The Biggest Brain Hacks, Hyper-Productivity Tools, Sleeping Without Sleeping & Much More With Science of Success Host Matt Bodnar.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

So I try to really spend my mornings doing the big, powerful kind of creative thinking, journaling and that sort of work. And then I spend my afternoons, when I have lower energy and less cognitive power, doing things like meetings, checking email, and dealing with kind of all of the annoyances of, you know, work life. Basically, the fixed mindset is this belief that your identity is fundamentally fixed. And so everything that you do, you know, so your intelligence, your abilities are kind of fixed characteristics and fixed traits. And this ripples through a ton of things.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Green. And my guest on today's show, Matt Bodner, was named to Forbes 30 under 30, which makes him one pretty special dude. But that's not all. He was also called a rising restaurateur, restaurateur star by the National Restaurant Association, a strategy pro by Restaurant Hospitality magazine. He's a partner in early stage investment firm Fresh Hospitality. But perhaps most relevant to you, he's got a kick butt podcast. Matt is the creator and he's the host of this podcast called Science of Success. I've been listening to it. I actually found it. It was number one on the new and noteworthy in Apple itunes, And it's all about decision making and understanding human psychology. And there are experts in there who talk about things like sleep, science and the mental tactics used by Olympians to using sound to enhance the brain and a whole lot of kind of and intriguing topics. Intriguing enough to where I thought I should get Matt on the show, especially after we happen to have met while skiing in Jackson Hole earlier this winter. So Matt previously worked as an import export consultant in China. He spent several years at Goldman Sachs before returning to the hospitality and restaurant space and getting famous in Forbes. So welcome to the show, Matt.

Thanks so much for having me on here, Ben. I'm super excited to share some wisdom with your audience.

Yeah, so just out of curiosity, dude, how does somebody get named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list?

So getting on the 30 under 30 list, you know, I mean, it's all about a strategy, right? And I've had that as a goal for a long time, probably five or six years before I got on the list. I had initially set out the goal of, hey, I want to be on this list. What can I do to get on it? And as with many things, when I want to achieve something, and I think this is a really good kind of mental model or framework broadly for thinking about achievement, when I want to achieve something, I try to study the people who've achieved it and figure out, okay, what did they do to do it? In this case, what did they do to get on the Forbes 30 under 30 list? And I kind of tried a couple different strategies that didn't really pan out. But one of the. Eventually, the kind of breakthrough that I had on trying to position myself to get on the list. I went to a conference. And one of the main draws to the conference, there was a guy speaking who had previously been on Forbes 30 under 30. And I went to his panel and kind of listened to it. The panel wasn't about anything about that. It was about kind of marketing. But after the panel, I went up and asked him. I was like, hey, what do you think really enabled you to get on the 30 under 30 list? And so to me, again, following that kind of strategy of figuring out people who've already achieved it and then trying to model them, trying to emulate them, even asking them directly, like, what did you do to get on the list? And he gave me a really simple kind of recommendation and strategy. He said that the fundamental thing that helps you get on the list is by getting people who are previous winners or previous nominees and getting them to recommend you and getting them to put in kind of favorable comments about you to the editors and the judges. And the sort of demystifying thing about the 39 to 30 list is that it's not just 30 people across the globe. It's actually by category. So there's probably 10 or 15 categories for different kind of industry verticals, things like science, technology. I was in the food category, for example, because I'm in the hospitality business. Games is another one. There's a bunch of them. But he said, find people who have been in your category who've won and get them to give you positive recommendations. And so, you know, that was. That's. He said that's kind of what he did to get on the list. And he said that was the best strategy. So what I set out to do was find a couple people that were essentially in My extended network, you know, through kind of relationships, LinkedIn, et cetera, work to develop relationships with a couple of people who were previous winners in my category and, you know, sat down, talked to them and said, hey, I'm really interested in being on the list. Like, tell me, what advice do you have? What strategies would you recommend? And eventually was able to kind of get them to help me position myself and get on the list.

Interesting. So in terms of why it is that you got on that list, what is it that they found interesting enough about you to actually get on there? Is it your success in the restaurant industry? Was it something you did before that?

Yeah, I mean, the prerequisite for being on the list is you have to be doing something at least relatively interesting. Right. And there's definitely people doing more interesting stuff than me. Part of it is networking, building relationships, getting in the right place at the right time. But also a piece of it is you have to be doing something interesting enough to warrant being on the list. You know, I could talk to you and tell you all about sort of my day job, but I'll give you just a really brief summary review of it. I mean, fundamentally, the reason that I set out to be on the list initially is because I looked at some of the nominees and some of the winners, and whether it's ego or audacity or foolishness, I kind of looked at said, you know what? Like, I don't think that anybody on this list is doing stuff that is more unique, interesting, exciting, cool or whatever, PR worthy than what I'm doing. And, you know, I think I have enough merit to be on the list. How can I make that happen? And I mean, you know, like, again, I'm not trying to brag or too man whore. I mean, like, in the restaurant space, our company is positioned pretty uniquely and does some really interesting stuff. So without going super deep down this rabbit hole, because it's probably not credibly relevant for your audience, but, you know, we invest across kind of the food and hospitality vertical. And we're sort of like a hybrid between a venture capital company and private equity group. We invest in and seed early stage restaurant companies and build them and grow them. And we, you know, today in our portfolio, we have about 15 different restaurant concepts, comprise about 175 units, all kinds of different brands, everything from juice bar to barbecue concepts. And, you know, we've scaled a couple of the biggest ones. We have a concept called Tzatziki's Mediterrane and Cafe that we've scaled from three units to now they have about 75 locations. And we have another one called I Love Juice Bar. That's a juice bar concept that we've scaled from two units to almost 50 units now. And that's all in the last five to seven years. So we've grown super rapidly within the food business. We're doing some really interesting and innovative things, and I think that kind of laid the groundwork and was enough to merit being on the list. Then it's a question of positioning yourself, building the right relationships, and kind of following a strategy that is a proven strategy that other people have used to get on the list.

Okay, got it. So primarily you were running, like, juice bars and other restaurant concepts, and you were extremely successful and you got named to Forbes 30 under 30.

Yeah, I mean, we're not necessarily. We're involved in the operations, but we're really investors fundamentally. So we invest in their super early stage. We bring the capital and the knowledge to help them scale up.

