 A lot of you really enjoyed my last video explaining why the Danny Gonzalez TikTok song didn't go viral, so I thought I'd make a new video about his power balance experiment. I know a lot of you are nerds just like me, who love science and love to learn. So let's discuss what's going on with Danny's power balance band. Recently, Danny came across a YouTube ad for a wristband that apparently helps people with their balance and makes them quote unquote feel better. This is nothing new and snake oil salesmen have been around for ages. As consumers, it's important that we know how to spot pseudoscientific claims so we don't waste our money on sham products like these balance bands. As Danny mentioned in his video, he remembered the original power balance bands from high school because all of the athletes were wearing them. Although I'm a little older than Danny Gonzalez, I remember people wearing these bands to improve their game as well. What Danny didn't mention was that professional athletes were even wearing these things. Shaquille O'Neal, yes, Shaq wore one and he said that it quote unquote really works and then went on to say, there were about three of my teammates with the product on and we won that game by 57 points. During the height of the power balance craze, celebrities were wearing these bands too. Celebrities like Gerard Butler, Robert De Niro and Demi Moore were wearing them. Since then, the realm of social media has exploded and celebrities are promoting even more pseudoscientific products to us. In the best case scenario, it's Gwyneth Paltrow promoting her Goop wellness products, but worst case, it's Instagram influencers promoting flat tummy teas. Although we're going to have some fun debunking the bad science around power balance bands, it's crucial that we understand science so we don't waste hard earned money on these fraudulent products. In his video, Danny Gonzalez reads the FAQ from the power balance site. One question asks, what does it do, will the wristbands work for everyone? What does it do, will the wristband work for everyone? Well, we have received testimonials and responses from around the world about how power balance has helped people. There is no assurance it can work for everyone. We make no claims and let the consumer decide based on their experience. That's smart. That's a crazy marketing strategy. We don't make any claims about what our product does. We let the consumer decide what the product does. I think that's the slogan of the new iPhone. After reading this, Danny laughs in jokes about how this is a genius marketing technique. Although it's definitely funny how they've worded this and this is a huge red flag to anyone even considering buying one of these things, there's actually a good reason why they have this disclaimer. Dr. Steven Novella is one of the hosts of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast and he has some great courses on medical myths and alternative medicines. In his audio course, The Skeptics Guide to Alternative Medicine, Dr. Novella discusses the fraudulent claims made by power balance and the power tricks they use to sell the bands to people. Eventually, the FTC cracked down on power balance and the company was forced to release the following statement. Quote, we admit that there is no credible scientific evidence that supports our claims, end quote. And they also agreed to give refunds to customers who believe they were cheated. Well, despite the skepticism of the power balance band, Danny Gonzalez bought 30 of them and decided to do a little bit of an experiment. Today, we're going to discuss his experiment and what it tells us about the power balance bands and what a better version of the experiment would look like. But before we get started, if you're new to the rewired soul, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. Here, we practice critical thinking and your skepticism to better understand what's going on in the world while also improving our own well-being. And if you're interested in any of Dr. Steven Novella's books or audio courses about medical myths and alternative medicines, my affiliate links with them are down in the description below. One of the reasons I love Danny Gonzalez and his friends Curtis Conner and Drew Gooden is because they have scientific minds. You can tell they're inquisitive and like many of us, they just want to understand how the world works a little bit better. The world is a crazy place and even with all of the advances we've made in medicine, psychology, and technology, there's still a lot we don't know. So let's nerd out for a minute and pretend that Danny Gonzalez really wanted to see if these power balance bands worked. The first thing we need to do is develop some type of measurement for what it means for these things to quote unquote work. Power balance makes a lot of bold claims, but for the sake of this experiment and Danny's video, we're going to focus on one measurement, balance. Danny did a great job in his original video defining a metric for measurement. He wanted to see if the power balance band actually improved his balance. In the video, Danny used the time measurement of Mississippi's to count, but in a real experiment, we prefer something a little bit more accurate like a stopwatch. In this experiment, the independent variable is the power balance band. So Danny was on the right track by doing two different tests. First, he measured his balance without the power balance band, and then he measured his balance with the band on. After doing the experiment a few times, Danny was a little shocked that it seemed like the power balance band actually increased the amount of time he could balance. Not only that, but when he put on all 30 bands, he reached his longest balancing time yet. I do feel kind of icy, though. Look at this drip. Here it goes. If I die, don't watch this. All right, well, here we go. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, six Mississippi, seven Mississippi, eight Mississippi, nine Mississippi, about 13 Mississippi, 17 Mississippi, 27 Mississippi, 28 Mississippi, 29 Mississippi. Man, what the? So, did the power balance band improve Danny's balance? Well, we're not sure. After Danny did his experiments, he said that he's not sure if it actually worked. He questioned whether or not he just naturally improved his balance by practicing balancing. If you're trying to be a scientific thinker, this is an excellent question to ask yourself. Some scientists have had to retract their work because they didn't ask themselves these questions. Sometimes, like the rest of us, scientists fall victims to their own biases. When trying to confirm their belief, they'll test something until it works. When it doesn't work, they come up with reasons why it didn't work, and then when it does work, they just stop. This is bad science. Right now, in the scientific community, there's a replication crisis, and a lot of it is because of this exact issue. In our hypothetical situation, Danny has come to us, told us about his results, and wants to know if he's proven that the power of balance band actually works. The first step we're gonna take as good scientists is to try to come up with alternative explanations for how