Tony Hsieh & Jewel Conversation @Zappos All Hands

[Music] so [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] sorry [Applause] welcome jewel and uh thank you for coming out and uh attending and doing that video with us we have a few other people wanted to welcome if we can get this clicker going oh nope those aren't the interns go hold on i'm back stop we're starting over i click too far welcome jewel welcome everyone and welcome zappos insights guests our culture camp people i think are somewhere up there and uh welcome zappos interns and so uh jules gonna uh co-emcee this i think um or part of it but let's start with financials um first up uh unless unless you guys would rather hear a song or two from jewel first then wait let's take a vote financials or jewel okay and the results are in i'll go with joel that's gonna be really scary i was actually worried if financials was gonna be i was like okay i deserved that i am very happy to be here you guys hello let's see see you guys no my name is jewel that's my real name i get asked that all the time um it's a family name it's on my birth certificate these are my real teeth nobody asks me that but i just thought i would start with it um i have no idea what i'm going to sing for you so i was raised in alaska which a lot of you know just so you know a little bit about my background i've had to do my life story in two minutes because that's how boring it actually is it actually does take about an hour and a whole book but the short version is um my family were pioneers i was raised in alaska which is a beautiful wild country my mom left when i was eight my dad had a lot of ptsd from how he was raised he had a really abusive childhood and then he went to vietnam and he got more trauma and then he became a dad with very little skills and then when my mom left when i was eight he turned to drinking to try and calm his anxiety and to medicate the pain that he was in and it didn't work out well and he ended up repeating the cycle he was raised by better he wasn't as abusive as his dad was but i ended up moving out when i was 15 because i thought i would go live on my own rather than live with a man who wasn't kind to me and i knew that statistically kids like me should end up repeating the cycle that they're raised by statistically you know not only do we have a genetic dna inheritance but we have an emotional inheritance and it's invisible to us the architecture of an emotional language that we learn to speak is taught to us usually in our family units it is not taught at school and so our idea of love of intimacy of kindness um of how we treat each other how we resolve conflict uh all the things it actually takes to be human we're not given a real proper education in and so you're supposed to glean whatever you can from your family group none of none of them are perfect it's you know like universities the reason universities are built is so you get the best ideas the newest the latest ideas because information is always being upgraded why aren't we doing that for emotions what does it take to be human and why isn't there a human school and so i decided when i was 15 to see if i could solve for this and look at this idea of nature versus nurture i received some pretty bad nurture how could i get to know my real nature how could i get to know who i was we had this bunny when i was a kid and um it thought it was a chicken because it was raised by chickens which was cute it actually would sit on the nest and hatch eggs for the hens but it gave me like this existential crisis when i moved out at 15 because i was like what if i'm a bunny that was raised by chickens and i'll never get to know my bunny nature and so i was like if i'm really vigilant and i'm hyper vigilant and i try and avoid the pitfalls of the emotional language i was taught if i can teach myself and piece together a new emotional language can i have a different outcome than what my life was set up to do according to you know statistically i showed up on drugs in a ditch on a stripper pole some combination of those things i wanted to avoid all of those except the stripper pull i'm kidding um and so i did pretty good i got myself through school i graduated i ended up in san diego where my mom was sick i was taking care of her and a boss propositioned me one day and when i wouldn't have sex with him he fired me without my paycheck and i couldn't pay my rent we got kicked out of where we were living my mom went back to alaska i was living in my car in san diego thinking it would only last a couple months i'd get a new job i'd save up for a deposit on a new place i'd get going but i had bad kidneys and i was getting sick all the time my anxiety levels were skyrocketing i started having panic attacks when i was 16 and i had no skill set to handle it you know talk about you know paying rent at a very young age was under a lot of stresses and so suddenly you know living in my car these things were ramping up my health was getting worse i almost died in the parking lot of an emergency room because they wouldn't see me because i didn't have insurance and uh it was this and then the car i was living and got stolen that sucked but i wasn't in it so that was less sucky um silver linings so this is how i ended up homeless there's sort of this misconception that i was living in my car for my music that was not the case i was living in my car just strictly to survive and when my car got stolen i got introduced to what the poverty cycle actually is and what being dehumanized is being an animal means that you're just surviving you're worrying about food shelter safety period nothing else you don't have time or resources to do anything else you're really stripped of the gift of what it is to be human and as we enter this new age of artificial intelligence where they're going to out-think us they're going to be able to do things intellectually and not intellectually but through programming whatever you call that uh where they're gonna out think is they're gonna outmaneuver us what is it that being a human is what is special about being human and so i started asking myself those things while i was homeless because i needed to because i was an animal and i needed to figure out how to get back to being a human and i was stealing a lot i was having i was agoraphobic which is an intense fear of leaving your home which when you don't have a home is very intensified um and one day i was stealing this dress i yeah i stole a fair amount back in those days it started with carrots which apparently are the gateway vegetable because pretty soon it led to the hard stuff like medjool i was a very healthy homeless kid and it was mostly food until one day it looked like it would escalate when uh there was a dress in a window and i coveted it it was clean and it was girly and it was new and just everything i felt like i wasn't and i decided that i would go in there and i would take care of myself by stealing a dress and i caught my reflection in the mirror and i couldn't deny what i looked like i looked like a homeless kid stealing and i was a statistic i was really disappointed in three short years i went from being a very independent very capable young woman at 15 paying rent i worked a job since i was very young traveled all over the country hitchhiked through mexico and in three short years my life came to a grinding halt and i quit believing that i