Jon Levy, Behavioral Scientist and New York Times Bestselling Author

Summary

The Walker Webcast: Jon Levy on the Science of Leadership, Trust, and Team Genius

Podcast: The Walker Webcast
Host: Willy Walker (CEO, Walker & Dunlop)
Guest: Jon Levy (Behavioral Scientist, Keynote Speaker, NYT Bestselling Author)
Date: February 5, 2026

---

Episode Overview

In this dynamic episode, Willy Walker welcomes Jon Levy, acclaimed behavioral scientist and author, for a deep dive into the real drivers of effective leadership, team performance, and the science behind building high-trust, high-impact cultures. The conversation ranges from the flaws of conventional leadership assessments to the secrets of Levy’s infamous Influencers Dinners, and from the role of psychological safety in teams to the promise (and limits) of AI in the workplace. Levy unpacks the myths and realities of what makes companies (and leaders) thrive, mixing research insights with lively anecdotes and memorable moments.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Debunking Traditional Views on Leadership (04:04–11:17)

• Levy challenges the validity of “personality tests” and certain business school teachings for predicting or nurturing true leadership.
• Leadership ≠ Personality Traits: Tools like Myers-Briggs, while popular, have little predictive value for effective leadership.
• The Core Leadership Trait: “The only thing that was common across all leaders... is that you all have followers.” (Levy, 05:56)
• What Inspires Others To Follow: It's not charisma or vision alone, but making people feel “emotionally that there will be a new and better future.” (Levy, 07:45)
• Leadership archetypes vary—there’s no single ‘star CEO’ mold for success.

2. The Crucial Role of Teams—and Psychological Safety (10:31–13:44)

• From Stars to Groups: Exceptional companies are not built by superstar CEOs acting solo, but by well-functioning, diverse teams.
• Team Dynamics: The most effective teams have a mix of complementary skills and a climate of psychological safety—even when led by notoriously tough leaders.
• “Because the smallest unit of effectiveness isn’t leader, it’s team.” (Levy, 12:29)

3. Spotlighting Quiet (But Vital) Contributors: Glue Players (52:06–55:52)

• Multipliers: Some team members, like NBA’s Shane Battier, are “multipliers” or “glue players,” making everyone else perform better despite not racking up flashy stats.
• Three Traits of Glue Players:
  1. High emotional intelligence.
  2. Team-first orientation (e.g., stepping aside when others are better suited).
  3. Forward thinking—acting proactively for the group’s benefit.
• “They multiply everybody else’s results by a factor of 1.6, which is just crazy.” (Levy, 53:50)

4. The Influence Experiment: Lessons from the Influencers Dinner (16:16–27:46)

• Setup: Leaders, Nobel laureates, artists, and more cook dinner together without sharing their names or professions.
• Diversity by Design: No more than two guests from the same industry to maximize unique perspectives and mutual respect.
• Anonymity as an Equalizer: “We tend to have more of an experience of imposter syndrome than arrogance in general.” (Levy, 18:54)
• Leadership Fluidity: Accountability in organizations is fixed, but true leadership during collaborative tasks is “fluid” and emerges situationally.

Memorable Dinner Moments

• The story of Isaiah Thomas, the NBA legend, who sat unnoticed next to a guest until the reveal: “‘I can’t believe I was making guacamole with Isaiah freaking Thomas bragging about my Division 3 basketball career.’” (Levy, 22:40)
• A recurring insight: Even at the top, people feel like outsiders. “No matter who was there, nobody felt like they belonged.” (Levy, 23:10)

5. Belonging and Shared Experience (28:42–30:19; 30:48–37:15)

• Events like Burning Man foster community through shared effort and common ground, erasing status distinctions.
• Human connection boils down to “common interests” and “shared effort.” (Levy, 29:20)

6. Vision, Trust, and the Emotions of Followership (30:19–37:15)

• On Vision: It’s not simply the “charisma” or “substance” of a vision that wins hearts and minds–it’s the emotional resonance and how people feel about a leader’s intent.
• “What people really look for… is a sense of belonging and community.” (Levy, 27:28)
• Trust’s Formula:
  1. Honesty
  2. Competence
  3. Benevolence—valued above honesty and competence (33:26–34:35).

Sales and Trust Example

• “Person B comes in and says, ‘ Willy, your company’s success depends on these servers... here’s my phone number. I will be there figuring it out with you.’ Who do you trust more?” (Levy, 34:15)
• Walker: “... the trust factor between our team and the client is really what better dominates the sale.” (36:07)

7. AI’s Impact on Teams, Trust, and the Workplace (37:15–42:00)

• Short-term Fears vs. Real Potential: AI might replace some efficiency functions, but its promise is in making teams smarter and more emotionally intelligent—not just replacing people.
• AI as Team Coach: Advanced systems can “notice” team dynamics, alert leaders, and increase group effectiveness.
• “We can actually program an agent to increase the emotional intelligence of the group.” (Levy, 41:24)
• Citing DARPA research: AI as a ‘sidekick’ can raise team intelligence measurably.

8. Coaching, Learning, and the Military Model (42:00–51:41)

• Coaching Drives Performance: The main differentiator between improvement and stagnation is having a coach, not just putting in more practice hours.
• “Employees with coaches get more compliments and comments on their improvement, even when... people making the comments had no idea that they were using a coach.” (Levy, 48:20)
• Military vs. Corporate Talent Models: The military recruits individuals, then finds their best-fit role—a strategy that works best with junior positions and fosters development.
• “They have all of these structures built in... [because] their lives depend on it.” (Levy, 48:53)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Leadership Tests:
  “It's like doing a horoscope. They're like fun. But it turns out that they aren't really great at predicting anything.” — Jon Levy (05:30)

• On Visionary Leaders:
  “For human beings, our experience of the present doesn't define how we feel, but rather the future that we believe we have.” — Jon Levy (07:32)

• On Glue Players:
  “They multiply everybody else's results by a factor of 1.6, which is just crazy. Nothing causes a 60% increase in people's performance.” — Jon Levy (53:50)

• On Trust:
  “We value benevolence above honesty and honesty above competence.” — Jon Levy (34:12)
  “If you look at the doctors who get sued, it's not the incompetent doctors, it's the one with the bad side manner.” — Jon Levy (36:08)

• On AI and Teams:
  “If emotional intelligence is such a critical factor, we can actually program an agent to increase the emotional intelligence of the group.” — Jon Levy (41:11)

• On the Impact of Coaching:
  “The thing that we found most consistently improves a person’s skill is having a qualified coach.” — Jon Levy (48:05)

• On Imposter Syndrome:
  “No matter who was there, nobody felt like they belonged.” — Jon Levy (23:10)

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 04:04 – Levy calls out the limitations of personality tests and business school approaches to teaching leadership.
• 07:40 – The “Sunday Scaries” analogy and what really motivates followers.
• 12:29 – The centrality of team over individual leader.
• 18:42–22:40 – Stories from the Influencers Dinner and the phenomenon of “fluid leadership.”
• 27:28 – Shared events and belonging.
• 30:48 – The science of vision, trust, and the emotional basis of following.
• 34:12–36:08 – What drives trust in sales and leadership.
• 37:15–41:11 – AI’s potential as a tool for team intelligence and emotional insight.
• 42:56–48:20 – The value of coaching, practice, and personalized development.
• 52:06–53:50 – Glue players and their profound (but overlooked) contribution to high-performing teams.

