The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway: Conversation with Jennifer Cohen — Building Healthy Habits and Staying Confident

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Episode 273, 273 Kelvin is the temperature of which water freezes in 1973.

The United States Drug Enforcement Administration was founded.

I recently watched a documentary on marijuana.

Actually, that's how I watch all documentaries.

Go, go, go!

Welcome to the 273rd episode of the Prop G-Pod.

Just a quick note, I'm on the road and having technical difficulties.

I'm here in Napa at some very fancy place called Stanley Ranch, and unfortunately they

don't have a lightning sea.

I don't know what it is.

Anyways, I've got every cable except the one I need.

I've got, literally, I've got pretty much, I think I could probably launch nuclear strike

missiles right now, but I don't have the cord I need.

This reminds me of a scene in Das Boot, which is, in my opinion, probably one of the best

or most underrated war films about German U-Boat soldiers.

There's, you know, 50,000 U-Boaters or whatever, Submariners, German Submariners, set out

to sea and only 10,000 returned.

Anyway, it's a fascinating, fascinating movie, and there's this one scene where they can't

figure out a way to fire their torpedoes.

They're kind of defenseless because they don't have 50 fennig, I think that's what they

call it, in wire.

Anyways, that's how I feel.

I feel like a German U-Boat commander.

Anyways, in today's episode, we speak with Jennifer Cohen, an entrepreneur brand strategist

and host of the Business Podcast, Habits and Hustle.

We discussed with Jennifer the importance of being bold and resilient.

Bold, she's bold.

How to build confidence and adding more movement into your day.

I really enjoy Jennifer.

She strikes me as someone who is really scrappy, sort of reinvented herself a few times and

has kind of landed on this cool wellness meets fitness vibe and has really, has gotten

a lot of traction and comes across authentic.

Nice woman.

I'm a big fan.

I was on her podcast and I thought, I'd like to have her on mine.

Anyways, what's happening?

As I said, I'm in Napa.

I've got the best week planned.

I came to New York, saw my sister and my niece and my nephew, and daddy takes them into a

room and gives them cold hard cash.

I like that total baller move.

I only have one requirement and that is you spend this on something really stupid that

pisses off your parents.

Hello!

Bad influence.

And then we went to dinner at Lure, which is a sushi place in Soho, which was lovely.

Which was lovely.

And then broke up the trip on my way to Napa by stopping in New York.

Because if I go eight time zones and one fell swoop in midair, I could slip and break a hip.

And then yesterday came out to Napa.

And then on what I'm really excited about, I'm saying a conference out here, what I'm

really excited about though is on Wednesday, I head to Vegas to go to the Sphere to see

you too, one of my favorite bands in the world.

And in this incredible, spherical music venue that supposedly costs two billion dollars

and costs a half a million dollars a day to advertise on supposedly, and basically have

sensory overload.

And I've heard that people take mushroom chocolates to really enjoy the experience.

Just what I've heard.

Anyways, I'll report back on that.

And then I head to LA, I'm going to be on Bill Maher this Friday, which I'm really

excited about.

And then I go to much of Halloween parties.

I'm going to Deadpool.

I've been told, I look like Ryan Reynolds, which is the good news.

The bad news is I've been told I look like Ryan Reynolds after the fire where he is

severely deformed.

So I'm actually going to try and figure out a way to put even more scars on my face.

But I'm very excited about that.

Halloween hands down the most genius holiday in the world, favorite holiday.

Why?

I get to put on a wig and women dress up as sluts.

Is that a hate crime?

Anyways, what is not to like?

What is not to like about Halloween?

All right, what's happening?

I've been blown away, literally just blown away by some recent numbers coming out of

Netflix.

I'm going to add and get this, 8.8 million subscribers in the third quarter.

It's biggest quarterly gain since 2020.

The stock jumped 16% on the news, giving them their best single day performance since January

2021.

They now boast 247 million paid subscribers of 11% from a year ago.

And that is just, they are just on fire, right?

So Amazon Prime Video has 157 million, although that number is a bit misleading because I

think they group anyone that has prime into that number.

20 has 146 million, that's more of a real number.

Warner Brothers Discovery, nearly 96 million subscribers, kind of the original gangster

here with HBO.

Paramount Plus, 61 million.

I think that's primarily just Yellowstone.

I don't know what's driving that.

And they have the Star Trek franchise, I think.