Gotcha. So how old are you now?

30.

Okay, got it. So you could no longer ever be named to the Forbes 30 under 30. Now that you've made it past that benchmark, you have to go for the 40 under 40, man.

Yeah, I actually made it. My birthday was one day. I was born on January 1, and my birthday was one day after the cutoff. So I made my last year by a single day.

Nice. You barely squeezed in. That's almost cheating. So I'm curious, for a successful guy like you who does what you do, and I know you interview a lot of these experts on your show about the science of success, I want to. I want to hear more a little bit later on about why you call it the science of success. But I always like to kind of delve into how, you know, successful and, you know, relatively young guys like you actually achieve what you achieve. So do you have some kind of a morning routine like. Like that sparks your day or that sets the standard for the rest of the day.

Yeah. And. And I would say it's. It's part morning routine, and it's really kind of part like more broadly a structure for my entire day. So, you know, my morning routine, quote, unquote, starts really the night before. And it starts with, I try to set out at the end of the day what I call sort of an MIT or a most important task that I want to achieve the following day. And this goes into a bunch of. There's a bunch of neuroscience research and creativity research behind why this works. But I try to set out sort of A most important task or a big challenge that I have that I want to think about the next day. And then I kind of let it go. I try to focus on spending time with my wife, family time decompressing, and let work completely go from my mind. And that's an important part of the creative process. And it enables yourself when you consciously shift your focus away from something. And this is all kind of research driven and we've done a whole episode on kind of the science behind this in the show. But when you consciously take your focus away from something and you spend time relaxing, eating dinner, sleeping and meditating, when you return consciously to that problem, your subconscious has kind of recombined different ideas and concepts. In many cases, you sort of found the solution to that challenge. So my morning starts the night before when I set out either a problem that I want to really wrestle with or a most important task that I want to achieve the next day. Then when I get up, typically sometimes I'll train in the morning as soon as I get up. On days that I don't train, I'll meditate and then I'll go. Before I kind of check email and get sucked into the vortex of people wanting this and that and all of these kind of urgent but unimportant demands of my time. I try to carve out a couple hours in the morning to do things like journaling, things like working on the, you know, the one or two most important things that I set out. And really kind of I typically structure my entire morning around kind of that proactive, really high value value creating work. And I typically don't take any meetings until after about 12pm and so I try to structure my entire morning around how can I both using things like meditation, using the neuroscience behind the creative process, how can I cultivate and harvest the processing power of my subconscious and bring that to bear when I'm fresh, when I'm ready and before the world has kind of distracted me with irrelevant email requests and other things.

What is your meditation look like? Are using one specific form of meditation right now.

I've kind of been alternating between two forms of meditation and I'm on the fence right now of kind of picking which one I really want to go deeper on. Which, you know, I view as kind of the two fundamental schools of meditation. One of them is, you know, sort of mantra based meditations like transcendental meditation, and the other one is more traditional sort of mindfulness meditation. So just meditation where you focus on breath or focus on sensations and kind of Let thoughts pass through your head. There's a lot of research validating, actually both kind of meditation methodologies, and there's pros and cons to focusing on one versus the other. I probably lean slightly towards mantra based meditation, but it's harder for me to do it. And I find mindfulness to be kind of easier, more natural. But I prefer kind of mantra based because it helps me stop my mind from wandering as much.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Mantra based meditation being the one. And I. Excuse me, I've taken a transcendental meditation course and I've interviewed the guy that I actually did TM with. And that's where you're simply repeating a mantra over and over and over again, almost as a way to kind of distract your brain or create white noise in your head. And that's the form of meditation that you found to be best in the morning.

Yeah, and like I said, I mean, there's really two fundamental schools like mantra based and just kind of traditional mindfulness based that both have a ton of research behind them showing and demonstrating that they're both relatively powerful. Literally reshape the gray matter of your brain, improve your cognitive abilities, improve your abilities to deal with stress, all kinds of different stuff. It really boils down to some subtle nuances, preferences about what you like better. And for my own kind of cognitive structure, in the way that my mind works, my mind is constantly almost in overdrive and analyzing, thinking, rethinking about everything, running over thoughts, almost like obsessive in some ways. And so to me, mantra based helps kind of really focus and stop my mind from clicking into overdrive.

Right, right. And then what about your actual nutrient protocol? I know that you're really into neuroscience. You're really into the brain and cognitive performance. Do you have a specific type of dietary protocol you follow in the morning?

So, I mean, I'm not, I'm not as hardcore as a lot of the, you know, you biohacking guys. I have, I have a very simple sort of supplement stack that I take every day. And then sometimes I'll kind of mix in and test different supplements to whether, you know, improve cognition or chill out or whatever it is. You know, my core stack is super simple, and I try to base it in research. And what I've found and seen over and over again is kind of the most commonly validated and recommended supplements to take. So at its core, really simply what I take is vitamin D, fish oil, and B12 are kind of the three things I take every single day. And then I'll experiment, I'll add in one supplement and kind of see how it makes me feel. Over a couple weeks I'll subtract something, kind of see how it makes me feel. And a really good resource that I use for a lot of that is examine.com which is a great kind of non biased, science driven source. And so if there's a supplement that I hear about or interested in, I'll kind of dig through examine.com and figure out, hey, what does it say about X, Y or Z and should I be taking these particular supplements or what are the impacts of taking them? And so there's a few, two that I've kind of kicked around and a couple that are on my radar right now that I might start taking regularly, which we can dig into if you want to. But really it's for like, you know, vitamin d, fish oil, B12 are the three that I, that I stick with the most. Other than that, I mean, from a nutrition standpoint, I'm definitely not an expert in it. Again, I mean, it's a world that you know a thousand times more than I do. And it's a world that is so full of noise that it's often hard to distinguish the signal. You know, I mean, I think about it from a very high level standpoint. There's three or four kind of dietary frameworks that all have a ton of commonalities and I think people get caught up in the small differences that they have. So I think if you look at things like paleo, vegan, the Mediterranean diet as sort of described in the book Blue Zones and Keto diet, those are probably, at least from my sort of rough understanding of it, like those four all have a lot of merit and there's a ton of commonalities amongst all those four diets. There's obviously points of contention, meat, not meat, et cetera. But across all four of those, there's a ton of really similar things. Don't eat processed food, eat a lot of whole vegetables, that kind of stuff. So really I try to focus on sort of the 80, 20 commonalities between all those diets and then I'll sort of dip into little pieces from various ones around that.