could do earn forty dollars or earn enough money to buy an apple that's how much of a standstill my life came to and i remember this quote that a buddha had said that happiness doesn't depend on who you are or what you have it depends on what you think and i had this great pleasure of being stripped of every single thing that might distract me from that single proposition what is the quality of my thought i began to read a lot of book books on physics i always was fascinated by physics and when i learned about particle non-locality that a single particle can be in two places at one time and that where that particle went was often dependent on what the observer expected it to do that gave me really a lot of hope as a homeless kid because it felt like wow something about the fabric of this world is listening to us and as we pursued finding the higgs boson and all that stuff that eventually came to pass and now they think there's what four more but um i digress into my physics geeky i apologize um i began to turn my life around one thought at a time and i began to go what is it to be human what do i need to be human and the model that i came up with is that happiness is a side effect of right choices it's a side effect of having tone on every limb of your life and so a lot of us are raised in our households to maybe have the ability to have an education in one limb of our life let's pretend it's our career limb for me was singing i was raised singing of a musical family so my singing limb was really buff by the time i was 18 i had a pretty impressive fitness on my singing limb and if that's the only thing you saw you'd think i was a pretty together with it kid but my ability to have emotional intimacy was horribly atrophied my physical wellness was horribly atrophied uh all sorts of other limbs and i realized for me to be happy i actually had to create tone in every limb of my life because just like with a physical body if all you had was one strong right arm you'd be in a lot of physical pains the rest of you would be so atrophied our emotional bodies are like that if we only have tone on our ceo arm or only have tone and i'm a mom too i have a almost six year old so let's say i all my identity went to me being a mom what about the rest of me it can't atrophy and and i can't expect happiness to be the side effect if i only have one strong limb or now that i am a mom both my parents were pretty dysfunctional when i was young so how do i get fitness in that limb that's worthwhile and so i came up with my what i call whole human strategy and i began writing songs i got discovered and what i was writing about were these things that i was dealing with thinking about talking about i was able to cultivate a fan base that really supported me and believed in that same proposition music it was never about music it was about a value proposition of i am a work in progress i'm trying to find inspiration and education and then find the equipment to have tone in every area of my life so when i got signed to a record label i almost didn't sign it which is strange for somebody to say as a homeless person i was signed a million dollar i was almost given a million dollar signing bonus i was offered one and i turned it down because i realized it was a loan and my number one job was to be a whole person not to be famous and not to be rich and so i had to make good on that that meant i had to make plans for how do i protect my humanity in a situation that's possibly very dehumanizing fame and so i said about making a very simple folk record talking about my own philosophies and what i was reading in books and amazingly i ended up having a successful career but again i never thought it was about the music and that's why i took years between records that's why i changed genres that's why i really pushed myself and now as i look at the world and where the world is and that technology's here to stay it's not going anywhere it has created you know this there is no distance we're closer to one another we're singing to each other's lives but we're still not receiving a meaningful education about what it is to be actually human and that's a disservice it's a shame we're being taught math and english which i'm not against math and english they've benefited me greatly okay the english part um i should have learned more math that's a whole other chapter in the book that's pretty sad but uh what do we do to get a human education and so as i look now as a mom that i don't want to just tour and make a living i want to be able to talk to people about the things that i've learned the experts that i've found how i've gained tone and every limb of my life and to be able to start having a deeper dialogue with people beyond just my fan base and i met tony on necker island and heard what he was talking about with self-organization um physics a lot of the stuff that really excites me and i really believe there's a vacuum being created in his society and we have the opportunity to fill that vacuum in a meaningful way i want to play one song for you i think i have time here um unless there's any requests i was going to try one song but if you guys have any has to be something i wrote though because i don't know any thing else particularly i thought i'd sing you a the song i wrote when i was homeless when i realized that you know i came up with this exercise you know i was trying to figure out okay if happiness depends on what you think what do i think and i was having too much anxiety to calm down a new study just came out actually saying that anxiety and depression are at all time highs in historical history historical history redundant i do write good lots i barely graduated so we're lucky i'm just upright um i couldn't perceive my thoughts in real time and so i had to learn to calm my anxiety i had to learn how to intervene with my panic attacks develop tools and strategies and so i turned to writing and i thought if i can't see what i'm thinking or even notice what i'm thinking witness it in real time i can watch what my hands are doing and so i started to follow my hands around and journal and write how many times they stole because that didn't stop right away how many times they would open doors how many times they would shut them how many times i wouldn't shake somebody's hand how many times i actually did shake somebody's hand my takeaway you know if you want to see what you're thinking watch what your hands are doing because it is your thought slowed down into action the takeaway was i quit believing in myself you know at some point i started believing a lie that i wasn't capable and i believed that lies so thoroughly that i stopped trying um i was i beat myself in in my head uh but the other thing that was really unexpected is my anxiety calmed down as i did this little what they would call now mindfulness exercise of just watching my hands it forced me to be present and i learned that fear is this thief and it takes the past and it projects into the future our brains are these amazing biological computers that are built to do exactly that you know the best indicator of the recent future is the recent past and so it's constantly projecting your past into the future and robbing you of the only opportunity you have to actually create change so to me what mindfulness is this word is maybe a word you guys have heard in the 90s nobody was talking about it mindfulness to me