Peacock, 24 million.

I bet 23.9 million of those people are tuning in for Premier League games, but it could

be wrong.

In Apple, it's estimated to have 20 to 40 million people.

What was very interesting was it looks as if the Jon Stewart show, or the problem with

Jon Stewart show, is going off the air because of controversy over kind of creative freedom

to talk about China and AI, and then like, look, boss, 95% of our products are produced

in China.

We just don't want to deal with the headache.

Let's call the whole thing off.

Netflix also has the lowest churn rate in the U.S. compared to other premium streaming

services at about 3%.

In sum, if people cancel Netflix, it means their credit card has expired.

Similarly that, it's been the only streamer to show consistent profitability.

Netflix is literally pulling away.

So Netflix is a fascinating example of, in my opinion, Netflix, you could argue, is the

best managed company in tech in terms of consistently reinventing itself, making baller decisions,

kind of assessing the landscape, and making just very big, important, bold, strategic

moves.

So let's talk about it.

The firm launched in 1998.

It's 25 years old.

In 1999, subscription service debuts DVDs by mail.

Now, why is that strategic?

If you want to build a company worth more than $10 billion, you need to do one thing.

And that is build a thick layer of innovation on other people's capital investment.

What do I mean by that?

The greatest venture capitalist in the history of mankind is the U.S. government, whose investors,

the limited partners, U.S. middle-class taxpayers, invest in technologies, make massive investments

and no one else is able to or willing to invest in space launch capability, research

around vaccines that may or may not work, DARPA, GPS.

It goes on and on.

And in this instance, Netflix, just as Amazon did the same, leveraged an enormous investment,

a multi-hundred billion-dollar investment that loses money every year called the United

States Postal Service.

Why?

Because Netflix said the future is about delivering content into people's living rooms, but we

can wait for broadband and technology to catch up, or there's this amazing broadband

pipe called the United States Post Office, and they used to send DVDs out via mail.

And the real kind of games to move there, and I don't know if you remember this, I don't

know how old you are, but was that you, essentially, the pain point it solved was when I rented

cousins or Hannah and her sisters or Turner and Hooch back in the 90s, and I forgot about

it, and I found this thing in the back of my BCR cabinet, and I would absolutely be

horrified because when I went back to Blockbuster, I owed them eleven million dollars because

I'd had it out for four months, and essentially, Netflix said, okay, that's the pain point,

that's the anxiety, that's the fear here is these late fees.

So we're going to say you can have any three DVDs out at any time, and you create a queue

of the movies you want, and then when we get the DVD back via return, you know, kind of

this elegant design package where you just put the DVD back in, a pre-postage, prepaid

envelope.

When we get it back, we'll send you the next DVD from your queue, and then, and then they

went public, and they IPO'd a one dollar a share, by the way, it's now four hundred

and six dollars a share.

It's very easy to talk about your wins.

Let me talk about one of my biggest losses, or biggest, like, you know, put a gun in my

mouth moments.

I shouldn't joke about suicide, I shouldn't joke about suicide anyways.

And I think about 2011, Netflix was at ten bucks a share, I bought a bunch, I loved it,

I thought it was well managed, and it dropped to eight bucks a share, and I sold it to take

the tax loss in late 2011, and I never bought back in, and now see above, it's at four hundred

dollars a share.

I want to find a time machine, so I can go back, find me, kill me, and then come back

and kill myself.

Again, more inappropriate discussion around self-harm, but anyways, Jesus Christ, I wouldn't

be talking to you, I would be doing this podcast from a Gulfstream with some sort of

broadband or K-band technology, anyway, instead of searching for a fucking cable, as I sit

here, in the wine country.

2007, they decided to go into streaming.

They saw the writing on the wall, and they made a big, big bet.

2010, streaming launches on mobile, and they began their international expansion, and 2013,

they go vertical with original series programming.

So what did they do here?

A couple of enormous, enormously bold and strategic moves.

One, they were really the second company in big tech, if you will, to leverage capital

as a weapon, and that is, they had a very visionary CEO, Reed Hastings, who the market

loved and did his stock up, and then he said, this is my advantage as I'm trading an international

multiple, and on my competition, they're investors value profits over growth, whereas my investors

value growth over profits, which means I have the ability to invest ahead of the curve.

The good folks at Time Warner, who owned HBO, weren't allowed to go negative, in terms,

they weren't allowed to make the types of investments Netflix could make.

