How to build your community and influence with Jon Levy

Bulletproof Radio, a state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today is going to be a lot of fun because I'm getting to interview a behavioral scientist, a guy who has studied human connection, trust and influence, and a guy you might have heard, if you're a longtime listener, because he was on episode number 395. That. That's about 50% of the show ago where we talked about using behavioral science to become successful. And his name is John Levy. He's the founder of Influencers, which is a private community of about 2,000 industry leaders, including some Nobel laureates, Olympians, celebrities, executives like me, royalty, not like me, and more. And today I wanted to interview him about influence and how you create influence. It's particularly useful if you're new to Clubhouse or you're working your way through Clubhouse or for your job and for your profession or even your family, because influence has changed in a world where we get less FaceTime and there are no pheromones. And who's taller than anyone else? I don't know. Angle your camera. So a lot of our signals have changed. We're going to talk about his new book, which is about influence, and about his influencer dinners, and just have a lot of fun. John, welcome to the show, my friend.

I am so excited to be here. I had an absolute blast the last time I was on. So for all of you listeners, I recommend going back and checking that one out. And we always have so much fun together, just in general. So thanks for having me on.

I used to think you were a crazy person. I got this weird email from Jarvis a while back, who is your assistant, and saying, dave, you should come and have dinner with people you don't know. And I get a lot of dinner invitations from people, more than I could ever possibly eat. But you said, well, here's a link in the New York Times about what I do. I said, okay, maybe Jarvis is real. And I ended up at a condo somewhere in la and there were a bunch of people in the room and we weren't allowed to say what we did for a career so we could talk about anything else. And then we made dinner together. And then at the end of the dinner, as we were eating it, we went around and guessed what everyone did, which was totally funny. I'm like, oh, there's some famous people and people who've done big things in the room. But you wouldn't know, because when we don't talk about what we do, it's a very different vibe. And you call those the influencers. You call the influencer dinner as a secret dining experience. And what made you decide to do that? Because it's weird.

Yeah, I. I decided to do it because it's weird. So let's just do a quick comparison. People listen to you because what you say stands out. And it's backed by research, but it's novel or different. Years ago, I was 28 at the time, and I came across this completely insane study that changed my life. It was by these two guys, Christakis and Fowler, and they were curious about the obesity epidemic. And what they found was that if you have a friend who's obese, your probability of obesity increases by 45%. Your friends who don't know them have a 20% increased chance, and their friends have a 5% increased chance. Now, this is crazy. This means that not only are we the, let's say, average of our five closest friends, but their friends and their friends, which meant that if I wanted to accomplish things like being healthy, happy, successful, the most important thing I could do is maybe figure out how to connect with extraordinary people and also connect them with each other. So I needed to figure out, how do I hack connection? How do I. How do I hack trust? And how do we use that to create a positive impact? And that's kind of what started the whole search for the research. And one of the most important things I learned is that if you want to connect with very influential people, it really helps to stand out and do something novel or different.

Do you consider yourself a very influential person?

No, I don't. Not at all. I consider myself somebody who's really fortunate because the magic of anything I can do is a byproduct of the relationships I create between other people. So, for example, we might meet an athlete preparing for a big Olympic challenge or something like that. By me being able to introduce them to you or to a breathing expert or something like that, their performance increases. But I'm not the one who really define that. I might have been able to nudge it along the way to make the introduction. And that's kind of my superpower.

