Leaders and Their Stories

Richard Lowe (00:01.026)
Hello, I'm Richard Lowe of The Writing King and Ghost Writing Guru. Today I'm here with Paul Berry, who's going to talk to us about habits. Paul, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Paul Barry (00:11.21)
Absolutely, I'm Paul Barry. I'm the CEO and co-founder, one of the three co-founders of Habit Driven. Habit Driven is our habit tracking app. It helps you create healthy habits and remove the ones that you don't want. With AI, Habi is your conversational chatbot. The whole idea in the first place was to make habit building conversational.

Richard Lowe (00:35.118)
Very interesting idea. Why don't you tell me a little bit of how that works?

Paul Barry (00:38.188)
Yeah, so when I first met my business partner Mike, Mike had built this app.

based on, he was always tracking his habits in the Google spreadsheet. And when ChatGPT came out, he thought, hmm, I think I'll just upload this sheet into ChatGPT and ask it, what can you basically guess about me from these habits? And it gave him some really interesting insight. And then he kept asking questions and he thought, I wonder if this would be something that would make a good app. So he started building it initially just for himself.

And then he got a team and started to grow a team of developers to work on it and turned it into a fully functioning app that other people could use. And then I met him about 10 months ago and I was building a...

basically conversational marketing chatbots for high ticket coaches and consultants. And we looked at some of our work and said, this would be kind of cool to have. And so we decided to combine the two and create Habi as a conversational companion and assistant, not a coach, but to say, listen, you through your conversation will work out what you need to do. Habi is here to make sure that you stick to it, that you can adapt and roll with the punches as you go.

And yeah, that's kind how it all started and how we started working together. We've been working together now for about 10 months.

Richard Lowe (02:02.818)
Nice, nice. So why don't you walk me through the process of say if I had an eating problem and how would I use HABi to help with that?

Paul Barry (02:13.314)
Well, the first thing that we always start with is the why. So if you said to Habby, I have an eating problem, the first thing I hope Habby would, I hope from Habby's training, Habby would want to do is work out first of all, what do you mean by that? And why do you think that? And why is it a problem? So it's very easy to start setting goals immediately and say, I want to lose 20 pounds in the next month. But.

If you don't know why you're doing it, then it's going to be very difficult down the track to do it because if you've lost track of your why and suddenly you're looking at the what, what you have to do, it doesn't seem to even make sense to you anymore. So, Habbie, hopefully would say to you, what's your experience of this? What's the pain point here? What have you tried before? Why is this a problem? And then get into sort of what do you hope to be on the other side of this? And knowing all of that,

Habi can then sort of look at your schedule as well. So when people come in, can do a improve Habi. So it's a part of the conversation where they can improve Habi's.

understanding of your needs by answering questions about your sleep patterns and your work and different goals and so on. But using an aggregate of all of that information, Habi can then start to make suggestions. So rather than you come in and immediately Habi starts making suggestions, hopefully you'll have a conversation first and make sure those suggestions are far more specific to you and not just generic to everybody.

Richard Lowe (03:46.958)
Well, let's take a, instance, let's say the person is a procrastinator. He simply waits to finish things until he's almost too late and then rushes, rushes, rushes to catch up. And he's gotten away with it many, many times. And sometimes he hasn't. So he goes to Habby, Habby says, Habby, hello. And Habby says, what's up? Says, okay. I want to, I want to confront my procrastination problem. I assume then it would say, tell me about that or something like that.

And I'd say, well, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it would keep asking me like Socratic method almost. sounds like question, answer, question, answer, you know, keep digging down and it would say, okay, so you're procrastinating because.

Paul Barry (04:23.576)
So yeah.

Richard Lowe (04:34.836)
you're not sleeping enough, I'm just guessing, you know, or whatever. So sleep more. I'm guessing you tell me if this isn't the way, then I might say, yeah, the sleep is fixed. I'm sleeping fine now, but it's still not fixed. And then it might come up with a different.

