Disrupting the Fitness Industry with Dr. John Jaquish - There is No Try

In this episode, we’ll be chatting with Dr. John Jaquish, a longtime innovator and thought leader in the biomedical fitness scene. Dr. John Jaquish invented the globally popular OsteoStrong training device to fight osteoporosis. His more recent fitness sensation, X3 Bar, has revolutionized the way people think about and perform strength training.

Full Transcript

Pierre Rogers: Dr. John, so excited to have you on the show today.

Dr. John Jaquish: Hey, thanks for having me.

Pierre Rogers: Yeah. This is going to be a lot of fun and I’m really glad we were able to finally connect. I would love for you to start, as we start many of the show episodes, start at the top. Where do people know you today? Brag a little bit for me about where you are today and then we’re going to get into the nitty-gritty.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay. I invented the world’s most effective osteoporosis treatment. It’s found in OsteoStrong clinics exclusively, that’s the brand OsteoStrong. We’re in 10 different countries in 160 different clinics, and that’s highly effective and it’s a great business, a billion-dollar business.

Dr. John Jaquish: Then after developing OsteoStrong and made some observations about weight training that nobody had been able to because I had a very different perspective at triggering bone to grow, it led me to a very different conclusion than weight training so I know. I’m the author of a Wall Street Journal bestselling book called Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want where I demonstrate why weightlifting is a waste of time and there’s a better way to trigger the body to grow musculature, to lose body fat, all the kinds of things like that.

Dr. John Jaquish: I have a big business now and it’s the fastest-growing brand in fitness. We have a very popular fitness product, it’s the most effective muscle building, strength training device. 17 NFL players use it exclusively. We have entire an NBA team. The Miami Heat endorsed the book on the back. They used it exclusively and as well as some guys in the Detroit Pistons and some other NBA teams.

Dr. John Jaquish: I hope a lot of drug-free athletes, so like NFL, NBA, they’re tested. I want people to see what can happen with a drug-free athlete with this. Yeah, there are bodybuilders who that sports god level of performance that is in drugs and it’s not a secret.

Dr. John Jaquish: But for the people who are going down that path, and that’s the vast majority of people, that they can see what’s happening to some of the NFL and NBA, natural athletes and then we also some amazing before and after picture. There are 30, 40 people on the website where we see just tremendous people putting 20 pounds of muscle on in six months.

Pierre Rogers: Wow, that’s incredible.

Dr. John Jaquish: And these are people who have been lifting weights for like 10 years and weren’t getting anything out of that. Also, one of the premises of my work, whether it’s bone density or musculature, we’ve been trying to trigger the human body to adapt for a long time. We’ve done already our weights and it doesn’t work hardly at all.

Dr. John Jaquish:, most people you know that go to the gym, they’re going for years and they don’t look any different.

Pierre Rogers: It’s funny that you say that.

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re just as bad as they were. They’re just skinny arms and a double chin and most people I know or most people I bump into with just internet commenters and general idiots are like a double chin, baby arms, and a ton of opinions on what everybody should be doing. It’s like, “Well, why doesn’t that work for you then?” That sort of thing.

Dr. John Jaquish: I think humans have a very strong desire to be right. They’ll say some stupid shit and then defend it almost to death. Whether it’s coronavirus information, just absolute… People who know f*** all nothing about the subject and just acting like they’re the biggest experts in the world. I’m a researcher. I have a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering and when it comes to a subject like the coronavirus, I’ve been asked on some news programs to comment on it, and man, I don’t want to say anything because all the information is changing all the time.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s one, I was on a Newsmax show and I said the virus isn’t airborne because at that time, that’s the information that we had, which is wrong but we were told because the Chinese government was minimizing.

Pierre Rogers: Of course they were.

Dr. John Jaquish: Or at least some scientists were minimizing the seriousness and didn’t want to admit that this could be bad, so yeah. I was like, “Wow, that’s not going to age well at all.” People are still looking at it. I was wrong about that but that’s just the information we had.

Dr. John Jaquish: Anyway, yeah, I’m a researcher and I don’t want to comment on coronavirus or masks or whatever because there’s conflicting research all over the place and it’s highly political.

Pierre Rogers: Which is disappointing that it’s gone so political because I don’t think that politics should play.

Dr. John Jaquish: Health should never be political.

Pierre Rogers: Correct. Health, science, math, these things aren’t-

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, remember math is racist.

Pierre Rogers: Yes, and therein lies the issue. Ultimately, that is a really interesting thing. We spend a lot of time talking about psychology on this show and why people find the need to be right over the need to win, or you could win, which would you rather?

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s like making moods. Being right is more important than actually being successful.

Pierre Rogers: Yeah. What’s interesting about scientific methodology, and this I think is going to play directly to your background and what we’re discussing now is there are actually a lot of similarities by creating a hypothesis, testing that hypothesis and iterating based on that hypothesis to starting a business. Matter of fact, they’re almost identical, right?

Pierre Rogers: You have this, you start with a premise, you go, “Hey, I think this is going to work. Let’s go test it.” As you test that theory, this is true in business and in science, you’re going to learn some things. You’re going to learn most often that you’re wrong and that it needs to be tested again and tweaked.

Dr. John Jaquish: You never learn anything if you’re being right.

Pierre Rogers: That’s exactly right, so, interestingly, people get so hunkered down on this one fact that we took from coronavirus 18 months ago, some people are still holding that as if it’s the truth and the reality is that science, using the Socratic method, continues to chip away and try to find the truth similar to a lawyer would or a startup founder or whoever. We’re all trying to get to that most effective thing.

Dr. John Jaquish: Getting the right answer is always the goal or at least closer to the right answer is always the goal of science whereas it doesn’t always seem that way. But fortunately, like in business, the great news is when somebody’s wrong in business, this is why I love private industries so much.

Pierre Rogers: Thank you very much. Preached. Go.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s not just like, I don’t know, blind capitalist, but all problems solve themselves in business. When somebody’s got a terrible idea and they’re executing on it and people either buy it and don’t like it or don’t buy it, guess what? Shit goes away.

