Transcript of Science-Backed Hacks For Growing Wealth with Jon Levy

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If you're an unhappy person in general, piling on more money doesn't fix that. You have to deal with your unhappiness.

John Levy has captivated millions with one of the most watched TED Talks on Human Connection. His best-selling books have transformed how we understand influence, trust, and community. He's been on the show before, and it was one of the most popular shows we've ever done. So today, he is back with his new groundbreaking book, Team Intelligence: How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Collective genius. And he is here to tell us what most people get wrong about building wealth. And no, it's not about the numbers, the spreadsheets, or the calculations. John reveals what's really standing in your way, and it's something you've been overlooking your entire life. This conversation will change how you see success, relationships, and what it actually takes to grow wealth. I'm Nicole Lappin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. It's time for some Money Rehab. John Levy, welcome to Money Rehab again.

I love this. I'm so happy to be here.

I'm happy to be- It's a short list of the repeat guests. But for the very first time, you can do the The big reveal.

Oh, the big reveal.

Of the cards because you were like, Oh, it's so official. You have cards. But I actually have nothing on them for the first time.

I don't even know which camera to point it to. There is nothing on this. It's not even like hidden ink where she can see it with special contacts. It's not. I think they were ripped off of something. I know.

It's like a sense memory. I feel like I need them in my hand, but I don't need them when I'm talking to you because we've known each other for 100,000 years.

Yes, that's true.

And you just came to my house and brought 30 of your closest friends to do one of your famous, famous, famous influencer dinners that has now extended to lunches.

Lunches, yes. Why not?

Why not? But maybe breakfast is our next.

We had Influencer Snack Time. Here we come. Television and movie celebs and executives from toy companies and the person who wrote newsies.

Yeah. As always, you pull together such an eclectic, impressive group of folks. Thank you for letting me sneak in.

Yeah, it's enough to give a person like... What is it? Imposter syndrome. That's the one. Yes. Imposter syndrome.

But we talked all about the ins and outs of the work that you do in our first episode. I love that you're still holding the cards.

It does feel very official. I have a right here.

We'll link our first episode in the show notes if you want to hear all about the Influencer's dinner. How do you get invited to this, by the way? Being a listener of the show gets you in, obviously.

Anybody can apply, and anybody can be recommended. So we're open to anything. And then we simply judge people based on one of three characteristics. Are they viewed as having accomplished the award or the status marker in their industry? So if you're a Grammy Award winner or something like that, then- Then you're in.

You just need a Grammy.

Yeah, or an Oscar. An Whatever it is in architecture, it's like the Fisker, I think. And then if you have previous success, so like you sold the company, you've invented a thing, whatever it is, or you hold a specific position. So you're the CMO of a company or CEO of C-suite often or SVP, then you often have a lot of influence within your industry.

So email you?

Yeah. Text you?

Text, yeah. Slide into your DMs.

Maybe. More like WhatsApp.

It's worth going to. If you get a nondescript email from Cody Smith, you might think it's spam, but go.

Yes. It will change your life. We used to- I don't say that lightly. We used to send it from an email account called Jarvis Pennyworth because I wanted an assistant that sounded like he worked for both Batman and Iron Man. I'm really geeky, I should emphasize. And then we realized nobody took that seriously.

But you're in the right place. We are geeks. But what I wanted to do this time was dig into financial geekiness, which we didn't do last time because we talked about social currency and how that plays into all aspects of your life, career, ultimately your financial status. But since you're a big deal behavioral scientist- Thank you. Such a big deal, how many years of school did you go to?

Too many, I think is the right amount. Yeah.

So that tracks. So you've done a ton of research. You break it down in a really, really interesting way. I encourage everybody to watch your glorious TED Talk, read the books. You're on your third now. Team Intelligence is the latest. Because I wanted to take it a step further and really look at some of the issues that people face when trying to get their financial lives together. And it's not a numbers issue. I started, as you know, as a poetry major. So I am not a numbers person by nature. The thing that stands in people's way isn't the numbers, though. It's the mind stuff. It's your relationships, how to talk to your significant other about money, how to get your friend to pay you back. These are the issues that stand in people's way more than getting the math in order, because to start investing, you need fifth-grade math. It's not serious. And sometimes that becomes just an excuse for people to not get going.

Yeah, you get a lot of people getting paralysis. They think, Oh, I have to be or accomplish something in order to even buy my first stock or put my money into an ETF or something like that. There's just no proof in any of that. I think you and your listeners have probably experienced this to some degree. In the first stage, I'd often say, Let's get just some basic healthy habits in place. And let's examine the way that we think about what it is that we really want to accomplish. I'll give you a classic example. New Year's resolutions. Everybody's like, Oh, this year I'm going to save better. This year I'm going to invest. This year I'm going to pay off my loans, whatever it is.

New Year, new financial year.

Yeah, exactly. And this is Common, right? People do vision boards and all those things, and all that stuff is completely fine. But then we ask the question, what actually gets somebody to accomplish it? What is it? So here's what's interesting. Setting a goal is important, no doubt. But it turns out that this advice that we should tell everybody about our goals doesn't actually work. Really? Yeah.

It doesn't hold you accountable?

So if you You have relationships with people who will call you out on your stuff, that could work. You have mentors, or you have a colleague or a friend who will be that type of person who will really call you out. Most people won't. What the researchers found, the study on this is that when you talk too much about accomplishing a goal, it makes people feel the joy and satisfaction of accomplishing it, and then they don't feel like they need to actually take action.

So the dopamine is in the story. In the story that they're telling about what may happen and not in the actual process.

Exactly.

What actually- Because usually it's for the search, right? The misnomer around social media or dating apps is that The dopamine comes from finding that person, but the dopamine comes from searching for the person.

Yes. When you're using...

I actually did- You can put the cards down.