Got it, got it. And so when you do this morning routine, you've got your transcendental meditation, you have these nutrients that you're putting into your body. And then what about morning movement protocol or morning exercise protocol? You do anything like that?

So I have a, you know, again, you know, a trillion times more about exercise and physical fitness than I ever Will, But I have a trainer, so that helps me kind of outsource that. He's a, you know, he's a former Olympic lifter and he's kind of just trains me on like, my goals were basically to build muscle mass, build strength, and keep my body healthy. So I train two or three times a week. And then on the days that I don't do that, I'll just do cardio, typically for maybe 30 to 60 minutes. And to me, I actually do the cardio less for the sort of physical benefits and more for the mental benefits. And there's a ton of research around how incredibly beneficial just steady state cardio is in terms of dealing with things like depression, anxiety, improving your mood, improving cognitive function, really.

So steady state, not interval based training.

Exactly, yes, steady state cardio. And you know, we had a particular interview with this dude named Talben Shahar, who's a, a professor who taught the most popular class in Harvard's history. And it was all about how to be happy. And he recommends the 3 to 4. Basically things he recommends fundamentally to really improve your cognitive state, your cognitive function, your happiness, are get good sleep, do cardio, have sex and meditate. If you just do those things, you're doing 80% of what's necessary in terms of building kind of a stable fundamental base around that can even battle back and combat things like depression and anxiety.

Okay, so what were the four again?

Cardio, cardio, sleep, getting enough sleep, meditating and having sex.

Okay. Cardio, getting enough sleep, meditating, having enough sex. And the cardio that he recommended was not interval training, but just like basic aerobic, steady state cardio. Like I assume you're talking about like 20 to 30 minutes of riding a bicycle or running or something like that.

Stationary bike, yeah, stationary bike, et cetera. And again, it's not for the physical benefits, it's for the mental benefits, right?

Yeah. And that's kind of been the word on the street in exercise science for a while, has been this idea that when it comes to this miracle grow for the brain, right, this brain derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF as it's called, that steady state cardio is one of the better ways to actually enhance that, especially when done like in the morning before a cognitively demanding day. With the theory being that when you weightlift, you get BDNF also released, or when you do high intensity cardio, but there's so much blood flow to the muscles that less makes it to the brain. Recently actually, you know, not to be contrarian but in the past couple of months, there's been some new research on weight training and how weight training and high intensity interval training does indeed appear to enhance BDNF just as much as that steady state cardio, which also works. But it's interesting. I think exercise in general can help. But the one thing I bear in mind when I'm like, when I'm gonna be speaking at a conference, right. Or I've got a really cognitively demanding day is the high intensity interval training. And the weight training can be exhausting. Right. Like, it can kind of cause this cortisol release and leave you just a little bit fatigued, which is why I'm personally kind of like you, Matt, like, like a fan of like an easy swim or a walk in the sunshine or, you know, a little. Little bit of time on the elliptical train or that type of thing before. Before a day where I really need to ask a lot of my brain.

Yeah. And I mean, that's why, you know, that's why I try to kind of alternate. I do the cardio on days when I'm not doing lifting or physical training so that I can kind of get that mental reset and get those cognitive benefits. And then I try to kind of harness the. All of the other benefits around weightlifting and building muscle with strength training a couple times a week.

Got it. Okay, so you've got transcendental meditation, some form of steady state cardio. You're kind of putting these nutrients into your body. And the three main supplements you said you take are a vitamin D, a fish oil, and I believe there's one other B12 and a vitamin B12. Like a. Like a complex or just straight up B12.

Yeah, like a B. Like a vitamin B something or other.

Okay, so you take those three supplements everywhere, and then do you have like a specific breakfast that you have every morning?

Typically. And I mean, dude, again, like, I don't. I mean, I'm happy to share my routine, but in terms of fitness advice and like, health advice, I don't know that I'm going to be adding a ton of value that you, like, you. You probably listen to my recommendations, like cringing and being like, oh, my gosh, this, like, this guy knows nothing about nutrition. But typically what I'll have is I'll have kind of a protein shit. I'll have like a protein shake with maybe like, I'll do a double scoop typically. So like 30 to 40 grams of protein. And then I'll have maybe like a banana. And that's typically what I have for breakfast.

Okay, got it. So like, like a vegan protein shake with a little bit of fruit?

Yep, exactly.

Okay, cool. And then you're off to the races. But you kind of protect your day and you don't really do a lot until noon when it comes to actual work.

Well, I mean, I do a lot of work in the morning, but it's not, it's not meetings and busy work. Right. I spend my mornings doing that kind of high value, proactive, productive work. Things like thinking, journaling, kind of sketching out, figuring out, okay, where do I want to be in five years looking at my business, conducting an 8020 analysis of how I'm spending my time and energy. So I try to dedicate the mornings to, if you've ever read the book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, there's kind of a grid of urgency versus importance. And I try to dedicate my mornings to things that are important but not urgent. And those are typically the things that are going to create the most leverage in your life that are going to create the most long term positive impact for you. And so I try to really spend my mornings doing the big, powerful kind of creative thinking, journaling and that sort of work. And then I spend my afternoons, when I have lower energy and less cognitive power, doing things like meetings, checking email, and dealing with kind of all of the annoyances of work life.

