Maneesh Sethi is the CEO of Pavlok, a new biohacking device that helps people change their habits. Maneesh is also the editor-in-chief of the popular blog, Hack the System, a guide to hacking fame, productivity, travel, languages, exercise, and business. He is an experienced biohacker who has become…
Maneesh Sethi: Time Management with Pavlok Skip to content About Blog Weight Loss + Nutrition Women’s Health Performance + Motivation Healthy Aging/Anti-Aging Cognitive Enhancement Sex Health Skin + Beauty News Better Sleep Books Podcast Menu About Blog Weight Loss + Nutrition Women’s Health Performance + Motivation Healthy Aging/Anti-Aging Cognitive Enhancement Sex Health Skin + Beauty News Better Sleep Books Podcast BLOG WEIGHT LOSS + NUTRITION WOMEN’S HEALTH PERFORMANCE + MOTIVATION HEALTHY AGING/ANTI-AGING COGNITIVE ENHANCEMENT SEX HEALTH SKIN + BEAUTY NEWS BETTER SLEEP BIOHACKING PODCAST COACHING SHOP UPGRADE LABS DAVE ASPREY BOX TRUEDARK 40 YEARS OF ZEN HOMEBIOTIC HUMAN POTENTIAL INSTITUTE About Subscribe Maneesh Sethi: Time Management with Pavlok Maneesh Sethi is the CEO of Pavlok, a new biohacking device that helps people change their habits. Maneesh is also the editor-in-chief of the popular blog, Hack the System, a guide to hacking fame, productivity, travel, languages, exercise, and business. He is an experienced biohacker who has become a “famous” DJ in just 90 days, spent a month living in the wilderness for a month with no backpack, and written an international bestselling book by the age of 14! Why you should listen – Maneesh comes on Bulletproof Radio to discuss the science of behavior formation, how habit change works, and how to use technology and biofeedback to transform your life for the better. Enjoy the show! Click here to download the mp3 of Maneesh Sethi: Hacking Habits, Accountability, & Time Management with Pavlok – #158 What You’ll Hear 0:10 – Cool Fact of the Day! 1:05 – Welcome Maneesh Sethi 2:12 – The 90-day Famous DJ Hack 4:15 – Hacking productivity with negative reinforcement 6:08 – Pavlok change device 9:52 – How habit change works 14:26 – The Pavlok Habit Formation Model 20:37 – Keystone habits 22:05 – How long does it take to form a habit? 23:35 – Breaking bad habits 31:10 – Technology, feedback & data 42:21 – Top three recommendations for kicking more ass and being Bulletproof! Featured Maneesh Sethi Pavlok Hack the System Pavlok Alpha App How to Form Good Habits in the Brain (video) Twitter – @Maneesh Maneesh Sethi on Facebook Maneesh Sethi on YouTube Resources 90-Day Famous DJ Hack RescueTime B.F. Skinner Operant Conditioning Charles Duhigg 40 Years of Zen Program Neurobiology of Pavlovian Fear Conditioning Pavlovian Conditioning Aversion Therapy in Management of 43 Homosexuals (1967 Study) Haptic technology Basis Band Corventis Nuvant Mobile Cardiac Telemetry (MCT) System Muse Headband Headspace App Bulletproof 2014 Bulletproof Biohackers Conference Transcripts Click here to download a PDF of this transcript Dave: Hey, everyone. It’s Dave Asprey with Bulletproof Radio. Today’s cool fact of the day is that the way your brain works is actually shaped by your culture. For example, people from Western cultures, when we see a picture, we’ll focus on the objects in the foreground, what’s right in front of you, but people who have been raised in Asia will most likely focus on the context of the photo and the background, sort of more the peripheral things. Brain scans will show that people from different cultures even recruit different parts of their brains to process the same picture, so we literally see the world differently based on our cultural context. Your perception of reality is the reality that you lived in. This is profound. It also means that you can train your brain and even train your vision, and I’ve done work on both of those, in order to teach you to see things in a different way or even switch between perspectives and to use the soft vision that’s more peripheral versus the very focused one. Amazing stuff. Today’s guest is a friend and a fellow entrepreneur. His name is Maneesh Sethi, and he’s CEO of Pavlok and editor-in-chief of Hack the System. He’s also written an international bestseller when he was 14 years old. He writes about hacking fame, hacking productivity, languages, exercise. Today, we’re going to talk about hacking human behavior because Maneesh is doing something really, really interesting around using negative feedback instead of just positive feedback. In my own experience as a bio-hacker, there’s parts of the brain and parts of the body, the less conscious parts, they respond really well to negative feedback, but we know the parts of the brain respond well to positive feedback. It’s not like negative’s bad and positive’s good. It’s