Thank you. I actually did the largest study in history on dating. We looked at 421 million potential matches between people and actually asked what causes people to date. I know this is a bit of a tangent, but most of the stuff we're told, just like in most of the advice we get on social media, just isn't true. Opposites don't attract. The greatest predictor that you would date somebody is the more similar they are to you. Okay. Down to your initials. If you have the same initials, you're 11. 3% more likely to date.

That's so odd. It's a causation-correlation.

That's causation.

Because also you can just then monogram, bring your monogram towels.

So the reason is there's a characteristic of human beings called implicit egotism. Anything that reminds us of ourselves makes us feel safe. We like it And so when people share the same religion, go to the same types of schools, have the same types of interests, it's just easier to connect because you feel safe and familiar, you know what you can talk to them about. The one exception was introvert and extroverts. So we thought introverts would connect and extroverts would connect. But two introverts never start a conversation. It's just like a... It tends to happen that way. So you need one extrovert often. Anyway, this is a complete No, but the dating market, a lot of people think that that's a shit show, as is the housing market and the financial market.

There are a lot of markets that are- Getting a match is like...

Going to a marketplace and getting a match is tough. Don't get me wrong. We found it took 200 swipes to actually, or more, to find somebody that you'd even want to exchange contact info.

But isn't it the most important financial decision that you will make? Do you believe that, that who marry is the most important financial decision you make?

That's an interesting question. I think it is really important depending on how much money you have. Tell me more. Here's why. If you are so wealthy that money doesn't actually play a major role in your concerns, then it's less of an issue of somebody's overspending. There's this famous study that people keep quoting about, once you earn a certain amount, things don't matter.

Like 75 grand, though.

It turns out not to be true. And it's funny. So let me explain what the research actually says. What the research says is there's When you do not have enough money to cover your basic needs, the extra stress and thinking that you constantly have to do to make a decision reduces your IQ by about 11 points. So if you have to decide between eating a full dinner or eating half a dinner and being able to take the bus home rather than walking, that strain constantly causes you not to have the mental capacity to handle other things as well. You're not actually stupider, you just don't have the capacity.

The cognitive load is real.

Yeah, precisely. Once you've gotten... You're not worried about your next meal, your clothing, or if you have a major medical bill or something like that, then you reach this point where things begin to grow more slowly. But it's not actually true that the more money you make, the less happy it makes you. There's that limit. What that found, because of the way that they asked the questions, is if you're a person who's not happy, more money doesn't make you less unhappy.

But does it amplify your previous state of happiness or unhappiness?

If you're a happy person, more money will make you happier. The way that it works is pretty simple. It stuff like, Oh, I really want to see Taylor Swift. I don't have tickets. Now I can buy scalp tickets. I'm happier. But this idea that it doesn't is unfair. Now, will it make you- For sure.

I mean, those people haven't been poor. Yeah.

But if you're an unhappy person in general, piling on more money doesn't fix that. You have to deal with your unhappiness.

Fair. But then money can be helpful after a certain amount?

Still, yes.

I mean, Arthur Brooks came on the show and he said that the amount was not realistic at this point. Like 75 grand, I don't think it's accounted for inflation.

Yeah, I think it also depends on where you live. Like, New York City is a different number than Omaha.

For sure. But at that point, then you start feeding into whatever... The way he approached it was like the God that guides you. If you're looking for money or if you're looking for influence, that's the thing you need to be careful of because- Oh, interesting.

Let's take a step back and say, if you actually just want to be happier, there's a more effective way than trying to double or triple your income. I'm not opposed to you making more money, but there's a long-running study from Harvard that shows nurturing social ties are the defining characteristic of what actually leads to better health and happiness. And even if you look across, there's a study that actually looked at what predicts if somebody will live a long time. On the really low end, it's like clean air and water.

Maslow's hierarchy of just surviving first.

Sure. Yeah. But it's like if you're drinking tainted water, you're probably not going to be in great shape. After that, it's like getting your flu shot, especially if you're old. Exercise, quitting drinking, quitting smoking are then predictors. Then it's close friends and family. And The number one predictor was social integration. It's the number of people you come and contact within a day. So if you actually want to be happy, it's about relationships. If you're talking about the benefit of money, it gives you access to a lot of stuff.

So you're the richest dude I know.

Because you are the most socially connected. It depends how you measure things. I would say that, and I think we've discussed this before, the things that most people try to accomplish with money I end up accomplishing with relationships. So people might say, I want to go to the Super Bowl, I'll buy a ticket. Or if you have the right friends, they'll just give you a ticket.

You were just at the Super Bowl right before this.

Top of mind. Yeah.

I I mean, you've talked about not coming from money, but achieving the types of connections that can get you into the Super Bowl, the Taylor Swift concert, wherever else you want to go or connect with the heads of any company you want to do work with. And being connected to all the right people has given you an immense amount of social currency. I mean, you could talk to whatever extent you're comfortable with about your background and how that's changed the trajectory of your life and your wealth creation for yourself and your family.

Oh, sure. So a quick background. Parents are immigrants. We lived in a feast or famine house. My dad was an artist. Either things were great or things were definitely not. I didn't really have a very good conversation or relationship to the idea of money because nobody ever talked to me about it. The most my dad ever said to me was something like, I said, $100, that's not much money. He's like, No, $100 is a lot of money. We were talking about something random. I was like, That's the only money advice you've ever given to me, that $100 is a lot of money? It depends what it's for.

He's not He's not wrong.