Pierre Rogers: Yes, quickly.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, very quickly. It’s like there are no rewards for being principled. Any time I meet somebody who’s in business and they’re like, “Well, I’m doing this for the principal,” that’s somebody I’ll never work with.

Pierre Rogers: Yeah. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Dr. John Jaquish: Where they sued somebody and it’s like, “It doesn’t matter, it’s the principle.” You’re an idiot. Lawsuits are like drinking games. No matter who wins, everybody’s the loser.

Pierre Rogers: Only the lawyers are the winners, that’s correct, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure. Yeah.

Pierre Rogers: The only people who are winners are the lawyers because they’re the ones getting paid. That’s how that works, but wait, I want to switch back to your story about osteoporosis and how you came down that path, and if you’re willing to share because I know it’s a bit of a sensitive story, but would you be willing to share why you’re so motivated in that specific area of science?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I developed, I first went down the life science path. I worked for an enterprise software company before this. I had finished my MBA and I was doing software design consulting for relationship management type software so people could connect better with their customers, understand their customers better.

Dr. John Jaquish: When my mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis, I read about osteoporosis and I just had a fresh approach and my Ph.D. adviser told me, “If you had done your Ph.D. first and then had this idea, you would have talked yourself out of it.” Of course, I said, “Why?” He said this is so different than the entire industry things that you would’ve been like I don’t want to be an outlier. I don’t want to come up with some crazy idea and then have people go, “Well, that’s wrong. It can’t be that simple.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Coincidentally, that’s the shit people said, but at that point, I knew I was right so it was like, “Okay. I’m not wrong, I just haven’t explained it to you well enough. Let me go back and come up with a better way to explain it.”

Pierre Rogers: Would you tell the audience a little bit what osteoporosis is if people aren’t familiar with that?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It’s typically associated with age though it has more to do with the lack of high impact. Children absorb high impact, they build bone density very high, and then after you turn 30, it just goes down from there, and then when you hit menopause which is not a problem for me, but biological females, yeah, they’ll have a problem with it.

Dr. John Jaquish: When going through that, they can rapidly lose bone density. The bones become porous and easy to fracture. Now if you’re over 50 years old and you have a hip fracture, you have a 50% chance of death within one year because of the complications. You get pneumonia, you’re stuck in the hospital, can’t move around, lungs fill up with fluid, you suffocate, you die.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s not as dramatic but osteoporotic fractures in the complications of said fractures kill as many people as breast cancer, so it’s a huge problem.

Pierre Rogers: It’s a huge deal and it affects Asian women even more so because of their diet. For that population, those numbers are even worse.

Dr. John Jaquish: Their diet-

Pierre Rogers: And their lifestyle.

Dr. John Jaquish: … and also, they have a smaller gauge of bone. The thinner the bone is, obviously the less structural integrity it has, right? Tongans and Samoans seldom have this problem. It’s because of the thickness like if you grab on your radius, I don’t know how many people watch the show as opposed to listening to it, but your radius bone is at the top of your wrist.

Dr. John Jaquish: You stick your thumb straight up in the air and you grab on your wrist and then move back about three inches on your forearm and pinch that bones on the to, that’s your radius. My radius is three-quarters of an inch thick. You grab a Samoan’s arm that’s about my height, a six-foot-tall guy, it’s just like, “What’s in there?”

Pierre Rogers: It’s a tree trunk, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Yeah. I used to play rugby with Tongans and Samoans. I was the only non-Tongan speaker on the field. Me and one other guy who actually, he was a monster. He used to play for The Eagles, so he’s an NFL player. I didn’t belong out there. He was like 160 pounds. I was an outside center so it’s like a wide receiver. I watched my buddy get busted up which is why I was like, “I’m retiring.”

Dr. John Jaquish: His face was caved in, he broke his orbital, and it was like you took his cheekbone and just pushed it in, and it looked like it was supposed to pop out but then the swelling started and I’m like, “Okay-”

Pierre Rogers: “I’m out.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Kids were looking at me and crying.

Pierre Rogers: Yikes.

Dr. John Jaquish: Let’s get back to the story. I wander off.

Pierre Rogers: It’s all right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Got ADD. ADD is another name for creativity also, so anybody who thinks they’re limited because they have ADD, no, you’re good. That means your brain doesn’t go where you’re told it should go, which means you’re not a lemming.

Pierre Rogers: Right. This is incredibly important.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yes. You don’t want to be a lemming. You don’t want to be a person who just does what’s expected.

Pierre Rogers: I have a quick test to show people or to demonstrate to people maybe how many people fall into more the lemming follower category as to people who are outside thinkers, some may call them leaders, et cetera.

Pierre Rogers: If you have ever been leaving a concert, leaving a sports arena, that can include just going to a prep rally at your high school where you’re leaving the gymnasium and you’ve got all those doors lined up and everybody’s funneled out and there’s one door open and all the people are funneling through that one door-

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, let me just go to the other door.

Pierre Rogers: … and then that one guy or gal that’s like, “Well, there’s all these other doors. Why don’t I just open another door and then ostensibly, more of us can leave?”

Dr. John Jaquish: That was me.

Pierre Rogers: That’s the person.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, sure.

Pierre Rogers: Be that person. Don’t be the person that stands in line looking at all the other options.

Dr. John Jaquish: Morons waiting for one door.

Pierre Rogers: But it’s an interesting thing because we’ve all universally had that experience and it’s a quick way of just showing how many people fall in line. They follow whatever the group, the herd is, and this has to do with the social mentality that humans as a species have evolved to have, right? We’re a very social species, and if you don’t believe that you need socialization, I can prove that one too.

Pierre Rogers: For the most hardened criminals in the world, these are the guys that are in jail that have committed terrible acts, what do we do to punish them? We put them in solitary, right? These are the worst people in the world and what do we do to punish them? We put them in solitary confinement.

