Habits and Hustle - Episode 94: Ozan Varol – Rocket Scientist Turned Law Professor & Bestselling Author

Episode Date: December 15, 2020

Ozan Varol is literally a Rocket Scientist turn Law Professor (at Lewis & Clark Law School) and is the author of the bestselling book Think Like a Rocket Scientist. Ozan discusses how conventional wisdom has stunted our growth and he delves into the specific ways we can approach decisions of all magnitudes in our life. Each minute of this episode has something valuable to be learned and his strategies are designed to be applicable to anyone! This episode is essential to see why flying lower is not necessarily safer than flying high.  Youtube Link to This Episode Ozan’s Website Ozan’s Instagram ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Did you learn something from tuning in today? Please pay it forward and write us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts. 📧If you have feedback for the show, please email [e-mail]  📙Get yourself a copy of Jennifer Cohen’s newest book from Habit Nest, Badass Body Goals Journal. ℹ️Habits & Hustle Website 📚Habit Nest Website 📱Follow Jennifer – Instagram – Facebook – Twitter – Jennifer’s Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to the Habits and Hustle Podcast. A podcast that uncovers the rituals, unspoken habits and mindsets of extraordinary people. A podcast powered by habit nest. Now here's your host, Jennifer Cohen. I don't even know where this, I guess we could start at the beginning. I was thinking there are so many like in each chapter, you kind of have so many really good points

that I was like, that's so true, that's so true. So I don't know if I wanted to go, and I never have done this before, but chapter through chapter, but basically overall, I love how you kind of make us question our own assumptions and our own ideologies, right? Because we get so stuck in our own ideologies and ideas of what we've done in the past.

And then we take those into what we do in the in the in the future. So like let's even start with like chat, you know, even in chapter one, you talk about how humans are actually programmed to fear uncertainty, which I totally agree with, and how anomalies are an important driver for success. So let's start with that. So start with why you wrote the book, your background, and then answer my first question. Sure. So I served on the Mars Exploration Rovers Project, which

sends two Rovers to Mars in 2003. Their names are Spirit and Opportunity. We had built them to last for 90 days and then I still get goosebumps when I say this, but opportunity, one of the two rovers ended up roving for over 15 years into its expected 90 day lifetime. So it ended up being one of the most successful interplanetary missions of all time. And then I did a major 180, which people always ask me about. I left rocket science, went into Toa, I went to law school, became a practicing attorney, and then became a law professor after that, and then pivoted again to write and speak to general audiences.

But one of the things I did was I took these concepts, these frameworks, decision-making skills, critical thinking skills from rocket science, and started applying them to vastly different fields. Like law, like academia, like business, and I noticed there's a huge gap between what rocket scientists have figured out in terms of how to make decisions on their uncertainty, how to tackle complex problems when the clock is ticking, that the rest of the world just simply doesn't know. Because we tend to put rocket scientists into their own corner, right? We, you know, it's not rocket science

or it is rocket science. So I wanted to write a book, not about the science behind rocket science, but about simple strategies that anybody can use to be able to make giant leaps in work and life. And so that blossomed into the book, think like a rocket scientist. So the chapter you mentioned,

which is flying in the face of uncertainty, ended up being particularly relevant, even though I wrote the book far before the COVID-19 pandemic. Right. But that first chapter, certainly, is very relevant to everybody right now. And so going to your question about fearing uncertainty, as you said, there was a genetical component to this. Like if our ancestors did not fear the unknown, they became food for a

saber-toothed tiger. You know, the unknown could present danger to us, whereas what you knew was familiar. And so the ancestors who survived long enough to pass their genes onto us were those who were afraid of the unknown and were afraid of the uncertain. So you take that genetic conditioning and then you build in layers and layers of educational conditioning on top of it, that gives us really false impression that life is a series of right answers. And that right answer is delivered to you by this authority figure that steps up before the classroom and just gives you knowledge for you to absorb, for you to memorize, for you to then spit out

on a standardized test, widely disconnected from how the real world operates. And by the way, the education system doesn't let you see the messy reality behind the glamour. Like you see Newton's laws as if they just arrived by like a grand divine visitation. You don't see the years that Newton spent tweaking them, revising them, his failed experiments,

none of them makes the cut. So then you get this false impression that life is a series of right answers. So then we bring this false impression that life is a series of right answers. So then we bring that into our adult lives and that's why people look for life hacks and shortcuts and you know guaranteed formulas for making however much money a month. But that's not how life works. You know all breakthroughs happen in uncertain conditions. If you look at scientific history, they all happen when a scientist embraces chaos, embraces uncertainty, sits with a problem for a while, and then a breakthrough happens. The

discovery of penicillin, x-ray, oxygen, all of that happens when scientists embrace rather than reject an uncertainty. And that's the same for businesses and people too. I think particularly in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was such a grasp for certainty in the business world. If you think back to March and April of 2020, when you must have received numerous emails from businesses like from your insurance company and from your bank, they're all basically saying the same thing. Like, especially from our CEO about COVID-19 and repeating cliche phrases like dear valued customer. And it happens because in particularly in uncertain conditions, we tend to assume that other people know something that we don't. Right.

So we end up copying and pasting them. So life then becomes a race to the center. Like everybody is doing the same things. Everybody is using each other's tactics, but the people who stand out, the businesses who stand out tend to be the ones that explore the edges. They are not watching to the center. They're reasoning from first principles. They're not copying other people's tactics just instinctively. They're actually questioning them and asking like, okay, well, this business is using this marketing tactic, but is it the best way of implementing our overall vision?

And it's incredible the number of businesses and the number of people who don't ask those questions. Well, yeah, I think like you said, it's very much part of our human nature to be comfortable and feel safe. So, how does someone take what they're kind of psychologically and program to do and shift that mindset? I think there are a number of things you can do, which I talk about in the book.

Number one being just realizing that if you look at any business achievement, any scientific achievement, it happens when the scientists or the business person embraces rather than rejects uncertainty. So just beginning with that standpoint, that uncertainty is actually a friend. And then asking yourself a series of questions and a series of frameworks that you can use. Number one, is this a one-way door decision or is it a two-way door decision? That's something I ask myself on a regular basis.

So one-way door decision's meaning if you open the door and you walk into this room that you haven't been in before these uncertain conditions and you don't like what you see, you're stuck. You can't walk back out. Whereas two-way doors are the opposite of that. You can walk in and take a look at what the room shows you. And if you don't like what you see, you can walk back out. Most of the time, we assume that our decisions are the irreversible one-way door. Right. Which is why people just sort of tend to not do anything. They just stick with the status quo. But if you look closely, a lot of our decisions are two way doors.

