The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #351 - Jon Levy 

TRANSCRIPT

Jon Levy
Your job when you're part of a team isn't to love everything, you might need to speak up when you don't want to speak up, but your ideas might be critical and bring up a problem or a solution that we need to discuss. When there's a sense of a common mission, common goal, that you're heading in the same direction, it very much enforces culture, that you're in it together.

And human beings survived as a species and were rewarded as a species for collaboration.

Melanie Avalon
Welcome to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast where we meet the world's top experts to explore the secrets of health, mindset, longevity, and so much more. Are you ready to take charge of your existence and biohack your life? This show is for you. Please keep in mind we're not dispensing medical advice and are not responsible for any outcomes you may experience from implementing the tactics lying here in. So friends, are you ready to join me? Let's do this.

Welcome back to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast. Oh my goodness, friends. I am just smiling thinking about today's episode and I think you guys are going to love it. It is with my dear friend, John Levy, who never fails to completely fascinate me.

Not only is he a behavioral scientist, he is also a multi-best selling author and the founder of the influencers dinner. I've known him for years and he never fails to make me smile or blow my mind. I had the best time reading his book, Team Intelligence, how brilliant leaders unlock collective genius and asking John all of my questions today. Get excited because we touch on so many topics. You're going to learn what actually makes a brilliant leader. And yes, it's probably not what you think. The role of women when it comes to success, problems with too much talent on a team, the myth of the alpha male, how many social connections you can actually have and how to maintain them, how to deal with narcissists, how to find your super skills, and so much more. The show notes for today's episode will be at Melanie Avalon.com slash team intelligence. Those show notes will have a full transcript as well as links to everything that we talked about. So definitely check that out. I can't wait to hear what you guys think. Definitely let me know in my Facebook group, I have biohackers intermittent fasting plus real foods plus life. Comment something you learned or something that resonated with you on the pinned post to enter to win something that I love. And then check out my Instagram finally Friday announcement post. And again, comments there to enter to win something that I love. All right. I think that's all the things without further ado, please enjoy this incredible conversation with my dear friend, John Liebe.

Hi friends. Welcome back to the show. I am just giddy with excitement about the conversation I'm about to have. It is with one of my dear, dear friends who, this is a guest that when I first had him on the show, his book at the time that I had him on for, You're Invited, completely blew my mind. And it was one of those things where going into it, I was so excited to interview him and I didn't know that we would become such lovely friends. And I just absolutely adore what he's doing. And so when John Liebe, who I'm here with today, said that he had a new book out called Team Intelligence, How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Collective Genius, I just knew that I immediately had to have him on the show or as soon as possible once I read the book.

Melanie Avalon
And friends, this book is absolutely mind blowing. So basically, what it talks about, which we will talk all about on today's show, is what actually leads to great leaders, great companies, great teams, because you would think there would be some sort of formula for success there, but is there? I don't know. We're going to talk about that.

And we'll talk about obviously the role of intelligence and all of that and how if intelligence is such a key to this, then why does a big group of people who are intelligent not necessarily be the answer? So we'll talk about that. And then there's all this just crazy mind blowing stuff about what led to the concept of a singular leader, the problems with this alpha male concept, the shocking history of the MBA, stuff on personality tests and company culture. And it is just so fascinating. This is one of those books because I read a lot of books for this show. This is one of those books that I was just so happy to read because every sentence is just fascinating.

So John, thank you so much for being here. Oh, and congrats because it was four weeks on the bestseller list. Yes.

Jon Levy
Yes, it was. So first of all, thanks for having me on. I was beyond excited that I got to be back here. I think you know I love our conversations and look for any excuse to hang out with you. So this is a treat.

Yeah, team intelligence. I'm super proud of this book. It spent four weeks on the national bestseller list. It also got a star review from both Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. It's not when those things were like five stars exist. It's like you either get a star you don't. So it's my first book that like got attention as I guess by the people who are super smart and do book reviews.

Melanie Avalon
Well, that is really important. I wonder if they evaluated their own situation like at their jobs after reading the book.

Jon Levy
Oh, that's so funny. So I'm not at liberty to discuss.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, okay. No comment.

No comment. One of my memories about this actually is when I first saw the cover and I was like, oh, it's fireflies and you're like, it's not fireflies. Are you sure it's not fireflies on the cover?

Jon Levy
Yeah, it's definitely Firefox.

Melanie Avalon
Metaphor. Yes. Okay. It is a firefly metaphor

Jon Levy
Yeah, the idea was that they figured out how to get out of the jar. So for those of you who don't see the book, it looks like there's a jar and these glowing firefly kind of happy beings that look like they've just escaped from it.

And there as a group escaping. And the title of the book is team intelligence, how brilliant leaders unlock collective genius.

Melanie Avalon
and it is brilliant. And I have so many questions. First of all, a guessing game. Do you want to guess what my favorite fun fact was from the entire book?

Jon Levy
Was it that Darth Vader was a terrible boss?

Melanie Avalon
I did like that section because it took me a second to catch on what you were doing. John, like, describes this whole, like, leadership situation and it's Star Wars in the end.

Like, you don't say it's Star Wars at the beginning when you're describing it.

Jon Levy
Oh, definitely not. I'm discussing some of the worst bosses in history.

And I talk about one that terrified his employees so much that when they were building a base, they clearly were too scared to tell him there was a design flaw and then rebel forces blew it up. And it was the story of Star Wars.

Melanie Avalon
When I was reading it, I was like, wait, is this NASA? Like what happened? And yeah, that no, that's not it because that was not a disappointment. But where's the Star Trek analogy?

Jon Levy
We had a Star Trek analogy.

Melanie Avalon
I don't know if there's not, that's why I'm saying, that's why I'm saying the Star Wars can't be the answer because I can give you a hint, it has to do with me, no, it has to do with them. That will give it away.

Half of the population.

Jon Levy
Oh, yes, for your listeners. I spent basically years trying to understand what makes great leaders and great teams. And so it turns out that those things are kind of separate from each other.

After September 11, a group of people did a review of what happened. And they discovered that the CIA actually knew half of the entire plan. And the FBI basically knew the other half. The two were so bad at working together that they had the largest failure in American intelligence history. And the Twin Towers came down and all the people died. And so in the review of it, it became clear that we need to research what actually makes teams smart, like what allows them to solve problems quickly, because we couldn't afford another failure like that. And so there's this amazing researcher by the name of Anita Williams-Woolley. And she worked with a bunch of different research groups to figure this out. But it turns out that none of the things that we traditionally thought actually predict if a team will do well. It doesn't matter the IQ of the smartest person on the team. It doesn't matter the average IQ of the team members. It doesn't really matter how much they like each other. The biggest predictor was actually adding Melanie to the team did more than adding me. It is the number of women on the team. The more women, the better the team did.

Melanie Avalon
Isn't this mind blowing? Except it's at least two women, right? There has to be at least two.