Yeah, that's kind of interesting. I'm similar. I always, in the morning, I do my fiction writing, I always knock out the one big piece of content that I want to do during the day. So I have this rule that I need to make art every day. And that's been a key to my success. Right. For the past 10 years, I've made an audio or a video or an article every single day. But I find by the afternoon, for me personally, I'm pooped out. Right? Like, I can respond to emails really well and I can do like, kind of like the mindless, like, you know, creating podcast show notes or, you know, even doing things like, you know, writing training plans or going over consults and stuff like that before the super deep creative stuff, I gotta knock that out in the morning, I gotta knock out my body care in the morning, I gotta knock out my meditation in the morning. And then by the afternoon and by the time the afternoon evening rolls around, that's all kind of like response mode type of stuff. So, yeah, I totally get where you're coming from, but I do know some people who, and I've even written an article about this called the Morningness Eveningness Questionnaire, who really do well in the evenings, who have their most productive times from 9pm till 2am And I think that that's based on everything from circadian rhythmicity to genetics to actual. To the way that people have set up their lives to where they really train their bodies to be more productive in the evening versus the morning. But I think you and I are somewhat alike when it comes to how we set up our days. You've got this podcast like I mentioned, called the Science of Success. Now you also, when you were talking about your morning routine, you talked about neuroscience. And the neuroscience of productivity, I think was the way that you phrased it. When you throw around phrases like that, like how success is science or how productivity is based on neuroscience, what exactly do you mean? Can you give me an example of how like success is based on science?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and the name itself, you know, we, the reason, the way we kind of came up with the name was we had about 50 different titles and we tested them all and the Science of Success happened to be the most popular title. And so it's not necessarily about the science behind super successful people, though that is a piece of it. And we look at a ton of different components of that. But it's much more about the science and research and data backed components that make somebody successful. And I'll give you a couple examples. One of the most. One of my favorites is the concept of the book Mindset by Carol Dweck. I don't know if you've read that book or heard about it. It's one of my favorite books of all time.

You interviewed her?

Yes, yeah, we interviewed her. The interview probably was a month or two ago, but that book, like I read the book years before I interviewed her and it was probably the single most impactful book I've ever read in my life.

What's her main idea? Like what's the main thrust of that book?

So she's a research psychologist at Stanford. Right. And she's conducted studies, like massive studies. In fact, the largest population she conducted it on was the entire 8th grade population of the country of Chile. So like huge data sets, hundreds of thousands of people, and repeatedly verified the same findings over and over again, which is this. There's the distinction in the way people deal with life and they fall into sort of one of two camps. One is called the fixed mindset and one is called the growth mindset. And without going super deep down the rabbit hole, basically the fixed mindset is this belief that Your identity is fundamentally fixed. And so everything that you do, so your intelligence, your abilities are kind of fixed characteristics and fixed traits. And this ripples through a ton of things. It ripples through how you think about challeng, how you think about struggle, how you think about effort. And so somebody who thinks that their abilities are super fixed and they can test for this as early as like age 5 or 6, they can test it in first graders. They give them a math test that's challenging, but not super hard. And then for the people that do really well on it, they say, hey, do you want to take another test that's about the same as this and you can get another A on it, or do you want to take a test that's really hard and you're going to get a C on it? And so people with a fixed mindset are super focused because of the belief that their identity is fundamentally static. They constantly want to demonstrate their talents and abilities. They want to show and demonstrate how great they are. And so it leads to an avoidance of challenge. It leads to the belief that effort is not necessary for success because if you're a natural, then you don't need effort, you don't need training. And it leads to viewing other people as threats and judges of your ability and a constant focus on trying to prove yourself and demonstrate how awesome your innate abilities are. The flip side of that is what she calls the growth mindset, which is essentially a focus on learning and improvement and the realization that in order to get better, you have to face challenges, you have to do stuff that's super difficult, you're going to have a lot of failures, and you're going to need people along the way who can help you. So the growth mindset is fundamentally a focus on improvement and learning and realizing, hey, sometimes I have to fail and look stupid and make mistakes and take the difficult math test in order to get better. And they can clearly delineate this distinction. And she goes through a ton of examples in the research of how it impacts people's lives, from, you know, everything from parenting to everyday life to top performers across a ton of different fields. But you know, that's one really specific example of something that is a highly research validated conclusion that can have a huge impact on your life. And it had a huge impact on my life because I was a very fixed mindset person in the way that I approached things. And it led to a lot of self sabotage. It stifled me, held me back from succeeding in a lot of different areas of my life. And once I was able to. I mean, so the fixed mindset, right? It's all about proving how great you are. And so in many cases you will self sabotage your effort because you don't want to damage your identity. And so it leads to blame and excuses and kind of externalizing failures outside of yourself. She has a really good quote that if you don't believe that you're at fault for something, it's impossible for you to learn from it, right? So if I'm, let's say, playing a game of tennis or competing in some kind of sport, and I blame my failure to win the game on the weather or the refs or the sun was in my eyes or XYZ factor, that's outside of my control, I've robbed myself of the ability to learn from that and improve. And so flipping that on its head and saying every single thing is my responsibility. I have to overcome all these challenges and I should have, as she calls it, the mindset of a champion and be able to win despite all these setbacks, despite all these things going wrong. When you have a fixed mindset, all you care about is preserving that identity of I'm a winner. And so I can't accept that I lost because of my ability. It had to be some external thing, and that it really sabotages your ability to learn and grow if you can't honestly assess your own abilities and honestly assess your own shortcomings.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I was actually talking with my kids about this at dinner last night, about how when I was growing up, everybody told me that I was really creative and I was good at things like watercolor painting and playing the violin. And I actually got painted in this corner where I really love to do things like program video games and write fantasy fiction and play World of Warcraft craft and make music. And the whole time the other thing that people would tell me was, oh, you're very, very right brain and creative. You're not very left brain. You're never going to be good at math and science and you're not that great of an athlete, right? And it took me until I got to, well, high school to really discover that I actually did like sports. And with practice and application and avoiding that fixed mindset actually could be good at sports. And I kind of turned myself into an athlete. And the same thing happened with math and science in college. I went 4.0 pre med all the way through college. Once I realized, hey, if I apply myself and actually sit down and learn this stuff, the mind is a pretty cool thing, and it can learn and it can expand. And we were having this discussion with my kids last night because, for example, on my son River's end of the year report card, it told him that he liked to rush through tasks, right, and. And get tasks completed very quickly. And I told him, well, that doesn't necessarily mean that that's who you are, that that doesn't define you. All that means is that you can teach yourself how to slow down, how to be more mindful, and here's how we can do it. You know, the same thing with, with my other son, Taran. You know, it talked about how he really didn't seem to have the skill necessary to be at the top of his class for multiplication tables. And I told him, well, you can, you can easily change that part of you with some things as simple as flashcards and recognizing the application of multiplication to things like, say, you know, finances or making money or, you know, running your little Airbnb business. And, you know, I think it's really important, and I believe that Carol Dweck does talk a lot about parenting as well, doesn't she, when it, when it comes to, to this application of a fixed mindset to parenting?