Paul Barry (04:51.35)
Yeah, so I mean the first thing that you'll probably discover chatting with happy is that happy will talk to you about

cues and triggers and rewards and all that kind of stuff. I'm saying there's something that's obviously triggering someone to sleep more than they feel they need to or to procrastinate. So, Abby might say to you, so what is the fear? So I had a conversation, I do a lot of interviews with people, just box pops interviews with people in the street. And there was this one girl at Santa Monica College that I stopped and talked to. And I said, is there something that you're struggling with at the moment? She said, yes, I procrastinate. I don't do some

the things that I want to do and so I said to her, so what's something you want to do? She said that she had her...

Richard Lowe (05:30.232)
Right.

Paul Barry (05:36.438)
driving license permit, bitch, hadn't scheduled the test or something. And I said to her, you know, why don't we do it right now? She's like, my God, right now. I said, yeah, I said, like, can you cancel it? If you don't want to go through with it, if you can book it right now, could you cancel it? And she goes, well, yes, I said, all right, we'll just book it right now. And she booked it. And the second she booked it, I said, do you want to cancel it? And she said, no, I don't want to cancel it. So sometimes the thing is that you need to be able to have something cancelable. And like I said to people, you, if you want to run a

Marathon you need to know that at any point if it's hurting you you can stop at any point if you just don't want to do it anymore you can stop at any point if you're bored you can stop but if you say to yourself I need to run a whole marathon right now like saying I need to be able to conquer procrastination right now forever it's it's unreasonable and it's probably not going to happen so happy will have a similar conversation with you and suggest what is the reward that you can give yourself for actually doing

that thing and what is the punishment that you feel that you're going to get if you actually go ahead and do it and then probably compare that punishment to the punishment you're giving yourself by delaying that thing and not

Richard Lowe (06:50.062)
Right.

Paul Barry (06:51.224)
And then it just comes down to ultimately doing. So what can you do? Years ago when I was going through counseling after I lost my mom, was going through palliative care, gave some counseling to the family and I was struggling to do things and I was saying to the counselor, I was saying, well, what can you do here? What can you do there? And I was saying, I can't do anything. I can't do that. can't do that. I'm giving very, very reasonable reasons why I couldn't do any of these things. And eventually whether she changed

how she said it or it was just that I heard it differently I heard her say Paul what can you do so rather than what could you do it's like saying well I could win the lottery I could become Alex Omosi and become an amazing marketer I could do this or well what can I do or what can I do

Richard Lowe (07:28.206)
Thanks.

Paul Barry (07:40.256)
And I realized I could take a couple of hours every day, same time of the day, from four to six that day back in Australia in summer, and I could get in the car, I could go to the beach and rain, hail or shine, because it was beautiful summer weather. I could get in the ocean, I could get wet, and I could come home, have a shower, and I could do that. That would be good for my body, that would be good for my mental health, that would be good for communing with nature, that would be good for everything for me.

orphans for everything and so when you talk to happy because happy has largely been trained on my voice even though happy has a lot more infinite amount greater amount of experience in human psychology and behavior and so on

Because Javi has largely been trained on my voice, it tends to sound a bit like me when Javi talks to you. And so my experiences and how I've overcome them have kind of been baked into it, just as the way the kind of teams has. So when it comes to something like procrastination, I always think...

What is the worst thing that could possibly happen? And we always say that famous quote of you can't manage what you don't measure. I was saying to someone the other day on Reddit, she said, I'm overwhelmed, I've got all this stuff going on and I can't succeed at this, can't do that, and this is going wrong, this is terrible. And I said, have you done a full audit of what you're talking about?

She said, what do you mean? I said, have you created categories, financial category, relationship category, and so on, eating category or health category, and then go through and say, let's mark the stakes of these, the greatest, the result of your greatest hope and the result of your greatest fear, the difference between the two, that's the stakes. And I gave her a whole list of stuff to go through. 10 minutes, she wrote back and said she'd created this whole kind of thing and it was already helping because some of the things that she was

Paul Barry (09:45.826)
Turning from molehills into mountains and ahead she was saying I can't mentally let it go well now Mentally it just disappeared because she realized it wasn't a priority. It certainly wasn't a long-term priority It wasn't a priority that affected anything other than a small part of her life But there were other things that were big oppressing priorities that affected a lot of her life and now she can focus her attention on that So the first thing about procrastination I'd say is if you do that audit you're already not procrastinating

And doing the audit doesn't mean you have to do anything about it. It just means it's like putting on your sneakers Yeah, your joggers you don't have to run the marathon But now you're prepared if you want to and then by doing that step That's first step to the next one and the next one on the next one all you did You just set up the dominoes don't have to push them over yet But you've set up a bunch of them and then you can next time and and have his logic is very similar to that

Richard Lowe (10:28.398)
Wait.