Jon Levy
So very insightful. Here's what we, what I want to do, which is it's really common for us to take what's easy to see and just assume that that's what's going on rather than considering what's really useful. So why is it the number of women and why does it, as you pointed out, start it too and continues getting higher, but it can't be the entire group? And the answer is a few things.

First of all, there tends to be the need when women are in groups to have what's called the ally effect, which is that when you're the only one of a marginalized group, then it's hard to speak up. When you have two or more, then you have a cohort. So it really, there is a byproduct of kind of guys just being terrible at, at including women, frankly. And when there's one guy on the team, then it ends up being enough. The second factor is that it actually isn't because you're women. It's because women test higher on emotional intelligence. When you look at how groups actually work, you could be, let's say a tennis player and have it be pure talent. Like that's your super skills. You're like awesome at it. You don't need anybody else and you don't need to rely on them. But when you go from a single person activity where let's say IQ or talent matter to a group activity, then now you're, let's say basketball, you're now mostly like passing the ball rather than shooting. And so the ability to coordinate becomes more important than the ability to really just shoot that shot. And as a byproduct, what happens is that the teams that have more emotional intelligence have a better chance of coordination because then they know when they can push on a topic and when they shouldn't, how to coordinate, how to map the unwritten rules of an organization, and so on. The ability to call on somebody when you know they're scared to speak up, but they have something important to share. And that's why it's people can point to women, although there are plenty of men with really high emotional intelligence.

Melanie Avalon
This is so, so interesting. It's interesting, also, I interviewed Candy Wiens. She has a book called Burnout Immunity, and she was trying to find the singular thing that led to burnout or that made people immune to being burned out, and it was high emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence seems to be the bee's knees, as it were.

Does the emotional intelligence of a person extend to the team automatically? What's the difference between an individual intelligence, either just what we think of normally, or emotional intelligence, and then the team? How do you make it stick to the team?

Jon Levy
Yeah, so that's a really interesting question that the researchers had to tackle. So what does it mean when I say, oh, Melanie, she's really smart or intelligent? It means that in most situations, if you have a problem in front of you, you'll be able to figure out a solution quickly. The faster you figure out that solution, the more we generally call you intelligent. And that's how we evaluate teams.

We don't say, oh, that team has 14 Nobel laureates, thereby they're probably going to solve problems quickly. No, we ask the question, does the team actually solve those problems quickly? And if so, what led to that? And so if you're a leader on a team, what you really care about is the speed that you get things done. And so now we can begin to ask what actually causes that? What makes that team solve problems quickly? And it turns out that it's an unexpected series of characteristics. And there's this kind of fun thing. Do you remember I talked about the too much talent problem in the book?

Melanie Avalon
Yes.

Jon Levy
Yeah, so in and this is kind of like a weird thing that as a listener, you should see if you can figure this out. It turns out that in basketball and in soccer, when you cross about the 50% mark of top talent, the team scores less, you actually do worse. Now this exists in basketball and soccer, but not in baseball. There's no upper max. I'm just going to give you a second to try and think through why that might be the case.

The answer has to do with a group of chickens from the 1970s and 80s. Do you remember the story?

Melanie Avalon
I do, the beaks.

Jon Levy
Yes, the beaks. How awful is that?

To answer this question, you have to understand that in the 70s, there was this egg called the decalb XL. It was a chicken, actually. That was like the Ferrari of chickens. It could outlay any chicken out there. It was like just the best egg laying chicken. The problem was that it had been bred for so many years to lay eggs for pure productivity that it became hyper competitive and it would actually peck the other chickens around it to death.

Melanie Avalon
fairly violent.

Jon Levy
Yeah, yeah. Have you ever had a corporate job?

Melanie Avalon
I had like an internship at film production companies. Does that count?

Jon Levy
actually, maybe. The film industry is a lot like that, which is that people keep competing and competing to get to the top. And at a certain point, the only way you can ensure that you're at the top is by making sure that everybody else is in the bottom. So when we cause people to continuously compete at every level, then it breeds selfishness. Now, an evolutionary biologist named William Muir said, this is awful. We need to stop this.

And so what he did was he took a bunch of crossbred chickens, created 200 teams of them, and then just weighed how many eggs they laid, and found the teams that produced the most eggs as a group and re-bred them and re-bred them for six generations. And what he found was that he was able to create what he called the KGB, kinder and gentler birds. And what was amazing about them was that as a team, they laid a ton of eggs, even though no one chicken, when you pulled them out, was remarkable in any way. And when he compared these KGBs, these teams, to groups of super chickens in a head-to-head competition after one year, the KGB birds demolished the super chickens, mostly because almost none of them were still alive. At the end, they'd all pecked each other to death.

And herein we learn the answer, which is that when you continuously cause people to compete, it comes at the cost of the team. And when you get to the level of elite sports, when you bring more and more top talent, nobody wants to share the ball. And selfishness becomes a major issue.

But in baseball, there's no way to be selfish. And so the researchers discovered that there is no upper max to talent when you have no interdependence, meaning that when my work doesn't depend on your work, when we can work completely independently of each other, then there's no upper max for talent. But the moment you actually have to function as a team, there is a too much talent problem. And we have to learn to get people to operate together. And that's more important than having pure talent.

Melanie Avalon
So, and this is perfect timing because, well, not really by the time this comes out, but my episode this week, like live right now is with a major league baseball player, Johnny Damon. Do you know him? I feel like you know everybody.

Jon Levy
Oh no, I've never, I've hosted a lot of people at my secret dining experience, but not many guests.

Melanie Avalon
You should have him. He's like a legend in the, like, New York Yankees Red Sox world.

Jon Levy
Oh, wow. I'm sold. If you like somebody, I'm like going to fall in love with them.

Melanie Avalon
Perfect, I had a question. Okay, so applying that practically to different types of jobs.

And I know you were mentioning corporate situations where people are competing to get to the top, and like my entrepreneur career situation, would that mean that when I'm hiring people to do all a cart related tasks for my job, like hiring a designer to design something or hiring somebody where they're just doing the job, completing it, but they don't interact with the rest of my personal team, that it's important for them to be like super high talent. But then when it comes to team members that are regularly interacting, then that's less important, the talent, or you don't want everybody to be super talented.

Jon Levy
It's not about the talent. It's about the selfishness. So in our society, that tends to go hand in hand.

Because the way that you become a top basketball player is that when you're young, you have some slight advantage and then you get put on a specialty team and you kind of say goodbye to your other friends. And then you compete even against the people in your own team to get the attention of the local high schools and then the universities. And then no matter what, at every level, you have to be better than everybody else to make it to that next level. And even when you are on a basketball team in the NBA, then you still want to be the person that scores the points and gets the rebounds and all that. Because there's only one stat in basketball that predicts a player's salary. And that's the number of points they score.

Melanie Avalon
Really? Wait, really? I didn't know that.

Jon Levy
So in every player in the NBA is incentivized to be selfish.

Melanie Avalon
Whoa. Wait, so if they, if they had like a, if they were creating a basketball team, and then they created a, like a quiz, I know, but we can talk about personality tests, but like a quiz that filtered out levels of selfishness, and then they got the most talented from like the non-selfish pool of people, would that be the exception?

