Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash)

23:57And like I get really jazzed when I think about, wow, they work, I do could actually impact their future lives and other people. And it's like, whoa, I can feel the children 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 it's been helpful is, you know, I've deeply immersed myself. You know, I have it's also you know, I haven't really jumped around between you know crypto and genai I love this stuff and a lot of people do that's great nothing wrong with that But you know, I've been in this you know largely focused on mobility you know space for 10 years now With some stents over in the restaurant tech and delivery side But very related in terms of last biologists and so you know, I think it's hard to come up with a great strategy If you've only been working in an area for like six launches It's like, as much of these things like this, there's your brand new on it.

24:45Like shared rides are a good example where it's a super hard problem to crack. And like, you know, it's like going deep on that for a long time is a precursor to being successful. The other thing I would say though is like, you know, people always talk about first principles thinking, but if there's truth in it, I think, you know, that's like, you know, and like with Elon's like, well, why does the rocket cost, you know, $1 billion to launch? And you know, like, there's no reason they have to throw away the materials. And, you know, it's all blah blah. Well, one example might be, why do we need a 4 ,000 pound vehicle to move a human 3 miles?

25:21Okay. Well, or even a couple of humans, right? We do a Uber pool or a share, right? And you move two humans or three humans, even then, like that's pretty inefficient, right? If you think about just the physics there, like the energy expenditure, right? It's like, and that's where I think, you know, you might come up with bikes and scooters and little other things, right? and sure it's always raining or you want to car. But that's an example of 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, well maybe things could be different.

25:57So I can extend that at a larger level to the future. My general thing is just like, yeah, that's the mountain thing. It's like, I tried to just like, close my eyes and imagine the future as far out as I can. It's like five years from now, ten years from now, whatever. And it's like, develop a really salient picture of what that looks like. You know, it's like, it's like, okay, so we can do this right now. It's okay. Ten years from now, what could Sam just go with 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?

26:31Are there bus -like things, there are autonomous, that are connecting people to bikes and scooters, and how are people living? Do they live in the far sub -bridge? Even more because autonomy and they have a nicer house and they come in, or is all the space repurbished and actually it's cheaper to live in the city because compact things blah, blah. It's not about having the right one. It's more developing some sort of picture of the future that gets you fired up. Right, and then yeah, you gotta go like you know articulate that and communicate it and get people to come on the journey with you But like from that picture.

27:04It's like well what first principle what's gonna be true? You know 10 20 years from now well autonomy is like a given I think most people would probably agree with that and you know We'll probably solve it with just cameras and multi -light arc as humans though I've light art You know the cost of vehicles and sensors will come down and remote support will come down And at some point it'll be super cheap and it's like okay like in a trap like that will be a thing separate from which player wins. I'm not saying I can predict, you know, the ecosystem of companies that will win here. It's more about just the underlying dynamics, right?

27:33And then, you know, that would be one. And that one would be, yeah, sharing a way. It's like, well, a lot of people are like, oh, well, we have cheap autonomous cars. Like, everyone could just have their own super cheap Uber Tesla or whatever it is. You're on the city. And you're like, well, that doesn't work because then we're going to hit this and you do demand concept, right? Which is like what economists call it and like, you know, you used to, when text messages cost 50 cents a piece, how many did you send, right? Versus now within screens and the same thing when it add a lane to a highway, right?

28:00The traffic just gets just as bad as before because more people drive and so forth. So if we flood the street with super cheap autonomous cars with single occupancy, we're just going to have even more good luck than we do right now. Now, maybe we'll do the boring company thing and big tunnels and see the likely, right? So then that, for me, it's like, well, from birth, Facebook shared rides is going to continue to be an important part of the future transportation. And other modalities were a gap back to the three mile thing. It's like, well, it probably will be various form factors of bikes, scooters, and little mini golf cart things, and whatever we end up building, right?

28:34And so that's kind of an example of how I try to think about, right? Like, what are the likely things to be true in the future? And then how does that lead to a potential kind of ecosystem and strategy around what we might build, you know, towards that future? This is great because there's something everyone can do. And there's all this talk of like 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. 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?

29:10And do you do this in a state of if we were to do this product and change or as a 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, to the question, I think you could probably do either. I typically like to start with the far which is just like, what will the world move towards absent me just trying to take a, you know, kind of bird's eye view of what I think is 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?

