A Nomadic Blogger Who Wants To Upgrade Humanity By Shocking People With A Device Called The "Pavlok": The Maneesh Sethi Podcast Episode

Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. I shared a hotel room a couple of years ago with my guest on today's podcast and he wildly entertained me in a good way. So he's on the show now. He's on the show and he's gonna wildly entertain you with a shocking episode. I'll leave it there. You'll understand later in this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

Yeah, legit. He was, he was pissed and I thought that was vindicating. I was like, if you ask for money and then turn someone down in the. They do is they curse at you. Like that's, that's clearly a vindication of the reason of you, why you turn them down. And in fact, it was a type of science that was pretty common in the 1980s and early 1990s in America. Clinically tested called aversion therapy, where they would use either nausea or electric shock while doing a bad habit to create a long lasting Pavlovian aversion.

He's an expert in human performance and.

Nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential, influential.

People in health and fitness.

His show provides you with everything you.

Need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield. Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy, all the information you need in one place right here, right, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. Hey folks, My guest on today's podcast is Manish Sethi. And I actually had the pleasure of getting to know Manish when somehow we got stuck staying in a hotel room together at a health conference. It was actually Maneesh, I don't know if you recall, but it was actually, it was a pretty nice, it wasn't a hotel room. It was more like a whole, like little villa that we had in a mountain in Arizona.

It's a villa in a mountain. And staying with, staying in a room with you for two nights was pretty freaking eye opening because you are insane, my friend.

Well, so are you. I mean, to, to put this in perspective for, for people listening in, Manish and I are going to talk about. Because he's, he's basically like, like an inventor and an entrepreneur and he's, he's made this, this really interesting device that you may or may not have heard of. I'll, I'll tell you about it in a second. But I think this was after you had been featured on Shark Tank. Manish and you had, like. I know you're into, like, Pavlovian responses, and I think in this case, you had, like, your computer set up to ding every time you sold one of these units and your Shark Tank episode went live. And so every time I'd walk into the room where your computer was, all I would hear was just like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. So that was. That was actually.

I think it was actually triggering on my Pavlok at that time.

Yeah, it may have been on the thing on your wrist.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So you invented this Pavlok. And I definitely want to hear the story behind that. But for those of you who don't know who Manish is, he actually studied psychology under a relatively legendary psychology professor named BJ Fogg. And I believe you became pretty intrigued with behavior change at that time when you were at Stanford, right, Manish? Yeah, yeah. Launched the website hackthesystem.com and I'll link to all this in the show notes if you just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.comManish that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Manish. And for those of you who don't know how to spell Maneesh, it's M A, N, E, E, S, H. You should know that. Shame on you if you don't know how to spell Maneesh. Anyways, so. BenGreenfieldFitness.com Manish I'll link to a lot of the stuff that we talk about, but Manish wound up, after he left Stanford, inventing something very interesting that I'll let him tell you about. And it's kind of had multiple iterations since then. I've gotten my hands on a few of his crazy little inventions. And the story behind how it actually launched is pretty interesting too. I'd love to hear about the person you hired to slap you in the face and all that stuff. Manish. So let's dive in. Welcome to the show, man.

Hey, man, it's a pleasure. I always enjoy talking with you because you're one of the few people who actually uses the tech that people like me make.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I. I was always fascinated by human behavior. I grew up pretty ADHD, so very in the 98th percentile of lack of focus. And I always had trouble committing and finishing stuff. But I noticed very rapidly that when there was a set deadline or if I was working with somebody else in the room, that I would finish tasks always just on time. And this was pretty consistent my entire life growing up, that deadlines and a fear of consequences would make me finish stuff as I got into. I studied at Stanford under BJ Fogg. I did a class with BJ Fogg and on Facebook, apps. I've been a programmer. I wrote a book on game programming when I was, like, 14. Became a bestseller. It was called Game programming for teens. And it was translated into a bunch of languages and actually became a textbook in Poland for every kid who went through Warsaw's middle and high schools. They used my textbook, which was pretty weird. And I was really intrigued by human behavior, and I had experience in tech, and so. And my brother Ramit Sethi was a blogger. He runs the website I will teach you to be rich dot com.

I will teach you to be rich dot com. I've heard of that website.

Yeah, he's pretty.

To be rich dot com. I think I. I visited that before. What. What exactly is that website all about? Not to make you talk about your brother on a podcast, but.

No, it's okay. It's. Most of the conversations I have are about my brother anyway. I'm just kidding. But. But he was very inspirational in my life and definitely set me down this path. His website and his blog and his book, his New York Times bestselling book, are about helping people get control of their finances. Control, like take care of their spending and then earn more money by finding their dream job or becoming a freelancer. And so he was very inspirational because of his research as well with human psychology. And so I actually left Stanford. I took a leave of absence to travel the world. I left for about four years in total. I traveled and started a blog called Hack the System. And this blog was about doing experiments on myself. So I had my readers would vote on where I would go and on what sort of experiments I would do and what projects I would do in each city. I lived in, like, 20 or 30 different countries over a span of four years in South America and Asia, in Europe. And I did a bunch of experiments that, you know, I could talk about that for hours, but a lot towards the end of my blog.

Yeah, fill me in. Tell us about a couple of the more crazy experiences. Dude, you can't skim over that. I want to hear.

