Gabrielle: Welcome to the Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show, where I believe a healthy world is based on transparent conversations.
In today's episode, I sit down with John Jaquish, Ph.D. This guy, he has spent years researching and improving health. The guy is an inventor, which means he is an innovator. In this episode of the Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show, we talk about why conventional resistance exercise may not be the most effective path to health and longevity. We talk about current dietary innovations, and what people are eating. Is the carnivore diet the way of the future? We also talk about how many exercises one must do to obtain a certain level of fitness. this conversation is interesting. We talked about things in multiple domains, how he got to where he is, what makes him so successful, and what I really think that you can learn from this episode is the way in which this guy thinks.
Again, oftentimes we think about the end product and what the person has produced in the world, but where some of the real value is, is how did they get there? I really hope you like this episode. This guy is very charismatic, and I would appreciate it so much if you were to share this episode. Rate, review, subscribe. That is the cost of doing business. Let's dive in.
I am in studio here with Dr. John Jaquish. I see how you're looking at me. You're waiting to see if I'm going to pronounce it.
John: Yeah, I was going to wait and see if you inaudible get it.
Gabrielle: And lo and behold, this is a Sunday.
John: A Sunday.
Gabrielle: This is a Sunday. I know days of the week don't matter. They're all the same. But I have to say, you are special, and you are legitimately the... Although I was hoping that your better half was going to be here, but we'll see her...
John: We'll see her at dinner.
Gabrielle: We'll see her at dinner. But you are the only person that I would...
John: Thanks. Yeah. I flew to New York for you. We just didn't want to do this over Zoom. There's way too many important things we're going to talk about.
Gabrielle: And we're actually going to be able to talk about anything that you want. And one of the things I really appreciate about you is you are a thinker, and you are very entrepreneurial. Not only that, but you ask a lot of questions and question everything. And you challenge, you have no problem challenging the narrative.
John: No problem at all. Well, most narratives are wrong. So we should be asking the question, why do we do things the way we do? When I was a little kid, I don't know, I had a huge, they're probably half-pound can of peanuts. And I was watching a movie and I was just too lazy to put them away. So I was pouring them in my mouth like I was drinking a drink. And I had this half-pound of peanuts, and I felt so awful from that. And it made me want to read about peanuts. I was like 10. And so then I started realizing, there's a lot of things in peanuts that are not good for people, and you're not supposed to eat a lot of peanuts. And then also, I looked at some different seeds and nuts and beans and I just... Why do we eat these things? There's health risks all over the place. Nobody ever told me. My mom never told me. I told her. She's like, "Geez, I'll never buy peanuts again."
Gabrielle: That's crazy. So have you always been interested in health and fitness and wellness?
John: I think I'm just interested.
Gabrielle: Fair.
John: They're just things that I see that catch my interest all the time. Just, I don't know, engineering problems, or... I do like looking at, analyzing, the things we do with the human body. There's a lot we don't understand. And then what we think we understand, some of it's wrong. So figuring out better answers so we can live better lives, I don't know, I can't think of a better way to spend my time.
Gabrielle: Yeah. And you've come up with quite a few answers. You have also been very entrepreneurial in bringing these answers to the public. I would say that you've pretty much solved osteoporosis, and so you're solving care with affordable care. What else are you working on? What is of interest now?
John: Well, I want to get everybody much more fit than they've ever been, or ever even thought they could be. Most of the fitness doesn't work very well. I would say 99% of people... This is my estimation, but there's some research to back this. 75% of American males are either obese or overweight. So when I see it gets to magnitudes where you could probably represent the population, just the people who comment on my advertisements. Most of the people explaining to me how great the gym is, in response to my book, Weight Lifting Is A Waste Of Time, they're all obese. It's like double chin and baby arms, is the kind of person who comes at me with rage. And it's like, why are you defending an industry that obviously does nothing for you? The other day, some guy's like, "I've been lifting weights for 35 years, and I'm in fantastic shape." And I just responded to the guy with his own picture. And people just ridiculed him, like, are you sure? You've been going to the gym for 35 years. The guy just a had double chin and baby arms. I mean, okay.
Gabrielle: How did we get so mixed up?
John: You sure proved my point.
Gabrielle: How did we get so mixed up?
John: I think people just do what they're told. And finally, we have a government that's capitalizing on that by seeing how just totally subservient some people are, just do what they're told and they don't question it. I'm just blown away. Humans are amazing followers, blind followers. Not a lot of leaders. There's just not a lot of people who are like, "Everybody's going to the right. I'm just going to find out what whwhat'sere before I make my decision." I never took the vaccine. A hurried vaccine, it's like, I'd rather just get the virus and build natural immunity. Now, I've been saying this for a long time, so now what I'm saying is kind of the normal thing to say.
Gabrielle: And that goes to what you've been... And we're going to talk all about nutrition too because I dant to talk about that. How did you figure out... And it's interesting, I talk a lot about resistance training, and I have been listening to you, and perhaps there's a component of that we could really impro.
John: I've never really explained this on a big podcast, so you're going to get some interesting content. The reason... So here, let me go back to the beginning. I went to a high school with this guy named Mark, and when we started high school, he was a little bit stockier than me, a little more muscular, maybe two inches shorter than me. I don't know, I was just... I'm almost 6'1", but I was really skinny. Like 100 pounds.
Gabrielle: That's hard to believe.
John: Oh, I was a stick. And so we were in the same weight room. Over the summer, the guy put on 30 pounds of muscle, in three months. And it was between freshmamy n and sophomore year. And I did the same thing he was doing, and I ate the same stuff, and just like, what else are you doing? He's like, "I don't know, smoke cigarettes." And I'm like, "Well, that's not the magic..."
Gabrielle: Hard pass.
John: Right. Okay. And I watched this guy, by the time he was a senior, he was benching 575 for repetitions, just on his way to the NFL. And so it was like, we did the same stuff, ate the same stuff, it happened for him, it didn't happen for me at all. I put on a little weight, but that was puberty. It wasn't like... Yeah, I had a six-pack, I was lean, but I just didn't put on the size.
And so I remember senia or year in high school, I'm like, "I'm going to figure out the difference. I'm going to figure out what is different about guys like him." Because basically the people in the NFL, the strongest people... NFL are the strongest athletes in the world, fastest athletes in the world. Weightlifters love to argue with me on that one, but I'm like, "Yeah, you went into a sport where you make maybe a couple of thousand dollars a year, but you didn't want to go in the NFL, because just weightlifting's better, right?" Okay. Believable. So I figured it out and documented it, it's the last chapter of the book, but in retrospect, I wish I had put it towards the front. My book is... It's not heavy. There's science, but I show a study and then I say, "And this study is important, because..." And then I'll explain in layman's terms. So by the time you get to the end of the book, I think people just look at the last chapter and they're like, "Oh, fuck it. I'm not even reading the last one."
So here's the difference. A genetic outlier, a person who puts on muscle very easily, is not built like me. Because here's the origin of my pectoral, and if you... I'm not sure if my arm's on camera or anything, but I'm just pointing at my arm. The insertion of the pectoral is usually right here. It's at the top of the humerus bone. So the pectoral pulls the humerus bone towards the midline of the body. But some people have the insertion on the other end of the bone. Very rare to have that. But it means they have a much longer tendon. Tendon is the most elastic material on Earth. Also, that long tendon becomes a lever at the same time. So they have an elastic lever inside their body that the rest of us don't have, which means they are able to move more force and activate the musculature to a much higher degree.
