🐟 Defying Rules with Vujá Dé

📖 Read: 

We live in a world obsessed with learning. Conferences promise to teach us the “latest strategies.” Books offer “frameworks for success.” Podcasts deliver “insights from industry leaders.” And yet, the most transformative figures in history—the ones who actually changed their fields—didn’t succeed by learning more. They succeeded by forgetting.

The pattern is clear: look at what everyone accepts as inevitable. Question it. Imagine alternatives. Build proof. Expect fury. Persist anyway.

The question isn’t whether you have revolutionary ideas. The question is whether you have the courage to unlearn enough to find them.

Against the Grain: Defiant Giants Who Changed the World by Terry O’Reilly

Terry O’Reilly (broadcaster)

Under the Influence (radio series)

This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter.  Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Thanks for listening today!

Four recurring narratives underlie every episode: boundary dissolution, adaptive complexity, embodied knowledge, and quantum-like uncertainty. These aren’t just philosophical musings but frameworks for understanding our modern world. 

We hope you continue exploring our other podcasts, responding to the content, and checking out our related articles on the Heliox Podcast on Substack. 

Transcript

0:25

Welcome to the deep dive, where we take a stack of compelling sources and, well, we pull out the most important insights. Today, our mission is to give you a shortcut to understanding the lives of people who just flat out refuse to accept the status quo. Yeah. These aren't just people who challenge convention. We're talking about giants who... O'Reilly is, I mean, he's kind of uniquely positioned to talk about this subject. Oh, absolutely. He's not just an author. You have to remember, this is a veteran of public radio and podcasting, a Grammy-winning producer and writer. I mean, shows like The Age of Persuasion and Under the Influence have been on the air since 2005. People are obsessed with them. And he was inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame in 2025. But what's really crucial here, I think, is his perspective. He spent his entire career in the advertising world, which is, you know, fiercely competitive and often stuck in its ways. Exactly. So he spent decades studying how people are persuaded. His appreciation for those who challenge the gatekeepers, the naysayers, it comes from a really deep and personal place. He was looking for others who had that same kind of courage to see a better way. Even when that vision brought them into direct conflict with their entire industry. Precisely. And the central idea of the book is actually beautifully simple. He says these brave people, they attacked cherished beliefs, not because they wanted to destroy things, but because they envisioned a fundamentally better way of operating. Whether that was building an iron tower or selling soap or, you know, running a city. Right. And the fury they unleashed, that was just the predictable response of the status quo trying to protect itself. OK, so let's frame this whole deep dive with a core concept that O'Reilly brings up, which he borrows from the writer Bill Taylor. It's the idea of vuja day. Vuja day. We all know deja vu, right? That weird feeling you've seen something before, even though it's new. Vuja day is the complete opposite. Yeah. It's the practice of looking at something totally familiar, a problem you've seen a hundred times, as if you have never, ever seen it before. It's like you're actively scrubbing your brain clean of all the assumptions and the biases you've built up over the years. And that, I think, that is the golden ticket that connects every single person we're going to talk about today. If you treat a problem like you've never seen it, you just, you automatically avoid the well-worn, safe paths. You start to ignore those artificial boundaries that fence in your imagination. And those boundaries are usually the unwritten rules of an industry. Exactly. These defiant giants made a habit of just tossing the standard script out the window, which allowed them to see what was really possible when you ignore the rules. And that framework brings us perfectly into our first segment. the revolutionaries who totally changed how we are persuaded, the pioneers of advertising and media. In this world, tradition was less about history and more about profit, which made their defiance just explosive.