Yeah, absolutely. She talks a bunch about parenting and how, you know, things that we say to try and encourage children often can sort of reinforce a fixed mindset and end up creating and sort of sabotaging their ability to learn and grow and improve. Because if you tell somebody over and over again, oh, you're so smart. Oh, you're so great, like, it can reinforce this image where their identity of being smart, they don't ever want to do anything or put themselves in any situation where that identity is challenged or questioned. Because if you intelligence is fundamentally fixed, you don't want to risk it and do something that you might fail at. Because people say, oh, you're dumb, right? Oh, I thought you were smart, but you failed that thing. If you believe your identity is unchangeable, then you're permanently labeled a failure. But if you think that, hey, my identity is constantly something that I can improve and grow on, and whatever I am today is just a starting point, the sky's the limit in terms of your ability to grow and improve.

Yeah. And, you know, another kind of key part of this, this whole, like, science of success thing is the whole piece about productivity. And I know that you have thoughts about, you know, really productive people, like superstars, you know, superhuman business people like Warren Buffett and Ray Dalio and Charlie Munger and, you know, Tony Robbins. Elon Musk, etc. How do they actually get so much done? Are they using this neuroscience of success principle, like thinking outside the fixed mindset? Are they using more of the 8020 principle? How do you think people like that actually get so much done?

Yeah, that's a question that I've been obsessed with for a long time. And we dig into a bunch of different components of that on the show. The simplest kind of example that really set me off thinking about this was just thinking about Bill Gates. And somebody, somebody once told me, bill Gates isn't producing a thousand times more value than me. He's not producing a million times more value than me. He's producing billions of times more value. And if you think about the kind of old adage or the really simple mental model that many people use, it's not possible for Bill Gates to be working a billion times harder than me. There's not enough physical raw time for that even to be possible. And so when I started digging into that, the reason that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger and all these guys are so successful and achieve so much is because they're ruthlessly focused on what I consider to be the greatest kind of mental hack of all time, which I call high leverage thinking. And high leverage thinking is all about this idea of how can I ruthlessly and constantly generate more leverage on my time, more leverage on my thinking, and constantly be getting more output for the same amount of input. And fundamentally, as you touched on, it's rooted in the 8020 principle. Right. Which is an incredible phenomenon that governs everything from the math of how craters are distributed on the moon to how files are distributed on your hard drive. Rabbit populations, income distributions, et cetera. It's a super deep pattern that runs through all kinds of phenomenon in the world. And if you look at it and study it, what you can realize is that a few inputs create most of the relevant outputs in our lives. And that applies from both a positive and negative sense. And studying these guys really deeply, I figured out they've mastered how to create incredible amounts of leverage in their lives. And there's two fundamental principles that they use to do that. The first is they've ruthlessly improved their ability to think and make better decisions, which I call the art of decision making. And then they've hired people and relentlessly replaced themselves.

So when you say they've relentlessly replaced themselves, what do you mean by that?

So, you know, can I read you a quote about Andrew Carnegie?

Yeah.

So this is from. This is one of my favorite quotes. And it's from a, it's from a book about Andrew Carnegie. Quote. When A.B. farquhar, a Pennsylvania businessman, boasted that he was in his office every morning by seven in the morning and was the last one to leave in the evening, Carnegie laughed at him. You must be a lazy man if it takes you 10 hours to do a day's work. What I do is to get good men and I never give them orders. My directions seldom go beyond suggestions. Here in the morning I get reports from them. Within an hour I have disposed of everything, sent out all my suggestions. The day's work is done and I'm ready to go out and enjoy myself. And there's actually another quote, I won't read it now, but there's another quote from John D. Rockefeller that's almost identical where he was talking to a new recruit at Standard Oil and he basically said, anything that you can get anyone else to do, train them and have them do it and spend all of your time thinking about how you can make more money for Standard Oil. And both of those people, titans of industry, two of the wealthiest, from an inflation adjusted standpoint, wealthiest, if not the wealthiest people ever shared the same ethos. And the same ethos that Warren Buffet uses, that Charlie Munger uses, that Ray Dalio uses. All of these people having ruthless focus on constantly replacing themselves and constantly trying to get out of the middle, constantly trying to hire incredible people, put them in a position to succeed and get out of the way. And the challenge that a lot of entrepreneurs, especially smaller entrepreneurs face is that people really struggle to let go and get out of their own way and let go of the need to kind of control every piece of the puzzle. But the more you can focus on your areas of strength, the more you can get out of the way and stop doing everything except what you're exceptional at. You know, once you do that, that's how you really start generating leverage, right? You're generating leverage on your time because you're not wasting your time doing things that you don't absolutely essentially need to be doing. And you're getting leverage on your effort because you're only doing the stuff that you're really, really good at and getting even better at it.

How do you avoid if you are, you know, someone like, you know, you know, a CEO or the owner of a company or someone who is delegating tasks to others, that temptation to micromanage.

You know, I mean, I think it's, I think it's a learn and it's a trained Skill. Right. And fortunately, I consider myself an incredibly lazy person. And so I've been able to ruthlessly cultivate my laziness into an incredible ability to delegate pretty much everything. And my first question that I ask myself whenever I encounter any kind of business problem or situation is, you know, how can I delegate this? How can I design a system so that I no longer have to deal with this? How can I give this to somebody else? How can I move this off my plate as quickly as possible? You know, one of the books that can really kind of help cultivate that mindset and train that skillset, actually, I'll give two quick book recommendations. One of them is the Effective Executive by Peter Drucker, and the other is the book Essentialism. And both of those books are really good about kind of getting out of the mindset of the belief and the idea that you need to be doing everything and relentlessly focusing on only really kind of thriving and living in your zone of strength.

Interesting. Yeah, I've read Essentialism. I've never read the Effective Executive, but I'll have to check that one out. And by the way, for those of you listening in, if you go to the URL BenGreenfieldFitness.com ScienceOfSuccess that's BenGreenfulFitness.com ScienceOfSuccess I will link to the resources that Matt and I discuss in the show notes over there. So basically, it sounds to me like the number one thing that a lot of these guys do is they figured out ways to kind of like clone themselves and to create a team around them to be able to do the things that perhaps aren't the best use of those guys as time.

