 And I think we are live. All right, guys, welcome back to another episode. Today I got a special guest for you. I got my good friend, Manish Seti, and a quick little bio on who he is. Manish Seti is an American author, internet entrepreneur, and the famous founder of Pavlock, which we will be discussing today. Manish, welcome to the show. Hey, it's a pleasure meeting you, man. Likewise, likewise. So why don't we dive into it? This little thing I got in the mail, that's a long ago, right here. What is it? Why did he make it? Let's talk about it. Sure, yeah. I used to have a travel blog and I would do a bunch of stuff. And I found it really hard to focus and get stuff done. And I decided to do some experiments on myself. One of my experiments, I hired someone to follow me around. And every time I wasted time, he'd slap in the face. And I watched my productivity skyrocket. Like, I got like four months of writing done in about five days. And I was like, whoa, this is actually really cool. What if I didn't have to pay and I could just make like a dog call that could zap me every time I went on Facebook? Maybe that could be even better. And then I thought that's actually a really good idea. There's like a million wearables that track what you do. This one could actually change what I do. So that was the idea for how Pavlok got born. And what it really is, is it's a behavioral training device. It vibrates, beeps, and releases electric stimulus to reward you for doing positive stuff and help you stop doing bad stuff. We found the biggest thing about it is that the electric zap is, it ranges from like light to very strong. And at strong levels, it really becomes like a negative stimulus that rapidly trains you in the moment to stop doing what you don't wanna do. The two most common use cases are for waking up early. Like, if you don't get out of bed, it knows by motion tracking if you're out of bed and it can vibrate, then beep, then zap to make sure you get out of bed. Really, really effective. Like, especially for people who have heavy sleeping problems, really effective. That's the number one use case. And the number two one is to stop bad habits where we have a version of using a version therapy. You basically associate the negative sensation with smoking, cigarette, or biting your nails. In the same way, when you get really drunk on tequila and then never drink tequila again, create that Pavlovian association to help people stop bad habits for good. So how does it stop you from biting nails? Cause I haven't set mine up yet, but for example, I bite my nails. So every time I move my hand like this, people will know I'm moving my hand and shock me. Now, yeah, something like that. It's two steps. The first step is the training process. There's an audio course inside and it basically says, for five minutes, do the action on purpose and think about it. So you're gonna focus on zap. The audio is like, do the habit again, zap. And you're gonna overdo the habit to the point that you don't wanna do it anymore, but you just stick through with it for five minutes. You're overdoing it while experiencing negative sensation that creates a Pavlovian association in the brain. The first thing you'll notice for the rest of the day is that you become more aware of when you start to bite your nails. The second thing is that the device itself will start to vibrate when you bite your nails. You're gonna catch yourself and zap yourself by pressing the button like that. That'll make it go away for a while. You do that for about five days. So you listen to audio course in the morning and then you just zap yourself and you catch yourself doing it. The habit starts to just dissipate. It becomes, just like I said, like if you get really drunk on alcohol and then suddenly the smell of that alcohol is like, ugh, the same action happens when you catch yourself by your nails. We have about 60 to 80% cessation rate for nail biters who go through our five day program after six months. It's pretty high. After six months. Yeah. So I just wanna recap that I first have to program it to understand my behavior and to- First thing you can be done, you can be done with phone. All you do is just listen to the audio course and do what it says. Five minutes later, five days. It says, bite your nails on purpose and press the button. Bite your nails on purpose and press the button. You do that for a while. It's gonna feel unpleasant. That's all you need to do to start off with. And then the rest of the day, whenever you catch yourself biting your nails, press the button. That's the manual version, no phone needed. And that's enough for most of our users to stop the habit completely. What are some surprises you've seen so far in developing this and dealing with customers and on your journey with the startup? From the entrepreneurial side? Any side. Like, okay, so building hardware, first of all, building hardware is freaking hard. It's like, it's a totally different world. Like you think of a startup as like two guys working on content and an app in a garage. Like, building a hardware company means you have to have supply chain, customer support, hardware, software, web. Like, it's like seven startups in one. So, if I had known what I was getting myself into, I wouldn't have done it. Second, like, the difficulty of building a hardware business is also its biggest strength. In the sense that no one else in the world really knows how to make hardware. Very few people do. And there's fundamental times and cash infusions you have to have to make hardware. So it gives you a really good competitive advantage once you do it. I found that like people over rely on venture capital and under rely on building a product that some people will