348. Creating Lasting Connections: The Neuroscience of Memorable Event Design with Jon Levy (Refreshed Episode)

Welcome to episode 348 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. Today's episode is an interview with John Levy about his book. You're invited. Ready? Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now here's your host, Malik Melina Palmer hello.

Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Today's episode is a refresh of my conversation with John Levy, which Originally aired on April 29, 2021. John is a behavioral scientist and New York Times best selling author known for his work in trust, human connection, belonging and influence. He specializes in applying the latest research to transform the way companies approach marketing, sales, consumer engagement and culture. His clients range from Fortune 500 brands like Microsoft, Google and Samsung to startups More than a decade ago, John founded the Influencers Dinner, a secret dining experience for industry leaders ranging from Nobel laureates, Olympians, celebrities and executives to artists, musicians and even the Grammy winning voice of the Bark from who Let the Dogs Out. Guests cook dinner together but can't discuss their career or give their last name and once seated to eat, they reveal who they are. Over time, these dinners developed into a community with thousands of members. Influencers is the largest community of its type worldwide. John's second book, you're the Art and Science of Connection, Trust and Belonging, was released in 2021 to incredible fanfare, quickly becoming a New York Times bestseller and was selected by the Wall Street Journal as a book of. In it, he demonstrates the importance of human connection, trust and community to accomplishing what's most important to us. This book and his insights from it are what we discuss on the episode today. In his free time, John works on outrageous projects, among them spending a year traveling to all seven continents or to the world's greatest events including the Grand Prix, Burning Man, Running of the Bulls, et cetera, and barely surviving to tell the tale. These adventures were chronicled in his first book, the 2am Princip Discover the Science of Adventure. I love this conversation and have been so delighted to have met John and had a chance to get to know him in this conversation and in the many interactions we've had since then. He's such a generous person, which isn't surprising when you learn more about what.

He'S dedicated his life to.

I know you're going to love this idea. His book and our chat today don't forget that there are links for everything, including past episodes, books and articles, all waiting for you in the show Notes for this episode we'll which are found within the app. You're listening to and@thebrainybusiness.com 3, 4, 8. All right, let's talk about. You're invited. John Levy, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited, mostly because you're awesome and very, very fun, and I know this is going to be a really fun conversation.

Oh, well, thank you. I feel the same. I know we're going to have a great time and I am so delighted. I love the name of your book, for one, and just the concept of all of what you have built, it's such a cool thing. That's so different. Yeah. And so I know I mentioned in the intro, you know, before this, but our books are coming out on the same day.

Hooray, Frenemies.

I know.

Or we could just fight you to the end.

Or we could bundle them together and say, people should get both what your customer wants as well as you're invited.

Oh, my God, this is so funny. So a few years back, I was talking to a friend of mine and we noticed that when you buy something on Amazon, when it's offered, it says people often buy this along with it. And we thought it would be really funny to start buying, like when we buy a friend's book, also buying things that would be, like, very awkward, like adult diapers and, you know, just, like, just naughty things. Right.

Yeah.

And. And if we got like 10 or 20 people to do it, the algorithm would say, oh, people who bought your book also bought adult diapers and like, apology cards or whatever it is. Like, whatever it is. And that way when people would look at their webpage, they'd be like, what is up with their customers?

I know.

Who are they?

I don't know what's going on here. And so I think it would be great if we were bundled together. It's much better than probably what my friends are doing to me.

Right. Well, you've got all the payback now. So if you, if you actually did this to people.

For years, my friends have been waiting for me to release something.

Right. But I mean, that's also kind of like on the side way of getting them to feel the need to buy a lot of books.

Right.

To make that happen.

So.

And then they're going to be stuck with a lot of adult diapers.

You know, I mean, you do what you Got to do. Yeah.

Eventually they'll probably need them, right?

Yeah, just stock up. They don't go bad. So. Yeah. Awesome. Well, tell a little bit about the. And I don't know if it's best to start with just the influencers dinner in general, maybe, like, how. So tell a little bit about, I guess, who you are and how you even got into writing a book and the work that you do.

Yeah.

What I do professionally is I'm a behavioral scientist. I do a bit of research. So I work in conjunction with a lab at Kellogg School of Management with this neuroscientist by the name of Moron Cerf. And we've done a bunch of really ridiculous studies. We did the largest study, I think, ever on dating. We looked at 421 million potential matches and asked what causes them to date. And we found that, like, across every characteristic, really, the more similar you are, the more likely you are today. That goes down to religion. NCAA conference, your school was a part of, which is super weird. Your initials, if you have the same initials, you're 11.3% more likely to date. Like, just weird stuff. That's called implicit egotism. It's like when something reminds you of yourself, you're more likely to like it. Did a huge one on consumer behavior and found, like, people use less coupons when it rains. Or there's this kind of funny thing. If you are about to get $100 hotel room and I give you a $20 coupon, what's your total bill?