Pierre Rogers: We as species, we are social. It is how we’ve been able to survive for so many millennium and it can be a huge punishment, but also the negative side of that is we just are like lemmings a lot of times. We just put our head down, we follow the guy in front of us and that’s just what we do, right? So allow that ADD to come in and ask stupid questions.

Pierre Rogers: Ask stupid questions, ask obvious questions, because while they might be seen dumb and obvious, a lot of people don’t even ask them and there can be beautiful moments of brilliance in those what I call stupid questions. The famous philosopher Takuan Soho, arguably the most famous zen priest ever of Japan, famous for saying “A child’s mind is a beginner’s mind.”

Pierre Rogers: To bring it back full circle to you in osteoporosis and asking some of these questions, the child’s mind, the beginner’s mind is this blank sheet, they don’t have those preconceived notions on how it’s supposed to be done, so tell us a little bit more about, okay, you’ve done some osteoporosis study, you’ve gone into formalized medical training, and now you’re pushing back on the establishment in asking these somewhat simple questions that actually have brilliant outcomes. Bring us back to that point.

Dr. John Jaquish: I didn’t really ask questions as much as I just developed a prototype of what I knew would help to build bone, launched it, saw it working with pre-imposed DEXA scans, it’s a bone scan where you determine the density or porosity of bone, wrote a book about that, and I wrote the book while I was a rookie.

Pierre Rogers: What pushback do the scientific community give you based on that?

Dr. John Jaquish: I have a lot more perspective in how much, sort of like how good was your first kiss? Well, it was your first so I don’t have anything to compare it to.

Pierre Rogers: Sure.

Dr. John Jaquish: Years later, you’re like, “Now it’s a fish,” you know what I mean?

Pierre Rogers: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: There was a lot of push back and I’d introduce this to physicians and they would take the f*** out of my office.

Pierre Rogers: That’s where I was expecting you to go.

Dr. John Jaquish: An important problem was I was super young. I walk in there, I’m in like the ‘20s and I’m like, “Hey, I got the thing for osteo…” They look at me, they’d be like, “There are trillions of dollars spent by some of the best minds in the world that are working on a biochemical solution to this and you think you’ve got something better,” and I was like, “No. I know I’ve got something better,” and it’s not because I know more about biochemistry than they do, it’s because the answer isn’t the biochemical one.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now this is me being able to communicate with them after I learned what not to say. People were like, “Okay, different approach. You got me. I’m interested. You got two minutes. Tell me.” As I was providing axial compression of the bones, we distort the length of the bone for about five seconds, and when the disruption of the bone matrix takes place, minerals get pulled into the bone and it re-calcifies, making it more powerful just like high impact activity with younger people.

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re like, “Whoa, okay.” So you give them a logical argument and then I back it up with research because I had published research which took me a couple of years, many years to put together. Then it was like they just, “Okay, yeah. Understood.” At this point, anybody who’s not willing to listen to the argument of OsteoStrong, it’s like I can win them over if they’ll take the time to listen.

Pierre Rogers: That’s if, and you can’t control that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, and some physicians, when I say “This is going to be good for your patients,” they’ll say, “I don’t care.” Just like that, “I don’t care. I don’t want to take the time.” A physician is paid like a manual laborer. They’re paid when they’re seeing patients and they’re not paid to learn.

Pierre Rogers: Which is so shocking to a lot of people by the way. Don’t gloss over that, that’s an important fact.

Dr. John Jaquish: But I’ve been continuing education conferences where they go for like an hour lecture, they get some continuing education, and by the way, the hour lecture was paid for by Pfizer or whatever. Not that that’s corrupt inherently but it can be problematic, as many point out.

Pierre Rogers: Well, hold on. Pause. When Pfizer just got the largest criminal fine in US history, just as in a few weeks ago as of this podcast, I think that that is while you’re point is correct, that’s not entirely bad, I would just put that out as a single data point which is “Hey, just because my uncle Jessie stole a bunch of times doesn’t he’s going to steal again,” right?

Pierre Rogers: It’s still a data point that we should probably just be aware of. It’s a $2.5 billion total fine of which $1.3 billion was a criminal fine, the largest in US history. Okay, I just want to leave that data point there and we’ll go back. Please.

Dr. John Jaquish: Sure. The continuing education is not what it should be and pharmaceutical companies subsidize medical education anyway, so really when you go to medical school and become a physician, much of what you’re doing is sponsored, and that’s problematic also.

Dr. John Jaquish: Anyway, but once you show them the data, then that’s all they really need. I think selling into medicine is not hard at all. You got to be prepared. You got to have the right tools, you have to have the right evidence. You have to have big enough sample sizes even though they don’t understand statistical analysis like they should.

Dr. John Jaquish: They understand the word statistical significance. They don’t understand that a smaller sample size that has statistical significance is more powerful than a bigger sample size. In a bigger sample size, you reach statistical significance very easily, and so they don’t understand statistics very well. Why should they? They don’t even take a class on it. That was a little bit of an issue because the initial studies are very small.

Pierre Rogers: There’s a great book out there called Bad Science and it’s all about how as a normal, as a civilian, right? As someone who’s not a doctor, how they can learn to have a mind that better understand things like looking at statistical information, like test the difference between something being correlated versus two things mirroring each other that do not correlate with each other whatsoever. Let me give you a quick example. The hole in the ozone is directly related to our lack of pirates. When we had more pirates, correct. It’s right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Obviously, the ozone shows up.

Pierre Rogers: Exactly, right? Those things have nothing to do with each other

Dr. John Jaquish:

Pierre Rogers: Right, but the data shows that they have something to do with each other because as world pirate populations went down, the ozone hole got bigger.

Dr. John Jaquish: Mixed up.

Pierre Rogers: Correct. All the time. That correlational versus causational conversation is something that a lot of civilians lack and unfortunately can even leak its way into the medical profession a little bit because we’re all humans, right? It’s a human trait. Okay, this is for my own and I apologize, we’re getting a little bit off-topic here, but around this idea of bone density.

