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

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

Jennifer Cohen, an entrepreneur, brand strategist, author, and host of the business podcast Habits & Hustle, joins Scott to discuss the importance of being bold and resilient, how to build confidence, and adding more movement into your day. Scott opens with his thoughts on Netflix’s rise to greatness.   Algebra of Happiness: Who are you an advocate for?  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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was founded i recently watched a documentary on marijuana actually that's how i watch all documentaries go go go Go, go, go! some very fancy place called Stanley Ranch. And unfortunately, they don't have a lightning C. I don't even know what it is. Anyways, I've got every cable except the one I need. 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. Did you know 50,000 U-boaters or whatever, submariners, German submariners, set out to sea and only 10,000 returned? It was 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 pfennig, I think is 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 and brand strategist and host of the business podcast Habits & Hustle. We discuss with Jennifer the importance of being bold and resilient. Bold. She's bold. How to build confidence 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 I broke up the trip on my way to Napa by stopping in New York, because if I go eight time zones in one fell swoop in midair, I could slip and break a hip. And then yesterday I 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 U2, one of my favorite bands in the world, and in this incredible spherical music venue that supposedly costs $2 billion 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 a bunch of Halloween parties. I'm going as 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, 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. The firm added, get this, 8.8 million subscribers in the third quarter, its 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, up 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. Disney 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. 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 I could be wrong. And Apple is 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's show is going off the air because of controversy over kind of creative freedom to talk about China and AI. And they're like, look, boss, 95% of our products are produced in China. We just don't want to deal with a 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. Not only that, it's been the only streamer to show consistent profitability. Netflix is literally, 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. 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 capitalists 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 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 gangster 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 VCR cabinet, and I would absolutely be horrified because when I went back to Blockbuster, I owed them $11 million 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 at $1 a share. By the way, it's now $406 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. Shouldn't joke about suicide. Shouldn't joke about suicide. Anyways, in I think about 2011,

Netflix was at $10 a share. I bought a bunch. I loved it. I thought it was well-managed. And it dropped to $8 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 $400 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 begin their international expansion. In 2013, they go vertical with original series programming. So what did they do here? A couple of 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, is I'm trading at an irrational multiple. And all my competition, their 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 percent a year versus profitability. Looking at that growth and saying, as long as our 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 bid up stock price. And then wash, rinse, repeat. You 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 open 550 temples 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. But if you're selling other people's products, it becomes about a race to the bottom, and that's lowest cost, and you need massive scale. And 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 strike, but more wind in their sails. And 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 in 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 of the value proposition gulf between Netflix and everybody else began to get wider and wider and wider.

And what happened in the writer'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 that international production. Two, their content pool was so deep that people didn't even notice it was a writer strike. And three, they started raising prices because they realized 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 percent and Netflix is up 20 or 30 percent, 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. Satya Nadella 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, 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 Life, 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 my 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, it 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, you know, we hear a lot about 10x-ing 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. Almost 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, you know, exponentially been greater, right? 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 in 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 the 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? Like 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 coddle culture of today, right? We coddle, we coddle our kids,

whereas then they're not given those skills later on. So, you know, 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'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 coddling, the coddle 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, but I don't think you are. I think you're born shy. 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 developed some economic security, frankly, I've become more successful and developed some economic security. Frankly, I've become lazy around being bold because I expect things to come to me. 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 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 practice the skill of boldness at a young age. And like anything else, if you want to get good at karate, Spanish, 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. Or 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 if we're 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,

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 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, aren't young people being trained not to be bold?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I wrote this book called Bigger, Better, Bolder. And I have a huge part of like a huge section about this whole thing that we have now become, we're losing the ability to socialize. We're losing the, even the ability to even have that aggressive or that, that tenacity and go-getter mentality because things have become too easy with technology, right? Like if with, with, with you're saying like with all the different like dating apps, you can name any of them. We can just passively, you know, go left. And if we like someone, we could 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'd 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, given 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 like 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 low 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 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 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 I don't mean money, rich life. I think having fulfilling relationships, I think satiating 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. To me, 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. So I like these hacks.

It just makes sense to me. You set goals around working out and fitness. 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 kind of 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, 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, right? Versus like 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. Like I'm a big believer, like what I've done my whole life is I figured out early on, I was fortunate enough to be somewhat self-aware and figured out that, you know, 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 kind of like exponentially became even better at my strengths, which then built my confidence. And then that in itself kind of just, you know, 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 like minimized my confidence, right? Minimize my success ability 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, you know, insecurity around we're not pretty enough, we're not talented enough, We're not this enough. And then I don't do anything. And then that just is like, that becomes a vicious spiral down to just living, not enjoying, not being successful, not really curating or designing what you want. So like my message, I say all the time, like chase what you want. Don't just take what you get, but 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. I read that you're one of the 100 most influential people in health and fitness. What role, if any, does spirituality, meditation, gratitude practice play in your life? And 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, it's near impossible to me and I have almost no interest in it. And I, I'm embarrassed because it's like saying you're, you don't believe in climate change or I don't know. I feel, I feel shamed by the world when I, when I acknowledge I don't meditate every day. I totally agree. I'm not a big believer in just like following, you know, just being basically being a sheep. And that's basically I feel what's happened,

right? Like now I feel shamed myself because you asked what even when you asked me that question about like meditation or breath work, my heart saying because I'm like, I don't I don't do either. But I've figured out what works for me. And like 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 very

superficially. What I suggest to people is figure out what works for you and what you like by doing, you know, trial and error. I 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. I decided to give that up and just drink a shit ton of alcohol on a regular basis.

But anyways, what- Did it work? 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 antidepressant my entire life. But there's just a huge 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, 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, like, 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. You know, when you're stagnant, everything stays

stagnant. You know, just you talk about you talk about an antidepressant, a mood stabilizer. To me, it's been like a 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 are so obsessed in this culture with longevity and anti-aging, and yet we're missing, we're like 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, 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. Very rarely do a part, like 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 CEOs 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 CEOs 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. 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 like random compliment to somebody. Women are much better at it than men. 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 know, you're asking me earlier to that, similar to what you're talking about with confidence and giving people a compliment, you know, there's been a ton of research on even the gratitude journaling. People are constantly talking about journaling, gratitude journals. But the research has actually shown that a better way to really feel gratitude is to say to somebody, you know, thank you so much for this, you know, one person, right? And their response in terms to back to you like, oh, you're welcome. That like hit of 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 of 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 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 shapeshift how we go about our days. Makes sense. And last question, Jennifer. We're actually in very similar businesses. Authors, podcasting, speaking. That's where I get, not 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. 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 wanted to do 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 in that direction. And 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 focus on a goal that's attainable. And 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 when 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 people just, if I can teach people a way to just act. Jennifer Cohen is an entrepreneur, brand strategist, educator, and host of the business podcast Habits and Hustle. 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 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. author of happiness taking stock of your blessings and advocacy my narrative up until 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 winds 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, the 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 bank. 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 don't even call it aggressive about LGBTQ rights into calling people out for their thinly veiled homophobia. And I've tried to be, and I'm hugely 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. It's, 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 that is find a group and engage in what is one of the most rewarding things that any human can engage in, advocacy. This episode was produced by Caroline Shagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer, and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to The Property Pod from the Vox 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've got two-headed glass dildos, a desalinization machine, a cotton gin.