Well, it depends on where I am, I guess. Tax and forget about taxes. So I have $100 hotel room and a $20 coupon.

Yeah.

And if I'm forgetting tax, I feel like my bill would have been 80.

Yeah, that's what you would expect. But it turns out people deal with like, dollar amount coupons as, like, found money. And so you end up with a bill of like 120 because you feel the right to upgrade.

Right.

And so it's. We. We kind of just called it. We never formally wrote this up, but we call it the delusion of discount, which is like, if you think you're getting a discount, you're kind of delusional. And that's the kind of stuff we do. It fits into like behavioral economics or behavioral science. We're doing another one right now about YouTube. That's kind of like the fun and games. Just because I'm interested and I really believe in research. But what I spend most of my life on is the application of research. Right. There's so much that we've learned about human behavior, but we very rarely use it. And what I've especially been curious over the past decade is what allows us to connect, what allows us to build trust, and really that leads to having a sense of belonging. Because when we look at everything from human longevity to business success, the predictors point to this very odd characteristic. The top predictors of human longevity aren't doing yoga and finishing a cleanse. Number two is close social ties, and number one is social integration. And so it seems that belonging is really, really important to us and is kind of this universal characteristic of actually getting to enjoy life, and a long life at that. So I got really interested in what connects us. And to kind of prove out my theories, I did something absolutely absurd. I convinced groups of strangers to come to my home. They weren't allowed to talk about what they did or even give their last name. They then cooked dinner together. And when they sat down to eat, they got to guess what everybody did professionally. And that's when they found out their fellow guests were Nobel laureates, Olympic medalists, editors in chiefs at big outlets, Academy Award winners, Grammy Award winners, you name it, right? Top of their industry. And then when they were done with dinner and hanging out together, they came to my kitchen, washed my dishes and cleaned my floors. And the weirdest thing is they thanked me for the experience of eating like the most mediocre food you've ever had. But I did it 227 times before sheltering at home started across 10 cities in three countries. And I built what's probably the largest community of industry leaders in the world. I think, I think. I have no idea.

So do all those people have a place now where they connect beyond like that? You let them kind of stick together in a group of sorts.

We run it as a in person community or digital event community, as opposed to, you know, you could go on Reddit and there's. And you could do things that are, are not like time based. You write, somebody can comment, and a year later they can comment. Everything we do is ephemeral. It exists for that moment. And so after the dinners, we host salons, and we do them in New York, Louisiana and San Francisco almost every month. And that is when we. When it was safe too.

Right.

And at those, we'd invite about 60 to 100 of the dinner guests back, and they would get to meet people from other dinners and really bond with each other. And we'd create kind of like wild activities. So we'd sometimes have talks like we'll have Bill Nye the Science Guy give a talk. And then when the Roots perform, or we would. There was one that was really kind of wild. So companies, after a while, started coming to me and saying, hey, can we sponsor the dinner? And I tell them, I'm sorry, I can't do that. Because my objective isn't to make money off of this. My objective is to bring people together in the hopes that it'll bond them and improve their lives, and hopefully we could have a larger impact on society. So if there's a social issue, when Covid hit, we raised money when got media and attention for social issues, all that kind of stuff. But I said, if you want, I can design things that are custom for you, and it's going to be completely based on the type of behavioral science that you cover episode after episode. We invented an event for one company called the Aesthetic Scentability Brunch. And the name is completely nonsensical, and that's intentional. When guests arrived, all they knew was that they had to bring the names and addresses of three loved ones. A world expert was flown in to teach them something. And this time, the food will be good. It will be prepared by someone else. So they arrive, they grab some food and drinks, and then 12 at a time, are pulled into a separate room covered in flowers. The person at the front of the room is one of the top florists in the world. And over the next 30 minutes, you learn how to assemble a perfect bouquet. And then everybody announced who they were. And that short woman was Dr. Ruth. And then we had somebody from the Marvel TV shows and so on and so forth, like all these fancy folk. And the last person said, my name is Ajay Khoury. I'm the founder of Urban Stems. We deliver bouquets anywhere in the city. And if you follow me, we have runners who are on the spot going to deliver your bouquets to your loved ones. And if you follow me, we'll make sure they're taken care of. So while people were still at the event, they got photos of their loved ones receiving their bouquets. Aww. And that's how we ended it.

I have the goosebumps going.

I bet our listeners do, too.