29:50Either could be good, right? You might say we're going to, the tailwind or the headwind, both are overcomeable, but like having some awareness of the relationship between those things is good. And I think transportation, Uber, Waymo, it's like in theory, it might be easier to visualize that future and how exciting that might be versus a B2B SaaS payroll app or some like photocuring thing, but on the other hand, not necessarily, right? What in the future, 10 years, how are people going to be paid? How do people work at companies? Like, I think there's an opportunity to do that no matter what you're building.

30:21How do you actually, 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? Like, 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, okay, our reviews and random, and it went on Wednesday meetings, it's like, I like to do it on my own first, if I, you know, let's say something that already have a kind of an outline for it, I'm ready to move into a team space. So for me, it's like, yeah, like can I get into a quiet contemplative space, right?

30:52So 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 like think of stuff or drop something down and make a voice note while I'm doing that, you know, it's kind of get things going. But yeah, like the first step for me if just getting out of the craziness of day to day. Like to me, it's still insane, like how many product managers, leaders of all kinds, right? Run the schedule of like back to back meetings, you know, 30 minute reviews, a big meaty topic, you run out of time, run the next thing, answer a bunch of emails, and then cram some PRDs in there.

31:25And like, it's like, you know, it doesn't work, right? And so I'm a big fan of carving out time. Again, first for myself, a couple hours, you know, whatever, where I can just like get out of the day to day creationists and get into that headspace of five to ten years from now, right? It's just a different place. You need to transition to that. And then, yeah, bringing that to teams. If I have like an outline of that kind of future 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 AWS came into the office to talk about future of marketplace.

32:00And it was super productive. It was like, you know, laptops down, We're gonna spend all day together on a whiteboard. It's like a lost art. People talk to people and use the whiteboard anymore. So, but yeah, and then from there, it's like getting more people. And then you can kind of iterate on it, right? So I had some vision of the future and someone points out something that is a little bit, you know, off with it or it has a better idea or you kind of, then you move into co -creation. But I love that. I said, you know, the picture calls the brain trust, right? When if you read a kind of moles book, right?

32:29Where they're like, how they come up with Toy Story and inside out all these things, right? is like 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, there's no, you know, there are in a co -creative sort of space where they're just like co -exporting and riffing with each other. And I love to be in that space with, you know, with other PMs and engineers and theoscientists. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top -notch security practices, things get complicated fast.

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33:44Something 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, this is hard. I don't want my brain to just go. Like, you don't want, you don't trust your brains, it go to a place that's fun, but 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 it. Or it's not really good for your podcast business. It's all people not good.

34:16Okay, everyone. We're cutting this. What I find really helpful is playing Lennie'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 I don't think it would pursue. I've been in that mode where I'm like, yeah, more content, more of it. But yeah, actually some are used for a lot of time now, like not listening to anything. Go on a hike where you don't listen to a live cast or music or yeah, you're commute and see what happens. You might be surprised. Yeah. And it always ends up being like, oh, that was cool. And that's why shower ideas come from and all these things.

34:50Maybe just to see if there's something here, is there 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 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 I'm fortunate to be involved in trying to help develop and articulate kind of a multi -year three -year product or overall sort of tech strategy for the mobility business doover.

35:22And one of the big a -hospheres is we're easily move away from the kind of, in some ways, somewhere we're all double -brexed, right, being the predominant product, which is, you know, it used to be pretty simple, right? You, it's kind of like a taxi meter on the driver's side, right? There's a time and distance rate that everybody gets. And then on the right -or -side, it's like, sure, there's some surge pricing, based on supply and demand, but, you know, it's one product that's pretty straightforward. for it. And so, you know, this future of multi -modality and on the both demand side and supply side is what makes Marketplace like even more complex and challenging to build.

36:00And so it's going to all have us around like, okay, well, you know, now that we have taxis in the platform and we have fleet providers and we're starting to add weight modes and crews and other things, you know, we have to have a Marketplace that's aware of those different types of supply. and which ones might be available for what trips and how to think about cost and quality and kind of 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 each other?

36:33Right, how do we think about which ones to show which user, how do you think about the ranking and so forth. and then that all has feedback loops into pricing and matching itself as well. So the dynamics of the thing when I think about the future of marketplace Uber is like, whoa, it's like, and I don't even ever built that. That's a 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. And you know, relative to digital marketplaces, for example, just different visible world requirements. And then this next part of what I described of thinking about different types of supply and different kind of demand channels just adds even more to that.