love. And hardware in particular because it's so cash intensive. When we run out of money, we make the best decisions we can and we ever have made because we have to focus on what we'll sell. Decisions like removing the screen and removing the step tracker and focusing on a tiny module that can be reused for different purposes. Those are very profitable decisions that don't really sound good from a customer perspective at the beginning. But they're very good when you realize you have to get through that process. So that was one of the interesting parts. The second thing I started to notice is that this is one of my favorite stories about hardware which doesn't completely apply to every industry. But it doesn't end in this industry that you're buying products from other people and reselling it or selling it to suppliers and distributors. There's a thing called, basically my friend got into Walmart. His product was like a smart globe. It was starting to sell really well. It sold so well that he went bankrupt. There's a thing called the cash conversion cycle which is when you spend the dollar, how long does it take for that dollar to come back to you as profit or revenue? And the ideal goal is to make that number negative. So you get the money first. But some people don't realize that and they just continually buy. So basically, if you pay your suppliers on the day it ships from China and then your vendor doesn't pay you until 60 days after it ships, then the faster you sell, the faster you go broke. And the only way to get out of that situation is there's two ways. One is to raise more capital or take a loan. And the second way is to ask for an extension on your supply terms. So one of the most interesting things to me was that I figured I fixed a ton of my massive depression and almost company dying woes by picking up the phone and asking my manufacturer if I could have an extra 30 days to pay off. That was it. And it fixed everything. And so that was one of the most surprising things about entrepreneurship. It took me two and a half years to learn. Negotiation and just asking. No, but just timing that when you get paid is more important than when you get paid. Totally, especially for you for the logistics and I used to have a physical business as well in the clothing in China as well. So I can relate to the nightmares. Did you buy from China and sell it in China? Well, I did it backwards. I did a very convoluted, I bought raw material from China and made it in Canon and shipped it back to China to sell to Chinese. Whoa, that is very backwards. Yeah. That's a whole different story. But yes, so yeah, I mean, have you done anything you've done when did you get out of that business? Two and a half years ago. Cool, and you started working on Block Eaks? Yeah. I thought that was really smart. So yeah, I think you and I have been talking about blockchain like fucking it forever now. And it's like, it's interesting because when you started writing about it, I was like, it was intriguing because it seemed like you saw, even though people were making fun of the idea, they still are. Like you saw that it was going to be a great idea, a project to build and started prepping in advance by building up SEO and ranking the terms for it. Are you finding that that was a good decision that you're starting to see huge results in those early days? 1.2 million visitors a month, not too bad. Yes. I mean, yeah, you're like the number one for everything that you search for, essentially. Trying to be, trying to be. You know, we focus more on quality. Like we're not a news website. We're more or less like a vertical. So we'll train people. We have a job board. We have a forum. Eventually we're gonna have our own kind of like online incubator where people can submit their ideas. Kind of like a product hunt, but not for products, but for businesses. So think of the whole vertical where you have your one stop shop for everything. We're slowly rolling all those different features out. I love it. It's like, there is such a different economy being shifted and shaped in this world by now. And there is no right. They're just like what will happen and what is. And it's cool because there's like very few people who see the world in the same way that you do. Where it's like, people who understand blockchain understand that it's not about the blockchain. It's not about the investment. And it's definitely not about the speculation. Because money is a fungible resource. And it's just a means of trust. And if you create the trust first, following psychological principles, then the money will come because the trust is real. I find like, and that's like everything about related to Pavlock is all about behavior change, right? And behavior relies on positive and negative reinforcers. And the act of receiving money is a positive reinforcer. But the act of getting fired if you don't go to work is a negative reinforcer. And people think that positive is more important than negative, but it's not true. It's that negative makes habits start, but positive makes habits stick. Yes. Even negative emotions. Like you can see it in one of the 25 cognitive biases at Super Deprival Syndrome, where you give somebody something, or like when they do it in discounts right here, you'll lose $20 if you don't buy it. But you never had $20 to begin with. Yeah, it's like how much will you pay for this bottle of wine? No more than 15. How much will you sell this bottle of wine for? No less than 50. And it's like, it makes no sense, but it's just the fear of loss. It's so powerful in human range. And so we're finding that there are ways to trick people for their own advantage. We have a goal at the company, which is we want to create a vaccine against