---

Tone & Style

Levy's approach is rigorous yet humorous, gently poking fun at status symbols and business fads while grounding his arguments in behavioral research and real-world experience. Walker is a warm, attentive host, who candidly applies Levy's frameworks to his own life and company, creating a conversational, relatable atmosphere while driving at insights.

---

Conclusion

This episode of The Walker Webcast offers a rich, research-backed, and often surprising perspective on leadership, team building, and human connection—from dinners where no one knows who’s famous to the power of “glue players” and the subtle (and not-so-subtle) forces shaping trust and performance at work. Leaders, managers, and anyone striving to build better teams will find actionable insights, memorable anecdotes, and plenty of food for thought—just don’t expect to ace that Myers-Briggs test.

Transcript

[Willie Walker]

Join Willie Walker, Walker and Dunlop's Chairman and CEO as we bring you fresh perspectives about leadership, business, the economy and commercial real estate. Willie hosts a diverse network of leaders as they share wisdom that cuts across industry lines. His guests are experts in their fields, from leading economists and CEOs to Harvard and Yale professors and everything in between. Our one goal is simple, providing you with unique insights, unparalleled data and real time market analyses.

Welcome to another Walker webcast. I'm really excited to be joined by John Levy today. I'll do John's intro in a second before I dive into that. We've focused on housing and real estate for the last two weeks and I had Ivy Zelman on two weeks ago and I had Dr. Peter Linderman on last week and Ivy's episode on the housing market Overall has over 320,000 views so far on YouTube and Peter has just gone over 220,000 on last week's Macroeconomic conversation. And so to those of you who tuned into us to hear a really good deep dive on the housing market and the overall commercial real estate market, thanks for joining us last week. This week we kind of shift gears and we go to leadership and John Levy is a keynote speaker, behavioral scientist and New York Times bestselling author known for his work on trust, leadership teams and the AI enabled workplace, which we will invariably talk about today. John specializes in applying the latest research to transform the ways companies approach C suite and employee performance, marketing, sales, culture, training and development. His clients range from Fortune 500 grand such as Microsoft, Google, AB, InBev and Samsung to startups. More than a decade ago, John founded the Influencers Dinner, which we are very clearly going to talk about today. A secret dining experience for industry leaders ranging from Nobel Laureates to Olympians to celebrities to executives to artists, musicians and even Grammy winning voice of the Boy Bark from who Let the Dogs out and guests cook the dinner together but can't discuss their careers or give their last names and once seated to eat, they reveal who they are. Over time, these dinners developed into a community with thousands of members. Influencers is the largest community of its type worldwide. John's second book, you're the Art and Science of Connection, Trust and Belonging was released in 2021 to incredible fanfare, quickly becoming a New York Times, Wall Street Journal and international bestseller. He was selected by the Wall Street Journal as the Book of the Month. In it he demonstrates the importance of human connection, trust and community to accomplishing what is most important to us. His third book, which we will focus A bunch of time on Today, Team How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Collective Genius spent weeks on the national bestseller list and received a star rating from both Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. In it, he demystifies the science of leadership and the habits that make teams more than the sum of their parts. In his free time, John works on outrageous projects. Among them spending a year traveling to all seven continents or the World's greatest Events, Grand Prix, Art Basel, Burning Man, Running of the bulls, etc. And barely surviving to tell the tale. I went to Burning man this past year, John and I. And I didn't. It wasn't a near. I survived.

[John Levy]

It wasn't a near death experience.

[Willie Walker]

You know, some people do view it as such. These adventures were con in his first book, the 2am principle, Discover the Science of Adventure. So John, let's start here. First of all, thanks for joining me. It's really a joy.

[John Levy]

My pleasure.

[Willie Walker]

So I want to go to the dinners. But before we do that, the setup to all this is, is that I read your most recent book. You spend the very you spend the first couple chapters sort of, if you will. I don't want to say debunking, maybe you do debunk sort of common literature as it relates to leadership traits and what leaders need to focus on. But as someone who has taken the Myers Briggs, which you basically discard as having no capability to indicate leadership skills, someone who went to business school, and you especially poke fun at Harvard Business School, where I happen to go to business school, where you say it doesn't really teach you how to be a leader. And as someone who is viewed by many as an alpha male CEO of a public traded company where you say 70% of publicly traded companies are led by alpha males, but that does not necessarily mean that they are the right leaders for those organizations are for any organization. Tell me why I should feel good about myself today after reading that's so funny.

[John Levy]

So first of all, the fact that you even just took the Myers Briggs suggests that you care about improvement, which is a really important factor. Right. This growth mindset we've consistently seen really matters. But let's take a step back. I've spent about three years researching this and I was curious what actually matters to make somebody a really incredible or effective leader or run a great team. And I was searching for real answers. So I started with looking also at these personality tests and they're really amusing. It's like doing a horoscope. They're like fun. But it turns out that they aren't really great at Predicting anything, it might tell you that you're more introverted or extroverted. That doesn't mean you're going to be a better or worse leader. Because of that. There's no relationship between those traits and being an effective leader. And Harvard Business School is an amazing place. You'll learn a lot of things there, maybe a lot of accounting, or maybe even how to negotiate better. But sending somebody to a school to learn how to lead is like saying, okay, I want you to learn how to drive a car. Here, play this video game, Mario Kart. If you're completely separated from people, what's the feedback loop? How are you going to know if a technique you applied or a way that you communicated really worked? Because at Harvard, you're just surrounded by a bunch of people who are already hyper competitive. They're going to go along with stuff. So what we ended up discovering is that none of these things are great predictors of anything. That in fact, there's only one thing that was common across all leaders, and it was frankly kind of stupid. It's that you all have followers. And I would argue, really, that when you ask people why we follow someone, the most common answers are vision and charisma. And I actually don't have a doubt that you're a very charismatic and visionary leader. There are plenty of leaders who don't have that trait, so it couldn't be the defining characteristic. What we ended up discovering that really defined a leader had to do with. Do you have kids?