He's not wrong, but he's also not right. Like $100 for a car. It depends on what you're investing. The context. Yeah. That's the closest thing to advice I ever got about my relationship to money, so I had no idea. Just to give a condensed version of the story, I was 28, underemployed, heavily in debt from college. I basically came across a study that found that human behaviors are contagious. So everything from our health, like how much we weigh and obesity, to marriage and divorce rates, smoking habits, voting habits, it turns out, are contagious from person to person, based on who you spend time with and the relationships that you have with them. What I mean by that is if I have a friend who's an athlete and I spend my time hanging out with a lot of athletes, I'm much more likely to spend my time exercising to hang out than, let's say, going to a movie and eating a tub of popcorn. And so I said, okay, if I'm going to get my life organized, it's going to be much easier to have the habits and the mental frameworks and the conversations that matter if I find a way to connect with the people who actually know what they're doing and have good habits.

And so I made it my mission to develop relationships with the people who are most respected in their industries. I spent years and years looking at the science of it and how to do it, and I ended up launching a dinner series that you mentioned and developing all these friendships. And fundamentally, that changed my entire perspective on everything. And I think the really important part is that I started this journey 16 years ago. It took me eight years to get out of debt, to finally pay off my college loans. And after that, I had the perspective that I'm going to grow my income exponentially every year. I remember the first year, I maybe earned 70 grand, and that was a huge deal. Then it was 140, and then it was 200, and then 800. That basically held until the pandemic, and I lost all my business overnight. I had to rebuild because I lost 72% of my business overnight because I was the person who was consulting on marketing and events to shift my entire company. But my perspective was, if I do the work and connect with the right people, there's no reason why I couldn't have exponential growth in my income.

I'm really proud of the progress.

I'm proud of you.

Thank you.

There's two aspects of that. There's the cognitive part and the shame and the guilt and all of that. And then there's also the snowball method versus the avalanche method and how to actually pay it off because the mindset is so important, but it won't actually pay the bills.

Yes. So let's separate those two. The technical stuff, there's no doubt that you are 10 times the expert on the technical stuff. The mindset stuff is I can... What is it? Wax poetic about.

Wax poetic for us.

I think, first of all, let's get down to, most of us didn't grow up with great habits around these things. Most of us don't have even good language around it. One of the things that I very clearly learned that interacting with people who are incredibly wealthy, let's say billionaires, it's not like, Oh, they know different techniques. They are literally speaking a different language. It is the difference between speaking English and Turkish. There just is no relationship between what I grew up with and what they do. The best way to actually learn a language is through full immersion. You want to be around these people and all that. Now, if I'm going to form a habit, one of the things we talked about earlier was just telling people that I have a goal, that actually doesn't really work that well. If it's somebody who's a partner who can hold you accountable, great. What actually tends to work is two things. One is if then statements, and I know that's going to sound a little weird, but it turns out that, let's say you set a goal, I'm going to save $100 a month and put it into an ETF.

So month after month, I'm starting my savings habit, I'm going to put money into an ETF. First of the month, right? You want to set a time and place for that thing to occur. It's going to be the first of the month after my paycheck from last month clears. What you want to do is set contingencies. If If that month, I don't put $100 in on the first because I don't have money in my account, I will make sure that on the fifth, I will put in $50 at a minimum. Because what happens is that people will set goals, and then the situation, inevitably, life occurs. Something happens, your car breaks something, you need to switch the tail light, suddenly you're short money, and now you are not fulfilling on your goal. If you have no room for error, then people will give up on their It's like dieting.

Oh, I messed it up. I might as well eat the whole cake.

Exactly. Oh, that way it won't be there tomorrow to distract me, right? So I can start my diet tomorrow. But it turns out that if you put if then statements in place, then suddenly you can think through the contingencies and how you're going to handle it. With dieting, Oh, I'm going to a party. Okay. If I go to a party, I'm going to put a protein in my pocket. That way, when they have dessert, I'll eat the protein bar rather than an entire cheesecake. As you think through these contingencies, what ends up happening is that you're actually developing the habit better. That's one thing that research has definitely found. If you are going to be serious about something, you have to think through the contingencies. The second thing is it turns out there's a difference between being a person who saves and saving. Once you self-identify as having a characteristic, you are far more likely to actually fulfill on the thing. It is a fundamental mind shift. It might sound ridiculous, but there's, I think, a double-digit difference in follow-through. It's just something about human beings. If you say, I'm going running versus I'm a runner, then suddenly being a runner means, Oh, it's something I do consistently.

No, I'm a runner. When you're hanging out with people, No, I'm a runner. Then you need to actually follow through with that. You are far more likely to, especially if you make those contingencies in those if-then statements.

So I'm an investor.

Precisely. Now, how does that actually express itself? On the first of every month, I put $100. Now, that might not seem a lot now, But with compounding interest and a consistent habit, that makes a huge difference. It's similar to, you probably know, save more tomorrow. It's like an award-winning method of saving, where as your income grows, so does the automatic amount that's removed your account going into your checking, and it goes directly into some saving system. As a result, people see huge gains in their investment portfolio.

It sounds like there's a lot of shame, guilt, cognitive load, barriers, something that comes back to some cost fallacy, which you talk a lot about, too, which stands in the way of people reaching their wealth goals.

Absolutely. Let's, first of all, talk about shame. We used to have this impression that, Oh, if I made you feel bad about something, and we were taught this as children, you hurt your sibling, you should feel very bad about that. It turns out that shame actually doesn't work. It is an absolutely terrible motivator. There is no amount of shame that you can feel that actually helps motivate most people. Are there occasionally stories about people being like, I got made fun of, so I got skinny? Sure, maybe. But those are really few and far between. Most of the time, we just eat our feelings when we have shame.

But more like the Brunae Brown guilt shame, I made a mistake, I am a mistake. I think the shame around money is like, I am a mistake. I can't do this. I'm not a numbers person. I didn't come from money. I don't have enough money. I'm too old. Yeah.