- Our journey here starts at the turn of the 20th century with a man named Albert Lasker. And what's wild is that, despite his massive influence, he really just wanted to be a journalist. Yeah, he dreamed of being a reporter, but his father absolutely hated the idea, called reporters drunkards. So in 1898, Lasker joins Lord & Thomas, an advertising agency. And the world he walked into was so different from what we think of as advertising now. Oh, completely. Back then, agencies were just brokers. That's it. They were brokers of media space. Their main job was to take a client's money and put it into the right magazines or newspapers. So they were middlemen. It was purely transactional, not creative. They weren't coming up with the ads themselves. Not at all. They just placed them. But that whole model was about to get blown up by this one moment of, I don't know, pericuriosity. Hmm? Lasker is sitting in his partner's office when a secretary hands over a note. A note from a guy in the saloon downstairs, right? A total stranger named Johnny Kennedy. And the note is just unbelievably audacious. it says. I can tell you what advertising is. I know you don't know. His partner just scoffs. But Lasker, the young, ambitious one, he's intrigued. He sends back the word yes. In walks Kennedy, a former Canadian Mountie. And after about an hour, he drops the line that basically unlocks modern commerce. He says advertising is salesmanship in print. And that simple phrase was so revolutionary. Why? Because before that moment, agencies were focused on these vague ideas like publicity or getting your name out there. Right. Salesmanship implied a direct, measurable connection between the words on the page and the client's bottom line. It demanded results. Lasker called it trigonometry compared to the hazy ideas they had before. It was a formula. But the defiance wasn't just intellectual, it was financial. And it was fast. Oh yeah. Lasker hired Kennedy on the spot. And to the absolute shock of the entire industry, he paid him $28,000 a year and then quickly raised it to $75,000. Which in today's money is well over $3 million. for one copywriter. The gatekeepers were apoplectic. The legendary ad man, J. Walter Thompson himself, actually scolded Lasker, saying no copywriter was worth more than three grand a year. But Lasker just shrugged it off. He knew he wasn't paying for writing. He was paying for the blueprint. His act of defiance was basically saying the creative idea is now way more valuable than just buying the media space. And the results were immediate. I mean, there were no copywriters back then, so Lasker just hired a bunch of newspapermen, guys who knew how to write persuasively. And that led to these landmark campaigns. Like Palmolive Soap. Before Lasker, soap was just about getting clean. And Lasker's team pivoted the whole conversation. They started emphasizing beauty appeal. It wasn't about hygiene anymore. It was about aspiration. And that one shift made Palmolive the best-selling soap in the world by 1916. they literally changed what the product meant to people. Or the Sunkist campaign. That wasn't born from aspiration. It was born from a crisis. Yeah. Orange growers were producing so many oranges that the price had collapsed. They were about to start chopping down their own groves. A traditional agency might have just suggested, you know, buying more ads. But Lasker's salesmanship approach was different. It was a structural solution. They invented a new use for the product. It sounds so simple now, but it was unheard of. They started advertising the idea of drinking orange juice every day for your health. Not just eating oranges. Right. And that one idea created a massive sustained increase in demand. It saved the entire industry. My favorite one, though, the one that really shows an understanding of the audience, is the Kotex campaign. The product was revolutionary, but women were just too embarrassed to ask a male pharmacist for it by name. This was a huge barrier, a classic unwritten rule. So Lasker's first act of defiance was to insist on really candid open print ads describing the product. A lot of magazines banned them at first. But the real genius was solving the problem in the store. Exactly. He told retailers to wrap the boxes in plain white paper, no logo, and stack them on the counter right next to a change box. A woman could just put 50 cents in and take a package without ever having to say a word. It was a complete empathetic rejection of the standard sales process. Just brilliant. And that philosophy just kept going. They pioneered national radio advertising with Amos and Andy for Pepsodent, and sales doubled. Lasker truly built the industry.