So when that person works out, it's a much more powerful stimulus than when the rest of us work out. When most of us work out, there's like no stimulus at all. 23%, I think it's... The author starts with a P, I think it's probably like the eighth reference in my book. It was a 2008 study. The guy determined that there's 23% of the population that cannot with weights ever stimulate any muscular growth, any muscle protein synthesis. They can maybe have some sarcoplasmic growth, they can retain some glycogen in the muscand le, make it a little bit bigger, but that's not going to compound. These are the people who, the first two weeks of lifting, they put on a couple of pounds of muscle, and then they work out for 10 more years and nothing happens.
Gabrielle: No matter what.
John: No matter what. So weightlifting just sucks as a stimulus. Because when I looked at these genetic outliers, and I was like, "Whoa, I know how to create that effect external of the body. They're doing it internally, but we can do it externally." And I came to that conclusion when the clinical trials of my medical device were going on in London.
Gabrielle: And what device, what was that?
John: That's OsteoStrong.
Gabrielle: Okay. inaudible
John: That's my bone density device. So we were taking postmenopausal females and having them put 800 pounds, 900 pounds through their hijointsnt. Now, that seems like a lot, but they're in the impact ready position. So for my upper body, that's the right her120-degreeree angle, back of the hand in line with the clavicle. So I can either absorb or create the greatest amount of force right here. When a fighter hits somebody, they want to hit them just like that. They don't want to hit them here. They don't want to overextend their arm. That's the range they want to be in when they hit somebody. So efficient position, versus the inefficient positions.
So what I determined in looking at how medical device was working with people, was designed to just expose these impact-ready positions, how you would brace yourself and fall, expose these positions to many multiples of body weight, and trigger growth. Is it inaudible the minimum dose response in the hip, which is the most important place for bone density, because fractures in the hip end lives.
Gabrielle: That kills people very quickly.
John: Yeah. Same mortality rate as breast cancer. It's just not quite as scary, because you break your hip, and then you go to the hospital, and then you get pneumonia, and then you don't recover. So putting all these things together, it's like, we need a massive variance. So iy you're seven times stronger here than you are back here, why would we work out with a static weight? So that's where I came up with the title Weight Lifting Is A Waste Of Time for the book, and started kind of tinkering with the book and outlining it, not ever knowing if I was going to come out with it or...
Gabrielle: When did you actually p? It was a bit ago, wasn't it?
John: Two years. Two years ago.
Gabrielle: Oh, so not too long ago.
John: inaudible ago.
Gabrielle: Was that aha moment...
John: Sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
Gabrielle: Yeah. Well, I am going to read it.
John: Great.
Gabrielle: And we're going to share it. Your aha moment, though, came in high school, seems as if it started...
John: Yeah, it started for sure, because I went in a completely different direction. I went in the bone density direction because my mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis. It's like, I'm going to help my mom.
Gabrielle: And you're an only child.
John: I'm an only child.
Gabrielle: So you got to get the job done.
John: I knew no-one else was goino onedo it. It's funny, my dad's a scientist, but he never had any interest in the human body. He developed a Luna Rover for NASA.
Gabrielle: Yeah. How does he live with himself?
John: He's a problem solver. So it's like... Yeah.
Gabrielle: So you got some good genetic brain genes.
John: If that can be transferred via genetics, yes. But it was more just watching him solve problems. Never went the conventional way.
Gabrielle: So did he teach you to think outside the box?
John: Yeah. Completely. And he laughs now, because I'm talking about all kinds of stuff he doesn't understand, and isn't particularly interested in. I mean, I see him reading Popular Mechanics and it's like, all the advancements in automotive technology, he's just excited about it. And then sometimes I'm like, "Check out this study on statins," and he's like, "Can you just tell me what it says?" He doesn't really care that much. But anyway, that's kind of cool. So it was just different interests, but over this whole period ofperiodly come to that conclusion, we're so much stronger in the impact ready rangimpact-readye so disadvantaged in the weaker range, unless you have that genetic anomaly situation where you have the longer tendons in the body.
Gabrielle: And what percentage of people do you think even have inaudible?
John: It's less than 1%.
Gabrielle: Less than 1%.
John: Yeah.
Gabrielle: Doesn't that make all the... I mean, that would probably confuse all the studies that we're looking at for muscle protein synthesis, if we're not even taking into account the...
John: But who ends up in those studies? The people who are really into weightlifting.
Gabrielle: Yeah. Self-selected is what you're saying.
John: Yeah, so it becomes self-selecting. Like for example, one of the most powerful references for variable resistance, exercise. So he more recent years, there have been some studies done with banding and bars and stuff like that. And there was one where they did it on... They had a control group that lifted regular weights, and then they had the variable resistance group. But both groups were Cornell athletes. So it's like, okay.
Gabrielle: Self-selected to be inaudible.
John: Right. Yeah. So the people who lifted weights grew muscle, and the people who used variable resistance tripled the gains of the weightlifting group. So it still came out much better. But they're all genetic outliers.
Gabrielle: Right.
John: And so it's like, okay. It's a bummer, but the people who generally end up not liking weightlifting or getting results from weightlifting, they leave it, they go do something else. It doesn't mean they're not going to be athletic. They might do something that doesn't require a lot of strength. I mean, whatever, some other hobby. But I think you need to focus on muscle. The two greatest drivers of long life that are uncontested are high levels of muscularity and low levels of body fat. That's what brought me to my nutrition conclusions,because nutrition research is all over the place. You can find anything is great for you, especially when the study is sponsored by Nabisco, or the other way around, if they're actually doing their jobs. So I had to back that one up too and go, what's going to make people live the longest? High level of muscularity, low level of body fat? Well, there's only one way you're going to eat.
Gabrielle: For sure. In my opinion.
John: Yeah. In the outcomes of pretty much every unbiased study out there. So, heavy animal protein. So now getting to the point... I'll go back to the... inaudible
Gabrielle: Everyone wants to know, so should they be lifting weights? It seems like ththat'sot super efficient. There's other ways to do it that you're talking about that... I mean, you're the only person that I know that's even talking about it in this way. Is that true?
John: Correct.
Gabrielle: Or is it gaining more... No. Yeah. You're the only one.
John: Yeah. I see my job as pretty important, because I...
Gabrielle: And it's variable resistance, is that...
John: Variable resistance. That's the scientific term.
Gabrielle: So in another 17 years, perhaps we'll have more people that will continue to be working on this.
John: Yeah. Probably.
Gabrielle: And what is variable resistance?
John: It's just changing the resistance as we move. So when I do a bench press movement, I'm holding 150 poundpounds
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John: When I do like a bench press movement, I'm holding 150 pounds here, about 300 pounds in the middle and 550 at the top. And that triggers an incredible amount of growth. I get a much bigger level of exhaustion. Only need to do one set per exercise. In fact, the fact that we do, when lifting weights, the fact that humans do more than one set is so symbolic of how abme weight lifting is because it is like, how many sets do you need to do in the sunlight to get a tan? And people look at me when I ask that question. I'm like, one. Right?
How many sets do you need to do in the garden to build a callous? Let's say you're not talking to a weightlifter. Well, one hard abrasion on the hand. I don't build a callous. Right? So why do you do five sets in the gym? Because the stimulus sucks, barely does anything. And then on top of that, when you're in the weaker range of motion, you're typically overloading the joint and damaging it.
Gabrielle: Is that why people get injured as they get older?
John: They get injured when they're younger and they ignore it. And that's why it becomes chronic. Talk to anybody who's been heavy bench pressing for 10 years and they got to wipe the tears off their face after they put their shirt on because they just, that range of motion is brutal. The pain in their shoulders. I have no pain in my shoulders.