[Willie Walker]

I do. I have three.

[John Levy]

How old are they?

[Willie Walker]

22, 20 and 18.

[John Levy]

Okay, do you remember when I guess the 18 year old might still be in high school? Uh, in college. Okay, so when your kids were in high school, Sunday nights at 6pm, what would be their mood?

[Willie Walker]

Well, given that we've just watched a couple hours of NFL Red Zone, he typically was in a pretty good mood. But I think I know where you're going. Which is he's looking for the upcoming week and not in the best mood as it relates to having to do homework and going back to school.

[John Levy]

Exactly. The Sunday scaries. So the fun was over. Quality time with dad was over. And now the future is, oh my God, I have school. And so he's free but anxious. And at Friday at 1pm, he's in class, locked in and excited. Why? Because the weekend's ahead and he's going to get more time. Quality time with dad. For human beings, our experience of the present doesn't define how we feel, but rather the future that we believe we have. And the common trait we found across all leaders is, is that when you interact with them, they make you feel emotionally that there will be a new and better future. That's it.

[Willie Walker]

So double click on that a little bit as it relates to you. You underscore sort of the characteristics of some of the most prominent leaders who probably wouldn't be viewed as the greatest people. Whether it's from being respectful to people or being eloquent in the way that they express views. Yet it's that vision that they have the sense that they're going to change the world. You were talking to somebody who was in a tech company who said, I can either be, you know, completely strung out in this job and getting no sleep or be bored to death. And I'd rather be strung out working 24 by 7 for this leader than or death sitting on my rear end. Talk about that, about the characteristics of leadership, because I think there is a certain sense that we all have that leaders are supposed to be a certain profile, if you will. And that doesn't necessarily correlate to success.

[John Levy]

That's the beauty of it, is that the studies keep showing things like psychological safety and bringing consensus and all that might be really important for a team. And then we look at the most effective leaders in our society, like Elon Musk, a Bill Gates, a Steve Jobs. They weren't known for creating psychological safety. That's an absurd expectation of them. They in fact were known for being, or are known for being really contentious, for even potentially bullying. Saying that then we need to mimic that doesn't make sense because they're also fantastic leaders who don't have those skills. And so what becomes clear is that what causes us to feel that there's a new and better future is not some specific set of skills. It's that whatever your super skills are, these handful of skills that are so disproportionately strong that when people interact with them, we feel that there's a new future. So in Elon Musk's case, he thinks it's scale and moves faster than anyone in our society. Now, you might not like the guy, that's fine. You don't need to like the person's personality. When people interact with him, they go, wow, I believe there'll be a new future and they'll either invest in his companies, buy his products, or want to work for him. And that's the defining characteristic, that feeling of a new future.

[Willie Walker]

But you just mentioned the psychological safety, and in your book you underscore how important psychological safety is even more so. You talk a lot about the skill sets of the team and making sure that leaders have people around them who, if you will, complement their skills or fill in for the skills that they either don't have the capability to use or aren't that good at. But one of the things that I took from your book, John, was that that sense of psychological safety is like paramount to getting a team to work well together. And yet you just use an example of Elon Musk where it feels like I've never been inside of his executive team, but it feels like from the way that he says things and acts that there probably isn't a lot of psychological safety.

[John Levy]

So I'd say a few things about this. The first is that we expect leaders to be all things to all people. And that's not realistic right there. Elon Musk, Steve Jobs are probably a bunch of people on this call, all very impressive. But that doesn't mean that they're going to be well rounded. And so when we actually looked at the important factors, giving people a sense that there'll be a new and better future will get them to follow, right? That'll get the team together for the heist. It won't let the team get away with the heist. At that point when we actually want the team to be effective, it's about the wide range of skills on the team. And my hunch is that if you look at the teams at Elon's different companies ranging from SpaceX to Tesla to SolarCity, or you look at Apple and all that, the way that these people function is that they have people around them with incredibly high emotional intelligence to well round their behavior to provide a buffer between them and the rest of the team. Because it is not realistic for people over long term periods of time to live in constant fear. But if we can have a well rounded team, then it can reduce the negative impact of some of these more, let's say harsh characteristics and allow the teams to actually function really well. Because the smallest unit of effectiveness isn't leader, it's team.

[Willie Walker]

When you talk about that, one of the, one of the components of highly effective teams that you underscore is that it's not about the CEO, it's not about the star CEO, but it's actually about the way that the team interacts. Yet we find ourselves in a world, whether it's due to social media, whether it's due to employment contracts for star CEOs that boards seem to pay up and pay up and pay up for CEO Pay. And now there's actually a SEC definition that you must put into your proxy as a publicly traded company as it relates to the ratio of the CEO's pay to the, to the average worker inside the company to make sure that that doesn't get too out of whack. And many boards say, basically say, I don't care how whack that gets, I'm going to hire the star CEO. What's your counseling to CEOs as it relates to the, if you will, flying too close to the sun to sort of have their name in the headlines and that that's what pulls the team and pulls the company across versus staying out of the spotlight, staying out of social media and really focusing on the day to day interaction with their executive team, which at the end of the day is what actually gets the team functioning better than having a star CEO.

[John Levy]

So I think the, the first thing to understand is that there's an unwritten rule with media and the media. Unwritten rule is if you say things that are sensational, if you do things that are loud and abrasive, we will cover you and you will get more attention. And for a lot of companies that's great. The classic example I give in the book is Ryan Ayer, CEO. He's like an arrogant jerk and so he'll say just the most obnoxious stuff like, oh, whenever we want to increase drink sales, we'll just manufacture some turbulence and drink sales go right up. That's like an awful thing to say, right? And do. But because he says that the media covers him and then Ryanair's sales go up in the following days. And so there are a slew of CEOs that play this game and are really good at it. And as a byproduct, we think that that's what all CEOs are, Mike. Because we don't see all of the quiet CEOs, the ones that are heads down with their teams grinding. We also don't notice that if you look across the Fortune 500, most people have no idea what most of those companies are because they're not consumer facing. So Maybe there's what, 20, 30 CEOs that anybody's ever heard of. Everybody else probably doesn't have those characteristics. Now that doesn't change one amusing fact. There was a great study called the British Psychopath Study that looked at where are the psychopaths in our society? Right. A psychopath is defined as somebody who has a thin veneer of charm, they're super charismatic, but it hides a Complete lack of remorse and often impulsive behavior. They are a very dangerous group of people. It doesn't make them bad. I want to emphasize this. You could have the characteristics of a psychopath. It doesn't make you a bad person. It just means you have a lack of remorse or a tendency towards it. And what they found is that the greatest percentage of psychopaths aren't necessarily in prisons, they're in the boardrooms. Yeah. They're on their surgeons. They are often high ranking clergy. Any place where they're. You have mass power. Right. And so it's not surprising that there's a certain percentage of CEOs that get a lot of attention for acting in kind of wild ways. And that's because they're often rewarded for it either through media or through compensation. But the majority of CEOs aren't going to be that way. We're talking like 5% out of 95 and the other are just going to be working along.