All right, cool. Yeah, I guess I started traveling in Italy, and then I moved to South America, Buenos Aires, Brazil, into India, and then Berlin. I was in, like, a lot of places, but the experiments that were really fun included. My favorite one by far was Berlin. It was a experiment called 90 Days to becoming a famous Berlin DJ. So me and a friend had no experience DJing music. But we were both in Berlin and decided to try to hack the Berlin DJ scene. So what we did was we first created a shopping cart music sound system and started playing parties in the subway, in the metro stations, and we would get, like, groups of a hundred people dancing on a shopping cart. So we ended up making deals with bars and clubs around the entire city where we would just wheel in people. They just follow us, and we would just wheel them in. And ended up getting and booking our first few DJ gigs like this. Then we started. Then after we had our first few gigs, we started buying Facebook fans and calling up clubs, pretending to be. Hi, I'm Will from Regal Entertainment. I represent DJ Manish. He's really famous for house and dubstep. And so it took about 45 days before we were being flown around Europe being paid to play shows for a thousand people.

Amazing.

So that was really fun. The second experiment, which was really cool, was I started an NGO in India. So I lived in a village in India for about nine months, and I raised money online to help wire up a village with electricity. I raised money to wire up the village with electricity, buy computers for kids, and then teach kids how to use computers. So that was really, really inspirational, really moving for me. I also got to buy a camel and own and travel by my own little camel named Jiminy. So that was a really cool experience when I was 22.

Did you say a camel?

Yeah, I bought a camel. It was cool. Yeah.

Oh, wow.

Sometimes you get a camel.

That's interesting. Did you know that that camel milk is very, very good for you? Did you ever drink its milk?

I did not drink its milk. It was male, but I actually have only heard that from. I think I saw a mention that you. You put on Facebook about camel milk. What's a good point?

Yeah, I was drinking it for a while. There's a company called Camel's Milk, fittingly enough, that was sending me camel milk from California. It was actually really good. My kids liked it too. It's a, and we have goats, and we do a lot of goat milk because it's what's called thermodynamically favorable, meaning that the protein in a goat milk or camel's milk is better absorbed and results in fewer immune issues by the human body. So you should be kicking yourself now for not A, owning a female camel and B, milking it.

Definitely. I think that that will probably be the thing. I sleep too, sadly, tonight. That little regret that pops up tonight.

Yeah.

And then do you know if camel Milk has lactose in does, but it.

Has also present in it a lot of the probiotics that pre digest the lactose. So it's almost like it does the work for you.

This is just a sidebar, but I found out when I was 25, I think maybe 26, that I was lactose intolerant. And I had never known that in my entire life. And when I discovered that I was lactose intolerant, I did not realize how much it affects your entire life. It's like a sugar high. You always need more of it and you never have ever got. If you've never gone a day without lactose, you think that that's your normal state, that you are a binge eater, that like you always are going to fart a lot. And also that you are like the mental fog was very, very consistently high. And that was really intriguing to me because they say that over 95% of Indians are lactose intolerant.

Yeah.

And every in India drinks milk tea, drinks a chai every day. It's like milk is part of our culture. So I've always really been interested in the macro effects of mass lactose on an entire billion person population who has lactose intolerance. I have no idea what the reason is.

That's why everyone is walking around India with dementia, which I don't know is true. I may have just made up that statistic. But you know what's fascinating is I had the same deal going on, Manish. I used to drink a whole gallon of 2% milk every day growing up. And I would go to bed with stomach aches and my parents used to think I was just a kid who got stomach flu a lot. And they'd give me antibiotics and they'd give me medications and they never actually really even hypothesized about the fact that I might have actually been intolerant to the milk. When I got to college and started studying nutrition and learned about lactose, that's when the light bulb kind of turned on for me. But yeah, same thing for me. I went forever drinking milk thinking it was perfectly normal to just basically fart and have stomach aches every night.

Same thing. It's. It's crazy how that happens. Yeah, yeah. And so then to get back on hack the system, the third experiment that I ran is actually the one that led to Pavlok and the, this third experiment, basically I always knew that I was really bad at finishing stuff. And you know, I'm going to add one more experiment that I thought was really Cool. Before I tell you this one, and that was. I read Seneca and he was talking about how living in the. You should spend at least a week or two each year living your biggest fear. Because once you. Once you do that, you'll understand that fear is nothing to be afraid of. And so I read that actually while I was doing the DJing in Berlin. And I decided that right after I would try to live in the wilderness and learn how to survive outside. And so I did a 28 day. It was a. It was a course with Boulder Outdoor Survival School.

Oh, cool. That's. That's funny. I've actually done stuff with Boulder Outdoor Survival School before.

They're amazing.

I went down there and did. I'm part of an entrepreneurial mastermind with a bunch of other guys. And we went down there for a week and they kind of put us through the ringer for a week. I remember wandering around the forest with GPS satellite devices to find treasures. It's actually a cool experience.

Yeah. My experiment was the Hunter Gatherer experiment. So it was 28 days, no backpack, no sleeping bag, no tent. You hike between 12 and 15 miles a day, you have no technology, and you just kind of have to survive. And that was extremely eye opening to me because, number one, I had never spent even like 24 hours without tech. And I wrote more during that period than any other time except for the experiment I'm about to tell you about with the Craigslist slapper. That the lack of distractions was actually the secret that really let me unlock my potential. But that was really cool being like when you realize that you can live in the wilderness and survive, then nothing else scares you anymore.

Oh, yeah. Well, one thing that I've found, I discovered this when I hunt for six or seven days, is you get super lean.

Dude.

Did you lose weight doing this survival course?