But here's what's kind of interesting. So we wanted to design something built on how people actually behave. And so we said, okay, if I want to engage highly influential people, for starters, it needs to be novel. It needs to be a fundamentally a different format than anything that they've seen before, because these people are so busy. Unless it gets on their radar, they won't care. So we knew that we had to create something kind of weird, right? And there's a section of the brain called the snvta. It's the major novelty center. Essentially, the more novel something is, the more we're enticed to explore and understand it. And so by creating an experience where we left a lot to their imagination and for them to wonder about, they got more curious. It was also why we gave it such a weird name. The Aesthetic sensibility Brunch. Now, in retrospect, you go, oh, scent, aesthetics. I kind of get it. Flowers. So George Lowenstein did this study, or not study, claimed that something called information gap theory, which is that simply when there's a gap between what you're being presented with and what you know, if it's the right size, curiosity is triggered. So we figured if we could make you really curious about the event by giving it a weird title and only giving you some information, you'll be more likely to actually want to show up in a tent.

Yeah.

And then we said, okay, that'll probably get people there, but how do we get them to care about the company and each other? And so in general, we know, like, if I just give you something, you probably won't care very much about it. But because of the IKEA effect, which is that when we have to assemble our IKEA furniture, we care about it more. We knew that if we could get people to assemble or build or work together around something, they'll bond more with each other and they'll care more about the company. So we had people actually assemble the flowers. Then we also knew that human beings don't make logical decisions, as you know better than anyone. And we don't really remember the duration of pleasure or pain. And that's the peak end rule. We remember the peaks of experiences and how they end. We wanted to end on the emotional value of the brand. We ended on this experience of the delight and surprise of gifting, which is what flowers is all about, or flower gifting. And so that's kind of the methodology we use when we really wanted to engage high profile people, is we design around the mechanics of how we actually behave and do something novel and generous and really well curated. Right. The guests are interesting so that everybody's like, oh my God, what interesting people. Oh, what a fun activity. And so on.

Oh, and my family was delighted and they're going to be talking about it and you get to continue to share and relive the experience over and over. So I Love you mentioned several concepts as we were going there and just so the audience knows, there are links back to episodes on reciprocity, the power of novelty and story, IKEA effect, peak and rule, surprise and delight. They're all going to be linked in the show notes for you, so you can go check those out if you don't already know enough about them. So we've got those there waiting for you. So I love it. I'm sure everybody does. It's just such a cool way and I love the. It just shows that combination of what's so important when you get into an Applied Behavioral Science vs Academic Research Behavioral science, which they both have their places, they're both very important, as you said. Like we both kind of dabble in both sides, which I think isn't super common in the industry. So it's nice to meet someone that does some of that same stuff. But in applied you can be looking at, well, how do we mix a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I talk about it like recipes to follow when. Yeah, that's so in my book I talk about behavioral baking and how you're going to put that all together and trying to start applying yourself. And I like how you said instead of just doing a basic sponsorship and I think this is great insight beyond the way that you've done it, where people don't get to know who anyone is or whatnot. But people that put on conferences, whether it's when they're back in person again or doing stuff virtually and getting people to engage into where sponsors are going to get great value instead of just asking someone to pay, you know, 50 grand or whatever it is to have their logo on a billboard for a while, which is. Or you can say you're the sponsor of the luncheon.

Yay.

But people don't remember. But in this case with urban stems to be able to say, I remember when you were just talking about it that that's who it was and you think, whoa, what a cool thing that they were involved in this. They must be so just forward thinking and innovative and it just helps to have that halo effect for that vendor.

Because of that IKEA effect, because they were making the flowers next to and with the the staff, instead of renting the relationship from some PR firm on the side, they actually invested effort with each other and built a relationship so that they owned it. And they could call the person up a year later, email them, say, hey, can we grab some coffee? And what ended up happening was that there was a wild number of articles and stories created as a byproduct of that experience. Because the media that was there felt really connected to the brand.

Yeah. Which. And you can't buy that publicity in the same way that it's that extra kind of the word of mouth, the unpaid media space where you're able to just truly have that connection and you feel compelled. That's the reciprocity piece. Right. You want to give back even more and be able to share. It's so much more valuable for a sponsor to be involved. And if you put that thought in also, it just helps, like I said, if you're putting on a conference that the people attending think, wow, they really think through everything that's here. It's here for a reason.

Yeah. One of the things, and I think you're pointing to this, is that you don't want to be a sponsor, you want to be a partner. You actually want to be actively designing or at least being involved in the thinking process. Because what matters is that people get your core value and value proposition. Not that the number of events I've been to that I partner with companies and then they're spending their time rearranging like the tables and chairs to be perfect and the plates in the perfect spot. Nobody's going to remember that. If you take that same five minute period and go talk to somebody and make them feel welcome, it's 100 times more important.

Right.

