Get clear on your objective function, and one way that I've gotten clear on it is trying to think about it from future me because five years from now, I'm not going to give a if I made the presentation slightly better, but I'm going to care a lot about what kind of relationship I have with my daughters, and that means that the next action, the next thing I do today and tomorrow, those will translate into the relationship with her, right?
Not to be morbid, but just again, most of us just aren't really tuned into an awareness that our lives will come to an end.
We try to pretend like we're going to live forever and just not think about it.
And the horror of it is that we succeed, right?
We mostly manage to just go live our life and eat ice cream and go to work and go on vacation and do what we do.
To me, an awareness and mindfulness that our lives will come to an end punctuates reality in a way that requires me to rethink my priorities. Today my guest is J. M. Nickels. J. M.
has been a product leader at Waymo, DoorDash and Uber.
He's also an engineering manager at Groupon, and before that an equity trader at Getco.
At Uber, he built and launched the very first version of Uber Pool and then went on to lead the team responsible for the infrastructure and algorithms powering the economic and logistics brain behind Uber's matching and pricing systems.
At DoorDash, he was head of product for DoorDash platform.
At Waymo, he led product for the commercialization of autonomous ride hailing and last mile delivery.
And he recently returned to Uber to lead product for the mobility team.
This conversation is a unique and beautiful mixture of hard skills, soft skills, tactics, and emotions.
I won't give away too much about the conversation, but this is a powerful one.
Tears are shed, stories are shared, and I'm confident you'll become a better leader and human having listened to J. M.' s insights and lessons.
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.
It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously.
With that, I bring you J. M. Nickels. J. M.
, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Lenny. Thanks for having me.
I'm thrilled to be here.
Really appreciate your dedication to helping product managers improve their craft and up-level.
We've done a lot of great researches out there for that, and coaching and development, as I'm sure we'll get into, is a passion of mine as well, so we have a lot of shared interests there.
Oh, I really appreciate that.
I want to start with a phrase that came up again and again when I ask people what to talk to you about from your colleagues, and this phrase is conscious leadership.
What is conscious leadership?
What does this phrase mean?
To me, leadership is broadly defined as having influence in the world, and so by that definition, to me, everyone is a leader because we all have influence in some way.
It's not about whether you're a manager or not, it's like I have influence on my kids or my partner or my community, or the world, the way I vote, the way I show up.
So we all have influence.
We're all co-creating influences of each other.
So that's the leadership piece.
The conscious piece then is becoming more aware, waking up.
To me, it's like learning more about my interior world, what my background is, my biases.
We all inherit certain belief systems from our parents or our church or our community, and a lot of times they kind of go unquestioned and then they end up in conflict.
And so it's really just about becoming more aware and then taking responsibility for the influence that I have.
So yeah, taking responsibility for my influence in the world.
As you talk about this, something that came up and something that I thought about as I was preparing for this episode is this idea of soft leadership, the power of soft skills and just how important that is in success.
Is there something there that comes up when I say that?
Just the power of soft skills and the importance of those in being successful. Yeah, it's, what was it?
Theodore Roosevelt, speak softly and carry a big stick?
Yeah, I think I've evolved in that department.
I think when I was younger in my career, I thought it was really important that we got to show up to the meeting and have the right slides and be the loudest, rightest voice in the room, and that's the way to have influence.
And there's certainly a place for having leadership in a meeting and presenting a point of view and helping guide the narrative, but to me, yeah, I would say I've evolved more towards sitting back.
It's also as I've become a more senior leader, I'm aware that there are power dynamics there.
There's imbalances where junior folks don't feel as comfortable speaking up or I say something's not a good idea and then, "Well, I don't want to disagree with J. M."
So it's like, back to being more aware of my influence in the world.
I really try to spend more time being mindful of that and say, I want to hear from other people first.
I want to create space and I don't need to win the argument in the meeting.
There can be a follow-up.
It's not like this is my last chance to say something, but that's also more true when you're more senior because when you're more junior, it's like, well, this is the one presentation I have with Dara for the next six months. I really got to nail it.
And so the pressure is a little bit different. Yeah.
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There's a couple of threads I want to follow here, but first, I was thinking as you're talking, when people think Uber and people that work at Uber, I don't think they imagine people like you.
And I know you were there early and then you joined again.
Was that ever like a, "Is this a place for me?"
Did you ever go through that struggle or is it just, yeah, I don't know?
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I would say I have been fortunate to experience probably three Ubers at this point. We joke about Uber 1.
0, the Travis era, and you hear a lot about in the media the kind of bad parts of that, but there were some really good parts too.
I mean, I think there was a lot of...
Like when I joined in 2014, there was this mission of making transportation as reliable as running water for anyone anywhere, which is bold, audacious, and maybe a little bit pretentious from a little bit of Silicon Valley edge, but you could feel the electricity in the air.
There was this energy and excitement like we're doing something transformational, autonomy is coming, car ownership will change.
And it just like, feel, like my vibration.
And then, yeah, the good parts of that era were, Travis was a very great visionary product leader, and we started ATG and Elevate and these future-forward things and the way he would conduct product reviews, I learned a lot.
It was stressful at the time, but looking back, I was like, wow, I learned a lot.
But yeah, I would say it was not a very conscious leadership sort of place.
You're right, it was like many organizations that run on fear because you can do that, carrots and sticks do work.
But actually that's kind of how I found this work is it was in 2015 and I was a very junior product manager at that point, in over my head in a fast-growing place.
And in these weekly reviews with Travis as we were building out Uber Pool, and I had a six-month-old daughter, my firstborn, and we had just moved to San Francisco from Chicago.
So my whole life was in flux and it was a very stressful place, and I was like, "I think I'm going to snap.
I don't think I can handle this."
And that's kind of what led me to start to explore this sort of inner work and meditation and sort of finding a way out of that.
And that's what got me interested in bringing it to teams too, is because I remember I was in one meeting where we were working on this future pricing thing, which is rider pricing, driver pricing, incentives, and how we bring surge pricing and all that together.
And it gets very, I'll go heavy, and we have all these PhDs in the room, some of the best minds in the world.
We were able to hire people like Garrett van Ryzin, who was the foremost [inaudible 00:10:04] more person from Columbia and other people.
But everyone's back to lizard brain, everyone's arguing.
They're like, "Well, no, I think we should do it this way.
We should do it this way." And I was like, huh.
As much as I enjoy the content of this, believe me, I'm an algo PM end to end, I love that stuff.
But I was like, I don't think this conversation actually needs another PhD, or I'm not even PhD, but content expert.
It's like what we need here is a way to shift again, back out of that fear, threat, righteousness sort of state into a more co-creative, collaborative, open-minded, curious, trusting sort of space.
And that got me interested in pursuing more skills in coaching of individuals and teams.
But yeah, to your Uber question, yeah, the Uber 1. 0 was crazy. Uber 2.
0 was kind of like, Travis is out, the board is feuding, is leaking to Mike Isaac, whatever.
And then Dara comes in and the peacemaker and then tries to stabilize, but the IPO is rocky.
And so now I would say we're in Uber 3.
0, which it's full pirate ship to navy, in Reid Hoffman's words, a profitable company.
We're printing free cashflow, we're in the S&P 500, we've established the independent contractor model in a lot of states and jurisdictions, and it's like there's less risk of that model changing.
And yeah, I would say we're in an era now of Cambrian explosion of different types of transportation.
The company really just built the UberX model and scaled it out to the world.
That's primarily how we got here.