You're sort of influencing the influencers and lets you hang out with them, which is a lot of fun. And frankly, it's one of the reasons I started the bulletproof radio is just I wanted an excuse to talk to people who were doing amazing thinking or had knowledge that I wanted to be able to learn and assimilate and put into the frameworks I use. I'm like, this is great. I probably couldn't have picked up the phone and called them, but now I can. And I imagine you have a similar experience doing that. And you also now have a community of people who support you. And the old, was it a Tony Robbins ism or a Jim Rohn? You know, you're the sum of the five people you spend the most time with. And one of the things that that also attracted me to having you back on the show is the greatest predictor of human longevity isn't actually whether or not you drink bulletproof coffee. I know people listening are going to be really surprised. And it's not whether you live in a blue zone. And it's not food, it's close social ties and social integration, being part of a community and that knowledge, it led me to actually build the mentorship community called the Upgrade Collective. And we have a bunch of members listening right now, where it's not just me teaching stuff, but it's people learning in a community and in a group, because I think you learn better that way, in addition to living longer. And there's a lot of loneliness because of the pandemic and all that. What have you changed in your life because of the pandemic? So that you still have community even if you're not able to go see people.

Oh, wow. So there's, I think, two or three things. And I do want to point something out, because we're talking about how lonely people are because of the pandemic or the impact of social media on loneliness. This started way before any of that. In 1985, the average American had about three friends besides family. By 2004, just 19 years later, it was just about two friends. And that trend probably continued. And my hunch is that the reason is that it became more acceptable for people to move, to go for a new job or after college, and so they lose their social ties. So this is a devastating trend. When, like, you point out the impact of loneliness is on par with, like, smoking a pack a day of cigarettes or something like that, that's terrible.

So loneliness is like kale.

It's like kale. Is kale that dangerous?

No, it's just gross.

Got it.

It's not as dangerous as cigarettes. I just like to pick on kale because it's not that good.

So it's. So what we began to realize was in the pandemic, there were kind of two issues. One is the people who are normally social, they were feeling, like, the need for social contact. Right. But what's actually more dangerous is the People who are already isolated. When you feel lonely and you're isolated, it breeds a belief that you're deserving of being isolated and lonely. So if you have three friends and one of them moves and you're down to two, then the world seems suddenly much smaller. And then you think, okay, I guess I'm limited to these two friends now. And that's what I'm really concerned about. So during the pandemic, I started examining the research on human behavior to try to understand since we can't physically be around each other, which is normally how we deal with great social stress. So you look back to the blitzkrieg during World War II on London. The entire city is being attacked. Everybody's freaking out, and people are trying to get into shelters, and everybody's worried that there's going to be fighting and looting and attacks in the shelters, and there weren't any. And that's because in times of great stress, human beings are phenomenal at coming together.

In fact, we're wired to do that. And I think it's in our cells, the basic algorithms to do it. We have those four F words I keep talking about in the show. And the fourth F word that we all do and all life does is friend. You've got to do that. And if you're not doing that, you're malnourished. Right.

I couldn't agree more. There's even this really solid argument that the Maslow's higher order of needs that maybe we should put as the most important social integration. Because if you look at the greatest punishment that we give a person when we don't want, like when they're a problem in our society, it isn't like starving them. What we do is we either put them in solitary confinement or we push them out of our culture. And so for human beings, it seems that there's no greater need than the need to fit in. We're in fact, willing to deal with just about anything in order to feel like we're part of a culture society.

Does that mean that Cancel Culture is actually creating loneliness because people are afraid of being ostracized now?

I think so. And the reason I would. I think that that's actually a really good observation is that when Google was looking at what the greatest predictor of a team's success was, they. You know, there's a lot of things that people think. Like you take a diverse group of people who are geniuses and you throw them in a room together, let them solve a problem. That's it. Or tenure or something like that. But it was actually psychological safety, the feeling that you're part of the group, even if you have a descending view. So the two of us can't explore an idea. If I agree with everything that you.

Say, well, it's kind of boring.

And we'll also never find the problems to improve it. Right. Ideas are antifragile. The more pressure you put on them, the more you discover the strength of them and where you need to sure things up. And so I think that you're kind of spot on with this cancel culture thing. If you're scared of saying anything that's unpopular, then we're never going to get to a better idea. And also, let's be honest, when has shaming anybody for anything been the solution?

Shaming doesn't work very well to change behavior, now, does it?