Pierre Rogers: For those of us who have trained in martial arts before, a lot of the repeated hitting, i.e. breaking boards or hitting our shins or what’s called makiwara boards where you’re striking this object over and over and over, why that’s done, I know you know this but for our audience, is because your bones have a honeycomb-esque like structure and when the trauma happens, it creates these little micro-fractures in there and the bone builds itself back up thicker and stronger, it becomes denser.

Dr. John Jaquish: It just distorts the bone matrix, so more of those little walls are built. When it comes to the calcium deposits, like a Muay Thai fighter, they’ll kick bamboo over and over and over again to build up or to… They build calcium deposits on the front of their shin. That’s actually from trauma. It’s more like scar tissue that’s inside bones, so crushing those microstructures and those microstructures go back to be like they’re still crushed but they grow calcium deposits and it’s more like a trauma response, like building scar tissue.

Pierre Rogers: Interesting.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Different. We’re not putting trauma into the bone like that.

Pierre Rogers: Very interesting.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s a good question, I get that all the time.

Pierre Rogers: Yeah. Just as a layman person, I’m a layperson when it comes to this subject, that’s what I think of it like, “Oh, making your hands or elbows or shins stronger for Muay Thai and other martial arts like that,” right? That was a common thing, that toughening and hardening of the body. Good to know that it’s a completely different outcome based on that trauma.

Pierre Rogers: Okay, so you’ve come up with this thing, you’re now out in the field, you’re selling it. How does that founder story go?

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, it was ugly in the beginning because I just didn’t have the data and it took forever to get these studies done. I heard this expression. I grew up near San Francisco and I lived in San Francisco for many years. It used to be a nice place. It’s like 1940, you don’t want to go there, total no, but I learned to ignore rejection.

Dr. John Jaquish: Rejection was just like this guy didn’t want to listen, which happens, or this guy or female just… I said the wrong thing. I got to get better at that. I just used every failure as an opportunity to learn something while I was putting together the research. Then a few years later, I took all the bone density information and collected raw data and I realized I can basically disprove weightlifting.

Dr. John Jaquish: Weightlifting is a lousy stimulus for muscle and I can come up with something much better. I decided to launch a new product that was more fitness-focused as opposed to bone density focus because I can make a muscle grow far faster than regular weights and I could take somebody even further, so if people think that they’re at their genetic potential, no. I can get them way beyond that which is what I’m doing with guys in the NFL.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s even a lot of NFL players I can’t mention because I don’t have their permission and their name is worth thousands of dollars. They use it but I can’t talk about it. I’d say there’s a couple of NBA guys. Andre Drummond did give me his permission and he’s one of the best guys in the NBA, but there’s a couple others that are like the other best guys that also use it and I’m like, “Come on. You want to be like Andre,” and they’re like, “Not really.”

Dr. John Jaquish: They want to get paid and I understand. It’s like they only got a couple of years where people actually care about them and they want to monetize everything, I understand but at the same time, if I pay somebody for an endorsement, does it mean anything? Not really.

Pierre Rogers: Not really. Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right now, what we endorse, and I’m proud to say this, I didn’t pay for a single one. They all did it, like Terrell Owens, he just uses it. He called us and was like, “This is the greatest thing ever. How do I help?”

Pierre Rogers: Break that down because that’s a pretty bold statement. We’ve been weightlifting forever and you’re in super great shape. I don’t know how old you are but you’re massive. You’re living proof as to this methodology, but to say, “Hey, weightlifting,” there’s gazillions of dollars in weightlifting, right? There are 24 hours fitnesses everywhere with a bunch of huge weight rooms and you’re disrupting that. Tell us more. I’m dying to know how you figured this out.

Dr. John Jaquish: I was born to be a disruptor I guess. First, it was osteoporosis and I had some really interesting conversations with pharma executives when I go and speak at the World Congress on Osteoporosis. They were never really that mean to me. I thought they would be threatening or like “We’re just going to buy your shit and shut it down” or whatever. What makes you think I’d sell that? I was not ready with all those evasive, adversarial. Nah, they were cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: They realized that I got a really simple solution to trigger the body to fix itself. That’s always going to be the preferred method, so physicians that know about OsteoStrong always prefer it over any pharmaceutical intervention because it’s the body fixing the body.

Pierre Rogers: Always the best way.

Dr. John Jaquish: From a liability perspective, is anything going to go wrong when you enacted the body’s own physiology features and abilities? No. Exercise doesn’t cause cancer, so we have nothing to worry about here.

Dr. John Jaquish: They were pretty good about it and then as I moved on to my fitness product, X3, that was much more difficult to market at first because the doctors, if you showed them the science and they took the time to listen, they were in. They were like, “Wow, that’s great.”

Dr. John Jaquish: We just published a paper with NASA showing the superiority of this approach that I have and that’s a big deal, and NASA doesn’t write about most people’s life’s work but they did a paper about mine, I’m very happy about it. They didn’t do it as a favor to me, they did it as a favor to the astronauts, so yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m just super happy about that and everything’s going so well and it even covers a little bit of what we’re doing with X3 Bar Home Gym because it’s the same logic, applying tremendous forces to the body in strategic positioning for an intended effect. The problem with fitness is people who are fitness followers, they’re not scientific nor can they come anywhere close to reading science. Most people are baffled by Men’s Health articles which are already an abomination.

Pierre Rogers: Dumbed down to the lowest denomination. Yes, absolutely.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I read a typical Men’s Health article and it’s oversimplified, and oversimplification is another word for wrong. People want it so dumbed down, and I say people, stupid people or lazy people, want it so dumbed down that it’s inaccurate and it’s like would it kill you to just learn something? Just try maybe to learn something?

Dr. John Jaquish: What happened was we launched, and we were talking about before the show, my life is a series of catastrophic failures that I learned from that I immediately turned into successes. Targeting the fitness industry, absolute idiots, like total mouth breathers. Jordan Peterson says 20% of the population is only smart enough to mop the floor, and you try and get them to do anything else… Do you know who Professor Peterson is?