And now it's like we're going out for all these different new sort of modalities, whether it's reserving a ride in advance or shared rides or renting a car or buses, and then different supply types too.
It's not just contracted, we have a lot of fleets in the platform, we now have a lot of taxi drivers in the platform.
You've seen we've signed deals with Waymo and Cruise and other autonomist players.
So I feel like we're now at the beginning of another era of Uber and transportation, that the next decade or two, it's going to be super exciting.
One quick tangent, UberX, a previous guest shared that the name UberX came from...
it was just like the internal code name, UberX, we'll figure out a real name later, and then it stuck and no one had a better name. Is that true? Yeah, that's right. I think that's right. Amazing.
When I joined, we were already scaling UberX rapidly. I joined in early 2014. That's amazing.
But I did help name Uber Pool, Uber Pool, which I selflessly like to bring back.
It got renamed to Share during my external APM rotation. Okay.
I want to come back to the thread that I pushed us off of, which is you talked about, you made this really interesting point about emotions, and this is something I've been learning myself recently with having a kid and also a couple of previous guests.
So you say that when you have...
so you're in this meeting, you're stressed, there's a lizard brain kicking in.
Something's like, "Oh, Dara's going to think I suck and it's going to really screw my career if I mess up this presentation."
Your advice there is very counterintuitive, I think for a lot of people, which is accept that emotion.
Because when I feel stressed and nervous in a meeting, I'm not, "Embrace the nervousness, let it out."
It's more I'm just like, "No, it's fine. Going to be okay. Don't worry about it."
Talk about why that is actually more effective. Yeah, yeah.
It's like my daughter the other day had some nightmares and she was like, "Dad, how do I stop thinking thoughts about the nightmare or whatever?" And I said, "You can't.
Don't try to stop the thought. Just allow it.
Let me show you why that doesn't work."
I said, "Don't think of a pink elephant.
What did you just think of?"
And she's like, "A pink elephant."
And then now she thinks it's hilarious and she tells her sister, "Don't think of a pink elephant."
But yeah, I think you're right.
It is a little counterintuitive, but one of my first coaches actually had a great phrase, what you resist will persist and what you fear will appear.
And so in my experience, this is another reason why becoming more aware of my internal world has been so important.
I have more agency than I realized on the outcome of my experience.
And so when I think a thought like, Dara might think I suck and then I have a thought that I suck, that can become a self-enforcing negative feedback loop where I have a thought that creates stress, anxiety, fear, and then that triggers more thoughts and we call it cognitive emotive loop where you're kind of in this cycle of thinking stressful thoughts and then having unpleasant, anxious, fearful feelings.
And so one way to break that is to just allow it and not try to fight it with other thoughts.
So the advice is very tactically, so you're in a meeting with Dara, you're stressed about something.
Just allow it, let it be.
Don't try to pretend like it's not there or don't try to convince yourself- Well, that would be the first step, is just to allow whatever's here, thoughts and emotions are rising.
They come, they go, they're transient. It's not permanent.
There's a lot of wisdom I think in the Buddhist lineage around those concepts.
And then the next piece for me, once I can take a breath and relax a little bit, is coming home to the fact that I...
and this is a little more radical for some people, I don't actually need Dara to approve of me in my presentation in order to be okay.
What I'm up to over here is trying to force self-worth and self-love from within.
And so we talk about approval, control and security.
It's very easy to look for that from the world. Do you approve of me?
And if not, can I control outcomes to get approval or get security and get the job, the bank account, the house, whatever it is?
But what I kind of woke up to at one point was that as long as I was going out there looking for all that stuff to try to complete something inside of me that was missing, it's like I was a hungry ghost.
It's like, it doesn't matter how many Michelin star meals and promotions and money and title and whatever.
It's like it's never enough.
It's like you kind of enjoy it for a little bit and then you get back to like, hm, you know?
So it's like a never ending sugar addiction.
And so that's the next step for me is allow it.
Yes, allow the emotion, allow the thought.
Come home to, "I am okay even Dara does think I suck."
And then also it's not permanent, right?
It's like sure, there might be some high stakes things in life where you only get one shot, but for the most part it's like if I didn't do a great job on this presentation, there'll be another one. It's okay.
And think of it as practice.
The other thing is from the fear threat state, I'm like, uh-oh, this is a risk, alarm bells, my career could be over.
Whereas if I'm in that trusting, curious, open space, it's like this is an opportunity for feedback. How can I learn?
How can I get to become a better presenter?
It's like the feedback from others is no longer a threat. It's actually a gift.
It's like information that I can use or not use to alter how I show up in the future and the skills I develop and all that good stuff.
I imagine some people may hear this and feel like if Dara or Travis or whoever thinks I suck, my career is at stake and that really matters and everything's going to fall apart in my life because I get fired, there's stakes involved with messing up.
Is there anything that helps you get past that and not worry so much about just this trickle effect of all the things that could go wrong if you mess something up in an important high stakes meeting or presentation? Yeah.
Again, and maybe it is a little paradoxical, but what I found was the more I focused on how I show up and optics and having a good deck and all this, the less I got promoted and then the more I dropped focusing all that.
Because for my first few years of Uber, I was a senior PM and then I finally got my groove and started kind of moving through the product ladder.
And it was really correlated to me at least, maybe causal, with dropping a lot of the focus on the presentation and how I show up and whether people like this or not, and just really focusing on the work.
It's like, you know what?
I am here to be a conduit from what wants to happen in the world of transportation and mobility and shared rides is one that I've always been particularly passionate about, so that's a good example, and then how can I get present and listen to what wants to happen next in the world of shared rides?
And there's lots of different ways we can take the product and all that.
And it's really about, I want to make a fucking awesome product, right?
And it's like, whether people like me or think I'm a good PM or presenter, as long as I manifest a great product into the world that makes riders better off, drivers better off, cities better off, less congestion, all these things, that to me is the reward.
And sure, in order to manifest that, it is often helpful to communicate things, present, align, all those sort of things.
But those are a means to a more powerful and transformative end than just my career.
I'm tapping into a larger purpose and sense of belonging and identity and sort of meaning.
And from that place, it's like I've just dropped the kind of egoic, self-centered focus on whether I did good in the presentation or not.
And then yeah, maybe paradoxically, by doing that, it actually goes better and we do great work and it gets recognized.
Wow, that is fascinating.
To make that work, you need to really connect with the mission of the company you're working at.
You really need to believe this is very important and very meaningful.
So maybe that could be an issue for people if they don't really care about what the company's doing, it's going to be hard to allow for that approach. Totally, totally.
It's interesting that you say that optics aren't as important.
I think the reason I think about this as you talk about, a lot of people feel like there's the work and then there's talking about the work, making the work, the optics of what you did is really, really important. And I love to hear.
Nobody wants to do that, but they always get this advice.
So important, optics, how you share the impact you've done, how you represent yourself.
I guess, is there anything else you can share there about just helping people relax about that aspect of their job and without being so critical? Yeah.
And to be clear, I do think it's important.
It can't be all work and no optics or all optics and no work.
There does need to be a balance there, and I think it does change depending on the size of the company and the level of seniority.
When you're an IC, you're probably hopefully doing more actual work, and leaders are supporting them and presenting and communicating that work so that they get.
I mean, the optics does matter, right?
At some senior level, you do spend more time on that, and it does have influence, back to the influence piece, which is like, how will I communicate an idea and the need for engineering resourcing and so forth might mean that team gets more engineers or doesn't get more engineers, or we do this project or we don't, right?
