Growing Up With Freeman Dyson

Description: Physicist Freeman Dyson wrote of his daughter that her main childhood advantage was being neglected. She saw it more as freedom.

Your father said your main advantage growing up was being neglected. Do you agree? 

Esther Dyson: In to some extent yes, wasn’t that I was yeah home was during the thing that I wasn’t guided, I wasn’t told what to do, I was given a lot of freedom and also lot of responsibilities, so when I was 13 I went to live in London on my with another family but out of my own family and when I was 15, I left home to go to college and then after a year of college I took some time often his like to round Europe and then went to live in Morocco with my boy friend and for each of these things they basically said if you want to do it, go ahead and do it, be responsible for what happens and bless you so I was in a sense encouraged but not manipulated. You could call that neglect, but I was pretty benign.

 When did you get involved in technology?

Esther Dyson: Yeah, well I got in to it. It was kind of I took it for granted and then realized there was no way I could compete with my mother and my father so I kind of avoided it in college and thought I would be a novelist and then I become a business journalist but then in the end I got back ended technology because it was the most interesting thing to write about.

Recorded on: March 21 2008