[Willie Walker]

You ask the question, does someone really want to lead? And first of all, one of the things that you're very good, I think at talking about is that what makes you a leader is not wanting to be a leader, but whether people follow you. So what you said previously, which is at least in my case, for instance, when I was younger, I was present my class, I was captain of the team. And it was very evident that in various facets of my life, people would follow me. And so I always sort of thought leadership was something that I would always find myself in. At the same time, you don't start working up the corporate ladder to sort of say, I'm going to be a leader. You work your way up the corporate ladder and as you do it, you're going to be successful and have people follow you. But as you, as you looked at the people who came to your dinners, because I'm fascinated by your dinners. There are 4,000 people who came to over 400 dinners. You would go out and randomly select 10 people and it could be, as I said previously, a Nobel laureate, it could be the president of a university, it could be a whole bunch of people, but you couldn't know who they were. It's just an amazing social experiment and understanding their qualities and how they acted when they didn't have the badge saying I'm CEO, I'm whatever, whatever. Talk for a moment about the composition of those groups and what you did to. First of all, if you will, figure out who you were going to invite to a given dinner. Because as you point out at the very beginning of the book, you talk about the 1979 USA basketball team that didn't go to the Olympic Games and ended up playing a bunch of college teams and playing a bunch of NBA teams and they beat all the NBA teams, even though it was a bunch of college players.

[John Levy]

Yeah. So the 1980 Team USA team versus the NBA All Stars, the best players of their era, and they beat them five of six games, four out of five games. In one game, they beat them by 31 points. The only game they lost was by two points.

[Willie Walker]

So my question to you is this. That clearly shows that if you put all, you know, like the all star teams or the dream team that went to the Olympics, you know, they, they ended up losing games to teams that didn't have, on an individual basis, the talent. Did you construct your dinners to make sure that you didn't have a group filled with 10 type A CEOs and that you were figuring that out and then watching how potentially someone who would wasn't in the leadership role actually turned into a leader in that cohort?

[John Levy]

So here's what's interesting. I'm going to answer both questions, but it's going to require two very different answers. The first is when you don't know who's in the room and you know that they might be. Let's say you were talking to somebody about during the cocktails portion about, like an article you recently read about a new breakthrough. You don't know if the person that you're talking to is the person who just won the Nobel Prize for that breakthrough. Right. So it's a very humbling experience. And we tend to have more of an experience of imposter syndrome than arrogance in general. Now, are there people that are wildly arrogant? Yeah. But out of 4,000 people, I can maybe think of five that acted that way. And so the anonymity really plays a part in it. The second is that because they're cooking together, the cooking produces an effect called the Ikea effect, which is we care more about our IKEA furniture because we have to assemble it. So I think you invest effort into, you care more about. And so by having them cook together, they care more about each other and the food. And because the food is just awful. I mean, it's 12 people who don't know how to cook cooking together, then they actually enjoy the meal more than they should. Right. If I were just to serve them that meal at a restaurant, they would send it back. So the way that we make the selection is we try to avoid any More than two people from the same industry. And the reason is that if you're an Olympian, you'll be really impressed by the astronaut, the astronaut will really be impressed by the CEO, the CEO will be impressed by the Grammy Award winner, and so on and so forth. And so when you have these wildly divergent set of characteristics, then people can't compare themselves to one another. You comparing yourself to the musical talents of a seven time Grammy Award winner, like, you're just going to be impressed. You're not going to be like, I could have done that better. Oh, I don't know why they're getting the attention, right? It's. You compare yourself to people who are semi similar. Now, as far as the leadership characteristic, this is one of the things that we get confused about, I would say as a culture, there's a difference between accountability and leadership. And what I mean by that is, Willie, you are accountable for the results of your organization. You are also the leader of your organization. But when you're in a meeting with your chief legal officer and they're explaining a strategy, you are going to probably be a follower for that period of time. Leadership is fluid. Accountability is not. What we find is that in the most effective teams, there's leadership fluidity. So that the person with the expertise, the knowledge, the proper mental models to handle that portion of the might be guiding the group and people are following them during that moment. But the person ultimately accountable for producing the result is whoever the manager is or the CEO or whoever.

[Willie Walker]

So sticking on the dinners for a moment, I wanted to go back because I love that theme as it relates to leadership and the fluidity and accountability which I want to put a pin in and come back to it. But I don't want to lose the theme on the dinners because first of all, is there one dinner that stood out as either being the best or the worst? And either it was just ruckus, laughter. And everyone went home saying, best dinner in my entire life. And was there something that made it such or to the other end of it? I can only imagine that there were a couple of dinners where you pulled together this group of people thinking it was going to be pretty great. And it just, just didn't move anywhere for or that someone said something that they didn't know who the person sitting at the table and they offended someone tremendously.

[John Levy]

There was ones that people were offended, but there were like these funny moments. So we had one where there's a, everybody's sitting around the table and you kind of guess what people do before there's a reveal. And we're all guessing what this gentleman does. He's black, probably in his late 50s, maybe 60s. And then people like, oh, you're a businessman, you're a investor, you're, you know, all these things. He's dressed very nicely. And then he goes, oh, my full name is Isaiah Thomas. I'm a 12 time NBA All Star, yada yada, you know, he's a legend, right? And the person sitting next to him goes, isaiah freaking Thomas. And she takes her napkin and literally hides behind it and swoops down into her seat. And this woman is like, pretty tall, 5 10. And she goes, I can't believe I was making guacamole with Isaiah freaking Thomas bragging about my Division 3 basketball career. And she was just so embarrassed. But that, that kind of stuff happens and you know, or you find out that you were making a guacamole with Bill Nye or Regina Spector or Dan Kahneman, the Nobel laureate or whatever it is. And so you get these moments where people actually meet their heroes and it's, it's pretty lovely. The interesting thing is I actually feel like the Duners get better and better. And it took me a while to understand something because I didn't grow up around really successful people or wealth or any of these things. And what kind of struck me was that no matter who was there, nobody felt like they belonged. Meaning the Nobel Laureate. It was a few lucky days in a laboratory. And if it wasn't for the prize, nobody would care who they were. The Olympian knows that they may be won by 3/100 of a second in a pool, but they don't know if they're even going to make it to the next Olympics. And then what are they going to do with their career? The CEO knows. Yeah, they had a bunch of great quarters, but the economy is finicky and global economics and macro effects are wild and things might change. And so there are no guarantees for any of them. And as a byproduct, there's this uneasiness of feeling like they belong in any one place.