that you want the right signal for the right part of the body, and that’s one of the things were going to be talking about here. Maneesh: That’s absolutely right. You got it completely right. Hey, Dave. Nice to see you. Dave: Maneesh, it’s good to see you this time over Skype instead of in person, which done just last time we met. I regret that I didn’t meet you when you were a famous DJ in Berlin, 90-day famous DJ hack. It’s entirely unrelated to hacking human behavior, but you just got to tell me and our listeners, how did you get to become a famous DJ in 90 days? Maneesh: I wouldn’t say it’s unrelated to human behavior whatsoever. It’s about identifying what works from a larger … We were trying to hack our way into fame in different cities. I lived in Berlin. I was there with a friend. Both of us were interested in electronic music, and we said, “Well, I’m here for 90 days. I had just figured out a way to get a full-time salary and outsource my work, so I had no work with passive income.” I said, “Let me use that money to become a DJ in Berlin.” What we did is we started off by … we created a sound system that we played in the streets and we played in subway stations where we get people to start dancing 4 and 5 in the morning, and then we’d have a friend, the other, our partner, would be DJing a club, and we would just start [wheeling 00:03:08] them in. We would get a group of people in the subway, who we’re drunk out of weekend. Get them to start dancing in the subway station. Then we had a street car, like a shopping cart sound system, and we’d roll them over to the club and bring over a ton of people. Clubs in Berlin started to invite us to play because even if we weren’t that good, we were definitely bringing in a lot of people, but then we started to buy Facebook fans, and we decided to do this as a test. We bought Facebook fans to create this idea of social prestige. I created a website. I created a fake identity. I called the clubs around Europe saying, “Hi, I’m Will from Regal World Entertainment. I represent DJ Maneesh. He’s famous in America for House and Dub Step. Would you like to book him for shows?” Literally within 45 days, we’re being flown around Europe, being paid to play shows for up to 500 people at a time. It was a fantastic. It was a really good 90-day experience. You can see that at 90days.tv. That was just a fun thing we did back in the day, in college. Dave: It’s an interesting hack of what people will do from a societal perspective and how people get fame and prestige, so call it your hacking society. The other thing, in fact the reason that I first got to know you was because you got to be well known because you hired a girl from Craigslist to sit in your home office and slap you every time you used Facebook. What the hell? Explain this. Maneesh: This is actually one of those big things that change the way I live. I was doing productivity experiments while I traveled. I found that travel ruins your ability or focus. On my blog Hack the System, I decided to do an experiment where I took, I hired a Craigslist. Her job was to watch me. Whenever I got off task, whenever I used Facebook or wasn’t writing my article, whenever I got off task, she just would slap me in the face. It was that simple. It started off as a funny experiment, but it ended with my productivity quadrupling. You saw recently Rescue Time, Dave, and my productivity percentage of the day that was productive before the experiment was 28%. While I had her with me, it was up to 98%. That means 98% of my time was spent in write room writing the words that would become a blog post or a pitch or whatever I wanted to do. What’s interesting here, and Dave, I think you’ll understand, is that slap was a potential fear, the potential pain motivated me a little bit, but also having the accountability. Somebody sitting down next to me with who I would say, “Hey, could you grab an image from this website to put in my blog post while I write the article? How does this sound?” Then I would say the words out loud. I found that having the negative reinforcement of the potential shock, potential slap plus the accountability together, helped quadruple my productivity ends. That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing today. Dave: Let’s talk for a minute about what you’re doing today. I see a lightning bolt behind you. I know what it is because I’m an investor in Pavlok. Just full disclosure there, like I’ve been working to help advise you with your start up, and I am intrigued because what you’re doing is so in the face of the super positive things people are doing. There’s two things I want you to talk about. First is just overall, what is this Pavlok change device. Your very early stages. You can’t go out