Richard Lowe (10:41.486)
Well, I found the change, I think there's a book about this, forget, Atomic Habits. And it talks about change 1 % a day. And I've been following that almost religiously now and it's been working great. Just a little change. So, know, eating disorder, well, take out this, next day take out something more, next day take out something more. A little more than 1%, but still. Actually, I wait a few days between each one to let it sink in. And before you know it,

Paul Barry (10:46.797)
Yeah.

that.

Yeah, great.

Richard Lowe (11:11.298)
No more eating disorder or no more procrastination. Take out that. And then, and then sometimes they get down to the real cause. Like I tend to have to eat too much because I get anxious, which causes my stomach to hurt and the food helps keeps the stomach from hurting. So there's actually like a semi-physical kind of thing. All right. So what alternatives are there from food? Well, there's, there's ginger tea and that turned out to work really well.

And so it's making it easier, you know, don't have to eat the Cheetos, which has various health effects that I don't want. And instead drink some ginger tea or eat some ginger. Well, it's not that great and then punches and, I just do a little bit every day. And, um, I think Habi sounds like it would kind of guide you in that direction. Cause sometimes I don't know about you, but I have a tendency to say, okay, I'll just stop doing that. Of course.

I'm just setting myself up for failure.

Paul Barry (12:13.495)
Yeah.

I mean, one of the things is like this conversation is really good for me and I hope it's good for you because I think conversation is where we get the chance to get stuff out of our system and then we don't if we speak it, we don't have to do it. We just have to communicate it. And so once we communicate that we have the ability to communicate that to something like happy and happy will be there 24 7 365 infinitely patient infinitely wise unlike your I unfortunately.

Richard Lowe (12:28.323)
Of

Richard Lowe (12:42.434)
Hey, speak for yourself.

Paul Barry (12:43.882)
You're reasonably wise, infinitely available. But what James Clear, I was going to say before, what James Clear also mentions in Atomic Habits, he talks about the importance of your environment and making...

Reducing the friction from things you want to do and increasing the friction on things you don't want to do So there's an old thing of if you're constantly spending on the credit card Take a buck and take an ice cream bucket put all of your credit cards in water and put that in the freezer Now if you want to do a purchase you have to go to some effort to get through that Get to the card and blow up now It's a bit easier to cheat these days because you got virtual cards you just press but I always say a really good example is people

Richard Lowe (13:07.342)
right.

Richard Lowe (13:21.614)
Right.

Paul Barry (13:30.99)
who say that they keep hitting the snooze button. Well, if you, before you go to bed, take your phone, and this will go on to the halo effect shortly, but if you take your phone and you put it in the living room and then you go to bed,

In the morning when your alarm goes off, you're not inspect a gadget, your arm can't go out and hit the snooze button. You literally have to get up and leave. So you're making it very, very difficult for yourself in your environment. You're making it very difficult for yourself to hit the snooze. Even better, if you want to then attach that phone to the next thing that you do want to do, if you put the phone in the living room, great, you get up in the morning, you come out and you're in the living room. But what if you wanted to actually get out of bed and go straight and walk on the treadmill?

Richard Lowe (14:01.102)
Bye.

Richard Lowe (14:07.278)
you

Paul Barry (14:16.954)
Will you be better off putting the phone on the treadmill because you know the treadmill well for me I used to get out of bed and then I would weigh myself and then I realized Huh, I really should go to the bathroom before I weigh myself because there's a big difference in my metric So then I would say I'll get out of bed I'll go there then I'll weigh myself and then I'll but if I do it the wrong way and I get dressed for the day now I'm like, oh, I'm not gonna go back and weigh myself So you work out the routine that would be great to get what you want and happy can all

Richard Lowe (14:19.96)
Right.