So the shame that you're pointing to is that I should be in a different place in life right now compared to my colleagues or my friends. When we actually look, that's probably mostly a byproduct of seeing people on Instagram pretending that they're rich and really probably don't have very much money at all. It's like those people who rent a private chat for 15 minutes so that they can get some photos of themselves in it, and they're like, Don't you want this lifestyle? Now sign up for my multi-level marketing program and lose your money.

I'll say you've probably been on many jets in your life. Sure. Yes. Good assumption. I have never seen somebody who actually owns a jet ever take a selfie of themselves on that jet. Never. It almost feels gross.

It's just not like the culture because it would be like you taking a selfie of sitting in Coach on your I'm like, not you, but a person getting on a flight and being like, look- This is the baseline. This is like, yeah, this is how I travel. They're also not taking photos of themselves driving around in their car because it's their car. I don't know about you, but I have a car, and I'm not like, Oh, look at how fancy my life is. Don't you want? It's just how you get around. It just wouldn't make sense. The context is completely off. The people who are trying to show off a flashy life are probably trying to sell you something. That comparison point is what's probably going to make us feel mostly bad. Now, most of the millionaires in this country, you would have absolutely no clue that they have money. They are the person who owns a tow company and was just really good about not overspending or living lavishly.

Yeah, or somebody that was a teacher but saved and retired as a millionaire. Yes, Millionaire is Next Door.

All that stuff is just marketing and show. Are there people who have Jets who are trying to show off their... Sure, occasionally, but that's not most people. Most people who are flying private often don't want the attention because they don't want to be targets. And it's not an appealing thing. Most billionaires aren't announcing that they're billionaires because it does not serve them. It just makes them a bigger target. When it comes to this shame stuff, we need to begin with a profound relationship to reality. This is where you are, and it's not too late to do something about stabilizing your income and putting yourself in a great situation for retirement. Listen, I spent most of my life overwhelmingly in profound debt. I was just really good at connecting with people, living modestly, and then honing my craft. But it takes a long time. Expecting some solution that tomorrow you're going to be debt-free is not realistic. Frankly, the people who suddenly get given tons of money, like lottery winners, end up overwhelmingly in debt because you haven't built up the habits and learned the lessons along the way. And so the moment you get that money, it's gone, and you end up worse off.

Yeah. I mean, it taking eight years is quite the number of years to go through that and to remember the pain and to know that you don't want to go back there, I assume.

That's for sure.

I mean, that's when I got out of it. It took me two years, but I remember- You two years.

You're amazing.

Thank Thank you so much. But maybe I had less debt than you.

Probably.

My brain is not that valuable or expensive. I was in credit card debt, so I just bought a bunch of stupid stuff.

You paid for your brain. I had university. And also I had $30,000 in loan debt from a failed company.

Yeah, too. I broke it down by the day. For me, that worked. It made me scared to ever go back there. That's Why? It's interesting. The word debt is used as something that can be used against you by the financial system. But once you have money, it's called leverage, and it can be used in your favor.

A lot of people probably don't know that most of the people who have tons of stock in major companies don't then sell that stock to have money. They borrow money against it because it just makes so much more... So they end up going into debt on one side so that they can keep that stock growing on the other.

Yeah. It was one of the crazy things that I learned once I started getting into this world, was realizing that leverage is just a fancy word for debt. What changed in your mindset, do you think, from those eight years of getting out of debt? Oh, wow.

Truth be told, I felt useless when I was at the start of it. People didn't listen to my ideas, and probably for the right reasons, I was young, and didn't know how to express them. I think just like learning a language of any kind, I needed practice and experience and to put in the reps and to fail a bunch of times along the way so that I would learn not to be the person that feels obligated to buy drinks for everyone at the bar, just so I could impress people. I'm like, I did that. It never works out. I never impressed people, and it cost me hundreds of dollars that night. I don't have that money. It was a lot of hard-earned lessons on, Oh, if I throw a dinner party, I don't need to impress them with expensive liquor. I could just ask them to wine. It's okay for them to contribute. To this day, I live, and me and my wife live, really far below our means. We're very careful. We ask the question constantly, If everything goes wrong and our income disappears, what's our runway today? And we're like, Okay, I want that to be 10 years.

And that works for us because that's what we value. We value knowing that we have safety and security, and then that we use our money to create memories. Where we all actually spend is going on vacation as a family or hosting an experience or something.

But to make you feel safe, you need 10 years of runway?

I grew up in a really financially unstable home. I keep in one just bank account 10 years of rent. Now, that's not the best strategy for building wealth, but It's a good strategy for my mental well-being.

Which, in the end of the day, is the most valuable. I can have a housing conversation with somebody from here to eternity and run the numbers and do the comps and the rest of it. But if it just makes them sleep better at night, then that's your answer. Again, which trumps whatever you might say about the strategy behind that, that it's not growing, that this or that, but you sleeping better at night or you having the peace about it is probably also the culmination of a lot of work that you've done on yourself to identify those traumas or where that came from.

Yeah, it's interesting. The older I get, the more I realize that phrase, you can take the kid out of something, but you can't take something out of the kid. Listen, at a certain point, I'm cooked. This is about as good as I'm going to get on these topics. I might get more opportunities to invest in cool things, or I might get really great advice that will grow my company. But for my mental well-being, that's probably not going to be changing very much anytime soon. I just got to accept it. And fortunately, my wife sees eye to eye on these things. And like you said, your most important financial decision can be who you marry. She This is amazing. And she's like, Yeah, that makes sense to me. If that's what you want, this is the number. We'll keep it in an account. We're good. And so it provides a lot of security for the family.

Yeah, I think The idea that it's the most important decision you're going to make financially isn't whether they have money or not, but whether you can see eye to eye on those values.