Because at the end of the day, executive resource allocation is largely based on the, quote-unquote, "optics layer". So it does matter. I want to be clear.
I'm not saying it doesn't matter, but to me, again, it's more about that's a means to an end.
It's not about the optics itself.
It's like say what the Buddha is saying, don't mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon.
And the finger pointing at the moon could be the presentation, the OKR, you know, whatever.
And it's like, that's not the actual outcome we care about.
That's an input to the output that really matters, which is the work, the product. Okay.
I'm going to shift this to hard skills and another kind of direction.
So another thing that came up a bunch when I was asking people what you're amazing at and what you're really good at is strategy and vision.
I had this quote from one of your colleagues, Brent Goldman, "J. M.
thinks big, has lots of great ideas, will 'yes, and' to other people's ideas, will inspire everyone around him to be more creative, ambitious, and hardworking.
He doesn't climb hills, he finds bigger mountains and will bring you there."
So along these lines, say someone comes to you and wants to build these skills, wants to get better at strategy, wants to get better at vision, which is something basically every product leader is trying to get better at and every leader wants to get better at, what advice do you generally share?
How does one improve in these areas? Yeah, thank you.
I appreciate the compliment. Thank you, Brent. That is a great quote. Wow.
Yeah, I mean there's no magic toolkit or manual.
I've long ago given up on the notion that I'm one book away from the perfect elusive answer to whatever plagues you in life.
And there's obviously lots of books about strategy and you get into all that.
I guess for me, a couple of things have been helpful.
One is you mentioned earlier finding a mission that you're really passionate about.
I think it would be hard for me to come up with a strategy for improving the healthcare system.
It's like, sure, it's important.
I hope someone does it and figures out how to deal with HIPAA and whatever, all this stuff, but it's just not for me.
It's not my purpose, mission and vision in life.
And so step one is, am I working at a place and in a product area in which I have a tremendous amount of passion?
Because for me, that is the fuel and the motivation that helps me break through to getting the strategy. That's the first step.
So that's where I feel enormously lucky because again, this revolutionizing transportation and car ownership and what happens with autonomy and form factors and future of cities is something that I'm super excited about.
I think about my daughters growing up and having a different world to live in that's safer and more environmentally friendly, all this stuff, and I get really jazzed when I think about, wow, the work I do could actually impact their future lives and other people.
It's like, whoa, I can feel the chills right now.
It's just super motivating.
So that's the first place, just getting myself fired up.
And then the next thing I guess that's been helpful is I've deeply immersed myself.
I haven't really jumped around between crypto and gen AI, this stuff, and a lot of people do that.
It's great, nothing wrong with that, but I've been in this largely focused on mobility space for 10 years now with some stints over in the restaurant tech and delivery side, but very related in terms of last mile logistics.
And so I think it's hard to come up with a great strategy if you've only been working in an area for six months.
Especially things like this, they're super nuanced.
Shared rides is another a good example where it's a super hard problem to crack and it's going deep on that for a long time is a precursor to being successful.
The other thing I would say though is people always talk about first principles thinking, but if there's truth in it, I think that's like when Elon's like, "Well, why does the rocket cost a gazillion dollars to launch?
And there's no reason they have to throw away the materials and blah, blah, blah."
One example might be, why do we need a 4,000 pound vehicle to move a human three miles? Okay, well...
Or even a couple of humans.
We do an Uber Pool or a Share, and you move two humans or three humans, even then that's pretty inefficient.
If you think about just the physics there, the energy expenditure.
And that's where I think you might come up with bikes and scooters and little other things.
And sure it's not always, it's raining or you want the car, but that's sort of an example of why questioning why are things the way they are, and then is the way they are super inefficient or not optimal in some sense?
And that is often a doorway to opportunity to see, okay, well maybe things could be different.
And so I kind of extend that at a larger level to the future.
My general thing is just like, yeah, that's the mountain thing is I try to just close my eyes and imagine the future as far out as I can.
It's like five years from now, 10 years from now, whatever.
And it's develop a really salient picture of what that looks like.
It's like, we could do this right now, it's okay.
10 years from now, what could San Francisco look like? Or some city?
What happens to the parking spaces?
Are there still parking garages? Are those parks now?
What are the modes of transport?
Are there bus-like things that are autonomous that are connecting people to bikes and scooters?
And how are people living?
Do they live in the far suburbs even more because autonomy and they have a nicer house and they come in, or is all the space repurposed and actually it's cheaper to live in the city because we compact things, blah, blah, blah.
It's not even about having the right one, it's more just developing some sort of picture of the future that gets you fired up.
And then yeah, you got to go articulate that and communicate it and get people to come on the journey with you.
But from that picture, it's like, well, first principle, what's going to be true 10, 20 years from now?
Well, autonomy is a given.
I think most people would probably agree with that, and we'll probably solve it with just cameras and won't need lidar because humans don't have lidar.
The cost of vehicles and sensors will come down, remote support will come down, and at some point it'll be super cheap and it's like, okay, I can extrapolate, that will be a thing.
Separate from which player wins.
I'm not saying I can predict the ecosystem of companies that will win here.
It's more about just the underlying dynamics.
And then that would be one, and another one would be sharing.
It's like, well, a lot of people are like, "Oh, well, once we have cheap autonomous cars, everyone can just have their own super cheap Uber, Tesla or whatever it is here in the city."
And you're like, "Well, that doesn't work because then we're going to hit this induced demand concept," which is what economists call it, and you used to, when text messages cost 50 cents a piece, how many did you send versus now when it's free, it's in the millions.
Same thing when they add a lane to a highway, the traffic just gets just as bad as before because more people drive and so forth.
So if we flood the streets with super cheap autonomous cars with single occupancy, we're just going to have even more good luck than we do right now.
Maybe we'll do The Boring Company thing and dig tunnels, but that seems unlikely.
So then for me, it's like, well, from first principles, shared rides is going to continue to be an important part of the future of transportation.
And other modalities where yeah, back to the three mile thing, it's like, well, there probably will be various form factors of bikes, scooters and little mini golf cart things and whatever we end up building.
And so that's hopefully an example of how I try to think about what are the likely things to be true in the future, and then how does that lead to a potential ecosystem and strategy around what we might build towards that future.
This is great because this is something everyone can do, and there's all this talk of creating a vision, painting a vision, communicating a vision, and what you're describing is how to actually sit there and think about what it might look like.
Sit there, close your eyes and in your head visualize in the next five or 10 years, what does the future actually look like?
And do you do this in a state of if we were to do this product and change, or is it just even if we're not around, here's where the future is going to go most likely, which direction do you usually take?
Yeah, that's a good question.
I think you could probably do either.
I typically like to start with the former, which is just like, what will the world move towards absent of me?
Just trying to pick a bird's-eye view of what I think the trajectories are and trends and what's going to happen.
And then yeah, you could apply a lens of, okay, if we were to build product XYZ or have the strategy, how might we influence the outcome or benefit from it, or is it in congruence with that or is it rubbing against that and trying to change that?
Either could be good, you might say it's a tailwind or a headwind, both are overcomeable, but having some awareness of the relationship between those things is good.
And I think transportation, Uber, Waymo, in theory it might be easier to visualize that future and how exciting that might be versus a B2B SaaS payroll app or some photo sharing thing.
But on the other hand, not necessarily, right?
What in the future in 10 years, how are people going to be paid?
How do people work at companies?
I think there's an opportunity to do that no matter what you're building.
Is this something you actually do?