So I'll give you an example from my own life. When I was practicing law, I was interested in leaving the practice of law and entering the teaching of law. And I agonize over this decision for months. I made like every pro and connoisse imaginable talk to numerous people. Research is important, but in hindsight, I could have decided far faster than I did because that was a two-way door decision. I was approaching it as if it was one way door. Like, I would leave the practice of law and I could never come back. And that was a false assumption. I could always go back. And that was a false assumption. I could always go back. I still had my part of license. That's really helpful to me.

No, no, I was just, I didn't mean to interrupt you. I was gonna say, I like that you said in the book, it kind of made me pause because you did say, most decisions are reversible, not everything, but you can and people think that once you make that decision, you're stuck there forever. And I agree. And then we get into this analysis paralysis. We think so long sometimes and we're just, we can't move one direction or another or we go on default. We take the thing that's most comfortable and we act we ask to what's in front of us because it's safe and comfortable.

And we don't even give ourselves the option or the opportunity to see what's in front of us because it's safe and comfortable. And we don't even give ourselves the option or the opportunity to see what's next. And so like, but when you said that in the book, I really, like I said, it resonated a lot. So what is, let's go into first principle thinking. Let's do that, let's go with that. Explain it. Yeah, so let me explain it with a story.

I open that chapter by telling the story of Elon Musk and space acts So when Elon Musk he he was one of the co-founders of PayPal and he sold PayPal to eBay and walked away with a bunch of money And he's his moonshot was to send people to Mars one day and so he started shopping for rockets He first looked on the American market. Those were way too expensive He then went to Russia and he shopped for a kid do not Decommissioned intercontinental ballistic missiles that he could Repurpose as rockets and even those were too expensive and on one of his Shopping trips from Russia Russia empty handed he had an epiphany and

He he realized that he he was doing basically what we were talking about before. He was copying what other people were doing. And in shopping for views, rockets that other people had built, he realized that he was not reasoning from first principles. So reasoning from first principles is a way of letting go of everything except for what is essential. So you are hacking through whatever system you've got in place, hacking through all of the assumptions as if you're like hacking through a jungle with a machete to get at the fundamental non-negotiable components and then you build the system back up from there. So for Elon, you're reading

it from first principles meant, wait wait a minute, what does it take to actually put a rocket into orbit? If you look at the raw materials of a rocket, the non-negotiable sub-components, it turns out that buying those raw materials yourself and building the rocket from scratch, it would be like 2% of the typical price of a used rocket. So that's what we ended

up doing. I was sampling these rockets at SpaceX's factories. Another assumption that he questioned was reusability. For decades, rockets couldn't be reused. So they would burn up in the atmosphere or plunge into the ocean after they delivered their cargo, requiring an entirely new rocket to be rebuilt. Now, we imagine for a moment doing that for commercial flights. I'm in Portland right now. I fly to New York City, the passengers deplane, and then somebody steps up to the plane

and just torches it, lights it on fire. Right, it's crazy, but what was crazy? With rockets for decades, and the price of a modern rocket is about the same as a Boeing 737. And so that's one of the assumptions that SpaceX ended up questioning. And because of that, the cost of space flight

has been cut drastically by a factor of 40, all because SpaceX was willing to look at the outdated assumptions in the aerospace industry and just put a question mark at the end of them. Keep coming back, you got plenty of space! Oof, not how you would have done that. You like working with people you can rely on, like USAA, who has helped guide the military community for the past 100 years. USAA, get a quote today. This episode is brought to you by GlobalX ETFs. Start your investing journey by exploring exchange traded funds. Exchange traded funds, more commonly known as ETFs, create baskets of stocks, bonds, and other assets that you can buy in a single trade.

At GlobalX, they specialize in ETFs that track emerging technologies, like the rise of electric vehicles, as well as strategies aimed to potentially generate income and much more. To discover how you can add ETFs to your portfolio, visit globalxetfs.com. Well, yeah, he's also like you use him as an example for obvious reasons in the book a bunch of times, right? So, but not everyone, that's why he's Elon Musk and most everyone else is not, right? Because he would, he would basically reverse engineer that in his head to think about that, right? Most people, again, can't do that. But like most of the stuff what I like about it is, there's a lot of things that people

we know, we just have to be reminded that we can be that way too. We can think that way on a smaller scale, right? By the way, are you friends with Elon because you both are in the same rocket science type of? No, not friends. No, okay. Hopefully one of these days our paths will cross. Oh, you haven't met him?

No, no, I haven't met him. But you write in the sense that, so people look at it figure like Elon Musk and say, well, I can't met him. But you write in the sense that so we look, people are going to figure like Elon Musk and say, well, I can't do what he did, right? You can actually, I mean, you don't need to be sending Rockestimars, but on your day to day life, it's as simple as asking yourself, do I own my assumptions or do my assumptions on me? Take one thing that you're doing on a daily basis. This could be a routine, a habit, like something you're doing simply because you've done it

before or simply because other people around you're doing it. And question it. Extra-diased. You know, was that? Let's say, ex working out. Yeah, exactly. It could be working out.

It could be the way you work out. It could be the way that like the way you work out, for example, is you get on the treadmill and you run for a half hour every day. Yeah. Because that's what you've always done, right? Exactly. That's the best way to train. Probably not, maybe, maybe not, but it's when you get into the habit of questioning those assumptions, it's like a muscle, basically, to use another workout analogy. The more you flex the questioning of the assumptions muscle, the stronger it gets. And once you, like, it can be as simple, we just move. It can be as simple as picking up, like, where you're certain, where you normally put your, like, coffee mugs or your water glasses

and questioning why they're there. Usually they're there because when you move into the house, this where you put them. And then even though they may not be the optimal placement, they remain there just because it's the status quo. And the people who get ahead in life tend to be the ones who question those assumptions on a regular basis and ask, is there a better way? Absolutely. You said actually a couple things. First of all, you should all, if you think of something and what is it here, it says, when you ask yourself why you're doing this and you come up with more than one answer, it usually means you're trying to convince yourself. First of all, which I thought was very smart. But you're right. We all do that. It's more like we're pre-programmed and on autopilot.