Gabrielle: And for people that are either listening or watching, you're veryyournd buff individual people can-
John: Yeah.
Gabrielle: It is true. This is just fact.
John: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'm about 7% body fat. I'm 200, now I'm about 230 pounds.
Gabrielle: And how long have you been as lean in as fit as you are?
John: That's a great question. Only recently.
Gabrielle: Is that true?
John: Yeah. Oh yeah. If you look at me before I turned 40, I was just an average guy, a little overweight.
Gabrielle: Is that true?
John: Yeah.
Gabrielle: All right.
John: Like 19% body fat.
Gabrielle: What changed for you?
John: Just inventing X3.
Gabrielle: So how old-
John: As soon as I invented it, I was like, oh shit, it's so easy.
Gabrielle: How old is X3? In my mind, this has been around forever.
John: No, no, God. Well, I launched it when I was 42 because I wanted to really get the results first before going and saying everyone's going to get the results because, but it's funny because in the beginning I was filming some of the training videos and the comments were like, why is this fat, weak looking guy promoting this product? And then other people were like, I like that they chose a model because especially early days, I like that they chose a model that-
Gabrielle: We'll be sure to link one of those videos.
John: Oh, it's so funny. They would actually applaud us for picking a chubby guy to represent the product. And it's like, I realize you're trying to compliment me. I'm not really taking it that way.
Gabrielle: How long did it take you to come up with it? Understanding that the variable resistance was the key and the way in which, I mean, how long did it take? How many years?
John: It's funny. It takes years. It really takes years of thinking and collecting information. Basically. You don't want to come out with something and have everyone go, you're a fool. Right?
Gabrielle: Right. That's not a great strategy.
John: No, it's not a great strategy.
Gabrielle: It's not a good life strategy.
John: I really had to convince myself that it's as great as I think it is. And so first year put on 30 pounds of muscle. I had never put on more than maybe a pound of muscle in like I told you, all my weightlifting, 20 years of weightlifting I pretty much just kept telling myself I was putting on size, but I was just getting fat. A lot of, they have this thing now, they say, I'm a power lifter. It's like, no, you're just obese and you have a gym membership. You're not a power lifter.
Gabrielle: Yeah.
John: Like that.
Gabrielle: Yeah, I understand.
John: I was kind of in that mindset. I was like, all right, well, maybe I'm just a little heavier looking. And I wasn't really coming grips with the idea that I was just getting fatter.
Gabrielle: Do you think it was because everybody told you you should be lifting weights?
John: Oh, why did I keep doing it when it didn't do anything?
Gabrielle: Yeah.
John: Well, because I knew I didn't want to be weak.
Gabrielle: Yeah.
John: I just didn't want to give up on it because I thought strength was a great thing to have. It just didn't seem to work too well for me. So it was like every time I went into the gym for 20 years, I just like, wow, this is such a waste of time. I need to figure out how to make it not a waste of time. And of course, I look around and I would ask people, another thing from high school, I saw these guys, it was a really nice gym I went to. I went to high school in the Napa Valley.
Gabrielle: Are you from California?
John: Yeah. And so it was really nice. There was a really nice gym, and I would have a membership there every summer, and I'd see the same guys every year. They'd be, I don't know, they were in probably their twenties and thirties and they'd all talk to each other about their latest strategy and they would definitely bear the mark of the last truck that hit them because, most stupid people do because, and these guys weren't particularly stupid. They were just some Flex Magazine would have a new thing you got to do, and oh my God, this is how the islanders put on muscle. And of course, nobody there as an islander, but they're like, wow, this is our new program. And they're just running around in circles all excited about their program, like a dog in heat. And I'm just like, they're going to waste their time again.
Gabrielle: Do you think that this changes what we think about the potential for putting on muscle? Because oftentimes people will think, well, I can only put on, I mean there's a couple schools of thought that an untrained person could potentially put on two pounds of muscle a month. I have very rarely ever seen that. And we look at bone, I mean, we look at DEXA scans, we look at all kinds of things, and the literature will say one thing, but in clinical practice it's totally different. The amount of muscle and the potential that somebody has. What I'm hearing you say is that maybe they're never living up to that because they're not stimulating the tissue in the most effective way.
John: Most effective way. I mean, they're trying to get a tan with candles is what they're doing. That's what weightlifting is. It's just the wrong tool. I mean, it'll probably always continue to be a sport, but it should be seen as a sport where the human body has to deal with the inefficiency of a static weight. And it's almost like power lifting is really the only school of thought that understands that the human body is just totally not built for picking up heavy objects.
Gabrielle: And that goes against what everybody is thinking because we would think that the body is designed for that.
John: I think the power lifters, I don't think they'd ever word it the way I'm wording it, but they understand when they study the mechanics of just a deadlift, they know how just we are not designed to really do that well, but they're going to do it anyway because they can make certain muscles stronger, certain tendons of ligaments stronger and overcome those inefficiencies by just being efficient. You'll see a power lifter move very quickly through some of the range, the parts of range of motion. They can use momentum. They can do a whole bunch of different things because they're aware of the inefficiencies.
Whereas, and I mean, an actual power lifter is like 0.01 percent of people who train, train with weights. Rest of the people are just pounding their head on the wall. They have no idea what they're doing, just doing what guy next to him is doing, just as stupid as I should wear a mask because my neighbors are all wearing masks. It's just like, okay, you're a lemming. Good job. Like a low life form. But it's, I just keep trying to hammer in a people's heads. Just because you've heard it your whole life doesn't mean it means anything.
Frederick Goebel said, you tell a lie a thousand times, it becomes the truth. This guy was the propaganda minister for Adolf Hitler. I mean, you can just manipulate people really well. Just tell them the same stupid thing over and over and over again. They'll just believe it.
Gabrielle: Where do you think variable resistance training is going to fit in with some of the research? Because a lot of the research is hypertrophy strength, this continuum of lifting.
John: Right now there's 16 really high quality studies. They all show variable resistance will grow muscle and develop strength way faster. The one study I was referencing, which wasn't really set up well, still had triple the gains with the...
Gabrielle: Cornell athletes.
John: Yeah. And I never liked that. I actually, I've gone to a different sort of strap line of the product, which is greater force, greater gains. So I mean, that's a universal truth, but we truly are exposing the body to much more force than we ever would in a gym. And that's what triggers so much growth. But we're playing to the efficiency of positions and deloading the inefficient positions while still taking them to fatigue. So a set with X3 is, I'm going to go to that 550, the 300, the 150, I'm going to go through that whole process until I can't get to the 550. Then I'm just going to do shorter reps with 300, and then I can't get there anymore. Then my last couple reps might only be an inch with the 150, but now I have taken all ranges of motion, the entire muscle to absolute fatigue. You cannot ever do that with a weight, not even close.
So after I got started, I saw Dr. Atia on someone else's podcast, and he said, yeah, I don't encourage weightlifting very much because I feel like weightlifting overloads joints and under loads muscle. And I was like, wow, this guy is actually thinking the same way I am. And so that was a huge point where I was like, okay, now the world's ready for this. People didn't throw tomatoes at him when he said that. It was in front of a live audience too, which I thought was kind of a cool show wherever it was.
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Did you have any failures on the way to developing the X3 bar?
John: Not X3, no. The bone density medical device. Yeah.
Gabrielle: What's that?