Pierre Rogers: Absolutely.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Genius. He’s one of the top psychologists in the world right now. I’m like, “20% of the people are that stupid?” That blew my mind, and then I went to bodybuilding.com and I found them.

Pierre Rogers: You found them all.

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re there, yeah. They’re there and so I was like, “Wow. Fitness audience is just full of complete idiots.” It’s not that there aren’t smart people in there, but the smart people get drowned out by the idiots, and in fact, there’s a scientist I like, his name is Layne Norton. He’s a nutritionist and he teaches science but he has to do so in making fun of other people in the business, really tearing them down because in the fitness industry, disrespecting one another is like how to get attention.

Pierre Rogers: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. That’s what he has to, I feel bad for the guy because he almost has to make his science lessons into an attack on somebody that he and his fans then ridicule. The dude studied science. He doesn’t want to ridicule anybody, he just wants everybody to be better off, but he has to have a business model. He’s figured out how to mobilize the idiots. Well, I figured out how to mobilize the idiots differently.

Dr. John Jaquish: I piss them all off by calling my book Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want and since they’re so stupid, they treat their workout program like a religion.

Pierre Rogers: Yes, they sure do.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. It’s like vegans, you can’t even talk to them. Not about science.

Pierre Rogers: No. Don’t use facts. Don’t use facts, it’ll blow their mind.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, you don’t even want it, but because of the fitness people, they give me so much negative attention. Well, negative attention is attention, and so they are useful idiots to me because the more irate they get, the more of their friends are like, “Did you read this guy’s book? Because he’s a genius.” I’m not calling myself a genius, I’m quoting people. I don’t even think I deserve that title, but I think I’m clever, I’ll take that.

Dr. John Jaquish: It blows my mind how many people were just absolutely unwilling to learn anything and be completely dismissive and insulting, and so here’s what we did. We pivoted. Within three days of targeting fitness people, it was like, “All right, this isn’t going to work. These people are just like… I don’t even know who ties their shoes for them anymore.” So we pivoted to busy professions. Other people like me.

Dr. John Jaquish: Did I like lifting? I guess. I lifted it for 20 years and got zero results out of it. I got fatter and I thought I was getting more muscular, but I know a lot of people who fool themselves like that where they’re like, “Oh yeah, I put on 10 pounds of muscle” and you look at them and you’re like, “But you have a double chin now. Pretty sure you just are fat.”

Pierre Rogers: Just got bigger. Right, yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s how most people are progressing. When going through this whole process and switching, pivoting to busy professionals, first of all, there are a lot more busy professionals who are willing to admit that weightlifting didn’t do much work, because they all thought it.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’ve never met an entrepreneurial type guy who’s just never even thought about exercising. They’re all in exercise but they all stopped doing it because they go, “Well, I did for a long time and I didn’t see-”

Pierre Rogers: A ton of results, yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Pierre Rogers: Some small results, sure, but not a ton.

Dr. John Jaquish: “The beginner gains” is what they call it. Once you get strong enough where you have started dealing with heavier weight to continue to trigger growth, that bone growth stops because you have neural inhibition, so when you take a bench press in a weaker position, you bring back the bar against your chest, just getting it off your chest puts a lot of pressure on the shoulder.

Dr. John Jaquish: What I chose to do is bury the resistance with the proper ratio of variance which is determined by a lot of different research studies, and it was obvious. When I do a chest press, I hold 550 pounds and I’m on extension. I hold 300 pounds when I’m about a third of the way up, but then back when the bar is against my chest, it’s only 100 pounds, so then I fatigue the strongest range of motion, continue to downward fatigue in diminishing range, so my last repetition is maybe only an inch and I’m only using 100 pounds.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m stimulating all different ranges of motion but I’m not loading them with the same load, thereby the muscle grows, the tendons and ligaments grow because the tendons and ligaments only respond to force that is applied when they are linear, and there’s a great study on that. Benjamin and Ralphs, 1996.

Pierre Rogers: Say that one more time.

Dr. John Jaquish: When your arm is almost straight, that’s when you’re strengthening the tendons and ligaments, but when you’re back up here, that’s just when you’re stressing and that’s not where they’re triggered to grow.

Pierre Rogers: And that’s where injuries are most likely to happen.

Dr. John Jaquish: Absolutely.

Pierre Rogers: Because the tendon is-

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s major injury avoidance. The attention I got from the NFL had everything to do with injury avoidance. And the Miami Heat wouldn’t stop talking about how much they liked it and they have friends in the NFL, they have friends in the NBA and so I started getting all kinds of inbound calls of pro athletes that are like, “I want to train with this. Can you show me?”

Pierre Rogers: At that level, it’s all about injury prevention, right?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Already strong, they already got a contract, they just want to stay in the league.

Pierre Rogers: Exactly. Exactly right.

Dr. John Jaquish: NFL players in the league, I had heard two and a half seasons, but Terrell Owens said it’s more like 1.7 because a lot of the time is down time because you get an injury, and NFL players typically get paid by the game.

Pierre Rogers: We’ve had a lot of NFL players on here and NFL was frequently referred to as “Not for long” because you are only there for a year or two and you usually don’t get through and the reason is because of injury, right? It’s most often because of injury, and interestingly enough, we hear about the injuries that happen during the game, but actually, most of the injuries happen in camp or training. That’s when they most often happen, right?

Pierre Rogers: If you’re looking at, again, statistical evidence, if you’re looking at when injuries happen, typically it’s when you’ve come from the offseason back into training camp and you try to go back to the weights and the efforts that you were putting in when it was on the season and you were in better shape, that lull if you will. As you come back in, you go too hard too fast and injury happens and now you’ve got a bigger problem because now your contract’s on the line.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Pierre Rogers: We’re getting close to the top of time here. Weightlifting is a waste of time in your book. New York Times bestseller. Huge, making a bunch of waves in the industry-

Dr. John Jaquish: Wall Street Journal bestseller.