That I think too ends up being a real value add for the business of knowing. I'm a big advocate of quality over quantity in anything. You know, for me, I would rather be a guest on 10amazing podcasts or do interview shows or whatever than to be on a hundred just random ones. And to be able again, if you're sponsoring stuff, don't sponsor 10 things kind of halfway and just throw money at it where you can do two things really, really well that people will remember. It's going to be so much more valuable and impactful over time.

Yeah. I think that there's a lot of value put at scale and that's often questionable. Right. It's like when people say, oh, we hired this Instagram, they have a million followers. And then you're like, yeah, but you're a business to business supplier and all of their followers are teenagers. Right. Sure, you've got scale. Good luck with that, buddy. Yeah, you're gonna do great.

When I was in corporate marketing, I know people used to come and be pitching me constantly about the like, oh, you should have ads in our magazine or be do commercials on our show, you know, it's like we have a circulation of a million or 11 million or a hundred million people, and it's like, I don't care. So if it's 11 million of the wrong people, then it's just. It's still a waste of money. I would rather have the outlet that's perfectly targeted at 100,000 people that are just what I'm looking for than to spend a bunch for that big number that doesn't mean much for me.

So.

So, yeah. So I have to ask then now. So how do you find people and ask them to come in? I know you talk about the power of an invitation at the beginning of your book. And so, you know, how do you just say, hey, random Nobel Laureate, hey, Olympian, come on over. How do those first invites go? I'm sure it's much easier now.

Yeah, yeah, it's. So just for some context, in the years since we've been on the COVID of the Style section of the New York Times, and there's a TED Talk that I did about it and all that kind of stuff, so we have a bit of clout. But I will be honest, that still doesn't change the fact that I will start a dinner, people. We start off with cocktails, and about 20 minutes in, I'll make the joke. Hey, if any of you need to message your spouses or significant others before we get started so that they know that you have both of your kidneys and you haven't been kidnapped, now would be the time to do it. And inevitably, there's like, one or two people at every dinner. So no matter how much street cred you have, there's always going to be, like, a little bit of concern because you're doing something different, and that's fine. In the early days, I didn't know impressive people. I didn't come from, like, a wildly wealthy family or, you know, we're not some dynasty of a New York, like, family. My parents are immigrants. My generation's the first to go to college. So I started with people that I knew that were really impressive, but that weren't Nobel laureates. And then I kept kind of asking for recommendations and meeting people at events. And over time, it's just a consistency thing. I outlasted all the other kind of social events. And then I started a research team, and I hired people, and I'd pick a topic, I'd say, find me all the Nobel laureates in New York. Find me all the Olympians in New York. Find me people who are New York Times bestsellers. And the list would grow and grow. And we'd invite from there now. Sure, anybody. You could get literally anybody's contact info. You want to reach out to Ashton Kutcher. How hard could it be to find an email address? You just try a bunch of stuff until something works, right? That's not the important part. There are two important parts. One is never get hung up on Ashton Kutcher, like, not being myopic because there's a thousand people just like him. Maybe not just, you know, I don't know. Ashton. Ashton, if you're hearing this, you're a very special human being.

We love you, Ashton Kutcher.

We love you, Ashton Kutcher. Well, she loves you, Ashton Kutcher. I think you're, I'm sure, a wonderful guy. The key, though, is not to get caught up on that, because there's more actors than you can come up with who do investments than you'll ever have time to meet in your life. The key is understanding what are the behaviors or interests of that general group. And so let's say you want to meet all the people in the entertainment industry. I think the entertainment industry is estimated at, like, 400,000 people. Right. There's a very silly kind of fun equation called the prize law. It has to do with academic papers, and it says that if you take the square root of any group of producers, half of the work will be done by them. So if you have 25 producers, five of them, the square root will have done half of all the publications in academia. That means that in Hollywood, it's probably about 630, 40 people that are doing half of the work. And that's why you keep seeing Steven Spielberg on the same list and Jerry Bruckheimer and all these people. And really, it's just all, at this point, Disney anyway. But the point is that that's a very manageable number to come up with. If you can come up with 600 people across the industry, you'll have the top sound editors and actors or whatever it is, and, okay, track them down. Now, we want to just figure out what it is that actually engages these people. And within specific industries, there might be quirks. But in general, when you're at the top of your industry, you're kind of just everybody's after your scheme. Everybody wants your social clout, your time, your expertise, your access, your money. Everybody wants, wants, wants. So I had to figure out what will get past all that. And for that, I realized I need to do something generous so that they're not concerned that I'm after something. And the fact is that from a business perspective, I have no use for a Nobel laureate, an Olympian, an actor. I'm not in the entertainment world. I have no use for a Grammy. Like, I mostly work with big corporations on company culture and sales and marketing and things like that. So most people that meet me through the dinners have zero concern that I'm after something.

Right.