You just sit there in the office, close your eyes and just imagine?
Is this more of an iterative process where you get with your team, how do you actually practice this?
Yeah, it's not like something you can just schedule 30 minutes for in the middle of your day of packed OKR reviews and random one-on-ones and meetings.
It's like, I like to do it on my own at first unless it's something that I already have an outline for and I'm ready to move into a team space.
So for me, it's like, yeah, can I get into a quiet contemplative space?
So yeah, I like to go for a run and that obviously gives me ideas, or I'll go for a hike up in Marin and sometimes I'll just think of stuff or jot something down or make a voice note while I'm doing that to get things going.
But yeah, the first step for me is just getting out of the craziness of day-to-day.
To me, it's still insane how many product manager, leaders of all kinds just run the schedule of back to back meetings, 30-minute review, big meaty topics, you run out of time, run to the next thing, answer a bunch of emails, and then cram some PRDs in there.
It's like, it doesn't work.
And so I'm a big fan of carving out time, again, first for myself, a couple hours, whatever, where I can just get out of the day-to-day craziness and get into that head space of five, 10 years from now.
It's just a different place.
So you need to transition to that.
And then bring that to teams.
If I have an outline of that kind of future of transportation in my head, I might share that with a group of folks and we'll come together also for some extended period of time.
We recently had an all-day Monday thing where eight of us came into the office to talk about future of marketplace, and it was super productive.
It was like, laptops down, we're going to spend all day together on a whiteboard. It's like a lost art.
People don't use the whiteboards anymore.
But yeah, and then from there it's getting more people and then you can kind of iterate on it.
It's like I had some vision of the future and someone points out something that is a little bit off with it or has a better idea.
Then you move into co-creation. But I love that.
It's like Pixar calls the brain trust.
If you read [inaudible 00:32:28] book, how they come up with a Toy Story and Inside Out and all these things, is they have this group of people that just sits around riffing on ideas.
And again, there's no judgment, there's no attachment to being right.
They're in a co-creative sort of space where they're just like co-exploring and riffing with each other.
And I love to be in that space with other PMs and engineers and data scientists.
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Something I've started to do, which is hard, but I find really valuable is when I'm driving to not play anything on the radio, not listen to any podcasts, and it's so unnatural and it's like, oh, this is hard.
I don't want my brain to just go...
you don't trust your brain to go to a place that's fun, but it always does.
It always ends up being like, oh, that was so interesting just to think of this idea that just came up.
So I've been trying to do that, and that's such a simple thing to do.
Just don't turn anything on.
Well, it's not really good for your podcast business to tell people not to listen to podcasts.
Okay, everyone, we're cutting this.
What I find really helpful is playing Lenny's podcast every time I'm out and about.
No, but there's something to what you said, which is there's always a lot of content out there to pursue, and I've been in that mode where I'm like, yeah, more content, more...
But yeah, actually similar to you, spend a lot of time now not listening to anything.
Go on a hike where you don't listen to a podcast or music on your commute and see what happens. You might be surprised. Yeah.
And it always ends up being like, oh, that was cool.
And that's where shower ideas come from and all these things.
Maybe just to see if there's something here, in this meeting that you have, this ideation brainstorming meeting, is there anything that came out of that that was really surprising or new from a recent experience?
Is there anything there of just like, oh wow, we really uncovered this potential wrinkle of the future that we really need to think about differently?
Well, it wasn't maybe a specific wrinkle, but one of the things that we're thinking a lot about, like I'm fortunate to be involved in trying to help develop and articulate a multi-year three-year product or even overall tech strategy for the mobility business at Uber.
And one of the, I guess big ahas for us is as we move away from the, in some ways simpler world of UberX being the predominant product, which is it used to be pretty simple.
It's kind of like a taxi meter on the driver's side.
There's a time and distance rate that everybody gets, and then on the rider's side it's like, sure, there's some surge pricing based on supply and demand, but it's one product, it's pretty straightforward.
And so this future of multi-modality and on the both demand side and the supply side is what makes the marketplace even more complex and challenging to build.
And so it was kind of all this around, okay, well now that we have taxis in the platform and we have fleet providers and we're starting to add Waymos and Cruise and other things, we have to have a marketplace that's aware of those different types of supply and which one might be available for what trips and how to think about cost and quality and allocation of trips and all that.
And then on the demand side, it's like, yeah, we've got all these different products like shared rides and reserved rides and comfort and X and priority, and it's like how do we think about how to price those relative to each other?
How do we think about which one's to show which user?
How do you think about the ranking and so forth?
And then that all has feedback loops into the pricing and matching itself as well.
So the dynamics of the thing, when I think about the future of marketplace, Uber, is like, whoa.
And I don't think anyone's ever built that.
That's the super cool thing about it.
I think we have the best logistics marketplace tech on the planet and we built something that no one else has ever built, relative to digital marketplaces, for example, just different physical world requirements.
And then this next arc of what I described of thinking about different types of supply and different kind of demand channels just adds even more complexity to that.
But the aha was like, I guess, yeah, we got to think about all that stuff and think about how the supply and demand relate to each other and yeah, it's going to be cool.
It's just an infinitely cited marketplace now. That's wild.
One last nugget I wanted to just reinforce that you shared about how to become better at strategy and vision, developing great and interesting and innovative strategy, and vision is going really deep on a topic.
So you've been in the space for a long time.
There's this idea that Paul Graham talks about, I think, called your top idea or something like that, that when you have...
Whatever your top ideas, the more you can just think about that and keep that top of mind as you go about your day and just have one core focus, the more likely it is you're going to come up with new interesting ideas because your brain's going to keep working on it when you're driving around listening to Lenny's podcast.
Just kidding, or going on hike.
So I think that's a really important point is if you're finding you're not coming up with a great strategy or vision and just having struggles, part of it might just be you're not spending enough time in that space, you're not going deep enough in the problem area.
One approach is just spend a decade in that space.
Is there anything else just comes up as I say that of just how to do that? Yeah.
Well there's also, that's at the macro level, maybe spending 10 years in a space, but at the micro level, back to kind of like defrag your day, don't just do the 20, 30 minute meetings on 20 different topics.
Sure, sometimes you do that first and you got to do that.
You have a large team like I do, obviously reviews across teams.
I'm not saying I don't do that on some days, but it's like, yeah, what are my top few things, right?
I think, you're right, I think it was Peter [inaudible 00:38:52] or PayPal guys talked about that too, going really deep and having a person or a leader really responsible for one core, deep thing for the company, and that's something they immerse themselves in.
And so in the micro, that to me again translates to, yeah, I don't have a to-do list of 20 things.
I try to have a to-do list of three of the most important highest leverage things that could have impact broadly across the company and then try this, like you said, let that one top thing marinate and chew on it. I love that.
And I recently had a post about all these productivity tricks, and one of the things that I find really helpful is at the beginning of each day and also at the beginning of each week, just write down, here's the one to three things that I need to do and get done.
And everything else, I might have this really long list, but here's the three things if I get done, life will be good. I've done a lot.
I've accomplished really great, important things. Totally.
I tried to do the David Allen GTD thing once, the super complicated organization system.
It was too much structure for me. I couldn't do it.
At the end of the day, what you said is right.
There's basically three things that I need to do next, and then there's just some random backlog that I can just scan through periodically and that's it.
That gets you most of the way. It's crazy.
I read that book 20 years ago at this point, and there's elements that still make things, like I leverage and benefit from.