37:15So yeah, but the all -haul 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. Oh my God, yeah, it's gonna be cool. It's just an infinitely cited marketplace now. That's wild. One last nugget I wanted to just reinforce course that you shared about how to become better at strategy and vision developing great and interesting and innovative strategy vision is going really deep on a topic. So you you put in the space for a long time. There's this idea that Paul Graham talks about I think all of your top idea or something like that that when you have one like 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 gonna keep working on it when you're driving around listening to Lanny's podcast Just getting or going on height.

38:08So I think that's a really important point is like if you're finding you can't You're not coming up with a great strategy or vision and just like 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 like a decade in that space Is there anything else just comes up as I say that I've just had to do that? Yeah, well, that's at the macro level, maybe spending 10 years on this page. But the micro level is back to kind of like, don't de -frag your day. Don't just do the 30 -minute meetings, you know, 20 -30 -minute meetings on 20 different topics.

38:39Like, sure, sometimes you've brought first and like, 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 in some days. But it's like, yeah, like, what are my top few things, right? Like, I think, like, you're right. I think it was Peter Chilor, to literally pay for how guys talk about that too, right? like going really deep and having a person or a leader like really responsible for one core deep thing for the company And that's like something the inversion sells in and so in the micro that that to me even translates to Yeah, I don't have a two list of 20 things right?

39:08I tried out a two list of three about most important highest leverage things That could you know kind of have impact broadly across the company and then tried just like you say like But that one top fitting marinade and and chew on it I love that. And I recently had a post about how to be all these productivity tricks and one of the things that I find really helpful is at the beginning of each day. And also the beginning of each week's just right down. Here's the one to three things that I need to do and get done. And everything else, like I might have this really long list, but here's the three things.

39:37If 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, you know, the super complicated, you know, organization system. It was just like, it was too much structure for me. Like I couldn't do it. It was like, it didn't do it. You just write it. There's basically three things that I need to do next. And then there's just some random backlog that I could just scan through periodically and that's what that gets you most of the way. It's crazy. I read that book 20 years ago at this point. And there's just like elements that still make things, like I leverage and benefit from.

40:10Like even if you don't, you do the whole thing. Like 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 like email your designer and like, hey, I need you to review this product. Just like, 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 going to go ahead and go ahead and take it. I'm going to go ahead and take it. What I'm going to cover is not whatever steps you use, I think the most part of the thing that I'm going to cover 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 future transportation and remember to pick up something to the pharmacy.

40:53It's like it's just not, it's a recipe for disaster like this whole idea of like empty mind, you know, beginner's mind, well you have to empty the mind of all the two dudes first, it just get them out of the head. Absolutely. I think it was mind like water. That's the one that stuck with me. Yeah. Where nothing you need to remember, you can be in your head and needs to be written down. Anyway, let's not go into a whole productivity podcast here. Perfect. So we talked about vision strategy. So there's kind of like, classically, two problems people have with vision strategy. One is, how do I get better at it?

41:24The 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 vision versus just get shit done? execute execute execute what could you share about just what you learned about how to find that balance and what you've seen work in network. Yeah, I think you can go too far either direction right you could it's like everything in life is about balancing the polarity between two posing forces.

41:58And so in this one it's like yeah you go too hard in division and theory land. You know I've seen that go off the axle or Uber, where we're again back to the future of pricing. It's like, you know, we have all the data scientists and PhDs walked in a room for two weeks. There's a beautiful whiteboard diagram. What do you look like? And then it's like, why don't we actually build this thing? And engineers are like, like, this is like boiling the ocean, you know? And like, 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.

42:29So that's probably an example of like, we tilted a little too far towards, you know, the vision theory land. And this was, you're describing like the original plan to make a really good search pricing algorithm. Yeah, this was a what plan to try to bring together, you know, say how we do driver pricing, you know, time and distance rates, but also, you know, we do in census for drivers, where it's like if you drive this many hours a week, you get a bonus. And there's also third pricing. And like how to tile the systems together in a very sophisticated sort of way. This was, you know, you have back in 2018 or something and it was just, it was, a winged a little too hard in the theory land.

43:03And we still have that by sometimes, you know, we joke about marketplace, you know, especially when we talk about with other teams, you know, they're trying to integrate into marketplace, let's say they add, you know, fleets or, you know, teams with a big new product, right? And then marketplace people would be like, well, have you thought about this one random problem that could happen two years from now? If a team becomes this much of demand and blah, blah, blah, you know, whatever, and it's just like we do get wrapped around the axle on that sometimes. But yeah, so the future price, for example, we can go too far in the three one, but you get you probably go too far in execution land too.