I lost £23 in 28 days. I think I read an article about it.

Yeah, it's the best diet ever. Find your own food.

Yeah. One of the things I noticed is you can't eat cookies if you live in the middle of wilderness. Right. You can't smoke cigarettes if there are no cigarettes on your continent. And one of the best solutions to stopping habits is to remove triggers. So all of this, like all these experiments I'm mentioning, are all part of my mental model for the world. And I'm sure every single individual here listening to this has developed a mental model based on their experiences. But I think this last experiment was one of the most effective parts of changing my mental Models. And that was the Craigslist slapper experiment. So I had this blog and I always had trouble writing. Like, I had nothing to do except write. And I never wrote more than two articles a week. And I saw you, Ben, and the speed at which you write is just freaking mind boggling. It's you. I think your personality is fundamentally like a different sort of finisher type than I am. But you're freaking out of this world, man.

Writing is like a muscle in my opinion. I mean, like, I've been doing it since I was a little kid, and it just flows out of me, you know, it's like people have been playing the violin for 20 years and you just pick it up and just make it sing, you know, it's kind of like that.

I think I'm more perfectionistic where it's like, unless the deadline is final, it's finalized, I will never finish it because I think it can always be made better. And so what happened in this experiment was I hired someone to just follow me around and make me write. You know, like, when you go to the gym and you have a personal trainer, the value is actually in going to the gym. The trainer herself or himself is not always the most important part. It's the fact that there is someone there waiting for you.

Right.

That makes the personal trainer so valuable. So I did an experiment where I tried to improve my productivity. And I hired a girl to follow me around. Her name was Kara. And every time I wasted time or went on Facebook, she was allowed to slap me in the face. And she started off by. Whenever I went on Facebook specifically, she would slap me instantly. And if I ever started to waste time, she was just looking over my shoulder and would remind me. And so what I noticed is, number one, this became like a social experience. It was like, hey, does this sound good? I would say as I was writing. Or do you mind looking up photos while I type this up? And number two, I started looking at the results. I wrote about four or five months of content in, like, five days.

Wow.

Just having somebody next to me just made me. Because I was in writing mode and I couldn't get out of it. You know what I mean? And I was blown away. But then I posted the article online. I posted it on my blog and put it on, like, I just posted on my blog and sent it out to my email list. And the next day, I remember I was getting off of a plane flight.

Now, before you say what happened the next day, how hard was she slapping you?

There's a video of it online. I mean, as hard as she wanted, really. I think slaps. Like, you can find a video of me and Tim Ferriss doing a slap battle. The slap is like the best of kinds of punishment because it makes a loud noise, but it doesn't actually hurt. And so I love slaps because it's like a showmanship thing more than it is actual pain. It's like the Pavlok shot. It startles you, but it doesn't hurt you.

Right.

So I found. I found that to be so. Yeah. But I found that it's also hard to get people to slap you, so it was like you have to pay them to do it. But so anyway, what happened was I wrote so many articles that. And I posted this article online, and the next day, NPR gave me a phone call, and they're like, hi, are you Manish, the guy who hired the slapper? It turned out that the word slapper means prostitute in British English.

That's true. I think I've actually come across that phrase before in, like, old, old Sherlock Holmes books. That a slapper is a. Is like, yeah, it's a prostitute. Yeah.

So the title accidentally got really popular in the. In England, and by the time it was morning in America, I was, like, super famous that day. I was getting phone calls from everybody around the entire country. And for, like, three days, I was like, wow, this is awesome. This is, like, really, really fun. And, of course, then the news died down, and I was thinking about it, and I was, like, thinking about how I could make another story go viral and what I decided to do with a friend, I was like, yo, what if we made, like, a dog collar that could shock me every time I went on Facebook? And my friend said, let's go to Radio Shack. And so we hacked together this little dog collar. We broke it apart, this dog collar that could vibrate deep in zap with a remote control. And we hooked up the remote control to a computer with Arduino. And so it was basically every time I went on Facebook, it would signal the zap. And I was about to post this video online, and right before I did, I thought to myself, wait, this is actually really interesting. There's a million wearables out there that are tracking what I do, but this one's actually changing what I do. Maybe there's something more deeper to this blog post. And that was kind of the idea for how Pavlok came.

Interesting. Okay, so when did Shark Tank enter the picture? When did you get on Shark Tank?

So the story from there so that event happened end of 2012. I found a company in Boston. In August 2013, I moved to Boston into a hardware facility where a company offered me a little bit of money and some space to help build my product idea. It's called Bolt. And I worked there for about a year. So from 2013, August until about a year later in 2014. Launched our Indiegogo in 2014. So as soon as we were live on our Indiegogo campaign for Pavlok1 that raised about $280,000 with Pavlok1 just basically.

Being the device that you wear on your wrist that will monitor whatever you want it to monitor and then apply that mild shock when you do something you don't want to do.

Yeah. So it was. It's extremely difficult for me to articulate what Pavlok is and it's. But I think you articulated in a way that is okay. Thank you. Yeah. Essentially it's like a smart dog shot collar for humans. But yes. So the idea was that it would punish you when you do bad habits and then reward you when you do good habits. So we went live on indiegogo, raised a bit of money, we went super viral. So I was on Steve Harvey's show, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert Report. And so Shark Tank called.

Oh, wow. I didn't realize that you actually got around quite a bit.