You're right. So I've been working out for so long that I get stuck in my own rut, because I think you want wake up, you go to treadmill, you do the boom. And it's so hard to deviate from your regular routine. Even though it probably is good for many reasons. It can change the way you're probably your neurons

function together or you can get better. That's why people plateau is because they don't challenge themselves beyond that. But you talk about something called pain of independence because isn't that also when you kind of give lip service? You know, like right now what I'm doing, this is basically me doing pain of independence because isn't that also when you kind of give lip service, you know, like right now what I'm doing, this is basically me doing pain of independence. I'm talking about the way I know that I should change something. But yeah, the day I won't, I'll go right back to doing my treadmill and doing my squats

with, you know, my 15 pound weights or whatever, right? Like that's what we do. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, whenever you are deviating from the status quo, whenever, particularly deviating from the status quo in a way, that's non-conformist. So you are leaving your tribe behind in some fashion. That causes a pain of independence because we are tribal creatures. You know, if you didn't conform centuries ago to or thousands of years ago to what the tribal chief told you, then you would be ostracized or worse left for dead. So no, there's certainly a pain of independence, but the universe denters, the people who leave a dent on the universe,

tend to be the ones who move through that pain, just like in a workout, right? You know, you're suffering some pain in the process of lifting a weight, but your muscle is growing stronger as a result. And I think there's a counterpart to the pain of independence, which is the joy of independence, which I don't expressly call that in the book, but I think the output of the rocket scientists I cover in the book, certain the illustrates the joy that comes from reimagining the status of hanging a question mark and conventional wisdom and finding a better path forward. Those tend to be the people that the successful ones are tend to be the people that we talk

about and those are the people that leave a mark. I mean, so are you saying a couple things that we should, so are you someone who doesn't like routine? Do you feel that routine restricts us, hinders us from basically growing and progressing? Not necessarily. So a couple of things. One I think I do think it's unhealthy to copy somebody else's morning routine without questioning it, which I think a lot of people are doing.

If I just use the same pencil that this famous author is using, or if I just adopt the same way to writing that this best-selling author is done, then I'm going to be able to get the same results. I think that's false, and I think that's unhealthy, because what work for that author is not going to be able to get the same results. I think that's false and I think that's unhealthy because what worked for that author is not going to work for you necessarily. And you're only seeing the success stories, by the way. So you're only seeing the authors who are following that routine and then achieving that amazing result.

The people who are following that routine and are not achieving that result, they're not going to make the news. So I think that that's point number one. And point number two, I think for me at least, and again, I'm going to fair, I'm going to paraphrase, it's not paraphrase, a preface it by saying, this is what I do. For me at least, it's more important what I don't do in the morning than it is what I do actually do. And what I don't do, this could be a non-routine, or anti-routine, is like check social media, check email, any of those distractions that tend to clutter my head,

I don't do in the morning. My mornings, this is the only routine I have, are reserved for meditation, journaling, and writing. I don't take any meetings, any phone calls before 11 a.m. My mornings are sacred to me. Now, the way that I approach the mornings can vary from time to time. I do think there is something healthy about varying up your routines, because if you get too comfortable doing things a certain way, like if you're only a custom to writing, for example, while, you know while standing before your stand-up desk, drinking coffee, and you're listening to algorithmically generated,

soothing music, and that's the only conditions under which you can write, then I think you are becoming susceptible to disruption. So to the extent that that routine is disrupted, you have to travel, you have to be on the road. Now, all of those components that you've relied on so heavily to create the ideal writing environment are no longer there. So I think it's useful to disrupt your routines from time to time too. So you can have routines, but I do think it's good to not get too complacent with them and just change them up every now and then, just like you would a workout routine. Arnold Schwarzenegger calls us like shocking the muscles.

Yeah. So the muscles are not doing the same reps and sets every single time and getting complacent as a result, varying up your workout routine so that you're giving your muscles something unexpected. I think the same thing applies to your brain. I love home where you're using all these fitness analogies here too, right? Like maybe you should be a personal trainer in your next life, you know? Just like Arnold Schwarzenegger said.

I mean, you never know, right? You see your jack-of-all-trades. No, I agree with that. It's hard. You know, a lot of high performers are people who try to be really efficient, right? They put them, they create very stringent morning routines, night routines to keep them on task. I'm one of those people, I guess you can say.

It's so hard to deviate because I've conditioned myself to believe that the more things like certain things you put on autopilot, it gives your space and brain room to think about other things. Sure. But the counter to that is, then you get so stuck in your ways, you can't see anything beyond that, and then you're not pushing past that barrier. So, that's why I really, like I said, when I read this stuff, it resonates.

And I think a lot of people get stuck in that stuff all the time, right? And I mean, you were speaking about something again. I didn't even, I didn't know what these things were until I read your book, but a lot of times, because we can't see what's in front of us, because we do it over and over again. You talk about a couple things in the book.

You talk about, kill the company exercise and red teaming that companies like an Amazon would do to kind of because they know that you can only see what you see. It's myopic view. Can you talk about what those two things are and who does it and why it's important to do or how do we take it on a more of a basic level, people who are not Jeff Bezos, let's say, or whoever, and apply it? Yeah, so, and just so I'm clear on the question, the first one was kill the company. Was it was the second part? You said this and you talked about the kill the company exercise, red teaming. Oh, red teaming.

Red teaming, there's also I wanted to talk about. It's all on the same. Oh, no, let's go with those two. I don't want to confuse you with too many at once. Shout out to how good your memory is. Yeah, for sure. So Kill the Company is, and I first heard about it being discussed in the context of Merck,

the pharmaceutical company. But again, anybody can do this, and I'll explain how. And so Kenneth Frazier, who is the CEO of Merck, he wanted to promote innovation at Merck, like other CEOs, but most CEOs ask the cliche questions, like, what's the next big thing? Or how do we think outside the box? And when you ask those questions

that your employees have heard before, the answers that you get are by and large the same, or they tend to be like marginal improvements over the status quo. So one day, Kenneth Frazier asked his executives to do something they had never done before. He asked them to kill the company, to literally put Merck out of business.