[Willie Walker]

But does the, does the anonymity bring that? Because any one of those examples if going to, I don't know, I mean, if they're going to the Nobel Prize award ceremony and there's these other Nobel laureates who are there now, all of a sudden you're with, you know, there's something that says, oh, now I belong, or I'm actually part of this. Or the, the skier shows up and says, I'm at the Olympics. And I feel like I'm actually part of this. Is it the anonymity that allowed them to all feel that sense of insecurity or. Because they don't seem to carry it in other audiences, do they?

[John Levy]

It's, it's the other way. It's that when they were. They just don't feel like they belong in general. In our environment, we're so welcoming. And since nobody's becoming their friend because they want something or they know of their status markers, then they actually feel a greater sense of connection and belonging than in other places. Yeah, in most places, Willie, you walk into an event and people approach you and you are not sure. Are they trying to sell you something? Do they want a contract? Are they trying to get their kid an internship? Like, there's a defensive layer that has to exist because everybody wants resources and they're finite. When you can create an environment where people can just be independent of status, title, achievements, all that, and people are connecting with each other free of all those things, then it's like a. They can take a breath. They get to just be them.

[Willie Walker]

It's really, it's fascinating. My, my, my partner Sarah and I have an annual Dia de los Muertos party in Denver. And everyone comes and we have lots of face painters. And to sort of conceptualize it a little bit too dramatically, you have sort of my friends who are these CEO types closer to my age, and you know, US senators and CEOs and what have you. And then you have Sarah's friends who are younger and typically a lot of them we met at Burning man or wherever else. And they have a very distinct background. And because they come to this party and get face painted, not showing up wearing their outfit if you wish, which could say I'm, you know, I go to my going, I'm wearing a tie or whatever else. It just, it makes it all so that everyone just kind of melds into this wonderful atmosphere of I want to be here and have a nice time and not necessarily who are you and why should I either know you or not know you? And the atmosphere at that party is so dramatically different from anything else that the two of us host throughout the year.

[John Levy]

That's awesome. That's absolutely fantastic. I, I think you're. You demonstrate two things in that party. One is that when you allow people to be independent of like all their pre existing structures, their outfits, their titles, all that, all the traditional status markers of our society, then it puts people at ease in a different way. And the second is that what people really look for, especially now, because people tend to be more disconnected and isolated, is a sense of belonging and community. And it seems that you and your partner do this party that really allows people to feel like there's a sense of belonging to something. There's especially a moment in time to celebrate. And this is what happens.

[Willie Walker]

Talk about that, John, as it relates to your travels and doing some of the sort of world events that we talked briefly about. Burning man, the running of the bulls, going to a Formula one race, et cetera. One of the things that strikes me, having been fortunate enough to go to a number of those, a, the sense of community and then sort of a sense of shared purpose. You know, someone who travels to the Nevada desert to hang out for a week, you better have some type of shared purpose to go through that type of an experience. Or the running of the bulls and going out and kind of putting your life on the line as you run through the streets with bulls. Talk about those experiences and which one to you had the most sense of community, where you really sat around and said, wow, I now get why this is what people talk about. This is what people put on their calendar and say, I won't miss that.

[John Levy]

So I'd probably say Burning man has the greatest reputation. I think one is that there's this element of an equalizer. Now at Burning man, there are like status camps and things like that where ultra wealthy people show up with their staff, that's fine. But when you're actually out in the desert on what they call the playa, then it's generally like an equalizer. You don't know if you bump into somebody at a party because all the parties are basically open to everyone. You don't know if that party, that person is a billionaire or if they're, you know, an artist that's struggling. And so it provides a context for connection in a unique way. The other thing is that fundamentally people connect over activities or shared effort, right? So you, it's called the common ground theory. You, when you meet people, you're either. We tend to connect over common interests, religion, culture, common friends, things that we can start off as a area of common trust. Now you're either going to figure out what you have in common or you're going to create something through kind of shared effort. What that might be could be like the dinners that I host. It could also be people putting a camp together and building it. It could be going on a hike together. And so Burning man being a user generated experience, meaning everybody contributes to Having IT function means that there's a shared ethos and a shared investment into the success of the experience. And that bonds people, gives them that common ground.

[Willie Walker]

You talk about great leaders and giving hope for a better tomorrow a new future, and that that's really what people are, if you will, following. And whether it's some new technological innovation or whether it's just that this company is going to grow or whether this organization is going to have an impact on the world we live in, many, many ways. For people to lead. As you have studied leadership, what's more important, the charisma of the vision or the substance of the vision?

[John Levy]

So here's what's really interesting. The. Let's. Can I put a pin in vision for a second?

[Willie Walker]

Sure.

[John Levy]

So what gets you to feel that there's a new and better future might have to do with neither of those. It might be that a person's super skills have to do with the way that they can do math and organize information. And so suddenly you're like, wow, that person's an absolutely brilliant quant. I want to invest. They might not be great at communicating it. Paul Erdos or even like, who's the person who's. Oh, my God. Bitcoin marketplace fell apart. People gave him billions.

[Willie Walker]

Sam Bankman Fried.

[John Levy]

Yes. People like that is not a charismatic dude, right. But he did have a collection of skills that disarmed people and made them feel that there was a new and better future. Now you could say, oh, John, he was visionary. Yeah. But, like, you know, there's a difference between visionary like Steve Jobs and a visionary like Sam Bankman Fried. Right. And. And in that, what we begin to see is that that person's super skills were so disproportionately strong that it made you feel that there was a potential for something new. So I think asking about what was it substance versus what was the.

[Willie Walker]

The charisma of the vision versus the substance of the vision. In other words, the. The way you're articulating what tomorrow might bring. And it might not have a full backup of a plan or you got this great PowerPoint presentation that is very explicit on what the future.