The second is that, and you mentioned this, which is novelty. So, like, they don't need another casino themed fundraiser. They don't need another cup of coffee to meet somebody. What we want is something that stands out, that entices us. That's interesting. Then the other thing is that if you look at the most important people in our culture, if I were to ask you who do they spend most of their time with, who would you guess? I don't mean the ones that are locked at home with their family right now. I mean like pre Covid.

I guess it would be their assistance.

Yeah. Everybody thinks it's other fancy people.

Right.

It's not. And so if you can curate an environment with other high profile people, they will go far out of their way for it. Think about, have you ever heard of like Davos?

A little, but go.

Yeah, Davos is kind of like the World Economic Forum where like world leaders come and corporate heads and it costs like a quarter million dollars for a ticket or something like that. And people are willing to pay it even though it's in a miserable environment. It's in the cold and snow of winter and you stand in slush hoping to bump into like Andrea Merkels and Bill Clinton and Bill Gates. Right. But it's worth it because they've curated it so much. And so if you can curate an environment with other interesting people, people are willing to spend 10 grand to go to Ted because Ted took care of the curation. You could hear those talks online if it was about the ideas. Just view the dead dogs. So I would argue that that's at the base of what people want, that it's this opportunity to meet interesting people that's also novel. A novel experience. Something that's remarkable we're talking about and something that's generous so that they don't have to be worried that you're after anything. Now, I do want to point out, I don't mean generous like giving them stuff, because the kind of experience I'm generous with is letting them cook me dinner or make flowers for me.

Yeah, no, I think. But it is, it's generous with an understanding of who they are and what they're interested in and that you were thoughtful enough to think about something that they would find value in and that you're giving some of that, that time and an opportunity. It's the generosity of spirit, perhaps more than anything else is kind of what I hear, what you're talking about.

You know, it's interesting. There's, there's. I'd also say that with different groups, the generosity is a little bit different. If, let's say you're not yet at that point in your career where you're more of like a community influencer. Right. You have influencer like you're a martial arts master or reverend or something. I would say that you've tasted some success and either what you're curious about is maybe mastery or going up to that next level. And there I'd say generosity of skills, opportunities, maybe access and resources really makes a difference.

Yeah. So my next question on this would be, do you try to curate that it's some sort of homogeny and the people that are there, that they would have something in common to talk about and you give them like a theme of the evening, or do you just sort of pick the most random group of people and put them together and see what happens? You know, how do you do that? I guess pre. I mean, assuming the salons have some sort of a focus to them.

But one of the things that's interesting is that since. Let me answer that in two parts. One is the dinners, the other salons. At the dinners, we want no homogeny. And the reason is that the more homogenous, the more potential competition there is. So if you have two rock star authors, they might be comparing themselves with each other. Now, that tends not to be an issue because people made friends before they knew who people were.

Right.

And so we, as a general rule, try to only have one person per industry, maximum two. So we're not going to have more than two actors or two editors in chief or something like that also, because then they begin to recognize each other. The second is that at the salons we sometimes do themes of the topics that are discussed, but we tend not to because it's just really hard to create themes. Yeah, a lot of conferences create themes like unbound. And then you listen to the talks and they have nothing to do with it because it's really hard to stick to a theme.

But it's good for those people, I think, to have that underlying. They are making connections on things you couldn't have even possibly known that they had in common. Like they both played the oboe in elementary school or something. Right. Like, you couldn't have possibly known. And so you just kind of let it go and see what happens.

So, yeah, I think that what's interesting is that at the dinners, I've never really had this experience because I've never attended one of my dinners as a guest. But at the dinners, they can't talk about their work. And so you end up having the kinds of conversations that you have with your best friends, catch up on vacations and your kids and the embarrassing things they did and remodeling the house and like all these things that when you're not doing your standard spiel, you go to the conversations that are a bit more vulnerable or intimate to your life. And so I think that actually serves to accelerate the experience of trust between people.

Absolutely, yeah. And I didn't mention this before, but I am linking to the episode. I just a couple weeks ago had Stephen, Mr. Covey on the show talking about his book the Speed of Trust, which is all the value of the economics of trust and how it helps with businesses and relationships. So I think it's just such a perfect timing that we're having this conversation just very recently after that one. So really there's so much value that comes with having good trust and relationships.

And things like that.

Did he cover what trust is made out of and what it's and how it actually gets created?

You know, it's in the book, but we didn't super dig in. But so I think if you have some insights on that, it would be great for everybody.