So the executives spent a day thinking through strategies, they played the role of one of Merck's top competitors, and they figured out ways to put Merck out of business. And then they switched roles, they went back to being Merck executives, and they figured out ways to defend against those threats. And the exercise was, I think, really successful for two reasons. One, when you are being forced to, I mean, actually step outside the box and look at the box from the perspective of a competitor seeking to destroy it, you end up identifying weaknesses that you otherwise can't see. Because you're deploying new neural pathways,

you have an entirely different perspective on the issue than you had before if your CEO was simply asking you to think outside the box. And I think second, the second reason why it's successful is the urgency of change becomes clear. When you actually do have a list of threats to your company and those look relatively viable, you're like, oh my god, all right, we need to do something about these. And this is exactly what they did. They went back to being merc executives and figured out ways to defend

against those threats. It's very similar to red teaming, which comes out of the military. The military does the same thing. They have the blue team, the American soldiers, the red team, the enemy, and then one team will play the role of the enemy and figure out the weaknesses of the blue team. So you can do this in your own daily life. You can ask yourself, why might my boss pass me up for a promotion? Or if you're applying for a job, why may I not get this job? Or if you're launching a new product in your company, why might this product fail? And take those questions seriously, don't treat them like that. Interview question you get, when people ask, what's your biggest weakness?

you get like what's when people ask what's your biggest weakness? Right. Oh, bragging right. Oh, I worked too hard. Actually, be honest with yourself. Like why the people who are buying from your competitors, why are they making that choice? It's not because they're stupid. It's not because they're wrong in your right. It's because they see something that you're not saying.

They believe something that you don't believe. They're telling themselves a different story. And you're not going to be able to see that story, let alone change it if you're stuck in your own limited perspective. And a great way to jolt yourself out of that perspective is through the KELOLAND company exercise. And so how do we, when we're like like, my, I guess, my point before was also, like, sometimes you don't see what you don't see,

because you're so used to it. So with the Kilda Company exercise, red teaming, what do we do? Like, bring it down to the most basic level. What does someone do to kind of see those blind spots when we don't have, we don't have a consultant at, you know, Deloitte that we can hire or something else, you know. Yeah, there are two things you can do. So number one is just adopt the perspective of your

competitor. Adopt the perspective of your boss. And as I'm going to use another fitness analogy here. Here we go again. This is your new career. This is a muscle. I think it's so hard to see somebody else's truth. The more you do it, the better you get at it. And I think adopting the perspective of your boss or adopting the perspective of your competitors, and this could mean stepping into their shoes, like actually using the product that your competitor sells. If you work at Adidas, walk a mile in a pair of Nike's and ask yourself, why are people buying these?

So adopting the perspective of somebody else, it could be your customer, it could be your boss, it could be your competitor. Now even that is hard. Yeah, go ahead, John. No, no, it's going to say, like could be your competitor. Now even that is hard. Yeah, go ahead, John. No, no, it's gonna say, like, you know, you talk about in the book how invisible rules become even more difficult, like those are habits

and behaviors that kind of like are even harder to kind of change than anything else. And that's what I'm saying, when you're, these things are so ingrained in us, I guess you'd call them invisible rules. How do you, it's hard to change them, right? Like I guess you'd call them invisible rules. It's hard to change them, right? I know you don't have all the answers because you're not.

But it's just continue. I didn't mean to interrupt you. So these are kind of like these. It is really hard. And by the way, questioning your assumptions, trying to see what's in your blind spot is one of the hardest things. It's really hard. And it's really hard when

you first begin. But like I said, take it step by step, question the small things, the small assumptions in your life. And I guarantee you you will get better at it. You can also get some help. And that help doesn't have to be in the form of you available expensive consultants. I'm available for keynote speeches, but that's a. You can you know, you don't have to hire me to it can be as simple as as this could be your like spouse, your partner, it could be somebody from like a different team or a different division in your company who knows nothing about what you're working on, bringing them into the conversation, and letting them ask the quote unquote dumb questions that are actually not dumb at all. Usually beginners ask the

best questions because they are questioning things. They're outsiders. They are questioning things that go to some like fundamental aspect of what you're working on and they are seeing what you're missing because they are not wedded to the status quo. They don't give a shit about conventional wisdom because they don't know what conventional wisdom is in your field or industry. Then that's why if you look at the gate crashers in our modern businesses, they tend to be outsiders to the industry that they ended up disrupting. Elon Musk is an example of this. He picked up rocket science

by reading the fundamentals of rocket propulsion, which in Brazil somewhere. Jeff Bezos started Amazon after being in the finance world. Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix, was a computer programmer before he saw all of these outdated assumptions that the video rental industry was operating under. Sarah Blakely, who went from selling facts machines door to door to becoming the world's youngest self-made female billionaire after she started Spanks, they were all able to see what the industry insiders could

not see. So bringing other people into the conversation, particularly people who don't know anything about what you're working on, can be one of the smartest things you can do because they will help you identify those assumptions and those blind spots. I think that's a great point. I also think it's a good point to continue with that. People shouldn't limit themselves to what they think their experience is or what they know.

A lot of times when you don't know anything and you are, sometimes when you're too smart or you think your brain becomes complacent and you can't, that's when you really can't think about those things. But when you're a beginner, you know, nothing, everything is kind of like a world is your oyster. That's when you kind of see those things. And I say that to people who, you know, who really kind of do take things on that default and stay places where they know they don't want to be because they're, the fear component

comes in for trying something new. But to your point, a lot of those people who are the biggest successes of our time, right, are people who were kind of just like they pivoted from something totally different. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and Sarah Blakely, to go back to that example, people ask her, what was your business plan when you started spanks? And she says, like, what was your business plan when you start a spank? And she says, I didn't have a business plan. Right. I hadn't taken a single business class.

I knew nothing about fashion. I knew nothing about retail. It's just she had this idea she believed in. And she said, I just basically she went to first principles. And the first principles of a business are, you have to make a product, you have to build awareness and excitement around it, and you have to sell it. And the first principles of a business are you have to make a product, you have to build awareness and excitement around it, and you have to sell it. That's it. Those are the first principles of a business, and that's all she did. She built this product she believed in. She generated excitement and awareness around it, and she sold it. Rinson Rippy. That's it.

That's the super. Absolutely. I think it's interesting because, and you talk about this in the book too, and again, I appreciate that, is that sometimes the most obvious things are the most obvious answers are actually the answers. We try to over-complicate things that are really not that complicated, but we don't trust ourselves to just use that answer or the most simple answer is usually the correct one.