- And then four decades later, the very foundation that Lasker built became the establishment that needed to be defied. So if Lasker wrote the rules, Bill Bernbach came along to break them.- Bernbach was worried. He saw the industry getting stagnant, just repeating itself. In 1947, he wrote this now famous letter to his bosses at Gray Advertising. The warning letter. Yeah, he warned them they were falling into the trap of bigness. They were worshiping technique over art, following history instead of making it. He felt like originality was just being sacrificed for safety. And he had that great line, rules are prisons. And when they didn't listen, he left and co-founded Doyle Dane Burnback, DDB. His goal was just to put creativity and humanity first. So what was his first structural act of defiance? It was organizational. He pioneered the model that every ad agency in the world uses today. He paired writers with art directors. Which sounds so obvious now. But back then, they were in totally separate departments. Art director would just get a written brief and lay it out. Birnbach insisted that the words and the art had to be born together. That synergy was where the big ideas came from. And his whole philosophy is summed up in that perfect quote,"I've got a great gimmick. Let's tell the truth." He just hated hyperbole. He resisted all the boastful claims and the fake perfection that had defined advertising for decades. He believed in honesty, wit, and crucially, self-deprecation. And that whole ethos got tested right away under some pretty incredible historical pressure. For sure. DDB, a Jewish-led agency, takes on the Volkswagen account, a German car just 15 years after World War II. It was an incredibly provocative decision. But Birnbach saw past the history. He saw an honest, simple, reliable product. And instead of trying to hide the car's weaknesses, that it was small and kind of ugly and slow... He embraced them. He turned the small, cheap, ugly, slow, imported Nazi car into this beloved American icon. Those ads are legendary. Think small. Lemon. They didn't pretend the Beatle was something it wasn't. They used humor and transparency. And that vulnerability, that honesty, it just resonated with people. It built trust in a way that aggressive boasting never could. Yeah. That campaign is, I mean, it's still the most studied ad campaign in history for a reason. DDB also became the champion for the underdog. I'm thinking of the Avis campaign. campaign. Oh, yeah. Avis had lost money for 11 years straight. They were getting crushed by Hertz, the market leader. And Birnbach knew that trying to outpost turrets was just a losing game. So they did the unthinkable. They leaned into the disadvantage. They embraced it with a slogan that was just revolutionary in its honesty. The striving underdog. And it worked instantly. Avis's market share just soared. It proved that honesty and wit could be these incredibly powerful tools of persuasion, even when you're going up against a Goliath. Okay, so if Madison Avenue was one battleground, Hollywood was another. And here, the defiant giant was a total outsider named Tom Laughlin who made the film Billy Jack. Laughlin's story is just a perfect example of how an institution will try to smother an idea that doesn't fit its mold. Warner Bros. promised him a big launch. But then they sabotaged it. They released it on the low-level B circuit with basically zero advertising. O'Reilly says they sometimes just scrawled the title on butcher paper outside the theater. That's not just bad business. That's a deliberate attempt to kill the film. So Laughlin went to war. He sued Warner Bros. not once, but twice. And he took out these full-page ads in the trade papers. The ad that said, "Billy Jack is the picture even Warner Bros. couldn't kill." He was using the press as a weapon. It was brilliant. And then he negotiated this high-stakes gamble with him.