Yeah. And it was all like organic. I didn't call any people or anything like that. And so Shark Tank ended up calling me and asked me if I'd be interested in putting Pavlok on Shark Tank. And the first year it just was too fast. Like we just. Product development takes years and it wasn't ready. So we went through the process but then decided to turn them down that year. And then the next year we went on Shark Tank 2016. So I'll get there in a moment. But the Indiegogo was live end of 2014 and around. And during that campaign I discovered I stumbled on a type of science called aversion therapy. And so have you ever gotten drunk or sick off of some kind of food and you just never wanted that food again?

You know what? For me, no. But my brother, that happened with Texas black bean chili, my mom's famous Texas black bean chili that he vom all over our suburban and had to sit in his own vomit like a two hour car ride. And for the next 10 years, whenever mom made Texas black bean chili, he would have like macaroni and cheese or bread.

Yeah. And you'll see this happen a lot with people who drink a lot of like tequila during college and they get sick one night.

Oh yeah.

They experience this thing called an aversion. It's this feeling in the pit of your stomach that's visible in the brain. And it's what happens when you get a pavlovian association with any behavior plus a stimuli. And in one night, a habit can break for good. And in fact, it was a type of science that was pretty common in the 1980s and early 1990s in America. Clinically tested called aversion therapy, where they would use either nausea or electric shock while doing a bad habit to create a long lasting pavlovian aversion. And I stumbled on this word, started googling about the science and I found that like in one study with smokers, the average success rate with nicotine patches was 7.5%. And the average success rate with aversion therapy with smokers was 70%.

Wow. How are they doing the aversion therapy in the smokers?

So what they would do is the, the, the smoker would come to meet with a psychologist. The psychologist would have them imagine the blackness of smoke in your lungs and zap. Now bring the cigarette to your mouth. Zap. Now light it with a lighter. Zap. Now start to smoke the first puff. Zap. Now smoke the second one. Zap. And so at each step of the process, they would receive a series of zaps.

Wow.

And they'd want to put it down because nobody wants to get zapped, but they overdo it such that the brain creates the association.

Right.

And we started to experiment on this. We reproduced this in a study with the University of Massachusetts at Boston. We took a small pilot study of people who were pack a day smokers. And 75% of them quit smoking at a six month follow up. So that was really cool to see that we were able to actually make this work at numbers that were astronomical. 75%.

Wow.

Yeah. And, and so that was the first like, okay, well, let's start focusing on bad habits. This is late 2014, early 2015. I was very deep in habit science. So I realized that the secret to breaking bad habits was pretty simple. Zap someone when they do something that they shouldn't do. But to form a good habit, you need a positive reinforcer, you need a point system, a good thing.

Right.

And to me it was pretty obvious back in early, in early 2014, I realized this, that the secret answer would be blockchain would be creating or mining a new currency where users would earn money for doing healthy habits. But as I tried to describe this to a lot of people, they thought I was insane. They thought I was crazy.

Wait, they would earn money or they would earn cryptocurrency.

They would earn money, which is cryptocurrency. Or cryptocurrency, which is money.

Okay. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. So. So they. They'd earn. They'd own some form of value, some. Something that could be used as, like, a trading medium.

Yeah. But back then, it wasn't very clear what it was. Right. Now, if I told you you got a Bitcoin for going to the gym, you know what I'm talking about. But back then when I said you could earn.

Yeah, I'll take $12,000 for going to the gym.

Right, exactly. But back then I sounded nuts, especially when I talked to investors or people, they thought I was crazy. And so I realized that I would have to table this conversation around the blockchain while I focused on bad habits, built the infrastructure properly and started my own blockchain, which I thought was going to take years. I thought it would take till 2019. It turned out to speed up a lot this year. So, anyway, getting back to the point, Shark Tank happened in, and so we released the product in 2015. We released it the same month that Shark Tank filmed. So we won a competition with Shopify, Shopify's build a business 2015 challenge. We ended up getting to go to Necker island and spend a week with Richard Branson, Daymond John, who happened to be on Shark Tank, who was a Shark Tank guy. Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss and Marie Forleo.

Cool.

And that was really cool. And there I met Daymond John, who actually became a very avid user of Pavlok. He's broken two addictions with Pavlok, but because I had met him, they wouldn't let me be on the episode or show with him. So I had to film with other users, other people on the show. Yeah, really, really, really messed it up. So anyway, I filmed about 200 years ago.

You were his boy. So all of a sudden there was a. There. There was a, what they call it, conflict of interest.

Yeah. If I just hadn't mentioned it to Shark Tank, I think I would have had a very different Shark Tank life. But so a week later, or two weeks later, we filmed the show in la. The show went very weird. If you watch it online, you'll see it's the most viewed clip of all time. But not always for positive reasons. It's very interesting. I think it was two alpha dogs in the room. And Mark Cuban doesn't like other alpha dogs in the room. But I always describe it as Mark Cuban is Mufasa, Mr. Wonderful is Scar, and the other three are hyenas, and they follow whoever's in the lead. So Mark Cuban instantly didn't like the product, then the other three didn't like the product. Mr. Wonderful was sitting there with his Mr. Burns fingers. He offered me half a million dollars in exchange for a portion of my company, and I turned him down because he's not the kind of investor I would want to work with. He's pretty well known for how he defrauded his investors out of money when he sold his company to Mattel. And specifically, he was on a video of saying that 3.5 billion people living on a dollar a day is a good thing because it makes people try harder. So that video.

Did you tell him this when you did Shark Tank, were you just like, I don't like you, bro?