Yeah. Why do we do it? Why do we always do that? I think it's partially because of this tendency to copy. We look to what other people are doing and then they're doing all of this complicated stuff. They have this complicated sales funnel or they're using this software or this routine or this habit and then we copy it with all the complexities hashed to it

and and I do think that's That's part of it the other part of it is we tend to accumulate things Habits routine systems processes over time and we don't question them So they build up and things get more complex, more complex, more complex, the bigger the business gets. Because no one's taken the time to actually say, do we need these processes? A lot of our processes were developed in responsive problems that no longer exist. But the immune response remains long after the pathogen

leaves. You adopt a way of doing something in response to yesterday's problem and then you keep doing that even when the problem goes away. So I think that also tends to build complexity, but as you said, Jen, the simplest solution to a problem, all things being equal, is often the right one. And complex things just break more easily. When you have a complicated system, you're just introducing more points of failure to it. Whereas simple things, well, they're simpler. They have fewer points of failure. And then they also help you allow that that mindset of simplicity helps you get back to first principles, the fundamentals of actually

what you're trying to build. Going back and asking yourself, why am I doing all this stuff? Like what is the purpose of what I'm doing? And then identifying the non-negotiables and going from there, I think that's a great way to get to simplicity and cut through some of the clutter that you may have accumulated. More from our guest, but first a few words from our sponsor. The solutions to our country's biggest problems are closer than we think, and believe in people by Charles Koch is a guidebook to uncovering them. It's a look into the transformations that happen in society when we transform ourselves. From former gang leaders, turn peace

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We have a special link set up specifically to our listeners. Go to hustlenewcom.com and get 50% off your 30-day subscription of Newcom and their money back guarantee. That's hustle, Newcom, n-u-c-a-l-m.com. Hustle, n-u-c-a-l-m.com. I like how you said also how like when we don't know something, we were so used to relying on like Google or a book and that also can hinder us a lot of times. For sure. I think we all have experiences that we've had in our lives.

This like lifetime of knowledge that we accumulated yet we assume that the answer lies at the end of a well-formulated Google search. But you know, instead of looking within and asking ourselves, okay, now that I'm about to start a business and I know the fundamental thing I need to do is to build this product, build awareness, and then sell it, how do I actually do that? How would I approach that problem? And so that way of thinking before you research is a great way of unearthing some of the wisdom that is actually within all of us. Like we are all walking repositories of epiphanies, but those tend to get cluttered

because we rely so much on external search for answers instead of looking within for that wisdom. And again, two simple ways of doing this. One, think before your research. So before the next time you're about to research something, say how to build a marketing campaign, put the research aside for a moment and spend an hour brainstorming marketing strategies for yourself. Because if you don't do that, if you jump immediately into research, this is when the

copying and pasting tends to happen. This is why the original insights within you become obscure because you anchor yourself to what other people have did. So then it becomes harder for you to see what they've done in a different light. Research should come later. You can still delve into research, but think before you research. And then, and this is something I try to do as an author is to create more than I consume. I read a lot, but sometimes, and I found myself doing this too, reading can be an excuse for not doing. Reading for me can be an excuse for not writing, because I

can always come up with reasons where, well, I'm an author. I should be up on the latest business book. But if I create more than I consume, that mindset puts me in a position to say, okay, well, I need to generate some original insights today. And how do I do that? And the best way for me to do that is to get into this habit of creating more than I, more than I take it. No, I think that's so on your, you're so on the nose there because I feel we become, our brains become kind of lazy, not to use that whole analogy with fit, you know, muscles again, but you don't use your brain, you know, if you, if you stop using that, that muscle

to think and work for you, it gets kind of lazy. And I think with Google and all these books, I think it kind of like, it kind of enables us to do that, right? Like we kind of, we realize so heavily on all this Google it, like phone numbers. Do you remember the days when you remembered everybody's phone number that you needed, right? You knew your mom's number, you knew your friends number, and then because we can store it all, nobody knows a phone number.

I don't know my husband's phone number. I don't know my mom's number, I know, but besides my mom can't tell you anybody's phone number. And I dial it at nauseam 50,000 times a week, no clue. And I'm not alone because that's what happens. We just become lazy to the easy things that technology has kind of provided. Yeah, for sure.

You can call that like a tyranny of convenience of sorts. Like we are all, and I'm not about to give up using these services. Of course, I'm going to keep using them. But we all become servants to them to some extent. Like, yeah, we forget each other's phone numbers, we don't bother memorizing them. We rely on the suggestions from Netflix to determine what we're going to watch next.

Tiger King pops up or Indian matchmaking pops up. And so instead of being deliberate and intentional about what we're consuming, we just, we were like, okay, well, everybody else seems to be watching this. So I'm going to watch it. Or we rely on only on bestseller lists. As opposed to looking for books that are going to nourish our souls, like this is why before the pandemic, I spend so much time in indie bookstores. It's like you go and discover these books that are now out of print. That's like a used copy and a bookshelf somewhere. And they're profound insights in them, but no one's talking about them because they're

not on a bestseller list somewhere. Oh my God, absolutely. Yeah, so there's, there's I think a lot of value to, yeah, still of course use those technologies, but ask yourself, do those technologies own you or do you own them? Vitamin water just dropped a new zero sugar flavor called with love. Get the taste of raspberry and dark chocolate for the all warm, all fuzzy, all self-care, zero self doubtdoubt you. Grab a with love today.

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Jeep is a registered trademark. Now I think that's 100% right now. We can go on and on about that. That could be with music too. You know, you listen to what's, you know, on your Spotify, on the top 40, whatever, all you end up knowing is what people, what these random algorithms suggest to you. So then you don't even have access to anything else.

Like I remember I used to work in marketing for record labels years, you know, I'm in a different life. And I knew all these, you know, kind of far out random music bands that none of my friends knew. But by the way, that was the best music. It was the most amazing bands.

They were cool, interesting, the lyrics were great. And I'm out of that business. And I'm back to listening to Justin Bieber or whatever is on the playlist. It's one of those things where it's like, if you don't put yourself in those situations and if you don't have it you become Slave or to someone else's of the technology. That's what's kind of happened music and books It happens all the time and I think what you're what what your book and everything else is like you kind of have to kind of remind yourself It'd be much more like conscientious of that as something that's happening and search. But again, we get lazy. We don't want to do that work, right?

We go to like everything else that's convenient. But you know, now I'm thinking gosh, I got to change my playlist. It's unbelievable. It's like I'm listening to the same stuff. Well, we haven't even gotten to, I've got so much more for you. I hope you don't have to go anywhere because you touched upon this in the beginning, but I want to talk about the thought experiment and so let's talk about that and where there's also moonsh,

there's so much stuff with you. Moonshot thinking, there's, God, this is... let's go with thought experience. Does that help us kind of get out of that place? And what is that? Yeah, so thought experiment is basically this like imaginary scenario that you create in your head. Like probably one of the most famous thought experiments is from Albert Einstein.