So it's, it's interesting. I kind of broke down that influence is a byproduct of who we're connected to, how much they trust us and the sense of community that we share. Because if you're not connected to someone, you can't influence them. If they don't trust you, then they aren't going to opt in for being influenced. And you may notice that it's compounded by how much of an experience of belonging you have with each other. Researchers in general view trust as being made out of three things. Some people say four, but I stick to three, and those are competence, honesty and benevolence. Now, they're not all equally weighted. So if you screw up one day, I don't say, oh, I can't trust you, you're incompetent. I say, you probably had a bad day, you got your second vaccine shot and you've been exhausted. But if there's a slip up in honesty, we begin to doubt everything the person says or will say moving forward. But there's a weird loophole. And that loophole is if, let's say, the two of us are walking down the street and I say, hey, do you mind if we stop by my friend's house? I just want to pick something up. And you go, sure. And we go to my friend's house, and 40 of your closest friends jump out and scream, surprise. It would be very strange if you started complaining that I lied to you.

Right?

So we see that we actually value benevolence. I had your best interests at heart, more so than honesty, and honesty more so than competence. The weird thing is most companies and people lead with competence rather than benevolence. And so the first thing we really need to show people is that we care about other people. And then, so that answers the question of what trust is kind of like made of, right? But how we accelerate the process of it. Since you can't really buy trust, I can't get you a gift or take you out to dinner, and then you trust me more, you can leverage the IKEA effect. You find a joint activity to work on together. And that's probably because when we're working on something that one of us alone can't complete, we inevitably need each other's help throughout the process. And that will trigger what's called a vulnerability loop. If you hear me say, oh, my God, this is so heavy, can you. And I put out a signal that I'm vulnerable, I'm at a risky situation. If you ignore that or make fun of me, trust will be reduced. I could actually physically injure myself. If you jump out and say, oh, my God, John, here, I'm coming. Now you're acknowledging my vulnerability and matching it. And now we accomplish the task, and suddenly we can trust each other at this higher level. I know I can count on you. And that's how trust is created with these vulnerability loops, by leveraging the IKEA effect. These vulnerability loops happen very quickly. And what's very likely is that each time we complete a loop, we release oxytocin, further bonding us and leading us to connect more deeply. First of all, I think this is amazing because it demonstrates one, we need to really be on the lookout for people sending out vulnerability loop signals. Sometimes people say stuff and then we ignore it. That's really an opportunity for us to match and give people the support they need. The second is it also means that trust does not precede vulnerability. We have to be willing to put ourselves out there if we want to have profound trust. And it means that we should also ask people for more favors because it'll cause them to invest effort, close those loops, and actually care more about us in the process. And so I think it's absolutely just a fascinating misunderstanding because we're literally doing everything backwards. We're trying to buy friendships and leading with competence when we should be asking people to put in effort and leading with benevolence.

Yeah, well, I appreciate, like you're saying, asking for favors on things, which is, I'm confident you have been through some of the same stuff as you're prepping for your book to be coming out. And so when I finished my book, and I've had so many people Nowhere near the 227 dinners worth of 8 or whatever, 12 people a piece or whatever, you know, but that I've interviewed on the show and connected with on social media that I think would be willing to help. But that moment of, hey, do you want to be an early reader of my book and would you be willing to give me an endorsement about it?

Is.

Was the most horribly uncomfortable thing. And also reaching out to be like, do you want to be my forwardist, please? Just excruciating feeling to have to ask for. But I think we're better connected now, you know, because we went through that.

The other thing is that because of essentially loss aversion, because we feel twice as much pain from when something doesn't work out as the pleasure from when it does.

Right.

Then it also seems like a much, much bigger deal than it is when people are like, oh my God, I'm writing my own book right now. I just don't have the time to read somebody else's.

Right?

And we take it so personal and we're like, screw them, I didn't like them anyway.

Right? Yeah.

Or if you don't hear back, you think, like, they hate me, I'm the worst.

And they're just locked in their house with four kids. They haven't seen the light of day in a week. They're barely alive, they don't know how to feed everybody while also being on.

Conference call, zooms and teaching science to a six year old and all of that. Yeah, I know.

I.

Math, right? That's the thing. The Common core math thing is not my jam by any means. So yeah, I know I was having to be reaching out for those in like November, December 2020, asking for like happy holidays from quarantine. Will you please read my book with all the spare time you have. And do me this favor.

Thanks.

So I really want to make sure we've covered a couple things. I had several notes that I wanted to talk with you about from the book and from your work dinner. Work. Yeah, I don't know, let's go with it.

Let's call them. Terrible.

Yeah. From the burnt Brussels sprouts evenings or whatever you got going on there.

And the food is just not impressive.

Well, that's okay.

You know, you get to. So you have a couple of sections within the book I think we already covered. We talked about the power of invitation. You talked. I think you touched on connecting with people, but you have a section here that's talking about how to connect with anyone. Is there a simple tip that you would have for people on that?