He demanded control over the marketing in three of the toughest cities: 12:04

New York, Chicago, and LA. He had to hit a huge box office target. And if he failed, he got nothing. He had to drop all his lawsuits.

And get this: 12:13

he and his wife had to sign their house away as collateral. They signed their house away. That's the level of personal commitment that must have just terrified the studio lawyers. It showed absolute conviction. And it worked. Ticket sales went through the roof and Warner Bros. had to give him a national release with him in control of the marketing. And that's when he changed the movie business forever. He started by defying Hollywood's reliance on, you know, just gut instinct. He ran the industry's first ever focus group. But he wasn't just asking if people liked the movie. He was asking if the ads accurately reflected the film's deeper spiritual message. And the audiences said no. So he re-edited everything, and then he did something that foreshadowed the entire digital marketing era. He broke his audience down into 20 demographic subgroups. And he figured that about 12 of them would be receptive to Billy Jack. You know, hippies, veterans, spiritual seekers. And then he created a different specific ad campaign for each of those 12 groups. That split run advertising on a massive scale. It was like he was marketing 12 different movies. And he used heavy TV advertising, which Hollywood thought was too expensive. He rented billboards. He used every tool he could to get around the studio's machine. And Billy Jack's became the most successful independent film of its time. But more importantly, his methods became the new blueprint. That idea of a massive simultaneous national release in a thousand theaters at once. That was his innovation. A move that stunned the old guard. And it was immediately adopted. The model we see for every blockbuster now, like Jaws or The Exorcist, it owes a direct debt to Tom Laughlin... And his refusal to play by the rules. And we see that same instinct for arrest and control, for defying the industry in today's music world with Taylor Swift. O'Reilly even notes that he had to keep revising her chapter because she kept breaking new ground. She is the modern maverick marketer. Yeah. She's constantly evolving, but her brand is always consistent and focused on one thing. the music. She defied that whole superstar model of the last two decades. Right. No branded perfumes, no clothing lines, no liquor deals. Her most revolutionary strategy is that deep, authentic connection she has with her fans. O'Reilly points to tailurking, where she watches fan social media to see what they're saying, and of course the legendary secret sessions. The secret sessions were just, it was Walt Disney level customer service. inviting super fans, often the ones who couldn't afford tickets, into her actual homes for listening parties. That creates a level of loyalty that is just unbreakable. And she turned every album release into this collaborative treasure hunt with her Easter eggs. She'll use, you know, a color or her nail polish or a single red heart emoji to hint at what's coming next. It's not just promotion. It's involvement. It makes the fans feel like they're part of the process. But the core of her corporate defiance is her fight for ownership. re-recording her entire back catalog to regain control of her master recordings after they were sold without her consent. And that wasn't just a legal fight. It was a public education campaign. She brought her fans along with her, explaining why she was doing it. And they locked arms with her. Major networks like iHeartRadio publicly agreed to only play Taylor's version of the songs. It was a massive show of force. The economic impact of this is what O'Reilly calls the Taylor Effect. Her era's tour didn't just break records, it shattered them. Over $2 billion in ticket sales, doubling any other tour in history. And it boosted the U.S. economy by a staggering $5.7 billion. It's why she was named Times Person of the Year in 2023, the first entertainer ever to get that title. She proved that in this new era, control and loyalty are the ultimate forms of leverage. So if the first battleground was human persuasion, the next is defiance against, well, the laws of physics and the constraints of bureaucracy. We're moving into engineering and impossible timelines, starting with Gustav Eiffel, the builder of, I mean, the world's most recognizable structure. And his background is so interesting. He was not a great student. He hated school, was always bored. And he specialized in chemistry, not engineering or metallurgy. He was even bad at technical drawing. Yet he became this absolute master of iron. He pioneered the use of rivets, and he developed this patented process that demanded just fanatical precision. And that precision is the key to his defiance. He demanded that every single piece of iron arrive at the construction site forged and drilled to an error margin of less than one-tenth of a millimeter. That's an insane level of accuracy for the 1880s. It meant no on-site adjustments, no delays. It was all pre-planned to eliminate human error. And that precision is what allowed him to take the ultimate gamble. For the 1889 exposition, he submitted his tower design. The