When he was 16 years old, he asked himself, what would it be like to ride next to a beam of light. Which sounds like a ridiculous question, but then he sat with that question for 10 years and its resolution, the answer to that, gave us a special theory of relativity. And I'm so glad, by the way, that no parent actually told Einstein, stop the crazy talk, go back to your room and do your homework. Like he was allowed to daydream and to think and to come up with absurd scenarios and sit with them for a while. And that's something that we don't do in our lives.

We're so busy being an autopilot, moving from one email to the next, one notification to the next, one meeting to the next, one meeting to the next, without pausing, reflecting, deliberating, daydreaming, and getting bored. Getting bored is so essential to creativity. When you get bored, we tend to assume that your brain shuts off. When you get bored, it's actually quite the opposite.

When you get bored, when you actually quite the opposite. When you get bored, when you allow yourself the day dream, the region of the brain called the Default Mode Network lights up, and that's a region that's associated with creativity. Your subconscious kicks in basically and begins drawing associations between seemingly different things. It begins generating new insights. And by the way, this is why a lot of people have the best ideas when they walk into the shower. They're showering, they're in this distraction-free

environment, they're just letting their brain drift, their mind drift, and all of these insights start bubbling up to the surface because it's like one of the rare periods of our day when we're not being attacked by notifications, when you're not being attacked by notifications. When you're not being disturbed and you're allowed to be with your thoughts and let your mind drift. Now, imagine extending the power of the shower moment to other periods of your day, to actually and I call this airplane mode, but taking time to just sit on it. I have a recliner in my office for 20 minutes a day doing nothing.

I'll just sit there with a no pad and a paper and I'll just jot down whatever comes up. And a lot of 90% of the stuff that comes up is useless. But you often have to get that junk out of the way for the more useful insights to emerge. And some of the best ideas that have occurred to me in recent memory come in that environment where you're not being distracted and unless you're intentional about this, by the way, you're not going to be able to do it. You have to set your phone aside. You have to create an environment that's actually free from distractions. There's so many examples I cite in the book of like scientists literally walking themselves into the right answer to a problem. You know, they're stuck with something

that'll go on a walk somewhere and then the insight will come because they're giving their subconscious time to process those insights. Einstein would grab his violin and start playing the violin and in the middle of a song he'd say, I've got it. And so I think it's really important to carve off those time periods and to be

intentional about them, to put them on your calendar as I do. So you have to show up like any other meeting. Yeah, I think that's a really good point as well. And you know, I get them not to go back to the exercise, but I get a lot of my greatest ideas is when I'm running because I let my mind drift. I'm bored. I want it to be over and I'm just kind of thinking and doing. So like, you know, it could be the shower, it could be in your recliner, it could be when you're running, but giving yourself that time where you're like, you're letting your mind

kind of wander. I think it's so important in terms of all of these things that we're like even talking about. Is that how you got the idea to write this book as you were really bored and you're sitting in a recliner and you're like, hey, I'm gonna write a book. You know, it was a series of things. So a lot of my blog posts, what I write on a weekly basis

on my blog come from the recliner of like, I'll just sit there and jot ideas down and those eventually become articles. And then over time, I saw that the articles that I was writing about my rocket science background, the examples I used from rocket science, were resonating with the audience quite strongly. You know, they would assume that rocket science

was inaccessible to them, but then through those block posts, they realized that a lot of those insights were applicable to their daily lives. So then, well, I started to think about that. And often that sweet spot between what you're interested in and what the world is looking for and what the world is looking to pay you for, the intersection between those two is where the sweet spot is. And so, yeah, that's how the book idea came about. Well, then how did you have so many of these great tag?

There's so many of these, I don't know what you even call them, just sayings or moonshot thinking or you pull the outcomes, just things or like moonshot thinking or you know you pull like the outcomes raise or like whatever these things are. I've been been talked about you know, did you have, did you just know this because you're just you read so much or did you have to do a ton of research to kind of put the actual name to what it really is? I think it was a little bit of both. So some of it just comes from my background having been in rocket science and having studied astrophysics.

And the other part of it, I find that something interesting happens when you, and this doesn't have to be a book, it could be anything. It could be like making a commitment to launch a podcast and record a podcast episode every week. It could be making a commitment to launch a podcast and record a podcast episode every week. It could be making a commitment to launch a business. It's almost like you set up an antenna and you begin attracting all of these insights. So, once I decided that I was going to write this book and I had a year to do it, then everything I was reading, I was evaluating through that lens.

I was asking myself, could this be an example for this chapter in the book? You know, like, I collected so many different examples. So I have like an example from Steve Martin and how he needs the principles thinking to change the stand-up comedy industry. And I didn't know that example before I started writing the book, but I was reading his book, Born Standing Up, which is a great book, by the way.

And I came across this example. He didn't call it first principles thinking, but I was like, oh my God, this is a spot-on example of somebody using first principles thinking to get to the fundamentals of comedy and abandon the assumption that all jokes had to have these cheesy punchlines, which is exactly what everybody else was doing when Steve Martin came around and completely changed the way that people do stand up comedy. And I wanted to write a book where I collected very different examples from different fields to be able to say it's not just Elon Musk and SpaceX who can use first principles thinking. Steve Martin does it too. Alinea, the three star Michelin restaurant in Chicago does it too.

With that, I mean, we were having dinner there. My wife and I got engaged in Chicago. We were back there for a trip and we had dinner there to celebrate. And everything that they were doing seemed to me like an example of first principles thinking. So then, and I may not have noticed that, by the way, if we had gone there before I started writing the book. but because it came after, it became potential material for it.

So I think once you make a commitment to yourself to do something, seriously do something, then you end up attracting these insights because you're always on the lookout for them. Yeah, no, I think that's so true. I mean, that goes with my life, too, And I think a lot of people can relate to that. Once you say something, whatever it is, then you see it all the time. Once you make notice of it, then that's all you see. Then what is, who thought a monkey first strategy then?