is the ability to perceive a thought and create a gap before you act on a thought and the bigger that gap is the more you have time to bring your values to bear and new education to bear so you can have a different action than a knee-jerk neurological reaction that's how i turned my life around was creating a gap between perceiving a thought and acting on a thought and that's how i was able to turn my entire life around um i just launched a website where dr judson brewer neurological amazing expert explained why a lot of these exercises i built even work which was pretty remarkable for me to to see but this song was really about my first mindfulness exercise about watching my hands about the fact that if you can actually show up in the moment you have the opportunity to create change and you're no longer a victim of your circumstance you actually get to be the driver so i often use a metaphor of a car but let's pretend our body is a car your brain is not the driver it's a steering wheel descartes said i think therefore i am if i could reframe that a little bit i would just say i perceive what i think therefore i am so if i could perceive i was sad i was something other than sad i was the observer of sad that's a more exciting proposition if i could perceive i was anxious i was something other than anxious i was the observer of anxious that's very interesting your observer is the driver and when you have an atrophied relationship with your driver you feel empty inside your anxiety heightens you can't figure out what your passions are and anxiety is such a static like on a radio dial is just static you can't hear your own bio feedback system of when am i comfortable when am i not comfortable why am i uncomfortable and so for me it was about being able to really tune into that and develop a better relationship and not be a victim and this is the song that i wrote to sort of give myself a constant reminder of it it's called hands if i could tell the world just and me they're all okay [Music] not to worry cause worry is wasteful and useless in times like these [Music] i won't be made useless i won't be made idle with despair i'll gather myself around my faith for light does the darkness most fear my hands are small i know but they're not yours they are my own they're not yours they are my own and i am never broken poverty stole your golden shoes i did not steal your laughter an heartache came to visit me but i knew it was not ever after and we will fight but not out of spite just cause someone must stand up for its rights cause where there's a man who has no voice their hours shall go singing and my hands are small i know but they're not yours they are my own [Music] only kindness matters in the end only kindness matters [Music] [Laughter] [Music] i will pay i will get down on my knees and i will pray cause my hands are small i know but they're not yours [Music] we are never broken oh no we are never broken cause we are [Music] we are god's eyes [Music] we are god's hearts god's hands we are [Music] thank you appreciate it thank you so um give up for jewel so uh joel and i actually uh were speaking on a panel at a conference a few weeks ago the salt conference here in vegas and it was the first time she and i had ever we didn't really prep for anything and this guy named sean who's on your board i think was the moderator asking us questions and then we were just going back and forth and uh it was a really enjoyable experience and we were saying we should go on the road together or rather i was saying that i want to get off the road and um and so i thought and it was like i think half an hour or 40 minutes or so and thought it'd be cool to try experimenting and doing the same thing here so asked if sean was available and unfortunately as the moderator he was not but it turned out that he has a twin brother named ryan and so uh let's welcome sean's brother ryan [Applause] i think he's gonna you want to tell a little bit about yourself and i think why don't we put you in there oh sure sure okay sure well i'm sean's twin brother can you guys hear me is it on okay so ryan uh and i met he runs a youth foundation here in vegas uh where he helps uh at-risk youth and he kind of has developed an algorithm to help them understand what it is to be entrepreneurial give them a psychology for life and then give some mindfulness tools and he's just been experimenting with it and uh he has 100 success rate of the kids in his leadership team earning their own scholarships to princeton georgetown yale it's really incredible these are kids that shouldn't have graduated high school and you know i often say none of us get out of pain with none of us get out of life without pain you know we have different backgrounds but we're all going to have our hearts broken what do we do with the pieces that's what makes us extraordinary and he helps children do that in a really meaningful way he was an entrepreneur before that and he realized that he wasn't a happy person and that his billionaire boss wasn't necessarily a happy person either and he decided he wanted to learn more about how to be happy and so that's been the journey that he's been on and he's now the president of my organization and that's ryan and i'm sean's swim brother well part of that story is i i think most people in life have someone that came into their life and really inspired them and i had a great uh mentor but he knew how to build companies and and make profits big profits and uh and at a time in my life that was important but as i got older i just saw that as the leader of an organization you know you're responsible for families and individuals and i kind of had a jerry maguire moment like am i really living a meaningful life and and i walked away and did the foundation because frankly it's kind of neat for me to be up here with tony because back then there wasn't a tony chair a zappos type environment i wanted to have a whole human environment where people could be free um but back then it was i'm the boss you do what i say you know and this is how you live and and i don't know how anybody is inspired in that kind of environment so when i've heard about you know jules always talking about tony and his ideas and and self-management and it's just such an extraordinary thing but today i got to experience it so i go up to tony i said well you know what do we want to talk about and um he's like you know just whatever you think is best you know just trust yourself and i hope you guys know how special that is that someone will actually say i trust you and your ingenuity and your intuition and for you to be free and to express yourself and that that's actually in a corporate environment and i find that to be very extraordinary it's revolutionary i've never seen anything like it to be honest so it's an honor to be up here and to be sean's filling as a moderator um oh to be a twin but but the other night we had this big event where we had a meeting and we're gonna meet for four hours and i go over to do the meeting she's like i'm really sorry but i'm getting this amazing text from tony sending me these articles do you mind if i nerd out with tony and we just cancel all that and i'm like okay so i think we have a chance today to see like what do they do when they nerd out what do they talk about um see i'm like can you send me some of those articles i want to read them too um but first i'd like to know