They're compatible. I'm sure you've heard the stats that when you look at the biggest issues when analyzing divorce, the number one topic is consistently money. For sure. The amount of stress it can cause is dramatic. The other thing I would say is this concept we were touched on is the sunk cost fallacy, which is we, as people, have a really tough time letting go. Whether it's who we're dating, and maybe it's not the right match, or investments that we've made. This is like a classic Wall Street problem that people hold on stocks long past the point that they should, and so on. I was at a conference a few years ago, and somebody asked the most confusing question. She literally got up and goes, Hey, I'd love your advice. It's me and another behavioral scientist. She says, Should I divorce my husband?

If you're asking, the answer is yes.

Probably. Now, there's a lot of different ways you can actually answer this question. You have kids, how old are Why are you asking? Are you hoping that one of us is single? Where's this going? He said something absolutely brilliant. He said, I have no idea, but there's a great way to figure this out. It's really simple. Ask yourself, if you woke up today and you knew your husband, but you weren't married, you know all the good things, all the bad things, how annoying it can be, how wonderful he can be, the highs, the lows, all of it. Would would you propose? If the answer is no, then the question is, is there something that you could do to make it a yes? Or maybe you just shouldn't be married. Because if you would not propose today, then why should you be in that relationship? Then the only thing that's keeping you there is some conversation you have about the past. Like, I've invested so much time, I've invested so much money or effort. I thought this was brilliant because when we When we invest effort into something, it's called the IKEA effect, we disproportionately value it.

Like assembling our IKEA furniture. It's crap, but we care about it more because we put in all this effort. When we buy a stock or take an investment strategy, or when we start a company and invest all this time and effort into it, and it's not working out, we feel obligated to make it work. Then we start saying things like, Oh, no, the stock is going to bounce back. When it does, I want to get back to where was. It's the same thing that gamblers experience. But if you say, Hey, if I gave you $1,000 today, would you invest it into that stock? And your answer is no. Then why on Earth would you hold on to that stock?

Because of this uncaused fallacy. Because I put in so much time and I put in so much capital and so much research.

And maybe it lost some money and you want to make it back. But that misses the whole point. You have your entire rest of your life ahead of you. You should enjoy it. So be with the person you want to be with.

Buy the stock you want to buy.

Yes. You should have a relationship with the stock you love, not the stock you're with. Now, obviously, there's fees associated with transferring and selling, and you have taxes and all that stuff. So there might be a reason to hold on to it, just in dividends, all these other factors. But the point is that if you're running a company and it is not going well and you are suffering and you do not want to be running that company, unless there's some transaction that's expected soon, like you're about to exit or whatever it is that you're holding on to, why on Earth are you still doing this? Close the company down and go do something that will actually make you the living that you want.

Well, you could say that that could be a privileged position to come from, right? There's no shame in feeding your family if you hate your job, but you need to take care of- Oh, sure.

100%. Whoever. You're absolutely right. That was an oversimplification. I'm saying that too many people in general try to make a company work when it's just not going to work out. I've seen so many startups that are in zombie mode. They are just not going to go anywhere. It's obvious. People keep pushing. They hate doing it. That's different than like, Oh, I'm working at a marketing firm. I don't really enjoy it, but it makes a great living. That's not a zombie situation. That's still a situation where you can make a way for it to thrive.

Yeah, I think that you have to optimize for money at work. You can get passion in other places. You can't get money in other places unless you're doing some nefarious stuff or you have a trust fund or whatever. I shouldn't say a trust fund because we talk a lot about trusts and not in the old-school legacy way. But yeah, you can't get money outside of work unless you're doing something illegal or you come from a lot of money. Sure. Optimizing for money, I think, is quite a fair and healthy way to approach it. Oh, 100%.

This idea that you're going to be passionate about your work is like- I hate. Oh, my God, it's the worst. The only people who ever talk about having passion at work are people who somehow developed a huge amount of success in something that's completely not sexy. Then made a fortune and got a lot of positive attention so that they became passionate about it over time. So passion is a byproduct of a positive feedback loop. When you are a child and you do a little dance for your parents and they clap for you, that positive feedback loop then says, Oh, if I do this again, I'll get more positive attention. And over time, that person could become a theater person, right? So they become passionate about it. But it's not because they were born passionate for it. It's that there was a series of positive feedback loops that said, Okay, I have potential here. I am going to get positive feedback for doing this thing. And so I like that, and I end up spending more time thinking about it and developing expertise about it. In your 20s, that's the time to go work yourself to the bone, learn stuff, develop thought leadership, develop expertise.

And as a byproduct, over time, you become passionate about something. If you think day I was passionate about behavioral science. No, it was like, when I learned some behavioral science thing, I applied it, and holy cow, somebody's actually interacting with me because it worked.

Well, I think the equation is just wrong. That if you're passionate about something, doesn't I mean, you're successful. If you're successful at something, you become more passionate. That is at least what happened with me.

You became passionate because you became successful? Yes. Yeah, 100 %.

I didn't like finance. I was like, No, what the hell? Poetry major, hello. I thought this was the worst job I could ever get. And then I found the shaded part of the Venn diagram where I was like, I like writing. Here's the opportunity that I have. And it became something that I was passionate about because I was good at it.

I'm in full agreement that we will, on average, develop passion as we develop expertise and success. Then people want our ideas, which then supports us feeling good about it and feeling like we're experts. But if we really look, anytime your friend gets a new job, and you say, How's it going? What's the overwhelming thing they say? They say, I'm really enjoying it. I'm learning a lot. It comes from the process of growth and feeling like you're improving. That tends to then feed wanting to grow more and learn more and develop more expertise. And not that, Oh, you were born to do something. That's like total BS.

And you've proven the fact that it's who you know, not what you know that matters most.

Now, if you can combine both of those things. So I will tell you-World watch out. Yeah. Because I then said, It's not enough. I figured out the factor of how to connect with people, how to meet them, and how to develop those relationships. It took years. And then I said, now I have to treat my craft the way that an Olympian treats the sport. And so since I'm a speaker, what that meant was no speaker practices. No speaker does like the Monday morning reviewing of the tapes. I'd practice an hour for every minute I was on stage, which is an insane amount.