Was that? That was Astra Teller at Google X. They're now just called X. So Google X, for those who don't know, is Google's notoriously secretive, they called themselves a moonshot factory. They don't innovate for Google. Their job is to create the next Google. And they've done everything from, you know, Google. And they've done everything from, you know, make balloons that provide internet service to glucose measuring contact lenses, to self-driving cars, to autonomous drones, everything else you can think of. And they call themselves a moonshot factory. Now, they didn't invent the term moonshot. It goes back to President John F. Kennedy's speech in

September 1962 when he stepped up to the podium at Rice University Stadium and pledged to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. And that pledge at the time was quite literally a moonshot because so much of what was required for a lunar landing just hadn't been done yet. No astronaut had worked outside of a spacecraft, no American astronaut, two spacecraft

and never docked together in space. NASA didn't know if the lunar surface was solid enough to support a lander, whether the communication system would work on the moon. Kennedy said some of the metals required to build the rockets hadn't even been invented. And less than 70 years after that pledge, that promise, Neil Armstrong took us giant leap for mankind. And just to put that accomplishment in context, a child who was six years old, when the Wright brothers took their first flight, which lasted like 10 seconds and moved about 100 feet, would have been 72 when

flight became powerful enough to put a man on the moon. And that is that 66 years from Wright Brothers to Neil Armstrong. That's a dizzying speed. It was made possible because of moonshot thinking because we dared to aim for the moon, but we did a number of other things as well. So, moonshot thinking is often associated with dreaming big, and that's not it, actually. Yeah, you have to dream big, but dreaming big is not enough. Like, you can't just sprinkle some pixie dust and magically have your dreams take flight.

It's really a combination of idealism and pragmatism. And pragmatism to go back to your question, Jen, is where the monkey first strategy comes in. So pragmatism in the context of moonshot thinking first begins with backcasting. So backcasting is the opposite of what we normally do, which is forecasting. Forecasting, we just look at our current budget, our current skill sets, whatever it is we're doing, and then we extrapolate that into the future. that, whatever it is we're doing, and then we extrapolate that into the future. The problem with forecasting is it takes all of our problematic assumptions and biases that exist as part of the status quo and just projects them into the future.

Backcasting does the opposite. So you begin with the idea of outcome. You begin with Neil Armstrong on the moon, or you begin with a successful business, and then sketch out a really concrete roadmap for getting to that ideal reality. You sit down and list this out step by step. This is exactly what I need to do. And then the monkey first strategy says, you have to start with the hardest thing first. And that comes from an example, that astroteller, who is the head of Google X, gives, and

he says, you know, the anecdote is something like some of this guy is asked to have a monkey stand on a pedestal and recite lines from Shakespeare. That's your job. And most people, when they're given a task like that, they begin by building a pedestal. Because building the pedestal is an easy thing. Getting the monkey to talk is a hard part. And he said, you have to begin with the monkey first because you want to know whether your moonshot is doable.

And if your moonshot is not doable before you invest a bunch of time, energy, and money into it, do the hardest thing first so that if it's not doable, you know that as quickly as possible. So once you've created this roadmap through backcasting, look at the steps in front of you and begin with the hardest part.

Yeah, no, I think that's, I like that because I agree with that. You're also talking about, I like all your little analogies, like the Antelope or the, people normally go for the mice and not the antelope. And I love that analogy too because it's true. People go for the things that they think are,

what they think would be the most obvious thing. But you could talk about that. Do you want to talk about that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's the analogy where like if you're a lion, you have two options. You can, if you're if you're a lion, you have two options. You can, well, you're more than two options, but Yeah, I was going to say, if you're a lion, I don't know, but

yeah, go after mice. So you can decide to hunt mice, but it turns out that the calories you need to hunt mice exceeds the calorie content of a mouse itself. So it just doesn't add up. Or you can go for antelopes. Now, antelopes are ordered to capture, but once you capture as a lion, that's gonna provide you like a week of food. Most of us, as you said, Gen, go after the mice

because the mice are a sure thing. Plus, everybody around us is also going after mice. The antelopes, on the other hand, they're a moonshot, right? They're a much harder bet. But the thing is, once you capture one antelope, that's gonna provide you days and maybe weeks of food. And I think we're conditioned and I criticize the education system a lot.

I grew up in a very, I grew up in Turkey, lived there for 17 years, which was a really conformist education system, but I think education systems are conformist pretty much regardless of where you are. We are taught to believe that small dreams are wiser than moonshots, that flying lower is safer than flying higher, that, you know, that mice are better than antelopes. But as any pilot will tell you,

if you're flying high and your engine quits, the possibilities in life, just like the possibilities in flight, tend to be more expensive because you can go out, you're playing to safety. But if you're flying low and your engine quits, then your options tend to be a lot more limited. This does need to be a balanced approach. You don't want to bet your company on a single

moonshot because a lot of moonshots don't work. But the thing is, if you have a balanced portfolio of ideas and none of your bets are betting the company, then a single moonshot that works is going to pay off in spades for the ideas that don't work, especially if you apply the monkey for strategy and you quickly figure out whether something is workable. I also want to add that I know it's not the monkey first part of that analogy, but a lot of times when everyone's, you know, zig-zigging, you should zag, right? Because that's when the more opportunities are there.

If everyone's doing the same thing, you're off, it's a race after it, everyone's doing it. Your chances of success are much higher if you're doing something that most people are not doing because no one's looking over here so they're all going, no one's looking to the right if they're all going to the left. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Everybody's reaching for the low hanging fruit and the center ends up being way too crowded. And my favorite example of that, which actually I don't think is in the book, is from Johnny Cash. So Johnny Cash, before he was Johnny Cash, he was broke. His marriage wasn't ruined. He was like playing gospel songs at night with two of his buddies and he got an audition at this, I think it was Sun record labels. And the scene there, what happened in the audition is depicted in the movie Walk the Line, which if you haven't seen it, it's a great movie. I like that.

Yeah. So Johnny Cash walks into the audition room and he starts playing a gospel song. Because in 1954, which is when this happened, gospel is what everybody else was doing. And plus, it's what Cash knew best because that's what he will play at night. And the record label owner who's the head of the audition here, he's listening to Cash play this slow, dreary gospel song. And he interrupts him after 20 seconds and he says, Mr. Cash, we've already heard that song just like that, just like how you sang it. Now, give me something. Sing me a song that, you know, if this was your last moment on earth, would tell God what you felt like here on earth. The one song that people would remember you by,

and Johnny Cash collects himself and he starts strumming his guitar and playing the Falson Prison Blues. And he walks away with a record contract and he goes from being Johnny Cash the gospel singer to becoming Johnny Cash the gospel singer to becoming Johnny Cash the legend. All because he dares to sing the false and prism blues when everybody else is singing the singing gospel.