I did tell him I didn't like. I don't like you, bro. And I think I described it. They definitely didn't air. I think I described why. They definitely didn't air the reasons, but they did. They did air me turning him down and then him yelling at me, fu. You a hole. F you.

No way. He said that to you on Shark Tank?

Yeah. Yeah.

Was that just for tv, or do you think he was actually, like, legitimately upset?

He was tearing up, man. I think I heard his feelings. Yeah. No, legit. Yeah, legit. He was. He was pissed. And I thought that was vindicating. I was like, if someone. If you ask for money and then turn someone down and the first thing they do is they curse at you, like, that's. That's clearly a vindication of the reason of you, why you turn them down. But if you add enough lights and zooming logos and Shark Tank music, you can really make me look like the bad guy. And so I came across as the bad guy. It was very unfortunate, but for the next year, actually, I was getting phone calls. I was getting death threats, man. I was getting emails. I was getting legit people calling my phone and threatening to kill my mother and naming her by name. It was pretty dark. Wow.

Yeah. It's funny how TV can do that, though. I mean, I've done some of these TV shows where, you know, they sit you down for, like, a good week before they even start filming, and they get all their B roll of you saying certain things. Like, they cue you to. To literally say phrases like, you know, for me you know, it was like, I'm the brains behind this operation or they don't stand a chance. Or, you know, a lot of these. These TV shows, I do their competitions, but then they'll string all those together to literally, like, they'll. They'll take something you said and copy and paste that into a completely different scenario. You know, like, there'll be like some. Let's. Let's say like a. You know, like an extreme example would be there's like, you know, a handicapped person or somebody that. That you would. That. That I would personally never, ever discriminate against. But then they'll show a photo of me, like, smirking or something after that person talks when the smirk was actually filmed in a completely different scenario. Like the. Very, very good at making you whoever they want to make you.

It's infuriating. And if you watched my episode, you'll see my facial expressions and people think I am those facial expressions. And I'm like, yeah, you're gonna zoom in. They choose what they want you to sound like, and then they make it sound like that. It's.

Yeah.

Unfortunate, but it is what it is. So that happened in an aired in April 2016. It was very destructive for our business for a while. It. We got 39 fake one star Amazon reviews, instantly dropped our score from 4.8 stars to 2.9 on Amazon. We've never been able to get past that. It really made me take a step back because I realized that we were going to be getting hate for a while and that I needed to build our product to be perfect. We launched a product called the Shock Clock. At that time, it was an alarm clock that makes sure that you wake up on time, including motion tracking. So if you don't get out of bed, you get zapped. And the way to turn it off is to do jumping jacks.

I love it.

Yeah. So that was out for the last from 2016 until 2017. This year, 2017 has been a pure focus on building Pavlok 2, which is not just for bad habit cessation or waking up, but also for good habit formation. And with the speed of the blockchain revolution, this year, it really brought what I've been working on, like, much faster. It drove us much faster to where we are today, which was the creation of our digital currency Volts, where people earn points. They earn volts for doing healthy habits, and it becomes the kind of glue in our entire ecosystem. So that's where we are right now. We just launched Pavlok 2. Pavlok 2 is a. It's a hardware plus software plus behavioral currency solution that the aim of it is to help every single person who commits to a goal achieve a zero percent failure.

Okay, so I want to know a little bit more about kind of the practicality of how I'd use this. So first of all, for a bad habit. Can you give me an example? I guess what I'd like to hear about is something that you've actually seen. Pavlok people successfully utilize this device for, for, for breaking a bad habit. How does it work? Like from start to finish, I get this thing, it arrives at my house, it's in a little box or whatever. Like, how do I then break a bad habit?

Sure. So let's start with something simple. Let's say, do I do smoking or sugar?

I don't smoke. Pick something more sexy than smoking. Everybody knows smoking is bad. Oh, yeah, let's, let's say, let's say sugar.

Yeah, sure. So, sugar. So I'll give you a good example of how we have a lot of users who got over or lost between 20 and 150 pounds using Pavlok. And the way they did it is typically by cutting out either a specific food item or snacking in between meals or eating food late night. And so the way that we help people with these eating issues is very, very similar. So what happens is they purchase the Pavlok and it arrives, they download the app and they pair the app to the phone. And as soon as they log on, there is a course and the course describes how the process works. It's a five day course and the way it works is the first day we kind of just teach you to track your urges.

And you're looking at this course on the app while you're wearing this thing on your wrist. And it's talking to the app on the phone.

Exactly, yeah. It's talking to you by audio and it's talking to the device by Bluetooth. And the app starts off by saying, today's day one, welcome to the situation. Like, welcome to Pavlok. Today I just want you to start noticing when you're feeling these cravings. So simply press the button which will give you a slight vibration for the first couple days. For the first day. And we'll see on it tracks the time of the day and where you are while you're doing the behavior. So the first day you simply track whenever you feel like eating sugar or whenever you eat sugar. Then the next two days we have a meditation audio which I found helps People very much get in the mindset of noticing their thinking and continue to track it. And then on day four and day five, we start them down their aversion therapy process. So let's take late night, let's take snacking between meals. What you're going to do is actually buy some food and you're going to snack between meals. In fact, buy all the best foods that you eat. You're going to get to and actually have to snack for the next at least two recommended five days. And what you do is you start like, let's say you're eating, you're snacking between breakfast and lunch. What you'll do is after you're snacking your breakfast, after you finish your breakfast, and then you start that craving of wanting to snack, you're actually going to get up and you'll listen to the audio, and the audio will say, begin doing the habit. Go to your refrigerator. And you go to your refrigerator and it gives you a zap. And it says, open the refrigerator, Zap. Now grab some food. Now make the food, like, sit down, zap. And then it says, now take one bite. Zap. Now continue to eat for the next few minutes and you're gonna have to stick through with the eating. Painful. Does that make sense?