Then you could have like a all-talented team?

Jon Levy
So actually, this is really interesting that you asked this. When researchers started looking at this question of, are there players that don't score a lot but have a huge impact on the team, they found something interesting. It works like this. Let's say you score a ton, put up a lot of points, and you've got a really great attitude that makes the team function better. You get paid a ton of money. If you score a lot of points but you have a terrible attitude that brings everybody down, in the NBA, you earn a ton of money. No difference.

But what they found, and these are researchers from Brigham Young, is that there's an entire group of players who don't score much, but everybody else improves. Now, we know about this from stores. If I put my top cashier in front of everybody, everybody else works faster because they set the pace. In basketball, it turns out there are people that cause everybody else to perform better. As a byproduct, it multiplies their results. We call them glue players. When I say multiply their results, I mean by a factor of 1.6. So if you look, these players tend to have three major characteristics. One is high emotional intelligence because to understand how to maneuver all these big personalities, you've got to know when to push and when not to, how to build their trust, how to connect the team. The second is, they are proactive. They take action nobody even thought to take. So there's this player in the, was in the NBA, two-time NBA champion. His name is Shane Batier. Never really scored. He was after, later in his career, he was known as the no stats all-star. And he would memorize the other opposing team stats, knowing exactly where to push somebody when you were playing so that they would miss the shot. Because maybe they have a 3% reduced chance of scoring in the left corner versus the right corner. So he would push them to the left so that they would have a worse shot. Or he would know which players he needs to block from a rebound so that his own teammates could get the rebound. So he wouldn't get any stats out of it, but his team would perform better. And then the third thing is he would put the team above himself to an extreme degree. He's one of the only players in the NBA history to say stuff like, take me out coach. So that another player who's better suited could defend or play or shoot or whatever it was. And that's pretty amazing. And these combinations of characteristics mean that if you pair him with somebody like LeBron James, LeBron plays significantly better. The secret is actually pairing talent with glue players.

And in fact, what happened was when they did this, the Miami Heat, which included LeBron James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh, these three legends of basketball ended up winning two back-to-back championships.

Melanie Avalon
Didn't you say that he also would memorize like personal facts about the players and whisper things in their ear?

Jon Levy
So in the book, I tell a lot of jokes.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, is that a joke? Oh, I believe that John. I was like, that's why I literally took a note. I was like, is that allowed?

Jon Levy
I jokingly said he would memorize the opposing player's third grade school teacher's name.

Melanie Avalon
I really believe.

Jon Levy
that. So that when he was on the court, he could tell a player that like, Ms. Somerset thinks you're a loser and should have never been, you know, graduated, you stink.

But then I followed it up with, okay, maybe that didn't happen, but you couldn't prove that. So let's just pretend that it did.

Melanie Avalon
That's so funny. Does that type of player, like, did he get paid?

Jon Levy
No, he did not. I mean, they all make great money, but he didn't make any numbers close to LeBron.

Here's what's interesting about him. In the NBA, the way that you evaluate kind of a player's positive effect is a stat called the plus minus, which is with them on the court, how many additional points do you expect to score? So if with the top five players in the NBA, you get like a plus eight to a plus 12. So that's eight to 12 additional points on your team. Batier, who would never really score, wouldn't get many rebounds or anything like that. The team would have at his peak a plus six, which would put him almost in the category of a superstar, but he would almost never actually score. And that's amazing that you can have such an impact when designing a team with somebody who doesn't have any meaningful statistics.

Melanie Avalon
Wow. Yeah, that was one of the just comments in general that I had never thought about but appreciated from the book was you were talking about statistics in general and how they hide these things.

So like when we just look at blanket statistics on anything, we don't see like these really subtle nuances.

Jon Levy
There's a great quote by a statistician that says, statistics are like bikinis. What they hide is essential and what they show is suggestive. So you can make stats show a lot of stuff or hint at things. But we always need to get back to not what's easy to see, but what's useful.

What's easy to see is the person who scores a lot. But you could be scoring a lot and costing the team points. You could just be super selfish. Meanwhile, you could be scoring very little, but multiplying the team's results and leading to wins.

Melanie Avalon
And how much of this translates, so looking at sports teams, how much of that translates to corporate culture?

Jon Levy
I think that's a great question. I think the difficulty is that it's really hard to measure corporate culture because the results aren't as clear cut.

Like did your team win or lose because it's good or bad or did your company go under because the pandemic hit? In basketball, it's what's called a finite game. There's a clear beginning and end and there's a clear measurement system of success. And so we can get much better stats from sports. So I'm a believer that sports is a great place to learn things from, but it doesn't deal with the realities of actual business life. So I think that when we look at the corporate world, what we'll be able to do with all these new AI technologies is actually to have an AI assistant that constantly running, reviewing your meetings in real time. So if we were in a meeting right now, what would happen was it would say, hey, John, you've been speaking a lot. Maybe you should give somebody else the floor.

Melanie Avalon
Whoa. Would that impede though on the team's psychological safety?

Jon Levy
No, it increases.

Melanie Avalon
Really, okay.

Jon Levy
Because if, let's say, we talked about how high emotional intelligence kind of is this critical factor, you clearly have emotional intelligence. But let's just say, for example, you didn't, okay?

And you're leading this big team and you're running a meeting. And you cannot, for the life of you, realize that the look on people's faces is saying, this is not going well. It would be super helpful to have software running in your meeting, like a Microsoft Teams call or Zoom call or something that lets you know, hey, you're losing the crowd. Or it seems that Shana has something to share, but she hasn't had a moment. Maybe give her the floor. And now I've taken you from an emotional intelligence level of a three to a nine without any additional training.

Melanie Avalon
So it would be working with the person leading the meeting, not, I mean, it's looking at everybody. The reason I was wondering if it would affect the psychological safety is maybe some people don't want to talk. And then if it's like this person not talking, but then they don't want to talk.

Jon Levy
But them wanting to talk or not is not the relevant factor. What it comes down to is it is everybody's role on a team to make the team as smart as possible.

Now, some people contribute that with points like LeBron did, and some people provide other things like Shane Batier did. Your job when you're part of a team isn't to love everything. You might need to speak up when you don't want to speak up, but your ideas might be critical and bring up a problem or a solution that we need to discuss.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, I'm having flashbacks to high school.

Jon Levy
by being called on.

Melanie Avalon
Mm-hmm, yeah.

Jon Levy
So realize, though, that there's a difference between being in high school and being in a meeting.

Melanie Avalon
Slightly.

Jon Levy
in the sense that when you're in high school, you're actively trying to learn something or should be, right? When you're in a meeting, hopefully, you're part of the team because you possess skills, knowledge, resources, mental models, experience, that is a useful contribution.

If I bring you in as like a health expert into a meeting, I should be able to call on you for your expertise. Now you might say, hey, I don't have the information I need, but that's different than not being able to do a math problem at the front of the room.