Yeah, because your speeches are an hour.

In the early days, though, they weren't. They were like, People, when you're first starting out, we'll give you 20 minutes or something like that. So I'd practice 20 hours. Then I'd watch the Greats and see what they did. Then I'd watch technical analysis of how talks are written, and I'd practice, and I'd go out to events, and I'd be chatting with people. I'd just try a story, and if it didn't land, I'd try it another way, and over and over again.

So what's a win for you in a speech now? When you leave a room? Is it that they did a survey with everybody and you killed it? Is it that they invite you back? Is it that somebody reached out to you and said you'd help them or change their lives?

I recently, it was This past year, got to open for one of the biggest CEOs in the world. Everybody knows who this person is. And a few weeks later, I found out two things. One was I was the highest rated speaker at the conference, which was awesome to know. The entire audience was just CEOs of major companies. The second was I got an email from the CEO of eBay saying, I heard your talk was amazing. Will you have a conversation with me?

As a friend, as somebody to speak at the company as a consultant?

Initially, he was like, I heard you were fantastic. Will you just have a conversation with me? And that's when I knew I did a good job because somebody in the audience went to the extent of telling somebody who wasn't there. The question is, are you remarkable? When you interact with somebody, when you have a conversation, when you are pitching your product, when you are interacting with one of your customers, is the experience so exceptional that they have to remark about it? They literally have to talk about it. The reason that this is so important is that our species survived because of our ability to communicate, our ability to connect. If something isn't worth talking about, it's not culturally relevant. And so the mark of you being great is somebody actually talking about you. And that's the goal.

So tell me about those rooms of CEOs, too, because you've done a lot of work on this. It comes up in your new book. Do you have to be an asshole to be a CEO?

I will answer this in two ways. The first is that there was this crazy study in England called the Great British Psychopath Study. A psychopath is actually somebody... It's an interesting definition. It's somebody who has a veneer of charm. So you think that they're super They're charismatic, and it's hiding a complete lack of remorse. So it's like they actually enjoy firing people and things like that. It's one of what's called...

It's like sociopath.

It's similar, but there's four characteristics that we're actually concerned about. One is the psychopath, and the other three, all of them together, comprise what's called the dark tetrad, which are like these four personality types that you would refer to as an asshole CEO. And the other three are Are you a narciss? Or is the person a narciss? Meaning it's all about them? Are they a Machiavelian? Are you just a tool for them to accomplish their goal? Or are they sadistic? Are they sadist? And that's somebody who actually enjoys your suffering. It's like a lot of us have had this boss that gives us a task to do that's actually impossible. And that way, when you come to the meeting, they yell at you in front of everybody because they enjoy shaming people. And the answer is it's estimated that about 5% of executives fit into the psychopath space.

The top ones?

Yeah. So the reason is that if you feel very comfortable manipulating people, then you can take credit for all their work and leave them hanging, right? And so there is a higher collection of these personalities at the very top of companies. But do you need to be an asshole? Absolutely not. There's this myth of the alpha male, right? Did we ever talk about where this came from? It's so ridiculous. Tell me.

Like the Wolf pack thing? Yeah. Okay, yes, I have. But no, for our audience's benefit.

1970s, this guy named L. David Meek, Wolf researcher, writes a book called The Wolf, becomes wildly successful, like unexpectedly so. In fact, a Supreme Court justice wrote the New York Times book review on it. It was crazy. In it, he explains that wolves dominate in order to control, and that's how they control their wolf pack, and they use force and violence to basically do that. You'll see a lot of pinning, biting, all that stuff. This became like a rallying cry on Wall Street for like, Oh, I'm the alpha wolf. I'm the leader of the pack. I'm going to dominate and win. And that's how you get stuff done. And then he repeated his research in the '90s and discovered he was completely wrong. The reason looked like wolves were dominating is that when they reach mating age, they find a mating pair. They have cubs, and cubs are often... They get big, but they still pin them down so that they don't get in trouble. And so you see this very what you would call dominant behavior. But if your kid was running off to traffic and not looking both ways, you'd grab them and pull them back.

It actually wasn't dominance, it was child rearing. Here's what's more interesting. If you actually look at who you want to work for, nobody wants to stick around when somebody's constantly dominating them and embarrassing them and doing these things for them. The people that end up sticking around at these companies tend not to be the people you actually want working at a company. Can you go into a negotiation and dominate and eat someone's lunch, as they say? Yeah. But even at Apple, Steve Jobs used to do Then after a year, the company that they made an agreement with was like, We're out. We can't live under these conditions. All the contracts would have to be renegotiated. A separate team would come in, unassociated to jobs, because We didn't actually want them in the room. And that's the problem, which is that you can get away with it for a short time, but people won't deal with you unless they have to.

But in that case, you had to.

With jobs? Yeah. But you're a company. You're only going to keep going if it's profitable. You can't be producing iPads at a loss.

What characteristics make the best CEO?

I spent about three years studying leadership, and what we found was that most places said, Oh, there are these 10 or 12 essential characteristics of a leader. What ends up happening is if you actually look at them, most leaders have none of them. Elon Musk is not great at creating psychological safety or consensus among his leadership or any of these things. Wildly successful CEO by Wall Street standards. Steve Jobs wasn't like that. Bill Gates. You look at the list, none of them have these characteristics. What you end up realizing is that the defining characteristic of a leader is really stupid. It's simply that they have followers. Now, the reason we follow someone is very strange. It's a quirk of human behavior, and it works like this. Do you remember back in high school, Sunday night, it's about 6: 00 PM? Yes. Yeah. Do you remember how you'd feel the Sunday Scaries?