John: The, yeah, I mean, Osteostrong. Yeah. There were plenty of strange directions that we took and just had to scrap it and go with another design. Now, it's pretty perfect right now. The bone density Osteostrong. There's always room for improvement of anything, and that's a problem. You never really want to ask an engineer that question because there it is. You're always in redesign. In fact, here's something my dad told me. Never work for an engineer. Because if an engineer's running the company, all they want to do is redesign the product. They don't really care about sales or marketing or anything. All their head is always like, okay, well the next version. And also he told me, if you ever work at a big company, don't let the salespeople talk to the engineers, because the engineers will convince the salespeople that the product we're selling right now sucks. We got a better one coming. And then the salespeople are going to want to talk about what's next, meaning they'll never sell anything. So yeah, I thought those pieces of advice were pretty funny.
Gabrielle: So you are not going to be redesigning the current product?
John: Well, funny you say it. Last week-
Gabrielle: As a matter of fact.
John: As a matter of fact.
Gabrielle: Yeah.
John: No, last week, last week it really launched the flagship product. It'll be, it's at a higher price point, it's about a thousand dollars, but it's a bar that synchronizes to your phone. So you get to see the real time force.
Gabrielle: Wow.
John: So through that range of motion, describe-
Gabrielle: That is very cool.
John: Even more powerful. It captures a metric. We're calling total force, which is, if you look at repetitions, like cross-section repetitions, like a sine wave up, the rep, down, up, down. We total all the force created under the sine wave. And that's total work. So I may have a chest press day where I have, I've done 9,000 pounds of total work.
Gabrielle: How long do your workouts take you?
John: Let me get back to that.
Gabrielle: Okay.
John: That'll be the next thing I go. So if you capture all that weight under the sine wave, well, you could be almost there because you're competing with your previous. So now you know, okay, I'm going to fatigue, but I'll try and get an extra couple of shorter reps, just a couple to get to the point where I've put more force through the muscle this time than I did last time. So it almost guarantees the perfect stimulus every time.
Gabrielle: Wow.
John: Yeah.
Gabrielle: That's amazing.
John: That is so cool. You look at the numbers, you know it. And it's funny, I only have one for myself. Cobblers kids have no shoes. So regular X3s. I got one in the trunk of my Lamborghini. I got one in that lives in my suitcase. I got one in my place. I, so I got plenty of those. But the new one, I just have one and I leave it at my office. So that's my, during the week when I'm in town, that's the one I use just because I don't want to lose it or damage it or anything like that. But at some point I'll be traveling with that one.
Gabrielle: With that one.
John: Yeah. Yeah. And it's almost to the point where I'd rather skip a workout than not have the digital feedback because it just guarantees that the muscle is stimulated.
Gabrielle: Wow. And do you track it on yourself in terms of muscle mass growth?
John: Yes and no, because diet has a lot to do with that. I've been trying to get leaner more recently. I think it shows much better being leaner that I'm not a performance enhancing drug user, because as soon as I get lean, people were like, oh yeah, he doesn't look like a bodybuilder. And I mean, bodybuilders are somehow lean, yet their face is bloated like a balloon. I mean, just tomato heads, all of them. And it's because they're blood pressure's through the roof and all kinds of awful things that are happening inside their bodies shows. But it also kind of gives them a healthy look. Whereas when you get a little too lean and you're a natural athlete, you kind of look a little skeletal.
Gabrielle: Yeah.
John: And so there's a balance there. But I get way less accusations of steroids comments the leaner I am, because they just kind of look at me and they're like, yeah, that's not a PED abuser's face. So you can just kind of see it on me. So I've been trying to do that, which means a lot of days of calorie deficit via fasting. So yeah, I'm not going to put on muscle at the same rate as if I get the protein and calorie surplus.
Gabrielle: Well, I definitely want to talk about nutrition, but I know that everyone wants to know how long are you working on a day and if you're doing cardio?
John: Right.
Gabrielle: And then I want to hear all about your nutrition because I think you and I have very somewhat similar views.
John: Yeah. We do for sure. So my workout when I started was 10 minutes, and it's says it all over the X3 website. You can get a workout done in 10 minutes. When you become really muscular, you can't get it done in 10 minutes because you have more of a draw of blood. There's more demand. When I train my biceps, I go to contract my bicep. It's that big around. I need a lot of blood to go there. And I am gasping for air after a set. And so the larger the muscle is, the more of a cardiac demand it is. I need to catch my breath. I need to go back to a kind of resting heart rate before the next set. So that can take a couple minutes between exercises. So I'm still doing four sets per workout.
Gabrielle: Four sets of how many reps?
John: No, four exercises.
Gabrielle: Four exercises.
John: I shouldn't say sets.
Gabrielle: Okay. Okay.
John: You only do one set of each. So it's just four different exercises. So one is like chess press, overhead press, tricep press, and then calves, pushing.
Gabrielle: Got it.
John: And then we do a pull. The other day with-
Gabrielle: You've now peaked the interest of all the men listening to this podcast because they'll probably be able to grow their calves.
John: Interesting. I used to post about how no one can really grow their calves.
Gabrielle: Is it true? Can they?
John: You want great calves, you got to be born with great calves. It's completely not true. My lower legs used to look like paper towel tubes, just nothing. And now it looks like somebody stitched a ribeye steak on the outside of my leg and then just painted over it.
Gabrielle: So another myth that we think is true. That is not true.
John: My calves are awesome. Sometimes, I mean, you can see them right through my pants. Yeah.
Gabrielle: I mean, there you go.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, defeated that myth. Now you also asked, do I do any cardio? Absolutely not.
Gabrielle: Is it because it takes time, your heart rate is going up when you're doing the variable resistance and you need recovery or just?
John: No, it's only because of the cortisol, the chronic cortisol issue. Nothing wrong with cortisol. Your body doesn't produce any bad hormones. Because I always hear fitness people like, well, that's the bad hormone, like idiot. There's no such thing as a bad hormone. You don't want it chronically elevated though. You know, don't want ghrelin and leptin chronically elevated either, and they're wonderful hormones. So it's like, okay, cortisol goes up when your body is stressed. Getting out of bed in the morning, cortisol goes up, but then it goes back down. Have a cup of coffee, goes up, but then it goes back down. When you do cardio, more than 20 minutes, usually above or at target heart rate, so still aerobic, you will up-regulate it for two or three days maybe. Well, if you're then trying to become an endurance athlete, you do that over and over again, now it's chronic-
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS
John: ... to become an endurance athlete, you do that over and over again. Now it's chronically elevated. So let's look at what cortisol does. It gets rid of muscle and preserves body fat, so you stay as fat as possible as long as possible. Now, a lot of people have gotten to the point when they get into it, they're not necessarily overweight, but it's a skinny fat situation where you're cannibalizing the muscle and then you're preserving body fat. So you'll never be lean or strong.
And like I mentioned with my nutrition decisions, being lean and being strong are the drivers of long life, so basically cardio athletes are going to quit doing all that cardio when they turn, I don't know, maybe 60 or something like that. They'll have joint problems all over the place, and they're going to die younger. And they do, statistically. And oh God, runners, they're like vegans, they will come up with bullshit research and twist a study. They'll have an interpretation, you read the study, it's like, that's not what the study's even about. Just completely distorted reality. And it's a bummer, because I do admire somebody who can run a marathon. That's cool. It's just not good for you.
Gabrielle: I agree. My husband's actually training for the Boston Marathon, not by choice. He's doing it because some... I don't know. He'll have to tell us, but it's supporting some troops in some way, and he's like, "God, this is a terrible idea."
John: Yeah. Yeah, if somebody asked me that, I'd be like, "Can I just write a check?"
Gabrielle: He's not a born runner, to say the least.
John: Nobody is, nobody's a born runner.
Gabrielle: What about high intensity interval training, or any kind of sprint interval training?