Even if you don't do the whole thing, that book I recommend people read because there's just like, if you pick a couple things from there, your life gets better.
The things that have stuck with me, the main one is this waiting for concept of if you're waiting, if you email your designer and like, "Hey, I need you to review this product," just note, "Waiting for Dan to review design."
And just having that thread written down and not in your head really helped me. Totally. Yeah.
Anyway, I'm not going to go on that tangent. Yeah.
It's the core concept of like, whatever steps you use.
I think the most powerful takeaway from that book for me was if it's in your head, you're screwed because it's like you're trying to keep track of stuff and be creative and come up with the future of transportation and remember to pick up something from the pharmacy.
It's a recipe for disaster.
This whole idea of empty mind, beginner's mind, well, you have to empty the mind of all the to-dos first.
Just get that out of the head. Absolutely.
I think it was mind like water, that's the one that stuck with me, where nothing you need to remember can be in your head.
It needs to be written down somewhere Anyway, let's not go into a whole productivity podcast here. Perfect.
So we talked about vision strategy.
So there's classically two problems people have with vision strategy.
One is how do I get better at it?
The other is just like, I need to actually get shit done.
I can't spend all my time thinking about vision.
You have a really good take on how to find this balance and you've seen it work well and not well, just vision versus execution.
When do I go big vision, how much I spend on vision versus just get shit done, execute, execute, execute?
What could you share about just what you've learned about how to find that balance and what you've seen work and not work?
Yeah, I think you can go too far either direction, right?
It's like everything in life is about balancing the polarity between two opposing forces.
And so in this one it's like, yeah, you go too hard in division and theory land, I've seen that go off the axle, early Uber where again, back to the future of pricing, it's like we have all the data scientists and PhDs locked in a room for two weeks and there's a beautiful whiteboard diagram. What did it look like?
And then it's like, why don't we actually build this thing?
And engineers are like, this is like boiling the ocean.
And you just get wrapped around the axle of like, well, that sounds really good in theory, but I have no idea how to even start executing on this.
So that's probably an example of we tilted a little too far towards the vision theory land.
And this was, you're describing the original plan to make a really good surge pricing algorithm? Yeah.
This was a plan to try to bring together, say how we do driver pricing, time and distance rates, but also we do incentives for drivers where it's like if you drive this many hours a week, you get a bonus.
And there's also surge pricing and how to tie all those systems together in a very sophisticated sort of way.
This was back in 2017 or something and it winged a little too hard into theory land.
And we still have that bias sometimes.
We joke about marketplace, especially when we talk about with other teams that are trying to integrate in the marketplace, let's say they add fleets or teams with a big new product.
And then marketplace people would be like, "Well, have you thought about this one random problem that could happen two years from now if teams become this much of demand and blah blah blah, whatever."
And it's just like we do get wrapped around the axle on that sometimes.
But yeah, so the future of pricing is a good example, we winged a little too far into theory land.
But you could probably go too far into execution land too.
And I'd say DoorDash in my experience would do that sometimes where we used to actually even half joke there, some of us leaders would be like, "It's ready, fire, aim."
And it was like, people would be like, "I'm just going to run through a wall.
I have no idea if that's the right wall to run through, but at least I know I'm running through a wall."
So yeah, I think it's about balance and can you adjust. Again, it's dynamic.
I think there's times where you're in a soul searching sort of, "What is our product strategy? We got to pivot."
Maybe you're a startup and it's not working and you want to think about...
And then it's like, okay, well pull off the gas a little bit, ease up on the execution and let's lean into the strategy vision piece.
And there's times where the strategy and vision's pretty baked at least for the next whatever, six months, a year.
And it's like, okay, pedal to the metal. Let's just go execute. Let's get it done.
I just went to this Acquired Podcast event at the Chase Center.
Zuck was there, and the CEO of Spotify was there too.
And there's two quick anecdotes that you remind me of.
One is, Zuck talked about how once Facebook and Zuck and the team align on here's where we're going, no matter how many walls appear in front of them, there's going to be a Mark shaped hole in the wall very soon because they're just going to run through and get things done that they need to get done.
And I really love that mentality of once we're sure where we're going, we're going to bust through these walls. That's awesome.
The other is a really interesting value at Spotify.
So Daniel Ek shared this.
He said, "At Spotify we have this core value, talk is cheap."
And when you hear that you think it's saying talk is not valuable, and it's actually they look at it as a virtue.
Talk is cheap, we can talk and it costs us no money, very little money compared to building something.
So they actually spent a lot of time at Spotify refining their ideas and discussing until they're really sure something is right.
And I guess any reaction to that?
Because I thought that was really interesting. Yeah, I love that.
It's almost a different flavor of, I think the base of saying of he's like, I like a crisp dock and a messy meeting.
The whole Amazon thing, if you have the three-page or seven-page narrative, it's written with the clarity of angels singing from on high, at least describing how the problem statement or feature or whatever.
And so it's super crisp and organized and well articulated.
And then you might have a meeting where you pick it apart and you talk a lot.
That's what made me think of that. Yeah. Awesome.
Okay, couple more things I want to spend some time on.
One is you've worked at a lot of really interesting successful hyper growth companies, DoorDash, Uber, Waymo.
You were also in finance for a while.
I want to pick on a few of these and just see what's a lesson you took away or what's an experience from that time that might be interesting or helpful to people? Sure.
So you talked about DoorDash a bit.
What did you take away from your time at DoorDash?
What's something you saw there that either is like, wow, that's a really cool thing I want to do in the future, or here's something they weren't amazing at that I learned to try to avoid?
Yeah, yeah, it's really amazing to get to see different places and pick the best of what you like.
And also the other thing is back to like, for me, there's no right or wrong, it's just differences have pros and cons.
There's always two sides of the coin.
So what's interesting I think about Uber and DoorDash is first back to the mission and the strategy.
They started with different DNA, right?
So Uber started with it was to utilize blocked cars at the airport that were not doing trips, but it was more about the riders.
It was like whatever origin story you believe, Travis and whoever can get a ride in Paris.
And so then it was about better than taxi and all this stuff, but it was very rider centric.
It was consumer centric in that sense.
And so for a long time, I think Uber kind of took that too far.
We got to the polarity of drivers are a commodity, blah, blah, blah, and they had to flip that back and start really investing more on the driver's side of the marketplace.
But you look at DoorDash and it's like, Tony grew up in his parents' restaurant kitchen and the DoorDash thesis was how can we help small businesses be more successful?
And delivery was just the first instantiation of that sort of meta purpose of DoorDash.
And so they're much more merchant centric as opposed to consumer centric.
And by the way, the consumer centricism of Uber that started with rides than translated to Eats.
I think when Uber started with Eats, it was like, "Well, we just want Lenny to have some great Thai food and sushi and have some options.
But selection is a means to Lenny having a great eater experience."
Whereas DoorDash with their merchant focus is like, "We want every Thai restaurant in this city to be successful and be on DoorDash."
So their motivation for selection is, "We want all of the merchants to thrive and survive."
So that happens to give you better selection as a result.
But the motivation was very different.
So the analogy I use is Uber is to Amazon as DoorDash is to Shopify, if that makes sense.
Amazon has always been more consumer focused, Shopify is obviously very merchant focused. Interesting.
And by the way, either of those, again, there's no right or wrong, is a fine strategy.
They're both great companies.
And I actually don't know if you could do both.
Is it possible to be Amazon and Shopify?
To really focus on consumers and build all the merchant restaurant tech?
And maybe with enough resources and time, but that would lose focus.