So, I think if you look around this, life is filled with aspiring gospel singers. What is the people who can emerge there or who can embrace their inner Johnny Cash? That's when the magic happens. Yeah, I like that story. I agree. And why don't we just touch upon when we do kind of become Johnny Cash, not Johnny Cash, but a lot of times when we do reach some form of success. We do become very complacent with it, right? It's hard then

Again, this goes back to what we talked about in terms of if you're a high performer and you're very much a regimented routine person But you are successful You know that does that's why people don't change because they are doing okay with it. That kind of, they're, they're, they're complacent. It's working. How do we break away from that? Like what you, because a big part of it when you talk about this is that people do become very complacent when they are successful. Yeah, for sure. And if you, there are so many examples of this, you know, from business history, it's Kodak, it's Blockbuster, it's Sporters, it's Blackberry, from Rocket Science, it's the challenger and Columbia disasters, you know, those are. Let's talk about that. I like that example because I remember

that as a young kid. And you were talking about how that challenger was mostly because of a cultural problem that it came such a disaster. Exactly. So basically to explain in simple terms, the technical flaw was called an O-ring, which is this flexible rubber band kind of thing that seals to protect the, to prevent hot gases from escaping, basically. And on the morning of challenges launched, the temperatures that Cape Canaveral were unusually cold. They were below freezing. And the number of engineers raised their hands and said, you know, these are all rings. They tend to turn brittle in cold weather.

And if they're brittle, then they're not going to be able to seal properly. But the managers overruled the engineers when I had with the launch, the O-rings failed and with them tragically the entire shuttle. And I think, yeah, if you were older than six at the time, and you're an American, or even if you're not an American, you probably got to remember where you were. I was Canadian, by the way, and I remember it. Yeah.

Yeah. So, why did that happen? So, the commission charged with investigating the accidents, found this technical flaw, and yeah, that was a technical flaw. The orings failed. But why did the orings fail? What was the deeper cause of the accident? The deeper cause of the accident was this prevailing culture of conformity at NASA.

And NASA, you know, for most people, is associated with creativity, with innovation. And yet this atmosphere of conformity had developed within the ranks of NASA. And it happened because NASA was really successful. I mean, it emerged out of the Apollo era, basically assuming that amazing, wild success, the Apollo era brought, gave the impression to top level managers at NASA that they could do no wrong. And a number of space shuttle missions, so the problem with the O-rings wasn't new. This was happening for years before Challenger. And the managers looked at that and said,

well, look, all of these other missions succeeded despite some problems with the O-rings. Let's just go ahead and launch Challenger. But just because you're in a hot streak doesn't mean you'll beat the house. Eventually, luck will catch up to you. And that's exactly what happened. NASA had gotten lucky with those previous shuttle missions,

but they just said, look, we're going to follow process. We're going to do exactly what we did yesterday, because what we did yesterday generated success. So if you follow the same process, the same plan, the same formula today, the same success is going to result. And that's a recipe for disaster. Whether you're in rocket science or you're in business, assuming that previous success guarantees your future is one of the most dangerous things you can do.

And I think it's harder for most businesses to survive their success than to survive their failure for that reason. Because the moment we succeed is the moment we stop listening. The moment we succeed, the moment we declare ourselves to be an expert on something is the moment we, you know, start blaming other people when things go wrong. We stop doing that soul searching that you end up doing when you see yourself as a work in progress and not as a big success. So if you look at athletes, successful musicians, successful writers, they all tend to have that mindset of, I am a work in progress. Regardless of how successful I am,

or regardless of what the rest of the world might think of me, I see myself as a work in progress, as a perpetual work in progress, that's in continuous need of improvement. And I think that mindset, couple with some of the other disruption tactics that we talked about, like kill the company exercise, like red teaming, like pre-mortems.

I think those are helpful in terms of jolting you out of your current perspective. And helping you see that the line between failure and success is far more blurry than you might otherwise imagine. That's kind of also similar to like, you should be testing as you fly, fly as you test and all that other stuff, right? This was very interesting. I had a really nice time talking to you.

And how do people like get more information if they want to read, if they want to follow you, know more about you besides the book, they can buy the book, think like a rocket scientist, of course. Where else could they find some more information on you? Yeah, for sure. So the book is available wherever books are sold and then the best way to keep in touch with me I'm not active on social media is through my email list and you can sign up for that at weekly contrarian.com And it shares just one big idea that you can read in three minutes or less We just call it the one email I look forward to every week

Yeah, and that's that weeklycontrarian.com. And I really enjoy this conversation, Jen. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm having some hustle, time to get it rolling. Stay up on the grind. Don't stop. Keep it going. Habits and hustle from nothing in the summer.

All out, a host of budget of fuck going. Visionaries, tune in. You can get to know. Be inspired. This is your moment. Excuses, we in having that. The habits and hustle podcasts, power by habit. This episode is brought to you by the Yap Media Podcast Network. I'm Hala Taha, CEO of the award-winning digital media empire Yap Media, and host of Yap Young & Profiting Podcast, a number one entrepreneurship

and self-improvement podcast where you can listen, learn, and profit. On Young & Profiting Podcast, I interview the brightest minds in the world, and I turn their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your daily life. Each week, we dive into a new topic like the Art of Side Hustles, how to level up your influence and persuasion and goal setting. I interview A-list guests on Young & goal setting. I interview a list guests on young and profiting I've got the best guess like the world's number one negotiation expert Chris Voss Shark Damon John serial entrepreneurs Alex and Leila Hermosi and even movie stars like Matthew McConaughey

There's absolutely no fluff on my podcast and that's on purpose Every episode is jam packed with advice that's going to push your life forward. I do my research, I get straight to the point, and I take things really seriously, which is why I'm known as the podcast princess, and how I became one of the top podcasters in the world in less than five years. Young and profiting podcasts is for all ages. Don't let the name fool you. It's an advanced show.

As long as you want to learn and level up, you will be forever young. So join podcast royalty and subscribe to Young & Profiting Podcast. Or yeah, like it's often called by my app fam. On Apple Spotify, CastBox or wherever you listen to your podcast. Breathe in, breathe out. Get dressed, head out, grab some friends, camp out. Get hyped up, vibe out. Be brave. Think it out. R-E-I-Co-A.

All out. Visit R-E-I.com.