like how did you guys meet like how did this whole thing begin um so i guess we've known it's each other about a year now and um we were both invited to speak uh by virgin on richard branson's island necker necker island and so when they invited me i was like uh i guess i'll go and so and probably the same thing and um yeah it was a beautiful place and i was actually doing a powerpoint presentation about uh zappos and downtown revitalization and during the q a part of it and most of the other it was it was a small conference only i think it was only 30 or 40 people and most of the other folks were ceos or founders of their own companies of uh that had all done pretty well and the q a actually ended up being more about self-organization self-management and as you guys know uh trying to explain hello actually in a q a format in uh you know 20 minutes is fairly challenging and i was talking about concepts like tension processing and integration and and so on in purpose-based hierarchies and you know some people seem to get it most people as usual or it's hard to explain so we're confused by all the terminology and there's jewel in the back like just kind of nodding and then she was the one that kept asking these follow-up like really insightful questions that usually from a presentation i've never actually experienced with anyone it's usually maybe six months into actually practicing harassment or self-organization that start hearing some of the questions those ques types of questions from from people and so after the session was over we there was a break and myself and maybe four or five other people had follow-up questions and they were just asking me and then jewel kind of wanders and and observing us from and listening to other people's questions and i'm trying to explain well we have this tool called glass frog and it's basically our org chart literally changes every day and jewel kind of pipes up and it was like what's an org chart and and which i thought was like the most the fact she was asking all these questions and had never even heard the term org chart before um and then and then i think we just started talking and uh i don't know that's my version of it i don't know what you're i was just so drunk i don't even remember the day no okay now i do remember the day very well uh hearing tony talk about a self-organized company and i grew up in nature and that was my teacher and so i spent a lot of time observing and i learned if i observed very very very deeply i could learn an incredible amount and what i saw in his presentation was a natural living breathing organism and again i think i used a body as a metaphor but when he described circles i was like oh that's like a kidney and that's a liver and that's a spleen and they all know what to do the kidneys know what to do they're kidney like they're programmed to be a kidney they know what kidneys need to do they don't have to be told by the liver what the kidney needs to do but they're imprinted with the the code which is the values of the company and so i saw it as this living breathing organic organism and as somebody who studied nature and also loves physics i think everything has to be able to follow the natural order or else it will break down and what i was hearing him describe was a company as a living breathing organism that was given life breathed life through its values and what its purpose was it wasn't about shoes and i found that really fascinating and it made me want to pick his brain more yeah and i think also i think you talked a lot about fractals at the time but fractals in nature and uh i think about it in business and so on and and really this you know like if you use a rainforest as an example there's no ceo of the rainforest and but the rainforest is self-organized and another city fun fact i like to share sometimes is that in all of manhattan there's only something like three days of food supply but there's no central food planner there's different individuals and businesses consuming food and that creates opportunities for food suppliers but the system's amazingly resilient and a bridge there can be a natural disaster a bridge can go out but manhattan never runs out of food and and then i think there are just a lot of analog connections between how you think about resilience on a personal level and a human level and then having that fractal uh also apply on an organizational level yeah it's exciting we love geeking out over things like entropy the idea that the universe is constantly breaking things down and having them be rebuilt and if using rainforest is an example of that it's happening all the time and it it rebuilds itself in such a much more ingenious way than prior to when it was broken down it's constantly regenerating constantly being resilient it doesn't know how not to be and as humans when did we quit knowing how to be resilient when did we start thinking pain was something we couldn't overcome and convert into beauty or something more meaningful being broken down is part of a life and so what do we do to rebuild we're constantly in a state of rebuilding and the quicker whoever can get to that part quickest wins i don't know if winning's the right word but uh we move on with with less and less discomfort the quicker we can get comfortable with the idea that we're constantly being asked to break ourselves down and rebuild ourselves every single day as an opportunity to do that and how do we do that as humans and then how you can build companies that are a reflection of that and then what's funny is there's this whole area of research and that with lots of academics and that talks about systems thinking has nothing to do with humans but from a systems thinking perspective their resilience is actually a formalized concept and what's interesting is most companies actually try to maximize for either efficiency or stability or both and the research on systems shows that actually between stability and efficiency any time you've maximized for those you're actually minimizing for resiliency and so if you want to increase the resiliency of a system whether that system is some mathematical model or an actual organization that you actually need to [Music] in order to increase resiliency there will be some perceived inefficiencies or some perceived uh instabilities or not even perceived actual uh institut instability and that constant change in intention is actually part of what ultimately ends up making whether it's an organism or a or city or an organization more resilient and the reason why there's another statistic i think fortune 500 came out with their initial list in 1955 and 88 of those companies are no longer on the list so the default future for companies is death under the normal hierarchical structure and we've seen we all know so many examples of companies that were once greater industries the music industry for example once great and and then uh making and making lots of money being super efficient until they're irrelevant and so the reason that a lot of companies fall into that efficiency and stability trap is because you can observe efficiency and you can observe stability much more easily than you can observe resiliency and and so it's harder to get the uh appreciate the value till it's too late that's true yeah being able to pivot in real time like with my career i never had a plan of like this is where i want to be i want to be