That's a huge piece of it. But there's another piece of the puzzle too, and that's cultivating the ability to make better decisions, right? And I think about this, it's the power of compounding, right? Einstein called compound interest the eighth wonder of the world. And a focus on improving your decision making and your ability to think from kind of a meta or big picture sense is a compound improvement in your thinking for the rest of your life. If you get 1% better at thinking, deciding, understanding reality, that's going to cascade through every decision you make from that point forward. It's going to make you better at buying a house. It's going to make you better at analyzing what supplements you should be taking. It's going to make you better at growing your business. It's going to make you better at being a parent. And so when you make these incremental investments in your ability to think and more deeply understand reality, and a huge piece of that too is focusing on knowledge that doesn't change over time. It enables this knowledge to stack and stack and stack. And it's not an incremental growth in your knowledge. It's an exponential growth in your ability to think and understand better. It's like a snowball rolling downhill and gaining more and more and more. The larger it gets, the more it can accumulate.

Interesting.

Many people focus on studying tactics and they focus on studying very surface level principles. You know, they study things like the things that rapidly change and in three to five years, the example would be somebody who's in the Internet world studying online marketing. They're focused on what are the latest tactics and strategies I can use to get a 5% boost in my email click through rates. That information is going to be completely irrelevant in three to five years or five to ten years. Instead, what all of these super successful people do, people like Warren Buffett or his business partner Charlie Munger, or Ray Dalio, who's the founder of the largest and most successful hedge fund of all time, Bridgewater, they all keep throwing out this word, talking about this thing over and over again called mental models. And people hear it a lot and sort of, oh yeah, yeah, that sounds interesting. Like what is that? These guys are relentless about building a framework of these mental models that helps them deeply understand everything that's happening in reality. And they focus on developing these really rich pillars of understanding across the major disciplines that govern and explain everything that happens in the world. And so those are things like deeply understanding psychology and how, you know, how human behavior works, deeply understanding mathematics, deeply understanding game theory, biology, chemistry, all these different pieces of the puzzle. If you can grasp and build a framework of understanding that builds upon all of these major pillars of knowledge. That's information that doesn't change over time, that's knowledge that you can, that stacks up and helps you more deeply understand the way the world actually functions, what creates results in reality, and that lets you not only understand how things are going to play out, but also plan and develop tactics that can help you achieve the goals that you want to achieve. And so instead of studying these really surface level tactics, that's a very low leverage way to achieve the results you want. Zooming out and mastering the principles that govern the strategy, which is what all of these billionaires and really high leverage people do, enables you to develop the tactics on the fly whenever you're in a given situation.

Got it, got it. Okay, cool. And by the way, those are a couple of my favorite books. These ideas, especially from Charlie Munger, about human psychology and how does he call them? And you'll know this, Matt, he calls them the. Is it the irrational human decision making processes or something like he's got like.

A word that he uses. Yeah, he's got a list of. It's the 27 standard causes of human misjudgment.

Yes, the 27 standard causes. And that's in his poor Charlie's Almanac.

Right, exactly. And there's actually a YouTube video too, that's like an hour and 15 minute speech that he talks about. Every single one of them and kind of goes through, gives an example of each particular one and helps explain kind of what that mental model is and how it impacts people's behavior. But that, you know, just, just within the realm of psychology. Right. Like that's a perfect example of. If you can just master those 27 principles, it's super easy to develop effective marketing strategies because you understand the principles psychology that govern human behavior as opposed to trying to master the tactics of. Hey, what's the latest thing that is creating results right now?

Yeah, yeah. And you've interviewed a lot of interesting people on your show. For example, you had this one interview, I forget who it was with, but you did it about how sound, actual sound and frequencies can do things like help you to be happier or help you to achieve more. Did you have any takeaways from that show? Like did you start using sound in any way after you did that show or frequencies or music?

Yeah. So that was an interview with a dude named Julian Treasure who's, who's like a wizard of sound. He, he's a sound expert. He's given a bunch of TED talks and talked really in depth about sound and how it functions and, and the interesting takeaways that I had from that. It was actually, you know, there's, there's a couple different pieces. One is sound can impact everything from our heart rate to our brain waves to our breathing patterns. And the simplest example that he gives about how to think about that is if you hear a really loud like bang or noise, right? Like your blood pressure immediately jumps, like your heart rate jumps. You get a little shot of cortisol and you start kind of looking around and thinking about, oh, what are the threats in my environment? Like what's happening? So sound in a very real way impacts our physiology. And one of the most interesting stats that he talked about was this idea that noise can have a huge negative impact on our productivity. And in fact, noise can actually kill you in Europe every single year. Noise via reduced life expectancy kills a million health years worth of people's lives every single year, just in Europe. And so noise is this huge thing that is a crazy impact. One of the other stats that he talks about is the idea that ambient sounds around you, especially human voices, can negatively impact your productivity by up to like, 66%. So if you have. You're listening to a podcast in the background while you're. While you're working, or you're sitting in an office and you can hear people talking around you even if you're not consciously aware of it, it has a huge cognitive toll on your ability to think and effectively produce and kind of work on the work that you want to create.

Interesting. So do you use any of these, like, binaural beats or. Or tracks that you can listen to to focus or enhance creativity?

I've listened to a couple of them and I've meditated to them and kind of used them to entrain my brainwaves and experiment and played around with them. To me, the biggest shift that I made after listening to that episode was actually decreasing the amount of music that I listen to while I'm working. And now I either don't listen to music at all, or I listen to music that's really quiet. Because even though it kind of feels like music can help us stay focused, in many instances, music takes a subconscious tax on your productivity. The one exception to that, that research bears out is that if you're working on creative tasks, listening to music can actually improve your creativity and help boost creativity. So if you're doing stuff that's super creative, or trying to brainstorm or come up with new ideas, music is actually beneficial. But if you're doing as Cal Newport would kind of call deep work, and trying to really focus and execute music can actually be creating sort of subconsciously taxing your effectiveness.

Interesting. Yeah, I like this. Have you ever heard of Brain fm?