43:37And I'd say, you know, Dorrath, in my experience, would do that sometimes where we used to actually even hap joke there. Some of us leaders would be like, it's like, ready fire aim.

43:49And 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. Yeah. So, yeah, I think it's about balance. And you know, can you adjust? Again, it's dynamic. I think there's times where you're soul searching sort of, what is our product strategy? You know, we got to pivot, maybe your startup, but you're not working and you want to think about. And then it's like, okay, well, off the, pull off the gas a little bit, we ease up on the execution, and let's lean into, you know, the strategy of vision piece.

44:26And there's time for the strategy of vision. pretty bait at least for the next whatever six months year. And it's like, okay, pedal to the metal. Let's just go execute. That's good to do. And just went to this acquired podcast event at the J Center with in Zuck was there. And the CEO of Spotify was there too. And there's two two quick anecdotes that you remind me of. One is Zuck. Talked about how once Facebook and Zuck in 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.

45:06And I really love that mentality of like once we're sure we're going we're going to bust through these walls. That's awesome. The other is a really interesting value at Spotify. Daniel Ekshire this he said he said it's Spotify way of 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 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 spend a lot of time it's about if I refining their ideas and discussing until they're really sure something is right.

45:37And I guess any reaction to that because I thought that was really interesting. Yeah, I love that. It's an almost a different flavor of I think the the Bezos saying, he's like, I like a crisp doc and a messy meeting, right? The whole Amazon thing, you have the three page or seven page narrative, it's written with the clarity of angels singing from on high. We've described the other problems day, a matter of future, whatever. And so it's like 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.

46:12So yeah, awesome. Okay, a 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, Dordash, Uber, Waymo. You're 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 talk about Dordash a bit. What did you take away from your time at Dordash? 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 not to try to avoid.

46:47Yeah, yeah, it's really amazing to get to see different places and kind of pick the best of what you like and also there's what the other thing is that back to like for me, the writer wrong, it's just like differences like have pros and cons, right? There's always like two sides of the coin, right? So like what's interesting I think about Uber and DoorDatch is first back to the mission and the strategy, they started with different DNA, right? So Uber started with, it was to utilize block cars, so the airport that were not doing trips, but it was more about the riders, right? It was like whatever, Gordon St.

47:21Louis, Travis, whoever could get a ride in Paris, right? And so then it was about better than taxi and all this stuff, right? But it was very rider -centric. It was a consumer -centric in that sense, right? And so for a long time, I think Uber kind of took that too far. You got to the blueries, like drivers or commodity, you know, blah, blah, blah. And they had to flip that back and start, you know, really investing more of the drivers side of the marketplace. But you will get DoorDash and it's like, you know, Tony grew up in his parents restaurant kitchen and, you know, the DoorDash thesis was, how can we help small businesses be more successful and delivery with just the first instantiation of that sort of meta -purpose of DoorDash, right?

47:57And so they're much more merchant centric as opposed to consumer centric, right? By the way, the consumer centricism of Uber that But sort of with rides, then transitive to eats, right? I think 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 Dordash with their merchant focus is like, we want every Thai restaurant in this city to be successful and beyond Dordash. So their motivation for selection is, we want all of the merchants to thrive and survive.

48:29And so that happens to give you better selection as a result. But the motivation was very different, right? So the analogy I use is like Uber is to Amazon as DoorDash is to Shopify That makes that's right Amazon. Yeah, more consumer focus Shopify is obviously very merchant focus and by the way Either of those again, there's no right or wrong. There's a fine strategy. They're both great companies And I actually don't know if you could do both right like is it possible to be Amazon and Shopify to really focus on consumers and build all the merchant restaurant tech and maybe with resources and time, but that would lose focus.

49:06So it's like through the trade -off there. Yeah, that's like it every and be there's always this. Should we optimize for hosts? Should we optimize for guests? And there's always this like this time guest are most important. Right now host more when you make you know and make these trade -off decisions than marketplace. Yeah, so it's interesting that at Uber, your insight there is Uber is always very right or focused and DoorDash was from its DNA. He was very merchant focused. He also talked about a door dash. There was this mentality of just like going before figuring out where to go. Is there anything more there?

49:34That might be helpful. Either as a cautionary tale or as a lesson. Yeah, I think it's a balance. It's back to like, I don't wanna deliberate and pontificate for weeks on end about which door I should run through. And I don't wanna go the other extreme and just like, you know, it's been 30 seconds seeking about what to do and just go, go, go. So it's like finding that kind of happy medium. If I had to pick one, I'd rather bias towards running through a wall but 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.