So Netflix said, I know, as long as I maintain my growth, I can kind of just keep investing

at rational sums, because my stock goes up or down based on growth, the same way Amazon

stock went up or down based on their ability to grow 10%, 15%, 20%, 25% a year versus profitability.

Looking at that growth and saying, as long as their gross margins are positive, this

type of acceleration will bust through profitability at the speed of growth, it'll crash through

the wall of profitability and become very profitable at some point in the future, and

the market is essentially an attempt to be a prediction machine and say, if this company

is going to be very profitable, once it hits profitability, we'll pull those profits back

at a discount rate and reward the owners of these shares with a bit of stock price,

and then wash, rinse, repeat.

Keep growing, cheaper capital, boom.

And then there was sort of a pivot around, I call it 2018 or 19, where they said, okay,

our growth is slowing down, we need to move to profitability, and they got a little bit

more conservative.

They didn't make the massive types of increase in budget, but still, the game was over.

They were spending so much, they pulled away from the competition.

In addition, they went vertical, and that is, if you look at retail, the people who've

added the most value are the ones that are backward-integrated into private label, whether

it's Sam's Cola, or the gap having its own brand kicking Levi's out, or folks who have

forward-integrated into retail, specifically Apple who said the distribution of tech products

is terrible, so we're going to put 550 Tables of the brand.

Netflix did the same thing.

It went vertical.

It decided to produce its own content, and House of Cards really did change the game.

Remember when HBO was just running other people's movies, they went verticals first,

but they didn't make the kind of staggering investment or have the same traction that

Netflix did with House of Cards until, of course, HBO introduced Game of Thrones.

If you're selling other people's products, it becomes about a race at the bottom, and

that's lowest cost, and you need massive scale.

They said, well, if we have proprietary content, and that kind of set off an arms race in streaming,

and Netflix has consistently reinvested or invested more and pulled away, exceptionally

well-run company.

In addition, it's better to be lucky than good, or maybe it was both, or it's better

to be good and lucky.

They decided to create infrastructure overseas and have international content, and said,

let's take advantage of our scale, go international, build a huge content production machine in

Madrid.

They spent $17 billion in content in 2022.

That's 5% less compared to 2021, but still a massive investment, and then these gale

force winds of accidental storm that ended up being a good thing for them called the

rider's strike, but more wind in their sails.

Probably the biggest strategic error of the other content players was believing they were

on the same side of Netflix, because everybody else is more focused or a little bit more

dependent on linear television, specifically Disney or Paramount or Time Warner have huge

investments on linear TV, and when you're not punching out Jimmy Kimmel every night,

you become less of a value proposition, and Netflix, which was never linear, was always

streaming and has a content pool the depth of the Mariana Trench.

The disparity or the value proposition gulf between Netflix and everybody else began

to get wider and wider and wider.

What happened in the rider's strike, well, one, Netflix reduced their content budget

as they had to as they couldn't produce stuff domestically, but they still had a much better

offering than anyone else, because see above, they had international production.

Two, their content pool was so deep that people didn't even notice it was a rider's strike,

and three, they started raising prices because they realized in their margin power, so what

happens when you decrease, decrease your costs and increase your prices because the difference

between your offering and everyone else's offering gets broader and broader?

Oh my God, cocaine and champagne for Netflix and their stock is massively accelerated and

they have pulled away from everybody else.

You want to know why the market thinks a recession is likely coming?

LVMH stock is off 20% or 30%, and Netflix is up 20% or 30%, which says to me that the

market is saying, hey, people are going to be spending less money but more time at home.

Netflix is the most underappreciated management team in technology.

We talk a lot about Tim Cook.

He deserves all of it.

Sachin Adela deserves all of it.

The team that doesn't get the credit it deserves for being exceptionally strategic, exceptionally

bold, and the ability to read the tea leaves and make extraordinarily huge balls the size

of Jupiter-like investments and decisions that pay off, two words, first net, second

word, flicks.

We'll be right back for our conversation with Jennifer Cohen.

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Welcome back.

Here's our conversation with Jennifer Cohen, an entrepreneur, brand strategist, and host

of the business podcast, Habits and Hustle.

Jennifer, where does this podcast find you?

I'm in LA.

Let's jump right into it.

In your popular TEDx talk, The Secret to Getting Anything You Want in Lives, you provide some

practical steps for being successful in life.