I have, yeah. I've used it a couple times.

Yeah. Brain FM is one that I like quite a bit for kind of like that background noise that I can still do deep work during. That doesn't kind of distract me from getting that deep work done. And then, of course, when I sleep, I'll use. Actually use an app called Sleep Stream to enhance my ability to. Ability to be able to enter things like my delta brainwave zones while I sleep. It's kind of cool. It's like a DJ for sleep where you can choose between deep sleep and light sleep and power naps. You don't get into too deep a state of sleep. And I'm a huge fan of this concept behind sound and music and frequencies. There's even this guy named Michael Tyrell who creates these CDs that I blast through my home at night. They're called love life and Lullabies, and they enhance your ability to be able to relax and have feelings of higher emotions like peace and love and joy. And I've interviewed this guy on my podcast. I love his music. And I even have like a massage therapist come over to my house and plant her table right next to or in between a couple of speakers. And then I play these soundtracks from Michael Tyrell and just feel like I'm million bucks. And so does she, actually, when we do a massage. So I really like this idea of sound and music and frequencies as woo woo as it may seem. It does really seem to work quite well. Now, another interesting interview that you had was one about how to use neuroscience to build habits that stick. I think this was with Daria Rose, and I've actually had her husband, Kevin Rose, on my show. But was there anything you took out of that interview, especially when it came to using neuroscience to enhance good eating habits or your approach to food or anything else? With respect to that.

We'Ve done a couple different interviews around building habits. We have the interview with Daria. Actually, it hasn't been released yet, but in a couple weeks we have an episode coming out with Charles Duhigg, who's the author of the Power of Habit. And we also have an upcoming interview with Nir Eyal, who, I forget actually the name of his book, but he wrote a book about sort of applied applying the habit loop in a product development and marketing context. And all of these revolve around the same fundamental idea, which is the habit loop. Right. And the habit loop is really simple. You've got a cue as something that causes you to perform an action. You have the routine, which is the actual action that you're taking, and then you have the reward that you get. So the cue could be, oh, I want something novel and interesting. The routine is I pick up my phone and I scroll through Facebook, and then the reward is, you know, I get a feeling of, oh, cool, I got that kind of novelty and interest. And the interesting thing that all of them kind of talk about in terms of building successful habits is that oftentimes you don't want to change. You can't in many cases change the queue, and you want to keep the reward roughly the same. But what you want to figure out is how can you modify the routine so that it gets you to the same reward point without the negative kind of cost of whatever that previous routine was that you didn't like?

Gotcha. Gotcha. So what would be a concrete example of how you would use something like that?

I'll give you a specific example in my life that I sort of tweaked a behavior pattern. And this actually came from going back to the idea of how do I outline my day and spend my time? One of the things that I did a couple weeks ago, I did this sort of huge audit of how I spend every hour of my day and broke it up and looked at over the past couple months, like, how had I spent each week, how much time had I spent in meetings, and how much time had I spent doing productive time, and how much family time had I spent. All of these different pieces of the puzzle. So I create what I call my ideal day and my actual day. My ideal day is like, how I want to be spending my time every single day. And my actual day is how I'm actually spending it. And this is a concept we pull from the restaurant industry, actually, how we look at how we allocate our labor hours across different daypars, et cetera. But I applied it to my own life and my own sort of productivity and how I spend my personal time. And what I realized was in the mornings, I have kind of this ideal schedule of how I'm spending my mornings. But oftentimes I would get up and I wouldn't check email, but I'd spend. I'd get like sucked into a vortex of reading stuff on my phone for like 30 or 45 minutes, laying in bed, and, you know, Reddit and stuff like that. And I tried. I stayed away from social media and email because I know those can be huge time sucks, but really I was functionally doing the same thing, which was wasting time and spending time on stuff that could have been used a lot more productively. And so the cue was kind of I wanted, when I got up, to experience something novel or something interesting. And the reward was after I did all that stuff, I kind of got all this different novelty. And what I realized was if I could use sort of the same cue and the same reward, if I were to just get up and go to my office when I wake up, instead of sitting my looking at my phone for like 45 minutes and journal about whatever kind of challenges or problems that I'm facing. And that enabled me to shift my thing from wasting like 30, 45 minutes laying in bed reading random junk on my phone to kind of getting the same, using the same cue and the same reward to build that into a habit that's much more proactive and helps me think about creative solutions to problems and leverage some of the neuroscience behind the creative process to be much more effective and productive and ties much better into the kind of ideal day that I've outlined for myself as opposed to what some of my actual days were looking like.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Very interesting. Okay, so there's also this idea behind the concept of. And I found this intriguing. I don't know if you did anything with this when you interviewed this person. I forget who it was, but somebody talked about sleeping without sleeping on your show. And I assume they're referring to some form of meditation or power napping or something like that. But what was that all about? This whole concept of sleeping without sleeping?

Yeah. So that was our interview with a woman named Barbara Oakley, who's been called the female Indiana Jones. She's basically a professor, done all kinds of crazy adventures. And she wrote a book about the concept of meta learning, which is essentially sort of how to. How to learning, how to learn. Right. And one of the things she shared on our show was this technique that actually Salvador Dali, the surrealist painter, had initially coined, sleeping without sleeping. And it ties into some of this neuroscience we were talking about earlier, about how the creative process works and how to tap into the subconscious, but without going super deep on it. Your brain essentially has two sort of modes that it can alternate between. One is the diffuse mode, free thinking, very creative, kind of associating random ideas together. This is when you're sort of daydreaming. And the other is the focus mode. This is very analytical refining, studying, very focused in. And what Salvador Dali would do, he would sit in a chair with keys in his hand, and he would kind of dangle his hand over the side of the keys, and he'd relax and loosely start thinking about whatever problem he was having or painting he was working on, et cetera. And he would eventually sort of doze, like, start dozing off to sleep. And then as soon as he'd fall asleep, he would. His hand would open up and he'd drop the keys on the floor and it would wake him up, and that would. He would, like, jump and go back to work on that problem. And the idea was that by doing this, he was enabling his mind to toggle between A diffuse mode and a focus mode, and harnessing all of the cognitive benefits of the free associative state of being kind of half asleep and having your brain in a diffuse mode. And what that enabled him to do was tap into his subconscious really rapidly and tap into the free associated structure of diffuse thinking to get really creative and interesting approaches and solutions to what he was working on. Interestingly, he's obviously an artist. Another person who's kind of the opposite of the spectrum that did the exact same thing was Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison did this, except he did it with ball bearings. And he would do the same thing whenever he had a tough technical challenge. He would take a nap in a chair with ball bearings in his hand. And when he fell asleep, he would drop them and it wake him up. And then he would come back to the challenge with renewed focus and energy. And in many cases, his subconscious will have kind of combined unique and novel ideas together to formulate some sort of.