Richard Lowe (14:32.812)
Yes.

Paul Barry (14:47.074)
help with this. Habi would need to know the kind of things you already do, what's getting in your way, but you could say to Habi, and Habi will get smarter and smarter as you keep talking to Habi, but you could say to Habi like, why am I finding this so difficult? I do this, then I do this, and then I do this. Habi might say, well why don't you do both of those things at the same time?

I get up and I do this and blah blah blah and then I don't have time to read a book. Well, why don't you listen to an audio book while you're brushing your teeth and walking on the treadmill. You can do multiple things at exactly the same time to save time. And so what you do is you're connecting the things together in a storytelling way or a link kind of way. And then you're removed. That's helping remove the friction from the things that you want to do. In reverse, if you don't want to be eating Cheetos,

of all don't buy them. If you can't stop buying them, delete them from your cart online if you're buying them online. If you walk into a store, do not walk down that aisle. Just don't walk down that aisle.

Richard Lowe (15:52.334)
Right, right.

Paul Barry (15:54.616)
And there's so many different ways that you can increase the friction on bad habits and decrease the friction on the good habits. But first of all, it requires, once again, an audit, an open, honest audit. And that's the other reason I love Habbie is that if you tried to tell me, even if you trusted me, there's still stuff that you might not say to me. And so without information, I can't necessarily help you as much.

that with an AI, you can talk to Havi, know that nobody's ever going to see that it's completely yours and secure and safe. And you can say whatever you want to Havi and Havi now knows everything that you've not shared with anyone before, probably, and in that order and in that way and in that, you know, priority list. And then Havi has all the information that Havi needs to be able to help you make the choices. And then the best part is, Havi will then say, Hey, here's a few habits I think might be good for you.

and then get your buy in and make a few changes conversationally and then Abby will say, good to go, do you me to set these in stone? And you say, yep. And then Abby will put them on your dashboard and now they're on your in the app on the dashboard. So you can just swipe them as done or not done.

Richard Lowe (17:06.328)
Cool. Cool.

Very cool. I've been using, chat GPT for something similar chat. GPT knows everything about me. It's scary. And he has a memory now. And of course I haven't set the private mode. So it's not sharing any of that. So I've been, I'm not a marketer, so I've been working on marketing and trying to get the marketing. So I put it all in and I said, okay, you know a lot about me. It said, yeah, I know a lot about you. And I said, well, what do I need to do to make my marketing more effective? And it thought for a minute and it said,

Paul Barry (17:16.938)
Thank you.

Richard Lowe (17:39.234)
You need to be active. That's what do mean? So you're being passive now. You're putting out ads and things and people are, you expect people to see them and then come to you. You need to be actually like cold calling and calling and getting taught, being active out there, it, reaching out on LinkedIn and stuff. So my habit was I'm a writer. So what do do? I write articles, you know, now I'm doing videos, but it's still passive. I'm still expecting people to see the video or whatever, and then come to me.

So instead now, what I'm bearing down on is reaching out to people, which I'm an introvert. So it's as another barrier, but you know, sometimes you just got to do what you got to do and having to change that habit. I've been using the 1 % a day thing and it's becoming very, very interesting. Um, reaching out to old client, potential clients, reaching out to old

contacts, just reaching out to people who never responded and just using chat GPT to say, okay, here's their LinkedIn profile. Here's some other information. Here's their website. Now talk to me about how I should go into this call with them. And it tells me do this and this and this and this and this. okay. Talk to them about that. I can't wait to learn more about Google's deep research so that find even more about how to talk to these people. So

I did it the hard way. Havi sounds like we'd make that a lot easier, but.