[John Levy]

No, it's going to be the emotions day or day out. Like, there's a certain percentage of people who, who are really inspired by, like, a lot of structure. Right. And the rigor that. But that's not how human beings behave. You look at the amount of people who invest into, like, terrible ideas, and you'll see that it's because they fundamentally felt that it's going to succeed or all the people who give their money over to scams. Right. Like, it's now something to understand. And this is. I'll take this to a slightly different direction. If we're going to talk about you trusting somebody, it turns out that trust is made out of three things. Honesty, you're telling me the truth. Competence, you're capable of doing what I expect of you. And the third is benevolence. You have my best interests at heart. What's interesting is that the three are not equally valued. So you have somebody who reports to you. They're normally great, but they screw up a presentation one day. Do you say, oh, you're incompetent, you're fired? Probably not right now. If you found out somebody was lying to you, would that be a big deal?

[Willie Walker]

Big time.

[John Levy]

Yeah. So we value honesty above competence. But there's a weird loophole, Willie. The two of us are walking down the street and you say, john, I forgot something at my office. Can we pick it up? I'm like, yeah, absolutely. And when we get there, 40 of my closest friends jump out and scream, surprise. Happy birthday. It'd be weird if I said, willie, you lied to me. We can't be friends anymore. And that's because we value benevolence above honesty and honesty above competence. Now, if you look, most communication focuses on competence. The PowerPoint. Look at all the accolades and awards I have. Yeah, it's important. It's a shortcut for qualifications. Right? But that doesn't come close to the importance of somebody feeling like you have their back. And the example I often give is, imagine your company wanted new servers. So I say, great. Salesperson A comes in. Our servers are up 99.9999% of the time. You go, wow, Very competent. Person B comes in and says, willy, your company's success depends on these servers being up. We cannot risk them. I want you to know, if there's ever a problem, day or night, here's my phone number. I will be with there figuring it out with you. Who do you trust more, person A or person B?

[Willie Walker]

99.999% of the time.

[John Levy]

You. You trust the competent person. Maybe most people trust the benevolent person. Yeah.

[Willie Walker]

I only went to the number you gave me on five nines and not the sale then not the sales pitch of I'm going to add the extra service. And to exactly your point, I mean, we're in the service business, right? We sell loans and we sell properties, and we're telling people that if you give us that financing opportunity, you give us that asset to sell that we will do it better than anybody else. And, and at the end of the day there are only so many things we can do different. I'm not trying to under, under undermine the, the capability of my banking team, but the point being is that the, the actual difference between what we do and what Goldman Sachs does and what CBRE does as it relates to a financing, we can clearly do it better than they can. But the trust factor between our team and the client is really what better dominates the sale. It's not necessarily the, you know, the last deal they did or the fact that the last deal was X pricing versus Y pricing. And so exactly to your point, that's in the financial services space. I mean that is the, that is the underlying message to all sales is you can trust me to execute flawlessly for you. So that five nines reliability on the network versus call me at any hour. At the end of the day, I don't want to have to call anybody. I want the system to work 99.99% of the time. But it is nice that if it does go down, you know, you can call somebody and have them take care of it.

[John Levy]

So here's what's interesting. There is no doubt that competence is essential, right? But when you look at the doctors who get sued, it's not the incompetent doctors, it's the one with the bad, bad side manner. It's fundamentally for human beings, competence is seen as tertiary to benevolence. If your salespeople go out and say, hey, I get that closing this deal is defining characteristic of your career, we're going to figure this out and make sure you look amazing to your bosses. That goes a heck of a lot further than oh, I'll get you the best pricing. The best pricing is already like, you know, the competence factor that you're, once you're already in the decision set, right? The difference between, like you said, you and your competitors, you're all probably very competent, right? Otherwise you wouldn't be in the decision set. Now it's will you take care of me? Do you, Are you in this with me? Do you have my back? And so from, if you'll notice, it is for human beings the emotional factors that tend to define the decision, not the logical factors.

[Willie Walker]

So on that, what's your take as it relates to AI and AI disintermediating humans? Because clearly there's a lot of fear that someday the technology will just give you the answer and People say, great, go do it. I continue to say to people, John, that I could go to OpenAI or go to Grok right now and say, pick me a stock to invest in and it's going to go out and run all sorts of, you know, reagression analyses and it's going to say go buy Google, right? And it'll have all sorts of backup to it. But I'm not going to call my guy at J.P. morgan and say, hey.

[John Levy]

Told me to do this.

[Willie Walker]

Yeah, it just told me to buy Google. I, I want to have some reason on why I think that Google right now is to be there. And I'm going to talk to a friend and I'm going to get input and say this is a great time versus blah blah, blah, blah. And I will triangulate to making that investment decision. But I'm not just going to turn to the technology yet. It feels like we are all living in this either fear or paranoia, that we're just going to turn to the technology and let the technology make all the decisions for us. Are you in the camp that that human element is going to be necessary for quite some time to come, or do you think that the technology is going to basically disintermediate that emotional touch that you just so well identified being an integral part of how we sell what we do?

[John Levy]

So I think the important thing to realize is that your emotional state can be just as easily manipulated by software, right? So the as these models learn and can process human behavior and all these factors, they'll understand exactly how to present the information to you to nudge your behavior. Bottom line, right? When you look at the number of PhDs and geniuses figuring out how to get you to click on an ad just slightly better, all these models are going to figure out how to make that happen. Now, when it comes to AI, I think that we might be asking the wrong question. Not that that was a wrong question. They say situation, I just mean in general, right now we're in the early stages of the applications of these large language models and every time there's a new technology, the question is, where do we reach efficiencies and how can I cut costs, maybe even to invest into the technology? And so just like when telephone technologies didn't need operators anymore and we eliminated that job for the most part, that's kind of the first stage. The real benefit of, I would say a lot of these models is in solving one specific problem. How do we make our team smarter so that they can become more effective? I Consider a team effective or intelligent when it can solve a problem as fast as possible with the resources it has. And when we actually look at that, it means that if we have agents running alongside of our leaders and team members in meetings, then they can handle a lot of the processing that we might be missing. So, for example, the single greatest predictor of a smart team was something really unexpected. We thought it would be IQ of team members or average iq. It was actually the number of women on the team. And it's not because men aren't great. It's because women on average have higher emotional intelligence. So when you're in a team format versus an individual, Right. In golf, Tiger woods, pure talent, doesn't need anybody when he's on the field, but are on the course, I guess is the. I don't know the technical terms here, of course. Thank you. Or Serena Williams. Right. Pure talent. When you're a team, talent actually isn't that important. It's table stakes for entering the game. But it becomes more about the ability to coordinate and pass either the information or the ball. And that's why when you have teams with higher levels of emotional intelligence, they know how to coordinate better. They know when to push a topic and when not to, when to give the floor to somebody who often doesn't speak, or how to evaluate a decision process. And so if emotional intelligence is such a critical factor, we can actually program an agent to increase the emotional intelligence of the group. We can have an agent say, hey, Willy, I don't know if you noticed, but Bill from your team has been really quiet today versus his normal interactions. You might want to check with him after the meeting or, hey, it looks like Susie wants to say something. You might want to call on her. And so suddenly we can take teams that have low levels of emotional intelligence and give them superpowers, and suddenly they're solving problems significantly faster. And there was a project by darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Project Association. Same people who created the Internet, or early versions of it, that looked at just this and found that you can significantly increase the intelligence of a team when there's an AI agent supporting them. It's not a replacement for a team member. It is a coach that's letting you know things you might want to notice.