Melanie Avalon
And to that point with the skills, there's a whole section on, on skills. One of the sentences that stuck with me was something about how when it comes to leaders, like there's no minimum amount of competence required, which is a little bit discerning or just discerning.

Jon Levy
Yeah. So when we actually ask the question, what really defines a leader? Every organization and consultancy or MBA program says that there are these essential skills that every leader has to have. The ability to create psychological safety, build consensus, negotiate, have a vision, like all this kind of stuff. And when you actually look at these lists, they're ridiculous.

If what was required of a leader was having all these things, we would never have a single leader. And my favorite example is Elon Musk. And the reason is that dude does not create psychological safety or consensus, wildly effective, but does not have many of the characteristics that we would consider quote unquote essential to a great leader. Neither did Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or so on and so forth. And they all built huge organizations that were wildly effective. And so what we need to accept is that there are no essential characteristics for a leader except one. And it is a really stupid Melanie. I mean really stupid. It is that they have followers by definition.

Melanie Avalon
Mic drop, yeah.

Jon Levy
Yeah, it's just idiotic. Now we have to ask, why do we follow? This took us a long time to figure out, to be honest.

It works like this. Do you remember when you were in high school on Sunday at 6pm, the Sunday Scaries?

Melanie Avalon
Yes.

Jon Levy
Yeah, they were awful. But on Friday at 1 p.m., when you were in class, how did you feel?

Melanie Avalon
Very excited.

Jon Levy
Yeah. And that doesn't make sense because you're locked in class and you're excited, you're home and you're free, but you're upset.

And why is that? Because human beings actually don't relate to the present. They relate to the future that they believe they have. That's a good one. And so if you feel that your future is exciting, you are excited in the moment. What's interesting is that the reason we actually follow someone is that when we interact with them, we have an emotional response that causes us to feel that there will be a new and better future. You do not need to like them. You do not need to want to hang out with them. You just have to have that emotional response. The reason that people listen to your podcast is that in every episode, they gain knowledge and resources that give them a new potential future, whether that's with their health, their career, whatever it is. And that's why people follow. That's the defining characteristic of leadership. Now, I do want to say a little caveat here. It doesn't mean people will be effective. You could have just a bunch of idiots following a moron. It just answers the question, what gets the crew together for the heist? What actually lets the crew get away with the heist is this research on team intelligence.

Melanie Avalon
Wow. This explains why I, okay, this is just a tiny bit of a rabbit hole tangent. For me, it's very, very, I'm a big planner and it's very important that I plan out like all, well, obviously like my work and shows and stuff, but like going to theater, I have to have things planned all the time because I need to be anticipating something always. Like what is the next exciting thing I'm going to? And that like keeps me going.

And that's why I can't understand. So people who like don't plan, I'm like, how do they anticipate or maybe they anticipate the freedom of not having a plan and just showing up to stuff.

Jon Levy
So I think what you're describing is a combination of kind of two things. One is you probably have a collection of super skills that are really useful for how you maneuver through life. And what we found was that what actually gets us to follow somebody is not being well-rounded, but rather that they have these super skills that are so profoundly strong that when people interact with them, we go, wow, with that person in charge, I don't need to worry about that thing. So in the Elon Musk example that we talked about, he's not well-rounded. But he is incredible at thinking at scale, and he moves faster than anyone in our society. And as a byproduct, when you interact with those skills, you might not say, oh, I like that guy. But you will say, huh, he's going to get that done, I'll invest, or I'd join that company. That's why we actually follow.

It's the person's super skills. So Melanie, I think you have a collection of really unique super skills. And so do your listeners. The key is kind of just to figure out what those are so you can lean into them. In your case, probably part of it is being really organized. The second thing that you're talking about is exactly that, that element of having a new future that gets you excited. So I often think that everybody should have their next two vacations planned. And the reason is, that way, the moment the vacation that you're on is done, you still have something to look forward

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, you don't get the sadness of the vacation ending because you have the next one coming.

Jon Levy
Yeah, you're like, oh man, I've got to get to work. But guys, in eight weeks, we're off to wherever. And so it doesn't feel like it's all over. It just feels like there's the next thing to look forward to.

And looking forward to it is often even better than the vacation. The anticipation of going to see that theater show with your friend and getting to hang out with them, you get to have that for a long time. Much longer than actually going to the theater.

Melanie Avalon
Yes. We were talking before this about Disney. Words cannot describe, A, the amount of joy and excitement and anticipation I would have going to Disney World like in high school and middle school, but the sadness like when it was coming to an end was a feel like I can viscerally feel that feeling in me right now.

And I've had, I've had realizations and epiphanies about my life now. I'm like, I don't have that anymore. I'm so grateful. Like I don't, I never have that sadness of something ending because there's so many things coming. So yeah, keeps me going.

Jon Levy
One of the benefits you have is by having a show that records so frequently, is you always have that next conversation. And so you have something to look forward to that will help you grow and develop. Most people, I guess some people get that from listening to podcasts, but most people don't have an active social experience of development after they leave college, if they went to college.

Melanie Avalon
Hmm, like constantly meeting new people and exploring ideas. Oh, okay with people specifically

Jon Levy
Yeah, yeah. I want you to think about this. There's this funny thing that was kind of popular called like Baby Einstein. Do you remember this?

Melanie Avalon
Oh, that, that meat, yeah, the meat.

Jon Levy
meme? Oh, no, it's just like an actual recordings of stuff that were supposed to make your child smarter like listening to Beethoven or stuff like that.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I remember listening to Mozart as a baby thing.

Jon Levy
Yeah. And people also try to play like recordings in other languages to help their kid learn it. But it turns out that children don't learn anything just by listening to recordings.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, they have to interact.

Jon Levy
Yeah. Because we learn through social cues and interactions. And so how do you know what a chair is unless you're in 20 different scenarios where mom or dad or person said chair, right? And most learning is actually social.

Like, can you learn, sit at home and learn to code? Sure. There's certain things that might lend itself to that. But when you come up against a problem, if you want to solve it quickly, what do you do? You call somebody, or I guess nowadays you might ask chat GPT, and they'll solve it for you. But in terms of like meaningful learning, there's a process of attempt and failure and coaching and support. And it's a fundamentally social experience. And so I think that there's a healthy component where we need to be interacting with other people in order to develop.

Melanie Avalon
And I guess you get that too with, or I'm assuming you definitely get that with your job, which, wait, we didn't even, did I mention yet about your dinners?

Jon Levy
I mentioned that I run dinners.

Melanie Avalon
Yes, so John has these incredible dinners, which I promise I will go to one someday.

Jon Levy
Promise with promises. I've known you for five years now.

Melanie Avalon
Really? Yes.

I will, I will. The point is that he has these dinners where he invites people of certain levels of acclaim in whatever sphere they're in. So, you know, Olympians, celebrities, executives, all the different things. And, but people do not introduce themselves. So I guess, I guess really unless they're like a celebrity that you would recognize, they don't necessarily know who everybody is. And then they cook a dinner.

Jon Levy
even celebrities that you would recognize out of context people don't.