Solution that's kind of like the ultimate power nap. That's really interesting. So basically you just hold something and as soon as you begin to nod off or fall asleep, you would feel that thing drop and that would kind of like take you out of that state of sleep. Inertia still allow you to get a little bit of rest, but kind of gets you into a little bit more of a state of like lateral thinking or being able to shut off the cortex that might be getting distracted by other things.

Exactly, yeah. And it lets you harness kind of the free flowing associative insights from the diffuse mode. Because when you snap out of it, you still can kind of, you know, grasp onto the things that were in your head at that moment and then use those and apply them to whatever, whether it's an artistic challenge or technical challenge or creative challenge you're working on, you can kind of bring that. Those new thoughts and ideas to bear on that, on that challenge.

Interesting. Do you have any other like, like little cognitive biohacks? You know, whether it's like a piece of technology that you use or, or some other kind of fringe technique that you personally use to enhance your cognitive performance or your sleep, your brain, or anything along those lines? I mean, I know you're not a fringe biohacker, but I'm still curious if there's anything else that you do.

Yeah, I mean, so as I said, I think if you sort of apply the mental model of the 8020 principle, I think the four best things to do to get the most kind of bang for your buck are sleep Sex, meditation and steady state cardio or just simple exercise in terms of getting most of the cognitive benefits of normal human behavior. I do experiment with stuff kind of on the fringes. Two things actually, with three things that I've kind of been playing with recently for various different reasons. One of them is cbd, which I'm really interested in and kind of seems to have some really cool kind of benefits of just like chilling you out and has a lot of positive kind of cognitive side effects without, you know, I used to, I don't really. I used to smoke marijuana. I don't smoke it very much anymore because honestly it just makes me really hazy and I feel like cbd, I get some of the benefits of it without having my thinking get really clogged up.

Yeah, you don't get a lot of like the psychoactivity or the paranoia or anything like that.

Exactly, exactly. And then two other supplements that I've kind of been like researching a little bit of Ayurveda and like Ayurvedic medicine. And I came across two supplements that are really research validated. One of them is called Ashwagandha and the other one's called Brahmi. And I, and I did a ton of digging on these, saw them in a couple different books.

And how are you spelling Brahmi? B R A M I B R.

H B R A H M I. I think I can pull up. Let me see. I think I have this scientific name for it. It's called Bacopa Monieri.

Bacopa Monier, Yeah. That's a pretty well known nootrop. Interesting. Yeah, that's in some of the stuff that I use. I believe it's in the qualia. It is in the qualia. About 55% of it is in the qualia formulation that I use. I call it the God pill in the show notes only to the article that I wrote on it. But yeah, I'm a fan of that stuff.

Yeah. So both of like Ashwagandha and Brahmi are both ancient Indian herbs, but there's a ton of research actually about how they not only have a ton of cognitive benefits from in terms of improving memory, improving function, but also have a bunch of really interesting side effects in terms of reducing both physical stress and cognitive stress and reducing anxiety and generally kind of making you feel better. And they do things like combat Alzheimer's. I mean there's some crazy benefits that are all relatively research validated. And like I said, I mean one of my favorite sites to kind of bang these things up is Examine dot com. I just go in there and look at. Because they have all the data. And I think actually one of the editors there takes a lot of these supplements because he, like, he pretty. He highly recommends them because they're very, like, research validated. But those are. Those are a couple things I've been kicking around. I bought this other thing. I'm trying to remember the name of it right now, but it's basically this band that you, like, put on your head that you're supposed to be able to either send electric pulses into kind of your. I don't know if it's your muscle structure, your brain, that either calms you down or can, like, amp you up, like with a cup of coffee, but I can't believe you think of the name of it right now. But I played around with that thing for a little while.

Yeah, there's a few different models like that. There's one called the Circadia that works really well for sleep. And then there's one called the Halo, and it's a form of tdcs or transdirect. Or transdirect. Cranial stimulation, I believe is what that stands for, for the brain to, like, improve your motor skill acquisition or to make a task easier to kind of like. Like amp up the actual neural activity in the brain. And I actually did an interview with those folks that was really interesting that I'll link to in the show notes if folks want to listen to that. But it was quite interesting, this thing called a halo in terms of pushing your brain beyond its normal capacity. So that's interesting. And then that Circadia device for sleep is actually. It kind of works similarly. It enhances the. The firing of the neurons responsible for creating things like dopamine and serotonin. And so it enhances relaxation. By the way, I don't know if you're aware of this map, but I actually have a CBD capsule that my company makes that has a boatload of Ashwagandha in it. So it's both CBD and Ashwagandha.

Really interesting. No, I didn't know that. That's funny. I mean, it's. We came at these from very different angles, but obviously kind of both discovered that these supplements. There's something there, right? There's some science behind the cognitive effects of really, all three of those.

Yeah, yeah, really interesting. Well, I've been keeping notes of all this stuff from some of the books that you recommended to your own podcast, to some of these little neurological tweaks that we talked about. Even an article that I found about how Salvador Dali and Einstein and Aristotle perfected the power nap. So. So for any of you listening in, I'm going to link to all of this over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com ScienceOfSuccess that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com scienceofsuccess where you can check out Matt's podcast and his website and the other resources that we discussed in today's show. And Matt, in the meantime, thanks for coming on the show and sharing all this stuff with us, man. You're a fascinating dude.

Yeah. Well, Ben, thanks so much for having me on here. And for listeners who want to check it out, you can find the show@successpodcast.com successpodcast.com Sweet.

I love it. All right, folks. Well, this is Ben Greenfield along with Bat Modner or Bat Modner, Matt Bodner from the Science of Success podcast signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

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