[Willie Walker]

And you talk about coaching a lot in the book, John. And you talk about the results that people get from just practice and then practice with a coach. And as it was funny, I don't have a. I don't have a coach for my physical exercise, and yet I'M very, very disciplined about. I exercise. I do it every single day. And it was funny because I was sitting there, I was like, well, per John, if I added a coach onto my already disciplined life as it relates to that, I can take my physical exercise to a whole different level. And I was sitting there this morning thinking through what I'm going to take away from your book. And I was like, well, maybe it's time for me to go hire a training coach. And I. I don't think how interesting. I enjoy doing it, but talk for a moment about that. And also if you can loop in what you write about the military, because from what you write in the book, the military is exceptional as it relates to not only coaching, but continuous learning.

[John Levy]

Yeah, I think so. Let's. I'm going to tackle one thing first, which is you and your training a coach only matters to how much you're looking to improve. Willie, your day is probably so packed with meetings and other people. For you, potentially having an hour to yourself to process your thoughts might be the greatest gift you give yourself.

[Willie Walker]

Oh, it is.

[John Levy]

So adding a trainer in there doesn't necessarily improve your life. It actually might make it worse. Just gonna throw that out there?

[Willie Walker]

No. And look. And a. You're exactly right. I would also say one of the other things about it. I was just with a friend of mine last week, Strauss Zelnet crew. If you Google fittest, CEO, Strauss pops up. And Strauss and I do a lot of exercise with one another. And. And Strauss and I were working out together on day one, and then on day two, I said, I'm just gonna go do my own thing and you work out with the group. And he said, you know, it's amazing to me that you basically work out alone every day. I said, yeah, seven days a week, I'm pretty much alone when I ride my bikes. I work out with other people, but pretty much all of that is my own. And he goes, I never work out alone. Every single day I have a group to work out with. And it was so interesting because we're in, you know, we both take our exercise the same way. Yet his experience is only with a group, and mine is typically only alone. And I find that to be not only somewhat restorative, meditative, but I also quite honestly work my work into my workout. So I'll be at the gym and spend two hours checking emails, thinking about things, following up with people, and not just, you know, getting in a great sweat. And I've made it so it actually gives him the ability to do a combination of work and work out. Whereas like my friend Strauss, there's not a chance in the world if you went into the gym and you said to him, check your emails while you're working out, he'd be like, no, no, I'm in here. We're all doing wraps. Yeah, yeah, whatever. And it's just interesting about finding that, if you will, that space that meets your needs.

[John Levy]

Yeah, it's, it's. I think part of the problem with the, let's call it the influencification. I don't know what to say of, of media is that everybody claims to have the perfect answer and if you just did what they did, your life would be great. And the truth is that I willi, I am so impressed with your discipline. Like I wish I had that. I know that for me working out is a social experience. Unlike your friend Strauss. Is that his name?

[Willie Walker]

Yeah, Strauss.

[John Levy]

If I don't have another person involved, I am not pushing myself nearly as hard. I need a rabbit. I also need either that or I have a trainer four times a week to like tell me that, what exercises to do. And listen, I. These are not like, these trainings are not rocket science, but I just need another human being. And for most of us training or learning and development is a social experience. It's really hard to grow and develop on our own. It's. We're a social species and that's just how it is. And so you, you brought up this idea in the book. I was really trying to figure out, okay, if I'm a leader, if I'm a team member, whatever it is, how do I improve? And it turns out that a lot of the stuff that we've been told about improvement is a little BS y. So I'll give you an example. It turns out that genetics play such a critical role and if we're going to be good at something, it's just ridiculous. And the example I give is the number of seven foot tall players in the NBA. It's something like 10% of all seven foot tall people are actually in the NBA.

[Willie Walker]

Right.

[John Levy]

The number of people in the entire NBA history that were five, three and played was one. It was Mugsy Bogues, which tells you you've got to be about a thousand times better when you're 53 than you have to be when you're.

[Willie Walker]

When I read that, I thought it was so good and I was like sitting there like, you know, he literally nobody ever talks about Mugsy Bogues. As far as being the greatest of all time. He, he's never, ever on the, you know, give me the five best basketball players of all time ever, ever on that list. And yet to your point in the book, if you think about his skill set for his physical stature, he was by far the best basketball player to ever play.

[John Levy]

He could like, relative jump to height was like through the roof. That guy was I think, doing like the, the dunk contest and all that. I'm 5, 10 on a good day. There's no way I'm reaching a rim, I'll tell you that much. So genetics play a huge part, which means that when given the option, lean into the things that you have a genetic advantage towards. Now, does it mean that there aren't outliers? Of course there are. Misty Copeland, probably one of the most famous ballerinas of all time, did not have the traditional ballerina body and was still absolutely extraordinary. But those stories are magically few and far between and give, you know, inspiring because they're so rare. Like, if it were commonplace, we wouldn't be hearing about them. The second factor is practice doesn't necessarily produce the results that everybody thinks it does. And the reason is that practice without guidance could lead you down a completely wrong path. If you are practicing shooting golf balls but you have nobody guiding you, then how do you know how to improve from shot to shot? You need a coach, you need potentially a colleague to go head to head with, right? You can practice playing basketball on your own day in and day out, but unless you have a frame of reference through competition, it doesn't actually improve. And when me looked at the research, there was great research on chess and found that there's the difference between grandmasters was like a hundred time fold in practice. Like there's some that required, you know, 10,000 hours of practice, some that required a thousand hours of practice to hit the grandmaster. And there's a huge variation depending on how people practice. The thing that we found most consistently improves a person's skill is having a qualified coach. And when researchers actually ran studies around this, they found that employees that have coaches get more compliments and more comments on their improvement, even when the people making the comments had no idea that they were using a coach. So if there's a, let's say an objective standard, it's if you're getting a lot of compliments on your fitness level and nobody knows that you're training, then you must be doing something right. And so what's amazing about the military that we will not see in the civilian world or corporate America is that they have all of these structures built in. They've incentivized the leaders to ensure the development of their people because their lives depend on it. You want the people around you to be qualified. The leaders get promoted when and for the that leader to get promoted, they actually need the reviews of the people that report to them. In corporate America, if you're good at managing up, you're golden. In the military, you actually have to be good at managing your people and caring for them.

