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Comment by codr4life | Hacker News Reader

Sorry Travis; once an asshole, always an asshole; all the leadership training in the world isn't going to change that. You're 40 years old, how long would you have us waiting? Even brother J. was on your tail in noting that bad trees don't give good fruit. Claiming 'profound' for PR-bullshit like this when you're in that kind of mess is just another nail in the coffin.

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You can't attack another human being like this here, regardless of who they are or how you hate them. It degrades the community. Also, I'm sure you wouldn't want anyone to place this kind of judgment on you.

Because this type of comment is not welcome here, I'm going to kill this one now, as well as the other ones in which you've been venting. Please don't vent on HN.

I'm not really sure if your ahole comment is warranted?

Have you watched the source material?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTEDYCkNqns

It's not exactly like Travis is abusing the driver - if anything, it's the other way around. The driver had a bone to pick, and needed to vent - Travis obviously just wanted to go home, on what was obviously a night off.

The fact he actually took the time to try to listen to the driver, and explain things - that says something for him as a CEO. Sure, he gets frustrated at the end, but he certainly handled that level of abuse better than I would, and I suspect, better than many of the armchair commentators here.

> what was obviously a night off

Public figures don't get time off. It's one of the ugliest parts of the gig.

In my experience the most effective agent for change is gratitude. Learning to be really thankful for the things that you value in your life, leads to giving them respect and leadership in your actions. I know that sounds waaaaay over the top but in my experience it has been the only way to get past emotional blocks and to change effectively.

Sorry Travis; once an asshole, always an asshole;

No, people actually do change, you know.

People do; grandparent's idiom isn't accurate.

But I've found that I don't have the mental fortitude to wait for them and see abuse meted out in the meantime. Deliberate assholery once, I'm going to be suspicious for a long, long time. Asshole twice, we're done.

Even so, what do we get for waiting anyway? Uber is easily supplanted, they're not special as a competitive force.

I was being general. Uber has been a deliberate asshole more than once.

Name some.

How about Bill Gates? Nobody could have seen him being the most prolific philanthropist of all time back when he was leading Microsoft in the 90's.

I don't know if those are orthogonal though (ruthless business leader and philanthropist). Andrew Carnegie is another great example.

Those qualities aren't necessarily orthogonal, but think about what it implies about how you should treat that ruthless capitalist.

Every dollar you gave to Bill Gates ended up being rather effectively used for good.

You. 10 years from now. Mark my words, remember this comment, come back here and tell me if you've changed.

Poster probably won't change even in ten years, see research by Dweck. Fixed mindsets are a powerful negative thing. I salute you for believing in the right thing, a growth, malleable mindset supported by modern neuroscience and neuroplasticity!

I don't doubt I will change, but his or her comment was implying people can radically change and do a complete 180. In my experience in life so far, that almost never happens and I was asking for famous examples.

I'm guessing (matter-of-factly) that you don't have a degree in psychology.

IIRC, there were two traits that don't seem to change over the course of one's life: gregariousness, and level of anxiety.

Traits other than those two can change. Classic example: an alcoholic who becomes sober.

An alcoholic that becomes sober is still an alcoholic, they are just in control over their alcoholism.

A rude person that becomes conscious of the way it comes across to act disrespectfully may still be an rude inside, but if he/she is in control of the disrespectful behavior then I count that as real change.

I'm a different person than I was ten years ago. Some things remained the same, a few things changed.

It's hard to quantify how "different of a person" you are. But if there's one thing reading psych literature taught me it's that traits like aggression and compassion (or lack thereof) are measurable and shockingly persistent in people over decades.

Circumstances, triggers, and incentives change wildly. The world is in flux. But people's attitudes generally are not.

There's a huge difference between "can't" and "don't." People can change.

I have a degree in psychology and I would love to know which studies you are referring to there because I am not aware of such well established facts.

But we have made assholes extremely successful in the past (e.g. Steve Jobs). May be they all just want to follow the trend.

Steve Jobs wasn't just an asshole, he was a phenomenally effective CEO. The problem with Kalanick isn't that he's brusque-- it's that his company isn't making money.

When Steve Jobs was 40, which Travis Kalanick is now, he had been kicked out of the first company he founded (Apple), and his second company (NeXT) was failing miserably. Pretty much everything that Steve is remembered fondly for -- his success at Apple and Pixar -- came after 1995.

> Pretty much everything that Steve is remembered fondly for -- his success at Apple and Pixar -- came after 1995.

I strongly disagree. I think Steve is more remembered for the Macintosh than for the iMac/iPod/iPhone/iPad, at least amongst HN readers and the like.

You're changing the subject. You imply Travis isn't a good CEO because his company is losing money, whereas Steve Jobs was "was a phenomenally effective CEO." At the age of 40, he most certainly was not.

The core presumption of my argument is that Uber isn't really succeeding as a company in the way that Apple (or even NeXt) did at the same "age." There are a lot of articles out there making the case that Uber's current business is not sustainable, and I tend to agree.

If NeXt wasn't profitable, it was because their sales hadn't yet caught up with their fixed engineering costs. Uber's unprofitability isn't because they're waiting for sales to grow large enough to cover the cost of their engineering operation, it's because they're heavily subsidizing the unit costs of their business.

Travis is already successful. He is worth billions.

So being a successful human being is gauged solely on the size of one's bank account?

No, but saving thousands (millions?) of lives through philanthropy goes a long way towards making up for being kind-of-a-dick-sometimes.

So its OK to act crappy now as long as you do something philanthropic later with the money you made while treating people badly? What is that called humanity arbitrage?

I don't think that basic human decency is something you should keep in a ledger to run credit and debits against.

If you got rich wholly or partly through wrong doing I don't understand how you can assign them any of the credit for giving some of it away.

Imagine if I mugged you for $100 and gave $20 to the red cross?

Terrible strawman. Travis didn't mug anyone.

The driver in the video claims otherwise.

And his claim is ridiculous. Do you actually have a point to make?

Brother J?

Jesus Christ[0]?

I hate to digress from this topic, so I won't in depth, but this whole "good tree, bad tree" philosophy is central to protestant theology and has had an impact on Western culture, while it is often not true, in my opinion.

Another variant is the "bitter water, sweet water" parable from Jude.

[0] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+7%3A15-...

> ...is central to protestant theology...

tl;dr: Using the "good fruit" passage to condemn people as "bad people" is bad reading comprehension.

Those words were said by Jesus, so it's impossible to ignore, but it's also commonly misinterpreted.

In the place you cited, it's clearly talking about "false prophets", or people who incorrectly claim to speak God's truth. They look like spiritual people (Christians, even), but you can tell they're rotten by the "fruit" of their lives. And (continuing on to verse 20) some "Christian leaders" do not follow Christ and will absolutely be rejected by Jesus on their judgement day. That passage Jude is also about determining if someone follows Christ earnestly more than deciding they're hell-bound or something.

Also, if we back up in that chapter in Matthew a bit (1), we'll see Jesus clearly say you'll be judged by the yardstick we apply to others. If we condemn assholes, we'll be condemned as assholes. Which of us isn't an asshole sometimes?

That's not giving assholery a pass, though. It's just if we're really concerned about improving the world and fixing the behavior of others, we should address ourselves first so that we won't be ineffective in the task.

Anyway, I agree that the "know them by their fruit" passage is misapplied to judge someone as a rotten person. A rotten spiritual leader? Sure. But not deciding that someone hopeless case. You'll have to find another source of authority if you want to claim that.

(1) https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+7%3A1-5...

Cited passage does not support the thesis that people cannot change.

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