human beings not doing what they say they'll do. So we have lights up in our office. One is red, one is green. The green one only turns on if 100% of our users who committed to their goals in the app, like waking up on time, quitting smoking and going to the gym. If 100% of the users in the last six months hit 100% of their goals, the green light turns green. And obviously that hasn't happened. And our goal is to make that light up forever because we want, I believe that there is a solution. I believe that there are ways fundamentally for people to achieve their goals and that the way that people think is by saying what do I want as an individual but not looking at the structure. It's like missing the, there's ways to do it in psychology classes. There's ways to do it in economic theory, but they don't put those together. And that's what we're trying to do. Let me ask you this for one of the features for the app. Let's say, forget this. Does, is there a feature on the app that realizes that my Pavlock is at home? Yeah, Pavlock two. So you have Pavlock one? Yeah, Pavlock one, you know. Yeah, this is Pavlock two, which is coming out in September. And so, yes, it knows when you're not wearing it. It knows your like location and motion detection. But what we're really focusing on is the human element. So it's one thing if a bot reminds you to go to the gym, you often just swipe it away. But if the bot is a human and if that human is a coach and if you forget to leave your item at home, you get a phone call from your coach being like, hey, man, I don't think you're wearing your Pavlock. What's going on? Suddenly the next day, you're likely to put on that Pavlock. And if like, this is like a couple of years in the future from now, but imagine if you hit this news button on your alarm and someone just walks up and starts knocking on your door and rings the doorbell. Or if you say you want to quit smoking and you've done all our app in your course and it's like you're getting there, but it's not perfect. If someone is just with you throughout the day, watching your hand motions at first, watching the smell and you add a camera on, you earn volts for doing these activities, but then you'll be able to allow yourself to monitor. Once you hit that commit button, that goal of 100% adherence requires some pretty crazy activities. Yes. And I believe that we can get people to do those behavior, so basically once you hit the commit button, my goal is that it's grounds open. We can do whatever we want as long as it helps you hit that goal. Doesn't matter if it's me sitting with you for the next six months and never leaving your side. Once you hit the commit button, you're in. So don't hit that commit button unless you really commit. Do you see this almost kind of like a gig? Okay, let me paint something about your scenario. A lot of people have troubles waking up in the morning or let's do something during the day, not in the morning, like I don't know. They forget something. Maybe the gym, there you go, there's a gym one. I forget to go to the gym. And then on your feature in Pavlock, I'm willing to pay somebody, so this is my set price, like I'm willing to pay somebody five bucks to come to my location because I'm willingly showing people my location. And then it's kind of like a marketplace where I say, oh, that dude is five bucks and I'm like two seconds away for sure. I'll take that five bucks to walk up the stairs and slap it. Exactly. It's like an API for TaskRabbit meets the game with Michael Douglas. The way I see those exactly like that. Most of the issues that people have is forgetfulness is a huge thing. And once in an often, if they do remember, if the task is too difficult and if there's no disincentive, it's easy to ignore, right? It's very easy to walk by the gym and be like, I'll go there tomorrow. But then if you knew that if you don't go to the gym, you're gonna lose a hundred bucks, you might go. If it's gonna post on your Facebook wall and text your friends that you're missing the gym appointment, they'll probably go. And the thing is that it only requires that initial fear of loss just for the first few days because once you go to the gym for a few weeks in a row, about 20 to 66 days, the habit gets formed. You no longer need to think about it. It becomes natural. And so that's the- Let's pause right there. What is that? So there's so many different takes on that. How, in your experience, how long does it actually take to create these new neural networks? How long does it take to form a habit? Yeah. The only habit is different than breaking a habit. And that's one clear point I wanna be clear on. I gave a keynote presentation at the Royal Society of Medicine in London on how to form good exercise habits in the brain. We researched very deeply into that specific question. And the answer is this. It depends on the difficulty of the habit. The only metric of habit formation is consistency. If you do the same action X days in a row, after the same trigger or when triggered, then the action becomes automatic. That means that the brain activity stops acting here and it's fully present back here in your basal ganglia. That's when a habit is formed. For easy habits, like drinking a glass of water after breakfast, it takes about 20 days to form a habit. If you drink a glass of water for 20 days and you walk outside, you're gonna feel really uncomfortable if you forgot to drink water. Not drink water and drink water. That takes about 20 days. For the most difficult in the study that we spoke about was doing 50 sit-ups after breakfast. That took 84 days. So if you do it 84 days in a row, 50 sit-ups, the habit becomes formed. Harder to not do it. In one way, like 84 days and doing 50 