No. If shaming worked well, I would have been skinny my entire life. I'm dyslexic. I would have learned to read in a weekend. If people making fun of me was the answer, I would be a perfect human being right now.

And if shaming worked well, we'd all be Catholic, right?

Well, I'm Jewish, so believe me, there's no lack of guilt.

Yeah, I come from a Catholic family, so I can say that fairly, I think. Although if I offended you, I'm very sorry.

Oh, no, not offended. You are canceled, officially.

This goes down to something a little bit deeper and something that you're exploring in your new book. You're talking about hacking human connection and trust. Because on one aspect, there's connection. But right now it seems like, okay, every company out there is trying to take advantage of you. There's a whole bunch of people out there who are trying to take advantage of you. You never know because you can't see them. You get an email. I only need to send $10 million to Nigeria. I know I'm going to get it back. You know, so there's untrustworthy people.

Oh, you know that guy, too.

Exactly. Right.

I'm still waiting for an email back with the details for the return of the funds, but I'm sure it's coming anyway.

It's going to come. Yeah. Just don't even worry about that. By the way, I have another email for you. It's an even better deal. Just don't even worry. Right?

Is it those pills? Oh, my God.

Nice. The issue that we have, though, is if you want to create connection with someone or with a group, first they have to trust you, and you have to trust them. So how do you go about building trust?

So this is super interesting, and I'll be honest, this wasn't stuff that I knew before I started researching the book. But we all say, as you point out, trust is really important. It's the basis of relationships, all that. And if you ask people, great, great, what is it made out of? Why do we even have it? Because the fact is that, and you pointed to this a little, that trust is the willingness to be vulnerable. And if I'm willing to trust you, you could steal my money, you could hurt me, and so on. So trust doesn't actually make any sense to have, except for one problem. From an anthropological perspective, I came across some research that suggests that a single mother with a child can't collect enough calories in a day to support her and her offspring and protect it. Meaning that without trust, without knowing, okay, this person can care for the child while I collect food, or this person can go get me food so that the child can survive, we would have gone extinct. So trust is necessity from an evolutionary perspective. The problem is we still don't. That doesn't answer the question of what is it made out of? And for the most part, researchers agree that it's made out of three things. Some argue four, but for the purposes of anything we actually care about, three is fine. And that's competence, your ability to do something, honesty or integrity, if you're truthful. And then the third is benevolence, that you have my best interests at heart. And here's what's really interesting. Three pillars, all really important, but they're not equally important. So if I came to you one day and I shared something, and the next day I was like, oh, I found out that study was wrong, you wouldn't say, oh, John is incompetent, he got something wrong, I can't trust him anymore.

Well, if you're a YouTube commenter, you would.

For sure because of cancel culture. So you can see that you can have a screw up in competence and you're still in the clear, right? As long as you have a decent track record. But if you found out somebody lied to you, you then doubt everything they have said and everything they say moving forward. So you can see that breach in honesty is a much bigger deal than a breach in competence. And then the third thing is there's actually this weird loophole in it. And so if the two of us are walking down the street and I say, hey, Dave, I just forgot something at a friend's house, do you mind if we quickly pick it up? And you're like, yeah, yeah, sure, no problem. And when we walk in, 40 of your closest friends jump out and scream, surprise. It would be very, very strange if you turned to me and said, john, you just lied to me. We can't be friends anymore. And that's because, you know, I lied to you for benevolent reasons, which is I had your best interests at heart. And so we're more willing to forgive that, especially if it's for, like a temporary kind of joke or something like that.

Right.

And here's what's interesting about it. Everybody tends to lead with competence, like, he's capable or she's capable of whatever it is. But really, it seems that human beings care about benevolence more than honesty. So what we should be leading with is that we have other people's best interest at heart. You'll also notice there's, like, one other kind of weird thing. Do you remember when Wells Fargo had that whole thing about opening up bank accounts?

Yep.

Right. That is fundamentally a breach in benevolence. They don't actually care about their customers.

