that those guys that there are worth trillions, don't figure out how they go to Miami to save taxes. They figure out how you actually use technology, you know. And again, Elon, to be fair, even though I think he's a deeply flawed human being, but I have enormous respect for his IQ, he started talking about again, years ago, when you listen to what he was saying, is, and that's why, by the way, they had this, you should have open AI, why he supported it. He said we should have the minimum income. I don't know if that's the right answer. But he thought about if 65% of the US economy is consumption, which means people have a job, they make money, and then they consume. That's America. So when you have all of them now say productivity, you are going to need to fire millions of people. We don't need them, and this time, it's not the machinists. It's actually the lawyers, the accountants. How does so? Again, we're not thinking about the paradigm shift. I am hugely positive about what will happen if we survive at the other the land of plenty, but I hope the transition, which was World War One, World War Two, is what transitions were this time. Hopefully it's different. Stephen Burke  34:13I would just add mark. I think the thing that's going to help the inequality is, can we use technology to make the access to education better than it is right now for the low end, because 49% of the spending in the US is done by the top 10% of earners, so they the others don't have a shot. They just don't have a shot right now. And the way our educational system works in many states, it's driven by tax revenues, particularly real estate revenues, and that is the definition of inequality. So I think we have to fix the educational access to allow them to have a shot to compete, because we're not giving them the shot to they're not starting on an even playing field to begin with. Mark Sanor  34:59So. What we haven't talked about is the global, the geopolitical Democrats and Republicans. But we're in a world, a shifting world. You talked about the dollar and in our debt loads. But how do you see, I guess, what scares and excites you on the geopolitical fronts? I I'll Stephen Burke  35:20start just the same thing inequality. You have a couple countries that are dominating all the discussions and all the influence right now, and it's the US and China, primarily, that are sucking the wind out of the air, out of the room, and they're not leaving much for the rest. And as we're carving up the world, we're creating a real problem with that. I think you have inequality on three levels. I think you have it on a country level, you have it on a corporate level, and you have it on the individual level, and we have to deal with all three of them to for this, to get it right. Zoe Cruz  35:59What I'm excited about is that it's possible to have the Chinese leadership and the US leadership meet to say, if actually humanity is what we're trying to save, maybe we work together, as opposed to because the nuclear arms race is now the technology race that the Chinese and the Americans are actually fighting so they don't lose on a technological revolution that they recognize they can lose control of. So my hope is those two guys meet and then we get to the land of plenty fast. Do Mark Sanor  36:35we have like this new, enlightened, mutual, assured technological destruction? Yeah, and that we should be enlightened, Zoe Cruz  36:43yeah? Because, I mean, I'm sure there are, there are people that are telling both Donald and she that there is a scenario we all die. I mean, there is, we all know that. And so right now, externally, at least what we are hearing and reading is what they want us to hear and read. Those two are the super powers, the unilateral whatever you call it, the world where America was the only one. Yeah, so those two guys, I think there must be at least initiating discussions Russia and all that. It's a human, horrible toll. The two leaders that need to get together, the two that count, that can change the trajectory of the world, is the Chinese and the Americans. Speaker 2  37:41Okay? And I worry long term about shifting alliances. You know, the US, it may not be seen as a reliable partner. And certainly Europe, basic leaders in the last week or so have said we've got to go it alone. And that will shift alliances all over the world. You've got Canada, Mexico, and we'll see where that shakes out. And, you know, I think longer term, it could weaken us and our ability, you know, to withstand all sorts of global pressures, the fact that we've done so well the last few years, economically, all these things, again, this is longer term. This will take time to shift, but that's what I'm concerned about. What's being set in motion now. So what? What that may lead to, and it may not be good for us. Joe Mancini  38:24I'll tell you a thing that I probably shouldn't say, that I actually wish had been a little less certain for a period of time, which is, I don't know if folks noticed the news story about a week ago that there was a 3% chance in 2032 that a meteor was gonna strike the Earth, right? And then we got a better look at the media, and we're like, Ah, it's one and a half percent. And then we started look back in history, and we're like, Oh, something hit, you know, the northern part of Russia in 1908, it wasn't that big of a deal. And now we're saying, yeah, it's probably not gonna hit. No big deal. I wish that that had stuck at three to 5% for a little while longer, right? And just tried to bring the world a little bit together around, okay, this is madness, but we have an existential threat. We can see it through a big, giant telescope. Let's get the best minds together to try to figure out what to do. Unfortunately, now it's like point 1% and we'll probably be fine. Mark Sanor  39:17All right with that. Thank you to our kick off panel. Zoe Can I ask you to stick around? Can you stick around? We're going to talk about AI and two of my panelists are not here, and I thought you might keep sharing some. There you go. It's a half an hour panel. All right. So if Thank you. Thank you so Ben and Maisie Jack is on on an airplane. Watch her. Please come up. We're going to talk about AI, and if you, if you, and maybe. Be Ben, you'll go first, introduce yourself again. Sheri, come join our 361 firm community of investors and thought leaders. We have a lot of events created by the community as we collaborate on investments and philanthropic interests. Join us. Ben. You can subscribe to various 361 events and content at https://361firm.com/subs. For reference: Web: www.361firm.com/homeOnboard as Investor: https://361.pub/shortdiagOnboard Deals 361: www.361firm.com/onbOnboard as Banker: www.361firm.com/bankersEvents: www.361firm.com/eventsContent: www.youtube.com/361firmWeekly Digests: www.361firm.com/digest

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Panel - 361Firm's NY Tech Summit Feb. 25, 2025SUMMARY KEYWORDSArtificial Intelligence, generative AI, venture capital, seed funding, Hippocratic, LLM, job displacement, AI revolution, energy solutions, food security, humanoid robots, quantum computing, stakeholder model, economic impact, technological advancement.SPEAKERSSpeaker 1, Alex Zhuk, Rashmi Joshi, Ben Narasin, Speaker 2, Maisy Ng, Mark Sanor, Zoe Cruz Mark Sanor  00:00Um, introduce yourself again, share an insight and what scares and excites you about AI, there you Ben Narasin  00:06go. What is this the one? All right, Hi, I'm Ben Naris, and I run tenacity venture capital. I spent of any a large venture firm about three years ago. I focus on seed. I've been doing that for about 18 years. Last year, I saw 2000 companies. I funded three. They were all generative. Ai related. It it is not because I have an explicit focus on AI. By the way, focused funds of under perform generalist funds for 40 years, find that data out there and think about how you invest. It's that the best and brightest always go to the shiniest, most exciting thing, and that is certainly generative AI right now, I even have I paid them personally, the most I've ever paid for company, $500 million for a company called Hippocratic, which is creating LLM based nurses. And what's fascinating about AI, I guess there's so many things, but one, we don't know how it works and how it thinks. These machines are thinking. And people that are in the business will acknowledge they don't actually understand how, two, it totally changes the value and reality of time. So let's use the example of Hippocratic they have an LLM that is trained on the nursing notes from major medical facilities. It calls in audio every person that leaves a hospital or doctor's office and checks in on them to make sure they are staying in tune with the things they need to do to get better. When in the past, would that ever have been possible? You know, 1000 people leaves a hospital in a day, there is zero chance you can afford to get the people to do it. But AI can spend infinite amounts of time and spin up infinite instances, and it will totally change things that we are able to do. I make one more example of that. I was listening on calls that the AI made to different patients. And it called a woman that had diabetes, and it, you know, did its check in. And then she said, Hey, can I eat, you know, beans? Yeah, beans are fine. Can I eat bread? Well, bread is bad at spikes. And then she listed off one by 156, foods to see if they were okay to eat. And the AI, very patiently, said, yes, no, yes, no, that would never happen. But not only can the AI allow infinite time to be utilized to do things in parallel, but the people on the other side can take advantage of it in ways they never would have with a traditional nurse in this instance. So I think there are going to be so many things that happen that we are not expecting. I am not worried about I am a little worried about the single purpose tool labor, the person that is not able to be retrained well, because that's not the culture they grew up in. They didn't value education there, you know? But hey, I walk down New York City streets today, a lot of people swing and sledge hammers and dig in dirt. There'll be plenty of things to be done. It's just if you have a single if you're that high or gal in the call center in Bangladesh. Woo. I hope you can find someone else. Mark Sanor  02:45Okay, so Maisie, also introduce yourself. And again, what scares, excites, insights. Maisy Ng  02:53Hi. My name is May Z. I'm founder, managing partner of the light capital. We're VC head quarter in Singapore. We're now doing our second fund, the first invest in Southeast Asia tech companies that celebrate the UN SDGs. The second fund will invest in AI companies across the AI tech stack. We're really excited about this opportunity because, I mean, AI is like a tech East dream, right? So, because it's so revolutionary, the same O, same o doesn't work anymore. We need a whole new class of semi conductors, data center technologies, new software that will empower new applications. So this is, we think it's like, I think the aircraft guy, this is once in 100 years as well. So, and what excites me, I think, well, the sort of paradigm shift that AI brings, it enables us humans to do things we never thought was possible. And initially, for example, when deep mine was started, it started by trying to play chess. And initially it basically took all the grand master strategies and train the software to play like a grand master. And so it played against grand masters, and they win some and they lose some, and then they decide, okay, fine, we just tell the computer, these are the rules, and you just go play. And because computers can basically, you know, like, work really fast, they could play, like, a million games overnight, and very soon they learn how to play. And then they did this go, which is a far more complex game than chess, and just by playing against itself, they found new strategies that Grand Masters would not think of like in the chess game. They be sacrificing pieces, left, right and Sanor, and then they win. And people just can't understand how they did that. And a couple of days ago, I read this article about scientists using AI to design basically micro wave circuits, and they said that the design that comes out looks really weird. It's not something that an engineer would design, because it's not something you've been taught in school. But so it looks really weird. Doesn't look like a circuit board, but apparently it worked better than any other circuit. So I think that is opportunity that we can have with AI. What? What scares me a bit to what Zoe said. I mean, someone once said that basically, software would eat the world. So guess what? Ai. Eat the software. And to Ben's point, people will lose jobs, and this is a major program shift. Some of the jobs aren't ever coming back, and so you gonna have, like, massive layoffs, and what people are gonna do so the consumption will drop, because people just don't have jobs they can spend. So I think the governments and the companies need to know and try to plan ahead, because the core, I guess, social compound we have capitalism is that if you make money as a capitalist, you are supposed to invest the money to create more jobs, build factories. But what we saw in the past decades is that people who made money from outsourcing globalization, they didn't build more factories. They did hire more workers. What did they do? They bought Yach, they bought art. And so all this rent seeking behavior didn't help the economy, and that is a problem. So if you take AI, that's going to be like compounded a train in times exponentially. So I think companies need to be aware of that. Governments need to be aware of that. It may be that we have to do either tax on robots or UBI just to what people picking up. Pitch Fox, Mark Sanor  06:00okay, let Alex go next. Alex Zhuk  06:05Thank you, Mark. Thank you for having me. Great to see all of you. I'm going to give you a very short introduction by myself, because I haven't met many of you. I'm a founder of an AI company that uses satellites to map the environmental footprint of every farm on the planet to help ensure food security through resilience, but also decarbonize agriculture, which is the second largest emitting sector in the world. I'm also on the side involved in critical mission asset development, primarily energy solutions and data centers, starting with building a digital twin of the electrical grid, because it's becoming very hard to connect to it, as many of now, in terms of an insight that I think hasn't been shared by these experts near me, I think we are under appreciating, or at least I did for a very long time, the way in which industries that have been established as part of humanity's operation for 1000s of years will be disrupted. So I work in agriculture. We've been farming in a mechanized, or at least structured manner for centuries, but you could argue 1000s of years we are actually for writing of climate reasons, but also just the way we've been farming since the 19th century, are on track to erode the size of arable land. It's about the size of Latin America, which puts in tricky position, especially with a growing global population, right? What do you mean by a road? So the way we farm, we've been farming for past 100 years is we've been blank to chemicals non stop on the soil, mechanically turning it over same crops. And what we found recently is that process over time kills us well. Now the question is, how do you deal with that? One way is to improve how we've been farming before. So precision agriculture, but you know, there's a completely different paradigm on hand, right? So, much like a century ago, in order to get a diamond, you would go down a mine shaft, you would dig it up, you would clean it, you process it, you ship it over. Now you can start with a kernel of carbon and grow it, right? Similarly, for example, with meat, we're getting to a point where we can grow real patties that are juicy, feel more or less the same taste and a real meat in a lab, what the consumption and the water and the energy needed to raise through animals at scale. So I think it's an opportunity in that AI can provide real resource abundance and a quality of life for each and one of us in terms of volume, that is fundamentally different from how we've been approaching it as humanity for hundreds of years. The question comes back to actually something you mentioned and several other panelists, which is, how do we tackle the social question, and how do we deal with the tension if the haves, if the gap between the haves and the have nots increases far greater than we've seen before. Mark Sanor  09:17So thank you, Alex, somewhat hopeful, maybe, maybe. Zoe, you're now on an AI panel. If you stick around, you could be on a health tech panel. What are your thoughts on on AI specifically scary and exciting. I Zoe Cruz  09:35mean, to me, this young man is Exhibit A why it all is going to be very good again. My concern is the transition. And right now, the way we allocate capital to wonderful things like AI is in at the traditional paradigm, which is, you know, stocks and bonds go up if x. Why, you see, there's a paradigm. I went and re read actually, and that's where AI is helpful. There is a book that was written in 1955 and it's basically the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And it was the first time they talked about paradigm shifts. And in that they said scientists do a lot of work in a particular paradigm, and then Copernicus says, no, no, no, the sun doesn't go around the Earth. It's the other way around. That's a paradigm shift. So you do something different. So for me right now, as my 29 year old son says, technology exists to take the carbon out of the air to even get these meteorites to go off. The technology exists. How do you deal with the existing capitalist model, where you have existing capital allocated to things that will go to zero? So I do believe this is something spectacular and exciting, but I can't put the two and two together. That comes up with four in terms of regular transition. And you know, one of the things I said to my son, because the world is now run by HEPA gene octogenarians, never mind heptogenarians, why don't you guys get more involved? I mean, he's a brilliant young man. He started evolutionary biology. He plays the classical piano. He should get involved. And you know what he said? Talk about socio economic issues. What's the point? We have to wait until you guys die off. Now he didn't mean me, but hopefully, but Mark Sanor  11:42so we were in Germany at a round table, and apparently there's, there's legislation afoot to reduce or incentivize you to reduce voting at later ages. So you've sort of heard the panel, if you guys want to make some comments. But otherwise, I started opening Ben Narasin  12:04it up to comment on something I very much disagree with. Maisie. I don't think the evidence is that people are greedy, venal yacht buyers. I think it's quite the opposite look at so I look spend a lot of time in trucking space. Trucking is the number one job in the world by head count, although nobody wants to do it anymore, and there's an issue with aging out, etc, etc. But I was very concerned for a long time, because I was also looking at autonomous trucks and the massive displacement number one job in the world by head count, it should be done by machines. Okay, these people are out of work over time. So I started looking backwards. And one of the great example. See what the very one of the very first commercialized robots was the card scanner at the gas station. Now, if you're unfortunate enough to live in New Jersey and drive a car, you are in one of two states that unions which, by the way, I could not despise an entity more than I despise union. So please, no union leaders here have insisted that a human being pump your gas, an incredibly inefficient experience that drives me insane whenever I'm forced to deal with it. By the way, yesterday I was in a apartment. We were looking at buying an apartment here, and they have a man who pushes the button in the elevator like talk about it doesn't matter how much we do, the unions will make sure people have ridiculously stupid jobs and get paid. So anyway, what happened with all that great wealth that was created because now they didn't have to employ people to pump the gas in 48 states the United States, did people just stick with what they were doing? Absolutely not. They created what is now known as the convenience store when you go to a gas station, instead of just having gas pumps, which back then was all there was, maybe a counter with gum and candy, full fledged stores with all kinds of food and drinks and slushies, those stores ended up employing more people than the gas station attendant jobs represented same thing with the ATM everybody said, Oh my God, all these banks, the tellers ought to work more banks today than there Were with ATMs. I Mark Sanor  13:59think maisie's Point was different, because and Esther again, Esther Dyson asked, What billionaires, you know, have become better people in the last 1020, years, some have, but we, of Ben Narasin  14:13course, remind me, exaggerates you. It doesn't change you. Rashmi Joshi  14:18Hi. Thanks for that. I have actually three questions, so you might have to come back to me in a bit, but I'm curious, as an AI founder myself, what industries or new verticals Do you feel like are going to be established as a by factor or a consequence of us getting rid of all of these mundane tasks and grunt work type of jobs? Alex Zhuk  14:42Sure, happy to so the near term industry that has gone from, I would say, sort of in the shadows, a little bit boring, to very exciting. That was obviously energy. So we're realizing that if we're in a race at international level, we. Can't afford to lose, to concentrate now, as to how do we power these machines, both to train the models, but also humanoids, once automation is commercialized, which we're seeing happening very rapidly, that's exciting. How that will be solved, whether it's nuclear, whether it's other source of energy, is a guessing game, but that's a very exciting space. We haven't seen this growth infrastructure in decades. Personally. You know, I mentioned example of how we can similar to how we can synthesize proteins for medicine, create new foods, right? So, there is a company that was able to create cow free milk, and they tasked an AI to come up with ingredients that would when combined, taste, smell and feel like milk. And when you know, you might wonder what those ingredients were. Those were pineapple and strawberries, right? So ingredients are completely unintuitive to the human mind, that when combined, we're able to synthesize something that we want to consume. And I think we'll see that across food, I think we'll see that across health care. Mark Sanor  16:03But those are interesting vectors. But I think your question was the people, sort of your earlier point about job, you know, people who are going to be out of out of jobs, was your question like, Where will they be going? Where should they be where's the puck going for people? Is that it Alex Zhuk  16:20very difficult question for me to ask Mark, I would say the best bet would be for the verticals that are growing the fastest, Mark Sanor  16:29or maybe this goes back to Steven SPI about education. Anyone else want to answer that skill set Speaker 1  16:38would be, oh, I will cycle into something different, maybe more productive, just like, Well, Ben Narasin  16:41that was a great example. One of my one of my founders, made the point we brought a YPO group in, and he said, you know, you were talking about farming before the Civil War, 90% of the US population farmed. So we have seen a massive wipe out of an entire population of workers before it was all of America, but then they moved to cities. And guess what? When you're on a farm, you don't cut you cut your own hair. So all kinds of jobs were created that didn't exist when we had a mono culture of farming as the primary job, hair cutter, barber being one, and there were infinitely more. I think, by the way, if we could answer your question, we wouldn't tell you, because we'd be investing in at least two of us would be investing in it right now to get ahead of it. Yeah, well, yeah, I'm you must not have met many VCs, because we're very greedy in the first round to get all the ownership we can. That's the only chance we get. But it's, I think it's unpredictable, but I'm not worried that it won't happen. I think that, look, we have been through this before. The difference is that this is the first time software ever attacked the labor force instead of just process. But the labor force has been attacked many, many times. I mean, the Luddites are obviously the most commonly quoted example. But you know, it's like labor is lake water. It flows to the place it's needed. I do have material concern about, I'll just say, because I'm not gonna go too deep and dark here certain populations that might not have the historic advantage of or desire to reinvest in their own education. And I think that sometimes it's unrealistic for highly educated people to believe that everybody can be re educated, and that they'll even want to be and so where does that end up going? But here you want hope there's 100,000 unfilled jobs the United States right now in construction that are paying over $100,000 it's a good place to start. There's many places where jobs are unfilled. And lastly, a lot of the AI will augment people's ability and take over jobs that aren't filled, that are wanted and needed. As someone once said, You're not at threat of a of being your job being taken by AI. You're at threat of somebody that's better of using AI, taking your job. Maisy Ng  19:01I think I might have mis understood your question. So if you allow me, I'll give you a misunderstood answer. So I think there's, I mean, AI could be used also for, like robotics. So for example, I think, you know, we have really seen from Boston Dynamics that like dancing robots, but that isn't too useful for most of us. You don't buy a dancing robot. But a couple days ago, I saw this really interesting video. I think it's a US company that has basically built robots that can be used for domestic work. So can you imagine a robot that cleans your house? And this one was cool. So there's like two humanoid robots and standing side by side, and basically the owner comes in and gives them a bag of groceries, and the robot just look at them, and they sort it out. And if they took up a ketchup and they know its ketchup, they put at the top shelf of the fridge, they open it and they see there's eggs. And one robot picks up the eggs very gently, hands it to the other robot, who then puts it in the fridge. I mean, that's pretty cool, because you need computer vision. You also need an LL. Am, and you know, you can train a domestic robot for all scenarios, right? So the robot has to know that if it's an egg, you handle carefully, and this may be a quills egg, so he would know to the LLM that is a quills egg, it's an egg, so I handle it gently as well, so that, I think would bring tremendous, I mean, advantage for us, because nobody wants, you know, to do housework these days. Can I Rashmi Joshi  20:20just piggyback off that for a Mark Sanor  20:24second? One second, piggyback on the mic. Rashmi Joshi  20:27So as humanoid robots become more and more similar to us, let's say I can build you a robot that would be your perfect husband or partner, right? And it's indistinguishable from the real thing. Maisy Ng  20:44I think I can distinguish that Rashmi Joshi  20:47today, sure, but maybe five years from now, maybe not, right? So my question is, then, what is the value in being human? Maisy Ng  20:57I think we still have a soul, which I don't think that. I mean, we could probably train the robots at some point, but I don't know, it's a tough question to answer. So I think, I mean, that's something that we had discussed internally as well. I mean, so do we teach robots about, you know, like life after life and so forth? I mean, do do when you Mark Sanor  21:17say So internally? I mean, your fund internally discuss this friends Maisy Ng  21:20and within the partners and so what it means to be human, and basically, what do we need to teach, you know, the robots and so forth. So I don't know. I mean, it's an honest answer. I really don't know good to see how it goes, Zoe Cruz  21:33because I'm gonna leave after this. Are you gonna drop the mic and just go? What an amazing question, in the sense that, first of all, the idea that I'm going to have this made in my home, this robot that I can't control, that somebody else actually can control, I don't know that I'm going to get to that dysfunction. To me, we're not again, we don't need we can take off the table. How amazing AI is going to be. Let's take it. It's not. You don't need to argue it. It's going to be amazing. Okay, the land of plenty. This thing about human beings, my experience at Morgan Stanley was, if you in the ability of human beings to do amazing things if you inspired them, is mind boggling. If you inspired them, that's what humanity is. And so this idea that we're going to replace human beings, you're going to build me the perfect partner. No, thank you. What I want to ask again, of all of us, why is it that we talk in terms of the stakeholder? We're talking about is the shareholder of a company that's going to make a lot of money because they're going to fire employees, and therefore productivity is going to go up, and therefore you're going to be rich. That's basically the discussion. Yes. Now the old capitalist system that I started growing up in as a young, you know, graduate of a business school was you had three stakeholders as a company, shareholders at the head of the que, clearly, your employees and your community, those were the stakeholders. And I think how we got to the only stakeholder in any kind of for profit organization is your equity holders. Is what stops us from doing inspiring things. I'm not inspired to be rich or they say the shroud has no pockets, so when you're six feet under, it doesn't matter whether you are multi billionaire or sent a millionaire. Did your life make a difference? So with that, sorry. 23:53Thank you. Ben Narasin  23:54Just one comment on humanoid robots. I mean, Japan has been trying to do humanoid robots for decades. It is not clear that human beings want them, and I'm looking think about your eggs, example. So what's better a humanoid with two hands and two feet, or an octopod, pod like creature that has eight you know, building for functionality will ultimately so you'll go back to one thing. You wanna know, it really scares me. So I was a writer for 10 years. I got a lot of freelance of freelance writing. I want to write a science fiction book on the following. Jump forward 10 years. Quantum works. Okay? I don't know how many of you spent time looking at Quantum. We have no flipping clue what it can do, right? It changes everything. And the only thing we worry about is end point, security. Well, how about literally everything else? It's things differently than human beings find ways to do things that we would never consider okay. So now we're 10 years forward. We're at chat GPT 10. Now someone express some optimism that China and the United States would get together for some positive Oh, hallelujah moment, which, yeah, good luck with. That I'll take 10 to one odds against it happening. China wants to replace us, not to be our buddy. So now you take chi and you take Putin. They, you know, probably two of the richest people on the planet, considering certainly how Putin has raped this country of its capital. And they each put a half a trillion dollars in a bucket, and they build out the largest data farm in the world that runs entirely quantum computing. And they bring in all the best people who, by the way, if they don't perform, get a bullet in their head and get buried in the back yard. And they get them to run the newest issues of chat, GPT, and they ask that system, that trillion dollar system, do just one thing, figure out how to destroy the United States. That's what I worry about. I hope we can stay strong enough that we have a really good chance. And while I'm not a political person and we, you know, the pendulum is a nightmare, we will spend well on defense. We will allow AI to flourish. And if we're not a leader, we have a very good chance of being a distant 12th 10 years from Mark Sanor  25:57now. And what's your last thought, Alex, actually, you're going to stick around because you do AG, so the panel you originally on, you'll stay, you'll stay for and rash me is going to come up along with Chris, and we're at two. This is why there's an AI for that. There's not an AI for my glasses. 229, so last, any last questions or thoughts for AI? Yes, sorry, David, Speaker 2  26:27so Alex, love what you doing. The thought is, you know, 50 years ago, there's probably people in a room, and they were talking about how spectacular we'd gotten at crop farming and the use of these fertilizers and this mechanization, all the stuff that's now proven problematic at that point seen ground breaking. What are your views on how we've grown in terms of thinking about the how of technology and being able to mitigate for all of because everything has trade off, so everything has unforeseen circumstances. Are we just plowing ahead, same as we did 6070, years ago, expecting perfect results, when actually we've seen that. That doesn't often happen. That's Alex Zhuk  27:06a fantastic point. And to give context to that comment, you know that process, which is the HP process, which allowed us to manufacture these chemicals for farm and very cheap and scalable, did prevent famines, and, you know, solved a lot of issues at the time were post World War Two, especially, really pressing. I think today, there's a component of that, which is, there are problems we can see in the near term, and it's extremely appealing to solve those at the expense of, you know, something we will have to figure out later down the line. And I will also compound on the comment I've heard earlier I can remember who mentioned it, which is that both great powers Today, China and America, realize that in particular, the AI race is the new nuclear race, and it's a race neither one of them can totally afford to lose, and the importance of which supersedes profits. So you combine that dynamic with where we today, and I don't see not only any one of us stopping, but how we could, even in the in national interest, slow down our progress given the dynamic internationally. Hope that answers your question, do you Mark Sanor  28:22want to hit that or you good. There's one other thing that I think you all should know. You all know open ai, llms, just give, give 3060, seconds on, on pricing model, Maisy Ng  28:34right? Yeah, we are investing in a new company that does the world's first large pricing model. So basically, there's lot of content in the world, but there's no price on it. So this company has figured out a way how to price different content. So just like you train an LLM with text input, I mean, with lots of text, so that you can figure out, using transformer model, what's the probability of the next word, and therefore, in doing so, be a performance sentence and reply to a query. So basically, LM has been trained on copious amounts of text to give you an answer when you input a tax query. So what these guys have done is, again, they've trained the large pricing model on a huge amount of content. And instead of figuring out a tax output, what it does is, when then confronted with a content input, it can then spit out the monetary value of that content. And so the use is immense. Because right now, if imagine, if I go to farmers market that was sharing this angle, we don't have time for the farmers market, but they can price any content. Mark Sanor  29:31But the point is this, this is, yeah, this is another new frontier that I think, is talk to talk. We'll be having round tables very soon. So thank you to this panel. We appreciate it. Alex, stay I'm joined our 361 firm community of investors and thought leaders. We have a lot of events created by the community as we collaborate on investments and philanthropic interests. Join us. You. You can subscribe to various 361 events and content at https://361firm.com/subs. For reference: Web: www.361firm.com/homeOnboard as Investor: https://361.pub/shortdiagOnboard Deals 361: www.361firm.com/onbOnboard as Banker: www.361firm.com/bankersEvents: www.361firm.com/eventsContent: www.youtube.com/361firmWeekly Digests: www.361firm.com/digest

If anyone should be anointed “aunt” or “court jEsther” of the tech industry, it's long time journalist, investor and philanthropist Esther Dyson. When I caught up with Dyson at DLD, she reflected on her 40+ year career in technology and her evolution from tech industry observer to wellness advocate. Her aunt/court jester" role, she explains, is to provide honest feedback to the tech powers-that-be while maintaining independence. In this role, Dyson expresses concern about society's vulnerability to "information diabetes" - addictive content that, like processed food, provides short-term pleasure but long-term harm. She details her work with Wellville, a 10-year project focused on community health and resilience, and explains her upcoming book "Term Limits," which argues for the importance of knowing when to pass the torch rather than trying to live or serve forever. Dyson - who, between 2008 and 2009 lived in Star City outside Moscow, Russia and trained as a backup cosmonaut - also shares her unique insights about Russia's descent into authoritarianism and the privatization of space travel.ESTHER DYSON is an investor, journalist, author, businesswoman, commentator, and philanthropist. She is a leading angel investor focused on health care, open government, digital technology, biotechnology, and outer space. She is chairman of EDventure Holdings and executive founder of Wellville, a ten-year project to show the long-term value, both social and financial, of investing in health. Overall, she is fascinated by new business models, new technologies and new markets (both economically and politically). From October 2008 to March of 2009, she lived in Star City outside Moscow, Russia, training as a backup cosmonaut. Apart from this brief sabbatical, she is an active board member for a variety of startups. She has a BA in economics from Harvard and was founding chairman of ICANN from 1998 to 2000. In addition, she wrote the bestselling, widely translated book Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

What does it take for leaders to know when it's time to step aside and let fresh talent take the reins? In this episode of FOMO Sapiens, Patrick J. McGinnis sits down with Esther Dyson, founder of Wellville and seasoned angel investor, to explore the complex dynamics of leadership succession. Dyson shares her unique perspective on the importance of evolutionary change in leadership, the impact of aging leaders, and the role of boards in ensuring smooth transitions. From personal anecdotes to insights on angel investing and long-term community building, Dyson's thoughtful approach provides a compelling case for fostering sustainable leadership and embracing new ideas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this thought-provoking episode of The Caring Economy, host Toby Usnik sits down with the legendary Esther Dyson—journalist, investor, and visionary. Esther's career spans decades of innovation, from shaping the early tech world to her current passion for preventive healthcare. Join us as we dive deep into Esther's incredible journey, exploring how she went from pioneering tech investments to focusing on long-term community health through her latest project, Wellville. From her unique approach to leadership, grounded in curiosity and asking the right questions, to her insights on building healthier, more resilient communities, Esther shares wisdom that's both inspiring and practical. Whether you're curious about the evolution of technology, the future of healthcare, or how to lead with purpose, this episode is packed with invaluable insights. Tune in to discover how Esther Dyson continues to challenge the status quo, paving the way for a healthier, more innovative world.

At the BCG Henderson Institute, we aim to bring forward-looking leaders the ideas and inspirations that will shape their next game. To honor this mission—and celebrate the 100th episode of our Thinkers & Ideas podcast—we welcomed three leading futurists to discuss the evolution of business and society.Rita McGrath is a professor of management at Columbia Business School, and has been ranked among the top 10 management thinkers globally by Thinkers50 for years. Gary Shteyngart, a professor of writing at Columbia University is also a New York Times bestselling author of science fiction novels. Esther Dyson, founder of Wellville, is an investor, writer, and expert on all things tech, space, and health.Together with Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, they discuss their complementary perspectives on the future. They also divulge their methods for making predictions, providing valuable hints for how business leaders can use similar approaches to shape their perspectives and strategies.Key topics discussed: 02:06 | Revisiting past predictions about the future05:08 | The digital age08:16 | Social media and a technology-centred society12:47 | Methods for sensing the future”17:23 | Harnessing the power of science fiction22:31 | Using metaphors24:41 | Bringing together these future-sensing methods31:07 | Predictions about what is coming nextAdditional inspirations from Rita McGrath, Gary Shteyngart, and Esther Dyson:Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen By Rita McGrath(Harper Business, 2019)Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel By Gary Shteyngart (Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2011)Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age By Esther Dyson (Broadway, 1997)This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

Welcome back to StartUp Health NOW! We think it's fair to say that when people think of StartUp Health, they think about entrepreneurs and founders. Over the last 12 or 13 years we've supported more than 500 health tech startups and nearly 1000 founders, many of whom have been featured on this show. Perhaps less well known is what happens behind the scenes at StartUp Health. In this episode we pull back that curtain a little bit, particularly as it pertains to our Health Moonshot Impact Board. We've got this advisory team of about 17 amazing individuals across multiple disciplines. These are people like Dr. Toby Cosgrove, former head of the Cleveland Clinic; Chuck Henderson, the CEO of the American Diabetes Association; and Sue Siegel, former head of GE Ventures – just to name three. You can see the whole Health Moonshot Impact Board here on our website. Recently, we brought together our Health Moonshot Impact Board in real life at the Lake Nona Impact Forum in Florida. Not only did the team get to learn from luminaries like Jeff Bezos, David Feinberg, and Peter Lee, but they got to go deeper on ideas with one another. In the spirit of encouraging a more radically collaborative impact board, we decided to flip the script a bit and have members of our board interview one another for this podcast. The hope was that this would lead to some unexpected lines of questioning and some uniquely candid moments. The first conversation in this series is between Esther Dyson, legendary angel investor and founder of Wellville, and Roger Jansen, PhD, the Chief Innovation & Digital Health Officer at Michigan State University Health Care. The conversation was just as wide-ranging and unstructured as we hoped it would be, and it touched on some incredibly powerful topics. We hope you enjoy. Innovating in Alzheimer's disease? Learn how you can join our new Alzheimer's Moonshot. Passionate about Type 1 diabetes? Learn how you can get one of the last spots in our T1D Moonshot. Want more content like this? Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox. Innovators: Health Transformer University fuels your health moonshot Funders: Become a Health Moonshot Champion

A discussion prompted by Esther Dyson's new essay "Don't Fuss About Training AIs. Train Our Kids" https://www.theinformation.com/articles/dont-fuss-about-training-ais-train-our-kids?rc=jrwr4u LEARN AI THIS YEAR! Registration is very briefly open for our February cohort of our AI Education Beta program. Get access to a library of 60+ tutorials, case studies and challenges New lessons drop every week day Join a passionate community of like-minded learners Topics include LLMs, AI nocode tools, image generators, voice synthesizers, AI for professional applications like presentation generation, website building and more. Learn more and sign up here: https://bit.ly/aibeta Registration closes on Sunday January 28th 11:59pm EST ** ABOUT THE AI BREAKDOWN The AI Breakdown helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI.  Subscribe to The AI Breakdown newsletter: https://theaibreakdown.beehiiv.com/subscribe Subscribe to The AI Breakdown on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheAIBreakdown Join the community: bit.ly/aibreakdown Learn more: http://breakdown.network/

Greetings Glocal Citizens! This week on we're moving into the new year with some wise words and insights in Part 2 of my conversation with Ghanaian investor and developer of new businesses, Eric Osiakwan. With 25 years of experience spanning 32 countries in Africa gained through a number of successful tech start-ups, Eric is a leading pioneer of internet in Africa. Having worked in multiple countries building internet service providers (“ISP”) and ICT businesses, some of his successful exits include iBurst in South Africa, One2Net in Uganda, and BusyInternet in Ghana, to name a few. Eric also founded and ran the Africa ISP Association for eight years, during which the ISP industry grew by almost 120 percent. He then moved on to leading efforts to build submarine cables on the continent. Eric was part of a public-private partnership in Kenya that built and launched the TEAMS submarine fibre cable, the first to connect East Africa to the rest of the world. He subsequently contributed to the building of terrestrial fibre networks in Ghana and Nigeria. As we learned in Part 1 of the conversation, he Co-Founded Angel Africa List, Angel Fair Africa and currently heads Chanzo Capital (https://www.chanzocapital.com/#abt), a venture and growth capital firm, investing capital, capacity and community in high-tech startups and scaleups in Kenya, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa. Where to find Eric? ericosiakwan.com (https://www.ericosiakwan.com) On LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericosiakwan) On Facebook (Eric Osiakwan) On Instagram (Instagram (@eosiakwan)) On X (https://twitter.com/eosiakwan) What's Eric reading? Works by Cheikh Anta Diop (https://www.amazon.com/stores/Cheikh-Anta-Diop/author/B000APFJ2O?ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true) Other topics of interest: How Greater Accra (Tema) is the geographical center of the Earth (https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/features/Is-Ghana-Really-The-Centre-Of-The-World-221634) About Panafest (https://panafestghana.org/history-of-panafest/) and Kojo Yankah (https://pahmuseum.org/founder/) On Ghana's Joseph Project (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10802304) Year of Return (https://www.yearofreturn.com) Full Circle Africa Economic Conference (https://fullcircleafrica.org) Stripe Payments Platform (https://stripe.com) Safaricom and the roots of Mobile Money (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa) United Nations Economic Commission for Africa: African Information Society Initiative(AISI) (https://repository.uneca.org/handle/10855/14949) UNDP Internet Initiative for Africa (http://web.undp.org/evaluation/documents/essentials_5.pdf) What are Internet Exchange Points? (https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cdn/glossary/internet-exchange-point-ixp/) The African Internet Service Providers Association (https://icannwiki.org/AfrISPA) ICANN (https://www.icann.org) and Esther Dyson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther_Dyson) About TEAMS (https://www.teams.co.ke) Bongo Hive (https://bongohive.co.zm) About the BenBen App (https://benben.com.gh) On Eric's book KINGS of Africa's Digital Economy (https://medium.com/@eosiakwan/the-kings-of-africas-digital-economy-tedxberkeley-by-eric-osiakwan-4a211e746955) Special Guest: Eric Osiakwan.

For episode 79 of Entrepreneur Rx, John interviews rockstar Esther Dyson, founder of Wellville, a 10-year nonprofit project dedicated to demonstrating the value of long-term investment in health and equity. Esther has been or is a director of many companies such as 23andMe, Avanlee Care, Meetup, and WPP Group. In addition, Esther is an active angel investor and also enjoys sitting on the boards of several nonprofits, such as Charity Navigator, ExpandED Schools, Long Now and The Commons Project.  This interview starts off with her explaining the Wellville project and her impressive background (she has even trained as a backup cosmonaut). Esther emphasizes the importance of asking questions and learning from others, rather than trying to have all the answers. Esther then shares her experiences as an angel investor, highlighting the qualities she looks for in founders, such as creativity, resilience, vision and humility.  Esther goes on to express concern about society's addiction to instant gratification of all kinds – drugs, food, VC exits and the like. She stresses the importance of providing support and resources for maternal care, doula services, and parenting education to create a stable foundation for future generations and to “train” babies to be healthy humans resistant to manipulation…by trained AIs. Esther encourages individuals to face their fears and take risks, emphasizing the value of having a support system in place. She then concludes by reminding listeners that failure is a natural part of life and should be embraced as a learning opportunity.

If weeds were people, they'd be the ultimate entrepreneurs. Stu Heinecke has created a business strategy based on weeds, and it's quickly taking root in the world of entrepreneurship. Stu is a business growth strategist and the originator of Weed Strategy™. He is also a keynote speaker, renowned cartoonist and bestselling business author. His first book, How to Get a Meeting with Anyone, was named one of the top 64 sales books of all time. His latest, How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed, introduces a new model for explosive business growth, based on the strategies, attributes and tools weeds use to grow and spread. Stu has been named “The father of Contact Marketing”. He is the Founder of The Total Weed Awards, in collaboration with the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center.  Stu has had an unusual career arc. Mentored by some of the world's top cartoonists from Playboy and The New Yorker, Stu has had his cartoons published in The Wall Street Journal and Playboy, among other publications.  Stu has explored Weed Strategy™ for several years, collecting insights from thought leaders from the worlds of business, government, and entertainment including T. Boone Pickens, Kathy Ireland, General Barry McAffrey, Henrik Fisker, Gareb Shamus, Giovanni Marsico, Esther Dyson, Christopher Lochhead, Nathan Myhrvold, Carmen Medina, Jon Ferrara, and Jonna Mendez.  What do weeds and entrepreneurs have in common? Stu Heinecke was stuck in traffic on the Santa Monica freeway when he noticed something that would change his life: There, in between the cracks in the pavement, dandelions were growing. It was an unlikely place for life. They were even spreading and taking over the cracks, one by one. As he sat in a long line of cars, Stu wondered why weeds thrive in the unlikeliest of places - and what it means for us. In that moment Stu recognized something vitally important. If entrepreneurs thought more like weeds, we could experience the same explosive growth! Think like a weed Weeds are so much more than pests. Weeds are natural disruptors, collaborators and process-builders. If that doesn't describe the ultimate mindset for entrepreneurs and their teams, nothing does. Imagine operating as a fierce collective, growing out of hardship, and taking over industries in innovative, unexpected ways. That's the power of Weed Strategy™! So what exactly is Weed Strategy™? To describe weeds and exceptional entrepreneurs, consider how they operate. They follow a consistent pattern: They always deal with what is, they never do anything without an unfair advantage, they never do anything alone, they always focus on what makes them win, and they thrive in disrupted ground.  Weeds deal with what is happening right now; They don't obsess about hypotheticals. Weeds don't do anything without an unfair advantage; They look for ways in which they already have a leg up on the competition in order to come out on top. They don't do anything alone; They use their connections to get their needs met. And above all, weeds thrive when they're challenged. We as founders, creatives, entrepreneurs and self-starters could do well to follow their example. Weeds are the Ubers, Airbnbs and SpaceX's of the natural world. Applying Weed Strategy™ to your business can  transform your organization into a fierce collective, fanatically replying unfair advantages that explode the scale of your enterprise.  Enjoy this episode of The Business of You for actionable insights that will change your life! Quotes “I was driving the Santa Monica Freeway. It's no place for a plant to take root… but there in the cracks in the concrete, I noticed a dandelion. It struck me - how did it get here? What makes weeds so special, hardy and unique? Is there a unified model that they use, and is it something we can use in our businesses?” “To describe weeds, look at what they do and how they operate. They always deal with what is, they never do anything without an unfair advantage, they never do anything alone - it's always at scale, they always focus on what makes them win, and they thrive in disrupted ground. All of these statements suggest something about the [business] model.” “Weeds would tell us - We would probably do well to let your actions lead our emotions, rather than letting emotions lead our actions.” “Weeds never do anything alone. They're natural collaborators. They would tell us - you need to team up with the smartest people you know, as fast as you can.” “We are creating unfair advantages for each other through collaborations.” “When you observe weeds, you can see that they're aggressive, urgent, resilient, adaptive, and they're even optimistic. I'm ascribing something to them when they don't have emotions, but they function in a way we would if we were feeling optimistic.” “We want our competitors saying, we can't get rid of them. How can we compete with this!” Links mentioned in this episode: Visit Stu Heinecke's Website at https://stuheinecke.com/  Purchase Stu Heinecke's Book on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Grow-Your-Business-Like-Weed/dp/1632651998  Connect with Stu directly on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuheinecke/  Find Stu Heinecke on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/stu.heinecke.1  Follow Stu on Twitter at https://twitter.com/byStuHeinecke 

Episode 165 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Dark Stat” and the career of the Grateful Dead. This is a long one, even longer than the previous episode, but don't worry, that won't be the norm. There's a reason these two were much longer than average. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Codine" by the Charlatans. Errata I mispronounce Brent Mydland's name as Myland a couple of times, and in the introduction I say "Touch of Grey" came out in 1988 -- I later, correctly, say 1987. (I seem to have had a real problem with dates in the intro -- I also originally talked about "Blue Suede Shoes" being in 1954 before fixing it in the edit to be 1956) Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Grateful Dead, and Grayfolded runs to two hours. I referred to a lot of books for this episode, partly because almost everything about the Grateful Dead is written from a fannish perspective that already assumes background knowledge, rather than to provide that background knowledge. Of the various books I used, Dennis McNally's biography of the band and This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead by Blair Jackson and David Gans are probably most useful for the casually interested. Other books on the Dead I used included McNally's Jerry on Jerry, a collection of interviews with Garcia; Deal, Bill Kreutzmann's autobiography; The Grateful Dead FAQ by Tony Sclafani; So Many Roads by David Browne; Deadology by Howard F. Weiner; Fare Thee Well by Joel Selvin and Pamela Turley; and Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads by David Shenk and Steve Silberman. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the classic account of the Pranksters, though not always reliable. I reference Slaughterhouse Five a lot. As well as the novel itself, which everyone should read, I also read this rather excellent graphic novel adaptation, and The Writer's Crusade, a book about the writing of the novel. I also reference Ted Sturgeon's More Than Human. For background on the scene around Astounding Science Fiction which included Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, and many other science fiction writers, I recommend Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding. 1,000 True Fans can be read online, as can the essay on the Californian ideology, and John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". The best collection of Grateful Dead material is the box set The Golden Road, which contains all the albums released in Pigpen's lifetime along with a lot of bonus material, but which appears currently out of print. Live/Dead contains both the live version of "Dark Star" which made it well known and, as a CD bonus track, the original single version. And archive.org has more live recordings of the group than you can possibly ever listen to. Grayfolded can be bought from John Oswald's Bandcamp Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Excerpt: Tuning from "Grayfolded", under the warnings Before we begin -- as we're tuning up, as it were, I should mention that this episode contains discussions of alcoholism, drug addiction, racism, nonconsensual drugging of other people, and deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and car accidents. As always, I try to deal with these subjects as carefully as possible, but if you find any of those things upsetting you may wish to read the transcript rather than listen to this episode, or skip it altogether. Also, I should note that the members of the Grateful Dead were much freer with their use of swearing in interviews than any other band we've covered so far, and that makes using quotes from them rather more difficult than with other bands, given the limitations of the rules imposed to stop the podcast being marked as adult. If I quote anything with a word I can't use here, I'll give a brief pause in the audio, and in the transcript I'll have the word in square brackets. [tuning ends] All this happened, more or less. In 1910, T. S. Eliot started work on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which at the time was deemed barely poetry, with one reviewer imagining Eliot saying "I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'" It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature. In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut wrote "Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death", a book in which the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, comes unstuck in time, and starts living a nonlinear life, hopping around between times reliving his experiences in the Second World War, and future experiences up to 1976 after being kidnapped by beings from the planet Tralfamadore. Or perhaps he has flashbacks and hallucinations after having a breakdown from PTSD. It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature or of science fiction, depending on how you look at it. In 1953, Theodore Sturgeon wrote More Than Human. It is now considered one of the great classics of science fiction. In 1950, L. Ron Hubbard wrote Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. It is now considered either a bad piece of science fiction or one of the great revelatory works of religious history, depending on how you look at it. In 1994, 1995, and 1996 the composer John Oswald released, first as two individual CDs and then as a double-CD, an album called Grayfolded, which the composer says in the liner notes he thinks of as existing in Tralfamadorian time. The Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut's novels don't see time as a linear thing with a beginning and end, but as a continuum that they can move between at will. When someone dies, they just think that at this particular point in time they're not doing so good, but at other points in time they're fine, so why focus on the bad time? In the book, when told of someone dying, the Tralfamadorians just say "so it goes". In between the first CD's release and the release of the double-CD version, Jerry Garcia died. From August 1942 through August 1995, Jerry Garcia was alive. So it goes. Shall we go, you and I? [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Omni 3/30/94)"] "One principle has become clear. Since motives are so frequently found in combination, it is essential that the complex types be analyzed and arranged, with an eye kept single nevertheless to the master-theme under discussion. Collectors, both primary and subsidiary, have done such valiant service that the treasures at our command are amply sufficient for such studies, so extensive, indeed, that the task of going through them thoroughly has become too great for the unassisted student. It cannot be too strongly urged that a single theme in its various types and compounds must be made predominant in any useful comparative study. This is true when the sources and analogues of any literary work are treated; it is even truer when the bare motive is discussed. The Grateful Dead furnishes an apt illustration of the necessity of such handling. It appears in a variety of different combinations, almost never alone. Indeed, it is so widespread a tale, and its combinations are so various, that there is the utmost difficulty in determining just what may properly be regarded the original kernel of it, the simple theme to which other motives were joined. Various opinions, as we shall see, have been held with reference to this matter, most of them justified perhaps by the materials in the hands of the scholars holding them, but none quite adequate in view of later evidence." That's a quote from The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story, by Gordon Hall Gerould, published in 1908. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five opens with a chapter about the process of writing the novel itself, and how difficult it was. He says "I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big." This is an episode several of my listeners have been looking forward to, but it's one I've been dreading writing, because this is an episode -- I think the only one in the series -- where the format of the podcast simply *will not* work. Were the Grateful Dead not such an important band, I would skip this episode altogether, but they're a band that simply can't be ignored, and that's a real problem here. Because my intent, always, with this podcast, is to present the recordings of the artists in question, put them in context, and explain why they were important, what their music meant to its listeners. To put, as far as is possible, the positive case for why the music mattered *in the context of its time*. Not why it matters now, or why it matters to me, but why it matters *in its historical context*. Whether I like the music or not isn't the point. Whether it stands up now isn't the point. I play the music, explain what it was they were doing, why they were doing it, what people saw in it. If I do my job well, you come away listening to "Blue Suede Shoes" the way people heard it in 1956, or "Good Vibrations" the way people heard it in 1966, and understanding why people were so impressed by those records. That is simply *not possible* for the Grateful Dead. I can present a case for them as musicians, and hope to do so. I can explain the appeal as best I understand it, and talk about things I like in their music, and things I've noticed. But what I can't do is present their recordings the way they were received in the sixties and explain why they were popular. Because every other act I have covered or will cover in this podcast has been a *recording* act, and their success was based on records. They may also have been exceptional live performers, but James Brown or Ike and Tina Turner are remembered for great *records*, like "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "River Deep, Mountain High". Their great moments were captured on vinyl, to be listened back to, and susceptible of analysis. That is not the case for the Grateful Dead, and what is worse *they explicitly said, publicly, on multiple occasions* that it is not possible for me to understand their art, and thus that it is not possible for me to explain it. The Grateful Dead did make studio records, some of them very good. But they always said, consistently, over a thirty year period, that their records didn't capture what they did, and that the only way -- the *only* way, they were very clear about this -- that one could actually understand and appreciate their music, was to see them live, and furthermore to see them live while on psychedelic drugs. [Excerpt: Grateful Dead crowd noise] I never saw the Grateful Dead live -- their last UK performance was a couple of years before I went to my first ever gig -- and I have never taken a psychedelic substance. So by the Grateful Dead's own criteria, it is literally impossible for me to understand or explain their music the way that it should be understood or explained. In a way I'm in a similar position to the one I was in with La Monte Young in the last episode, whose music it's mostly impossible to experience without being in his presence. This is one reason of several why I placed these two episodes back to back. Of course, there is a difference between Young and the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead allowed -- even encouraged -- the recording of their live performances. There are literally thousands of concert recordings in circulation, many of them of professional quality. I have listened to many of those, and I can hear what they were doing. I can tell you what *I* think is interesting about their music, and about their musicianship. And I think I can build up a good case for why they were important, and why they're interesting, and why those recordings are worth listening to. And I can certainly explain the cultural phenomenon that was the Grateful Dead. But just know that while I may have found *a* point, *an* explanation for why the Grateful Dead were important, by the band's own lights and those of their fans, no matter how good a job I do in this episode, I *cannot* get it right. And that is, in itself, enough of a reason for this episode to exist, and for me to try, even harder than I normally do, to get it right *anyway*. Because no matter how well I do my job this episode will stand as an example of why this series is called "*A* History", not *the* history. Because parts of the past are ephemeral. There are things about which it's true to say "You had to be there". I cannot know what it was like to have been an American the day Kennedy was shot, I cannot know what it was like to be alive when a man walked on the Moon. Those are things nobody my age or younger can ever experience. And since August the ninth, 1995, the experience of hearing the Grateful Dead's music the way they wanted it heard has been in that category. And that is by design. Jerry Garcia once said "if you work really hard as an artist, you may be able to build something they can't tear down, you know, after you're gone... What I want to do is I want it here. I want it now, in this lifetime. I want what I enjoy to last as long as I do and not last any longer. You know, I don't want something that ends up being as much a nuisance as it is a work of art, you know?" And there's another difficulty. There are only two points in time where it makes sense to do a podcast episode on the Grateful Dead -- late 1967 and early 1968, when the San Francisco scene they were part of was at its most culturally relevant, and 1988 when they had their only top ten hit and gained their largest audience. I can't realistically leave them out of the story until 1988, so it has to be 1968. But the songs they are most remembered for are those they wrote between 1970 and 1972, and those songs are influenced by artists and events we haven't yet covered in the podcast, who will be getting their own episodes in the future. I can't explain those things in this episode, because they need whole episodes of their own. I can't not explain them without leaving out important context for the Grateful Dead. So the best I can do is treat the story I'm telling as if it were in Tralfamadorian time. All of it's happening all at once, and some of it is happening in different episodes that haven't been recorded yet. The podcast as a whole travels linearly from 1938 through to 1999, but this episode is happening in 1968 and 1972 and 1988 and 1995 and other times, all at once. Sometimes I'll talk about things as if you're already familiar with them, but they haven't happened yet in the story. Feel free to come unstuck in time and revisit this time after episode 167, and 172, and 176, and 192, and experience it again. So this has to be an experimental episode. It may well be an experiment that you think fails. If so, the next episode is likely to be far more to your taste, and much shorter than this or the last episode, two episodes that between them have to create a scaffolding on which will hang much of the rest of this podcast's narrative. I've finished my Grateful Dead script now. The next one I write is going to be fun: [Excerpt: Grateful Dead, "Dark Star"] Infrastructure means everything. How we get from place to place, how we transport goods, information, and ourselves, makes a big difference in how society is structured, and in the music we hear. For many centuries, the prime means of long-distance transport was by water -- sailing ships on the ocean, canal boats and steamboats for inland navigation -- and so folk songs talked about the ship as both means of escape, means of making a living, and in some senses as a trap. You'd go out to sea for adventure, or to escape your problems, but you'd find that the sea itself brought its own problems. Because of this we have a long, long tradition of sea shanties which are known throughout the world: [Excerpt: A. L. Lloyd, "Off to Sea Once More"] But in the nineteenth century, the railway was invented and, at least as far as travel within a landmass goes, it replaced the steamboat in the popular imaginary. Now the railway was how you got from place to place, and how you moved freight from one place to another. The railway brought freedom, and was an opportunity for outlaws, whether train robbers or a romanticised version of the hobo hopping onto a freight train and making his way to new lands and new opportunity. It was the train that brought soldiers home from wars, and the train that allowed the Great Migration of Black people from the South to the industrial North. There would still be songs about the riverboats, about how ol' man river keeps rolling along and about the big river Johnny Cash sang about, but increasingly they would be songs of the past, not the present. The train quickly replaced the steamboat in the iconography of what we now think of as roots music -- blues, country, folk, and early jazz music. Sometimes this was very literal. Furry Lewis' "Kassie Jones" -- about a legendary train driver who would break the rules to make sure his train made the station on time, but who ended up sacrificing his own life to save his passengers in a train crash -- is based on "Alabamy Bound", which as we heard in the episode on "Stagger Lee", was about steamboats: [Excerpt: Furry Lewis, "Kassie Jones"] In the early episodes of this podcast we heard many, many, songs about the railway. Louis Jordan saying "take me right back to the track, Jack", Rosetta Tharpe singing about how "this train don't carry no gamblers", the trickster freight train driver driving on the "Rock Island Line", the mystery train sixteen coaches long, the train that kept-a-rollin' all night long, the Midnight Special which the prisoners wished would shine its ever-loving light on them, and the train coming past Folsom Prison whose whistle makes Johnny Cash hang his head and cry. But by the 1960s, that kind of song had started to dry up. It would happen on occasion -- "People Get Ready" by the Impressions is the most obvious example of the train metaphor in an important sixties record -- but by the late sixties the train was no longer a symbol of freedom but of the past. In 1969 Harry Nilsson sang about how "Nobody Cares About the Railroads Any More", and in 1968 the Kinks sang about "The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains". When in 1968 Merle Haggard sang about a freight train, it was as a memory, of a child with hopes that ended up thwarted by reality and his own nature: [Excerpt: Merle Haggard, "Mama Tried"] And the reason for this was that there had been another shift, a shift that had started in the forties and accelerated in the late fifties but had taken a little time to ripple through the culture. Now the train had been replaced in the popular imaginary by motorised transport. Instead of hopping on a train without paying, if you had no money in your pocket you'd have to hitch-hike all the way. Freedom now meant individuality. The ultimate in freedom was the biker -- the Hell's Angels who could go anywhere, unburdened by anything -- and instead of goods being moved by freight train, increasingly they were being moved by truck drivers. By the mid-seventies, truck drivers took a central place in American life, and the most romantic way to live life was to live it on the road. On The Road was also the title of a 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac, which was one of the first major signs of this cultural shift in America. Kerouac was writing about events in the late forties and early fifties, but his book was also a precursor of the sixties counterculture. He wrote the book on one continuous sheet of paper, as a stream of consciousness. Kerouac died in 1969 of an internal haemmorage brought on by too much alcohol consumption. So it goes. But the big key to this cultural shift was caused by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, a massive infrastructure spending bill that led to the construction of the modern American Interstate Highway system. This accelerated a program that had already started, of building much bigger, safer, faster roads. It also, as anyone who has read Robert Caro's The Power Broker knows, reinforced segregation and white flight. It did this both by making commuting into major cities from the suburbs easier -- thus allowing white people with more money to move further away from the cities and still work there -- and by bulldozing community spaces where Black people lived. More than a million people lost their homes and were forcibly moved, and orders of magnitude more lost their communities' parks and green spaces. And both as a result of deliberate actions and unconscious bigotry, the bulk of those affected were Black people -- who often found themselves, if they weren't forced to move, on one side of a ten-lane highway where the park used to be, with white people on the other side of the highway. The Federal-Aid Highway Act gave even more power to the unaccountable central planners like Robert Moses, the urban planner in New York who managed to become arguably the most powerful man in the city without ever getting elected, partly by slowly compromising away his early progressive ideals in the service of gaining more power. Of course, not every new highway was built through areas where poor Black people lived. Some were planned to go through richer areas for white people, just because you can't completely do away with geographical realities. For example one was planned to be built through part of San Francisco, a rich, white part. But the people who owned properties in that area had enough political power and clout to fight the development, and after nearly a decade of fighting it, the development was called off in late 1966. But over that time, many of the owners of the impressive buildings in the area had moved out, and they had no incentive to improve or maintain their properties while they were under threat of demolition, so many of them were rented out very cheaply. And when the beat community that Kerouac wrote about, many of whom had settled in San Francisco, grew too large and notorious for the area of the city they were in, North Beach, many of them moved to these cheap homes in a previously-exclusive area. The area known as Haight-Ashbury. [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] Stories all have their starts, even stories told in Tralfamadorian time, although sometimes those starts are shrouded in legend. For example, the story of Scientology's start has been told many times, with different people claiming to have heard L. Ron Hubbard talk about how writing was a mug's game, and if you wanted to make real money, you needed to get followers, start a religion. Either he said this over and over and over again, to many different science fiction writers, or most science fiction writers of his generation were liars. Of course, the definition of a writer is someone who tells lies for money, so who knows? One of the more plausible accounts of him saying that is given by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon's account is more believable than most, because Sturgeon went on to be a supporter of Dianetics, the "new science" that Hubbard turned into his religion, for decades, even while telling the story. The story of the Grateful Dead probably starts as it ends, with Jerry Garcia. There are three things that everyone writing about the Dead says about Garcia's childhood, so we might as well say them here too. The first is that he was named by a music-loving father after Jerome Kern, the songwriter responsible for songs like "Ol' Man River" (though as Oscar Hammerstein's widow liked to point out, "Jerome Kern wrote dum-dum-dum-dum, *my husband* wrote 'Ol' Man River'" -- an important distinction we need to bear in mind when talking about songwriters who write music but not lyrics). The second is that when he was five years old that music-loving father drowned -- and Garcia would always say he had seen his father dying, though some sources claim this was a false memory. So it goes. And the third fact, which for some reason is always told after the second even though it comes before it chronologically, is that when he was four he lost two joints from his right middle finger. Garcia grew up a troubled teen, and in turn caused trouble for other people, but he also developed a few interests that would follow him through his life. He loved the fantastical, especially the fantastical macabre, and became an avid fan of horror and science fiction -- and through his love of old monster films he became enamoured with cinema more generally. Indeed, in 1983 he bought the film rights to Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction novel The Sirens of Titan, the first story in which the Tralfamadorians appear, and wrote a script based on it. He wanted to produce the film himself, with Francis Ford Coppola directing and Bill Murray starring, but most importantly for him he wanted to prevent anyone who didn't care about it from doing it badly. And in that he succeeded. As of 2023 there is no film of The Sirens of Titan. He loved to paint, and would continue that for the rest of his life, with one of his favourite subjects being Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster. And when he was eleven or twelve, he heard for the first time a record that was hugely influential to a whole generation of Californian musicians, even though it was a New York record -- "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Garcia would say later "That was an important song. That was the first kind of, like where the voices had that kind of not-trained-singer voices, but tough-guy-on-the-street voice." That record introduced him to R&B, and soon he was listening to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, to Ray Charles, and to a record we've not talked about in the podcast but which was one of the great early doo-wop records, "WPLJ" by the Four Deuces: [Excerpt: The Four Deuces, "WPLJ"] Garcia said of that record "That was one of my anthem songs when I was in junior high school and high school and around there. That was one of those songs everybody knew. And that everybody sang. Everybody sang that street-corner favorite." Garcia moved around a lot as a child, and didn't have much time for school by his own account, but one of the few teachers he did respect was an art teacher when he was in North Beach, Walter Hedrick. Hedrick was also one of the earliest of the conceptual artists, and one of the most important figures in the San Francisco arts scene that would become known as the Beat Generation (or the Beatniks, which was originally a disparaging term). Hedrick was a painter and sculptor, but also organised happenings, and he had also been one of the prime movers in starting a series of poetry readings in San Francisco, the first one of which had involved Allen Ginsberg giving the first ever reading of "Howl" -- one of a small number of poems, along with Eliot's "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" and possibly Pound's Cantos, which can be said to have changed twentieth-century literature. Garcia was fifteen when he got to know Hedrick, in 1957, and by then the Beat scene had already become almost a parody of itself, having become known to the public because of the publication of works like On the Road, and the major artists in the scene were already rejecting the label. By this point tourists were flocking to North Beach to see these beatniks they'd heard about on TV, and Hedrick was actually employed by one cafe to sit in the window wearing a beret, turtleneck, sandals, and beard, and draw and paint, to attract the tourists who flocked by the busload because they could see that there was a "genuine beatnik" in the cafe. Hedrick was, as well as a visual artist, a guitarist and banjo player who played in traditional jazz bands, and he would bring records in to class for his students to listen to, and Garcia particularly remembered him bringing in records by Big Bill Broonzy: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Things Go Wrong (It Hurts Me Too)"] Garcia was already an avid fan of rock and roll music, but it was being inspired by Hedrick that led him to get his first guitar. Like his contemporary Paul McCartney around the same time, he was initially given the wrong instrument as a birthday present -- in Garcia's case his mother gave him an accordion -- but he soon persuaded her to swap it for an electric guitar he saw in a pawn shop. And like his other contemporary, John Lennon, Garcia initially tuned his instrument incorrectly. He said later "When I started playing the guitar, believe me, I didn't know anybody that played. I mean, I didn't know anybody that played the guitar. Nobody. They weren't around. There were no guitar teachers. You couldn't take lessons. There was nothing like that, you know? When I was a kid and I had my first electric guitar, I had it tuned wrong and learned how to play on it with it tuned wrong for about a year. And I was getting somewhere on it, you know… Finally, I met a guy that knew how to tune it right and showed me three chords, and it was like a revelation. You know what I mean? It was like somebody gave me the key to heaven." He joined a band, the Chords, which mostly played big band music, and his friend Gary Foster taught him some of the rudiments of playing the guitar -- things like how to use a capo to change keys. But he was always a rebellious kid, and soon found himself faced with a choice between joining the military or going to prison. He chose the former, and it was during his time in the Army that a friend, Ron Stevenson, introduced him to the music of Merle Travis, and to Travis-style guitar picking: [Excerpt: Merle Travis, "Nine-Pound Hammer"] Garcia had never encountered playing like that before, but he instantly recognised that Travis, and Chet Atkins who Stevenson also played for him, had been an influence on Scotty Moore. He started to realise that the music he'd listened to as a teenager was influenced by music that went further back. But Stevenson, as well as teaching Garcia some of the rudiments of Travis-picking, also indirectly led to Garcia getting discharged from the Army. Stevenson was not a well man, and became suicidal. Garcia decided it was more important to keep his friend company and make sure he didn't kill himself than it was to turn up for roll call, and as a result he got discharged himself on psychiatric grounds -- according to Garcia he told the Army psychiatrist "I was involved in stuff that was more important to me in the moment than the army was and that was the reason I was late" and the psychiatrist thought it was neurotic of Garcia to have his own set of values separate from that of the Army. After discharge, Garcia did various jobs, including working as a transcriptionist for Lenny Bruce, the comedian who was a huge influence on the counterculture. In one of the various attacks over the years by authoritarians on language, Bruce was repeatedly arrested for obscenity, and in 1961 he was arrested at a jazz club in North Beach. Sixty years ago, the parts of speech that were being criminalised weren't pronouns, but prepositions and verbs: [Excerpt: Lenny Bruce, "To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb"] That piece, indeed, was so controversial that when Frank Zappa quoted part of it in a song in 1968, the record label insisted on the relevant passage being played backwards so people couldn't hear such disgusting filth: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Harry You're a Beast"] (Anyone familiar with that song will understand that the censored portion is possibly the least offensive part of the whole thing). Bruce was facing trial, and he needed transcripts of what he had said in his recordings to present in court. Incidentally, there seems to be some confusion over exactly which of Bruce's many obscenity trials Garcia became a transcriptionist for. Dennis McNally says in his biography of the band, published in 2002, that it was the most famous of them, in autumn 1964, but in a later book, Jerry on Jerry, a book of interviews of Garcia edited by McNally, McNally talks about it being when Garcia was nineteen, which would mean it was Bruce's first trial, in 1961. We can put this down to the fact that many of the people involved, not least Garcia, lived in Tralfamadorian time, and were rather hazy on dates, but I'm placing the story here rather than in 1964 because it seems to make more sense that Garcia would be involved in a trial based on an incident in San Francisco than one in New York. Garcia got the job, even though he couldn't type, because by this point he'd spent so long listening to recordings of old folk and country music that he was used to transcribing indecipherable accents, and often, as Garcia would tell it, Bruce would mumble very fast and condense multiple syllables into one. Garcia was particularly impressed by Bruce's ability to improvise but talk in entire paragraphs, and he compared his use of language to bebop. Another thing that was starting to impress Garcia, and which he also compared to bebop, was bluegrass: [Excerpt: Bill Monroe, "Fire on the Mountain"] Bluegrass is a music that is often considered very traditional, because it's based on traditional songs and uses acoustic instruments, but in fact it was a terribly *modern* music, and largely a postwar creation of a single band -- Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. And Garcia was right when he said it was "white bebop" -- though he did say "The only thing it doesn't have is the harmonic richness of bebop. You know what I mean? That's what it's missing, but it has everything else." Both bebop and bluegrass evolved after the second world war, though they were informed by music from before it, and both prized the ability to improvise, and technical excellence. Both are musics that involved playing *fast*, in an ensemble, and being able to respond quickly to the other musicians. Both musics were also intensely rhythmic, a response to a faster paced, more stressful world. They were both part of the general change in the arts towards immediacy that we looked at in the last episode with the creation first of expressionism and then of pop art. Bluegrass didn't go into the harmonic explorations that modern jazz did, but it was absolutely as modern as anything Charlie Parker was doing, and came from the same impulses. It was tradition and innovation, the past and the future simultaneously. Bill Monroe, Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, and Lenny Bruce were all in their own ways responding to the same cultural moment, and it was that which Garcia was responding to. But he didn't become able to play bluegrass until after a tragedy which shaped his life even more than his father's death had. Garcia had been to a party and was in a car with his friends Lee Adams, Paul Speegle, and Alan Trist. Adams was driving at ninety miles an hour when they hit a tight curve and crashed. Garcia, Adams, and Trist were all severely injured but survived. Speegle died. So it goes. This tragedy changed Garcia's attitudes totally. Of all his friends, Speegle was the one who was most serious about his art, and who treated it as something to work on. Garcia had always been someone who fundamentally didn't want to work or take any responsibility for anything. And he remained that way -- except for his music. Speegle's death changed Garcia's attitude to that, totally. If his friend wasn't going to be able to practice his own art any more, Garcia would practice his, in tribute to him. He resolved to become a virtuoso on guitar and banjo. His girlfriend of the time later said “I don't know if you've spent time with someone rehearsing ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown' on a banjo for eight hours, but Jerry practiced endlessly. He really wanted to excel and be the best. He had tremendous personal ambition in the musical arena, and he wanted to master whatever he set out to explore. Then he would set another sight for himself. And practice another eight hours a day of new licks.” But of course, you can't make ensemble music on your own: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia and Bob Hunter, "Oh Mary Don't You Weep" (including end)] "Evelyn said, “What is it called when a person needs a … person … when you want to be touched and the … two are like one thing and there isn't anything else at all anywhere?” Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. “Love,” she said at length." That's from More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon, a book I'll be quoting a few more times as the story goes on. Robert Hunter, like Garcia, was just out of the military -- in his case, the National Guard -- and he came into Garcia's life just after Paul Speegle had left it. Garcia and Alan Trist met Hunter ten days after the accident, and the three men started hanging out together, Trist and Hunter writing while Garcia played music. Garcia and Hunter both bonded over their shared love for the beats, and for traditional music, and the two formed a duo, Bob and Jerry, which performed together a handful of times. They started playing together, in fact, after Hunter picked up a guitar and started playing a song and halfway through Garcia took it off him and finished the song himself. The two of them learned songs from the Harry Smith Anthology -- Garcia was completely apolitical, and only once voted in his life, for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to keep Goldwater out, and regretted even doing that, and so he didn't learn any of the more political material people like Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan were doing at the time -- but their duo only lasted a short time because Hunter wasn't an especially good guitarist. Hunter would, though, continue to jam with Garcia and other friends, sometimes playing mandolin, while Garcia played solo gigs and with other musicians as well, playing and moving round the Bay Area and performing with whoever he could: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "Railroad Bill"] "Bleshing, that was Janie's word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can't walk and arms can't think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of “blending” and “meshing,” but I don't think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that." That's from More Than Human In 1961, Garcia and Hunter met another young musician, but one who was interested in a very different type of music. Phil Lesh was a serious student of modern classical music, a classically-trained violinist and trumpeter whose interest was solidly in the experimental and whose attitude can be summed up by a story that's always told about him meeting his close friend Tom Constanten for the first time. Lesh had been talking with someone about serialism, and Constanten had interrupted, saying "Music stopped being created in 1750 but it started again in 1950". Lesh just stuck out his hand, recognising a kindred spirit. Lesh and Constanten were both students of Luciano Berio, the experimental composer who created compositions for magnetic tape: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti"] Berio had been one of the founders of the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano, a studio for producing contemporary electronic music where John Cage had worked for a time, and he had also worked with the electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lesh would later remember being very impressed when Berio brought a tape into the classroom -- the actual multitrack tape for Stockhausen's revolutionary piece Gesang Der Juenglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang Der Juenglinge"] Lesh at first had been distrustful of Garcia -- Garcia was charismatic and had followers, and Lesh never liked people like that. But he was impressed by Garcia's playing, and soon realised that the two men, despite their very different musical interests, had a lot in common. Lesh was interested in the technology of music as well as in performing and composing it, and so when he wasn't studying he helped out by engineering at the university's radio station. Lesh was impressed by Garcia's playing, and suggested to the presenter of the station's folk show, the Midnight Special, that Garcia be a guest. Garcia was so good that he ended up getting an entire solo show to himself, where normally the show would feature multiple acts. Lesh and Constanten soon moved away from the Bay Area to Las Vegas, but both would be back -- in Constanten's case he would form an experimental group in San Francisco with their fellow student Steve Reich, and that group (though not with Constanten performing) would later premiere Terry Riley's In C, a piece influenced by La Monte Young and often considered one of the great masterpieces of minimalist music. By early 1962 Garcia and Hunter had formed a bluegrass band, with Garcia on guitar and banjo and Hunter on mandolin, and a rotating cast of other musicians including Ken Frankel, who played banjo and fiddle. They performed under different names, including the Tub Thumpers, the Hart Valley Drifters, and the Sleepy Valley Hog Stompers, and played a mixture of bluegrass and old-time music -- and were very careful about the distinction: [Excerpt: The Hart Valley Drifters, "Cripple Creek"] In 1993, the Republican political activist John Perry Barlow was invited to talk to the CIA about the possibilities open to them with what was then called the Information Superhighway. He later wrote, in part "They told me they'd brought Steve Jobs in a few weeks before to indoctrinate them in modern information management. And they were delighted when I returned later, bringing with me a platoon of Internet gurus, including Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, Tony Rutkowski, and Vint Cerf. They sealed us into an electronically impenetrable room to discuss the radical possibility that a good first step in lifting their blackout would be for the CIA to put up a Web site... We told them that information exchange was a barter system, and that to receive, one must also be willing to share. This was an alien notion to them. They weren't even willing to share information among themselves, much less the world." 1962 brought a new experience for Robert Hunter. Hunter had been recruited into taking part in psychological tests at Stanford University, which in the sixties and seventies was one of the preeminent universities for psychological experiments. As part of this, Hunter was given $140 to attend the VA hospital (where a janitor named Ken Kesey, who had himself taken part in a similar set of experiments a couple of years earlier, worked a day job while he was working on his first novel) for four weeks on the run, and take different psychedelic drugs each time, starting with LSD, so his reactions could be observed. (It was later revealed that these experiments were part of a CIA project called MKUltra, designed to investigate the possibility of using psychedelic drugs for mind control, blackmail, and torture. Hunter was quite lucky in that he was told what was going to happen to him and paid for his time. Other subjects included the unlucky customers of brothels the CIA set up as fronts -- they dosed the customers' drinks and observed them through two-way mirrors. Some of their experimental subjects died by suicide as a result of their experiences. So it goes. ) Hunter was interested in taking LSD after reading Aldous Huxley's writings about psychedelic substances, and he brought his typewriter along to the experiment. During the first test, he wrote a six-page text, a short excerpt from which is now widely quoted, reading in part "Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist ... and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell-like (must I take you by the hand, ever so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resounding bells" Hunter's experience led to everyone in their social circle wanting to try LSD, and soon they'd all come to the same conclusion -- this was something special. But Garcia needed money -- he'd got his girlfriend pregnant, and they'd married (this would be the first of several marriages in Garcia's life, and I won't be covering them all -- at Garcia's funeral, his second wife, Carolyn, said Garcia always called her the love of his life, and his first wife and his early-sixties girlfriend who he proposed to again in the nineties both simultaneously said "He said that to me!"). So he started teaching guitar at a music shop in Palo Alto. Hunter had no time for Garcia's incipient domesticity and thought that his wife was trying to make him live a conventional life, and the two drifted apart somewhat, though they'd still play together occasionally. Through working at the music store, Garcia got to know the manager, Troy Weidenheimer, who had a rock and roll band called the Zodiacs. Garcia joined the band on bass, despite that not being his instrument. He later said "Troy was a lot of fun, but I wasn't good enough a musician then to have been able to deal with it. I was out of my idiom, really, 'cause when I played with Troy I was playing electric bass, you know. I never was a good bass player. Sometimes I was playing in the wrong key and didn't even [fuckin'] know it. I couldn't hear that low, after playing banjo, you know, and going to electric...But Troy taught me the principle of, hey, you know, just stomp your foot and get on it. He was great. A great one for the instant arrangement, you know. And he was also fearless for that thing of get your friends to do it." Garcia's tenure in the Zodiacs didn't last long, nor did this experiment with rock and roll, but two other members of the Zodiacs will be notable later in the story -- the harmonica player, an old friend of Garcia's named Ron McKernan, who would soon gain the nickname Pig Pen after the Peanuts character, and the drummer, Bill Kreutzmann: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Drums/Space (Skull & Bones version)"] Kreutzmann said of the Zodiacs "Jerry was the hired bass player and I was the hired drummer. I only remember playing that one gig with them, but I was in way over my head. I always did that. I always played things that were really hard and it didn't matter. I just went for it." Garcia and Kreutzmann didn't really get to know each other then, but Garcia did get to know someone else who would soon be very important in his life. Bob Weir was from a very different background than Garcia, though both had the shared experience of long bouts of chronic illness as children. He had grown up in a very wealthy family, and had always been well-liked, but he was what we would now call neurodivergent -- reading books about the band he talks about being dyslexic but clearly has other undiagnosed neurodivergences, which often go along with dyslexia -- and as a result he was deemed to have behavioural problems which led to him getting expelled from pre-school and kicked out of the cub scouts. He was never academically gifted, thanks to his dyslexia, but he was always enthusiastic about music -- to a fault. He learned to play boogie piano but played so loudly and so often his parents sold the piano. He had a trumpet, but the neighbours complained about him playing it outside. Finally he switched to the guitar, an instrument with which it is of course impossible to make too loud a noise. The first song he learned was the Kingston Trio's version of an old sea shanty, "The Wreck of the John B": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "The Wreck of the John B"] He was sent off to a private school in Colorado for teenagers with behavioural issues, and there he met the boy who would become his lifelong friend, John Perry Barlow. Unfortunately the two troublemakers got on with each other *so* well that after their first year they were told that it was too disruptive having both of them at the school, and only one could stay there the next year. Barlow stayed and Weir moved back to the Bay Area. By this point, Weir was getting more interested in folk music that went beyond the commercial folk of the Kingston Trio. As he said later "There was something in there that was ringing my bells. What I had grown up thinking of as hillbilly music, it started to have some depth for me, and I could start to hear the music in it. Suddenly, it wasn't just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies playing what they could. There was some depth and expertise and stuff like that to aspire to.” He moved from school to school but one thing that stayed with him was his love of playing guitar, and he started taking lessons from Troy Weidenheimer, but he got most of his education going to folk clubs and hootenannies. He regularly went to the Tangent, a club where Garcia played, but Garcia's bluegrass banjo playing was far too rigorous for a free spirit like Weir to emulate, and instead he started trying to copy one of the guitarists who was a regular there, Jorma Kaukonnen. On New Year's Eve 1963 Weir was out walking with his friends Bob Matthews and Rich Macauley, and they passed the music shop where Garcia was a teacher, and heard him playing his banjo. They knocked and asked if they could come in -- they all knew Garcia a little, and Bob Matthews was one of his students, having become interested in playing banjo after hearing the theme tune to the Beverly Hillbillies, played by the bluegrass greats Flatt and Scruggs: [Excerpt: Flatt and Scruggs, "The Beverly Hillbillies"] Garcia at first told these kids, several years younger than him, that they couldn't come in -- he was waiting for his students to show up. But Weir said “Jerry, listen, it's seven-thirty on New Year's Eve, and I don't think you're going to be seeing your students tonight.” Garcia realised the wisdom of this, and invited the teenagers in to jam with him. At the time, there was a bit of a renaissance in jug bands, as we talked about back in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful. This was a form of music that had grown up in the 1920s, and was similar and related to skiffle and coffee-pot bands -- jug bands would tend to have a mixture of portable string instruments like guitars and banjos, harmonicas, and people using improvised instruments, particularly blowing into a jug. The most popular of these bands had been Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, led by banjo player Gus Cannon and with harmonica player Noah Lewis: [Excerpt: Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, "Viola Lee Blues"] With the folk revival, Cannon's work had become well-known again. The Rooftop Singers, a Kingston Trio style folk group, had had a hit with his song "Walk Right In" in 1963, and as a result of that success Cannon had even signed a record contract with Stax -- Stax's first album ever, a month before Booker T and the MGs' first album, was in fact the eighty-year-old Cannon playing his banjo and singing his old songs. The rediscovery of Cannon had started a craze for jug bands, and the most popular of the new jug bands was Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, which did a mixture of old songs like "You're a Viper" and more recent material redone in the old style. Weir, Matthews, and Macauley had been to see the Kweskin band the night before, and had been very impressed, especially by their singer Maria D'Amato -- who would later marry her bandmate Geoff Muldaur and take his name -- and her performance of Leiber and Stoller's "I'm a Woman": [Excerpt: Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, "I'm a Woman"] Matthews suggested that they form their own jug band, and Garcia eagerly agreed -- though Matthews found himself rapidly moving from banjo to washboard to kazoo to second kazoo before realising he was surplus to requirements. Robert Hunter was similarly an early member but claimed he "didn't have the embouchure" to play the jug, and was soon also out. He moved to LA and started studying Scientology -- later claiming that he wanted science-fictional magic powers, which L. Ron Hubbard's new religion certainly offered. The group took the name Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions -- apparently they varied the spelling every time they played -- and had a rotating membership that at one time or another included about twenty different people, but tended always to have Garcia on banjo, Weir on jug and later guitar, and Garcia's friend Pig Pen on harmonica: [Excerpt: Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions, "On the Road Again"] The group played quite regularly in early 1964, but Garcia's first love was still bluegrass, and he was trying to build an audience with his bluegrass band, The Black Mountain Boys. But bluegrass was very unpopular in the Bay Area, where it was simultaneously thought of as unsophisticated -- as "hillbilly music" -- and as elitist, because it required actual instrumental ability, which wasn't in any great supply in the amateur folk scene. But instrumental ability was something Garcia definitely had, as at this point he was still practising eight hours a day, every day, and it shows on the recordings of the Black Mountain Boys: [Excerpt: The Black Mountain Boys, "Rosa Lee McFall"] By the summer, Bob Weir was also working at the music shop, and so Garcia let Weir take over his students while he and the Black Mountain Boys' guitarist Sandy Rothman went on a road trip to see as many bluegrass musicians as they could and to audition for Bill Monroe himself. As it happened, Garcia found himself too shy to audition for Monroe, but Rothman later ended up playing with Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. On his return to the Bay Area, Garcia resumed playing with the Uptown Jug Champions, but Pig Pen started pestering him to do something different. While both men had overlapping tastes in music and a love for the blues, Garcia's tastes had always been towards the country end of the spectrum while Pig Pen's were towards R&B. And while the Uptown Jug Champions were all a bit disdainful of the Beatles at first -- apart from Bob Weir, the youngest of the group, who thought they were interesting -- Pig Pen had become enamoured of another British band who were just starting to make it big: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] 29) Garcia liked the first Rolling Stones album too, and he eventually took Pig Pen's point -- the stuff that the Rolling Stones were doing, covers of Slim Harpo and Buddy Holly, was not a million miles away from the material they were doing as Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions. Pig Pen could play a little electric organ, Bob had been fooling around with the electric guitars in the music shop. Why not give it a go? The stuff bands like the Rolling Stones were doing wasn't that different from the electric blues that Pig Pen liked, and they'd all seen A Hard Day's Night -- they could carry on playing with banjos, jugs, and kazoos and have the respect of a handful of folkies, or they could get electric instruments and potentially have screaming girls and millions of dollars, while playing the same songs. This was a convincing argument, especially when Dana Morgan Jr, the son of the owner of the music shop, told them they could have free electric instruments if they let him join on bass. Morgan wasn't that great on bass, but what the hell, free instruments. Pig Pen had the best voice and stage presence, so he became the frontman of the new group, singing most of the leads, though Jerry and Bob would both sing a few songs, and playing harmonica and organ. Weir was on rhythm guitar, and Garcia was the lead guitarist and obvious leader of the group. They just needed a drummer, and handily Bill Kreutzmann, who had played with Garcia and Pig Pen in the Zodiacs, was also now teaching music at the music shop. Not only that, but about three weeks before they decided to go electric, Kreutzmann had seen the Uptown Jug Champions performing and been astonished by Garcia's musicianship and charisma, and said to himself "Man, I'm gonna follow that guy forever!" The new group named themselves the Warlocks, and started rehearsing in earnest. Around this time, Garcia also finally managed to get some of the LSD that his friend Robert Hunter had been so enthusiastic about three years earlier, and it was a life-changing experience for him. In particular, he credited LSD with making him comfortable being a less disciplined player -- as a bluegrass player he'd had to be frighteningly precise, but now he was playing rock and needed to loosen up. A few days after taking LSD for the first time, Garcia also heard some of Bob Dylan's new material, and realised that the folk singer he'd had little time for with his preachy politics was now making electric music that owed a lot more to the Beat culture Garcia considered himself part of: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] Another person who was hugely affected by hearing that was Phil Lesh, who later said "I couldn't believe that was Bob Dylan on AM radio, with an electric band. It changed my whole consciousness: if something like that could happen, the sky was the limit." Up to that point, Lesh had been focused entirely on his avant-garde music, working with friends like Steve Reich to push music forward, inspired by people like John Cage and La Monte Young, but now he realised there was music of value in the rock world. He'd quickly started going to rock gigs, seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds, and then he took acid and went to see his friend Garcia's new electric band play their third ever gig. He was blown away, and very quickly it was decided that Lesh would be the group's new bass player -- though everyone involved tells a different story as to who made the decision and how it came about, and accounts also vary as to whether Dana Morgan took his sacking gracefully and let his erstwhile bandmates keep their instruments, or whether they had to scrounge up some new ones. Lesh had never played bass before, but he was a talented multi-instrumentalist with a deep understanding of music and an ability to compose and improvise, and the repertoire the Warlocks were playing in the early days was mostly three-chord material that doesn't take much rehearsal -- though it was apparently beyond the abilities of poor Dana Morgan, who apparently had to be told note-by-note what to play by Garcia, and learn it by rote. Garcia told Lesh what notes the strings of a bass were tuned to, told him to borrow a guitar and practice, and within two weeks he was on stage with the Warlocks: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, “Grayfolded"] In September 1995, just weeks after Jerry Garcia's death, an article was published in Mute magazine identifying a cultural trend that had shaped the nineties, and would as it turned out shape at least the next thirty years. It's titled "The Californian Ideology", though it may be better titled "The Bay Area Ideology", and it identifies a worldview that had grown up in Silicon Valley, based around the ideas of the hippie movement, of right-wing libertarianism, of science fiction authors, and of Marshall McLuhan. It starts "There is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. We have called this orthodoxy `the Californian Ideology' in honour of the state where it originated. By naturalising and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian Ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless. The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as WIRED and MONDO 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete." [Excerpt: Grayfolded] The Warlocks' first gig with Phil Lesh on bass was on June the 18th 1965, at a club called Frenchy's with a teenage clientele. Lesh thought his playing had been wooden and it wasn't a good gig, and apparently the management of Frenchy's agreed -- they were meant to play a second night there, but turned up to be told they'd been replaced by a band with an accordion and clarinet. But by September the group had managed to get themselves a residency at a small bar named the In Room, and playing there every night made them cohere. They were at this point playing the kind of sets that bar bands everywhere play to this day, though at the time the songs they were playing, like "Gloria" by Them and "In the Midnight Hour", were the most contemporary of hits. Another song that they introduced into their repertoire was "Do You Believe in Magic" by the Lovin' Spoonful, another band which had grown up out of former jug band musicians. As well as playing their own sets, they were also the house band at The In Room and as such had to back various touring artists who were the headline acts. The first act they had to back up was Cornell Gunter's version of the Coasters. Gunter had brought his own guitarist along as musical director, and for the first show Weir sat in the audience watching the show and learning the parts, staring intently at this musical director's playing. After seeing that, Weir's playing was changed, because he also picked up how the guitarist was guiding the band while playing, the small cues that a musical director will use to steer the musicians in the right direction. Weir started doing these things himself when he was singing lead -- Pig Pen was the frontman but everyone except Bill sang sometimes -- and the group soon found that rather than Garcia being the sole leader, now whoever was the lead singer for the song was the de facto conductor as well. By this point, the Bay Area was getting almost overrun with people forming electric guitar bands, as every major urban area in America was. Some of the bands were even having hits already -- We Five had had a number three hit with "You Were On My Mind", a song which had originally been performed by the folk duo Ian and Sylvia: [Excerpt: We Five, "You Were On My Mind"] Although the band that was most highly regarded on the scene, the Charlatans, was having problems with the various record companies they tried to get signed to, and didn't end up making a record until 1969. If tracks like "Number One" had been released in 1965 when they were recorded, the history of the San Francisco music scene may have taken a very different turn: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "Number One"] Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were also forming, and Autumn Records was having a run of success with records by the Beau Brummels, whose records were produced by Autumn's in-house A&R man, Sly Stone: [Excerpt: The Beau Brummels, "Laugh Laugh"] The Warlocks were somewhat cut off from this, playing in a dive bar whose clientele was mostly depressed alcoholics. But the fact that they were playing every night for an audience that didn't care much gave them freedom, and they used that freedom to improvise. Both Lesh and Garcia were big fans of John Coltrane, and they started to take lessons from his style of playing. When the group played "Gloria" or "Midnight Hour" or whatever, they started to extend the songs and give themselves long instrumental passages for soloing. Garcia's playing wasn't influenced *harmonically* by Coltrane -- in fact Garcia was always a rather harmonically simple player. He'd tend to play lead lines either in Mixolydian mode, which is one of the most standard modes in rock, pop, blues, and jazz, or he'd play the notes of the chord that was being played, so if the band were playing a G chord his lead would emphasise the notes G, B, and D. But what he was influenced by was Coltrane's tendency to improvise in long, complex, phrases that made up a single thought -- Coltrane was thinking musically in paragraphs, rather than sentences, and Garcia started to try the same kind of th

This episode is about consistency as a creator and living up to your commitments to put work into the world...to ship. Features quotes, stories, and ideas  from Seth Godin, Esther Dyson, Mark Levy, Stephen King, Steven Pressfield, and more. Share your thoughts on social media using the #DaveBurgessShow hashtag. Dave on Instagram: @dbc_incDave on Twitter: @burgessdaveDave's website: daveburgess.comBuy Dave's book, Teach Like a Pirate HERE!

Ein Auszug aus dem Artikel „Costs and Computers“ von Phil Salin über das Thema der Opportunitätskosten. Im Original erschienen am 25. November 1991 im Newsletter „Release 1.0“ von Esther Dyson. Aus dem Englischen, unter Zuhilfenahme des maschinellen Übersetzers DeepL, von Christian Leuenberg. Weiterführende Links zu dieser Episode: Newsletter „Release 1.0“ Ausgabe 11-91 als PDF Den Podcast „Mises Karma“ unterstützen Affiliate-Partner: Relai – Bitcoin sofort kaufen und eigene Schlüssel halten – einfach und simpel. Einladungscode: MISES BitBox02 – Die sichere Bitcoin Hardware-Wallet, made in Switzerland Haftungsausschluss: Relai konzentriert sich hauptsächlich auf den Schweizer Markt.

Ein Auszug aus dem Artikel „Costs and Computers“ von Phil Salin über das Thema der Opportunitätskosten. Im Original erschienen am 25. November 1991 im Newsletter „Release 1.0“ von Esther Dyson. Aus dem Englischen, unter Zuhilfenahme des maschinellen Übersetzers DeepL, von Christian Leuenberg. Weiterführende Links zu dieser Episode: Newsletter „Release 1.0“ Ausgabe 11-91 als PDF Den Podcast „Mises Karma“ unterstützen Affiliate-Partner: Relai – Bitcoin sofort kaufen und eigene Schlüssel halten – einfach und simpel. Einladungscode: MISES BitBox02 – Die sichere Bitcoin Hardware-Wallet, made in Switzerland Haftungsausschluss: Relai konzentriert sich hauptsächlich auf den Schweizer Markt.

Hall-of-Fame-nominated marketer, bestselling author, and Wall Street Journal cartoonist Stu Heinecke shares his fascination with weeds and how anyone can grow their business into something resilient and unstoppable. Stu explored the Weeds model for several years, collecting insights from thought leaders from the worlds of business, government, and entertainment including T. Boone Pickens, Kathy Ireland, General Barry McAffrey, Henrik Fisker, Gareb Shamus, Giovanni Marsico, Esther Dyson, Christopher Lochhead, Nathan Myhrvold, Carmen Medina, Jon Ferrara, and Jonna Mendez. Listen to The Tony DUrso Show on VoiceAmerica Influencers Platform every Friday at 2pm Pacific or listen on Apple Podcasts or tonydurso.com/podcast.

Hall-of-Fame-nominated marketer, bestselling author, and Wall Street Journal cartoonist Stu Heinecke shares his fascination with weeds and how anyone can grow their business into something resilient and unstoppable. Stu explored the Weeds model for several years, collecting insights from thought leaders from the worlds of business, government, and entertainment including T. Boone Pickens, Kathy Ireland, General Barry McAffrey, Henrik Fisker, Gareb Shamus, Giovanni Marsico, Esther Dyson, Christopher Lochhead, Nathan Myhrvold, Carmen Medina, Jon Ferrara, and Jonna Mendez. Listen to The Tony DUrso Show on VoiceAmerica Influencers Platform every Friday at 2pm Pacific or listen on Apple Podcasts or tonydurso.com/podcast.

Hall-of-Fame-nominated marketer, bestselling author, and Wall Street Journal cartoonist Stu Heinecke shares his fascination with weeds and how anyone can grow their business into something resilient and unstoppable. Stu explored the Weeds model for several years, collecting insights from thought leaders from the worlds of business, government, and entertainment including T. Boone Pickens, Kathy Ireland, General Barry McAffrey, Henrik Fisker, Gareb Shamus, Giovanni Marsico, Esther Dyson, Christopher Lochhead, Nathan Myhrvold, Carmen Medina, Jon Ferrara, and Jonna Mendez. Listen to The Tony DUrso Show on VoiceAmerica Influencers Platform every Friday at 2pm Pacific or listen on Apple Podcasts or tonydurso.com/podcast.

Hall-of-Fame-nominated marketer, bestselling author, and Wall Street Journal cartoonist Stu Heinecke shares his fascination with weeds and how anyone can grow their business into something resilient and unstoppable. Stu explored the Weeds model for several years, collecting insights from thought leaders from the worlds of business, government, and entertainment including T. Boone Pickens, Kathy Ireland, General Barry McAffrey, Henrik Fisker, Gareb Shamus, Giovanni Marsico, Esther Dyson, Christopher Lochhead, Nathan Myhrvold, Carmen Medina, Jon Ferrara, and Jonna Mendez. Listen to The Tony DUrso Show on VoiceAmerica Influencers Platform every Friday at 2pm Pacific or listen on Apple Podcasts or tonydurso.com/podcast.

Freeman Dyson (1923–2020)—renowned scientist, visionary, and iconoclast—helped invent modern physics. Not bound by disciplinary divisions, he went on to explore foundational topics in mathematics, astrophysics, and the origin of life. General readers were introduced to Dyson's roving mind and heterodox approach in his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe, a poignant autobiographical reflection on life and science.  "Well, Doc, You're In": Freeman Dyson's Journey through the Universe (MIT Press, 2022) (the title quotes Richard Feynman's remark to Dyson at a physics conference) offers a fresh examination of Dyson's life and work, exploring his particular way of thinking about deep questions that range from the nature of matter to the ultimate fate of the universe. The chapters—written by leading scientists, historians, and science journalists, including some of Dyson's colleagues—trace Dyson's formative years, his budding interests and curiosities, and his wide-ranging work across the natural sciences, technology, and public policy. They describe Dyson's innovations at the intersection of quantum theory and relativity, his novel nuclear reactor design (and his never-realized idea of a spacecraft powered by nuclear weapons), his years at the Institute for Advanced Study, and his foray into cosmology. In the coda, Dyson's daughter Esther reflects on growing up in the Dyson household. “Well, Doc, You're In” assesses Dyson's successes, blind spots, and influence, assembling a portrait of a scientist's outsized legacy. Contributors: Jeremy Bernstein, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Ann Finkbeiner, Amanda Gefter, Ashutosh Jogalekar, David Kaiser, Caleb Scharf, William Thomas. Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Freeman Dyson (1923–2020)—renowned scientist, visionary, and iconoclast—helped invent modern physics. Not bound by disciplinary divisions, he went on to explore foundational topics in mathematics, astrophysics, and the origin of life. General readers were introduced to Dyson's roving mind and heterodox approach in his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe, a poignant autobiographical reflection on life and science.  "Well, Doc, You're In": Freeman Dyson's Journey through the Universe (MIT Press, 2022) (the title quotes Richard Feynman's remark to Dyson at a physics conference) offers a fresh examination of Dyson's life and work, exploring his particular way of thinking about deep questions that range from the nature of matter to the ultimate fate of the universe. The chapters—written by leading scientists, historians, and science journalists, including some of Dyson's colleagues—trace Dyson's formative years, his budding interests and curiosities, and his wide-ranging work across the natural sciences, technology, and public policy. They describe Dyson's innovations at the intersection of quantum theory and relativity, his novel nuclear reactor design (and his never-realized idea of a spacecraft powered by nuclear weapons), his years at the Institute for Advanced Study, and his foray into cosmology. In the coda, Dyson's daughter Esther reflects on growing up in the Dyson household. “Well, Doc, You're In” assesses Dyson's successes, blind spots, and influence, assembling a portrait of a scientist's outsized legacy. Contributors: Jeremy Bernstein, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Ann Finkbeiner, Amanda Gefter, Ashutosh Jogalekar, David Kaiser, Caleb Scharf, William Thomas. Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/mathematics

Freeman Dyson (1923–2020)—renowned scientist, visionary, and iconoclast—helped invent modern physics. Not bound by disciplinary divisions, he went on to explore foundational topics in mathematics, astrophysics, and the origin of life. General readers were introduced to Dyson's roving mind and heterodox approach in his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe, a poignant autobiographical reflection on life and science.  "Well, Doc, You're In": Freeman Dyson's Journey through the Universe (MIT Press, 2022) (the title quotes Richard Feynman's remark to Dyson at a physics conference) offers a fresh examination of Dyson's life and work, exploring his particular way of thinking about deep questions that range from the nature of matter to the ultimate fate of the universe. The chapters—written by leading scientists, historians, and science journalists, including some of Dyson's colleagues—trace Dyson's formative years, his budding interests and curiosities, and his wide-ranging work across the natural sciences, technology, and public policy. They describe Dyson's innovations at the intersection of quantum theory and relativity, his novel nuclear reactor design (and his never-realized idea of a spacecraft powered by nuclear weapons), his years at the Institute for Advanced Study, and his foray into cosmology. In the coda, Dyson's daughter Esther reflects on growing up in the Dyson household. “Well, Doc, You're In” assesses Dyson's successes, blind spots, and influence, assembling a portrait of a scientist's outsized legacy. Contributors: Jeremy Bernstein, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Ann Finkbeiner, Amanda Gefter, Ashutosh Jogalekar, David Kaiser, Caleb Scharf, William Thomas. Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Freeman Dyson (1923–2020)—renowned scientist, visionary, and iconoclast—helped invent modern physics. Not bound by disciplinary divisions, he went on to explore foundational topics in mathematics, astrophysics, and the origin of life. General readers were introduced to Dyson's roving mind and heterodox approach in his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe, a poignant autobiographical reflection on life and science.  "Well, Doc, You're In": Freeman Dyson's Journey through the Universe (MIT Press, 2022) (the title quotes Richard Feynman's remark to Dyson at a physics conference) offers a fresh examination of Dyson's life and work, exploring his particular way of thinking about deep questions that range from the nature of matter to the ultimate fate of the universe. The chapters—written by leading scientists, historians, and science journalists, including some of Dyson's colleagues—trace Dyson's formative years, his budding interests and curiosities, and his wide-ranging work across the natural sciences, technology, and public policy. They describe Dyson's innovations at the intersection of quantum theory and relativity, his novel nuclear reactor design (and his never-realized idea of a spacecraft powered by nuclear weapons), his years at the Institute for Advanced Study, and his foray into cosmology. In the coda, Dyson's daughter Esther reflects on growing up in the Dyson household. “Well, Doc, You're In” assesses Dyson's successes, blind spots, and influence, assembling a portrait of a scientist's outsized legacy. Contributors: Jeremy Bernstein, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Ann Finkbeiner, Amanda Gefter, Ashutosh Jogalekar, David Kaiser, Caleb Scharf, William Thomas. Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Freeman Dyson (1923–2020)—renowned scientist, visionary, and iconoclast—helped invent modern physics. Not bound by disciplinary divisions, he went on to explore foundational topics in mathematics, astrophysics, and the origin of life. General readers were introduced to Dyson's roving mind and heterodox approach in his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe, a poignant autobiographical reflection on life and science.  "Well, Doc, You're In": Freeman Dyson's Journey through the Universe (MIT Press, 2022) (the title quotes Richard Feynman's remark to Dyson at a physics conference) offers a fresh examination of Dyson's life and work, exploring his particular way of thinking about deep questions that range from the nature of matter to the ultimate fate of the universe. The chapters—written by leading scientists, historians, and science journalists, including some of Dyson's colleagues—trace Dyson's formative years, his budding interests and curiosities, and his wide-ranging work across the natural sciences, technology, and public policy. They describe Dyson's innovations at the intersection of quantum theory and relativity, his novel nuclear reactor design (and his never-realized idea of a spacecraft powered by nuclear weapons), his years at the Institute for Advanced Study, and his foray into cosmology. In the coda, Dyson's daughter Esther reflects on growing up in the Dyson household. “Well, Doc, You're In” assesses Dyson's successes, blind spots, and influence, assembling a portrait of a scientist's outsized legacy. Contributors: Jeremy Bernstein, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Ann Finkbeiner, Amanda Gefter, Ashutosh Jogalekar, David Kaiser, Caleb Scharf, William Thomas. Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Freeman Dyson (1923–2020)—renowned scientist, visionary, and iconoclast—helped invent modern physics. Not bound by disciplinary divisions, he went on to explore foundational topics in mathematics, astrophysics, and the origin of life. General readers were introduced to Dyson's roving mind and heterodox approach in his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe, a poignant autobiographical reflection on life and science.  "Well, Doc, You're In": Freeman Dyson's Journey through the Universe (MIT Press, 2022) (the title quotes Richard Feynman's remark to Dyson at a physics conference) offers a fresh examination of Dyson's life and work, exploring his particular way of thinking about deep questions that range from the nature of matter to the ultimate fate of the universe. The chapters—written by leading scientists, historians, and science journalists, including some of Dyson's colleagues—trace Dyson's formative years, his budding interests and curiosities, and his wide-ranging work across the natural sciences, technology, and public policy. They describe Dyson's innovations at the intersection of quantum theory and relativity, his novel nuclear reactor design (and his never-realized idea of a spacecraft powered by nuclear weapons), his years at the Institute for Advanced Study, and his foray into cosmology. In the coda, Dyson's daughter Esther reflects on growing up in the Dyson household. “Well, Doc, You're In” assesses Dyson's successes, blind spots, and influence, assembling a portrait of a scientist's outsized legacy. Contributors: Jeremy Bernstein, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Ann Finkbeiner, Amanda Gefter, Ashutosh Jogalekar, David Kaiser, Caleb Scharf, William Thomas. Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Freeman Dyson (1923–2020)—renowned scientist, visionary, and iconoclast—helped invent modern physics. Not bound by disciplinary divisions, he went on to explore foundational topics in mathematics, astrophysics, and the origin of life. General readers were introduced to Dyson's roving mind and heterodox approach in his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe, a poignant autobiographical reflection on life and science.  "Well, Doc, You're In": Freeman Dyson's Journey through the Universe (MIT Press, 2022) (the title quotes Richard Feynman's remark to Dyson at a physics conference) offers a fresh examination of Dyson's life and work, exploring his particular way of thinking about deep questions that range from the nature of matter to the ultimate fate of the universe. The chapters—written by leading scientists, historians, and science journalists, including some of Dyson's colleagues—trace Dyson's formative years, his budding interests and curiosities, and his wide-ranging work across the natural sciences, technology, and public policy. They describe Dyson's innovations at the intersection of quantum theory and relativity, his novel nuclear reactor design (and his never-realized idea of a spacecraft powered by nuclear weapons), his years at the Institute for Advanced Study, and his foray into cosmology. In the coda, Dyson's daughter Esther reflects on growing up in the Dyson household. “Well, Doc, You're In” assesses Dyson's successes, blind spots, and influence, assembling a portrait of a scientist's outsized legacy. Contributors: Jeremy Bernstein, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Ann Finkbeiner, Amanda Gefter, Ashutosh Jogalekar, David Kaiser, Caleb Scharf, William Thomas. Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Freeman Dyson (1923–2020)—renowned scientist, visionary, and iconoclast—helped invent modern physics. Not bound by disciplinary divisions, he went on to explore foundational topics in mathematics, astrophysics, and the origin of life. General readers were introduced to Dyson's roving mind and heterodox approach in his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe, a poignant autobiographical reflection on life and science.  "Well, Doc, You're In": Freeman Dyson's Journey through the Universe (MIT Press, 2022) (the title quotes Richard Feynman's remark to Dyson at a physics conference) offers a fresh examination of Dyson's life and work, exploring his particular way of thinking about deep questions that range from the nature of matter to the ultimate fate of the universe. The chapters—written by leading scientists, historians, and science journalists, including some of Dyson's colleagues—trace Dyson's formative years, his budding interests and curiosities, and his wide-ranging work across the natural sciences, technology, and public policy. They describe Dyson's innovations at the intersection of quantum theory and relativity, his novel nuclear reactor design (and his never-realized idea of a spacecraft powered by nuclear weapons), his years at the Institute for Advanced Study, and his foray into cosmology. In the coda, Dyson's daughter Esther reflects on growing up in the Dyson household. “Well, Doc, You're In” assesses Dyson's successes, blind spots, and influence, assembling a portrait of a scientist's outsized legacy. Contributors: Jeremy Bernstein, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Ann Finkbeiner, Amanda Gefter, Ashutosh Jogalekar, David Kaiser, Caleb Scharf, William Thomas. Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Freeman Dyson (1923–2020)—renowned scientist, visionary, and iconoclast—helped invent modern physics. Not bound by disciplinary divisions, he went on to explore foundational topics in mathematics, astrophysics, and the origin of life. General readers were introduced to Dyson's roving mind and heterodox approach in his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe, a poignant autobiographical reflection on life and science.  "Well, Doc, You're In": Freeman Dyson's Journey through the Universe (MIT Press, 2022) (the title quotes Richard Feynman's remark to Dyson at a physics conference) offers a fresh examination of Dyson's life and work, exploring his particular way of thinking about deep questions that range from the nature of matter to the ultimate fate of the universe. The chapters—written by leading scientists, historians, and science journalists, including some of Dyson's colleagues—trace Dyson's formative years, his budding interests and curiosities, and his wide-ranging work across the natural sciences, technology, and public policy. They describe Dyson's innovations at the intersection of quantum theory and relativity, his novel nuclear reactor design (and his never-realized idea of a spacecraft powered by nuclear weapons), his years at the Institute for Advanced Study, and his foray into cosmology. In the coda, Dyson's daughter Esther reflects on growing up in the Dyson household. “Well, Doc, You're In” assesses Dyson's successes, blind spots, and influence, assembling a portrait of a scientist's outsized legacy. Contributors: Jeremy Bernstein, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Ann Finkbeiner, Amanda Gefter, Ashutosh Jogalekar, David Kaiser, Caleb Scharf, William Thomas. Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Freeman Dyson (1923–2020)—renowned scientist, visionary, and iconoclast—helped invent modern physics. Not bound by disciplinary divisions, he went on to explore foundational topics in mathematics, astrophysics, and the origin of life. General readers were introduced to Dyson's roving mind and heterodox approach in his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe, a poignant autobiographical reflection on life and science.  "Well, Doc, You're In": Freeman Dyson's Journey through the Universe (MIT Press, 2022) (the title quotes Richard Feynman's remark to Dyson at a physics conference) offers a fresh examination of Dyson's life and work, exploring his particular way of thinking about deep questions that range from the nature of matter to the ultimate fate of the universe. The chapters—written by leading scientists, historians, and science journalists, including some of Dyson's colleagues—trace Dyson's formative years, his budding interests and curiosities, and his wide-ranging work across the natural sciences, technology, and public policy. They describe Dyson's innovations at the intersection of quantum theory and relativity, his novel nuclear reactor design (and his never-realized idea of a spacecraft powered by nuclear weapons), his years at the Institute for Advanced Study, and his foray into cosmology. In the coda, Dyson's daughter Esther reflects on growing up in the Dyson household. “Well, Doc, You're In” assesses Dyson's successes, blind spots, and influence, assembling a portrait of a scientist's outsized legacy. Contributors: Jeremy Bernstein, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Ann Finkbeiner, Amanda Gefter, Ashutosh Jogalekar, David Kaiser, Caleb Scharf, William Thomas. Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Hall-of-Fame-nominated marketer, bestselling author, and Wall Street Journal cartoonist Stu Heinecke shares his fascination with weeds and how anyone can grow their business into something resilient and unstoppable. Stu explored the Weeds model for several years, collecting insights from thought leaders from the worlds of business, government, and entertainment including T. Boone Pickens, Kathy Ireland, General Barry McAffrey, Henrik Fisker, Gareb Shamus, Giovanni Marsico, Esther Dyson, Christopher Lochhead, Nathan Myhrvold, Carmen Medina, Jon Ferrara, and Jonna Mendez. Listen to The Tony DUrso Show on VoiceAmerica Influencers Platform every Friday at 2pm Pacific or listen on Apple Podcasts or tonydurso.com/podcast.

Hall-of-Fame-nominated marketer, bestselling author, and Wall Street Journal cartoonist Stu Heinecke shares his fascination with weeds and how anyone can grow their business into something resilient and unstoppable. Stu explored the Weeds model for several years, collecting insights from thought leaders from the worlds of business, government, and entertainment including T. Boone Pickens, Kathy Ireland, General Barry McAffrey, Henrik Fisker, Gareb Shamus, Giovanni Marsico, Esther Dyson, Christopher Lochhead, Nathan Myhrvold, Carmen Medina, Jon Ferrara, and Jonna Mendez. Listen to The Tony DUrso Show on VoiceAmerica Influencers Platform every Friday at 2pm Pacific or listen on Apple Podcasts or tonydurso.com/podcast.

Hall-of-Fame-nominated marketer, bestselling author, and Wall Street Journal cartoonist Stu Heinecke shares his fascination with weeds and how anyone can grow their business into something resilient and unstoppable. Stu explored the Weeds model for several years, collecting insights from thought leaders from the worlds of business, government, and entertainment including T. Boone Pickens, Kathy Ireland, General Barry McAffrey, Henrik Fisker, Gareb Shamus, Giovanni Marsico, Esther Dyson, Christopher Lochhead, Nathan Myhrvold, Carmen Medina, Jon Ferrara, and Jonna Mendez. Listen to The Tony DUrso Show on VoiceAmerica Influencers Platform every Friday at 2pm Pacific or listen on Apple Podcasts or tonydurso.com/podcast.

Hall-of-Fame-nominated marketer, bestselling author, and Wall Street Journal cartoonist Stu Heinecke shares his fascination with weeds and how anyone can grow their business into something resilient and unstoppable. Stu explored the Weeds model for several years, collecting insights from thought leaders from the worlds of business, government, and entertainment including T. Boone Pickens, Kathy Ireland, General Barry McAffrey, Henrik Fisker, Gareb Shamus, Giovanni Marsico, Esther Dyson, Christopher Lochhead, Nathan Myhrvold, Carmen Medina, Jon Ferrara, and Jonna Mendez. Listen to The Tony DUrso Show on VoiceAmerica Influencers Platform every Friday at 2pm Pacific or listen on Apple Podcasts or tonydurso.com/podcast.

Hall-of-Fame-nominated marketer, bestselling author, and Wall Street Journal cartoonist Stu Heinecke shares his fascination with weeds and how anyone can grow their business into something resilient and unstoppable. Stu explored the Weeds model for several years, collecting insights from thought leaders from the worlds of business, government, and entertainment including T. Boone Pickens, Kathy Ireland, General Barry McAffrey, Henrik Fisker, Gareb Shamus, Giovanni Marsico, Esther Dyson, Christopher Lochhead, Nathan Myhrvold, Carmen Medina, Jon Ferrara, and Jonna Mendez. Listen to The Tony DUrso Show on VoiceAmerica Influencers Platform every Friday at 2pm Pacific or listen on Apple Podcasts or tonydurso.com/podcast.

How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed: A Complete Strategy for Unstoppable Growth Show Guest: Stu Heinecke A playbook for growing your business no matter the circumstances. Hall-of-Fame-nominated marketer, bestselling author, and Wall Street Journal cartoonist Stu Heinecke shares his fascination with weeds and how anyone can grow their business into something resilient and unstoppable. How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed applies a model to business growth, examining the successful strategies that ordinary weeds use to spread, and prosper in almost any situation. This book will enable readers to apply strategies, mapping their own path to rapid and sustainable growth, while providing a focus on weed-based attributes to get the job done quickly and effectively. It also provides a pathway to transform their entire team into a collective of weeds operating on behalf of the company, acting as an incubator for innovation and productivity, while enriching their own opportunities for growth and security. Stu has explored the Weeds model for several years, collecting insights from thought leaders from the worlds of business, government, and entertainment including T. Boone Pickens, Kathy Ireland, General Barry McAffrey, Henrik Fisker, Gareb Shamus, Giovanni Marsico, Esther Dyson, Christopher Lochhead, Nathan Myhrvold, Carmen Medina, Jon Ferrara, and Jonna Mendez.

An ongoing 10-year community-based project is improving the health of residents through investments in long-term health programs. Esther Dyson, the founder of Wellville, explains how community collaboration and resident involvement can have positive impacts on quality of life.Plus, Terry and Dr. Bob discuss the latest health news, including AARP's new financial report, which shows the bulk of its funding comes from insurance royalty deals.And news from the FDA reveals the potential link between breast implants and cancer. Kate speaks with Maria Gmitro of the Breast Implant Safety Alliance to hear what this means for the patient community.Finally, stick around to the end of the show to hear from patient correspondent Ashley Rankin Collins on breast cancer early detection.Hosts: Terry Wilcox, Executive Director, Patients RisingDr. Robert Goldberg, “Dr. Bob,” Co-Founder and Vice President of the Center for Medicine in the Public InterestKate Pecora, Field CorrespondentGuests: Esther Dyson, Founder of WellvilleMaria Gmitro, President and Co-Founder of Breast Implant Safety AllianceAshley Rankin Collins, Patient CorrespondentLinks: AARP 2021 Financial ReportsAbout WellvilleBreast Implant Safety AllianceFDA MedWatchNeed help?The successful patient is one who can get what they need when they need it. We all know insurance slows us down, so why not take matters into your own hands? Our Navigator is an online tool that allows you to search a massive network of health-related resources using your zip code so you get local results. Get proactive and become a more successful patient right now at PatientsRisingConcierge.orgHave a question or comment about the show, or want to suggest a show topic or share your story as a patient correspondent?Drop us a line: podcast@patientsrising.orgThe views and opinions expressed herein are those of the guest(s)/ author(s) and do not reflect the official policy or position of Patients Rising, nor do the views and opinions stated on this show reflect the opinions of a guest's current or previous employers.

Beatie Wolfe interviews philanthropist, journalist, investor, and cosmonaut Esther Dyson about her journey from childhood dinners with Einstein to becoming a leading authority in the tech world and executive founder of Wellville, an open source nonprofit looking at health as maintenance rather than a repair job. Listen to this show that takes you from growing up at Princeton to training as a Cosmonaut in Russia via the thread of being present without leave. Orange Juice for the Ears with “musical weirdo and visionary” (Vice) Beatie Wolfe explores the power of music across space, science, art, health, film and technology by talking to leading luminaries from Nobel Laureates to punk publishers about their life's work and musical DNA. Beatie Wolfe is an artist who has beamed her music into space, been appointed a UN role model for innovation and held an acclaimed solo exhibition at the V&A Museum. Esther Dyson's Orange Juice for the Ears First song that imprinted? “She's Got A Ticket to Ride” by The Beatles / First album that shaped who you are? The White Album by The Beatles - track played “Glass Onion” / The music you would send into Space? “Clair de Lune” by Claude Debussy / The song you would have at your memorial? The Canterbury Pilgrims: IV. The Nun by Sir George Dyson / The album you would pass onto the next generation? Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles - track played “When I'm Sixty-Four” // This show first aired live on dublab radio - tracks have been shortened for this podcast. The podcast was mastered by Dean Martin Hovey.

Esther Dyson is the executive founder of Wellville, a 10-year national nonprofit project aimed at achieving equitable wellbeing for people . She is a leading angel investor focused on health care, open government, digital technology, biotechnology, and outer space. During the personal computer days, when I was Apple in the 1980s, she was the most powerful and prestigious analyst in the business. She was a king and queen maker. You prayed that she'd cover your product in her newsletter, Release 1.0 or invited you to her conference, but you feared a negative review or getting drilled on stage. People like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, if they didn't fear her, at the very least, realized they better suck up to her. She may not even realize how intimidating she was back then. Esther is the daughter of physicist Freeman Dyson and mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson. She obtained her bachelors in economics from Harvard, She is the author of the bestselling book, Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age.

When we started this podcast Amy and I had no idea where the journey would take us. Nor did we know how many amazing people we would get to meet because of it. Today's guest is one of those people.  Esther Dyson is a notable investor, board member, entrepreneur and even a one time cosmonaut in training. It's hard to fully define what she has meant to the business world – from technology to aerospace and now health (care). After many years of making her mark as a journalist, investor and board member, today she is the executive founder of Wellville - a 10-year national nonprofit project to cultivate equitable wellbeing in five U.S. communities.  Join us for a great discussion with Esther about why she's more interested in “health” than “care.”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed: A Complete Strategy for Unstoppable Growth by Stu Heinecke About the Book: “Weeds scale faster than any business. It's in their DNA.” - Kathy Ireland, CEO, Kathy Ireland Worldwide A playbook for growing your business no matter the circumstances. Hall-of-Fame-nominated marketer, bestselling author, and Wall Street Journal cartoonist Stu Heinecke shares his fascination with weeds and how anyone can grow their business into something resilient and unstoppable. How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed applies a model to business growth, examining the successful strategies that ordinary weeds use to spread, and prosper in almost any situation. This book will enable readers to apply strategies, mapping their own path to rapid and sustainable growth, while providing a focus on weed-based attributes to get the job done quickly and effectively. It also provides a pathway to transform their entire team into a collective of weeds operating on behalf of the company, acting as an incubator for innovation and productivity, while enriching their own opportunities for growth and security. An accessible and practical guide that leaders and companies across industries can help increase their market share, prominence, and customer base, this book enables them to grow, expand, dominate, and defend their turf. Stu has explored the Weeds model for several years, collecting insights from thought leaders from the worlds of business, government, and entertainment including T. Boone Pickens, Kathy Ireland, General Barry McAffrey, Henrik Fisker, Gareb Shamus, Giovanni Marsico, Esther Dyson, Christopher Lochhead, Nathan Myrhvold, Carmen Medina, Jon Ferrara, and Jonna Mendez.  About the Author: Stu Heinecke is a best-selling author, twice nominated Hall of Fame marketer, and Wall Street Journal cartoonist. His first book, How To Get a Meeting with Anyone, which introduced the concept of contact marketing, was named one of the top 64 sales books of all time. The American Marketing Association named him the "Father of Contact Marketing." Stu's books have enjoyed glowing coverage in Forbes, Inc., Harvard Business Review, CBS radio, and many other places. Stu is also a NASDAQ Entrepreneurial Center Author in Residence and Mentor, and founder of cartoonists.org, a group of cartoonists from The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker, who donate art to help charities raise funds. And, interesting fact – he and his wife Charlotte live on Whidbey Island in the Pacific Northwest in Puget Sound, north of Seattle AND and at the University of Southern California, he was a college party pal of actor LeVar Burton! Click here for this episode's website page with the links mentioned during the interview... https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/how-grow-business-like-weed-stu-heinecke

In this episode, investor, journalist, philanthropist, and amateur cosmonaut Esther Dyson joins us to talk about the importance of moving from short-term self interest to long-term shared interest. Esther is the executive founding soul behind Wellville. She talks about this ten-year project and the five US communities participating to improve their own health and wellbeing while inspiring other communities to do the same. We converse about the importance of shifting from a “we” centered way of thinking to one that invests in the success of the whole and we talk about the problem of addiction, how it relates to short term thinking, how it creates competition as opposed to collaboration within a community and how it affects both personal life as well as business growth. Furthermore, we dive into how to build something sustainable and the story behind ICANN. SUPPORT US ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/rhyslindmark JOIN OUR DISCORD: https://discord.gg/PDAPkhNxrC Who is Esther Dyson? Esther is the chairman of EDventure Holdings and is the executive founder of Wellville, a 10 - year nonprofit project dedicated to demonstrating the value of long-term investment in health and equity. Esther is an active angel investor, best-selling author, board member and advisor concentrating on emerging markets and technologies, new space and health. She sits on the boards of 23andMe and is an investor in Crohnology, Eligible API, Keas, Omada Health, Sleepio, and StartUp Health, among others. For 6 months, Esther lived outside Moscow, Russia, training as a backup cosmonaut. She has a BA in economics from Harvard University, and a completion certificate in space medicine and space plumbing from Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center. Topics: Welcome Esther Dyson to The Rhys Show!: (00:00:00) About this century being the turning point & the governance system: (01:49) The problem of having a “WE” centered world: (04:19) About the metaphor of addiction & how it shows up in different fields: (08:14) Short term aspiration versus long term aspiration: (12:57) About Wellville helping five communities to build their own fishing school: (18:05) The approach of collaborating & complementing one another: (21:38) Sustainability within nonprofits: (31:43) The ICANN story: (34:20) Words of advice to the audience: (38:13) Mentioned resources: ICANN: https://www.icann.org/ “The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children” book by Alison Gopnik: https://www.amzn.com/B01ARRWPUS Connect with Esther Dyson: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/estherdyson/ Wellville Web: https://wellville.net/about/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/edyson?lang=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/esther.dyson Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/estherdyson/

Lauren Kelley-Chew, Levels Head of Clinical Product, chatted with Esther Dyson, philanthropist and Levels investor, about Esther's philanthropic initiatives, how she shifted away from investing in healthcare so she can bring more of her attention to the health and wellness space and CGMs. Become a Levels Member – levelshealth.com Learn about Metabolic Health – levelshealth.com/blog Follow Levels on Social – @Levels on Instagram and Twitter

Esther Dyson is an investor, journalist, author, and philanthropist. She is the executive founder of Wellville, a nonprofit project focused on improving equitable wellbeing.Esther and Auren discuss the structural problems that drive poor wellbeing across modern society. They dive into potential solutions ranging from improving parenting to the role of government. They also discuss how untapped data about people can potentially revolutionize health and wellness. You can find Auren Hoffman (CEO of SafeGraph) on Twitter at @auren and Esther Dyson at @edysonWorld of DaaS is brought to you by SafeGraph. For more episodes, visit safegraph.com/podcasts

Jerry Michalski was the long time managing editor of Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 newsletter. He is now the leader at the Relation Economy Expedition (REX) as well as an advisor facilitator and speaker at the Institute For The Future with a deep focus on trust and relationships.

In 1993, Wired magazine described Esther Dyson as "the most powerful woman in computing". She was chair of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN, from 1998 to 2000 and is now a prominent angel investor. In this interview with POWER PLAY's Ayden Férdeline she recalls how she got roped into ICANN and how, 20 years later, she thinks the organization fares.

The panel:Esther Dyson: journalist, tech investor, and the Executive Founder of Wellville, a nonprofit project devoted to helping communities sustain health for the long termKay Makishi: entrepreneur, advisor, and mentor who serves as Principal of KEM Growth, a growth marketing consultancyMario Vasilescu: a robotics engineer turned humane technologist and the CEO of ReadocracySilka Sietsma: Head of Emerging Design at AdobeAngeline Gragasin: a writer, filmmaker, and artist, and the Co-Founder and Director of Happy Family Night MarketClaudia Gonella: Marketing & Communications Director at GRESB, an investor-led initiative that assesses and benchmarks the ESG performance of real assetsLakshmi C: a software engineer, data analyst, and admissions manager for Teach for India based in Tamil Nuda, IndiaSeth Killian: a game designer best known for his work in fighting games, including Street FighterZach First: the Executive Director of the Drucker Institute founded by the legendary business writer Peter DruckerBrandon Silverman: the CEO of Crowdtangle, a social media analysis tool that's part of FacebookRecorded December 11, 2020

My guest today is Esther Dyson. Many of you will be familiar with Esther's work, which includes multiple startups and board seats - 23andMe being one - her writing - including the 1997 book Release 2.0, her work in digital health and her investing with EDVentures. And that's only part of her history. These days, one of her big projects is Wellville, a non-profit focused on community health and community wellness that she founded and chairs.