These steps are be bold, ask for what you want, just act, get comfortable at failing,

practice training your brain to be bold, and write down anything you want in life and make

10 attempts with it.

Can you take us through how you identified these specific steps for success?

Absolutely, I can.

So boldness is the secret sauce to success.

It's not intelligence.

I think people focus way too much on smarts and not just acting.

And so my entire life and based my philosophy on that is people are not doing the most simple

thing possible, which is actually just asking for what they want.

And therefore, they acquiesce or they accept the good enough, and then that's what we have.

So my first step is if you figure out what you want even right now, doesn't have to be

for your lifelong thing, but just for right now, figure out what that is that you want

and then make 10 attempts at going for it.

Because my other part is I created this whole idea of this 10% target.

And we hear a lot about 10xing your life and doing all these things, but then there's no

real practical, actionable step to get to that place.

So my thing is like, you know what?

Most people don't even make one attempt.

Because nobody makes two attempts.

So if you're somebody who is retraining your brain to make 10 attempts, your chances on

just pure volume alone have been exponentially been greater.

So you're making 10 attempts, whatever that thing is you want most.

And you may not even get to that particular goal, but another opportunity will present

itself based on going through the process.

And that's more or less what I speak about and how people can retrain their brains technically

and be more bold and kind of design and curate the life that they really want.

And everything, by the way, Scott, not just business.

It could be personal.

It could be in any area that you feel that you're just not showing up.

Oh, I think of it as, and I think it's a similar end state.

I've said that key to success is the willingness to endure rejection.

I mean, isn't part of being bold, the ratio of your resilience over failure, isn't it

the willingness to be bold again?

Is that somewhat what you mean by kind of your 10% rule?

Absolutely.

Exactly.

So basically it's about training your brain to be resilient.

And how you do that is you become desensitized to the feeling of failure.

Because all of this is about, it's all about just failing over and over again to become

successful, right?

The people who are the most successful is because they've fallen probably more than

anybody else.

How do you instill that sense of being bold in children?

How do you teach resilience and how do you teach your kids to be bold?

A lot of parents, I find, especially where I live, there's a lot of helicoptering parents.

I mean, this has kind of become like the new thing.

I call it like the caudal culture of today, right?

We caudal, we caudal our kids, whereas then they're not even, they're not given those

skills later on.

So everyone gets a participation trophy.

So if you fail, God forbid the kid fails and they have to learn what that feeling of rejection

is.

I say, I'm a big believer in allowing your kid to fail, letting them feel the feelings,

go through the process and pain, and then let them figure out how to move on and move

on to the next thing, as opposed to trying to curate the stale environment of success

around them.

I mean, I feel like when I was younger, it was kind of much more part of the process.

And that's why I feel like now, the caudal culture has really kind of been a disservice

for kids.

As I think about this, it feels like called the boldness or willingness to endure rejection,

I feel as if, okay, you're a kid, you're naturally shy, you're just, you're not born

bold.

Maybe you are.

I don't think you are.

And then a lot of people develop confidence.

They get capitalist motivations to be aggressive, ask for the business, ask for the job, go

up to a strange potential romantic partner.

They're taught it.

And then at least what's happened to me as I've become more successful and develop some

economic security, frankly, I've become lazy around being bold because I expect things

to come to me.

I don't, I don't want to be bold any longer.

Is there an arc to boldness as you age?

That's so true.

I totally agree.

So I think that, I think being bold is a skill.

I don't think that most of us are born bold to your point.

That's not how I see it either.

I think you have to, you've got to practice the skill of boldness at a young age and like

anything else.

If you want to get good at karate, Spanish, what dance, tennis, whatever it is, you need

to put in the hours and times and the practice, just like if you want to be bold.

That's the first part.

And you practice being bold or brave by doing these small little bold moves.

So I say, you know, be brave for 10 seconds.

If you can be brave for 10 seconds and just go through it, that's all you need to do.

But I do believe that as we do get older, we definitely get less bold because, especially

for successful, right?

Because we don't have that same tenacity or hustle because we don't have to.

So it's kind of like the same thing.

Like if you don't use it, you know, if you don't use it, you lose it.

You know, if you work out and you stop working out, your muscles will atrophy.

It's the same thing, right?

Anything that you don't use, you will atrophy and it won't be as good.