this amount famous i want i never had those types of metrics or goals in mind i had in mind like what is right today for me to do what am i seeing in my atmosphere what can i respond to to help what i'm doing align with what's culturally relevant that's what i've always found really fascinating just with our friendship is you know as i look at where we're headed in society you know where are we at in society i feel like i did that when i was you know at the beginning of my career my music career i was like what do i have to offer that's relevant and authentic to where culture's at right now for me it was the 90s we just came out of the 80s grunge was basically a response to the 80s happy shiny world and the grunge movement was basically saying i don't feel happy i don't feel shiny i feel horrible i feel empty inside and i want to talk about it and i'm not going to write silly pop songs saying everything's great when i don't feel great and that's an important part of the evolution of a zeitgeist for a culture and grunge music gave voice to that unrest and i was dealing with a lot of that and then it was sort of i came to the dot dot dot and now what i feel crappy dot dot dot and now what how do i how do i fix it and i happen to intersect in culture at a time when they were looking for solutions so you i don't think there's any true cynic alive they end up killing themselves so all of us that are here breathing actually have some hope that there's there's a way to have a better tomorrow than what we did today and that's what my career was founded on and as i look today at where culture's headed ai's fascinating i was talking with steve wozniak i know you know as well and he was talking to me about ai and he goes he was talking about an axiom i can't remember the name of the axiom but basically where if we program ai to say it can't do harm to humans we'll be safe and he said i actually think it's backwards i think we have to have an axiom that says we won't hurt a.i and then we're safe it's pretty profound thing to hear something like steve wozniak say that's how real it is and then it started me thinking what is unique about being human you know what is it about humans that we can't that we can do the computers never will be able to and it has very little to do with our intellect and if you think about it our quality of life has very little to do with our intellect and in fact our quality of life is often inhibited by merely our internet intellect it's really having that relationship with our observer that gives us oh these are what my passions are this is what my direction is in life this is how to have satisfaction and fulfillment and how does that start to apply to a workforce that's going to start to be very displaced by ai it's fascinating yeah i mean i i think uh definitely the successful businesses of the future are going to have some ai component to it just like you know 20 years ago if you said if we were instead talking about the internet instead of ai it would be are you an entering company or not a new but basically almost every uh sizable business now needs to somehow interface with the internet and so i think the same thing's going to happen with with ai i think from an organizational perspective historically zappos has always been strong in culture and values and i think that's one of the that is the main pillar that historically has gotten us to where we are i think moving forward it's actually you know to tie into not only how do you make a human think of a human being more human but how do you make an organization more human and um we have an acronym pec that stands for personal emotional connection and that's what we try to do with every phone call when a customer calls in and really transfer that human connection and and elicit some sort of emotion it's not an intellectual rational response we're trying to get from the customer and um and then one of the things that whole actually has enabled us to do is rather than the standard hierarchy of people the way it's organized currently is it's a hierarchy of purpose statements and there's circles and sub-circles and so on so i think that's kind of our next um one of our next big opportunities is really having the idea of having purpose of and every employee here fills probably multiple roles and each role has a purpose statement that's in the context of their circles greater purpose statement which is in the context of the parent circles greater purpose statement and so on all the way up to the company's purpose statement and i hope that over the next i actually have no idea how long it will take that being able to for us to have purpose be top of mind in how we make decisions the same way core values are for us where our core values are just part of our everyday language and when when something becomes part of language then it changes your neurology and then it becomes this self-reinforcing because now you have a reference point in your brain that that you can point to so i'm hoping we do the same thing with purpose statements we refer to our values we refer to our purpose name and then we have this other concept that we've uh started talking a little bit about called market-based dynamics and it's really just this idea of getting away from top-down hierarchical decisions and like a rainforest or like a city you know the mayor of city doesn't tell us residents what to do or where to live it's more about creating the right context and conditions for great creative ideas to happen for self-organization and self-management to happen so i kind of think of those as the three pillars of zap i guess not just zappos but potentially for for any company if one of the pillars is about value slash culture one of the pillars is about purpose and one of the uh pillars is about whether you call it self-organization or market-based dynamics or something that concept and i think those three combined is kind of the next evolution of i guess companies in general and so we're we're learning a lot and and i feel bad for ryan who i'm just trying to swim brother no i i find it interesting because i get to sit here and listen and that's how we met and now i know why she said can i have four hours to nerd out with tony but um well i do have a question in that because this is fascinating to me um because i know that when you first started all these companies society didn't think like this and it probably took a lot of courage and will to actually get boards and public people that are investing to be okay with this even though it makes the most sense when was your jerry maguire moment like how did this all come to mind was it 20 years ago was it your first business how did this come about so back in 1996 i had co-founded another internet company with um with a college roommate and we grew that to about 100 or so people and ended up selling the company to microsoft in 1998 but what a lot of people don't know and i don't even know if you know this the real reason we sold the company was because it just wasn't the company culture had gone completely downhill and it just wasn't a fun place to work at anymore and i remember when it was just five or ten of us we were we were kind of your typical early stage internet company we were working around the clock sleeping under our desks had no idea what day of the week it was but it was like super exciting super fun and uh as we started growing we started