Most basic one is that we're generally told terrible advice, which is go out there and network. And we hate networking. We will do just about anything to avoid it. Like, nobody really has ever said, oh my God, I love networking. I can't wait to do it right now. And if they did, then they're probably in a multi level marketing scheme and get away from them. Problem is that networking evokes feelings of being dirty, mostly because it's not a natural way for people to connect. And what we want to look at instead is how do we make friends? Because that's really natural for us. It might be a little uncomfortable in the sense that, like, our muscles have atrophied as we've been locked in our homes for so long, but it's something we enjoy. If I ask you, would you like to network people like, oh, I asked you, do you want to make some friends with interesting people? You're like, absolutely. Now if you're introverted, that number might be smaller, but you still want friends, right? And so if that's the case, we want to look at what actually causes people to become friends. And it's usually shared interests or shared connections. And so my biggest recommendation is actually to participate in joint activities that you actually enjoy. That might be a soccer club or a hiking group, it might be an arts and crafts class. But whatever it is, it should be something that requires joint effort and possesses things that you actually value, because otherwise you're not going to want to leave your home to participate. Even when we run Zoom events for our community, we spend just as much time in small breakout rooms playing games as we do in main session spaces, hearing talks, because people really want to connect over activities and it works really well.

Yeah, that's great. I love that. I'm reminded of for a while when we were doing interviews to work for our team when I was in corporate land, we used to have all of our interviewees would play Jenga with us, that we would have the marketing team all play a game of Jenga. And so you get to see how someone is. You kind of like, let your guard down in an interview if you're playing a game like that. And so you can see the real personality of people and get to connect on a better, like a deeper level and have some fun together.

So if you want a pro tip for interviews. This is so stupid. There's this thing called the pratfall effect, which is why in, like, romantic comedies, everybody notices that, like, the male lead or female lead is falling all over themselves and they're kind of goofy.

Right.

It turns out that we like them because of that, not despite it. It shows kind of a bit of vulnerability. Right. So researchers had people go into job interviews and some of them spilled coffee on themselves and like dropped papers or something like that. And those people were rated higher mostly because they're more human.

Right.

Assuming that you, like, kind of laugh it off versus being the trying to hide that it happened. Yeah.

When you get really self conscious and like, awkward and I don't know if it helps that much, I'd have to look back at the paper. But I think you're probably right.

I love it. I feel like we should rename it the Chris Pratt Fall Effect. Right.

Because.

I know we talked about Marvel or the Disney.

It has to be from his, like.

Parks and Recs and rec. But like, I feel like a Star Lord even. He's pretty goofy. He's.

Oh yeah, he is. But he also led to, like, Thanos. I mean, this is a longer conversation.

We can talk. Marvel Universe another. Yeah, that was one of our first things we did in quarantine was that we sat and watched all those Marvel movies with the kids and it's like 24 movies or. Yeah, that's who's counting. Yeah. And so you start with. But you watch them in the order, like, chronologically of what the story is. So we start with Captain Marvel.

No, Captain America.

Captain America, then Captain Marvel. Right. And then you go through this way through the story instead of where, you know, Captain Marvel comes out at the end. Totally great. The story is. So you realize all that interconnectedness of what's happening. I've done an episode on the behavioral economics of Disney. I feel like Marvel needs its own thing coming up soon. But so as we are closing out. I think, as we've already said, I could talk to you for days and days, but I know that I don't get to. So what would be a tip? I know you have chapters in the book that are about creating this for business success and for good online communities. If you were to pick kind of a general tip around one or both.

Of those, what would you suggest for people?

I think the most important, regardless of what it is, is that relationships will really define the quality of your life. It's just the research keeps backing it, whether it's company culture and feeling like you belong at your office, or it's longevity and finding healthy people to exercise with or play games with, whatever it is. And so the key is to be willing to be a little bit vulnerable. And it's either vulnerable with an invitation like, hey, do you want to go take a walk? Or vulnerable in accepting. Because if you're shy or you're really introverted, it might seem a little uncomfortable, but that's where the magic happens. And so my biggest recommendation is just go out there and do something. Don't wait. Text a friend, tell them to bring another friend and meet somebody new, whatever it is. I have a friend, Daniel Laken, super successful television producer. I think he's. Was it 13 time Emmy loser or something ridiculous like that? He's the biggest loser I know. And he started a group called Urban Sherpas, lowercase s. And what they do is literally just take a walk, but they'll pick. Okay, today we're going to walk three bridges in New York and it takes like a couple hours and people just walk together and they talk as they walk and they jump from person to person, have conversations. It's delightful. Right. It doesn't need to cost any money. It doesn't need to be sophisticated. You can literally pick the path or whatever activity is the morning of. The key is just reach out because otherwise you're not going to expand your social circle and you're not going to be able to create an impact.

Yeah. And yeah, there are just amazing people out there. If we can get over that status quo bias, go have a conversation with somebody. Do a little something different today. It can make a big difference.

