Conversation with Jennifer Cohen — Building Healthy Habits and Staying Confident

0:00Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door. expertly cleaned and folded. So you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like tea time you. Mmm. Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you. So did you hear about Dave? Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. Mmm. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great. episode 273 273 kelvin is the temperature of which water freezes in 1973 the united states drug enforcement administration was founded i recently watched a documentary on marijuana actually that's how i watch all documentaries go go go

0:57Welcome to the 273rd episode of the Prop G-Pod. Just a quick note, I'm on the road and having technical difficulties. I'm here in Napa at some very fancy place called Stanley Ranch. And unfortunately, they don't have a Lightning C. I don't even know what it is. Anyways, I've got every cable except the one I need. I've got, literally, I've got pretty much, I think I could probably launch nuclear strike missiles right now, but I don't have the cord I need. This reminds me of a scene in Das Boot, which is, in my opinion, probably one of the best or most underrated war films about German U-boat soldiers.

1:35Did you know 50 ,000 U-boaters or whatever, submariners, German submariners, set out to sea and only 10 ,000 returned? And 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, and wire. Anyways, that's how I feel. I feel like a German U-boat commander. Anyways, in today's episode, we speak with Jennifer Cohen, an entrepreneur, brand strategist, and host of the business podcast Habits and Hustle. We discuss with Jennifer the importance of being bold and resilient.

2:11Bold! 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 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.

2:51I 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 came out to Napa. And then on what I'm really excited about, I'm emceeing 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.

3:37and 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 L.A. 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 to Deadpool. cool. 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.

4:15So 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.

4:54They 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'm about 23.9 million of those people are tuning in for Premier League games, but I could be wrong.

5:34And 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 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.

6:10Netflix 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.

6:51What do I mean by that? The greatest venture capitalist in the history of mankind is the U.S. government whose investors, the limited partners, U.S. middle-class taxpayers, invest in technologies, make massive investments 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.

7:30Or 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.

8:08That'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 postage prepaid envelope. When we get it back, we'll send you the next DVD from your queue. 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.

8:46I shouldn't joke about suicide. Shouldn't joke about suicide. Anyways, in I think about 2011, Netflix was at 10 bucks a share. I bought a bunch. I loved it. I thought it was well-managed. And it dropped to eight bucks a share. And I sold it to take the tax loss in late 2011. And I never bought back in. And now, see above, it's at$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.

9:26Anyway, 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. In 2010, streaming launches on mobile and they begin their international expansion in 2013. They go vertical with original series programming. So what do 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 bid his stock up.

10:02And then he said, this is my advantage as 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 % 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.

10:50At 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.

11:20And they got a little bit more conservative. They didn't make the massive types of increase in budget, but still this was, 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 have 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 demos of the brand.

11:51Netflix 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.

12:23And 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 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.

13:02And 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.

13:37And 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, they had international production. Two, their content pool was so deep that people didn't even notice there was a writer's 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?

14:07Oh, 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.

14:53Two words. First, net. Second word, flicks. We'll be right back for our conversation with Jennifer Cohen.

15:26From wellness and soccer to culture, the climate, and more. Read, watch, and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com.

15:47Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Jennifer Cohen, an entrepreneur, brand strategist, and host of the business podcast, Habits and Hustle. Jennifer, where does this podcast find you? I'm in L.A. 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?

16:24Absolutely, 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 I base 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 what 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.

17:11Because my other part is I created this whole idea of this 10 % target. it. And, you know, we hear a lot about 10X in 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, 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.

17:57And 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 is that somewhat what you mean by kind of your 10 percent rule?

18:38Absolutely. 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.

19:16I 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 mean, I feel like when I was younger, it was kind of much more part of the process.

19:59And that's why I feel like now this the coddling, the cult, the coddle culture has really kind of been a disservice for kids. As I think about this, it feels like college called the boldness or willingness to endure rejection. I feel as if, OK, 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 develop some economic security, frankly, I've become lazy around being bold because I expect things to come to me.

20:47I don't I don't want to be bold any longer. Is there an arc to boldness as you age? That's so true. I totally agree. So I think that I think being bold is a skill. I don't think that most of us are born bold, to your point. That's not how I see it either. I think you have to you got 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 in 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.

21:27Or 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, 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. If you don't use it, you lose it. 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?

22:19I 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. 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 even the ability to even have that aggressive or that tenacity and go-getter mentality because things have become too easy with technology, right?

23:14Like with what 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 we actually are able to design exactly what we want. What do you, I get asked all the time, what advice would I give to men to be more professionally and romantically successful?

23:56What attributes, what coaching would you impart on young men? And so I put the question to you, what advice do you give to young women around how to be professionally and romantically successful in today's environments, 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 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?

24:35So 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 you're not afraid to to ask or talk or 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.

25:28Agreed. What what do you just define as the end state? What is in your mind? What does success look like professionally and personally? I think it's having a rich life. And I don't think I don't mean that by the fight. I don't mean money, rich life. I think having fulfilling relationships. relationships, I think for 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.

26:09And that's why, again, I keep 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 of business. 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 talk about this a lot.