Oh, you mean like all the social media customer or companies?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So. But whenever there's an issue, they don't admit. Oh, yeah, you know, we had some managers that just don't care. What they say is that it's an issue of competence. They say, sorry, we put an overview committee to make sure that accidents like this don't happen again. But we want you to know that we really care about our customers. So they very cleverly try to hide where the breach in trust is. And it's like, the more people are aware of it, the more we can see, okay, can we actually trust these companies or not? We can really take a look at these things. So that's what trust is made out of. But that didn't really answer the question for me of I. How do I build trust quickly with somebody? Especially if I meet somebody very influential. I only have a few minutes with them. So the question became, what is the mechanisms that build trust and how do we accelerate the process so that if I only have 20 minutes or an hour with you, by the end of that, it feels like we're old camp friends. And that's what the dinner is actually built on.

The dinner really did create a sense of trust because there's some vulnerable sharing. And I'm embarrassingly forgetting who's the guy from Top Gear that you sat me next to. Do you remember?

Yes. Adam.

Adam. Is it Savage?

Yeah. Adam Savage was there that night. Jennifer Morrison was there that night from House. And once upon a time there was also somebody from like One Tree Hill or something like that. Like, and he was also on the Walking Dead for a while. We had a famous. I remember your dinner. It was a crazy dinner. We had a famous magician, we had a famous furniture designer who also had his own show with Common. Yeah, it was like a crazy, you know, L. A. It's a lot of entertainment people.

I didn't know who any of these people were. I'm such an. I'm such a nerd. I'm like, I don't know. I'm pretty sure you're an actress because you're short and you look like an actress. And actresses are all short. That was my one guess. That was correct. Everyone else, I got wrong, which was kind of funny.

I think it was also really amusing how surprised people were that you were the. At the time, you know, this is years ago. You were the coffee guy. Yeah, right. Oh, the coffee guy. Yeah. Butter. I love butter.

It was a really weird trust building experience. But you really felt you got to know someone different than you would at a normal dinner where you're a little bit more guarded just because you couldn't do the normal stuff you do.

So here's what's really interesting about it and here's the design and what people can actually use and take home with them. So there's this. This really weird characteristic of human beings. If I were to like, take you out for an expensive meal, you may or may not actually care about that. Nobody really wants another business dinner. They often feel like obligations. And if I just give you a bunch of swag at an event or a throw a party, people barely remember who threw the party and they mostly just throw out or give away the swag bags, which means none of that kind of stuff of trying to, like, buy people off really works. There is an exception, which is I. I know that you're really into biohacking. And if I find this, like one really rare thing that you really care about and get it for you, you'd say, oh, wow, John really cares about.

Yeah, a thoughtful gift does something different than a. A T shirt.

Exactly. So the question is, what actually does work? And it turns out that it's the exact opposite. It's called the IKEA effect. And it states that we disproportionately care about our IKEA furniture because we had to assemble it.

So you make them work for it.

Yeah, that's exactly it. Anything we put effort into is what we care about. Disproportionately and so I'm not trying to win anybody over by being, you know, gifting and like spending a fortune or anything like that. What I'm actually looking to do is find ways for us to invest effort into each other together. And there's this really interesting thing, and it's kind of obvious when you really think about it, but the reason the IKEA effect works is that anytime you have a problem that's too big for one person to solve by themselves, then joint effort is required. And then we produce something known as a vulnerability loop. It works like this. Let's say I came to work at your company and I'm sitting at the desk next to yours, and it's my first day there, and you hear me say, I am so overwhelmed, I don't know how I'm going to do all of this. I've just signaled vulnerability at a certain level. Now, if you ignore that or make fun of it, trust will be reduced. But if you acknowledge it and throw out your own signal, John, my first week running this company, I was totally overwhelmed too. I know how you feel. Let's see if we can figure this out. You've just signaled your own vulnerability. You used to be overwhelmed. Now, we've both shown that we're safe with each other at this level, and now we can trust each other more. Now, when we're working on a project together, like cooking a meal, then these loops are created very quickly, especially if we're time locked. And suddenly we're starting and closing loops. Like, Dave, quick, pass me the. And then you pass me a knife so I can cut something, or pass me like a spatula so I can make sure something gets on the stove. And all these loops are opened and closed and suddenly we feel like we can really trust each other. Now notice trust did not precede vulnerability. Vulnerability precedes trust. So if we want to accelerate the process for building trust quickly, we need to do a couple of things. We need to one, notice people's vulnerability loops. It could be something they say or they do physically. And we have to be willing to put out our own signals. Now, the fastest way to create that is probably by finding some task that both of you can do together. And the reason is that human beings are terrible in like an interview setting where they're sitting across from each other. It's like a miserable way to meet somebody. But if you go on a hike together or you play a game together, then suddenly the loops get created quickly and it's a natural experience to Actually bond.