Melanie Avalon
Really? Oh, that is fascinating. Really? Oh, that's interesting. Wow. So, and then these people, they cook a dinner together, right?

Jon Levy
Yes, they produce some of the worst food you'll ever eat. It's 12 people generally. We cook a mediocre meal. And when we sit down to eat, and it's all anonymous, you know people's first names, and that's it.

And then when we sit down to eat, we play a game to figure out what people do. And you find out that it's everybody from the Academy Award winning writer of Little Miss Sunshine and Toy Story 3 and the Hunger Games and all that, all the way to the, you know, 10-time Olympic medalist in swimming or the guy who won a Grammy for barking on who let the dogs out. I've hosted about 4,000 people.

Melanie Avalon
Incredible. And I just thought of somebody else you have to have, and he's in New York. And there's a reason I thought about it because you referenced something tangential to him. Cool.

Yes. I have just one last rabbit hole tangent question about this. I think about this a lot, actually. Because like you just said, and we're talking about I'm and you, we're constantly meeting new people and having substantial dialogue with them, so engaging with them, meeting them. And now, honestly, the majority of my good friends I've met on this show, probably, I probably, I get really overwhelmed by is it true that we can only maintain 300 relationships in our head at one time?

Jon Levy
That's a kind of misnomer. So what you're talking about is an experiment by a researcher named Dunbar where he looked at, I think it was mammals and their brains, and looked at how big their social groups are as a species. So you look at wolves, you look at maybe otters or something, I don't even know what he looked at. And what he found was that this specific section of the brain seems to grow with the number of social ties. And Dunbar said based on the human brain, that means that number is about 150. And this became known as Dunbar's number.

Now it's completely theoretical. It's not based on actual evidence of the number of people you remember or whatever it is. In fact, when it comes to working memory, there's this paper called 4 plus or minus 3, which is the kind of ideal numbers that you can kind of store in your head and how much you can have in working memory. But the point of this is, when you're in a community, communities can only be so big before you start feeling disconnected. So if you're in a small town with a few thousand people, everybody kind of knows each other. Because everybody went to the same high school and all that kind of stuff. Oh, you're Jimmy's cousin or whatever. When you get to the size of New York, when somebody says, oh, I have a friend who lives in New York, do you know them? The answer is no, of course not. There's 8 million people in the area. There's no sense of community or belonging. And so there probably is an upper max. My hunch is it's different for different people based on their social skills and so on. And I think that technology has allowed us to expand beyond the normal number, because you can stay in touch with people through social platforms like LinkedIn and so on. So people that you've completely forgotten about, but you can pick up where you left off. So you know that camp friend experience where you don't see somebody for years, but it's exactly the relationship is exactly where you left it. We have a lot of that kind of stuff. People we used to work with at old companies or people we met at events and things along those lines. So I think it's a nice idea, but it isn't something that's a hard and fast rule.

Melanie Avalon
That was really helpful for me because I will rant every now and then get a little bit acutely stressed out about wanting to maintain all these different relationships with people that I've met and then like, but is that possible? And then literally I will have times where then I think of you and I'm like, but John is meeting people 24 seven. And he seems to do a pretty good job of, I mean, at least from our relationship, like, you know, creating an actual real relationship with people, but he's meeting so many people.

Jon Levy
can I make a recommendation for you? And you actually do this very well, is when I first started the dinners, the issue became how do I meet as many people as possible? And then it quickly turned into, holy cow, I'm not gonna be hanging out with all these people all the time. This just isn't realistic.

And I also didn't wanna hang out with everybody who came. But what I realized was that the more people I can connect to each other, the more I can keep people in my orbit. So think about it like this. If the only person you know in my social circle is me, then the chances that we'll bump into each other and stay aware of each other is very low. But if you are friends with 50 of my friends, you're gonna show up in conversation, we'll bump into each other at other events, right? It keeps us in each other's orbit. And there's a very cynical reason for that. And the reason is that for most people, if I make a new friend for them, right? I introduce them to somebody, they're going to have to end up giving up a friendship somewhere else because they're just not great at maintaining friendships. So now it re-centers their life a little bit closer to me. Now that's the cynical interpretation that some social scientists believe. But it also makes sense, like most people only manage so many relationships. So if I can introduce you to a whole slew of people, then it keeps you around. And since I want you to positively impact my life, that benefits me. And hopefully knowing all these amazing people that I know will benefit you. It's healthy all around.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, that's so interesting and that is naturally, I love connecting people to people and then outside of my sphere as well. And that was kind of the takeaway of you're invited, like the power of the invitation to other people.

Jon Levy
The basis of your invited was that when researchers were looking at the obesity epidemic, they found that, Melanie, if you had a friend who's obese, you have a 45% increased chance of obesity. Your friends who do not know them have a 20% chance increase, and their friends have a 5% chance increase. And this kind of effect is true for happiness, marriage and divorce rates, smoking habits, voting habits, all these factors that become contagious, that have to do with the quality of our life.

And so I said, I'm overweight, broke and underemployed, how do I change these things? And rather than participating in another personal development course, I said, okay, I'm going to figure out how to make friends who are top in their field in all these things. Now, Melanie, you achieved that through your podcast. I achieved it through Cooking Terrible Food.

Melanie Avalon
Amazing. I have two topics that relate to things we were just talking about that bring it back to your current book. One is, so you were mentioning how the size of communities and if you're from New York and then you have a friend in New York, it's very unlikely that you actually know them. It's such a big community.

And yet interestingly, I think I've thought about this a lot throughout my life. So I was from Memphis, for example, and if I were ever somewhere else and then I would meet somebody and they were from Memphis, I'd be like, oh, I probably know them, which is silly because I probably don't know them. But your initial inclination is if you're outside of your community and then you meet somebody else from the community, you're like, oh, I must know them, even if it's a really big community that you're from. So does that relate to because you have a whole section on company culture and this role of membership and symbol systems and things like that. So what is that role in a team's intelligence, the actual feeling of the club that people are in?

Jon Levy
So let's answer this question in two parts. The first part is, why do you have that experience when you're traveling? And the answer has to do with what's kind of called the common ground theory of relationships, which is that human beings tend to become friends or connect when they have a lot of things that are common. So if two people go to the same church, same gym, and have kids in the same high school, they're much more likely to be friends, because that commonality causes us to feel safe. Things that are familiar, that we're exposed to often, are safe.

And people who share those things with us are likely what we would consider community members. When you are in a foreign place and you find something that's such unique common ground with a human being, like you're both in Japan, but you're both from Memphis, what's the chances that you'll meet each other? It feels very safe and familiar. And so you're more likely to be friends in Japan than you were in Memphis.

Melanie Avalon
And you're more likely to assume that you had met them before.

Jon Levy
or have some kind of comment. Oh, have you ever been to that restaurant? Oh, we must have both been there. You know, oh, you would go to the parties at that place or, oh, that's the gym you worked at. I was, you know, whatever it is, you will find examples that are familiar to each other that make you feel safe.