It feels as if almost every or a lot of very successful companies, whether it's Netflix

or Facebook or Tinder, they're kind of suppressing our mojo to be bold, aren't they?

I mean, why be bold and shower and spend money on going to an activity where you might meet

somebody?

Why?

Why try and network at an event when there's LinkedIn believing that there's just these

lower risk, easier facsimiles of life or being bold that kind of protect you from taking

real risks?

Aren't we sort of young people being trained not to be bold?

Yeah, exactly.

So I wrote this book called Bigger, Better, Bolder and I have a huge section about this

whole thing that we have now become, we're losing the ability to socialize.

We're losing even the ability to even have that aggressive or that tenacity and go get

our mentality because things have become too easy with technology, right?

With what you're saying, with all the different dating apps, you can name any of them, we

can just passively go left.

If we like someone, we can just rely on us just texting if they don't like us, who cares?

We're always hiding behind a screen as opposed to having that ability to have that physical

interaction.

All of these things have taken over our ability to kind of evolve and become self-actualized

in a way that we actually are able to design exactly what we want.

What do you, I get asked all the time, what advice would I give to men to be more professionally

and romantically successful?

What attributes, what coaching would you impart on young men?

And so I put the question to you, what advice do you give to young women around how to be

professionally and romantically successful in today's environments, giving some of the

challenges we've outlined?

I think first of all, you've got to build self-confidence and you can start at the fundamentals of building

in habits that, A, you follow through on, I think a lot of times we're losing a lot

of our self-confidence because we make promises to ourselves and we're not following through

on those and that just deepens our slow self-esteem, right?

So if we can create habits that are building our self-worth by small things, like even working

out regularly, like I'm a big believer and if you're building physical confidence, you

end up building mental confidence, mental strength, they're very, they go hand in hand

and that will help grow and build their mental confidence, which then they show up in the

world differently.

They present themselves better and you do things like that regularly.

It helps you as you get older and you can be more bold, right?

When you're more confident, you're not afraid to ask or talk or do all those things, but

it really starts at like a core fundamental level of simply is just like exercising, taking

care of yourself physically.

Agreed.

What do you just define as the end state?

What is in your mind, what does success look like professionally and personally?

I think it's having a rich life and I don't mean that by defying, I don't mean money

rich life.

I think having fulfilling relationships, I think associating relationships, experiences,

I think success to me isn't about having a great career and then having all these other

areas in your life be obsolete.

That to me is not success.

I think you have to be able to really, I think, foster relationships.

I think if you don't have that, you really have nothing and that's why, again, I keep

on going back to all this.

If we don't figure out a way to curate these, then really, it's a very shallow and empty

existence.

I like these hacks.

It just makes sense to me.

Do you set goals around working out of business?

If you hit those goals, you develop confidence, feel better about yourself, trying to keep

your word, trying to be disciplined about following through.

Have you thought about any other little hacks to start, if you will, building that reservoir

of confidence?

I think leaning in on your strengths is a really big one.

I think a lot of times that we hear, and you talk funnily enough, you talk about this

a lot.

I think we did this on my podcast about people constantly following what their quote unquote

passion is versus leaning into their actual where their effort is lying or what they're

good at.

To me, it's like the two don't have to go hand in hand.

I'm a big believer.

When I've done my whole life, I figured out early on, I was fortunate to be somewhat self-aware

and figured out that what I'm really good at and what I'm not so great at, and then

I went really in on the things that I was good at and really exponentially became even

better at my strengths, which then built my confidence.

Then that in itself just took on a life of its own, where I was able then to do a lot

of other things that I would have otherwise never been able to.

If I only focused on the things that I was, if I focused too much on what I was weak on,

that would have just minimized my confidence, minimized my successability, and just gave

me a lot of overwhelmingness and frustration.

A lot of us don't do anything because we are full of so much self-doubt, so much insecurity

around.

We're not pretty enough.

We're not talented enough.

We're not this enough.

Then they don't do anything.

Then that becomes a vicious spiral down to just living, not enjoying, not being successful,

not really curating or designing what you want.

My message, I say all the time, chase what you want.

Don't just take what you get.

Then you have to put in the work and be proactive in your life and make these decisions and

learn discipline, not rely on motivation, but learn discipline.

We'll be right back.

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I read that you're one of the 100 most influential people in health and fitness.

What role does spirituality, meditation, gratitude practice play in your life?