Pierre Rogers: Yes, Wall Street Journal. Pardon me, Wall Street Journal.

Dr. John Jaquish: The New York Times bestseller list has nothing to do with selling books.

Pierre Rogers: I know. Can we talk about that for one second, please? Because a lot of people don’t realize that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Pierre Rogers: This is your second book, correct?

Dr. John Jaquish: You can say it’s my third. There was one there in the middle that I co-authored. Tony Robbins wrote the foreword to it. He’s a business partner, but they didn’t have wide distribution. It was about bone density.

Pierre Rogers: When did you find out that The New York Times bestseller list had nothing to do with being a bestseller? How did that go? Because a lot of people don’t understand that.

Dr. John Jaquish: My publicist explained it to me and I was like, “That’s crazy,” and then I Googled it, and yeah. It has a handpicked, so right now, every bestseller is a social justice warrior book.

Pierre Rogers: It’s amazing how that happens.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. It’s completely like if you got a book that can prove that Trump’s skin color means he’s actually from hell, you’ll be a bestseller.

Pierre Rogers: Yeah. If you-

Dr. John Jaquish: Basically, they told me, they’re like, “You’re a White male. You’ll never get it.”

Pierre Rogers: In this environment, that sadly doesn’t surprise me.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, and I’m like, “Whoa. Okay, so I’ll be judged for the color of my skin? Yeah, racism, right?

Pierre Rogers: I think there was a guy who wrote a speech about that and he said, and I quote, “I hope for a day where my children are judged by their character and not the color of their skin.” I think that man was Dr. Martin Luther King.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah.

Pierre Rogers: Interesting how far we’ve come. Yeah, it’s incredible. Wall Street Journal’s bestseller list, much more accurate in terms of the actual volume of books.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. It has to do with sales.

Pierre Rogers: Yeah, I know.

Dr. John Jaquish: Selling 100,000 copies.

Pierre Rogers: That’s huge, especially in that category where you’re not just crapping all over a politician, right? This is something of real merit and value with scientific study to back you up.

Dr. John Jaquish: On the Amazon list, we were number one in Amazon for men’s health for I think seven or eight months. It’s crazy.

Pierre Rogers: Yeah, that’s crazy. That’s a very transient list so that’s a long time.

Dr. John Jaquish: People are trying to say they’re just the bestselling author, they’ll write a book and then they’ll put it in the category of like a garden tool buyer’s guide. Seriously, that’s a category.

Pierre Rogers: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish: It is books written about different gardening tools and where you can find them. They’ll put a fitness book or a book about whatever, meditation, in gardening tool buyer’s guides, and so then they can say they’re an Amazon bestseller.

Pierre Rogers: Yeah, which is why everybody’s an Amazon bestseller by the way. That’s all you have to do is spend a minute on Instagram or Clubhouse and you quickly realize that everyone has written a “Bestselling book,” right? But actually moving units, that’s a completely different story.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s where the Wall Street Journal comes in.

Pierre Rogers: Yeah, exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: Am I an Amazon bestseller? Yeah, but I don’t care about that.

Pierre Rogers: Right, exactly. Okay, so we’re going to go through your journey one more time. So attacked osteoporosis due to your mom being diagnosed with osteoporosis.

Dr. John Jaquish: By the way, she’s completely healthy now. Has a bone of a 30 year old and she’s in her 80s.

Pierre Rogers: That’s amazing, and congrats to you for that. After you attacked that business, you go on to I would say more iterate because it’s along the same thought line as what you did with osteoporosis but you just transitioned to that same thought process or hypothesis into muscle growth, muscle development and fitness.

Pierre Rogers: You poked the bear with the body building community, you found the better place to be is within the busy professional space, and you made a comment about startups and founders and entrepreneurial type people being pro-fitness.

Pierre Rogers: I was just going to say I agree with that a lot because the discipline that is required to be productive within building a startup or building a business is very similar to the discipline that you need to be physically fit, and I’ll take it one step further because I actually wrote an article about this.

Pierre Rogers: I was in Saint Lucia not that long ago, about a year and a half ago right before the pandemic, literally days before the pandemic and we were staying with this family and it was one of these all inclusive resorts and it was filled with a lot of people who were there to get drunk in the sun.

Pierre Rogers: What I noticed, what I observed is that most people there were overweight, most people there had a lot of tattoos, most people there were pretty rowdy, right? They would drink too much and just hoot and holler and yell and scream, and this is in an all inclusive resort meaning that people were doing that 11 in the morning, one in the afternoon, right? We’re not talking late at night, we’re talking middle of the day.

Dr. John Jaquish: Drinking booze all day.

Pierre Rogers: Exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: The best stuff in an all inclusive place.

Pierre Rogers: Correct. One day, I said to my wife, I go, “This really isn’t my scene and I know we’re here with another family, we’re trying to acquiesce to their income level, but let’s sneak off to this other place called Sugar Beach,” and if you’re familiar with Saint Lucia, Sugar Beach is one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, the Viceroy resort is there. All the oligarchs park their yachts park off of the cove there, and so we go to Viceroy.

Pierre Rogers: Now, this is the same country, everybody’s there for the same reason, except all of these people are far more affluent. Do you know what I noticed? Everybody’s thinner, everybody’s quieter, everybody has far fewer tattoos, people were far more well-mannered, so it was really interesting to sit back and just study that these two income groups, and there was a big difference.

Pierre Rogers: I’m not saying that you can’t be super-rich and be fat with tattoos and be rowdy, I’m just saying the evidence, the science shows that that’s probably not likely.

Dr. John Jaquish: I get accused by my friends all the time of being like an elitist. “You only want to hang out in rich people’s places.” I’m like, “No, I just don’t want to hang out at loser places.”

Pierre Rogers: Bingo, and there’s a difference in that.

Dr. John Jaquish: People are like, “Oh, let’s go and dive,” and I’m like, “Yeah, you lost me.”