John: Love that.
Gabrielle: You do?
John: Oh, yeah. If I had the time, I would do that. I used to be really fast. I was an outside center in rugby in university, so really enjoyed that. I'd love to play rugby again, but I'm 46 years old. Also, my wife would just be terrified.
Gabrielle: Yeah, and rightly so. Rightly so.
John: I used to race Lamborghinis and-
Gabrielle: No, that's out too.
John: ... as soon as it got to the point where I had done enough training where I was doing wheel-to-wheel races where you're passing people and stuff. Yeah, she was like, "No."
Gabrielle: I like her already. Yeah, she's smart.
John: Well, it's funny, when I truly saw that look of fear and she starts blinking really fast like she's going to cry and she's trying to hide it. She's trying to be supportive and concerned, but not really show her emotions because I don't know why she would ever think I would be mad about that.
Gabrielle: Because we want to support our husbands in their really bad ideas, and we don't want it to be-
John: That's it.
Gabrielle: ... a have to choose-
John: Yeah, and I saw through that.
Gabrielle: ... but I'm glad that you saw through that.
John: Well, and she's like, but what about me, what if you get hurt? I was like, "Okay, I don't need to do this."
Gabrielle: It's true.
John: Now I am going to be racing classic cars, but that's very different.
Gabrielle: How... Oh, really?
John: Everybody does one lap and it's whoever has the fastest time.
Gabrielle: Okay. And it's relatively safe?
John: Yeah, it's relatively safe. Well, because you think you really don't want to destroy a classic car.
Gabrielle: Yeah, I can imagine.
John: And so the cars are treated with a lot more respect by the drivers.
Gabrielle: 65 miles an hour.
John: And not all things are... It's more like the celebration of some of these amazing cars that are from our past, that are really special. So I'm having a 1969 GT40.
Gabrielle: That's so cool.
John: Yeah, yeah. Completely rebuilt from the rails.
Gabrielle: That's so cool.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Gabrielle: I want to hear about your wandering through nutrition. You've probably started eating one way, have transitioned, and I'm curious as to what your thoughts are in the current space of nutrition, where you see we really fail, how we're even thinking about it.
John: Yeah. This is the hardest thing for me to talk about, because I got a lot of answers, and it's also not my field. So I kind of had to discover this well after finishing my PhD in... I was thrilled, but then as soon as I started telling people about it, they saw it as very limiting. And removing stuff from your diet that's bad for you is not limiting. You shouldn't ever look at it that way. If I tell you pizza sucks, you shouldn't really eat it. Maybe if you're not from New York and you happen to be in New York and you like New York pizza, okay, have a slice. I did last night. I had a slice of pizza.
Gabrielle: Did your wife have one too?
John: Yes, she did. She never had New York pizza.
Gabrielle: Was it worth it? Was it good?
John: Not really.
Gabrielle: Yeah, it's not.
John: It's not that special.
Gabrielle: No, I know.
John: No. Chicago is not that special either. It's just deep, it's just more carbohydrates, like okay. So now it's like, I did that, the next time we're here, "Oh, you want to get a piece of pizza?" "No, we already did that." So telling people that really the culprit in nutrition, just broad stroke is just carbohydrates, like past glycogen replenishment, which your body can do on its own by the way, gluconeogenesis. Past that, it might be advantageous to have 15 grams of carbohydrate before a workout. And yeah, I have a supplement that's a combination of essential amino acids essential amino acids and glucose.
Gabrielle: You've been very busy.
John: I've been very busy.
Gabrielle: You've been very busy making lots of stuff.
John: And so it's for a specific protocol really to try and trigger hyperplasia. So we get a little bit of carbohydrate, you get a lot of hydration and the essential amino acids all at once, you work out, you stretch. And this has been proven a couple times in research, the strength training plus the stretching, plus what's volumizing the cell, it stretches out the fascia of a muscle and it allows for cell splitting, muscle cell splitting. And so previously, 20 years ago, it was like, "Okay, the only place hyperplasia happens is in the womb," but we know better now. It's been proven we can actually induce this and so that's my supplement. And I actually get 150 grams of protein out of just that per day. I mean, I ingest the essential amino acids and they become 150 grams.
Gabrielle: And notice, you said essential. So not the full spectrum of amino acid, just the essentials, okay?
John: No, your body makes the rest.
Gabrielle: That's right.
John: Yeah, you really only... And that's where I help vegans, because I'm really not in favor of that. I think it's going to go down in history like anorexia and bulimia, but it's just based on bad information. So I just tell vegans, "Look, if you want to eat the way you want to eat, I'm not going to argue with you."
Gabrielle: But you should
John: "But you should take in that essential amino acid complex is made out of fermentation, so no animals are involved."
Gabrielle: That's cool. Now, tell me about your diet. We were talking before about the push of triglycerides, LDL, it sounds like you've been thinking a lot about your nutrition as of late.
John: So I had a fresh perspective. I was like, okay, I launched X3. I want to set up nutrition programming to make people successful. Because the only people who didn't succeed with X3, in the beginning, were the ones who I'd asked how many grams of protein and they would go, "Oh, I get a lot, like 30 grams a day." And I'm like, "You should put a zero behind that number." And this was a particularly large guy who said ths, because you want to write about one gram per pound of body weight. Actually, there's been a new meta-analysis that was done on performance and gaining muscle, they found a little bit less.
Gabrielle: But then again, where are you going to get your calories from? It's either going to be carbohydrates or fat.
John: Or you can just be perpetually in a deficit, and just get your protein and not really worry about anything else, which tends to be my current style, especially because I'm getting 150 from Fortagen, 150 grams of protein, and then I'll have a pound and a half of steak and-
Gabrielle: Call it a day.
John: So I eat one meal a day, it's just meat. Meat and water, that's it.
Gabrielle: What-
John: It's pretty simple, it's not limiting. People are like, don't you get tired of eating like that. And there's a nice way to answer that and then there's the way I do answer it, which is, "You ever just brush your teeth with a toilet brush?" And they're like, "No." "Right. But you don't feel the need for variety, aren't you just bored of your toothbrush? Why don't you try the toilet brush?" And they just like, "No, the toothbrush is the right tool." "Right." And there's one thing we should be eating. Now, I like a sunny side up egg sometimes.
Gabrielle: We eat that all the time.
John: All the time, yeah. Cheese, I got a couple little issues with some cheeses, just has to do with some of the proteins that are more prevalent in cheeses, like casein. They can have a inflammatory mucus response-
Gabrielle: For some people, yeah.
John: For some people. And so people are like, "Can I eat cheese? Can I eat tons of cheese?" "Well, I don't know about tons, but you can eat it. Yeah, it's fine." So yeah, pretty much the only thing that we eat that is just all nutrients and carries no damage at all is meat, and is animal protein.
Gabrielle: Some people would argue with you.
John: Oh, lots of people would argue.
Gabrielle: And say that that is the bane of the existence and probably causing heart disease.
John: Yeah, they're wrong.
Gabrielle: And colon cancer... Wait, what... That's a good one.
John: So the major study, that was like the watershed moment for colorectal cancer?
Gabrielle: Yes. The nitrate-
John: Exactly. It was nitrate meat. So they found a couple groups of people that for 40 years ate however they ate. And one of the groups they picked was people who ate meat every single day for 40 years. They ate nitrate meat every single day. And for those of you who don't know what nitrate meat is, this is a gas station hot dog. Even Oscar Mayer doesn't do this anymore.
Gabrielle: And what else were they doing?