What role does that play in building this reservoir of confidence?

I'm not a big meditator.

I'm not going to lie to you.

I'm not good at it.

Are you good at it?

It's near impossible to me, and I have almost no interest in it.

And I'm embarrassed because it's like saying you don't believe in climate change.

I don't know.

I feel shamed by the world when I acknowledge I don't meditate every day.

I totally agree.

I'm not a big believer in just basically being a sheep.

And that's basically I feel what's happened.

Now I feel shamed myself because even when you ask me that question about meditation

or breath work, my heart's saying, because I'm like, I don't do either, but I've figured

out what works for me.

The truth of the matter is to answer your question, what I do is what works for me.

And just because it works for me doesn't mean it works for you, Scott or Bob or Joe or whoever.

And I think what happens is we tend to listen to what other people do.

They like to do the meditation and they like to do the breath work.

And then we inhabit what they do, even though we don't really like it, it doesn't really

fill us.

And then that becomes our routine varies superficially.

What I suggest to people is figure out what works for you and what you like by doing trial

and error.

I've tried meditation a bazillion times and quite honestly, it doesn't work for me in

that way.

What works for me, my form of meditation is jogging.

I get my best ideas.

I go into a quote unquote flow state when I jog.

That is a habit that I do daily.

My suggestion is to people figure out a routine and a system that makes you the best version

of yourself by trying a lot of shit.

And then whatever that is, do that every day or as often as you can.

Yeah, I used to do a cold plunge while I was doing breath work and then write down the

things I was grateful for and I decided to give that up and just drink a shit ton of

alcohol on a regular basis.

But anyways, it's working for me.

I'm happy.

I'm grateful I get to do these things.

What about specifically health and fitness?

I mean, you're obviously really into fitness and I think it's something that's been kind

of my anti-depressant my entire life, but there's just a huge swath of swath of people

out there who are never going to work out every day.

They're never going to really, they just don't, it's just not their thing.

Have you thought about kind of, it's like, what's the old Navy of health and fitness?

When I say old Navy, 80% of the gap for 50% of the price, we thought about just sort of

basic low effort, fairly high ROI things people should incorporate into their life, assuming

that they're just never going to be that guy or that gal who's super into fitness.

I say walking.

Walking is the most basic thing you can do.

Anybody can do it.

I mean, you don't need equipment, you don't need a gym membership and it is the number

one, the number, I would say the number one health hack, you like the word hack, the number

one health hack out there, the most bang for your buck and it's great not only for your

physical but for your mental astuteness, for your mental longevity overall.

If we can get people just to walk 15 minutes a day, 20 minutes a day, the benefits are

enormous and that's like, again, like that's not asking people, I mean, if you can't find

20 minutes a day to move your body, then we have a bigger problem.

And the reason why I think there's nothing that you're going to say to me that will take

me away from the idea of movement, I think a body in motion stays in motion.

I think inertia is a huge, huge thing and we don't focus on that enough.

When you're stagnant, everything stays stagnant.

You talk about an antidepressant, a mood stabilizer.

To me, it's been like an exercise has been a saving grace for me in terms of that and

I think if people stayed with it long enough to kind of get to see the benefits, they would

never look back.

As you get older though, another one, as you know, and I'm sure you do, strength training.

I mean, yes, people don't like to work out, I get it, but forget about physicality.

How about just in terms of like overall preventative health, in terms of building lean muscle mass

and strength training for your bones, for your joints?

I mean, we're so obsessed in this culture with longevity and anti-aging and yet we're

basically missing some major fundamentals.

We're going to all of these drugs and supplements and peptides and I can go on and on and on.

Hormone replacement, but yet we're not doing the things that are at the core of the most

basic things we need to do, which is lift heavy things and move your body by walking.

These are not just hacks for your overall health.

These are hacks for success.

That's very rarely do I meet somebody who's really kind of accomplished a lot in their

life.

I'm going to ask you, who don't integrate some form of that movement into their life?

Well, yeah, 484 of the Fortune 500 CES work out five plus times a week.

It's the common attribute more so than college degrees, gender, race.

The most common thing among Fortune 500 CES is regular exercise.

So I'll put forward another hack and it's something I wish I'd discovered earlier and

it's so basic and it also overlaps nicely with kindness, but the reality is I just didn't

embrace it until I was older.

I feel much more confident when I compliment others and that is if I find the confidence

that I met someone last night and this guy and he was wearing this great outfit and he's

so handsome.