That whether you should or shouldn't feel safe with a person, I don't know. But that's just the natural mechanics of being human. Now, how it plays in in a team is that when there's a sense of a common mission, common goal that you're heading in the same direction, it very much enforces a culture that you're in it together. And human beings survived as a species and were rewarded as a species for collaboration, right? Like bottom line, a mother who just gave birth cannot collect enough calories and protect her offspring by herself. Like it's just not realistic. We're one of the few species that's the case, right? Like a deer, when they give birth, they're like, Vaughn can just go run off right after. And so we need each other. And so our mechanics as a species are to reward collaboration. The issue is that for far too long, we have rewarded individualistic behavior. And as a byproduct, we've gotten our employees to compete with each other because we've rewarded the top 10%. And the only way to always be in the top 10%, like we said, was eventually to make sure that everybody else is in the bottom 90.

Melanie Avalon
Are there companies that are doing this really well?

Jon Levy
think that's a great question. I'm sure there are, but they seem to be so few and far between. I'll give you an example. I was in a conversation with an executive at one of the big tech companies and they said, John, yeah, that all sounds great, but it's not realistic for us to give bonuses to everybody. That'll be just so expensive.

And I laughed because I said, why don't you just take the bonus money and share it with everyone? And their brain looked like it broke. The idea that, oh my God, we could actually give this to everybody, they just couldn't make it. They're like, but then the circuits just shorted out. They said, listen, here's the deal. People fundamentally compete for status. Do they use money as their status marker? Probably. They use that and a whole bunch of other stuff. And if that's the culture you want, go for it. But understand that it's not necessarily serving the company, it's creating individuals that are remarkable. You're enticing people to be selfish. Now, if instead what we said is, hey, the team that accomplishes X will be rewarded with blank as a team, we will take you all in your spouses on a vacation. That's probably the same amount that you're paying for bonuses, but it makes everybody feel great. Or maybe it's not a vacation. Maybe it's a something else. I don't even know. If I keep rewarding individual behavior, it will eventually come at the cost of the team because you can't keep telling people you'll get paid more if you score more and then expect them to pass the ball.

Melanie Avalon
I think Taylor Swift does this pretty well. I don't know if you watch the docu-series.

Jon Levy
Yeah, she has a really great reputation of recognizing people.

Melanie Avalon
She like hand wrote thank you notes to every team member of her tour and then gave out a hundred and like almost 150 million in bonuses to everybody.

Jon Levy
I would not say no to $150 million bonus.

Melanie Avalon
not individually, but spread between everybody. And then the status thing, that's a whole fascinating section of your book. You have a story about the yams.

Jon Levy
Let the yam come, the yam off.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah. And what's funny is like reading that you're like, that's so silly that they have all this status based on the size of VMs.

But then you think about, like, if you practically step away and like look at our life.

Jon Levy
we should probably tell the listeners what we're talking about. There's this island, I believe it's called Panape, where the way that people earn status in the society is by the size of their yams, like the actual vegetable. And people compete year after year to grow the largest yams they can, and then they bring them to festivals. And the people who consistently bring the largest yams earn titles and status in society and potential chiefdoms and stuff like that.

And these yams are just gigantic, because when you find a pissing contest, people will compete very hard to outdo each other. And these yams require sometimes four people to carry them. They're just humongous. And so it just sounds absurd, but you were saying, not me.

Melanie Avalon
I was saying, it sounds absurd. And then though, if you look at what we do for status and really separate yourself from it, it's equally absurd, like purses, like brands and stuff like, okay, so that because this purse has like this logo on it now.

Jon Levy
Now I'm better than you. Now I deserve to get into the nightclub or the job or date the person who has better mating characteristics.

Yeah, some of the funniest status things was in the UAE, I think it was, people were spending millions of dollars to get a license plate with the lowest number. So if you wanted a single digit license plate, you were spending literally millions just as a FU contest.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, it's so interesting. But I do like the concept that we can't, or at least when I interviewed Dr.

Loretta Bruning, she has a lot of books on stuff, but one is called The Status Game. One is called Status Games, and it's all about this. And she makes the case that we are naturally wired to seek status, so we shouldn't see it as a negative thing. It's not bad that you want status, but just don't hurt other people while trying to get status.

Jon Levy
Oh, yeah, of course. When you're a teenager and you're a boy, you're trying to be stronger, better, faster than the other boys, or smarter, or whatever it is. And the girls do their thing, and society's probably changed a bit.

But yeah, that makes perfect sense because a species would need to be hard-coded to figure out who the ideal mate is so that there can be offspring. And whether it's an absurd dance that a bird does, or a peacock flashing its feathers, or something else, there needs to be a mechanism.

Melanie Avalon
And speaking of animals, one of my favorite topics that we haven't touched on yet, this was mind-blowing to me. The history, well, there were a few different sections where it was the history of something which was not at all what I thought, but one was the history of the alpha male concept.

The experiments in wolves were not what I thought.

Jon Levy
So this is so wild.

Melanie Avalon
No pun intended.

Jon Levy
Oh, no. Yeah, definitely. No, but I wasn't even thinking. You know, we're used to thinking about leadership in a bunch of kind of principles. And as I was researching this, this idea that, oh, it's the alpha male that dominates and controls and that's what makes a great leader really kept showing up. And as I looked into this, I ended up coming across this crazy story that in the 1970s, a book called The Wolf was released. Now in it, the author, El David Meek, shared kind of the latest research, which wasn't very in depth at the time. They're much more knowledge now. And there was this one experiment where a bunch of wolves were put into a room together and they fought each other until one came out dominant and he controlled the pack. But it turns out that in nature, that's not how they operate.

But in the book, that was the one point he had, so he shared it. The book became a huge hit to the point that a New York Times review was written by one of the Supreme Court justices. That's crazy. And he ended up on like the most popular late night show at the time. And it sold thousands and thousands of copies. And Business World used it as an excuse that like, as the leader, I'm the alpha wolf, I'm going to dominate and control. But it turns out that in nature, it doesn't work like that. It turns out that in fact, when you do see kind of dominant behavior, it's usually child rearing, meaning that when a wolf reaches mating age, they break off from the pack, they find a mating pair, and then they have cubs. And when those can be very large, and as they're teaching them to function, they'll often pin them down so that they don't do something stupid or get themselves killed. And so it looks like really dominant behavior, but it's just raising your child. It's like, if your kids started running into the street, and you grabbed them and yelled at them, like, that's not dominant behavior. It's just saying, hey, you're going to get hurt, you can't do that. I need to scare you a little. And so we thought that it was one thing, and it was something completely different. It turns out that even in nature, wolves that are overly aggressive end up getting the pack into fights and weakening the pack. And or the other wolves don't want to stick around and be dominated like that. So they leave and join other packs. The entire myth of the alpha leader is total BS.