Wow. So basically you're making the decisions that you already might know deep down inside to be a poor decision. And you're actually. Is it automatically zapping you or are you having to zap yourself when you make that decision?

The Pavlok 1 was manually zapping. With Pavlok 2, it can auto zap.

And how does it know, like, how does it know that I'm reaching for whatever, like, sugar in the refrigerator?

In this example, it's timer driven. So there's straight up an audio file that's like, go and grab the food timer, zap. Now bring it to your mouth. Zap. But with Pavlok 2's actual motion tracking, it can tell when you bring the food to your face.

Oh, wow, Interesting. And have you shown that this actually works? Because, because to me, it seems like when I'm. When I'm opening up the refrigerator, I'm grabbing something from the refrigerator. It almost seems contrived, right? Like, versus me just. Well, I guess, I guess knowing that I'm consciously zapping myself, it seems contrived, but it actually works.

Huh? It seems contrived that people think, well, why don't I just take it off? And I'm saying, like, well, why don't you just stop biting your nails?

Yeah. Exactly. It's like, why wouldn't I just take off a thing and quit zapping me? I'm good to go. I can, you know, stuff my face with all the coconut ice cream.

Why don't you just stop stuffing your face? Right? It's because I'm sure you know this as much as anybody, that there is no you in your brain. There's at least a few billion neurons all fighting for consciousness. But specifically, if you think of the reptile brain and the prefrontal cortex, your thoughts are in the prefrontal cortex, your habits are in the basal ganglia, reptile part of your brain. And your habits have much more control over your behavior than your thoughts do. And what we found is that just like a dog collar gives the owner control over the dog, the Pavlok gives the prefrontal cortex power over your basal ganglia. The Pavlok acts as a way to control your own behavior. It makes yourself the personal trainer of yourself. That's all.

Okay, what about for good habits?

Sure. So. So let me just. Because I didn't finish exactly describing how the habit gets broken.

Okay.

Basically, at the end of this, you do this a few days, you're going to start to notice that you don't want. Like, most people think they've quit on day two, but they don't want them. They don't want to do the behavior anymore. And then what we do is we recommend that they do it two more days to make the habit. Killed dead in the brain. Kind of like your. Your brother, who had to sit in his vomit for so long that he never wanted to or didn't want it for years. In the same way, you want to make sure that that goes away and goes away extra. And then if it ever comes back, we recommend you just press the button a few times to make sure it doesn't come back again. There's a pretty. Pretty measurable extinction curve, which is pretty cool to work with because we get to see it in our users. And the nice thing, the best part about this is that it's all measurable and we know it works. We have 60,000 users of the product. We still have around a 70 to 75% cessation rate for most serious bad habits like smoking and nail biting. And my favorite one is negative thoughts. We've really found that pressing the button whenever you have a negative thought or anxious anxiety feeling, or did you see my video with the paranoid schizophrenic Kendrick who used Pavlok to get over his schizophrenia?

No.

What happened Basically, I met a homeless guy outside who was asking for money. I had found out that he had paranoid schizophrenia for about 10, 20 years. And I had read an article about aversion therapy for paranoid Pavlok. And he was able to get over his symptoms instantly because whenever he had the negative thought that started to, like, the voices in his head started to play. He pressed the button, and the voice just went away. He was able to snap himself out of the activity. Yeah. And so this guy, actually now, he's now my roommate. He's homeless. So I brought him in. He lives with me now. And he didn't have an ID or a bank account. He lived on the street. I'm like, of course you have negative voices in your head. Like, if I lived on the street and didn't know where I would go every night, I don't even know what would happen to me. But working with him and living with him has been, like, mind blowing because I found that a lot of what we call mental illness is just a lack of control over your thought patterns, and that possibly Pavlok is just, at its core, good habits or bad habits, what it really is is just influencing thought, and that's kind of powerful for people trying to change.

Wow.

So, yeah, so I can answer your. I'll stop there, but I can answer about your forming habits, if you like.

Yeah, so. So good habits. Let's say I wanted to. Let's say I didn't want to eat sugar. Let's say I want to. I want to do a. Three times a week, I want to squat, and I hate barbell squats. How would I use the Pavlok to. To cause me to get into the habit of doing squats?

Sure. So when you think about reinforcement, we think about operant conditioning. Operant conditioning has positive and negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is more effective at getting you started to do a habit, and positive reinforcement is more effective at making the habit stick. Specifically, a habit is how I define it, is when it's harder to not do something than to do something. This is kind of important because you think about brushing your teeth, right? Like, if you forget to brush your teeth one day or like, you don't have a toothbrush with you while you're traveling, one day, you'll feel this weird feeling or sensation in your mouth, and you really want to get rid of that sensation. And that doesn't make any sense because toothbrushes have only been around for, like, 75 years.

Oh, really? That's it, huh?

Last, like, hundred thousand years of humans they didn't have toothbrushes, but I do.

Know that they used sticks. I have one actually. It's a tooth cleaning stick. I got it off an apple tree. Actually works pretty well. Not kidding.

Oh really?

Yeah.

Does it feel good?