I'm like, Jesus, I said to him like in the military, I'm like, Jesus Christ, you're

so good looking and have such a great sense of style and it just like stopped the table

and then everyone kept talking and I just could tell this guy, he was a little bit embarrassed,

but I think he was like probably late 20s.

I could see this guy like literally like grow a foot and I'm doing a lot of virtue signaling

right now, but I don't do it.

I'd like to think I do it for him, but what I found is it makes me feel more confident

and I wish I'd figured this out earlier that by recognizing other people's strengths and

attributes, you're kind of saying to the world, I'm a baller.

I'm confident enough to say these things because I'm not threatened by other people's attributes

because I have so many positives myself.

What are your thoughts on complimenting as a means of building your own reservoir of

confidence?

Oh my God, I totally love that and I'm a big believer.

I do that all the time by the way and people look at me strange because I'll be in the

elevator and I'll say the most random compliment to somebody.

Women are much better at it than men.

Women are much better at it than men.

You're so right, but even women are kind of like, I find it also disarms people, makes

them much more comfortable and you become more likable.

So that's another kind of hack, but I will say, you're asking me earlier to that, similar

to what you're talking about with confidence and giving people a compliment, there's been

a ton of research on even the gratitude journaling.

People are constantly talking about journal and gratitude journals, but the research has

actually shown that a better way to really feel gratitude is to say to somebody, thank

you so much for this one person and their response in terms to back to you like, oh,

you're welcome.

That like hit a dopamine of terms of like them acknowledging that you're giving them

that kind of acknowledgement is much stronger than just writing in a notebook every morning

the five things that you're grateful for, I should say.

And which by the way means that nothing will ever take the place of human connection and

human interaction.

Have you given any thought to the other side of the spectrum here and that is, okay, be

bold, some hacks around health and lifestyle to be happier.

What about when you're down and you're trying to kind of get unstuck and by the way to mourn

and be depressed is natural and there's nothing wrong with that.

But have you given any thought or do you have any sort of personal methodologies or go-tos

in terms when you say, I'm not doing well and I want to get out of this and I want to

get out of it faster.

Well number one, are you talking more about like in that moment because if it's in that

moment of feeling unwell, go for a walk in your like just get up, change your environment

and get into nature, go for a walk, go for a hike, you know what, how about just calling

a friend.

I mean, I like to say, you know, a lot of times we focus on how we feel before an act,

right?

But if we try and focus on that feeling of how we feel after we do something, it really

does help and shape shift how we go about our days.

Makes sense.

And last question, Jennifer.

There are actually very, very similar businesses, authors, podcasting, speaking, that's where

I get the lion's share of my revenue, but a lot of it and you're doing the same thing.

How did you get into this business?

I think a lot of people would look at the business we're in and think, that seems like

a cool way to make a living and they're not entirely sure how to start.

How did you get into this business?

A lot of things I've, listen, a lot of the things that I've started doing was I didn't

know anything about it, but I had, I didn't have a destination, but I picked a direction.

I mean, my career has pivoted over the years, all right?

I was in the sports world and then I'm like, no, I went back to business school and then

I got into the music world and then I didn't want to do that anymore.

I went to the health and I literally was following like where my effort was going, which was

I was very interested in health, so I kind of had that path and that direction.

With the podcasting and all those things, I feel like it was literally transferable

skills.

I took skills from all the things I've done before and accumulated them and created what

I have now.

It's ever-evolving, so focused on a goal that's attainable.

I guess at the end of the day, my goal is to help people.

I'm not an expert or a guru or any of these things, like I hate what people call themselves

that.

I'm just somebody, you know what I mean, who it's giving somebody ideas to be a little

bit better to up level their lives based on like what I've tried through my trial and

error and that to me is being bold and just going for it and not overthinking it and not

using analysis paralysis to talk yourself in or out of something if I can teach people

a way to just act.

Jennifer Cohen is an entrepreneur and brand strategist, educator and host of the Business

Podcast Habits and Hustles.

She is also a bestselling author of several books in the fitness and wellness space, including

her latest, Bigger, Better, Bolder, Live the Life You Want, Not the Life You Get.

Jennifer has also been named one of the top 100 most influential people in health and

fitness.

She joins us from her home in Los Angeles.