sit-ups is really hard, I mean it's just really hard. But it's also kind of beautiful because you could take anybody in the world who's never done exercise before, make them do sit-ups for 84 days and they become the kind of person who does sit-ups. Yes. But what was most beautiful to me was like, what if it was more about doing one sit-up? Just do one sit-up after breakfast. That's closer to 20 days. That's probably as easy as drinking a glass of water. So we built this plan back in 2013, which we did in 2014, where we basically had users commit to going to the gym and they would break their habit into step-by-step tasks. So you just froze on me. Can you still hear me? Cool. On my back? Yeah. So it was like, basically for the first week, just go outside in your gym clothes and lock the front door, send a selfie. If you do it, you win, if you do it a few days in a row, you get to buy yourself that thing you promised. You said that at the beginning. If you don't do it, you got to pay your partner 50 bucks. So all you got to do is go outside, take a photo. Done, no problem. So easy to do, you can fail. So stupid to fail, you lose 50 bucks, why would you? The second week, it would be a little harder. They'd go to the gym and swipe their card. They didn't have to work out. Week three was spent 20 minutes in the gym. Week four was spent 30 minutes in the gym. By the end of the fourth week, they were addicted to putting on their gym clothes and going outside and locking the front door. The 20 day habit was formed and the rest of it just cascaded down. So we had, does that make sense to you? I don't know if I'm wrong. It does, it does. Basically we had an 80% success rate on our users going every single day for 30 days and then we kept measuring it. So the experiment ended, 80% of that 80% made it to the end of the second month and then another eight, it was like cascading over half of the users went 90 days in a row. It's all about simplifying though too what you want to create. I call it the Mount Everest syndrome. When you look at Mount Everest, like oh fuck me, how am I going to climb this shit? I tell them me or you tell them habits. Habits in general, like people get overwhelmed. Whether it's to break it or to create a new one. It's like you need to break it down into the easiest to do task and then you have someone hold you accountable to that task and if you put those together, then it becomes natural. Yeah, like for the longest time I was trying to learn Spanish on and off, do a lingo, this now, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like fuck it, this time I'm actually going to learn it. So I hold myself accountable. I prepaid for three months straight every fucking day for a tutor online and I have to show up. And it's done, right? It's done. It's like I'm there, I know it, I'm paying. If I don't show up, I leave that person hanging on Skype and that's not good. It's usually not the money, it's usually the person hanging out that you feel bad about. You'll notice that it's almost always like money is what we abstract as the value of stuff. But the real value is human emotion. And if you can learn how to navigate and just do your own internal emotions, like feeling uncomfortable, feeling like you're letting somebody down, feeling guilty, those feelings are designed and you can use them for your own good. So I find that to be powerful. It's never about the personal trainer. It's never about the higher personal trainer. It's never about what he teaches you. It's about the fact that he's waiting for you at the gym and you feel bad if you don't show up. So in all those ways, I think that the world needs accountability and needs friends. Like people need to have social interaction. It just doesn't work with hanging out on your phone all day. And so if we can add that properly and incentivize people, like I guess you haven't really talked at all about the pulse thing that we're doing in the system. I don't know if you wanna talk about it but if you wanna go into it, sure go into it. Yeah, I'll talk very briefly about it. Basically we have a plan to build, basically what we're doing in our app is we have a point system. So the device itself vibrates beeps and taps as a reminder but the app itself lets you set goals for yourself or a coach assigns you goals. And each day that you achieve those tasks, you earn volts, this in-app point system. It's not a coin yet. It's just a regular point system but you'll unlock new features and capabilities through the app as you do your positive behaviors. The goal is later on in a year or two to be able to flip it into a blockchain currency or a token. A lot of users, at least 100,000 daily transactions is the goal to convert it into a system then but building the association of value first and utilizing that as a point system that you respect will let us be able to assign different values to the tasks that we think you should do to achieve your end goal. And I know you mentioned about this before but you're also building this massive database that eventually what Pavlok can become into is almost like this self-empty and AI system. Yeah, cool if it works, right? Yeah, it's like an AI human thing. Not if it will, but it can be. Where are you? The one rule we have in the company with regards to our AI bots, coaches, and customer service is that you have to have at least one winky face every four messages because I'm super flirty when I chat online so I'm like, it's gonna have my flirty-ass personality. Use the winky emoji AI. That's one of our three rules of robotics. So I don't know, it seems really funny but we've noticed some really interesting things because we have been experimenting with this. We have our customer support chat in