John: Right. And it's like if you're eating a gas station hotdog every day, you're probably smoking cigarettes. You're probably doing all kinds of stuff that doesn't put your health as a priority. I mean, like intravenous drug use, I don't know, but lots of awful shit. And they don't control for those variables.
Gabrielle: And it's also a low quality study. It's epidemiology.
John: Right. It's just surveys. And a lot of people fill out surveys the way they'd like to believe they live, not the way they live.
Gabrielle: Right.
John: And at times, I've seen researchers do this when they conduct an interview or they write the questions. Some studies will actually show the questions and the questions are so leading.
Gabrielle: Right.
John: And They're not supposed to do that. But peer reviewers don't call them out on it. I do. I do peer review for Archives of Physical Medicine and they'll have things like that, but I read those and I'll say like, "Wow, you shouldn't really include the data from this one particular question, because it's a leading question."
Gabrielle: Do you think that there are certain myths that just refuse to die? Kind of like the red meat colon cancer or...?
John: Oh, yeah. People want to believe... We have news in this country that's biased, well, all in one direction except for Fox, and then they're in the other direction. People love their biased news. It's a shame. People really, it seems like they don't want the truth. They want to hear what they're most comfortable with. And-
Gabrielle: It's unusual though, right, in the nutrition space as well? It's unusual.
John: Yeah, but it's tragic.
Gabrielle: I know.
John: Why? I guess people would rather die younger so they can eat Twinkies and feel good about it. I don't get it. I'd rather just have the real answer. And then if I have a friend that's like, "You know what? I like Twinkies more than life." And I'd be like-
Gabrielle: Fine.
John: ... "Knock yourself out, dude. I don't assume you're going to show up to that workout day." It's just like, "Okay, if that's what you want to do."
Gabrielle: Do you think that there's a handful of myths, maybe just off the top of your head, that just refuse to die? I see it all the time.
John: If it's what somebody wants to believe. Nabisco pays for a lot of research that supports veganism. It's not because... No, it is because they know vegans don't eat kale exclusively. They eat cookies and cakes and all kinds of vegan products, and they make billions off of it.
Gabrielle: I know. And so that you have all these groups fighting amongst themselves. It's a complete smokescreen.
John: Totally.
Gabrielle: I mean, the whole "the animals are the main source of greenhouse gas," cows, it's all a smokescreen.
John: Well, so I don't really know. Maybe you can help get this message out. If you take a blade of grass and it falls over, no cow ever ate it, it starts to decompose-
Gabrielle: That's right.
John: ... it creates the same amount of methane.
Gabrielle: Marginal land. There's nothing you can...
John: The plant is always going to convert to methane, whether you eat it or not. And I posted that, and some guy's like, "Well, yeah, but the same blade of grass will come up and then the cow will eat it, and it'll..." It's just like, what difference does it make? Okay, or it'll die or the grass will just keep on growing taller and then more methane will be created. All plants give off methane when they go through their life cycle. Period. And whether the cows there or not, it makes no difference.
Gabrielle: Yeah. What you're saying I believe is true, that these companies like Nabisco, they drive funding and also they drive our conversation and they drive what we think is healthy, and then they divide us. And you have individuals that-
John: They turn into an emotional argument.
Gabrielle: And you can't win those.
John: Well, yeah, you can.
Gabrielle: Really?
John: The moment somebody becomes emotional, there's no argument at all. You're just talking to a child. And I'll tell people, "You made it emotional, which means you're just a child when it comes to this subject, so fuck off." And that's what the ban button's for. No one wants to hear from your loser act again. Yeah. That's how they have to be treated. There's a reason that social media platforms have the ban button, because they know a lot of people are just there to cause trouble.
Gabrielle: What about this whole seed oil situation and fruit? And I'm just curious as to what your thoughts are, because I'm sure you've thought a lot about this.
John: Yeah. You knew I wanted to talk about the fruit thing. So a guy I really like started promoting eating fruit along with your carnivore diet. Man, I told him, "That's not a good idea." And the reason it's not a good idea is because high LDLs, higher cholesterol is going to happen, anybody who eats meat exclusively. It actually doesn't go as high as you'd think.
Gabrielle: Do you think it's for everybody, or do you think it's a saturated fat issue or total calories with a higher LDL?
John: How the body decides to process... I can eat five eggs and you can eat five eggs, and we get our blood work done a few minutes later and your body will actually deal with it a little differently to mine.
Gabrielle: Yeah, absolutely.
John: And so we don't fully understand how one person will deal with it. And there are some people who just by default have higher cholesterol. Now the good news is, we have learned that higher cholesterol actually makes you live longer. So the whole premise behind statins was wrong. Interestingly enough, statins have been applied in some other ways that actually have been relatively positive, but not for that. And when somebody says, "Well, I have high cholesterol," I'm like, "Wow, you really need to read something, like anything in the last 10 years on cholesterol, because you don't understand."
But the issue is when you have high LDLs and then let's say, so you're eating mostly meat, and then you want to go and eat a bunch of fruit too. This is what this friend of mine was doing. He starts advocating fruit. So now you have high triglycerides.
Gabrielle: That's a problem, that's a problem.
John: Right. And high LDL. So you basically have an artery that's sticky, because that's what triglycerides do, particles become more easily trapped. And when you have a lot of free floating particles, like low density lipoprotein, it can get stuck and cause a blockage. It's this LDL triglyceride thing, the eating a lot of fruit with your meat only diet, it's a recipe for a stroke. And so I stayed silent about it for a year, and I'm talking to other medical professionals about it, cardiologists about it. It's hard to find a cardiologist that understands carnivore nutrition, unless you have a couple hours to sit down with them. But a whole bunch read my book and they were like, "This is awesome. I know the whole LDL thing is bullshit. We don't need to worry about cholesterol. I love your book."
And then I'd be like, "Hey, can I run something by you?" Because I wanted to talk to over 100. That number was in my head. I want to talk to 100 people about this who really know what the hell is going on, because I want to make sure I'm right. If we could just eat all the fruit we want and all the meat we want, and okay, "Whatever." It's not the case. We just shouldn't eat it. Now, if you want to eat a lot of fruit and you're not really eating protein anyway, because you're eating kale and you got to get your greens. I hate it when people say that like they know something. It's like, "Okay, fine. You're not going to be lean and you're not going to be strong, but it's not going to kill you either." This actually will kill you. So wow, it's a shame, but...
Gabrielle: So again, you're saying that there could be fruit in the diet, but it really has to be calorie-
John: Limited. Very limited. Yeah. I've never been zero carbohydrate as far as my recommendations. I have been personally many days without having any carbohydrates at all. But yeah, there's just no upside and there's a big downside, like this fruit thing. I'm afraid what's going to happen is some people are going to have strokes and they're going to blame the meat instead of... It's like, "Well, this person had a very extreme..." Somebody died recently and they called his diet extreme and it was carnivore, and he died of something completely unrelated to his nutrition.
Gabrielle: And we know that higher amounts of carbohydrates will drive triglycerides up.
John: There's no way around that.
Gabrielle: That's one of the first things that we do. And my mentor, Dr. Donald Lyman, he did some of these early studies where he reduced individuals' total carbohydrate intake, and he saw a 40% drop in triglycerides.
John: Yep. Yeah. There's no way around it. If you have carbohydrates in your diet, you're going to have high triglycerides.
Gabrielle: Depending on how many carbohydrates.
John: Right, right, right. Yeah. So if somebody wants to have... I stay under 50 grams, even... We're going to sushi tonight.
Gabrielle: There's going to be cooked sushi.
John: No, yeah. There will be some. Actually, the restaurant my wife chose has a really good ribeye.