All right, so now you walk into a room, hey everybody, I'm vulnerable. Now we get back to that trust issue. And then, you know, the three sociopaths in the room are like great, you know, fresh meat. So how do people know when and how to express vulnerability so they don't get screwed? Because that's the reason people won't express vulnerability in the first place.

So the, the simple answer is that. And this is kind of funny, in the book I explore this too. The. Have you ever seen all those like Criminal Mind type shows?

Oh, totally.

Yeah, they're great drama, right? Criminal minds lasted like 15 years, hundreds of episodes. So I interviewed the, the guy who created the show. It turns out that the behavioral sciences team at Quantico has probably never caught anybody based on behavioral sciences. You cannot predict a single person's behavior. It's just not possible. Like, maybe if you're really like dedicate your entire life, you can get really pretty accurate, but you could do it on scale. And here's the problem. There are certain tells that you can probably figure out. But hoping that you're going to get a zero rate of meeting jerks is near impossible. And that's also because human beings change over the course of a lifetime. So we might be best friends this year and next year I suffer a tragedy and I start drinking or something like that, and I become a jerk. So it's expecting or trying to get that number to zero is tough. What we can do is a few things. Mostly people trust others due to what's called the halo effect, right? So I trust your friends because I trust you, and that's fine. It's like, at least you've got some signals like, oh, Dave thinks he's cool, so I'll probably think he's cool. The bigger issue, I think, is that the length of time it takes for us to trust somebody or not, like at the basic level is the length of time it takes for like a hummingbird to flap its wings once. It's like a single frame of a movie.

Yep. We know it in our bones, but we don't listen to it.

And what's interesting about that is that most of those signals aren't based on anything real. So it's like you said, are they taller, where their cheekbones are, is their nose pronounced? These signals. And some of them are probably, probably genetic and probably some of them are social, right? So in an American culture, people have criminalized dark skin. Right. There's a whole culture of white supremacy that has made people scared. Shows like Cops have led to it. And so I think it's really tough to judge these things. I think, like, even. What is it? Judges are so bad at guessing who's telling the truth and who's lying that they have, like, a 53% accuracy. That's awful. They do it professionally.

Sounds like a pretty good job. Flip a coin.

Yeah, I'm average, and you have the job for life. So it's really good. So I think that the bigger issue is. Or I'll take a step back. Let's say you come into a room and you want to meet people. My question is, do you actually want to go into a room to network? Because the fact is that networking is a really terrible way to meet people. It makes us feel dirty. Research out of Harvard Business School found that the implicit association to networking is wanting to wash our hands. Right? Like, it's just awful. Nobody has ever said, oh, my God, networking's so fun.

I don't think that's a true statement. People new to their career who are clueless and eager are happy to go to networking events. And they're all excited about it because there's lots of people they could take advantage of. It's like the people on Clubhouse. Like, I've got to ask a question. Let me tell you five minutes about myself before I ask my question, which. Which is a. A problem for people new to clubhouse. Right? And so you do find people who have way more to gain than they have to give are the ones who are most eager to go to a networking event. At least that's been my experience of going to those.