hiring friends and friends of friends and that whole that kept the culture really strong because everyone had some sort of relationship beforehand and that whole strategy actually worked really well until we got to about 20 ish people and then we ran into a major problem and the problem was we basically ran out of friends and so so and we were fresh out of college had no idea how to interview people learned a lot through trial and error i think did a decent job in terms of hiring people with the right skill sets but we just didn't know any better to pay attention to culture had never thought about what values of the company were or should be um and so by the time we yeah by the time we got to 100 people it wasn't any one higher it was just kind of death by a thousand cuts and and so when i got involved with zappos wanted to make sure didn't make the same mistake again and um and so that's why culture was always important from the beginning for me like i see things in such again natural metaphors but when i was studying trees when i was younger i'd look at the softwood trees they grew quickly which looked like fun i grew quickly it was impressive but then they fell over very quickly and you saw the hardwood trees they grew very slowly and they grew from a really deep widespread very stable root system and a lot of the growth was invisible and then slowly started to see something above ground but growth really happens from that root system up you're fed and nourished and given information and even if you look at creativity you know the headwaters of creativity or curiosity the death of creativity is hubris and arrogance and so as i was a young artist i was like how can i be a hardwood tree how can i grow my career slowly in the shape that i think will last a long time that will be based on and so i started my kind of hardwood model which is based on my root system as my values and those are what inform me and it was interesting i was talking to my five-year-old the other day and he was like well i grew up to be a good person and i was like i don't know honey he's like what i was like i don't know i was like it's not a guarantee you know it's like you you actually it's a choice you make every day and he's like even me i'm like yeah even even even you like and i didn't say it wasn't scary but he's like well how will i grow up and to be a good person and i'm like well there's all kinds of adults you know what kind of adult do you want to be you have to give that some thought because there's powerful adults that are greedy there's powerful adults that are kind and wise and they wield power with wisdom there's unhappy grumpy cynical adults there's very happy fun partying adults there's all kinds you know what do you want to be giving that some thought you know what is your purpose why are you here what do you want to do and he says well how will i grow into a good wise person and i was this isn't the bedtime conversation i thought i'd be having that night um but i was like how do you not get lost in the forest and he said a compass and i was like what is your compass in the forest of life and i said it's your values that's how you start to not get lost and so we started listing his values and i said every day if you can act in accordance and walk each step with your values you'll end up where you want to go and he's like well but what is my what is my purpose and i was like that's a treasure hunt that you're on i can't actually tell him his purpose he's his own little individual and he's like i get to be on my own treasure hunt for my own purpose i was like yeah you're on a little scavenger hunt and like you're going to start listening to your environment you're going to start seeing what moves you what inspires you and that's what you need to listen to more than anything else and so it's really extraordinary for me to be near somebody and talk to somebody and potentially get to build something with somebody that is thinking in these terms because again when you look at fractals what's you know if you take a salt of the drop of the ocean it's going to have all the information that the entire ocean has in it they're not inseparable they're not two separate things um and so if you have a happy whole human as an employee you're gonna have a happy whole organization organization and vice versa you can't have one without the other and with that video that you guys got to sell rocked my world that was an awesome video it's so true you know we really are looking at a society now where we have to look at i used to call it capitalism with a conscience if capitalism has no conscience it gets to run amok and we're living in a world now where you don't get that margin of error because it's transparent you get to see into people's hearts into their motivations into what's really motivating them and people want real value they don't just want they don't want just a pair of shoes they want a value offering with that saying we actually care there's an emotional connection here i see you as a human what value can i bring beyond this single proposition how can it be more holistic proposition it's really cool to see and do the two of you guys want to talk about i know you've been talking about i'm lucky enough to be on jules board of directors and you're talking about doing a collaboration to help people become whole humans you want to talk a little bit about that and share with them um yeah me and tony we're talking about resiliency how do you create resiliency in companies um what do i think about resiliency just in humans and and how do we help people learn how to transmute pain into beauty um or i assume with company cultures you know how do you transmute shifts and respond in real time and not see that as a big tragedy or keep your mouth shut but actually move toward it move toward the uncomfortable things move towards where the shifts are happening that's where the good stuff is so i learned as a human emotionally like if i'm uncomfortable move toward the uncomfortable feeling it'll get resolved quicker it's the best shortcuts the only meaningful shortcut that there is and it allows me then to get to rebuilding quicker so and and then i think this is one of the things we ended up talking a little bit on the panel when when you mentioned that to me that's the analogous thing for and you don't know enough about halachi that we're using but it's all based on tension processing it's when you notice the tension uh you are i think for a lot of humans forget the in an organization just individually if there's something uncomfortable then uh would i think by default avoidance of that tension and so that's one of the things that i really liked about your philosophy is really leaning into the tension rather than avoiding the tension and and that's something where um that's part of the reason why i have this mohawk because uh we had this uh circus theme party my hair was really short like last august and then it was right at the time for the party but then you know that's obviously faded out but i actually have not cut the middle at all for almost a year now and it's been it was definitely uncomfortable in the beginning and now it's uh it's interesting just uh sometimes just the different reactions i get from strangers and children and and their parents that walked the other way and so um but it's something i try to do in my personal life try to do you know