Gabrielle: I don't know, but I might be having that, if I'm in New York.
John: Yeah, I'm going to have the ribeye. I'm not even going to-
Gabrielle: And by the way, your wife is so thoughtful. We're going to early dinner. That was really thoughtful, and I hear that that was-
John: You have kids. Nobody wants to go out late when they have little kids, because they want to be home and put the kids to bed.
Gabrielle: They're so cute. They are, they are cute. And also a good form of birth control. But you were saying that you do well on 50 grams or less. I actually do well on a little bit higher, but I could do lower. But I do pretty well on moderate carbohydrate diet. I'm a very small human. My triglyceride, all my markers look great.
John: What are your carb choices usually? Is it slow digesting?
Gabrielle: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
John: Yeah, I did come to a conclusion which forced me to create another product called...
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS
John: Another product called Cytronium. This product, it changes the glycemic index of the carbohydrate.
Gabrielle: Does it have some kind of white bean extract or something?
John: Citrus peel. Yeah. In citrus peels, there's a lot of really powerful acids that can alter. So somebody could eat a Snickers bar, and it digests with the same glycemic index of a carrot. So I don't want people to do those sorts of things, but they will. I mean, I have a million followers now. I know they will.
Gabrielle: So what you mean your mission is to really change the face of the way people take care of themselves? I mean, I'm assuming that's your mission.
John: Oh yeah. My mission is to lead people to live just healthier, happier life.
Gabrielle: I mean, because if you think about it, if you take a step back, you have pretty much probably met nearly every goal you've set for yourself. Plenty of money, beautiful wife, great career. So you're not doing it because you have to at this point.
John: No.
Gabrielle: And if you don't have to, there's always something else that drives the person. Sure.
John: Well, this is fun. I think talking about this, making new discoveries, getting people excited about what I'm excited about, that's fun. In my mind, in some way, I don't know. I quit working when I was like 30.
Gabrielle: But you're still driving really hard and creating new things.
John: I don't ever expect it to be any different.
Gabrielle: Do you have any major failures aside from that thing with the ... device. But is there anything else, or do you just move on so quick?
John: So you want to engineer small failures. So you avoid big failures? I come up with an idea. Let's say Cytronium, came up with that idea. Well, first person I go to is Henry Alkire. He's my co-author on the book, and one of the smartest people I've ever met in my life.
Gabrielle: It's amazing.
John: He's awesome. And this is like, okay, I think there's a marketing message here that's powerful. I think it'll be helping a lot of people out because they're just unwilling to go super low carbohydrate. So if we can just reel back the damage that carbohydrates do... Oh, I described it that way. And I had so many people damage. You're such an idiot for saying carbohydrates do damage. I'm like, "Do you ever heard of diabetes? You think that's a good thing?"
Gabrielle: And you're very unscathed by the social media world.
John: What do you mean?
Gabrielle: I mean, you seem like you don't care.
John: Oh, it's a matter of perspective. If I see my job... Oh, somebody asked me. I was on this kind of weightlifting sort of podcast, and the guy's like, "So what do you describe as your job?" And I said, "I'm a shepherd." If I tell myself that, it feels like that's kind of what I'm doing.
I'm trying to get the herd to go in the right direction. And there's always the dumb ones that just won't see it. But it's okay because it's not for everybody. I'd say my biggest challenge right now is really connecting with more people who are at all places from a socioeconomic standpoint, telling people they have to eat meat. That's expensive.
I mean, our government is against eating meat. And I know why. And it's not a sinister reason. It's because they know at some point, menial labor is going to disappear because it's going to be replaced by robotics.
Now, the people in the bottom third of intelligence quotient will have no job. They will be dependence of the government, wards of the state almost. And you can't give them another job. These are people who Jordan Peterson defines as they cannot do anything other than inaudible. They can't. If you give them a vehicle, they'll crash it. If you give them a gun, they'll shoot themselves in the foot. They're just dumb. And this is the most outspoken people on the internet also, because I mean, the Dunning-Kruger study, right?
Gabrielle: I do, unfortunately. Yeah.
John: The most unintelligent people, they don't know what they don't know.
Gabrielle: And unfortunately, some of them are influencers. And they just can't even engage them because they-
John: Well, in the fitness industry, that's almost everyone.
Gabrielle: You cannot engage them.
John: They don't know what they don't know.
Gabrielle: No idea.
John: And because they're unaware that they don't know some stuff, they think they know everything.
Gabrielle: I know.
John: And I mean, they're kind of dangerous. But also, it's pretty easy to point out that they're wrong. So I do. And again, I'm a shepherd. That's my job. I got to point out who's just a fool. Also, I never attack people. I only criticize an idea.
I've never said so-and-so has it wrong. You noticed I didn't even mention the name of the person, yeah, because I like him. He's awesome. I just think he got the one thing wrong. And we're fighting because we're living in a world of bad information.
We're living in a world where sometimes bad information is profitable for someone. Nabisco and Kellogg's will never tell us the truth. They're going to tell us to eat more breakfast cereal.
Gabrielle: I know.
John: Yeah. They even got the federal government to say, frosted mini wheats are the most nutritious thing you could eat on earth. A product that comes in a plastic bag in a box, that's the most healthy food according to Tufts University and the White House. Yeah. I'm going to have to be the guy that breaks it to everybody. There's a percentage of people who are just going to be on government assistance. And yeah, they're probably going to eat crummy food. But if that's not you, pay no attention to what they're doing. It's just a sad reality.
Gabrielle: How do you think people can navigate? What recommendations do you have? I mean, obviously, finding people you trust and listening to them. But even, they can get things wrong. How do you suggest people navigate this landmine, this field of so much information?
John: They have to decide who they want to believe. When my fans listen to me, they typically don't have trouble swallowing anything I'm saying. Also, you notice all of my posts on social media have peer-reviewed references.
Gabrielle: They're excellent. Your posts are excellent.
John: All of them. I mean, maybe, if I don't make a scientific statement, I won't put a reference there. But everything about the human body, we should know where that information's coming from. So it's sort of like you're not really doing what I'm suggesting. You're doing what about a thousand different studies are suggesting.
And these studies were done by people who are the top of the field who were trying to get to the truth. So, obviously, none of the biased study... There's no bias study from the meat industry. There is a meat industry. But the margins in meat are typically single-digit percentages. Somebody who's got a huge cattle production business, they might make 6%, whereas a box of Triscuits, 600%.
Gabrielle: And also, what you're saying is, let's say the beef industry, all commodities have to allot... They all have money that they allot towards research, whether it's dairy, egg, beef. It's the beef checkoff. And again, the marketing budget, the research budget, these big-
John: It's so much slower. Yeah.
Gabrielle: It's inaudible what $9 billion if it's Nabisco or someone else.
John: Yeah. There's no meat producer that can-
Gabrielle: It's a couple million together.
John: Right. And you can also, when you're Nabisco, and they did this multiple times, they start some nonprofit research that they fund exclusively. And it's the Research Institute for Health and Nutrition. And then, that's Nabisco by proxy. But most people don't know it. And then, I'll never trust anything at a Tufts University again. They're corrupt. They just took money to lie.
Gabrielle: And there's also some of the other bigger institutions that all do that as well. A lot of the Ivy League institutions that put out a lot of information that are funded by a lot of these Kellogg-type companies really, really make it challenging.
John: Yeah. So to navigate, you really just have to learn. You got to see both messages and then make a determination on your own. But the people that I argue with, whether it's from an X3 perspective, if X3 works, if variable resistance training works or nutrition, it's only the ignorant that have the problem. There's never been a single day where somebody who actually knew the subject was like, "Hey, Jake, wish you're wrong about that." Never happened. So not that I'll get everything right. I mean, we all get something wrong sometime.