the app and sometimes we'll name the chat a human being's name. Sometimes we'll name it Pavbot. It looks like this, it's like Intercom. So you can chat with me at any time in the app and send messages and stuff. And we notice that if you name it a bot and you say, I'm Pavbot, people will go out of their way trying to trick it and then they'll think, they can't abstract it. They're like, but it's a human, I'm just a bot. I don't know what you're talking about. They just keep coming back trying to trick you even though they know you're clearly a human. Yeah. As long as you don't, so we're finding like, I'm just curious about how that works because it's like more about experimentation and that. It's just fun. But we're trying to play around with that use case because we have this AI human coach we're working on where essentially you have a, we have a new app coming out in September which is a morning routines app. And the morning routines app is called Rise. It helps you stick to your morning goals and you can hire this AI human coach. So it's really just us, it's humans. I'm gonna pause there for a second. Would you say that's your biggest subset of people right now is people have sleep issues? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, we have two products. One is this shock clock, which is just for sleep. And the second is Pavlock, which is for sleep plus bad habits. We're known as a bad habit device but the thing that sells, the thing that people get instantly is the sleeping issues. And are you an early riser or early? You are, right? 5 a.m. Yeah. I never had trouble waking up and I didn't even think it was a big deal because it didn't apply to me. But we started getting these emails like I used to be a night owl and now I'm a morning person. You got from like 40 people. This is actually a big deal to people. Like getting out of bed is massive. Massive, man. I sent you the studies before. Yeah, it's crazy how effective it is. And then, yeah. And so we're like, I mean there's a billion things I could talk about. I think I showed you that correlation graph, more important than causation thing at some point on chat. If I haven't, that's a whole nother conversation at no time. But I think that if you amassed, if you personalize data collection for an individual and you look at the things that there are goals are and you forget about the whys, why do things happen? You only focus about on the what's. What happened when they slept well? What happened when they ate well? What, it doesn't matter if it was because of, but it's only what were they doing at the same time, building these correlations for individuals. We can start to push people down the right paths and learn more about them than they'll ever know. We had one user who tracked all of his food, his sleep and his weight for three months, or 100 days and found out that 100% of the days that he slept over seven hours, he lost weight. 100%. Who cares about what he eats? All that matters is that he sleeps seven hours. Like make that your goal because the food doesn't matter. Just do what you're doing, just sleep. After that, come iterate on it and see what's going on later. We're focusing on letting people choose their clear goal and then building the right paths that are for those people. It's so hard to explain because it's everything, but it's so simple to explain because it's that. Just set a goal and achieve it. We'll handle the tactics. I love it. So the media plan is just roll out Volt slowly, see how people respond to it. Do you have any big surprises coming up so people shall know about or? So Volt's coming out is a surprise. So nobody who even has a Pavlock knows. You guys don't have a Pavlock and you should buy it for sure. But even if you don't, you should download the app and create your account before September 1st. So just download the app, create an account, maybe play with it a little bit. I promise it'll be worth it because we're gonna be releasing modules in a very different way after September 1st and people who have their account first start off with a huge bonus. So that's all I'd recommend. I'll make sure I'll put a link below the video right now. Thanks. Yeah, I'll send you a couple of those pages too. Perfect. And then let's see, interesting or surprising things. Yeah, I'll tell you a couple of surprises. I'm sure that your community will like it. So what we've really been focusing on is building our hardware out to be a platform. It's like an app store for behavioral feedback and haptic touch. I've been piping Spotify or an audio jack input through our vibration motor and feeling the vibrations on your wrist as you listen to music or working on things like being able to sync up with your girlfriend using magnetometers and device whenever you're facing each other, getting heartbeat vibrations about where they are. Stuff like that, physical touch as a way to communicate interesting stimuli and data. So those are the kind of stuff that I'm really excited about that we don't really talk about too much. But those are some of those prizes. Awesome, Anish. Well, I want to thank you so much, man, for dropping by and giving us your time. What is the main website people can get a Pavlok at? Check it out at Pavlok.com. And this is live today, right? Yeah, right now. Yeah, so Pavlok 1, the product that you're holding, this thing, it's going away forever, starting Monday. So we dropped the price to like 99 bucks for the next, goes away. And so 99 bucks for one, 149 for two, I highly recommend it. Cool. 30, you know, you can get it for cheaper. So what is it? What's the cost? I'll give it to everybody. P-A-V-3-0. P-A-V-3-0, cool. We'll do it. Awesome. Awesome, brother. Thank you, man. Yeah, be careful. Peace.