Paul Barry (19:09.218)
Well, mean, look, even though all of the different language models have slightly different personalities and different strengths and different weaknesses, the whole idea is that as they all get better and better...

the bottom level, like these are massive LLMs and we are tapping into their abilities and their knowledge to be able to do something which is much smaller in scope than what they're trying to do. The difference being with function calling and so on, we are able to actually make things happen. Now the next layer on top of this is what we call our channel partners and we're gonna be launching these channel partners shortly and over time, by the end of the year, we'll have a whole marketplace of these thought leaders and coaches and people who

Richard Lowe (19:47.064)
Right.

Paul Barry (19:54.122)
other than just having a teacher teach you stuff and eventually you're supposed to do something with that, you actually download their success habits in their niche into your own app. And if you do them, into your own life. So if Alex Nomothi creates a million videos and says that you should do this and that, he's probably right. These are things that you probably should do is become extremely successful doing them. But you and I both, I'm sure, have watched so many webinars and videos and courses and read things and got the PDF and got the coffee mug and bought the t-shirt.

Richard Lowe (20:23.458)
Yeah, I can't do it anymore.

Paul Barry (20:24.026)
watch the VHS, I always kind of went, you know what, I'd just pay someone to just do it for me. But there is actually a middle ground that didn't exist until I think we've created what we've created. And that is that Richard Lowe is an amazing writing guru could

create a channel with all of his success habits as a writer. Stephen King said, you know, talent is as common as table salt, but the professional is the person who gets up and writes for X number of hours every single day, whether they want to or not.

Richard Lowe (20:57.742)
That's me.

Paul Barry (20:58.84)
So there you go as a professional writer, you would say, like you are about reaching out on LinkedIn or through your networking contacts, X number of people per day. And then because you're actually tracking that with a number, five people a day, one person a day, 10 people a day, now you can know what that extra 1 % per day is that James Clear's talking about. Otherwise, you're like, oh, I'm feeling 1 % better, bullshit, you're not, you have to be 1 % better. Yeah.

Richard Lowe (21:18.862)
Yep.

Richard Lowe (21:23.022)
That's not the way it works. Yeah, that's not the way it works. Well, we've been talking for a while. Is there anything you'd like to leave our listeners with if you had to sum it up in a paragraph?

Paul Barry (21:32.937)
well.

The reason I got involved with Habitrune in the first place is because I don't want anybody to ever feel that there is no hope. I've been in that position and it's not great at best and it's deadly at worst. So I want everybody to know that there is always someone there to help you. We'd be there to help you but absolutely Habitrune 247 365 is there to help you put whatever you're struggling with into specific daily action that

you can take or that you can put it into your app and you can do it. And if you're not doing it, you can't say that it doesn't work. You have to be working to have me making the changes, putting those habits in on working them through every single day on a consistent daily basis. And that's the biggest thing, whether you use habit driven and happy or find another way of doing it, you can't manage what you don't measure. So measure it, do an audit, make the changes, give yourself something to do every day.

an assistant if you can like Abby and just keep doing it every day. Only then can you say well nothing's working. Up until that point you haven't tried everything.

Richard Lowe (22:45.304)
I'm just saying you can talk the talk, but you need to walk the walk. And on that note, I'm Richard Lowe, the writing king and ghost writing guru. Where can people find you?

Paul Barry (22:49.752)
Exactly.

Paul Barry (22:58.968)
So they can go to habitdriven.ai, look up Habit Driven or Paul Barry.

Paul Barry official on a number of different platforms, but if you look up Paul Barry CEO, Habit Driven, people can find me. I'd love to hear from anybody. Try the app, take a seven day free trial, give it a spin. yeah, if they want to go straight into trying Habi, they can go to habitdriven.ai forward slash chat with Habi, H-A-B-I, and they can go straight in and try it before they even download the app.

Richard Lowe (23:29.688)
Nice, nice. Well, thank you for coming to the show. Like I said, this has been the writing king.com and ghost writing guru, ghost writing.guru are the two websites to go to. so that's the writing king.com or ghost writing.guru. How the hell I got those two good names. I don't know. and, been talking to Paul Barry about habits and what you need to do about them. And, or for and against, and he's got an app for it. Thank you for appearing and,

Paul Barry (23:32.759)
Thank

Richard Lowe (23:59.704)
Signing off.

Richard Lowe (24:07.075)
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