and buy this thing right now. This isn’t a pitch so much as what is the new bio-hack that’s coming down the pipeline. I find it fascinating, which is why I’m willing to spend my time on helping it succeed. What is Pavlock? Because it came out experiment. Just walk people through it so they know how you’re seeing the world, then I want to talk some more about that other software you just mentioned about how you’re tracking your productivity, and then we can talk more about changing behavior. Pavlok 101, what’s the deal with what you’re doing? Maneesh: Realistically, it all comes down to how do humans change behavior in the brain. I myself grew up extremely ADD. I’ve managed to be successful in things because I have out-of-the-mindset thinking capability, but I’m never good at executing. Because of that, my productivity has always suffered. I decided to start doing experiments, and we found that things like pets are extremely motivational for people who are bad at getting on task. Not just ADD people but people who have trouble finishing the loops that they open. I would start to make bets with a friend, like if I don’t finish my article by 5 PM, I owe you $50. I started to notice that this was really powerful. I started to notice that rewards could make it more automatic. If I set a trigger and said, “After breakfast, I will write it in a journal before I walk to leave the door, or else I pay money. I can make this a habit that didn’t need the money to sustain the habit.” It became automatic and part of my daily routine. Once I started to hack my brain, technology, fortunately, caught up with us at the right time because sensor technology and 3D printing and all of these things that make hardware, smart hardware possible have only come into existence in the last 2.5 years. October 2011 is when the real revolution came of Bluetooth 4.0 that made wearable devices possible. Because I happened to stumble upon some interesting brain stuff, and I had studied also at Stanford University on bad habits to an extent. I did two classes that were very interesting. I was able to put those two together, and I decided to take Pavlok and create a device that helps people form good habits and break bad habits using the most modern psychological and scientific experiments and data, as well as the most recent developments of technology as well. This is Pavlok. Dave: The idea behind Pavlok is really you do something you don’t like, and it’s brilliant. You didn’t do what you said you can do. It could track you automatically, but I think the most impressive thing is that it could post to Facebook and let your friends shock you. There’s some level of ego involved there. Like, “Oh, for God’s sake, now I have to admit publicly that I failed,” and then someone, and I won’t even know which friend it is like ha ha, pushing the button. It’s kind of evil in some … not necessarily evil, like super bad, but it does put you in a weird mindset, doesn’t it? Maneesh: I think it puts you in a competitive mindset. It’s more of a game than a potential like this is a bad thing, but you should understand that there’s two ways in which Pavlok works or which more importantly habit change works. People often want to form new habits, and people want to break bad habits. Those are two very different things. In general, Dave, what are you most interested in? Forming new habits or breaking bad habits? Dave: For me, right now, probably forming new habits would be more interesting. Maneesh: Do you have any habit in particular you or someone you know might want to form? Dave: New habit? I’d like to make it rain money. That’s a great habit. I haven’t figured out I don’t know. Maneesh: It’s a good habit. Dave: To be honest, what I’m working at is better management of a limited calendar. I’m finding that I’m not doing as good a job as I’d like to do on following up with people that I really want to spend time with just because I have this deluge of email and messages. I’m building systems in there, but there’s a certain habit, the things you do that make your calendar work. I’m not sure if I’ve identified the perfect habit there, but I do know that relentlessly checking my email all the time is not a good habit, and I should consciously schedule it and things like that. Maneesh: You’re coming at this from the perspective of a lot of people, which is they have some big shift they want to change, but they haven’t broken it down to the smallest form of what that habit really is. People think that they smoke cigarettes because they smoke cigarettes, but sometimes it’s because they want to break and they want to take a walk around the park, and that’s the self-habit that they didn’t realize they fixed that, and they just started taking a walk. They wouldn’t