So it's like there's a trade-off there. Yeah. Yeah.
Like at Airbnb, there was always this, "Should we optimize for hosts?
Should we optimize for guests?"
And there's always this like, "This time, guests are most important.
Right now hosts are more..."
Make these trade-off decisions in the marketplace.
So it's interesting that at Uber, your insight there is Uber is always very rider focused, and DoorDash from its DNA was very merchant focused.
You also talk about at DoorDash, there's this mentality of just going before figuring out where to go.
Is there anything more there that might be helpful, either as a cautionary tale or as a lesson?
Yeah, I think it's a balance.
It's back to I don't want to deliberate and pontificate for weeks on end about which door I should run through.
And I don't want to go to the other extreme and just spend 30 seconds thinking about what to do and just go, go, go.
So it's finding that kind of happy medium.
If I had to pick one, I'd rather bias towards running through a wall than not doing anything, because you still get learnings from that and you either make progress or you don't, and that gives you feedback and you can run through another wall as a result.
So I think the biggest failure case is probably erring on the other side of deliberating too long without action. What about Waymo?
What's something that you took away from that experience as a thing that you want to do more of or something you want to try to avoid?
Waymo is, you've probably seen people in San Francisco, they're quite prolific now in terms of they're all over San Francisco and you see them all the time.
And I'm not sure, I can't remember the last time I saw one towed, I don't want to say that they've solved self-driving, but they are obviously driving at scale with very minimal, at least real world intervention.
You can't tell by looking at the cars how many humans behind the scenes might be helping provide guidance of the car or whatever.
But yeah, I would say what's really interesting about Waymo is they've largely solved the self-driving piece, however they've done that, and in a complex environment like San Francisco, and you see them driving in fog and rain and puddles, and it's like, wow, that's pretty cool.
But I think what Waymo was learning, and I was trying help them learn is that building a self-driving car on a test track is a very different problem statement than scaling a fleet of thousands of cars.
And how do you operate them, clean them, charge them, maintain them, and then how do you build the ride share network?
It's like, okay, well we got to build an app and we got to acquire users and do classic growth stuff and think about that marketplace and matching and pricing and those are very different skills.
And so it's like a warning that those are different things.
And trying to hire for that and build culture around that was hard, honestly.
It's just like you're kind of a different thing than the host organism.
Most of the host organism is just obsessed with perception and planning and all the core autonomy pieces and you're like, the commercialization people there, "Well, now we've going to make money with this thing."
That's why I think that's an example where your overall vision would say Waymo is to build Waymo One.
Just be mindful that it's more than just one.
There's multiple pillars of that.
There's the self-driving piece, there's getting a lot of cars at scale, financing them, operating the fleet, getting the demand, filling the cars with people, and then it has to all come together. Right. Yeah.
It's so interesting that your title is Lead Product for Commercialization of Autonomous Ride Hailing at Waymo, and now it's come full circle where at Uber, that's going to be in a sense the way that people call Waymo.
And so it's so interesting that you've seen both sides of this. Yeah.
Well, we'll see what happens.
I think Uber, it got out of the autonomy business when it divested Autonomous Technologies Group or Advanced Technologies Group.
And right now our stated strategy is to be an aggregator.
So it's like, we are partnering with Waymo, with Cruise, Motional, others in China, et cetera.
And then the idea is to have every vehicle on the platform really, right? Autonomous or not.
And then use the power of the platform, we have this big demand base, we have a lot of riders.
And so I think what you're seeing is, Waymo and Cruise and others are like, "Okay, now that we've developed autonomy, what's the path to profitability for us?"
And so they can go it alone and try to build a ride-share network.
And Waymo is doing that with Waymo One, but it turns out it takes a while.
It's funny, I feel like engineers too are always skeptical of why other people's engineering problems take so much work.
There'd be engineers at Waymo would be like, "Why does Uber have so many thousands of engineers?
How hard can it be to build a ride-share app?"
But when you look at what made Uber successful, what we've been perfecting for the last decade, A, the marketplace tech that I alluded to earlier, but also how we manage a large rider base and doing rider support and driver support and logistics and all of the helping finance electric vehicles and working with regulators and cities and making sure we have safe and accessible pickup points and on and on and on.
And those are all the depth of the iceberg that you don't really realize or think of when you're like, "Oh, I can just build a ride-share app." Right?
Tesla publishes their sigma design and some earnings report and everyone goes crazy like, "Wow, okay, well I don't want to bet against Elon because that sounds scary," but there is more to it than just the app and the autonomy.
So yeah, I think these companies will have an interesting question.
Do they go alone, build their own ride-share network to capture all the value, or do they say, "Well, I could just work with Uber and have a faster path to high utilization of the vehicles," which unlocks financing and more vehicles and that gets them to scale faster?
And so if you look at the landscape right now, it's a bit of both, right?
Waymo is obviously working with Uber in Phoenix and we just announced Cruise will come back to some city next year I think, but Waymo is also still building their own thing, so they're kind of hedging their bets at the moment.
I want to take us to a recurring segment on the podcast that I call Contrarian Corner.
I feel like you're going to have a good answer here.
What's something that you believe that most other people don't believe?
One is back to being aware of your internal state and allowing emotions and thoughts is...
Emotions in the workplace, a lot of people have the thing of like, "Well, there's no need for emotion in the workplace.
We're going to be logical.
We're going to be data-driven.
Keep your feelings at home.
Just show up and presentation J. M. Mode."
And I guess in my experience, there's this thing around whole body intelligence and whole body, yes, which is yes, there is signal from the head and logic and data and left brain reasoning are amazing and it could be great, but there's also heart and gut.
And to me, what is an emotion?
It's just energy moving on the body.
Often it's correlated with a thought too as well.
I might have a thought that creates fear and so forth.
But to me there's wisdom in emotion and I can start to access noticing them more.
Like where do I feel sadness in the body?
I notice I feel fear in the kind of center of my chest, and then sadness is like a sinking feeling in my stomach.
And I notice when I'm angry, my jaw gets tight and my eyes furrow a little bit.
And so those are common ones, but you may have your own little signatures of you pick up where is joy, where is creative energy?
Where is fear or sadness, anger?
And then noticing those in a meeting or in a conversation or review.
And actually if you're willing, even just voice it to other people, that's like the next step.
But start with just acknowledging it to yourself.
And so for me, the wisdom of emotions is fear is something wants to be paid attention to.
There can be the saber-toothed tiger is not really Dara disapproving of me, whatever.
I shouldn't be afraid of that.
But there are times where fear is applicable.
There might be fear around, let's say back at Waymo, you want to be really intentional about safety and you want to be super...
That's one of the things I love about Waymo is they're very committed to having a super strong safety record.
And so there might be fear around did we really consider all the edge cases of what might happen if a dog runs in the street or a ball or child or whatever, and you might see wow, fear. It's great.
The wisdom of that is something wants to be paid attention to and listened to. Okay, great.
Sadness for me is something wants to be let go of.
There's a mourning, there's a letting go of I had an idea or vision for the future that will no longer be because whatever, something happened, other people don't want to do it, this or that.
But it could be a vision of a relationship, it could be a vision of what you thought your life would look like, whatever.
We all go through those sorts of things.
And there might be micro-moments of sadness of like, wow, that feature didn't work.
It's like I really wanted it to be successful.
I just let go of that, welcome the sadness.
Anger to me is something is not of service to me or my people or my mission or whatever I'm up to.
And so again, that can be a great signal to like, okay, I pay attention to that.