government was skeptical, so they only put up 1.5 million francs. Leaving Eiffel to cover the remaining 5 million himself. It was an extraordinary personal risk. He had to cover the equivalent of about 7.5 million dollars today. And the city was happy to let him because they fully expected him to fail. They thought they'd just tear the whole thing down in a decade. And what followed was just this unmitigated fury from the Parisian artistic elite. They were incensed. They called it a useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower, a gigantic black factory chimney. Citizens actually sued because they were afraid it would fall over on their houses. But Eiffel's defiance was rooted in science. He patiently explained that the lattice structure wasn't just for looks and allowed the wind to pass right through it, which is what kept it from toppling. And he emphasized its practical uses for wartime observation, for meteorology, and for exploration. He framed it as an indispensable tool, not just an attraction. And his planning paid off. The tower was finished in just 26 months. And the financial risk. He covered all his costs in the very first year. And the utility he predicted is what saved it. 20 years later, when the city was supposed to tear it down, they couldn't. It had become essential as a radio antenna for wireless broadcasting. A technology that didn't even really exist when he built it. His defiance became essential infrastructure. So from structures that conquer gravity, we move to structures that conquer time and bureaucracy with Clarence Kelly Johnson, the mind behind Lockheed Skunk Works. Johnson was audacious from day one. At age 23, fresh out of grad school, he walks back into Lockheed and tells his boss that they're brand new. cutting-edge airplane the model 10 elektra was unstable in all directions that is career suicide on your first day to just walk in and attack the company's flagship product but his boss saw a brilliant mind not just arrogance and he told johnson to fix it which he did by designing that unusual twin tail it was an early sign that he didn't think conventionally and then in 1943 world war ii pushes the stakes way up the allies are facing the nazi me 262 jet fighter they need a counter weapon immediately And Johnson makes this impossible promise. He says he can deliver an operational turbojet fighter in 180 days. Which everyone thought was insane. To do it, he knew he had to defy the bureaucracy that always strangled these projects. He demanded total authority. Zero interference. And this led to the creation of Skunk Works. The name came from the smelly plastics factory next door, right? Yeah, it reminded the team of the skonk works in the Lil' Abner comic strip. He set them up in this secret, unheated space under a circus tent. And his approach was just intense. His motto was simple."Dammit! Do it!" He put up a huge countdown calendar. He demanded high standards, but he also tolerated mistakes as long as you only made them once. And this whole approach was formalized into the 14 practices and rules, which are still the standard for rapid innovation teams. And these rules were a direct defiance of corporate process. Like rule number one, which basically said the skunkworks manager Johnson had to have almost complete control and be trusted completely. Exactly. Or rule number two, which limited the team to a small, tight group. They minimized paperwork. They insisted on direct communication with the customer, the pilots. And rule seven demanded strict adherence to the schedule. It was like creating a micro company that was totally free from the inertia of the larger corporation. And the result was just unprecedented. He delivered the shooting star in 143 days, 37 days ahead of his impossible schedule. Yeah. He proved that these small autonomous teams could shatter the illusion that bureaucracy was necessary. Which shows that defiance often means challenging the rules of engagement themselves. And that brings us to Antonis Mokas, the professor who became the mayor of Bogota. We're talking early 1990s Bogota. Statistically, one of the most dangerous cities in the world. And Marcus, who had no political experience, wins the election on a platform of pure ethics. His defiance was conceptual. He didn't define the problem as just crime or poverty. He saw it as a cultural crisis. He viewed the city as a classroom of six million. And he said his main job was improving the behavior of strangers in public places. And his philosophy was all about playfulness over coercion. He literally had an alter ego, super citizen with a yellow spandex costume and a cape. He was constantly using these non-conventional methods. When Bogota had a severe water shortage, he appeared in a TV commercial taking a shower in a skimpy bathing suit, turning the water off while he soaked up. It was ridiculous. but is also a practical demonstration. And it worked. Water usage dropped 40% in two months. He used humor to get compliance where regulations had failed. The most famous example, the one that really got the world's attention, was his solution for the city's chaotic traffic. The traffic officers were all corrupt, just taking bribes. And Marcus had this insight that Colombians feared public ridicule more than they feared a fine. So