Nobody wants to be dominated constantly by their boss. And when you negotiate with somebody who's always trying to get something from you, that's extreme, then nobody wants to do business with them unless they have to. Steve Jobs is famous for trying to get the most intense deal possible. And after about a year, companies would come back and say, we're canceling this contract because we can't live up to these terms. And they'd have to renegotiate everything anyway. And so it doesn't actually work unless you can be a full bully at all times, like unless you have all the cards. And in fact, leaders that are more compassionate tend to do better. And people want to stick around and work for them.

Melanie Avalon
Speaking of that, because I was going to ask earlier when we were talking about super skills, what are examples of other super skills? Because I bet listeners are pretty curious what super skills they might have. Is there just like a list somewhere?

Jon Levy
I think that we have to understand that we're inventing an idea to help us understand something. It's not the truth, right? So Melanie, you are incredibly inquisitive, right? You are curious and you ask questions and you are willing to reevaluate stuff. You have what's called cognitive humility. That's where you're willing to reevaluate the ideas that you believe if new evidence comes in. But it's not that every new idea changes your mind immediately. Now, those are some of your super skills and that's what makes you a great podcast interviewer, is that you're genuinely willing to look at things.

Now, somebody else might be a great podcast interviewer because they out-research people. They read everything. There's a guy named Brandon Fong who does this. He just devours. He spends hours researching everyone. But that's his super skills at play. My super skills are kind of being able to communicate complex ideas and developing trust with people. And so when I express things, people tend to understand them and it makes sense and trust what I'm saying is true. The best way, I think, for your listeners to figure out some of their super skills is to ask people that they interact with and not ask them for like, what am I good at? Like creating PowerPoints, but what unique skills do I have that support those things? You might be great at PowerPoint because you're an amazing storyteller. You might be great at PowerPoint because you feel really comfortable in front of groups, but that's not a super skill. Your super skill is actually your willingness to practice over and over and over and you're relentless about practice. So you can boil those down and realize like, oh, it is those skills that cause people to want to engage with me. Now that doesn't mean you shouldn't develop other skills, but you should understand that that's the basis of your strength.

Melanie Avalon
And what about the fact, because all of these skills that you're describing are all, you know, positive aspects and traits, presumably, what about the fact when you have a section, there's a section in the book for listeners on toxic people in the work culture and the dark triad and narcissists, and you point out that narcissism actually does enhance I think like business interview success.

Jon Levy
Yeah, so here's what's interesting. There are these four, let's call them psychological characteristics that are more dangerous than probably anything else.

They're called the Dark Tetret. They are being narcissistic. You make it all about you or the person makes it all about themselves. There's Machiavellianism. Everybody is just a tool for the person to achieve their personal goals. There's sadism. People actually enjoy making you suffer or making others suffer. And psychopathy, which is being a psychopath. It's a thin veneer of charm, hiding a lack of remorse and often impulsive behavior.

Melanie Avalon
Mm-hmm, one of my exes.

Jon Levy
Yeah, congrats for getting away from that. Holy cow.

So what ends up happening is we have to ask, okay, are these things bad or good or whatever? And the answer is that in the corporate world, people who are willing to manipulate will often rise to the top. And that's because we keep rewarding individual success.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, so it's like a system problem.

Jon Levy
Yeah. The other issue is that often people are incredibly talented and narcissistic. So look at a Steve Jobs. He might have had a toxic characteristic that is dangerous, but he's so damn talented that it's worth for the company to put up with it. Apple was fundamentally better off with Steve Jobs than without him.

But it does mean that you need a C-suite that knows how to handle it because people would say he has a something, a bubble around him, like that he would warp reality, a reality warping bubble or something. And that's because these personalities can be so strong and so talented or skilled that they are really useful to the company. The other thing is that trying to call somebody out for being a narcissist doesn't work. Their egos are too fragile and they'll go on the attack. And that's basically true for any dark personality. You'd never want to call them out. Are there things you can do that'll benefit your situation? Yeah. There's a fantastic person. I don't know if you've ever had her on Dr. Ramani. No. Oh my God, you should definitely have her on. She's incredible. And she's basically one of the big experts on the topic. And she's just fantastic. She's the person I interviewed to understand this from my book. And there are ways to protect yourself from these toxic personalities, but you're probably not going to win going toe to toe with them because they have a lot more experience manipulating people than you do stopping a manipulator.

Melanie Avalon
Or you pointed out even going to HR necessarily because the goal of HR is to protect the company.

Jon Levy
Yeah. There are very few HRs that are really going to look out for, do they exist? Yeah. But that are really trying to look out for the employees.

The key is to make sure that the company is not liable for something. So if you say, Oh, somebody's a narcissist and they're dangerous, then they start getting really curious. Oh my God, do we have a lawsuit? Is there sexual harassment? That's where the liabilities are. And if it's between making you happy and protecting the company, their responsibility is to the company.

Melanie Avalon
Well, that's upsetting.

Jon Levy
I mean, yeah, you know, every system is designed to keep itself alive.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah. And then on the flip side, you can have the complete opposite sort of action, which you talked about like in your own experience at your company, you instigated an anti-jerk policy for your behavior.

Jon Levy
Yes. So I think we all have these behaviors that come out in rare occasions, or maybe more depending. And my thing became that anytime something would go wrong, I would notice that I had this habit of making people feel just terrible. And it wouldn't solve the problem. It was about me getting to feel better about my terrible emotional state. And so my habit was that I would actually ask people questions, but I wasn't really asking them questions. I was just trying to make them feel stupid. And so it would look like I was trying to solve the problem, but really, I was just being a jerk.

And so we had to put rules in place to prevent this from happening. And the problem is that when you're already in a crappy emotional state, you don't have the wherewithal to stop yourself. You're too far down the path. So what we needed to do is create rules to prevent it from happening in the first place. So when something bad happened, we would divorce me from the situation so that I wouldn't be kind of, I'd never yell, but I'd never be upset at the employee who caused it. That way, enough time would pass that when we actually did try to figure out what the problem was, I was calm and collected and friendly. Now, it doesn't mean that we always kept everybody. We've replaced people over the years, but it did mean that we were really respectful in the process and actually came to figuring out what the solutions were rather than me being me, which didn't really help anything.

Melanie Avalon
It also speaks to just the power of systems and everything, which is appropriate because, you know, like we've been talking about all throughout this, it's not about, unless it's baseball, it's not about the individual people as much as the team and the systems that are running everything.

Jon Levy
Yes. So I think what we tend to do is we overvalue the individual and undervalue the team. In fact, and we were talking about that stat in basketball, that it's player salary that predicts stuff. So we've instead devised people to be selfish.

There's a stat that predicts if somebody is an effective coach, and it is not how much they win, because you might just not have the base level of talent that you need to succeed. Talents is still incredibly important. You know, you're not going to win a basketball championship with a bunch of fifth graders. But the factor that matters when it comes to coaching is the increase in the rate of passing under that coach. Meaning if you're my coach, and I've gone from passing 60% of the time to passing 90% of the time, now the ball will land with a player that has the best chance of actually scoring, rather than with me because I want to earn those extra points. And so the team is more likely to win when people are playing towards a common goal.

Melanie Avalon
And do these principles apply regardless of company size? So if you have just a few people on your team versus hundreds of people.