Gabrielle: We do.
John: Man, I'm not guaranteeing I'm always going to get everything right, but man.
Gabrielle: You're pretty diligent.
John: I'm careful.
Gabrielle: You're pretty diligent.
John: You have to be. Giving somebody the wrong health advice could kill them. And that's like why I felt the need to speak up about the fruit thing. I mean, okay. And people are doing it, again, it's not a death sentence for everyone who's doing that. But it just increases the chances. Why would you want to increase your chances of a stroke? You wouldn't.
Gabrielle: Yeah. Nobody wants that. I am curious. You've done a lot of amazing things. And hopefully, one day you'll be a father, which is amazing. And you have a lot of young people listening and watching you. Is there a piece of advice that you would give them coming up now? You probably have a lot of really good advice.
John: Yeah. I have a lot of really good advice that nobody would take, is the problem.
Gabrielle: No.
John: I worked so hard on getting my company off the ground. I went for seven years and didn't pay myself anything.
Gabrielle: Did you doubt yourself that you could get it off the ground?
John: No, never.
Gabrielle: Have you always had this much conviction?
John: Yes. You have to because when you're going to do something that no one's ever done before, you're going to be surrounded by people that are telling you wrong. And that's probably why I just seem kind of unbothered when it comes to people being upset on the internet, because no one questions me.
I question myself. And that's not doubt. That's me not being in a place where my idea has matured enough in my own head so that I am going to be like, "I'm either not going to present it and try and prove my theory wrong." So I come up with a theory.
And it's like, "How would I prove this to be false?" And then, I do all the work I can to try and really demonstrate that my idea was wrong. And there's some ideas that I've had that a couple of different movements, some biomechanics ideas I had that never saw the light of day. I test them. And it's not going to work.
So I've tried to change how people would train quadriceps because there's such a cardiovascular demand because it's biggest... That in your glute, it's like when you do squats, that's why you're just beat when you take your legs to fatigue. And I tried a couple of different variations and, no, squatting's still the best.
Gabrielle: So nobody questions you like question yourself.
John: Nobody could come even close.
Gabrielle: I think that that's what makes excellence. I mean, you're pretty humble. But this is an example of excellence. Right?
John: Thank you. Yeah. Also, I mean, remember, the people that are full of themselves, it's a front. If you have to walk around, you're great. It's like, "No. Those guys are just full of shit," because when you really did something and you helped bunch of people, that's not what comes to mind. It's like, "I'm satisfied with what I do and it's fun."
But man, I don't need to pat myself on the back. When people call me a genius, I'll be like, "I don't know about that." Einstein was a genius. I'll settle for clever. If you want to call me clever, fine. And also, everyone has to keep in mind that all of these things, all of them wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the research. So there's thousands of other people that worked on this, that worked on these ideas. I mean, it was many, many, many layers ago. But I want to give credit to them.
They challenge convention too. And so, I appreciate all those researchers out there that are doing the right research and coming out with something that doesn't fit the narrative. You and I, just to be funny, I mean, this would take a lot of time. So we probably won't do this.
We could basically come up with a study that says veganism is great and meat sucks and causes cancer. And we could write the shittiest study and probably get it in a good journal. I mean, we would do this just to prove, you can say any stupid thing as long as it fits in with what's cool to say. Medical journals don't. They'll be like, "Oh no. Excellent. Good work." And it's like, "No." We just faked it. And there's other ways researchers can do that sort of thing. But when you show up with a paper, that's like, "Hey, the whole industry's been wrong about this." Those are the ones they don't really want to publish or if they do, they will scrutinize a hell out of it. So even the medical community suffers group think. There's followers.
Gabrielle: They absolutely do. And they're trained to be very algorithmic. But you have to determine who's on the editorial board was the individual who produced a particular paper. And there's been many, especially within that lower protein group that have actually sat on the board of these journals, like sell and push these papers through.
John: How about Seventh Day Adventists? If you're a Seventh Day Adventist, it is your mission given to you by God to get people to stop eating meat. And these people are on boards that determine nutrition. Why? I mean, nothing. Against Seven Day Adventists. Every one of them I've ever met was a really nice person, but they didn't seem so nice after I told them I only eat meat. They were like, "Oh, oh," like just horrified. They looked like Elmo on fire. You've seen that. Yeah. It's just, "Oh my God." Yeah. Sorry. But that's what the body needs to be at its best.
Gabrielle: You probably don't remember this. But this was probably a few years ago. And I shot... And again, you get probably thousands of DMs, and I asked your advice on something, and I don't know if you remember this and what you said to me, because I was very inspired by what you've really taken is from bench to bedside. And when I say bench to bedside is you've looked at the research. You've helped with it. And then, you've brought it to-
John: I've made it actionable.
Gabrielle: You've made it actionable. And I was-
John: Not actionable. It doesn't mean anything.
Gabrielle: I was so inspired. And I was so inspired by your charisma and how you did it. And it was just amazing to see. And I asked your advice because I have a mission. I believe that we've been focused on obesity, and we've completely missed the mark, and we've spent decades focusing on pathology and symptomology of impaired muscle. And for me, I want to get that out there. And I asked you, "Do you have any advice?" And do you remember what you said? I mean, how could you remember? I'm going to share. And what you said-
John: I must have said something cool.
Gabrielle: It was cool.
John: inaudible brought it up.
Gabrielle: It was be really good at what you do, in fact, be the best at what you do.
John: Yeah. I still give that advice.
Gabrielle: And it was just really good advice. So thank you.
John: Yeah. You're welcome. Yeah. I get asked for advice, a lot of gas stations, because I pull up in the Lamborghini and half the people just give me a really dirty look. And usually, it's teenage boys will come over. And they'll be like, "Dude, what do you do for a living?" Tell them a little bit about it. Wow. Yeah, it's so cool. What advice do you have?
And I kind of try and size them up like, "Okay. How much of the matrix should I show this guy," because it's like I can't tell him like you sound like crazy person. You say everyone who's giving you nutrition and exercise advice is lying or just stupid and wrong, or they're just following you along with everybody else.
And I try not to do things like that. I'll say, "You need to question what you've been told." If you like a certain thing we do, and let's say you like racing cars, and you get into the design of how these cars are put together. Never let anybody tell you, "Oh, we can't do that." We're probably wrong. There's almost every way we do things in automotive engineering. In the past, it was like, "That'll never work." And that just happens all the time. But you never hear about how something was revolutionized unless it's at the time it was revolutionized.
So even though we are a very creative country, we don't really encourage creativity. We encourage following. We encouraged doing it the way it was done. And my PhD advisor told me... I developed the bone density device first. And then, I went and got my PhD. I was almost graduated. And he said, "I waited a while to tell you this." I'm going to tell you now, he said, "If you had got your PhD first and then had this idea, you would've talked yourself out of it," because the problem with structured education, which I'm against, I mean sometimes, you need a credential. But if you're a lawyer, you got to go to law school and pass the bar. But they teach you how things are done. And you can't do them any other way. That's just so often wrong.
Gabrielle: Yeah. That's really good advice. Dr. John Jaquish, thank you so much for spending Sunday afternoon with me. This is great. And I'm sure we will have you back on. And thank you again. And I'll put all the links of where people can find you-
John: Cool.
Gabrielle: ... and all your stuff. And I would like to play with an X3 bar myself and all the-
John: You're getting one.
Gabrielle: So thank you so much.
John: You're welcome.
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