we may have had his results. The first explanation is what Danny mentioned in this video, which is that it's possible that by practicing balancing, he would have improved anyways. This is actually an issue that pharmaceutical companies run into with antidepressants as well. Did the medication actually work, or would the person just start feeling better due to hedonic adaptation? The next explanation is the placebo effect. As we discussed earlier, professional athletes like Shaquille O'Neal swore by the power of balance band. It's 2020, and we see celebrities talking about the benefits of pseudoscientific remedies like energy healing and essential oils as well. It's definitely possible that someone might start performing better with the power of balance band on, or feel better with energy healing, but this can be the placebo effect at work. In his book, Suggestable You, author Eric Vance takes a deep dive explaining all of the powerful ways the placebo effect works. Using antidepressants as an example once again, many people feel better when taking the medication just because of the placebo effect. In many studies, when the person is given a sugar pill rather than the actual medication, they'll claim that it's helped their depression. Personally, my belief is that if you're willing to risk the possible side effects, but the placebo effect works on you, do your thing. And in the case of the power balance band, if it's making athletes play better like they're lucky underwear, that's great. But Danny Gonzalez hired us to do a job, so we need to figure out if this band actually works or if it's the placebo effect. So what do we do? We start by making two bands that appear to be the same, but one of them was actually fake. Then we could run two tests with Danny. One with a real band and one with a fake band. If you balance this longer with a real band, it works, right? Not quite yet. As scientists, it's possible that we're biased. Maybe we really want the power balance band to fail. So we unconsciously stop the stopwatch later with the placebo band to prove that the real power balance is fake. Or what often happens is a company like Power Balance has their own testers. And maybe they stop the stopwatch later with the real band to improve the appearance of the band. Since Danny might succumb to the placebo effect and we might have an unconscious bias, we need to turn to the gold standard for experiments like this, which is the double blind study. The double blind study means that not only does Danny not know which band he's getting, neither do we, the experimenters. Although many pharmaceutical companies don't comply with double blind study standards, it was created due to the fact that these companies often pay their own researchers to run tests. When you spend billions of dollars creating a medication, or in this case, a product, and you're funding the research, you're more likely to skew towards positive results. Now that Danny doesn't know which band he has and neither do we, we can rerun the experiment. The next issue we face is that there are all sorts of variables we need to take into consideration. What if Danny didn't get that good of sleep last night so it affects his balance? What if Danny just sucks at balancing? Or what if he's better than the average person at balancing? And how will we know if it works for other people if we only base it on testing Danny? The key to a great study is having the biggest sample size possible. We don't have time to get into the nitty gritty of statistics and data analysis, but we want to try this with as many people as possible. Ideally we'd get hundreds or even thousands of people to participate in this experiment so we can start getting some average balancing times. We'd also want to create a third group of people who don't wear a band at all so we have a control to compare the metrics to. With a double blind study and a proper sample size, we'd be able to be much more confident in our conclusion about the power balance band. But in my opinion, we could save a lot of time and resources by bypassing all of this nonsense. Why? Because the premise of the power balance band is complete pseudoscience. To date, we have no scientific evidence of frequencies or energy having any physical effects on the body aside from the placebo effect. And that's why it's important to understand science. We can save a lot of time and a lot of money by not even messing with some of these products because we know the science doesn't back it. While the placebo effect is a powerful thing, there are a lot of free placebos out there. All right, everybody. I hope you enjoyed that little video essay about the Danny Gonzalez power balance band experiment. And yeah, you know, like, man, for those of you true reward soldiers who have been around for a while, like I have so much fun. I have so much fun making these new type of videos and talking about this and just nerding out. Like I said in the intro, like I'm glad that I'm, you know, we're all creating a community of people who just like wanna understand the world a little bit better. And like I said, like this is a silly power balance band, but there's so many products marketed to us. And we can, when we understand the scientific process and what science actually says about different, you know, effects and results and things like that, we could save a lot of money. But the placebo effect could be a powerful thing and you could do you boo, right? Like if a little band makes you feel like you're Superman, do your thing. All right, but anyways, I love nerding out about this stuff just understanding the world and human behavior and all that. And I'm glad that you guys do too. And again, like I've been plowing through books. I'm at like 230 books for the year so far. And that's why I love recommending them to you guys. They're always linked down in the description. They're affiliate links, so a little bit comes back to the support of the channel. Check them out. And I know the holidays are coming up and it's a rough time for some people. If you're interested, I personally use BetterHelp online therapy. And there's always an affiliate link down in the description below. So again, you get affordable online therapy during this crazy pandemic. It's nice. I can do it from the comfort of my own home. We talk like once a week. You could do video call. You can just do a regular phone call. You could text message, whatever. But yeah, if you wanna check out BetterHelp, that's down in the description below. I have some more videos planned for the holidays. There's any topics that you want me to cover if you're curious about human behavior around the holidays or why we get depressed or anxious or sad or whatever like that. You know, I'll see what I can find in the field of science and we'll start discussing it. All right, but anyways, I'm gonna go now. I'm sorry for keeping you so long. That's all I got for this video. If you liked the video, please give it a thumbs up if you're new. Make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And a huge thank you to everybody who supports the channel over on Patreon or using my affiliate links down below. I really, really, really appreciate it. And I will see you next time.