Sunday Scaries, yeah.

Notice you're free, you're at home, but you're anxious. Friday at 1: 00 PM, you're in class. How do you feel?

Excited.

Yeah. The weekend's coming. It's a party. Human beings don't relate to the present. We relate to the future that we believe we have.

The weekend ahead or the weekend behind.

Exactly. Or the work a week ahead. The reason that we actually follow someone is that when we interact with them, we have an emotional response that causes us to feel that there'll be a new and better future. The reason that people listen to your podcast, and follow you is because when they do, they learn something, hear something, or get the feeling about something that tomorrow will be better because I've heard this. I'm more empowered, I'm more capable of creating a future of financial freedom. Now, when it comes to leadership, though, it doesn't mean that you even need to like the person. You'll also ignore all their shortcomings because of that feeling of a new and better future. What actually gets us to feel that, to get back to the skills thing, is not that somebody has a perfect collection of skills. I'm not perfectly or even mildly well-rounded. I don't want to make any comments about you, but it's actually the opposite. It's that you have a collection of super skills that are so profound, that are so impactful, that when listeners interact with that, when people interact with that, they go, wow, If she's in charge, I don't need to worry about this.

If I just do what she says.

Thank you. It's like mama's home.

Yeah, exactly.

Daddy's home. Yeah.

You've got your shit together and you know how to handle this? And as a byproduct, it doesn't need to be a concern for me anymore. That's why we follow, because we meet people that are not well-rounded. And so this idea that a CEO has all of these skills or whatever, it's total BS. It comes from companies trying to sell us training programs. Because if I can sell you these 12 characteristics, I can come in and I can sell it to your C-suite, and then you pay the fortune and your people get a certificate. So the question then is, or the problem that it creates is that just having a bunch of followers doesn't make you actually effective. What then really matters is who's on the team. Can the team coordinate? Can you get the people that have the skills that you don't to work with you so that together you can actually solve problems quickly? And that's what really matters.

I was reading that the most effective CEOs are either megalomaniacs, so You touched on that. Autistic, which you didn't put in your list, or have some deep-seated revenge. They got kicked out of their company or something, and they are just seething with revenge.

They've got a bone to pick, is what you're saying. Totally. So let's actually unpack these. You will get a lot of drive and work out of somebody who's obsessive, right? You also You'll look at the examples of the CEOs that you know, and you'll see they're all crazy. Steve Jobs wasn't a well-regulated human being when There are all these reports of meetings that he had where he would literally fire people and yell at them and be like, This is the stupidest person I've ever met in my life. You hear stories about Elon Musk, too, and all that. The problem is there's this weird unwritten rule that exists in business, which is if you say crazy stuff and you're a leader, we will publish articles about you. When we publish articles about you, your brand will get more attention for free. And so have you ever heard of Ryanair? Yes. Their CEO is awesome.

Yes. I did the backpacking around your situation.

You were around your 20-euro trip, where you basically have to stand and there's no customer service. Ryanair is a low-cost airline that grew from a regional small airline to a massive multibillion-dollar enterprise. And the way they did it was one of their strategies. The CEO would go on radio, television, anywhere, and just say the most obnoxious things. He would say things like, Oh, whenever our drink sales are down, the pilots just engineer some turbulence, shake the plane, and then people get nervous and buy more drinks. Or he'll insult customers. He'll say, Yeah, of course, we don't have customer service. You shouldn't expect a reflux. Or stuff like that. He once got hit in the face during a climate week event or something like that with a pie, and they used that video, which led to a 6% rise in sales of their airline tickets for the following several weeks.

Okay, what does that tell us?

That tells us that the outrageous CEOs get attention. The ones that have their heads down and actually are doing different type of work, they just don't get attention, so you don't know the strategies that work for them. It means a few things. The first is copying a CEO who's outrageous, if that's not your personality, you're going to just fail because you don't have the skill set or the charisma or maybe the actual insanity. Just because a handful of people that get a lot of attention do stuff, doesn't mean it's reproducible. The other thing is that all of these CEOs, every one of them obviously works hard and all these things, but they all do it with a different set of skills. I would be less concerned about the specific skills and more concerned about the team that you can put together. Because if you want to manufacture something, you probably need a manufacturing expert. If you want a great marketing campaign, you are going to need a marketing expert. You cannot be all things to all people. Even myself as a speaker, I don't take my own head shots. I don't do my own website.

Really awkward selfies.

Although AI, I don't know.

I know I've asked it to render me. As you've noticed, I don't animate well. There's a recent drawing.

John walked into the studio today, and the first thing he said when he looked at my new book was, Wow, you Photoshop well.

I don't. I just do not Photoshop. I was like, ouch. That's our relationship. Yeah, it's like a sibling relation.

I mean, and then you tried to back out of it with like, I don't sketch well. Check me out in the New Yorker. You do sketch well. No, I And everybody photoshop's well. No. What?

It's like the sunken eye. I got so many things going on.

You do not. But before we started the podcast, we were just ripping about my shortcomings, one being how self-deprecating I am. I thought, I was like, Oh, you'll forget more than I will ever know about behavioral science. But I know that self-deprecation is a sign of good EQ, emotional intelligence. So booyah. And you were like, Wait, wait, wait. There's 47 studies that I've read and 18 that I've conducted myself with the largest blah, blah, blah.

So let's actually go into this. There's Have you ever seen a rom-com? I'm sure you have. You'll always notice that the lead character is falling all over themselves. Hugh Grant, like Zoe Dishamel, whatever it is. And it turns out that we actually like them more because of these quirks or imperfection. At one point, it was called the... What is it? The Pixie Dream Girl, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, describing, I think, Natalie Portman. The researchers were actually curious if this is true. So they had people go in for job interviews and either deliver a perfect interview or deliver a perfect interview and drop some papers or spill some coffee. And what they found is that those that spilled and dropped outranked those that were perfect. It was actually the same. People listened to recordings of the interviews, and they either cut it off before the incident or after. And what we end up discovering is that when you can demonstrate your humanity without damaging your credibility, you're viewed as more likable. But that really, really works when you have incredibly high status. So if you're the CEO of your company and you crack a joke.