I want to change something.
And then joy is something that wants to be celebrated. We had a great win.
We nailed the OKR, we had a great product launch.
A lot of times we spend too much time moving back into the next, okay, let's set another goal.
It's like, it's okay to stop and celebrate.
And then creative energy is something wants to be born into the world.
It's like it's almost like I'm going to birth an idea or a vision or some new product thing and then just tuning into that.
So yeah, I would say welcome emotions, maybe even talk about them, god forbid, in the workplace.
Imagine that instead of having a OKR review where you're behind target and everyone's blaming other people, and you could tell when it's kind of fearful, if someone was just like, "Wow, I noticed that I just feel fear around this."
Everyone was like, "Wow, I feel fear too."
That would just totally change the tone of the conversation.
The advice here is bring your emotions into work. Don't let emotions...
What most people believe is leave your emotions at home, don't bring your emotions into the workplace, and what you've found is they actually can make you more effective and make your teams more effective.
And you even talked about it helps you make decisions in a more intelligent way because your gut and lizard brain almost tells you things that you should pay attention to. Totally. I love that.
Okay, so I'm going to close with a question that is rooted in something that you shared with me when we were chatting about this podcast that I think is going to be helpful to a lot of people.
What have you found to be keys to a successful, impactful, rich, fun life?
It's a great question, and I think lots of people have different prescriptions for that, and I don't claim to have the one truth around that, but the first thing I would say as a meta observation is I spend a lot of time thinking about objective functions.
We design algorithms to do matching and pricing and think about short-term effects and long-term effects.
And so I really am ingrained in this idea of we have an objective function for our life.
And then the problem is that a lot of us aren't conscious of it.
It's just like an implied OF that you inherited values from your church or community or what your parents valued or what you learned to be good at, and I do this for work and blah, blah, blah, and I'm just kind of bobbing along.
That's why I love Ray Dalio's principle thing where it's like, Hey, write down your values and your principles and get clear on what they are.
Or Clayton Christensen wrote a great book that he's less known for, he's obviously known for Innovator's Dilemma, but he wrote a book called How Will You Measure Your Life?
And he was trying to answer this question of, he teaches whatever, MBA students at Harvard, and he's like, "Wow, all these executives are super successful.
They're like Fortune 500 execs.
They're most super successful, but they're all divorced and their kids hate them and their personal lives are a mess. What's happening?"
And so one of the key insights he comes to is like, it's Sunday night and you have the choice of playing with your daughter, or you're reading a book or playing a game, and you have a presentation to Dara on Monday.
And he's like, "Well, I could make those slides a little bit better and I could go practice or knock out some emails," or whatever it is you want to do.
And so what he basically found was the type A exec, successful people are very short-term OF driven.
They're like, "Well, presentation's tomorrow, and that can either go great or okay based on Sunday night."
Whereas like, "My daughter will be here, I'll play with her next week."
And the problem is that he's getting in this cycle where it's like, okay, you start working every Sunday night and then years and years go by and suddenly you don't have a relationship with your daughter who's now a teenager.
But I think we're just not conscious of that.
So to me, the first piece of advice would be get clear on your objective function.
And one way that I've gotten clear on it is trying to think about it from future me.
Because five years from now, I'm not going to give a shit if I made the presentation slightly better, but I'm going to care a lot about what kind of relationship I have with my daughters.
And that means that the next action, the next thing I do today and tomorrow, those will translate into the relationship with her.
And I think a lot of us aren't just tuned into that.
I love the stoic stuff, being mindful of death, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, all those great ones.
Not to be morbid, but just again, most of us just aren't really tuned into an awareness that our lives will come to an end.
And we try to avoid that and we try to pretend like we're going to live forever and just not think about it.
And the horror of it is that we succeed.
We mostly manage to just go live our life and eat ice cream and go to work and go on vacation and do what we do.
And that can lead us to doing things that ultimately don't matter in the long run, and focusing on the wrong things.
And so to me, it's like an awareness and mindfulness that our lives will come to an end punctuates reality in a way that requires me to rethink my priorities, stop wasting time on things that don't matter with people who matter.
This relationship, this journey, it will come to an end.
I'm actually tearing up and feeling tingly just saying that.
It's like even right now, come back to it.
How am I going to spend my afternoon?
Am I going to hug my daughters?
Am I going to spend time with them after work or am I going to do email all night?
What would I wish I had done when I'm in my last breath?
There's a quote that I heard once that really stuck with me that I think is going to hit a lot of people really hard, which is that the only people that will remember you working late every night is your kids. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. An important reminder. J. M.
, we've covered a lot of stuff.
Is there anything else that you think might be helpful for people that you want to leave listeners with?
Or we're going to have a lightning round coming up, but before we get that, we ended on a really powerful, impactful note.
Is there anything else along these lines that you think might be helpful for people that you want to leave them with?
The one thing I'd encourage folks to do out of all of these we talked about is to see if you'd be willing to commit to breaking out of victim consciousness and mentality.
And it's not to say there aren't victims in the world, there are real injustices and things happening, but most of us, I've experienced, I often can fall into the trap of living my life at the effect of, right?
I'm at the effect of other people and what they do.
I'm at the effect of circumstances like COVID or Trump or whatever.
I'm at the effect of the conditions and circumstances of life, and I feel like life is happening to me.
And so to me, the most empowering and radical transformation that I've been able to cultivate and develop is shifting from that to a state of I I am willing to take responsibility for how I see the world.
And I may not be able to change the weather or the election or all that, but I can change how I'm being in relationship to it and choose to see it as a growth opportunity, as learning, how am I co-creating it, even things that I play a small part in, injustice in the world, how am I perpetuating that and being willing to see the world as I'm the painter of my existence?
I think Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning is probably the best example of that.
He's in a super oppressive situation that is very horrific and tragic, and the way he described his relationship with the people in the camp and the guards, and he given he gave a talk after he was free, the amount of compassion and empathy he had for his oppressors was just amazing.
So I'm like, well, if he can do that in the face of those conditions, I can show up differently in a product review or in a conversation with my partner or meeting or whatever it is.
Yeah, I think just that skill alone is such a powerful unlock for a lot of people instead of, here's all the things that I don't have and here's all the things that are setting you back and all the things that are hard for me versus other people.
Shifting to, I need to take responsibility for my own success and no one else will.
And just taking agency is a really powerful thing.
It's easier said than done.
There's a lot of hardships.
People have a lot of things that they don't have that other people have that are hurting their career and hurting their ability to be successful, but still, the more you can take responsibility and have agency and the less you have this victim mentality, I 1,000% agree, there's so much power there.
So that's an awesome lesson to end on.
With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round jam. Are you ready? I'm ready. Let's do it. Okay.
First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?
In the realm of the soft skills and conscious leadership, the best one is the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Diana Chapman and Jim Dethmer.
And those were my early coaches and teachers almost 10 years ago, and Diana is still my coach.
So I think that's a fantastic book that we'll go into more detail about some of the things we talked about around fear and threat versus trust and drawing a triangle and all that great stuff.
That'd be one that I'd definitely recommend first.
Another one more in the content world is I think you had Nancy Duarte on your podcast one point. Yeah, Nancy Duarte. Yeah. Or Duarte, sorry.
I love her book Resonate.
I know she has some other ones too, on slide design and stuff.
But what was so cool about that, I gave it to PMs all the time when I'm trying to help them develop their communication, storytelling, and presentation skills.