Jennifer, I love being on your podcast and you're one of the few people whose podcasts

I've gone on and I'm immediately called our producer Caroline and said we have to get

Jennifer on the pod, so thanks for joining us.

I love to talk to you.

Thank you and you are a great guest and I want you back on.

People are asking me all the time.

Go on.

There's that compliment.

There's that complimenting.

Out of happiness, taking stock of your blessings and advocacy, my narrative of the age of 40

was that I overcame financial hardship raised by a single mother who lived and died a secretary,

which was Latin for, you know, check out how fucking awesome I am, that my story was

about overcoming obstacles, success despite the obstacles that faced me.

And then when I got a little bit older and a little bit more self-aware and had better

perspective, what I realized is that I've had gale force wins in my back, being born

in America in California in the 1960s as a white heterosexual male and I'm not trying

to sound woke here, just look at the statistics around the access to capital, the access to

opportunities, the access to professional opportunities that people in my demographic

born in the 60s in California access to free education, literally free education and not

only free but access, 76% admissions rate at UCLA when I applied.

And then I thought, okay, what can I do in addition to being appreciating that, no,

I didn't have obstacles, I had wins in my back, what can I do?

And obviously you want to be a good provider, you want to be a good person, but I think

there's tremendous power and reward in advocacy.

What do I mean by that?

One of the things I admire about my podcast co-host, Kara Swisher, is that she has always

been an advocate for the LGBTQ community.

Even before it was cool, and at one point it wasn't cool, it wasn't easy to be out,

it wasn't easy to be very assertive and I'm going to call it aggressive about LGBTQ rights

into calling people out for their thinly veiled homophobia.

And I've tried to be, and I'm usually virtually signaling right now, but whatever it is what

it is, I'm trying to be an advocate for young men because I relate to them.

I relate to the struggles they face now.

So the question is, who are you an advocate for?

And you want to be an advocate for yourself.

You got to fix your own oxygen mask, and then you want to be an advocate for the people

you love.

But what does success look like?

Success looks like, and it's not necessarily financial security, it's not necessarily influence.

Do you have a connection to a group of people and decide to be an advocate for that group?

Whether it's young men, whether it's the LGBT community, whether it's artists trying to

protect their IP, whether it's you advocate for coworkers, you advocate for labor, whatever

it might be, who are you an advocate for?

Because here's the bottom line.

In a world where we have competition for a scarce amount of resources, in a world where

we are tribal by instinct, there will always be groups that are left behind.

There will always be groups that are unfairly persecuted.

There will always be groups that don't have access to the same opportunities that you

had.

And the ultimate expression of citizenship, the ultimate expression of what it means

to appreciate your blessings is to take on the role of advocacy for a group, for a group

that you relate to and needs help.

And let me tell you, it feels great.

It feels powerful.

For me, it feels masculine to be advocating for people that I may or may never meet.

You want to be happy, you want to feel good about yourself, you want to recognize how

blessed you are, you want to pay some of that back, you want to invest in karma, you want

to plant trees of which the shade you will never sit under.

Do what I never did, literally never did, until I was into my 40s and now I'm trying

to catch up.

Start earlier than I did and then find a group and engage in what is one of the most rewarding

things that any human can engage in, advocacy.

This episode is produced by Caroline Shagren.

Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer and Drew Burroughs is our technical director.

Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Box Media Podcast Network.

We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice as read by George Hahn and on Monday

with our weekly market show.

I got two headed glass dildos, a desalinization machine, a cotton gin.

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From the moment Twitter was founded, no one knew what it was supposed to be exactly,

which was kind of great.

Some people would look at it and say, this is the future of communications, others would

look at it and say, this is the public square.

Eventually, it became not so great.

What we didn't foresee was that everybody having a voice might produce a global, eracious

mob.

And there was only one place that that was happening.

It was Twitter.

A year ago, in what was essentially the world's most expensive impulse purchase, Elon Musk

bought Twitter.

That made him Twitter's most important user.

But he's certainly not the only one to fall for its spell.

It's a spell that promises attention, connection, and power.

I'm Peter Kafka, and I'm hosting Land of the Giants, the Twitter fantasy.

It's from Vox on the Vox Media Podcast Network.

This season is sponsored by Mint Mobile.

To learn how Twitter got started, how it got to where it is today, and where it's going

next, follow Land of the Giants wherever you listen to podcasts and get our first episode

on Wednesday, October 25th.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.