So let's separate two things. One is this. There was a study done. I think it was on Columbia University MBA students. So these are people who have the highest desire to network, quote, unquote. They even say networking is a major priority. When they actually go to networking events, I think they spend more than half of their time talking to people they already know, and then a very small portion talking to some new people. But the. The reason networking doesn't feel right is that that's not really how most of us are going to feel comfortable with people. Right. From a social perspective, almost everyone we meet is either through a shared interest and activity or through the fact that we grew up with them through friends. Right? And so if that's the case, maybe we should be looking at how do we make friends instead of networking? And for that to happen, we probably need some kind of activity or experience, because 40,000 years ago, human beings wouldn't have been like, oh, I'm going to like, I'm going to walk five villages away so I can network. It's not a realistic expectation on our species.

It's kind of funny. You created some online exercises that you use in your community, and I stole one of them with your permission for the Upgrade Collective. So for all the Upgrade Collective listeners, there's a reason that we go through that quiz to work as a team, to guess what some photos, some microscope photos are because of exactly what John's talking about now. And you can see it gives you a chance to get to know people even though you're remote. Which I thought was a really cool hack because I've been to events where I'm sitting with a bunch of people who funded the X Prize and we're building moon bases out of Legos at a cocktail party so we'd have a team event to do. That was a period Diamandis thing. But it really did work, right? It doesn't even seem to matter how trivial it is, just as long as it's a shared activity.

Yeah, I would actually argue that. So there is some research that just shows that we bond over shared activities. More so than kind of just like the interview style. You two should sit down and talk. That's really awkward. I think the reason is twofold. One is you get that IKEA effect. And two, if you want to be quiet while you're doing an activity, that's fine. It's not weird. If you want to be quiet for a moment while you're in conversation with somebody, that's awkward. And we feel really uncomfortable with silence. So I think you pointed to something though, that's really interesting, which is that not only does it not matter how trivial it is, but sometimes the fact that the activity is trivial is what's great about it. So when Covid hit and everybody started sheltering at home, we started looking at what. Why do people actually go to events? Because all the digital events that people were doing were miserable, right? It was less entertaining than Netflix. It was worse quality than YouTube. Right? Like, why would I sit there watching some fundraiser concert over Zoom or some big large scale tech event when I could just read an article about it the next day, right? And so we, we found that there's a handful of things that people actually want when they go to an event, even if it's not like ultra exclusive. When you go to a concert, you're not just there for the music, you're there also because there are other people you want to connect. You want to feel like you're part of something bigger, just being in people's environment. So connection is critical. The other is influence. And I know this might sound a little weird, but if I'm at a concert, I can boo, I can scream, I can shout, I can dance. I have an impact on the people around me. If I'm on webex and I die, no one will notice. Like I'm logged in there. I could be washing my dishes, I could be, you know, answering emails, anything that just gives me a feeling or sensation of having an impact on the world. And so when we started designing experiences, we said, okay, we need to put people at the heart of the experience because it's not about me, the host, it's about the participant. So we started with breakout rooms where we have eight people or seven people play a game together and they compete. And the reason that we do that is that it creates that time locked problem that forces them to create those vulnerability loops or that IKEA effect. So they end up connecting at a much deeper level after 15 minutes than if they would have been at some cocktail party, frankly. Wow.

And it works remotely?

Yeah, and it works remotely. It also gives them that sense of influence, like they matter. Now here's the funny part. You said it's trivial, right? What we started doing is we'd have former dinner guests give gifts to the winning team, but they'd be ridiculous. Like we had the president of Hanes.

The underwear I was on for that call, right?

Were you the winning team? Did you win underwear? The winning team?

I did not want a year's supply of underwear.

No, I'm sorry. We'll see what we can do about that. Knowing you, you probably have like special underwear that aerates and does all this stuff.

They're made out of leather. They're awesome.

Now I know what I'm shopping for. My book launch gift for myself.