I heard Payton Manning speak, and he was like, Oh, my first season, I lost 13 games and only won three. That was a total train wreck. Yeah, he can say stuff like that because you know how competent he is. If all he ever we talked about was his failures, it starts getting a little weird. A little bit is a good thing because it eases the social pressure and makes you seem human. A lot of it, probably not that useful. There's like a continuum or curve.

You're saying that I'm not being effective because I overindex on self-deprecation?

I'm saying that you are wildly effective, and you could be even more effective.

By doing what?

Toned it down a bit.

So just say thank you. Yeah.

Here's one of the reasons why. The smallest unit of trust is something called a vulnerability loop. I think we may have talked about it on the last podcast. It just works like this. Person one signals vulnerability, person two acknowledges it, person two signals vulnerability, person one acknowledges, trust increases. If I put out a compliment, I'm signaling vulnerability, I'm Wow, I'm really impressed by you. If you say, I'm not impressive, that's not acknowledging, that's saying I'm stupid for thinking that. And so it actually reduces the trust or potential trust between people. Wow.

I never thought of it that way. I would never want to say that.

Yeah. It's the same thing with gifts, right? If somebody brought you flowers and you're like, No, just no. Who does that? People offer gifts all the time. What? Yeah. It happens. People say, Oh, I brought you- What flowers are you bringing your wife? I brought you really ugly ones, apparently. But the point is, when somebody offers you something like, Oh, I'll send you a copy of my book, and you're like, No. That's hurtful. The answer is- People don't do that. I get so many books because of all the people I meet that- You're that guy? I end up having to explain two things. One is that I'm dyslexic. It's really overwhelming for me to actually read a book. And so I say, I would absolutely love your book. Do you have an audio copy? And then I actually listen to people's books. That's kind. Because I don't want it to go to waste. I'm like, and I would love to learn more about Stacks & Stack.

I feel even more honored that you were reading the book before this. Okay, so I'll work on that.

Thank you. And here's what's a way to handle it, if you want. Because I used to be in the same boat. I used to get really uncomfortable when people would compliment me on stuff. Then I realized what I was doing. I was actually making them uncomfortable by being like, Oh, It's not a big deal. They're like, Oh, my God, I absolutely love blank. And then going, Oh, yeah, it's okay. It's not a big deal. And they're like, But I love it. Why are you telling me it's not a big deal? I go, Wow, I really appreciate that. And then I explain how difficult or what it was like to actually do it. I really appreciate that. It was one of the hardest times in my life when I was working on that. I had a hard time acknowledging that it was really something special. I appreciate that you said that.

I love that.

And because we often feel this need to deflect, but it actually doesn't serve us, right? And so I needed to find a way to be able to handle the compliment without breaking my brain.

Masterfully. You did it masterfully, and I would like to borrow that tactic.

You keep, yeah.

Because two things came to mind when you were saying that. The first one is what I learned, and I learned so much about life in the improv class that I took, which is yes and. So you're not yes anding that person. Somebody is giving you, you call it vulnerability in improv, somebody is giving you a direction for the scene, and you just say, no, we're not in spaceship. It's like, scene's over.

What do you want me to do with that? I can't do anything. If you say no, it's over between it. There's no chemistry anymore. Yeah.

So that's really interesting. I never equated it in that sense. And then also what's helped me, although I still do this badly as well, you were so kind to reach out many times after the fire, thank you, and offered help. And a lot of people did, and it was a moment that I had to ask for help, and I always felt uncomfortable doing that. But what's helped me wrap my head around that was the idea that I love being of service, and I love being helpful. So what does it sound like if you asked me for help? Of course, I would want that. And so I would assume the reverse as well. I don't want to offend you. This makes maybe you happy or brings you joy or you feel good to help somebody you need or whatever it is. I think thinking about what the other person, how that comes across to what their intention is, which is kind and good and warm and fuzzy, is the same thing for the complement.

I'll even take it one step further, if you like. This is something that you can think about with your employees and people that you work with. There's this characteristic that I call stacking. It comes from a about people asking for directions. It turns out that if I stop a stranger on the street and ask for complex directions, overwhelmingly, I'm not getting them. It's just like people are busy all that. But if I say, Hey, what's the time? And they give me the time, and then I ask for directions, they end up almost always giving the directions. And this is counterintuitive because I'm asking for actually more, and I get all of it. And the reason this is important is that once somebody does something for you, you're viewed as worthy of more effort. They actually care more about you. And so at a certain point, I realized, Oh, the way we survived is because we invested effort into one another as a species. If we don't do that, we just don't survive. That means that when I accept or ask for support, that actually brings the person closer to me. If I I want to have meaningful relationships, I actually need to ask for stuff, and I need to accept stuff.

Otherwise, there's no relationship.

We end our episodes by asking all of our guests for a final tip that listeners can take straight to the I think.

We are constantly scared that we're going to bother people asking for help. Everybody really wants to help you, even strangers. Just get over that damn fear. Go and ask people for their input, their support, their help, Whatever it is, their services, just ask. Because those people who say yes will then care more about your success and will feel more invested in you and will want to see you win more. And so the more people you can do that with, the better off you'll be.

Why do you think we're hardwired to want to help others?

Because we literally can't survive as a species alone. You know how hard it is to be a mother. You cannot collect food and care for a baby all by yourself. We need other people. And so we are fundamentally wired to connect with each other and to care about one each other. Because if we don't do that, we're just done as a species.