Pierre Rogers: “What’s the upside of this?” Yeah, right. Everything’s sticky.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Well, some guys don’t want to fight. Guys doing like grab my fiance’s ass, you know what I mean?

Pierre Rogers: Right. Yeah, I’m not in.

Dr. John Jaquish: I don’t like losers. I don’t talk for them. Also, it’s amazing how once you’re a successful person, and it’s been a long time for me, because the bone density thing went very well. Once you have something to lose, your mindset changes.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’ll walk into a dive bar and somebody will be like, “Hey, look at the tough guy,” they want to fight with me or something like that and I’ll go, “Whatever contest you think we’re in, let’s just imagine you won. Leave me alone.” Problem is they won’t leave you alone because they’re strong and stupid and they always want to fight or just shove you or “Let’s arm wrestle” or just some s*** like that. I don’t want to be around this people. I got too much to lose. If I broke that guy’s neck by accident, I could lose millions of dollars.

Pierre Rogers: Exactly. This reminds me of a conversation I had where I was… All right, I’m going to brag for a second but I apologize, it’s directly imperative to this conversation. I had bought a brand new Ferrari and I was driving my buddy in that Ferrari and we’re just off to get coffee or wherever off to, and over and over I’d get people trying to race me on the road, right? It would be some guy in a-

Dr. John Jaquish: I bought a Lamborghini the other day. I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Pierre Rogers: Okay. Some knucklehead with a base model Camaro that they rented from Hertz or it’s a Honda Accord that they got a coffee can exhaust on or whatever, and I would always be like, “See you later. You won. You beat me.”

Dr. John Jaquish: I just act like they’re not even there. Lane is run but I’m just sitting there, just driving and they’re like speeding up and slowing down and speeding up, slowing down. I told my fiance, “Don’t look.”

Pierre Rogers: Yeah, just ignore.

Dr. John Jaquish: If you make eye contact, they’ll think somehow like…

Pierre Rogers: Because what’s upside to winning, right? If you win, they’re going to go, “Well yeah, you got the bigger, fancier car.” Okay, so you don’t get a win out of it.

Dr. John Jaquish: I just don’t give a s*** what they think.

Pierre Rogers: Exactly. That’s exactly my point. There’s no upside in you being involved at all but there’s plenty of downsides.

Dr. John Jaquish: Endangering the lives of other people on the road for what, I can prove obvious?

Pierre Rogers: Thank you, that’s a better way to say it. That was what I was trying to drive to, pun intended.

Dr. John Jaquish: Some of these guys, they’re cool, they just love the car and they want to see it go fast and stuff like that, and for those guys, hey, sorry, I’m not going to break the law for your entertainment.

Pierre Rogers: Are you going to pay for my ticket? Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: You’ll just endanger the lives of others. Let’s not forget, there’s people who take super cars… I did track days with Lamborghini before they even allowed me to buy that car because I have a Performante.

Pierre Rogers: That’s an amazing car.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, and it’s a special one because it doesn’t have the spoiler but it has the weight reduction in the exhaust, so it’s a little less stable. They wanted to make sure I knew what the hell I was doing. I already had time in the race cars before and now I’m racing with-

Pierre Rogers: That’s so much fun.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. We have a race series coming up at the end of this month.

Pierre Rogers: Good for you.

Dr. John Jaquish: In the next month. Driving at the speeds that those cars are capable of, you’re endangering everyone on the road.

Pierre Rogers: Correct.

Dr. John Jaquish: I’m glad they don’t sell a lot of those. I’m a little worried now that the Corvette all of a sudden is super fast. It’s a better handling car than it used to be-

Pierre Rogers: Yes, it is.

Dr. John Jaquish: … but it is way faster, especially when the track version comes out, the ZX6, I think it’s just going to be carnage.

Pierre Rogers: Yeah. We could go off in the car, I’m a big car guy, and yeah, I happen to agree with you because of the entry point… Okay, said differently, the barrier of the entry point is so much lower on that car that it could be accessed by more people who are going to make poor judgment. Exactly.

Dr. John Jaquish: They just then kill themselves and probably a lot of-

Pierre Rogers: Others. Yeah, that’s exactly the issue.

Dr. John Jaquish: Remember one of the guys… I shouldn’t get specific, but there’s a guy who had a following, and as soon as he became successful, what does he do? He goes out and buys a Ferrari and he’s racing down like a 40 mile an hour street, right along the water right around Balboa Island in-

Pierre Rogers: That’s my backyard.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay, yeah. It’s on California, and loses control and goes right into a telephone pole and dies. I’m just glad he didn’t kill anyone else.

Pierre Rogers: That’s a busy place. Yeah, that’s a busy area.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. These things are dangerous. Don’t get it and be a total jerk.

Pierre Rogers: Yeah, I know. You could make that argument for Teslas these days and I joke and say that Tesla drivers are the new BMW drivers, and what I mean by that is back in the day, BMW drivers were the guys that were cutting in and out of traffic and zipping around because-

Dr. John Jaquish: With like an M3 and it’s just like more power than they’ve ever had.

Pierre Rogers: Yes, but now you get that with Tesla.

Dr. John Jaquish: They don’t understand cornering.

Pierre Rogers: Yeah, but now you get that with Tesla in that not only is all that instant torque there, right? They tend to cut in and out a lot more but also because of their braking system i.e. you don’t actually have to hit the break, you can just take your foot off the accelerator pedal and it naturally slows due to the fact that it’s electric, the way that they speed up and slow down is significantly shorter or quicker, there’s maybe a better way to say that, than normal people in normal cars or non-electric cars, right?

Pierre Rogers: One thing, for instance, for your Lamborghini. Your stopping distance in your Lamborghini isn’t 5% or 10% better than let’s say Toyota Corolla, it’s 75% better, right? What that means is if you slam on your brakes, they’re massive, right? So if you slam on your brakes and the guy behind you driving an ostensibly normal car, a Lexus or whatever, slams on his brakes, you’re going to stop much, much quicker than he is. That’s great, unless that guy’s behind you. Exactly, you got to know that.