he did his radical experiment. He fired 1,800 corrupt traffic officers and he hired 400 professional mimes. Mimes? The Pris must have had a field day with that. Oh, they screamed that it was a frivolous stunt. They said it couldn't work because mimes can't write tickets or make arrests. But it did work. Beautifully. The change was profound. Pedestrian deaths dropped by more than half. The city's homicide rate fell by 70% over the next decade. Marcus proved that these cultural interventions, he called it cultural acupuncture, could create real change. Okay, but I have to ask a critical question here. Isn't replacing police with mimes a little... paternalistic. Like you're treating citizens like children who only respond to being shamed. That's a really important point. But Mokkas' idea was that this made citizens agents of the change, not just subjects of it. When a mime ridicules you for running a red light, you're not dealing with an authority figure. You're dealing with a mirror that's reflecting your own bad behavior back to the community. Ah, so it's less about the state coercing you and more about using social pressure to build a better civic culture. Exactly. He showed that some problems can't be solved with just laws. They need a cultural shift. And we see a similar spirit in sports with Roger Nielsen, a hockey coach who read the rulebook not as a list of limitations, but as a source of loopholes. They called him Rulebook Roger. He treated the rulebook like this complex system that was just waiting to be exploited. He'd spend time in baseball, and his tactics were all about misdirection. Like his famous "hidden apple" trick. It was pure theater. On a play at the plate, his catcher would throw a peeled apple high over the third baseman's head. It looked like a wild throw. The runner would jog home, smug, and then get tagged out by the catcher, who had the real ball hidden in his glove the whole time. That's amazing. And in hockey, his defiance actually forced the league to change its rules. Yeah, the penalty shot rule. This was magnificent. the rule said a player had to skate in from center ice against the goaltender. It didn't say who the goaltender had to be or that they had to stay in the net. I see where this is going. Nielsen would pull his star goalie and put a defenseman in net. As soon as the whistle blew, the defenseman would just charge the shooter at the blue line and knock the puck away. So he was following the letter of the law but completely circumventing the spirit of the rule. Totally. His teams stopped all six penalty shots they faced at that tactic. The league got so furious they had to create a whole new rule to stop him. He literally changed the official rules of the sport. But he wasn't just a trickster. O'Reilly says he was a real innovator in coaching. Absolutely. He was the first coach to bring in mandatory off-season training, He hired the first assistant coach. He pioneered using wireless headsets on the bench, literally pestering Motorola to help him develop the tech. He took these mediocre teams like the Vancouver Canucks and turned them into contenders just through tactical brilliance. And if Nielsen's defiance was intellectual, Dick Fosbury's was purely physical. It was an accident of genius. It was a high jump. The techniques had been standard for 50 years. The scissors, the straddle, and Fosbury was struggling with all of them. Yeah, he was about to quit track. Then during one meet in 1963, he makes what O'Reilly calls an on-site engineering adjustment. He just reflexively went up and over the bar, backward, landing on his shoulders. He started clearing heights he'd never come close to before. and the officials were totally flustered. They checked the rulebook and realized there was no rule against landing on your back. He faced immediate intense scorn. They called him the world's laziest high jumper. Said he looked like a fish flopping into a boat. But his ultimate act of defiance was to embrace the name. He called it the Fosbury Flaw. a flop that was a success. And he just kept refining it. The key was that the flop lets the jumper's center of gravity pass under the bar while their body goes over it. It was a physical impossibility with the old techniques. So at the 1968 Olympics, he wins the gold medal, sets a record, and proves his method was superior. And today, every single elite high jumper in the world uses the flop. It's the ultimate example of a mocked innovation completely replacing the old standard. So now let's explore the power of just sheer willpower, focusing on people who overcame these deeply entrenched systemic obstacles. And Richard Williams, the father of Venus and Serena, is the absolute epitome of this. He grew up in segregated Shreveport, Louisiana, facing constant violence for just refusing to bow to white authority. His mother instilled this deep sense of self-respect in him. And that history shaped everything. His defiant moment came when he saw a female tennis player win $40,000 in four days on TV. And he just decided right then, I'm going to have two kids and put them into tennis. And it wasn't a wish. It was a strategy. He wrote a 78 page document, a plan covering every single aspect of their training, their finances, their education. His goal was to bring two African-American