Jon Levy
I think you'll probably feel it the most when there's a few people on the team because you'll be acutely aware. So if you had a team of five people and one of those people is constantly saying, hey, Melanie, I know that you're the host of the show but I think I should really be on and so on and so forth, then they're wasting a lot of time trying to get attention for themselves rather than creating the best product possible.

When you're at the level of a company, it turns out that at the average company, there's complete misalignment. 60% of employees have no idea what the company's mission is. How do you know you're heading in the right direction if you do not know what the company's trying to accomplish? Of the remaining 40%, 60% of them don't care. So imagine we're on a hike. 60% of people don't know where we're going. 24% of them do not care. They're just like off in a field picking daisies. They might know where we wanna end up but they're not motivated to get there. That leaves 16% of people gathering everybody and trying to make sure that they're headed in the right direction.

You're hurting cats and wanna make a team or an organization stupider.

Melanie Avalon
Distract them

Jon Levy
Yeah, constantly have them go in different directions. There's a big tech company that at one point I think had five different teams producing video chat software. What an incredible colossal waste of time and money. And when you realize it and start shutting down those teams, the level of morale after people have put their heart and years of work into something just to have it shut down. Talk about disincentivizing an employee.

That's incredible. You need to know where you're going. And you need to make sure everybody else does.

Melanie Avalon
I've actually thought about that a bit because I reflect and remember when I was working in waiting tables and serving jobs and there'd be all these meetings with the company mission statement and ideals and I look back and remember how much I just didn't care. I think about it when I think about my work now as an entrepreneur and I'm like, oh, I should have a mission statement and ideals and it actually means a lot, but then I think about myself in the past when it didn't matter to me and it's almost like it can be there, but how do you make people actually care?

That 60% or whatever percent of people who don't care where they're going. I don't know if there was a question in there, but basically how do you, and I know we're coming up on time, but you can't make people care. So is that one of the good criteria for hiring people, like their personal passion?

Jon Levy
I think there are two aspects. The first is people often talk about cultural fit as critical. I would encourage cultural adaptability, which is that if you have a company, the focus of your company now and the focus of your company in 10 years might be completely different. You want people who can adapt to the different cultures.

The second thing is when we talk about creating alignment, right? The first thing is that you need the person to know what the company's mission is. Bottom line, you need to know what your team's role is within that company so that it can feed into the bigger mission. You understand your purpose and what you contribute to the organization as a whole. You need to know what your role is within the team. And the step that nobody seems to take is aligning people's personal goals with their work goals. Let's take an example from your life. What's a personal goal you have right now?

Melanie Avalon
while my personal goals I feel are my work goals, like that's not a career goal.

Jon Levy
No, just pick something, whatever it is.

Melanie Avalon
launch my coffee line in February.

Jon Levy
Great. Now, let's say you're like, John, I'm so tired of recording these podcasts, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you're super hyped on your coffee, right?

Saturday, Melanie, I'm so excited for you. I love this goal for you. Having a coffee line is just awesome. As we think about that, I want to make sure that the show doesn't get less of your attention and suffer in the process. I want us to think about how do we make sure that the show becomes the launch pad for it. Get the guests on that might be most excited to learn about your product and potentially promote it. And then as I'm talking to this about you, I will tie the coffee back into everything that you do so that you feel that fulfilling on the show and doing that at the highest level and your fitness and so on, whatever it is, fulfills on launching that coffee line. For somebody else, it might be they want to buy a home, but don't think that they're going to make enough working at the company to put down that down payment. I would talk to them about how if we hit our goals, the bonus will be so big that they'll be able to get their dream home. And so can I count on you for the next year to stay focused so that we can hit that goal, and you can be able to make that money to put the down payment down. I've aligned everything so that you're not off launching a Twitch channel to make money to buy a house or Uber Eats or whatever it is that people do for Side Hustle. Only fans.

Melanie Avalon
Yes, okay. It's like my serving manager who knew my love of wine and would have like wine contest rewards for certain things accomplished in the job.

Jon Levy
Yeah, perfect. But for that, you have to have conversations with your people, or you have to have the person on your team that knows this stuff, and you empower them to do it. Because not every leader's super skills is getting to know their people, right? And it's an unfair expectation for the leader to be great at all this stuff.

So empower somebody else on the team that's like the heart.

Melanie Avalon
Awesome. Well, I have a proposal.

My proposal is because we didn't talk about this, so listeners will have to just read the book to learn about the shocking history of the MBA, but I would propose instead of the MBA, people just read your book, Team Intelligence.

Jon Levy
I would be ecstatic if everybody picked up a copy or 20. Depending on when this episode is released, it could make a great stocking stuffer for next year's holiday season.

Melanie Avalon
That's the whole thing for listeners, not related to this topic, but do your Christmas shopping throughout the year. So let gifts come to you and then come Christmas time, you already have gifts for everybody because you've been casually letting them come to you throughout the year.

So people buy lots of copies of this book and then come Christmas or whatever holiday you celebrate, there you go.

Jon Levy
Dougie, you're the best.

Melanie Avalon
Thank you, John. This has been absolutely amazing. So how can people best follow your work, get your book? Are you writing another book?

Jon Levy
I am probably going to work on a children's book next.

Melanie Avalon
A children's book.

Jon Levy
happens when you have three kids. My name is John Levy, J-O-N.

Melanie Avalon
Well, you don't have three kids. You have one kid, right?

Jon Levy
Oh, by the time this comes out, I'll have my third kid. What?

Melanie Avalon
Wait, did I miss a second shot? Yes.

Jon Levy
Yes, you did. Whoa. Anyway, so you can find me at JohnLevy, J-O-N-L-E-V-Y.com. And on all the socials, I'm JohnLevyTLB, J-O-N-L-E-V, as in Victor, Y is in yellow, T like Thomas, L like Lion, B like Boy. On all the socials, I'm super responsive, so feel free to reach out. I'm most active on LinkedIn and probably TikTok. And I welcome hearing from you all.

And Melanie, thank you so much for having me on. It's always a joy to hang out with you.

Melanie Avalon
No, thank you. And very last rapid fire. I don't know if you remember this question from last time. It's always the last question though. What is something that you're grateful for?

Jon Levy
Oh man, I, 10 years ago plus at this point, walked up to a woman at an airport and convinced her to switch her seat on her flight to sit next to me. And that woman and I are married with three incredible kids and I could not be more thankful that she said yes to everything.

I'm super appreciative of her.

Melanie Avalon
That's amazing. Oh my goodness. Well, thank you so much. You are the best. I can't wait for your kids book and can't wait to talk to you soon. Thank you.

Jon Levy
Oh, it's a pleasure, buddy. I'll catch you soon.

Melanie Avalon
Bye. Thank you so much for listening to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast.

For more information and resources, you can check out my book, What Win Wine, as well as my supplement line Avalon X. Please visit melanieavalon.com to learn more about today's guest. And always feel free to contact me at contact at melanieavalon.com. And always remember, you got this.