50:08So I think the biggest failure case is probably hearing 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 you want to do more of or something you want to try to avoid? Right. You know, Waymau is, you know, I've probably seen people in San Francisco right there, they're quite prolific now in terms of, you know, 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 toad so, you know, they, I don't want to say that, you know, they've solved self -driving but they are, you know, obviously driving at scale with very minimal, at least real world intervention.

50:44Like, you know, you can't tell by looking at the cars how many humans behind the scenes might be, you know, helping provide guidance of the car or whatever. But yeah, I would say what's really interesting about Waymo is they've they've largely solved the self -driving piece, right? However, they've done that, right? And in a complex environment like San Francisco and you see them driving in fog and rain and puddles and like, you know, it's like, wow, that's pretty cool. But I think what Waymo was learning and I was trying to help them learn is that, you know, building a self -driving car on a test track is a very different problem statement than scaling a fleet of thousands of cars.

51:19and how do you operate them, clean them, charge them, and maintain them, and then how do you build a right -cher network? It's like, okay, we gotta build an app, and we gotta acquire users and do classic growth stuff, and think about marketplace and matching and pricing, and those are very different skills, right? And so it's like warning that those are different things, and trying to hire for that and build culture on that was probably, was hard, honestly. It's just like you're kind of a different thing than the host organism. Most of the host organism is obsessed with like perception and planning and all the core economy pieces.

52:00And you're like, the commercialization people, they're like, well, big money with the thing. That's the example. Overall vision, what's they waymo is is to build waymo one. It's like, you got to 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 cards at scale, financing them, operating the fleet, getting the demand, filling the cards with people. And then it has to all come together. Yeah, it's so interesting that your title is lead product for commercialization of autonomous ridehailing at Waymo. And now it comes full circle, we're at Uber.

52:41That'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, you know, the Uber got out of the autonomy business right when it divested the autonomous technology group or advanced technology group. And right now, you know, our co -stated strategy is to be an aggregator, right? So it's like we are partnering with WayModel, with Crews, MotionAll, others, China, et cetera. And then, you know, the idea is to have every vehicle on the platform, really, right? It's the Thomas or not. And then, yeah, use the power of the platform.

53:19We have this big demand base. We have a lot of writers. And so I think what you're seeing is Waymo and crew and others are like, okay, now that we've developed autonomy, what's the path to profitability for us, right? And so they can go it alone and try to build a right share network. And Waymo is doing that with Waymo 1. But it turns out it takes a while. It's funny people, I feel that engineers too are always like skeptical of why other people's engineering problems take so much work, right? Like, you know, there'd be engineers that blame them. Like, why does Uber have so many thousands of engineers?

53:55The hard couldn't be to build a rideshare app. But you know, when you look at what made Uber successful, you know, what we've been perfecting for the last decade, A, the marketplace tech that I alluded to earlier, but also, yeah, like how we manage a large rider base and during ridership work and driver support and logistics and all the helping financial electric vehicles and working with regulators and cities and making sure we have safe and accessible pickup points and it's like, stop, on and on and on, right? And it's like, you know, those are all the depth of the iceberg that you don't really realize or think of when you're like, oh, just hold the right share out, right?

54:29You know, Tesla publishes their Thickma design and some, you know, earnings report and everyone goes crazy. Like, wow, okay. Well, I don't wanna bet against Elon because that's on 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, right? Like, do they go along, build their own right -cher 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 unlock 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?

55:07like Waymo is obviously working with Uber and Phoenix and these announced crews will come back to some city next year I think and then Waymo's also still bullying their own thing right so they're kind of hedging their butts at the moment. I want to take us to recurring segment on the podcast that I call Contrary in 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 kind of being aware of your internal stay in 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, right?

55:44We're going to be logical. We're going to be data driven. Keep your feelings at home. Just show up and presentation in J .M. mode. And I guess in my experience, there's this thing around like whole body intelligence and like whole body, yes, which is, yes, There's signal from the head and logic and data and you know, love brain reasoning or amazing and that could be great But there's also like like heart and like gut, right? And like there's you know to me What is an emotion? It's just energy moving on the body, right? And often it's correlated with a thought too as well I can you know I might have a thought that creates fear and so forth But like to me there's wisdom and emotion right and I can and I can start to access like noticing the more like where do I feel sadness in the body.