[Willie Walker]

I thought it was so interesting as well that you pointed out that the, the military gets the person and then finds the proper job for them versus corporate America recruits to the job.

[John Levy]

Yeah, it's just, I think it has the potential for producing a better person a job fit. Now, nobody is one thing, right. There's probably a whole bunch of things that you could fall in love with, but it does allow us to then place people to where they'd have an advantage.

[Willie Walker]

So on that it's kind of interesting. So like, we have a, you know, we have summer interns who come into Walker Nollon. We also have an incoming analyst class that will begin in June of this year. College graduates who come and join us. And in that instance, we take those generalists, if you will, we bring them into W and D, we train them, and then we say, okay, you're going to go be in that banking group, you're going to be in that underwriting group, you're going to be in that servicing group, what have you. And in that way, in that cohort, we're basically doing what the military does, which is bring in a bunch of talents of people and then figure out what, yes, go. Whereas all of our other recruiting is for a specific job. And one of the things I've been thinking about when I read that was just sort of should we pool our job requirements into cohorts? And so say, okay, we've got, you know, 10 wrecks out there, but instead of going and trying to find that specific person for that specific wreck, create a pool of 10 people, bring them in, train them, and then put them into the jobs would take a lot more time. And you're clearly, when you're going for the wreck, you've got a certain background that's in that person's experience that you think is going to fit that specific role. But your, your military analogy made me sort of think about our recruiting model and almost at least challenge the. Should we, should we flip it on its head?

[John Levy]

That's interesting. There's the answer is I think that it works the more junior the position.

[Willie Walker]

Yeah. Which is why associates and analysts and.

[John Levy]

But once you get to the more senior positions, I think it's really like take tough to take a pool because those people are also self sorted at that point. They kind of know what they. If you're looking for a svp, they kind of know what they're into. Right. They're like. And if they wouldn't be applying for a job if they didn't want to be in the industry at that point. The.

[Willie Walker]

Let me, let me ask you. We're tight on time and there was one thing that I really wanted to talk about as far as teams and that was the glue players. Talk for a moment about Shane Battier and why Shane Battier was such an important member of his teams and how we can think about someone like a Shane Batier as a glue player to your, to your team.

[John Levy]

This is great. It came from a study at Brigham Young. Economists who were curious, do you have employees that actually cause everybody else to perform better? Like you might not see, they might not be putting huge numbers up in terms of sales, but when they're around does everybody else work harder? And because we kind of know it when it comes to like if they're, if you put your top cashier in front of everybody, everybody else works faster because they, they're like the rabbit. They set the pace. And what they did was they used basketball data because it's so robust and they found that there's players that produce a lot of points and get paid a lot. There's and have like a positive impact on the team. There are players that produce a lot of points and actually have a severely negative impact on the team. They're so egotistical, they're so mean to people that it destroys morale. They still get paid a ton. And then there are players that have a hugely positive impact on the team but don't score much and they actually don't get paid much. And what's weird is these players, they sometimes call them multipliers or glue players. They multiply everybody else's results by a factor of 1.6, which is just crazy. Nothing, nothing causes a 60% increase in people's performance. And one of the greatest, if not the greatest players in the NBA to do this is a guy by the name of Shane Battier, an old Duke star. And Battier was known as the no stats all star. He didn't get rebounds, he didn't score very much. He was like a solid player. Right. Because to even get into the NBA, you have to be. But just nothing remarkable about him if you were to look at his stats. But the moment he'd get on the court, people would call him Lego because everybody else would click into position. It was like he had a magic spell on the team. And the reason was he had three very unique characteristics. The first was he had incredibly high emotional intelligence. Now the reason this is so important is that he was on a team with LeBron James, one of the greats. Dwyane Wade also won the greats and Chris Bosh also won the greats of all time. When you are going to maneuver between large personalities like theirs who are used to being the dominant force on the court, then you have to have the emotional intelligence not to step on any toes. The second is he would put the team above himself. He's one of the few players that actually said take me out, coach, because he figured another player would be better on the court at that time. And the third was that he was incredibly forward thinking, meaning he would take action that nobody ever asked him to. He would memorize all of the opposing team stats knowing that if I could push you into a corner, it would reduce your chances of scoring by 5%. And over the course of a game that would mean points that your team didn't score. And so when you combined all of these things, his forward thinking, his emotional intelligence and his team orientation, it multiplied everybody else's results and they ended up winning back to back championships when he joined the heap. And your teams have the same kind of players. They have people who will read a book over the weekend or will redo all of the slides for the deck that nobody asked them to do just because it would be a better presentation. They're the ones that remember all of people's birthdays and make sure that we celebrate them or welcome people onto the team so that they're more productive faster. They're the glue of your organization that keeps everybody else performing at their peak.

[Willie Walker]

You have two glue players on your.

[John Levy]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The key is that you. Because they're often not specialists, they're often generalists, they can be specialists, but it means that you just need to make sure you also have other people. A team made up of multipliers need. Doesn't get anywhere because you need something to multiply. Yeah, yeah.

[Willie Walker]

We are out of time. And as I hope you can tell, I could keep talking to you for a couple more hours.

[John Levy]

Wonderfully. I'm thoroughly impressed by your interviewing skills. This has been a treat.

[Willie Walker]

I appreciate it. You know, practice makes perfect. I've done 280 of these things. Thank you. John, your books are fantastic. I love them. And I would, I'd love to just have dinner one on one with you or walk into a room with nine other people who I don't know. So hopefully sometime we would be honored.

[John Levy]

To have you reach out to your team about getting you to cook a terrible meal together.

[Willie Walker]

I'd love it. John, thank you. It's great having you with me. Have a great day. And to everyone who joined us today, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. And we'll see you again next week.

[John Levy]

It.