Dr. John Jaquish: A lot of times, I’ll just slow down a little bit and then change lanes and slow down a little bit more where I don’t have somebody right behind me. You’ve got to know that when you get one of these cars. It is totally different than another car. If you understand the differences, you will drive it without getting a scratch on it. If you don’t understand the differences, you will destroy it.

Pierre Rogers: Yeah. Destroy it yourself or others, so yeah. It’s a crazy world on a hyper car, super car world, and a Performante is right on the ragged edge of just performance. Those things are just-

Dr. John Jaquish: I think three years straight, it was the fastest production car in the world.

Pierre Rogers: I remember when they set down the Nurburgring time in it and it was just ridiculous, just crushed, right? Now you have productions cars that are sub seven minutes on the Nurburgring which when I was a kid, a great Nurburgring time was like 14, 15 minutes and that was considered insane, right? Now we’re less than half of that for production cars on pump gas with stock tires, like what?

Dr. John Jaquish: You have to say the two cars that beat the Performante, the Porsche 911 GT2 RS is barely… It shouldn’t even be a really labeled a car. They call it the “Widowmaker” and they always have. The GT2 RS, it kills people all the time.

Pierre Rogers: It’s insane. It’s the Widowmaker. That’s what it is.

Dr. John Jaquish: Even people at Porsche call it the Widowmaker.

Pierre Rogers: It’s so much obnoxious horsepower.

Dr. John Jaquish: They’ll tell you, “Don’t get this car unless you’re a great race car driver.” It doesn’t mean you drive fast on the street, it means you actually understand how to race.

Pierre Rogers: Right. Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: Dangerous car, and then the other one, the Aventador, the SVJ, it seems like a foot wider than any other sports car and about a foot and a half longer.

Pierre Rogers: They’re big.

Dr. John Jaquish: The reason it’s so on the ground is the thing is like a barge, but that’s what gives it such great handling and also lets it lay down so much power, and it’s all-wheel drive with tires about that wide in the back.

Pierre Rogers: They’re barrels, yup.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. That beat the 911 GT2 RS’s record and everybody’s like it was built for that purpose only.

Pierre Rogers: Yes. If you’ve never actually tried to park an Aventador, it’s terrible.

Dr. John Jaquish: I have. It’s awful.

Pierre Rogers: You can’t see any… You park nine feet away from the curb because the hood’s so short and you can’t see it.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s a reason Lamborghini doesn’t race that car. Their race car is the Huracan.

Pierre Rogers: It’s the Huracan, yeah. I’ve always said that. I said the Huracan is their race car, not the Aventador, right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Well, first of all, it won’t even fit on the track because-

**Pierre Rogers:**It’s so fat, man. It’s an amazingly cool car though.

Dr. John Jaquish: Amazingly cool but you always see them used with 1,500 miles on them because it’s a point A to point A car. You take it out of your garage and drive it and you put it back in your garage, because you can’t park it.

Pierre Rogers: Yeah. Not only can you not park it anywhere, and these are uptown problems, don’t get me wrong, but in most places, you can’t get in and out of the driveway, right?

Pierre Rogers: If you’re going to the gas station, to the coffee shop, to the restaurant, wherever you’re going to go in your daily life, as a super car owner, and I know you have this problem with the Huracan as well, it’s just not as bad as it is with the Aventador because Aventador’s wider, but you have to think ahead of time, can I get in and out of that driveway? Now thankfully, they’ve done the lifts in the front and that’s improved things a little bit.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. Lifted up.

Pierre Rogers: Because your car is so low and all those cars are so low, even when it’s jacked up, it helps, don’t get me wrong, but you can’t just cruise around like you’re in an SUV going over bumps, right? You have to stop at every stupid driveway and think, “Okay, can I make a certain angle and turn in on this?”

Dr. John Jaquish: You got to go in an angle. Right. Going in an angle helps and using a jack helps, so I probably use a jack twice a day.

Pierre Rogers: The coolest invention I’ve seen is that Porsche in their Turbo S’s and GT3s have a GPS pin that they drop every time the nose lifts, so if you go to the same place over and over and over, the car knows and automatically raises and lowers your nose for you. I thought that’s pretty cool.

Dr. John Jaquish: Something I actually like. That’s cool.

Pierre Rogers: That’s pretty cool, right? I like that piece of innovation. I know we got sidetracked, we got talking about cars, I love cars, we could talk about cars nonstop. Where can we send our audience to find more about you? Where should they go?

Dr. John Jaquish: My last name Jaquish, it’s hard to pronounce. A lot of people call me Dr. John, but since Julius Erving is fishing, my landing page is doctorj.com. You can go to doctorj.com it’s D-O-C-T-O-R, the letter J, dot com, and there’s links to everything. I do the most on Instagram. It’s the platform that’s easier. I travel all the time. Posting on Instagram from your phone is easy. Facebook’s a little more involved.

Dr. John Jaquish: Follow me on Instagram if you use Instagram or on Facebook, but I have a YouTube channel and you can find links to superior nutrition. I only take one supplement which I developed myself. People might want to look into that. The X3 product is available there or you can learn more about OsteoStrong on doctorj.com

Pierre Rogers: Fantastic, and all of those will actually be in the show notes. Links to socials, your website, as well as the YouTube channel. Dr. J, I’m so happy that you made time and were on the show today. This is a lot of fun. I learned a lot, so thank you, man. I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Dr. John Jaquish: Beautiful.

Pierre Rogers: To all the audience members that are out there listening, check out pierrerogers.com and as always, we ask that you just pay the fee. The fee is just to share the podcast. We don’t monetize the podcast. I actually don’t take any ads whatsoever and I do this because I want to spread positive good information and I’m not trying to make a nickel, I have a day job for that, so thank you for spreading the love, paying the fee by sharing this episode with friends and family. Until next time, thank you, Dr. J.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks.