#108 – The cross section of philanthropy, health and wellness (Esther Dyson & Lauren Kelley-Chew)

Health should be considered a community asset in the same way as physical infrastructure. That’s why Esther Dyson, a philanthropist, entrepreneur, and Levels investor started her nonprofit Wellville. In this episode, Levels Head of Clinical Product Lauren Kelly-Chew sits down with Esther to discuss the cross-section between philanthropy, health, and wellness. They talk about how philanthropy can be a strong lever for helping to create a movement, but it requires voices and advocates to be successful.

02:30 – Invest in health, not healthcare

Esther started her non-profit Wellville to help inspire communities to invest in health.

One was just, “Why are we spending so much money trying to fix people when it would be so much cheaper and nicer for everybody and produce better results if we just kept them healthy?” That was when I moved from investing in healthcare to figuring out how to invest in health, and it turns out it’s pretty hard to find a business model for that. So I ended up starting a nonprofit project. The goal of which is to inspire other people both to do similar things in their communities, but also to inspire people to vote and politicians to vote for and create laws and funding mechanisms. We look at health as a collective asset the same way we look at physical infrastructure. Human infrastructure is even more important.

05:06 – Build back better

Wellville is more like a coach for communities. They work to inspire and motivate people to make changes.

One reason people don’t change is because they don’t want to admit they weren’t perfect, originally. So in a way, it’s been very freeing. Let’s build back better, not my original term, but a good one. So fundamentally, what we’re doing is we’re like coaches for the communities. We don’t give them money, but they don’t pay us. In fact, we don’t have contracts with them. If they don’t want to listen to us, they really don’t have to. So it’s much more like raising children. You’re trying to foster people’s intrinsic motivation to do the right thing, and if your advice is good and compelling, they’ll follow it, but they’re not going to do stuff just to please you, which is what many community organizations do all day long because they’re trying to please the people to give them grants, even though they might think the project is stupid.

10:03 – Enable small communities to get funding

Many communities know how to get funding for infrastructure, but Wellville wants to help them put those skills toward investing in their people.

You don’t need a bunch of people from outside giving you advice. You can actually do it for yourselves, which is half true, but the other half is it needs to be easier for small communities that don’t have a lot of grant writers to get the government funding because even in Pittsburgh and certainly in Newark and Oakland, there’s all these people who know how to write the grants and nab the money as it comes down from the federal coffers, and the school systems, the childcare, the healthcare, all these, what should be, again, public assets are underfunded and inadequate. So the real funding model is we as a society need to realize that we need to invest in our people, not just in our bridges and our roads, but giving a community the capacity to do that, giving the kids a sense of agency.

15:10 – Take time to prioritize

Esther can feel pulled in several directions at once, but she takes time to swim every day and think through her to-dos, what she’s learned, and prioritize what she wants to spend time on.

Sometimes I get overwhelmed and I want to answer to everybody, “I am not a public resource. I got to focus on the things I’ve committed to, not on everything.” I mean, that’s one important point. Whatever you do, do that effectively. Don’t get too distracted because your job is not to fix the world, it’s to fix your part of it where you can have the most impact. I mean, in the end, your job is also to be a human being and love people and stuff like that. I mean, you need time off and so forth. So I swim every day for 50 minutes. I’ve been doing that more or less since I was 18. That is when I do the, “Oh, what did I do wrong yesterday? What did I learn from it? What am I going to say on the podcast today?” What we’re doing at Wellville is having this annual workshop gathering thing in May, and we’re constructing some of the workshops now. So what are we going to do in this workshop? It’s my parking lot for just about everything.

26:31 – Change your perspective on luck

Instead of only thinking about the best thing that could have happened and how you lost out, think of the worst thing that could have happened and how you were lucky.

Here’s one of my favorite stories about luck and decisions. So two summers ago, I was walking down the street and there was some construction. So I went into the street, tripped on the construction, fell over, cracked my femur, and ended up with surgery and being in a walker and stuff for a month or two. So there are two reactions to that. One is, “Oh, my God! I tripped in the street and cracked my femur. I’m so unlucky,” and the other is, “Oh, my God! I could have been killed. I could have been run over by a car and all I did was end up cracking my femur and I ended up spending a month at a friend’s house with a swimming pool just outside of Boston. It was really wonderful.” It’s partly how you read stuff in retrospect. Mostly, I feel I’m pretty lucky because something might have gone wrong, but it led to, “Hey, my life’s pretty good. I’m alive. This thing didn’t work out, but because it didn’t work out, I’m now doing something else or whatever.” You need to compare what happened not just to the best thing that could have happened, but also the worst thing that could have happened.

35:08 – Invest to learn

Esther doesn’t pick her investments based on what she thinks will make the most money, but on what she wants to learn about.

So rather than picking for making the most money where my picks are likely not to be, I mean, so much of it is guessing. You really do not know in advance, but I do know that if I invest in a genetics company with a CEO that I like, I’m going to learn a lot about genetics. So I invest in areas that I want to know more about and I get enough lucky wins, but the cost of each company is not a mistake. It’s the cost of an education. So I get 10 slices of education and maybe one or two really good wins and one or two mm, and then five that disappear and I can’t remember how much I put in, but I mean, two things. One, you have to have enough capital just to do this. If you invest in only one or two companies, statistically, you’re likely to lose all your money, and that second question is you need an asset base to be able to do that, and people talk about income inequality, but asset inequality is even worse because without assets, you simply cannot take the kind of risks I’m talking about. Even if the overall returns are likely to be pretty good, you don’t have the ability to spread your risk enough for it to be reliable.

37:55 – Speculating doesn’t solve anything

Speculative investing and trading might earn money for some, but it doesn’t help solve important issues.

I mean, the other problem with Robinhood is it creates no actual value. It creates money out of thin air for some lucky people, but it doesn’t contribute to the general welfare. It might contribute to the GMP, that might contribute to some people’s pockets by creating money, but it doesn’t clothe or feed anybody. It doesn’t educate them. I mean, I’m overstating it, but it’s just there’s room for a lot of … We still need better food and we need more caregivers. We need a lot of things that are much better ways for people to earn a good living, which should be a good living and, again, we should subsidize childcare and I think tax sugar.

45:10 – Build for the future

Wellville isn’t the end but the beginning of the mission to help these communities and build a system that keeps improving things into the future.

What we’re learning now is thinking about succession planning and how to get the community to think about that, too, and foster the next generation of people. We originally thought it was going to be much more data-driven than it is. It really is so much about the culture. You hope to see that reflected in the diabetes numbers and the smoking numbers and the incarcerations, but that, ultimately, it takes more than 10 years because it is the earlier you go in somebody’s life, the easier it is to have an impact and the longer it takes to see that impact. So we’re really hoping Wellville will be over, it will turn into some documentaries and stories and advocacy project, but our friendships in the community will continue. So I’ll still be going there. I’m also now on the board of a company in Grand Rapids, which is the airport that basically serves Muskegon. So we certainly are looking at the numbers and they matter, but we’re much more looking at the systems and the institutions that are being built. In the end, people are more persuaded by stories than by data. Anyway, we want to have both.

47:29 – Measure success like a net promoter score

Success is hard to measure for a big initiative like Wellville, but Esther said the biggest metric is whether people want to move to and live in the communities they’re helping.

Well, it won’t be 100% successful. I mean, there’s not a particular, were some persistent institutions built? Were some relationships and collaborations established? Do children grow up with better access to childcare, with better schools? Do their parents get training so that they can have better jobs? In a sense, if I had to interview one very small subset, I’d probably interview the real estate people and say, “Do people want to live here?” Because people, again, some people might do pros and cons, but people make a decision to move in or move out. Many people don’t have that decision, but net, net, is this a place where people want to raise their kids or do they desperately want to go somewhere else? When they’re grown up, do they want to come back or do they want to get the hell out? If you had to measure one number, which, of course, is a hard number to measure, anyway, but it would be that. And it’s almost like the net promoter score for life in Muskegon.

52:13 – Teach children about their metabolism

Wellville used Levels CGMs with children in Muskegon so that the children could be empowered to make informed health decisions.

Unfortunately, everybody assumes everybody wants to lose weight, and in many cases that’s true, but what we are measuring is their sense of agency. In other words, these kids are often bullied, told what to do, but what we want to help them learn is you can make up your own mind. You can determine your own future. If you want to lose weight, you know how, but it’s up to you to decide whether you want to. If you want to sleep more, this will help you know if you did it, but we’re not telling you what to do. We’re just helping you understand how your own body works.

Esther Dyson (00:06):

We have a quadrant chart, and at the lower left corner, it’s all about me right now, and in the upper right hand corner, it’s about the community or the country, as large as you can get, but looking both long term into the future and across the community well beyond yourself and your own in individual interests. The more you can encourage people around you to think not, “How do I get to the end of this? but “How do I become the beginning of something beyond what I’m doing now?”

Ben Grynol (00:45):

I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health, and this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is a whole new level.

Ben Grynol (00:58):

When you look at health and wellness from a global perspective, well, you have to remove the rose-colored glasses. It’s not as rosy as one would think. There are a lot of gaps, a lot of opportunities to make it better, and that’s where things like philanthropy come in.

Ben Grynol (01:26):

So Lauren Kelly-Chew, Head of Clinical Product and Esther Dyson, a philanthropist, an entrepreneur, and one of our investors in Levels, the two of them sat down and they discussed this idea about the cross-section between philanthropy, health, and wellness. It’s one of those things that when taken into account, it can be a strong lever for helping to create a movement. It’s something that takes time, but it’s something that you need voices, you need advocates to undertake. So the two of them sat down and they discussed this idea in depth. Here’s Lauren.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (02:03):

Well, thank you again for chatting with us and for being an investor in Levels. It’s really our honor, and we feel so supported to know that we have people like you onboard. Your parents were scientists, and you started your career as a fact checker at Forbes, and you’ve said your superpower is asking questions, which I think has to be one of the best superpowers that there is, if not the best. Have there been one or two you questions that you’ve asked that have completely changed the direction of your life or career and what were they?

Esther Dyson (02:30):

One was just, “Why are we spending so much money trying to fix people when it would be so much cheaper and nicer for everybody and produce better results if we just kept them healthy?” That was when I moved from investing in healthcare to figuring out how to invest in health, and it turns out it’s pretty hard to find a business model for that. So I ended up starting a nonprofit project. The goal of which is to inspire other people both to do similar things in their communities, but also to inspire people to vote and politicians to vote for and create laws and funding mechanisms. We look at health as a collective assets the same way we look at physical infrastructure. Human infrastructure is even more important.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (03:25):

While we’re on that topic of a Wellville, maybe we’ll take this as an opportunity to just learn a little bit more about it if you’re willing to share some of the evolution and then where it is today.

Esther Dyson (03:34):

Oh, no. It’s secret. Somebody’s going to steal our idea.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (03:37):

Let’s hope so, right? That’s the goal.

Esther Dyson (03:39):

Exactly. Basically, it was originally five years, five metrics, five communities. Honestly, originally I thought I would try and raise money for it, but I ended up getting really lucky in the stock market, not so much this last few months, but lucky enough that over time I was able to fund it all myself, which gives you so much freedom because if you raise money, you raise it in one or two-year chunks, you have specific things you have to do. I come from the VC and startup world where you have a goal or a problem, but then you block and tackle because the first idea of you have to had sold it turns out not to be right, and you learn as you go.

Esther Dyson (04:29):

So we’ve been on this amazing learning, we the team at Wellville, which is six people have been on this amazing learning journey, and we learned a ton even before COVID and then COVID came and in a sense, it both did what a lot of people talk about. It revealed the disparities and was a tragedy for many people, but it also gave people permission to try new things and to start over, and it gave a lot of people the ability to say, “We’re going to do something different without having to apologize for the past.”

Esther Dyson (05:06):

One reason people don’t change is because they don’t want to admit they weren’t perfect, originally. So in a way, it’s been very freeing. Let’s build back better, not my original term, but a good one. So fundamentally, what we’re doing is we’re like coaches for the communities. We don’t give them money, but they don’t pay us. In fact, we don’t have contracts with them. If they don’t want to listen to us, they really don’t have to. So it’s much more like raising children. You’re trying to foster people’s intrinsic motivation to do the right thing, and if your advice is good and compelling, they’ll follow it, but they’re not going to do stuff just to please you, which is what many community organizations do all day long because they’re trying to please the people to give them grants, even though they might think the project is stupid.

Esther Dyson (05:59):

Now, it funds the part-time coordinator and pays overhead, and what we’re trying to do is not give them fish or even teach them how to fish, but to help them build their own fishing schools for their own fish. When we leave two and a half years from now, they’ve built something for themselves. We’re not giving them a gift, but we’ve helped them build their own infrastructure, build their own sustainable institutions, and believe me, the job’s not finished when we leave, but they have the capacity to carry it on.

Esther Dyson (06:38):

I’ve adopted, maybe that’s the wrong word, but Muskegon is now yet another place that I feel really at home at. Muskegon’s the community that I work with. The others are Lake County, just north of Union, California, Clatsop, County, northwest of Portland, Oregon, Spartanburg, South Carolina, and North Hartford, Connecticut, in case anybody listening comes from one of them or is nearby.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (07:11):

Yeah. It’s such a refreshing and inspiring model. I’m from Pittsburgh, which is often also an overlooked city in some way. So I really appreciate now that I live in the Bay Area when people from the Bay Area from tech or who have the resources take the attention to look at these communities where really there’s much less attention and the need is there.

Esther Dyson (07:34):

Well, one of them was almost granted. So 42 communities applied. Our CEO, Rick Rush, and I visited 10 of the communities, one of them with Scranton and for a bunch of reasons, we didn’t pick them, but then two years later, David Feinberg showed up from UCLA and he is now gone on to both Google and Cerner, but Scranton became a really interesting community doing many of the same things. So it was a six Wellville when I joined there advisory board and so forth.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (08:09):

I know many people from Scranton so I appreciate that. I’m curious, you mentioned that this was a very different funding model in the sense that you were able to self-fund it, which created quite a bit of it sounds like flexibility, and really to be able to say, “This is what makes sense. This is what we’re going to do,” versus the forcing function that’s often comes with venture investment or nonprofit investment or whatever the source might be. As you look to the future and, hopefully, this model will be replicated in some way and spread into other communities, where do you see the funding coming from to be able to have that flexibility?

Esther Dyson (08:44):

So, honestly, I don’t see a whole lot of people doing what we are doing exactly. It reminds me totally different but another thing that changed my life was this trip to Russia with, of all people, Jack Dorsey. It was a government-led tech tour trip. The guy from the government had a friend who was in the acting business who was doing a film shoot, and then the film shoot canceled so this guy came along, too. His name was Ashton Kutcher. If you’ve ever been shaked by screaming girls right next to you … Anyway, Ashton Kutcher did his very best Steve Jobs’ imitation talking to a bunch of students in Novosibirsk, who a surprising number of them that said they wanted to immigrate to the US because people in the US smile a lot and they work hard and they’re happy. Ashton Kutcher said, “You can smile a lot right here. You can be happy here. You can build things here. You don’t need to go to America.”

Esther Dyson (09:57):

I mean, it was Ashton Kutcher, not me or Steve Jobs, but it’s the same message. You don’t need a bunch of people from outside giving you advice. You can actually do it for yourselves, which is half true, but the other half is it needs to be easier for small communities that don’t have a lot of grant writers to get the government funding because even in Pittsburgh and certainly in Newark and Oakland, there’s all these people who know how to write the grants and nab the money as it comes down from the federal causes, and the school systems, the childcare, the healthcare, all these, what should be, again, public assets are underfunded and inadequate.

Esther Dyson (10:44):

So the real funding model is we as a society need to realize that we need to invest in our people, not just in our bridges and our roads, but giving a community the capacity to do that, giving kids the sense of agency, which I’ll come back to when we talk about CGMs and so forth.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (11:05):

I think so much of where we are with health and healthcare, and like you said, there’s a distinction between them, is really about trying new things because we know that what we’re doing right now isn’t really working in general. So I still admire this approach that you have.

Esther Dyson (11:19):

Yeah. Actually, we do know what works. We just don’t do it, and that’s both we in terms of what we’re funding, but also we as individuals. I mean, everybody knows they should sleep more and eat less processed sugary food and get more exercise, but it’s hard to think ahead. It’s hard to feel that there’s a point. It’s hard to have this sense of agency. You just feel so beleaguered by everything, and it’s creating communities where kids have that positive experience rather than being understimulated not by drugs, but understimulated by loving parents and effective childcare and being fed toddler milk, which is a disgrace to humanity. It’s sweetened milk that destroys your teeth and your metabolism.

Esther Dyson (12:17):

So it’s somehow changing, we talk about at training AIs all the time, and we need to talk more about training babies not to be robots, but to be curious, excited, long-term thinking, kids who feel they make a difference in the world, who love their parents and are loved.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (12:39):

Absolutely. I’m curious, from your perspective, having worked within communities, having coached communities, are there things that everyday people, like something that I can do that helps to start to create this change even in the absence of being formally involved let’s say with a specific initiative, but just ways that I can start to begin to change the tide on some of these things?

Esther Dyson (13:00):

Well, from everybody according to their abilities to each according to their needs, it depends where you are and what you do. I mean, you can do everything from volunteer in your own community to funding. Again, the real issue, I did come from business. We have a quadrant chart, and at the lower left corner, it’s all about at me right now, and in the upper right hand corner, it’s about the community or the country, as large as you can get, but looking both long term into the future and across the community well beyond yourself and your own individual interests. The more you can encourage people around you to think not “How do I get to the end of this?” but “How do I become the beginning of something beyond what I’m doing now? How do I build something that will …” It’s the difference between investing where you create assets that keep producing value one way or another and spending, which just means, again, spending on repair rather than investing in an oil change every year keeps the car healthy and healthy living every year keeps the body healthy and the mind.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (14:20):

Yeah. We’ll link to your quadrant chart so that people can look and see, but I think it’s such a helpful way of framework of thinking about this both, like you say, on the individual level in terms of the way that we choose to spend our time and our resource and energy, and also from a high level in terms of how we’re thinking about this as a collective.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (14:39):

I’m curious, well, first of all, really glad that we went down that road in terms of the questions that have really altered your career because I think it’s such a good thing to start with basically what was the curiosity and then where did it take you. It’s so interesting to hear your story. If we think about it on a day to day basis, are there specific questions that you ask yourself daily or semi-regularly that help you prioritize how you spend your time, your resources, your energy?

Esther Dyson (15:07):

Yeah. I try to do this. Well, I mean, sometimes I get overwhelmed and I want to answer to everybody, “I am not a public resource. I got to focus on the things I’ve committed to, not on everything.” I mean, that’s one important point. Whatever you do, do that effectively. Don’t get too distracted because your job is not to fix the world, it’s to fix your part of it where you can have the most impact. I mean, in the end, your job is also to be a human being and love people and stuff like that. I mean, you need time off and so forth.

Esther Dyson (15:43):

So I swim every day for 50 minutes. I’ve been doing that more or less since I was 18. That is when I do the, “Oh, what did I do wrong yesterday? What did I learn from it? What am I going to say on the podcast today?” What we’re doing at Wellville is having this annual workshop gathering thing in May, and we’re constructing some of the workshops now. So what are we going to do in this workshop? It’s my parking lot for just about everything.

Esther Dyson (16:21):

So the questions will vary, but the attempt is, “What do I need to deal with today? What am I going to get out of this meeting? Do I really need to do that other thing?” That’s when I decide, “That second trip to California just doesn’t make sense,” or “This is what I want to get out of that call,” and it will partly depend on what’s on the schedule, short term and long term, but what makes it valuable is I don’t have pen and paper or I don’t have email to distract me. Just get a little out of the daily hustle. Whether you do it running or in the shower, swimming is actually one of the better ways to do it, but it’s that daily just, “Are you on your path or are you being distracted?”

Lauren Kelley-Chew (17:25):

Did you come naturally to that ritual when you were about 18 or was that something you decided, “I want to move my body every morning. I want to swim every morning”?

Esther Dyson (17:32):

Oh, no. I mean, I loved swimming. I learned swimming when I was four years old, and when I get water at my nose, I still remember Walnut Creek, which is the school where we learned to swim when we lived in Berkeley. There was a swimming pool in my dorm and you didn’t even have to wear a bathing suit. So it was extremely convenient. I just got into the habit and realized how wonderful it was. I wish there was some way that I could help everybody do that because it’s such a blessing, but I mean, the fundamental thing is I don’t decide to swim every day. I figure out how.

Esther Dyson (18:25):

So one of the team members at Wellville used to work for me as my executive assistant back in the ’90s, and if you ever get her lunch, she’ll tell you stories about calling up her tells and asking for their swimming full hour. So sometimes it’s somewhat inconvenient, but the trick is, again, if you talk to habit-forming people and so forth, you say, “I am a swimmer,” not “I must swim.” It’s part of your identity. It’s part of, well, you get up in the morning and you find the pool and with luck you found at the day before so you know where to go and the hours work and so forth, but it was not “intentional”. I mean, honestly, I really didn’t expect to live beyond 30, not because I expected to die, but just because my perspective wasn’t that far out.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (19:26):

When did that change when you started thinking beyond 30?

Esther Dyson (19:30):

Oh, I mean, I don’t remember, but I mean, in some ways, I’ve always thought long term because I think about space travel and civilization and so forth, but I wasn’t focused. I did have a career goal of being the Moscow Bureau Chief for the New York Times, but it was like all these things. It was something to do, but it wasn’t a destination. It was more like a direction.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (20:01):

It’s so interesting, and just to go back to swimming because the reason I asked you whether you just decided to start one day or whether you have not is because of what you said, which is I think these rituals, whatever they are and maybe some people don’t call them rituals, I do think they’re so powerful, but it’s hard sometimes to get started on them. Are there days when you just don’t feel like swimming?

Esther Dyson (20:20):

Actually, no. So I was in Portugal last week and the TMI, but they wanted me on the 7:00 AM shuttle and I persisted and got them to open the pool at 6:00. So I ended up swimming for only half an hour instead of the usual 50 minutes. I felt pretty crappy getting up that early and so forth and so on, but again, the swim was the proper start to the day. So no. It’s more likely that I would, how do I say, two or three times a year for whatever reason the pool doesn’t open, I’m on an overnight flight, so I’ll probably miss two or three days a year. In a sense, I want to prove to myself that I’m not addicted to it so I don’t fall apart, but I really miss it.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (21:26):

Yeah. That’s incredible, and I think it’s such a good model of how to find, whatever it is for any one person, just how to find that place of calm and quiet, really, at least that’s how I feel about running and dancing, which I do almost every day, and it’s just like you, on days when I am not able to do it, I really miss it and I crave it almost, which is it’s interesting.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (21:47):

So let’s talk more about your decision making because I think it’s so interesting what you mentioned about just really deciding to do something or figuring out how to do it. You’ve said that you’ve really made very few decisions where you sat down and thought about the pros and cons, but that it’s more like, and these are your words, it’s more like discovering what, you said, “It’s more like discovering what I’ve already decided. I just didn’t know it yet.” I just love that framework and that sense of curiosity and that you’re following your internal sense of discovery. Was that something that you’ve done from the beginning or was that a muscle that you had to learn how to use?

Esther Dyson (22:22):

I don’t know what it is. So when I was 12, I don’t remember all the details, but student exchanges were in the air. Students were coming from Berlin. This was post-cold war, whatever, and I decided that I wanted to go live in London for a year. My dad was English, and I somehow persuaded my parents that they should help organize this for me like paying for the flights. So I went to live for a year with some friends of my father’s, and I don’t know how I decided that, but clearly, it was my idea and I made it happen.

Esther Dyson (23:11):

So I got this sense of agency or something. I also left school when I was 15 to go to college. I don’t know. Somehow I was thinking about this in preparation for this. Those were not just decisions, but making things happen. With decisions, one of the very best books is The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. The thing about decisions is when you make one, there’s always the possibility of regret, and the way to think about a decision is not just, “Is A or B better?” but if I pick A and it doesn’t work out, how much will I regret it versus if I pick B and it doesn’t work out, how much will I regret it, which is why I’ve never had my nose fixed because I may or may not like my nose, but I’ve got it. Whereas if I fix my nose, then I’m responsible for it, and if I don’t like it, it’s much worse because I regret the stupid mistake I made.

Esther Dyson (24:23):

So there’s something there that a decision can be the right decision and still not turn out very well, but it was actually the best decision. There was a 10% risk it wouldn’t turn out and that 10% happened, but you still made the right decision or I did space training in Russia and I taped on the order of three million for the space training, and then there was this lottery ticket attached, which was I was back up to toss the money that I could have gone, but I paid for the space training. That’s what I got and I’m very happy. The lottery ticket was external. I’m sorry I didn’t get the lottery ticket, but I’m very happy that I got the space training and the six months experience and star soothing and so forth and so on.

Esther Dyson (25:18):

So with decisions, so often you really know what you want. You also know what you’re willing to risk going long, and if you quantify it, you end up getting what you don’t really want. Somehow, I don’t know, I just find if I wait long enough, I’ll know what I want. Sometimes it’s pretty late in the game. I try not to be annoying. It’s not like I cancel meetings 10 minutes advance or something, but somehow, the calculus goes well beyond the pros and cons. It goes to the, “Did I approach this question in the right way? I know my own preferences. I know my own risk tolerance, and I know what I’m more likely to regret.”

Esther Dyson (26:21):

So yeah, somehow there may also be a little bit of … Here’s one of my favorite stories about luck and decisions. So two summers ago, I was walking down the street and there was some constructions. So I went into the street, tripped on the construction, fell over, cracked my femur, and ended up with surgery and being in a walker and stuff for a month or two. So there are two reactions to that. One is, “Oh, my God! I tripped in the street and cracked my femur. I’m so unlucky,” and the other is, “Oh, my God! I could have been killed. I could have been run over by a car and all I did was end up cracking my femur and I ended up spending a month at a friend’s house with a swimming pool just outside of Boston. It was really wonderful.”

Esther Dyson (27:19):

It’s partly how you read stuff in retrospect. Mostly, I feel I’m pretty lucky because something might have gone wrong, but it led to, “Hey, my life’s pretty good. I’m alive. This thing didn’t work out, but because it didn’t work out, I’m now doing something else or whatever.” You need to compare what happened not just to the best thing that could have happened, but also the worst thing that could have happened. So the short answer is I can’t think of any big life decision that I regret and it’s not because I didn’t make mistakes or do stupid things, but because ultimately, I’m pretty happy with my life.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (28:08):

Why do you think that a pro-con list is one of the first things that most American children learn because I agree with you. I don’t think that it necessarily leads to good decision making, and if a anything, I think we’re probably relatively poor predicting what the true pros and cons are. Like in the story you said, who would’ve thought you’d break your femur, right? You probably wouldn’t have written that down in the con list. Likewise, you wouldn’t have written in the pro list, “If I get injured, I’ll spend a month at a friend’s and spending time with a friend and being in the pool.” How do we get away from this mindset? The reason I’m asking is because I think all of these things are connected in terms of changing the way that we think about how we live, changing the way that we think about the impact we have on others.

Esther Dyson (28:49):

If I ran the world, we’d have mandatory parent training. Imagine how well that would go over in this political environment. It does start with babies and loving parents and just a feeling of security not of you need challenges. Again, you need the ability to make mistakes, but to recover from those mistakes. In a sense, it’s the narratives you learn.

Esther Dyson (29:20):

Another great story, TV interview, local banker, some town like Scranton. He says, “Yeah, my dad was an alcoholic, and I just knew from my earliest days that I was going to avoid to drink and become successful because it just gave me that drive to put my life in order and live a useful life serving the community,” and then they interviewed the bum down the street who said, “Yeah. My dad was an alcoholic and it’s just like, ‘What do you expect? I learned from him. I just couldn’t stay off the sauce,’” and of course, they were brothers.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (30:05):

Wow.

Esther Dyson (30:05):

So yes, it’s what happens to you, but it’s also how you process what happens to you and whether you feel you’ve learned from it or it’s destroyed you. I mean, I can sit here in my nice little recording booth telling you all these great things, and if you grow up with toxic parents, you can’t just decide. It’s, in a sense, instead of turtles all the way down, it’s parents all the way up. Your parents weren’t very great parents because their parents weren’t, and somewhere we can interfere with troubled children and help them have one or two people who give them that sense of security and aspiration, and you can do it. You’re not powerless here.

Esther Dyson (31:01):

So it’s a very social thing, but it’s not like just passing a lot. It’s a lot more complicated, but clearly, good childcare, good schools, childcare both for the child and so that the parent can earn living and so forth and so on, those are the things we’re trying to help our communities do in their own communities.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (31:31):

Yeah. Well, and I think that the other thing that I find myself thinking about a lot is also just the way that our education system reinforces I think some patterns that are against growth or a growth mindset if we can call that or risk taking, where you learn from a very young age. Really starting at five or even younger, depending on when you enter school and what school you’re in, that if you take a risk and it doesn’t work out, you will get a bad grade, for example, and that is reinforced basically all through.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (31:58):

Then in addition to that, the result of getting good grades is you get admitted to a college of your choice. So you get a job that you wanted. Then at the end of all of that, we expect people to come out being really risk-seeking or growth-oriented or, like you said, even with the mindset of looking at everything from a much higher level and saying, “Okay. This was disappointing in what happened or this was even really damaging in what happened, but I’m able to reframe it in a way that then is productive to my next step.”

Esther Dyson (32:29):

Yeah, and it’s not just school and it’s not just taking risks, it’s just taking action and feeling that your actions will result in something that you want and the ability to plan rather than that short-term craving, where you’re craving for relief rather than for pleasure, for anything permanent. It’s the short-term mindset versus the building investing mindset that you learned from the people around you.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (33:10):

Let’s talk a little bit about your investing and this decision making model that you’ve been describing or really let’s say discovery as an essential part of the process rather than pros and cons. How has that influenced your investing?

Esther Dyson (33:24):

It’s probably very much of a piece. First of all, I keep telling people, “I’m not actually looking for deals. Enough of them show up,” and that’s, again, luck will find you if you’re willing to be lucky. I mean, I’m certainly always curious and I try very hard to tell people, “Look, I’m not rejecting you. I just don’t have time even to consider you,” which is often true, but first rule, I invest my own money. So if I make a “mistake”, I don’t need to apologize to somebody, and that’s really important because it gives you the ability to, again, make those, if you like, internal implicit decisions.

Esther Dyson (34:11):

Second, I always invest for the education, and then in a sense, the stock is the lottery ticket. So I joined the board of 23andMe because I wanted to learn about genetics. I did a lot of stuff in Russia because, again, I wanted to learn about Russia, whether it was space travel or just the emerging Russian IT economy. In the case of Russia, my lottery ticket did not pay off. The stock market is now basically not operating. So you need to invest in enough things so you look at it overall economically, investing in venture capital brings net positive results. If you invest in enough things, you’re probably going to do pretty well financially.

Esther Dyson (35:08):

So rather than picking for making the most money where my picks are likely not to be, I mean, so much of it is guessing. You really do not know in advance, but I do know that if I invest in a genetics company with a CEO that I like, I’m going to learn a lot about genetics. So I invest in areas that I want to know more about and I get enough lucky wins, but the cost of each company is not a mistake. It’s the cost of an education.

Esther Dyson (35:47):

So I get 10 slices of education and maybe one or two really good wins and one or two mm, and then five that disappear and I can’t remember how much I put in, but I mean, two things. One, you have to have enough capital just to do this. If you invest in only one or two companies, statistically, you’re likely to lose all your money, and that second question is you need an asset base to be able to do that, and people talk about incoming inequality, but asset inequality is even worse because without assets, you simply cannot take the kind of risks I’m talking about. Even if the overall returns are likely to be pretty good, you don’t have the ability to spread your risk enough for it to be reliable.

Esther Dyson (36:43):

That’s part of why I think things like Robinhood are so just really bad for the public, honestly, because what they’re fostering is not investing, but trading and speculating and gambling for many people who really can’t afford to do that.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (37:05):

Are there ways that people who don’t have the resources to formally invest can still take calculated risks in their lives to try to get some momentum around what you’re describing, which is basically some of this is just a volume game if you know that? If you spread right enough bets, how can people start doing this even if they don’t have that asset base?

Esther Dyson (37:24):

Well, I’m not sure that they should. I mean, it’s up to them, but the bigger question is, can you get a job that will give you the time and the money to get trained, to get a better job? Can you find a relative so that you can move to a town where there are jobs? I mean, part of the problem right now is so many people are stuck and they don’t. You need enough of an asset base to launch to get to the next level. Speculating is not the way to do it.

Esther Dyson (37:55):

I mean, the other problem with Robinhood is it creates no actual value. It creates money out of thin air for some lucky people, but it doesn’t, actually. It doesn’t contribute to the general welfare. It might contribute to the GMP, that might contribute to some people’s pockets by creating money, but it doesn’t close or feed anybody. It doesn’t educate them. I mean, I’m overstating it, but it’s just there’s room for a lot of … We still need better food and we need more caregivers. We need a lot of things that are much better ways for people to earn a good living, which should a good living and, again, we should subsidize childcare and I think tax sugar.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (38:47):

Yeah, working for Levels. I have a very specific feel on sugar. No, it’s interesting, and one reason I ask about personal risk and different versions of it is because I think it’s interesting even when you think about what job are you taking. By almost definitionally, if you go to work for a startup, in some ways, I think, for example, by my joining startup, I’m defying in some ways your investing approach, which is I’ve now put the majority of my time, energy, resources into one company. Now, of course, it’s different because, arguably, I have a role in the outcome of the company and I know the company very well, but in some sense, it’s a sequential portfolio I’m building in terms of moving from job to job or hopefully I’ll never leave Levels, but-

Esther Dyson (39:28):

… but you’re learning. I mean, again, if you’re investing in an education as well as taking a job, and I have another handy little motto, which is never take a job for which you are already qualified, so as long as you’re being paid and you’re learning, you’re getting something out of that because even if Levels folded, you could go elsewhere and say, “I have this experience. Hire me,” and they probably would.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (39:55):

I hope so. I really like your approach around education and learning. I’m curious, in addition to your work as an investor and what you’ve described as really building and in some ways as you were describing that, it almost sounds like when you invest, you know you’re going to learn. It’s just some of the learning is more expensive than others, depending on what happens. Are there other things that you do in your day to day to really just make sure that you’re not making the same mistakes twice and that you’re or constantly learning?

Esther Dyson (40:22):

Well, it’s interesting. I discovered something I didn’t really know. I lived in the same apartment in New York City from 1972 to 2019. What I didn’t realize and now is obvious to me in retrospect was I lived at work and then I went home and slept at home, but it really was like a giant bedroom and I was not much of a homekeeper so forth and so on. Then I moved to a new apartment nearby and learned a ton, including, boy was I lucky to be on the top floor because I’d never had a neighbor above me tramping around.

Esther Dyson (41:06):

Anyway, two months ago, I moved into almost 40 years in this one place, three years learning, and then realizing what it was that I really wanted, which is a nicer place for the swimming pool in the basement that opens at 6:00 AM every day of the week. I’m also beginning to … It’s a really nice place and I’m now living there. I go home at 5:00 or 6:00 PM and then I sometimes work at home, but I live there in a way that I hadn’t before. I’m learning all kinds of stuff about, and this partly happened during COVID. I learned how to cook like trial and error, and I learned everything from how the new washing machine works and I’m enjoying it. Half of me says, “This takes so much stupid time,” and the other half of me says, “Yes, but I’m learning things and it’s quite wonderful.”

Esther Dyson (42:20):

One of my all time favorite trip experiences was when a tour guide slash interpreter in Tallinn, Estonia offered to take me to … She was a moonlighting dentist. She offered to take me to a museum. I said, “I’d really rather visit your dental clinic instead.” I’d learned so much about how the economy worked. It was a government facility, of course. This was in 1989. They were advertising in Finland to get Finnish people to come down and pay hard currency for dental services, and they were going to start their own private dental clinic. You get a sense of what’s really going on in the economy and in people’s minds from they’re just going backstage. It’s always more interesting than watching the performance.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (43:15):

I feel the same. I feel the same. I want to make sure that we have more time to talk about Wellville. Actually, I think this is connected to learning. I’m curious, have there been things that you’ve especially learned about what it takes to coach communities to create behavior change? I’d be curious just, what has come out of that so far?

Esther Dyson (43:32):

Well, the first is you have to have people’s trust and it takes years. We went to Niagara Falls, which in the end also did not work out. A local pastor said, “We know people like you. You come here and you spend a year or two, and then you go away. We don’t need your kind.” With varying degrees, there was, “Yeah, we’re interested in what we think you’re offering, but is there any money, and what do you really want out of us?” It varies. After three, four years, they begin to trust you.

Esther Dyson (44:17):

The good thing about us is we don’t live there and we don’t want their jobs. So every community has politics, but we’re able to infiltrate pretty well without disrupting, if you like. So there’s that, and that’s why after, I’m not sure exactly when, I mean, again, this was one of these decisions that just emerged like, “Yeah, five years is not long enough. My stocks are doing well enough that I can commit to 10 years of my life and 10 years of funding for this thing,” and that happened the third or fourth year, I’m not sure, but, again, it was a slow decision.

Esther Dyson (45:10):

What we’re learning now is thinking about succession planning and how to get the community to think about that, too, and foster the next generation of people. We originally thought it was going to be much more data-driven than it is. It really is so much about the culture. You hope to see that reflected in the diabetes numbers and the smoking numbers and the incarcerations, but that, ultimately, it takes more than 10 years because it is the earlier you go in somebody’s life, the easier it is to have an impact and the longer it takes to see that impact.