women from the ghetto to the very top of this bleach white elitist sport. Yeah. This required just immense mental toughness. He moved his family back to gang-ridden Compton. And he personally fought gang members for a year just to get and keep control of the public tennis courts. He got broken ribs, lost teeth, and Venus watched it all, learning what courage really meant. He called it the Williams Life Triangle, right? Yeah, yeah. Courage, commitment and confidence with faith in the middle. Commitment meant sticking to the plan. He famously turned down an $87 million shoe sponsorship to keep his daughters grounded and focused on their education. Turning down almost $100 million on principle, that is massive defiance. And confidence was instilled through tough love. He'd hire kids to hurl insults at them while they practiced, so they'd learn to develop this impenetrable focus. But his ultimate act of confidence was just the sheer audacity of his prediction that his daughters would dominate the world. He defied poverty, racism, and the entire structure of elite tennis, all by sticking to that 78-page plan. And finally, let's turn to Suzanne Simard. Her battle was against the entrenched dogma of academia and the logging industry. Simard's gut feeling told her that the forest was this interdependent community. But that flew directly in the face of the accepted science, which saw the forest as a place of ruthless competition, the free-to-grow policy. And her descience met this intense resistance. She was labeled a troublemaker. Policymakers would literally fold their arms and walk out of her presentations. She even got an ethical misconduct letter for speaking out against government herbicide policies. So she needed undeniable proof. How did she, as this sort of lone academic, figure out how to measure the invisible communication happening underground? She came up with this daring but inexpensive experiment using radioactive carbon isotopes, C14 and C13. She'd seal seedlings of two different species, say a birch and a fir, in plastic bags and pump in the radioactive gas. So she was giving one tree a traceable chemical signature. Exactly. And by injecting the traceable carbon into the birch, which the industry considered a demon weed, she could track where that carbon went. And what she found was astonishing. The radioactive C-14 was showing up in the shaded four seedlings. It proved there was this miraculous conversation happening underground, an exchange of resources through the fungal network, the wood wide web. And the most counterintuitive part, the birch, which the logging industry was paying to eradicate, was generously donating its resources to the more commercially valuable fur, especially when the fur was struggling. It was a cooperative system, not a competitive one. Her research proved that cooperation, not just competition, is the beating heart of the forest. And her work eventually led to a 50% reduction in herbicide spraying in British Columbia. Her battle was fiercely lonely, but by providing that measurable scientific defiance, she forced the world to completely change how it views an entire ecosystem. What an incredible collection of stories. As we look back on all of them, Lasker and Birnbach, Laughlin and Swift, Eiffel and Johnson, all of them, the most powerful connection is just that sheer uncompromising willpower. Yeah, they all risked everything to break rules, and most of those rules were unwritten. And that unleashed that unmitigated fury from the status quo. You see the pattern so clearly. Lasker sets the rules of advertising, and 40 years later, Brunbach comes along to break them. In almost every case, the resistance was rooted in institutional ego, fear, and protecting profits. They were often these lonely hunters. Fueled by perseverance, mocked by critics. I mean, think of Fosbury looking like a flopping fish, or Eiffel's Tower being called a gigantic black factory chimney. Richard Williams had to fight gangs just to find a place to train his daughters. They all stood chin to chin with the established order and just refused to back down because they knew there was a better way. And in every case, they used that principle of Vujardé. They look at their familiar world with fresh eyes and they saw what everyone else was missing because they chose to forget what they thought they knew. The essential takeaway here, I think, is that profound change often starts not with some new invention, but with a simple reinterpretation of the rules or just the willingness to address the elephant in the room that everyone else has agreed to address. So what does this all mean for you? We've talked about how these individuals faced rejection and mockery, but ultimately prevailed. What is the one widely accepted sacred belief in your own field or in your own life that if you challenged it could revolutionize the path forward? Are you willing to embrace Vujadeh and risk the fury to find a better way? That's a great question to sit with. The book, again, is Against the Grain, Defiant Giants Who Changed the World by Terry O'Reilly. And it's out now and available at your favorite bookstore. Thank you for joining us for this deep dive. We'll be back next time digging into another stack of sources that challenge how we see the world.