It does feel good. It's kind of addicting. I've got it right here on my desk. You just kind of like stick it in your mouth and wiggle it around. It's like a toothpick. But it feels a little bit more natural because I got it off an apple tree. Dammit.

Yeah, that's funny. Yeah. So you have that habit of the apple tree stick now.

Right?

What we found is. So what I found in my old research on habit formation is that the way to form a habit is very simple. Do an action consistently for a specific amount of days. If you do 50 sit ups every day after breakfast, eventually you become the kind of person who feels uncomfortable not doing 50 sit ups after breakfast. So to form a habit, do any action consistently to get somebody to do the behavior at least once and then you want to keep them doing it. Add negative and positive reinforcement. So bringing that into Pavlok. Here's how it works. When you buy the app, you buy the product and it's delivered to you or you download the app, I guess you don't even have to buy the hardware, you just download the app. What happens is we start you off with a point system, these bulls. You have the ability to earn more by doing healthy habits. So you earn actual points, which we believe next year will be a crypto that's exchangeable for cash by doing good behavior. So that becomes the incentive structure. Then we allow you to add negative reinforcers and negative consequences as well as. So you can add, of course, vibration, beep and zap if you don't do the behavior on time. But also you can commit by putting down money that other people that you lose if you fail and you win back if you succeed. And if you succeed, you win from the other people who are in the community who fail. So it's like a betting pool on your own behavior.

Interesting.

And so that allows us. Right, so it allows us to add the negative reinforcer plus the positive reinforcer in one fell swoop. Think about it this way. You have digital courses, right, Ben?

Yeah. You mean like courses where I teach a series of classes online.

Exactly.

Yeah. I've done stuff with CreativeLive and Udemy. I actually did a. One of the ones I did on Udemy was. It's super niche. I did a course with a Guy named Ari Meisel. And we did like a 12 part course on fathers who have twins and how to raise healthy twins and stay fit. And it's a pretty niche audience. But yeah, I've got courses out there.

That'S very niche also. I know your Pavlok 2 is going to arrive today. If you open up the book, the how to guide, you'll see Ari's story on how he quit sugar using Pavlok.

Oh, nice.

His picture is right in that how to guide.

Oh, cool.

But yeah, it's a pretty small world actually, but. Oh man, what was I just saying?

You're talking about these vaults and how you're creating like a cryptocurrency within the app.

And specifically about courses. Right. So we noticed very early that like when users went through our course that they would succeed at breaking their habit. It's very easy to get people to want to do a course or even pay for a course. It's very hard to get them to actually do the course. Motivation doesn't tend to persist after the purchase is made. And so we started doing a small experiment where it was like, instead of just unlocking the course, would you like to commit, put down some cash at the moment of purchase and if you do the course, you will earn back your bets plus the amount from the people who didn't do the course. And we found that by adding a slight disincentive plus a community plus an incentive if you do well. Good job. Created massive success rates with like, in our current gratitude app, I think we have like 70 plus percent of people wrote the three things they're grateful for every single day this month, which is like unheard of results for people who are trying to form good habits. And so that's kind of. So to summarize, to close out this long branch of thinking right now, the way that we help people form habits is by allowing and creating like the property, like psychological protocol for that habit and for that user utilizing, you know, negative reinforcement plus positive reinforcement plus rewards plus commitment plus accountability, all that stuff. But essentially we just created the right environments that allows us to measure and help people change their behavior. And it will learn over time such that this becomes. What I want is a 100%. I want it to be the product that makes every single user who ever commits to an action achieve it with no chance of failure.

So could I lose volts if I keep up a bad behavior? Like, would it be able to like take currency away from me?

Yeah, of course.

Oh, wow. Okay. So I get, I get Vaults added to my account that I could use on apps and products and to buy goods and services and to unlock things within the Pavlok app. And those would be generated by me engaging in healthy behaviors that I enjoy and. Or maybe I don't enjoy them, but I'm trying to learn to enjoy them. And then when I do a bad behavior or I mess up, then I could get volts taken away from me. Negative reinforcement. Interesting. Wow. I know my audience is gonna wanna know about this. So tell me. Cause they're all health nerds, all trying to live until they're 150 years old. Tell me about the potential for electrical exposure, EMFs, stuff like that. Like, I mean, am I just like constantly going to bombard my body with WI Fi or Bluetooth using this thing? Is it only talking to the app when I have it turned on? Like, how does all that work?

Sure. Actually, you had a. We brought you up pretty recently in one of our firmware calls because of your. When I met you, I was pretty blown away at how much you really didn't like signals of WI Fi and Bluetooth.

Yeah, that's why I wear my tinfoil hat, baby.

Yeah. And you do look a lot younger than I do, so you're not wrong. But your question was about the health effects. So the nice thing about the electric shock is that it's localized to a 2 inch space on bottom of your wrist and it doesn't pass through your entire body. And most importantly, it just passes in the skin, across the skin. So we have seen like if you get zapped a bunch, like a little red dot will sometimes occur under the place where the zap occurs, but it goes away in a few minutes, it doesn't itch or there's no rash and there is no long term side effects. Obviously we're not a medical device and I'm not committing any kind of medical thing and you know, ask your doctor or whatever, but the product uses a very, very light electrical sensation that's programmable to the level that you like. And it just goes across the skin, not inside of the skin. So it's extremely safe.

Okay.

And it has no, it doesn't have those side effects like taking drugs or medicine because it doesn't go. It's not ingested.

Right?