56:31I notice I feel fear, you know, and the kind of center of my chest, and then sadness is like a sinking delay in my stomach. And I notice when I'm angry, my jaw of its tight, my eyes for a little bit, right? And so, you know, those are common ones, but you may have your own little signatures of like you pick up, you know, where is joy? Where is creative energy? Where is fear or sadness anger? And then noticing those in a meeting or in a conversation, I review, and actually, if you're willing, even just boys with other people, it's like the next step and start with just acknowledging it to yourself.

57:02So for me, the wisdom of emotions is fear is something wants to be paid attention to. There can be the saber tooth tiger, it's 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 like, what's the back of Waymo, you want to be really intentional about safety and you want to be super, that's one of the good I love about Waymo is they're very committed to having a super strong safety record. And so there might be fear around, do we really consider all the edge cases of what might happen if the dog runs in the street or a ball or a child or whatever, and you might see wild fear.

57:38It's like, great, that's the wisdom of that, is something wants to be paid attention to and listen to. Okay, great, right? Sadness for me is something wants to be let go of, right? There's a morning, there's a letting go of like, I had an idea or vision for the future that will no longer be because, you know, whatever is something happened. I don't know if you don't want to do it, just do 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 be all goes through those sorts of things. And there might be micro moments of sadness of like, wow, that feature didn't work.

58:12It's like I really wanted it to be successful. I just let go of that. Who welcomed the sadness, right? Anger to me is something is not of service to me or my people or my mission or whatever them up to. And so again, that can be a great signal to like, okay, I'm paying for that. I want to change something. And enjoy is like something wants to be celebrated, right? Like, you know, we had a great win. We nailed the OKR, we had a great product launch. Like, you know, it's a lot of times we spend too much time moving back into the next, okay, let's set another goal, you know, it's like, well, it's okay to stop and celebrate.

58:44And then like creative energy is like something wants to be born into the world, right? It's like what, it's almost like I'm going to a birth and idea or vision or yes, a new product thing. And then, you know, just tuning into that. So yeah, I would say welcome emotions. Maybe even talk about them, God forbid, in the workplace, you know? Like, I imagine it instead of having a OKR review where like you're behind target and everyone's like blaming other people and like, you know, you can tell everyone's kind of fearful. And if someone was just like, wow, I noticed that I just feel fear around this.

59:15Everyone was like, wow, I feel fear too, right? I would just totally change the tone of the conversation. So the advice here is bring your emotions into work. Like don't let emotions, what most people believe is leave your emotions at home, don't bring emotions into the workplace. And what you found is they actually can make you more effective and make your teams more effective. And you've even talked about it, it'll help you make decisions in more intelligent way because you're a gut and what your brain almost tells you things that you should pay attention to. Totally. I love that. Okay, so I want 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.

59:57What 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, you know, I spend a lot of time thinking about objective functions, right? We design algorithms to do matching and pricing and think about short -term effects and long -term effects and so I really And then ingrained in this idea of like we have an objective function for our life and then like Problem is that a lot of us aren't conscious of it.

1:00:36It's just kind of like an implied OF that you you know inherited values from your church or community, or what your parents valued, or what you kind of learned to be good at. And I do this for work and blah, blah, blah, I'm just kind of bobbing along. That's why I love like Radalio's principle thing where it's like, hey, write down your values and your principles and get clear on what they are. And, or like Clinton, Christianston wrote a great book. He's less known for, he's obviously known for innovative plumber, but he wrote a book called, How Will You Measure Your Life? And he's like, he was trying to answer this question of like, like he teaches whatever NBA students at Harvard, and he's like, wow, all these executives are super successful.

1:01:14They're like, fortunate 500 execs. They're like, you know, super successful, but they're all like divorced and their kids hate them and they're personal after math. Like, very well, what's happening, right? And so like, you know, one of the key insights he comes to is like, it's Sunday night and you have the choice of, you know, playing with your daughter, you know, where you read your book or play a game and you have a presentation to Dara, I think I'll just back to the drill, you know, on Monday and you said, oh, I could make those slides a little bit better and you know, to go practice or, you know, knock out some emails or whatever it is.

1:01:48And so the, what he basically found was like the tight bay, exactly, you know, successful people are very short -term OF driven. They're like, well, presentations 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 it's getting 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 and not teenager. And it's like, 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.