And she goes through those TED talks and Martin Luther King, I have a dream, and going to the Moon, and basically make the spark line against it to understand this concept of resonance with the audience.
It's actually a great skill for, back to vision and north-starring, she said what all these things do is they alternate tension between the world as it is and the world as it might be.
And it's like, here's that beautiful future of transportation, San Francisco, blah, blah, blah, but here's why it sucks today, all these problems and this and that, but here's how it could look in a few years.
And then you're creating that tension and the audience at the end is like sweaty palms and like, "I want to help build that future." What do you need?
You need money, you need time, resources, join your company. Great.
So anyway, Resonate, Nancy Duarte, great book.
Those would be some of the top two that I recommend.
There's not one specific book, but I really love Alan Watts' books if you're into...
He was one of the first people to articulate and kind of import Buddhism and that sort of Eastern thinking into the West, and he just has a very satirical, comical sort of not taking myself too seriously style and just like the way he explains a lot of those concepts.
So that'd be another one.
He also has an amazing voice if you listen to recordings of him with music, it's just so fun to listen to. Totally.
Actually, Sam Harris's Waking Up app now has the entire...
he worked with I think Alan Watts' son.
So the Waking Up app has all 80 or 100 hours of recorded Alan Watts lectures. Oh my god. There's YouTube videos.
[inaudible 01:10:06] There's some awesome YouTube videos of him that are worth watching, we'll link to some of those.
And then Nancy Duarte, she shared exactly that lesson on the podcast that we had together.
So if you don't want to read the book and listen to her give this tactic of this way to communicate a vision, you can listen to that episode, we'll link to it.
Next question, do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you have really enjoyed? Yeah.
The last movie I really enjoyed was Inside Out 2 with my kids, which is very- I could see why you'd love that.
Yes, consistent with the emotional awareness and allowing the different emotional parts and don't want to spoil the movie, maybe everyone hasn't seen it, but it's very simpatico with that lesson of you can't just let one emotion run the show, they all have wisdom.
On the first one, Sadness, Joy learning that Sadness is necessary.
It's all about integration, but it was beautiful the way kids understand it and it's a way to teach emotional literacy to your kids.
So I think what they've done there with those Inside Out movies is just brilliant.
Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love?
It could be an app, it could be something physical.
Yeah, so Eight Sleep is a smart mattress company.
They're on their third or fourth rev now, but it's like a Tempur-Pedic mattress, or you can put their cover on any mattress, but it has a cover that has little tubes of water, and then it has a little computer thing and you fill with water and then an app.
And basically what you do is you program it and it learns, it has sensors, it can measure your heart rate, your HRV, body temperature, all that, but you're basically trying to program a temperature curve to help you maximize your kind of REM sleep and deep sleep and get more value out of the sleep that you do have.
And so for me, it's super cool early for deep sleep, and then it warms you up as you want to wake up, which is...
or an alarm and all that.
But it's back to my thing about wanting to show up with the right mindset and energy and aliveness.
Having really high quality sleep has been a really key part of that, is like if I don't sleep well, I didn't get enough sleep or didn't sleep well, you're already starting off on a bad foot.
So yeah, if you haven't checked out Eight Sleep, great product.
No endorsement fee for me.
What's also cool about it is it tracks your sleep.
It gives you all these stats.
Instead of wearing a ring, and it gives you all these stats about your sleep quality.
And there's this guy, Brian Johnson, I don't know if you follow him, he's like this guy that's trying to stay alive as long as possible, and he had a perfect sleep score for six months in a row to set the record. Wow. Yeah.
He knows what he's doing over there.
Okay, two more questions.
Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to, think of, find useful in work or in life?
Yeah, I probably have had different ones over the years.
The one right now that really serves me is there's this track called Sit Around the Fire by Jon Hopkins, but it's on Spotify, Apple Music, but it's basically music with one of Ram Dass' talks, lesser known talks.
And so the mantra that's been really serving me recently is the very first part of that, which is he says, "Beyond all polarities, I am.
Let the judgments and opinions of the mind be the judgments and opinions of the mind.
And you exist behind that."
So sometimes I have an abbreviated version of that where I'm noticing I'm activated, I'm clinging to an opinion, I'm arguing with somebody, and I'm just like, "Beyond all polarities." An abbreviated version.
I do that in front of my kids and they laugh at me like, "Daddy is so weird sometimes."
Beyond all polarities, kids. That's so funny. Oh man.
There's another Ram Dass line that I often use with my wife, Be Here Now, which is the title of his book that everyone sees with the blue cover.
And I do that when she's on her phone and we're doing something. I'm like, "Be here now."
And she's like, "Okay, okay.
I'll put my phone away." Yeah. Final question.
I was going to ask you about the line tracking and what you learned from that.
You already shared an awesome lesson from that time.
So let me ask you something else.
I'll ask you about Travis.
Any crazy, fun, memorable stories of working with Travis Kalanick?
However you say his last name, Kalanick, Kalanick? Travis Kalanick, yeah. Yeah.
I'll share a quick one that's short but sweet or hilarious to me, and maybe lesser known.
So we used to have the Uber office at 1455 Market, and so there was one conference room where we'd often do reviews with Travis, and it wasn't the war room, whatever whenever room it was.
That was interior and no windows.
So this room had windows overlooking, what was that? 11th street. So 11th and Market.
And so we'd have a presentation up on the projector, some big screen we're about to go through something with Travis.
And reliably, every time he'd come in, he would close the blinds of the windows.
Everyone like, "Travis, what are we doing?"
It's not because there was glare.
They were orthogonal to the screen.
And then one time I was like, "Why are you doing that?"
He's like, "I'm pretty sure Lyft has drones outside the windows of our office and they're spying on our presentation." Oh my gosh.
I was like, whoa, your competitor paranoia runs deep, man. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Anyway.
It's hard to mention Lyft doing that.
I could see Uber doing that to Lyft. Old Uber. Uber 1. 0 Old Uber. Yeah. Wow. That's amazing.
It's like coaches in the NFL that are covering their lips always when they're telling and giving plays, just like, I wonder if people actually do that. That's amazing. Yeah, I get that. It's like high stakes. You never know.
Might be a drone out there. Right. Amazing. J. M.
, what a roller coaster of a conversation.
We covered so much ground.
I can't even name all the things we covered.
So let me just ask you two final questions.
Where can folks find you online and reach out if they want to work with you?
I know you work with folks, talk about that.
And then finally, how can listeners be useful to you? Yeah, yeah.
So I am occasionally on Twitter @NickelsJM, but I don't tweet a lot, but maybe I should start.
But the best way to find more about my thoughts and thinking on the soft skill stuff is a website called rhythmofbeing. com.
And I've got some blog posts and stuff there that go into detail on some of these things.
And yeah, I do a little bit of coaching on the side with folks. I do very little now.
My day job at Uber and my night job with my kids takes up most of my waking hours.
But for the right person and a few select spots, I can make time.
But yeah, that's the best place to find me, is rhythmofbeing. com.
And then how can listeners be useful to you?
Well, in the spirit of welcoming and embracing feedback, you could most be useful by reaching out, telling me what resonated, what didn't, what was useful, where did your energy go up when I talked, and where did your energy go down?
Because that to me is a signal of where I'm back to tracking the life, where's the juice?
And then that way in the future when I do other versions of this or other conversations, I'll pay more attention to the energy up stuff and go more there, and the energy down was like, okay, maybe that wasn't as interesting or didn't resonate. Great. No problem. J. M.
, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Bye everyone.
Thank you so much for listening.
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