Yeah. So the new Pavlok 2 has the ability to have airplane mode. So it won't deploy any sort of signal if you turn it off, if you choose to. Of course, the product is designed to remind you when you do stuff, so gestures can be programmed and stored directly on the device, as well as timers. That means that you could set up to vibrate or beep whenever you bite your nails and not have any Bluetooth signal. But for other behaviors, like location or if you want to send messages, send signals, or wasting time on Facebook or anything like that, that requires a Bluetooth connection to be in the moment. So that's how that goes. You can choose. You're able to set it to be on your planet.

Okay, got it. Cool. Interesting. So this thing, this Pavlok 2, is something that people can get right now?

Yeah, definitely. There should be a link on your show Notes. I'll make a link@pavlok.com BenGreenfield to redirect to you, and then I'm sure you'll have notes as well.

Okay.

A vlok.com BenGreenfield for anybody listening.

Okay. Are you. Are you gonna put a. I'm just gonna put you on the spot right now. Are you gonna, like, give people a discount or anything on that page to. I will absolutely take care of my. My folks, take care of my peeps.

I'm gonna give people a big discount. It'll be at least 20% sick. I'm just trying to make sure that I've committed what I'm committing to, but it'll be a very big discount.

Okay. All right, cool. And then once that happens, you better turn that dinghy thing on on your wristband because it's gonna. It's gonna dingy a lot. Maybe not as much as Shark Tank, but, you know, talking to me on a podcast isn't quite as epic as making Mr. Wonderful cry.

I don't know, man. You're Ben Greenfield, man.

Getting a big head. Cool. So my Pavlok 2 will arrive today, then, and I'm looking forward to trying it out. For those of you following me on Snapchat or Instagram, and there's always links on my website@BenGreenfoldFitness.com and all that jazz. I'll probably be doing a few experiments in my house. I just got to figure out what habit I want to give up. There are certainly vices in my life that I would say are beneficial, but that I've always been curious how hard would be to give up. I have a glass of wine every night. Sometimes it's not a glass of wine. Sometimes it's a Moscow Mule, or sometimes I put a little bit of vodka into my wife's kombucha, and it's good for me, but at the same time, I've thought, gosh, am I like addicted to having a drink every night or same thing with like, you know, vaping, you know, CBD or THC or, you know, or like, you know, a plant based medicine, you know, Is that something that, that a Pavlok could, could, could help me to, to break? Not that I really, I honestly, both of those things I think are healthy for me. But I'm always curious, you know, what other habit I could break. May I. I'll identify some kind of advice. I don't know. Manish, you got, you got any vices? We're friends on Facebook. Are there any vices that you know of that I have that I could break?

Dude, you know, you're like a freaking perfect paragon of man. Definitely, Definitely. But I will say, I will say this. I think that's for someone like you. The best use case of the Pavlok zap is either is most likely for memory. So if you learn someone's name and don't want to forget their name, a slight zap while you learn their name makes it like a minute. It's kind of crazy, actually.

Wow. So I just reach down as I'm introducing them, touch that little lightning bolt on there and it'll go zap.

Yeah, it's like, you know how it just, it's a function of memory. You know how, like the way that you learn. If I say a word and I show you a word, you're going to learn it much faster than if I just say it or just show it.

Right.

So the way that you learn is through multiple sensory stimuli. And so the zap adds a new multiple, a new sensory input. So I found, like, actually, I think at the summit that we met at Consumer Health Summit, there was like a special dinner and There was like 22 people there and I zapped as they introduced themselves. And then I got all their names right in a circle.

No way. Okay. I'm going to have to try that kind of stuff.

I'm not guaranteeing that for you, but yeah, it gives you a tool for memory, which I think is powerful.

Okay. So I have a little challenge I'm going to issue to those of you listening in. If you have a specific thing that you want me to try with the Pavlok, whether it would be to reinforce a good habit or punish a bad habit, leave a comment in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Maneesh that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com M A N E E S H same place where you can get the fat discount code Manish has given everybody on this thing, and I'll pick the top comment that comes through. That looks like a pretty compelling thing for me to demonstrate on Instagram or Facebook. So I'll do a little video for you guys if you want to see how this thing works. And I'll figure out some kind of bad habit to break or some kind of good habit to reinforce. So there you go. Leave a comment over on the show notes. Or if you have questions about this thing for Manish or me, you can leave a comment over there as well. Manish, this is fascinating stuff, man. You live an interesting life. And I also would encourage people to go visit hackthesystem.com and it's been a while since I've looked into what your brother's up to, but I'll encourage people as well to go check out iwillteachytoberich.com unless that just irks you, Maneesh, when people bring up your brother because apparently he's far more famous than you are. Yeah, he's far more famous than you, bro. But who knows?

You might eventually, to be clear, Ben, your brother I like more than you. So I understand. It's the same kind of situation.

I love Zach. All right, I'm giving you the digital middle finger right now. All right, well, cool. So, folks, it's BenGreenfulFitness.com Maneesh. You can also go to Pavlok.com BenGreenfield and Manish and I, between the time that I'm recording this and the time the podcast comes out, we'll get a nice little discount up there for you. And like I mentioned, leave a comment if you want me to try out this Pavlok 2 I'm receiving later today on any fun and interesting project. And in the meantime, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Manish Sethi. Sethi, I have a mnemonic now, Manish, it's seti like Satan.

I'll take it.

Yeah, that's right. I know it's exactly what you want to be associated with. We're signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sa.