one uncomfortable thing every day but then within the zappos context trying to the goal long term for the organization is to not view tensions as a bad thing but just the gap between the way things are today and what's possible in terms of furthering our purpose and making forward progress and the whole system is based on if everyone in all the roles process their tensions on an ongoing basis it's not going to mean that we'll wake up one day and suddenly there's no more tensions but those it's gonna necessarily create new tensions and then the ongoing processing is what's gonna ultimately make us better and more resilient and uh and moving forward which to me kind of is entropy and the idea of you know in thermodynamics they discovered a principle called entropy which is basically the universe is constantly tearing things down but it's constantly being rebuilt at the same time and that applies to everything it applies to everything and so when i got comfortable with the idea that there's constantly a force of entropy you know tearing me down and asking me to rebuild it just means i'm in a constant state of creation it doesn't mean i'm necessarily a constant state of death i'm just in a constant state of creation the quicker you get comfortable with that the quicker it's so exciting when you start getting comfortable with that proposition of being um as artists we often you know you write a song you have nothing and then you have something so you get pretty comfortable with the idea that i have a pile of nothing but something's going to come out of it pretty soon it terrified the label heads because they worked on quarters and they worked on like but what do you mean you don't have a song written yet we have a single dropping and next time like it'll come it's just not there yet um what is it to have a constant state of creation where we're constantly creating ourselves where we're constantly willing to see what needs to be taken away what no longer suits us you know where is being able to respond in real time to your ecosystem your environment and family around you i can't remember i sent you the ted talk or you sent me the type talk but there's uh i think it was a 12-minute long ted talk that talked about this idea of where they noticed that systems that have there's a correlation between systems that have more entropy but an entropy is uh like about losing information and uh but in those same systems there's also uh intelligence and they define intelligence as with the ability to maximize your future options and and in general in any closed system entropy generally wins and the only way you can have the intelligence also happen is energy needs to be put into the system so for us on earth we have the sun as an energy source and for us as an organization we have our employees and our uh income operating income as an energy store so it's just interesting seeing and the willingness to look at like with the record industry for instance i mean it was a dinosaur they didn't see the comet coming and you could see the comet coming for a really long time uh but it was a mixture of hubris um and just sort of status quality i thought they were too big to be brought down um and needed to be brought down and actually was incredibly inefficient um it needed to be redistributed it's being redistributed people don't quite know what the future of that disrupted market is which is something i find really fun and fascinating it's fun to be a musician right now um but to get back to our the thing that we might be creating together which i forgot to totally address uh we were talking about these ideas of the idea of resilience how can you create you know resiliency entrepreneurship courage um in a corporation or in a company in a living organization an organism you have to actually have each human individual empowered to do that and something that motivates me to get out of bed versus spend time with my child you know like what motivates me to leave the house is very different you know it takes a lot more to get me to want to leave my house than before i was a mom and for me it's this proposition of there's an incredible vacuum getting created where what it is to understand how to be human how to be a happy satisfied human is going to be really important as we face the future not only because i think it's important like we're alive who wants to suffer every day you know we've got to figure out how to have a purposeful meaningful life where we can get inspiration education education and then equipment in every limb in really busy lives where we have things coming at us every time so my assistant amy who's one of my dearest friends she's worked with me for 12 years you know she has two children and she has moments where she calls me and she's like i don't know what to do with my child right now i locked myself in the bathroom and it's taking all my energy just to call you and not go out there and scream at her i this has gone beyond her her education of how to handle this as a parent what if you could just facetime or skype somebody that was well curated and be able to get information education instantly with somebody that you trusted about here's how to handle this moment and what if we could do that in every limb and what if we could change that education model of what is it to inspire educate and then equip them and what if it was so well curated with such a well-trusted curator that you can just trust it you know a lot of the homework's been done and a lot of the research has been done where you can go i can trust this product i can trust this education i can trust this leader and i can now start to go develop tone in whatever limb you want to work on your parenting limb your fitness limb your understanding nutrition in a more meaningful way understanding physical fitness in a more meaningful way understanding your work life so that it feels like it has the same value position as your home life how do you make all those things sync up and it has a lot to do with culture and how do we interact with our work culture how do we interact with our customer culture that's something i've been very passionate about as a musician is really tinkering with my fan culture i have the coolest fans they call themselves the everyday angels they um now without my input at all i used to have to be more involved but i don't even have to do it they've they've built this amazing culture where one of my fans recently lost her long-term partner to cancer and she was devastated really really devastated and the group has learned to talk about their issues in front of each other really through social media because they live all over the world and my fans without any of my input developed a calendar and they all took days off of work and it was a grieving calendar where they went to grieve with her and they all flew in and spent however many days of a shift that they could afford taking off from their job and for an entire month she was never alone somebody cooked for her sat with her helped her cry and they showed up for one another in this really meaningful way and so what if businesses can i was reading uh jefferson um and adams when they were working on the declaration of independence and adam said question jefferson he said why are you so into small government you know what is it with you and he said well bureaucracies don't know how to love they can't fix social problems