Esther Dyson (45:58):

So we’re really hoping Wellville will be over, it will turn into some a documentaries and stories and advocacy project, but our friendships in the community will continue. So I’ll still be going there. I’m also now on the board of a company in Grand Rapids, which is the airport that basically serves Muskegon. So we certainly are looking at the numbers and they matter, but we’re much more looking at the systems and the institutions that are being built. In the end, people are more persuaded by stories than by data. Anyway, we want to have both.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (46:46):

Trust is such an important thing, and it’s something we think about a lot at Levels, knowing that for the vast majority of people, their experience of whether it’s people coming into the community or their interaction with the healthcare system, and I’m saying healthcare on purpose here.

Esther Dyson (47:00):

Yes. Right.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (47:00):

That it has been in some ways negative and not in a trusting environment or structure. So it’s really undoing a lot of that in order to try to create that trust. I so appreciate what you said about things just being slow. I’m curious, and maybe you’ve answered this already, but when you think about when Wellville reaches the end of its 10 years, is there any specific thing where you’ll say, “Okay. This was successful,” or is it, like you said, it’s really about the relationships that you’ve built and the things that have begun to change?

Esther Dyson (47:29):

Well, it won’t be 100% successful. I mean, there’s not in particular where some persistent institutions built, where some relationships and collaborations established. Net, net, do children grow up with better access to childcare, with better schools? Do their parents get training so that they can have better jobs? In a sense, if I had to interview one very small subset, I’d probably interview the real estate people and say, “Do people want to live here?” because people, again, some people might do pros and cons, but people make a decision to move in or move out.

Esther Dyson (48:18):

I mean, many people don’t have that decision, but net, net, is this a place where people want to raise their kids or do they desperately want to go somewhere else? When they’re grown up, do they want to come back or do they want to get the hell out? If you had to measure one number, which, of course, is a hard number to measure, anyway, but it would be that, and it’s almost like the net promoter score for life in Muskegon. Beyond that high school graduation rates, diabetes rates, do people trust the healthcare system? Are people healthy? What is the county health ranking? Stuff like that.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (49:01):

You had started an initiative of putting CGMs on kids.

Esther Dyson (49:04):

Yes. Okay.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (49:05):

I’m so curious what the outcome of that was.

Esther Dyson (49:08):

Yeah. Well, of course, to some extent, it was from Levels, but even before Levels, I used to think, “Boy, again, if I could run the world and do the mandatory parent training, I would also give every second grader a CGM so they could learn about metabolism,” but I was at the boys and girls club watching. It was really great. The first room, they were giving book reports and talks, and kids were presenting and other kids were listening and so forth. In the second room, they were doing art projects. In the third room, they were listening to a healthcare video and falling asleep. I thought, “There’s got to be a better way.”

Esther Dyson (49:57):

So here and there I would mention this idea, and then Rick met somebody from Abbot and we started down the road could we do a study, do it as a study so it would be funded, but work with the kids at the boys and girls club and give them CGM so that they could analyze, so that they could learn about their bodies using their own data, which is so much more interesting than reading about it in a book or watching a boring video.

Esther Dyson (50:29):

We wanted to do something that was, again, would help people learn from their own data. So we talked with Laura, who bless them, were also interested. We are now in year zero, which started last September. We hope year zero will conclude by next September and then we will start year one, but the thing that I love about this project is the kids get the rings, so do whatever staff at the boys and girls club want one, and fortunately, quite a few of them do.

Esther Dyson (51:06):

It’s great when the teachers and the kids learn together and so forth and so on. We are learning a lot about IRBs. The person running the project is a doctor who used to live in Muskegon and is now in Battle Creek, but comes back and knows a lot of the kids because she worked at the local FQHC. So the basic idea is look at your own data and understand how your behavior affects your sleep, understand how your sleep affects … Just they all interact, your sleep, your diet, your behavior, and your parents’ behavior. You can’t change your parents’ behavior, but you can change how you react to it, back to the, “Are you lucky or unlucky compared to what?” So this is IRB terminology, Independent Review Board clinical study terminology. The primary outcome is not, can these kids sleep more or can they lose weight?

Esther Dyson (52:13):

Unfortunately, everybody assumes everybody wants to lose weight, and in many cases that’s true, but what we are measuring is their sense of agency. In other words, these kids are often bullied, told what to do, but what we want to help them learn is you can make up your own mind. You can determine your own future. If you want to lose weight, you know how, but it’s up to you to decide whether you want to. If you want to sleep more, this will help you know if you did it, but we’re not telling you what to do. We’re just helping you understand how your own body works.

Esther Dyson (52:54):

By the way, we’re also going to tell you about the metabolism of the food system, which runs on money the way your body runs on nutrients. I love that. Now, we will have objective measures because this is a proper scientific study, blah, blah, blah, and it’s one of my favorite projects, but it’s not the essence of Wellville, which is much more about general community things. On the other hand, it’s a real model for being self-aware, feeling a sense of agency, and feeling in control, and managing your own destiny.

Lauren Kelley-Chew (53:35):

In many ways, this brings us back to our conversation started, which is the power of asking questions. I think it’s really beautiful that you’re taking that natural superpower of yours and you’re really training the generation in how to do that and what you learn when you do that and what that process is like. So I think it’s really an inspiring way of doing it and I’ll be so curious to follow the results of this and hopefully one day to get CGMs on them as well and see what the results of that are.

Esther Dyson (54:04):

Absolutely.