1:02:24And one way that I've gotten clear on is like trying to think about it from future me, right? It's like five years from now, I'm not gonna 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, right? And I think a lot of the starting, you know, just tuned into that. You know, I love the stoic stuff, you know, being mindful of death. You know, it's a cynic, Marcus Relius, all those great ones.

1:02:56Not to be like more, but just like, again, most of us just aren't really tuned into to an awareness that our lives will come to an end. And we probably avoid that, right? We try to pretend like we're gonna look 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. And that can lead us to doing things that ultimately don't matter in the long run, right? And like, 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.

1:03:40Stop wasting time on things that don't matter with people who matter. You know? Like this relationship, this journey, it will come to an end. I'm actually tearing up and feeling tingling 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?

1:04:18There'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 the the only people that'll remember you working late every night is your kids. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. An important reminder. Jam, we've covered a lot of stuff. Is there anything else that you think it might be helpful for people that you want to leave listeners with? We just are we're gonna have a lightning round coming up, but before we get that we ended in a really powerful Impactful note. Is there anything else on these lines that you think might be helpful for people? Do 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 be willing to commit to breaking out of Victim consciousness and mentality, right?

1:05:13And it's not to say there aren't but Kim's the role there are real and justices and things happening, but most of us, I've experienced, I often can fall into trap of living my life at the effect of. 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 kind of transformation that I've been able to cultivate and develop is shifting from that to a state of, I am willing to take responsibility for how I see the world.

1:05:51And 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 of learning, how am I co -creating it, even things that I play a small part in and justice in the world, how am I perpetuating that and being willing to see the world as, you know, I am the the painter of my existence, right? Like I think, you know, Victor Frankl's Manstruck for Meaning is probably the best example of that. He's in a super oppressive, you know, situation that is a very horrific and tragic and the way he described his relationship with the people in the camp and the guards and he's given, he had talked it after he was freed and the amount of compassion and empathy he had for his oppressors was like, just like amazing.

1:06:34So 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 a 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 gav 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, here's, like, I need to take responsibility for my own success and no one is a really powerful thing. It's easier said than done. There's a lot of hardships.

1:07:11People 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 recommended most to other people? In the realm of the soft skills and conscious leadership, the bus one is the 15 commitments of conscious leadership by Diane Chapman and Jim Duffer.

1:07:51Those were my kind of early coaches and teachers almost 10 years ago. And I still, Diane, I still my coach. So I think that's a fantastic book that will go into more detail about something that we talked about around fear and threat that British's trust and drama triangle and all that great stuff. That'd be one that definitely recommend first. Another one more in the content world is I think you had Nancy Dwarf on your podcast at one point. Yeah, I love her book, Resonate. I actually have some other ones too on slide design and stuff. But well, it was so cool about that. I give it to PM all the time when I'm trying to help them develop their communications, storytelling and presentation skills.

1:08:29You know, she goes through those TED Talks and Martin Luther King. I have a dream and go to the moon and basically make the sparkline against it to understand this constant resonance with the audience. It's actually a great skill for a back of vision and north -starring. What all these things do is they alternate tension between the world as it is and the world as it might be. It's like, here's that beautiful future of transportation, San Francisco, and then here's why it sucks today, like all these problems and this and that. But here's how I could look in a few years and then you know you're creating that tension.

1:09:06The audience at the end is like sweaty palms and like I want to build that future, you know, what do you need? You need money, time, resources, you know, join your company like great, you know. 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' book if you're into like, you know, he was one of the first people to articulate and import Buddhism and that sort of Eastern thinking into the West. And he just has a very satirical, comical sort of not taking myself to seriously style. And it's like the way he explains a lot of those concepts.

1:09:45So that'd be another one. He also has an amazing voice, if you listen to recordings of him with music, it just so far away. Totally. Actually, Sam Harris is waking up at, you know, that now has the entire, He worked with I think I want to son so the waking up out has all like 80 or 100 hours It recorded how much lectures. Oh my god. There's YouTube videos There's some awesome YouTube videos of him that are with watching will lead to some of those in men and see to our tape She shared exactly that lesson on the podcast that she had 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 willing to it Next question.

1:10:24Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you have really enjoyed? Yeah. The last movie I really enjoyed was Inside Out 2, my kids, which is very good to see why you'd love that. Yes, consistent with the emotional awareness and allowing with different emotional parts and going to spoil the movie and make your noise and seeing it. But it's a very simpatico with that lesson of like you can't just let one emotion run the show. They all had wisdom, you know, in the first one, right? Sadness, joy learning that sadness is necessary, right? It's all about integration and kind of, you know, but it was beautiful.