need a cigarette at all. You’re very [inaudible 00:11:27] stage, and with forming new habits, the best and most powerful way to do it is to use operant conditioning. That’s BF Skinner’s method of adding positive rewards if something good happens. If you go to the gym, you will earn a dollar or you will get a cupcake afterwards. It’s instantaneous reward. It’s a trigger action reward if you’re familiar with Charles Duhigg’s work. A side section that Skinner worked on was negative reinforcement. Positive reinforcement is positively adding pleasure, adding something good. Negative reinforcement is not punishment. Negative reinforcement is taking away something bad. From a psychological perspective, we’re saying the active going to work everyday because if you don’t, you’ll get fired. They’re taking away your salary if you don’t go to work, that’s negative reinforcement. What we’re doing here for a change, performing new habits. For example, I want to exercise each day. Or I want to walk 10,000 steps. I want to do one class on dual lingo a day. I want to do one … I want to my measure my HRV with the HRV sense app. If somebody wants to create this habit, I want to check my daily HRV level, or anything about nature. How it works is you would say, “All right, I want to make a commitment to do this. I will reward myself if I do this, but for the first few days, because I know it’s hard to get started, I will potentially inflict the penalty if I don’t do it, because that will motivate my ape brain, my animal brain to do the habit while the positive reinforcement catches it and turns it into a habit. Does that make sense? Dave: It does make sense. Maneesh: It’s kind of confusing. Dave: I think human behavior changes confusing because we have different levels. There are conscious behaviors. There’s things you want to do, and then there’s things that you wanted to do but you didn’t do it, and you don’t know why you didn’t do it. At least in my own understanding after the 40 years of Zen program and just learning to have a very detailed awareness of the inner dialogue in my mind and from reading various works of research and whatnot, you have a set of very, very fast automated behaviors that are actively conflicting with the human behaviors that you want to do. The prime example this is, today I’m not going to eat a cookie, and then you eat the cookie anyway. What the hell? Then you’re frustrated, and it’s because you have a [speed 00:13:59] mismatch between the human brain, the prefrontal cortex and this really older parts of the brain that are there like [inaudible 00:14:07] going to eat my tigers. That thing, different levels of that seem to want different levels of positive and negative reinforcement. Have you mapped that out using a train brain model or anything like that? Maneesh: I have mapped out a model, but we call the Pavlok habit formation model, which uses the brain frontal lobe, the prefrontal cortex versus the basal ganglia where habits are stored, and identifies what makes habits stick. I’m totally happy to share that, or I can explain it in a manner that you want. Dave: Let’s explain that. People driving in their cars, not everyone knows how to spell ganglia, much less what they are, so don’t get too science-y, but be science-y enough that people who are into this are going to get what they want from it. Maneesh: To form new habits, there’s two layers. Hold on one moment. I can actually show you how it works. Let me share my screen. Can you see this screen? Dave: I can, but keep in mind that a lot of people are [inaudible 00:15:07]. Walk through in words everything that the rest of people on iTunes, video, or on YouTube the stuff they’re seeing. Maneesh: To change behavior, basically you need to change two layers. You need to improve the ability for somebody to do a task, and you need to improve their motivation to do a task. If they have the motivation to do a task, for example, if I go to the gym everyday this week, on Friday I get to get myself a massage. That motivation of positive reinforcement is one important factor. The other motivation is ability. If you have to drive an hour away to get to the gym, even if you’ll earn a cookie or get a massage, you don’t want to drive a mile away to the gym. However, if it’s on your way to work and/or if you’re a gym instructor and you just aren’t at the gym all the time, it’s almost hard to not work out because it’s just so easy. It’s right there for you. The two ways that you can improve this is to make sure that you improve the ability and you improve their motivation. Right here, what you can see on some of your screens is the Pavlok habit model, which is talking about how we break down habits, … truncated (42,123 more characters in archive)