only only humans can because only humans have a heart and that just seems so apropos with the the talk that you started uh today's meeting with that really is one of our strongest values and especially as we move forward we're not doing a great job at helping people understand how to lead with their heart how to lead with their intuition how to transmute pain how to respond in real time to their environment and come up with these ingenious intuitive solutions that actually doesn't have a ton to do with our intellect we're not doing a great job at it now it's going to become paramount that we get good at it because ai i think is going to force us into that proposition i think it's needed anyway without that um so we're working on a little circle that is going to be tackling that so jules i think in a circle now that's pretty cool and i think you guys understand what that means so if you were to say the thing that blew your mind because i i'm on her board so i get all these requests can juul do this can she work with our company blah blah blah and i'm sure tony i know tony gets a million of those as well what is it about each of you that makes you say you know this is who i think i want to work with i get to pick really i know in your case one one organization i like to align with and really do you know put my heart and soul into it what was it about tony and zappos culture about him or the organization that really spoke to you or speaks to you i think there is this vacuum that's being opened up um we have a real opportunity to to do what jefferson talked about all those years ago which is solve problems for humanity because we're the ones with hearts and if we can inspire business leaders and other entrepreneurs to solve human problems for employees i believe that you'll have a more loyal more productive more resilient more courageous employee and at the same time you're solving some social problems by giving them a value offering of helping them how to understand parenting better when they go home helping them understand what to feed their family when they go home how to address their other limbs give them education beyond what affects you and your in your job and if you can do that with the culture with the company with the consumer that you're interacting with that starts to make human heart you know your heart scalable that's exciting to me and you don't meet a lot of people that think about corporations in an organic way about how can i create a living breathing thing that starts to respond to its environment in real time that's an exciting proposition that's very very stimulating and exciting and it's true because anything that isn't built on that principle will be broken down and it will be irrelevant i call it the dead tree in the forest you see these beautiful huge trees but they're dead on the inside but they're still standing a lot of companies are like that they're dead on the inside they just don't know it yet how can you constantly regenerate from the inside from the root system up as a human and then as an organization and if you can get both going at the same time i want to see that i want to see that exist in the world and so that's why i wanted to put what i'm hoping for the world into this type of partnership because you meet very few business leaders that are excited by that type of concept much less understand that there really is a lot of economic gain in conscious capitalism and how cutting edge can we be because right now the way i perceive a lot of large companies campuses is it's a more elegant trap it's in the guise of perks you know will do everything for you so you never leave work but we're not going to teach you how to be less anxious and we're not going to help you be happier humans to me what i hear tony saying he wants to solve for exactly that that's what i want to solve for and i'm excited to see where it takes us yeah and i think for me jewel lived in alaska for a long time and was amongst nature a lot and and i think just for for me i think all the answers are already in nature somewhere we just need to figure out where it is and how to apply it to whether it's organizations or ai is the is based on how the brain works and uh yeah and i think there's just so many things where the answers are right there in front of us and uh jules in nature a lot more and about fractals in nature and so on and so i think that's what initially uh drew me to her and if you don't mind we were in the trailer park which was epic and um you were telling us the story when you first met her and you're up on stage and she's asking the questions and you were talking about what was going on in your mind would you mind sharing that if you do with you yes she was asking you're a necker you were talking she was asking questions and you you were telling us what was going on your mind that you didn't say out loud you remember that oh um what yeah no maybe not no i don't okay i i think i wanted to answer the question with i love you but it wasn't and i was like no that's not something same in front of 30 people so apparently it's okay in front of 1500 people strictly platonic it was nice for me to be able to you know because you have a conversation i'm not a i wasn't i never went to college it was neat to meet a business leader that actually is thinking about these things because so many leaders are short-sighted and i don't mean that as a critique it's just what we're educated to do and they're not thinking about these long-term very far-reaching concepts of what is real sustainability we're not talking about just being green what's actually sustainable what's a model that will take us into the future for a long time it's never about the thing like for me it's never been about music you know talking to tony it's not about shoes it's about the whole ethos and the spirit that happens to be selling shoes but we'll get into other things because it's about the ethos and the spirit that's the sun that's the energy that will fuel other upstarts and other trees to grow in the forest of what eventually will be a very large ecosystem yeah and there's a quote uh supposedly attributed to charles darwin and it's something like it's not the strongest or fastest or most intelligent of species that survives it's the one that's most adaptable to change and i think the same thing is true for a human individually and same thing is true for uh an organization well i like to close by saying you know i think about 20 years ago if there were people that ran the organizations like these two i would probably have stayed in in that world and it's pretty amazing that both of these people could probably do whatever they want i think they have the resources and and the ability to choose any thing that they want to spend their time on but instead they're spending their time on how can we help people be happier and and be more whole humans and to be able to work for a company like that is a pretty extraordinary thing it's been an honor for me to be here today so thank you very much and let's hear it frog thank you thank you thank you thank you so i'm going to give you a hello thank you thank you appreciate it thank you um i think you're supposed to bye um joel and ryan you

Channel: Inspiringchildren

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Id: KJ_8e5BNBwA

Length: 65min 12sec (3912 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 15 2021