1:10:59The way a kitchen understands it, 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 like, really, yeah. Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered they really love? It could be an app, could be some physical. Yeah, so eight sleep, you know, as a smart mattress company, they're on their third or fourth rub now, but it has like, it's like a temporary peaty mattress, so you can put their cover on any mattress, but it has a cover that has little like tubes of water and then it has like a little computer thing and you fill water in the nap.

1:11:26And 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. And it, 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 you do have. And so for me it's like, you know, super cool early for deep sleep and then it warms you up as you want to wake up, which is like, you know, jolt or the middle arm and all that. But it's, you know, back to my thing about like wanting to, you know, show up with, you know, the right mindset and energy and aliveness, having really high quality sleep is to really keep part of that is like, if I don't sleep well, you know, they can get enough sleep and sleep well, like you're already starting off a bad foot.

1:12:06So yeah, if you haven't checked out Eat Sleep, great product. No endorsement. Eat for me. And what's also cool about as attracts your sleep, it gives you all these stats, like instead of bring a ring and it gives you all the stats about your sleep quality. And there's a guy Brian Johnson, and if you follow him, he's like this help. That guy that's trying to stay alive as long as possible. And he had a perfect sleep score for six months in a row. He's got the record. 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 and work or in life?

1:12:41Yeah, I've probably had different ones over the years. There's the one right now that really serves me as there's this track called Sit Around the Fire if you, John Hopkins, but it's on Spotify and Apple Music. But it's basically music with one of Ram Das's talks, what's our known notes? And so the monster that's been really serving me recently is the very first part of that, which is, he says, beyond all polarities, I am, what the judgments and opinions of the mind, be the judgments and opinions of the mind, and you exist behind that. Awesome. So sometimes I have a abbreviated version of that where I'm noticing I'm activated, I'm clean to an opinion, I'm arguing with somebody, and they're like, I'm just like, beyond all bull areas.

1:13:43That's a pretty good version. We went in front of my kids and they locked me. Daddy is so weird, some darn. The end all bullarity's kids. That's so funny. Oh man. There's another Ram Das line that I often use with my wife, Be Her Now, which is titled his book, If That Everyone Sees With The Blue Cover. And I do that when she's like on her phone and we're doing some, I'm like be here now. Which is like, okay, okay, I'll put my phone away. Yeah. Yeah. Final question. I was going to ask you about the line tracking and which you learned from that. You already shared an awesome lesson from that time.

1:14:16So let me ask you something else. I'll ask you about Travis. Any crazy, fun, memorable stories of working with Travis? Call it a clinic. Every salesman has a name, a clinic. Travis Callan, yeah. Yeah. I'll share a book one that's short, but sweet or hilarious to make. and maybe what we know. So we used to have the Uber office at working 55 market, right? And so there was a one -converture and we'd often do reviews with Travis and it wasn't the warbling, whatever I wanted to take it on those interior and no windows. But so this room had windows overlooking, what was that 11th street, right? So kind of the 11th and market.

1:14:54And so we'd have a presentation up on the projector, you know, some big screen, we'd have to go through some of the Travis. And reliably, every time he'd come in, And he would close the blinds of the windows. And my crowd was like, it's not because they were with glare, like 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 God. I was like, whoa. Your competitor, Perrono, everyone's deep, man. Okay.

1:15:29Yeah. Yeah. off. Anyway, it starts to mention a lift doing that. I could see who we're doing that to lift. Oh, you for over 1 .0. All do you. Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. It's like coaches and, you know, the NFL that are covering their lips always when they're telling giving plays just like, yeah, I wonder if people actually do that. That's amazing. I like, yeah, I get that. You know, it's like high stakes. You never know. Maybe a drone out there. Great. Amazing. Jam, what a roller coaster of a conversation. We covered so much ground. I can't even and name all the things we covered. So let me just ask you two final questions.

1:16:04Working folks find you online and reach out if they wanna work with you and 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 at Nichols .JM, but I don't tweet a lot, but maybe I should start. But the best way to find more about my kind of thoughts and thinking on the soft skill stop is a website I call rhythmofbeing .com and I've got some blog posts up there that go into detail on so many things. 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, if you select spots, I can make time.

1:16:50But 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 a 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, right? 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 kind of go more there and the energy down was like, okay, maybe that's what was interesting, you didn't resonate.

1:17:34Right, no problem. Jam, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'spodcast .com. See you in the next episode.