You also notice that when you have an activity as the social catalyst, then it feels significantly less awkward than if you're sitting across from somebody interviewing them. Yeah. And that's the point that the activity allows for being quiet around each other. If you have to chop food at a dinner or if you. Whatever. Painting. A painting, you can be engrossed in that and then occasionally say something.

Yeah, no, I love it. Wonderful tips. I know everyone here is going to want to check out. You're invited. Which of course we have a link to your book. You're invited in the show notes and so what's the best way to to follow you and hear what you got going on in the world?

So I'm super easy to get a hold of. I'm John Levy. T L B. So that's J O N L E V Y as in yellow. T like Thomas, I like Lion. Be like boy. I'm not at Instagram Clubhouse, Facebook, Twitter. My website is johnlevytlb.com and if you want to know more about the book, the book is you're invited. So Y o u r e invited.info and I've actually put up a bunch of games for people to play if they want to get to know people over Zoom and digital platforms. So it's completely free. It's for people to enjoy. I just really care that people come together.

Fun.

I love it. Well, I'm going to go play some games and meet some people. And of course I'm so excited for everyone to get their copies of youf're Invited and start having those deeper, better connections across the world.

And also all of you, don't forget to pick up a copy of her new book because it's coming out the same day. Yes, enough of you order both of our books. They'll be recommended with each other and packaged. So come on, get to it.

Right?

Help me help you help them help us help ongoing bundle bundles. Yes. And if you need to come up with something weird to go in tandem with our buying, I feel like we could come up with something, maybe something that's Guardians of the Galaxy related like a Mjolnir by Mjolnir or some sort of Funko Pop or something of Guardians.

Fun little fact about me. I was planning on buying a Mjolnir and bolting it to my living room floor so that nobody could ever pull it.

And then when they're all there for dinners, you get to see who tries to pick it up. Yeah, I guess for the non Marvel world it's like the Excalibur Effect or something, right?

Yes, exactly. It would be like if I inserted a sword into my cement, leave it.

So no one could get it. I love it. I think you should do that too. But other than perhaps you don't want to bolt something to the floor. But I like it.

Totally do.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you again, John Levy for joining me today. And we'll have all those links in in the show notes and everyone else you are invited to get a copy of both what your customer wants and can't tell you. And you're invited.

So what got your brain buzzing as you learned about trust and human connection with John today? For me, I love the idea of how simple it can be to connect with people on a deeper level. If you don't worry about the surface level stuff like our careers, job titles and accomplishments, when those things are off limits, it's amazing the connections that can be made, the deep conversations, the fast friendships, the laughs and genuine enjoyment. It's awesome that John has brought this ability for stars and athletes who may not get a lot of anonymity. I love that he has given this gift to so many. But there's also great insight in this for the rest of us. How often do you go to the conference or networking event or show up on social media with an agenda looking for titles, for budgets for what you can get from that other person? We're wired to do this in many ways, but it doesn't have to be that way. And what I found over the years, and would guess John has as well, is that when you connect with people on a more human level, they remember you and things tend to go even better than they might have if you just saw that person as a number, as someone to get something out of in your next interaction, take a real deep, genuine interest in the other person, even if it's just on social media. What makes them tick? What do you have in common? I've linked to my conversation with Nick Epley in the show Notes on the Science of Connection with Other Humans. It came out long after this episode with John first aired and has some great insight into ways you can reframe your questions to get to a deeper level easily.

You know, if you're not having a dinner party that's already kind of pre planned and you can do this even.

With strangers you meet on the train. As Nick explains in one of his examples in that episode, you're also going to find my conversation with Priscilla McKinney about anthropology and how it applies to marketing and behavioral economics. And one reason for that is because Priscilla is the reason I refreshed this conversation with John today. She is back in the next episode of the Brainy Business podcast to talk about her new book. Collaboration is the New Competition. It's such a fun conversation. I love Priscilla and know you will too as you'll hear our friendship started over LinkedIn and has grown over the years. One of my favorite talks she does is on treating LinkedIn like a cocktail party, which reminded me a lot of John and his book, so it was a perfect time to refresh that conversation. If you've enjoyed this episode, you definitely don't want to miss that one with Priscilla on Friday. So definitely take a moment to subscribe to the Brainy Business podcast if you haven't already. And in the meantime, check out her first episode, which is waiting for you in the show notes. In those, you're going to find links to related past episodes, books like you're Invited and Collaboration is the New Competition. A timestamped summary of the episode, and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and atthe brainy business.com 348. And just like that, episode 348 on you're invited with John Levy is done. Join me next time for a brand new episode with Priscilla McKinney discussing her new book, Collaboration is the New Competition.

It's going to be a lot of fun.

You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me. And remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness. Com.