Dr. John Jaquish: Reinventing Fitness (A Stern Talk #18)

Full Transcript

William Stern:: Episode 17 slash 18, and we’ve got an awesome guest. We’ve got Dr. J. Thanks for coming.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Hey, thanks for having me. You look a lot wider. Dr.

William Stern:: J? No, J.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Oh, J. J. J. Okay. Like the letter

William Stern:: J, he’s a bad person,

Dr. John Jaquish:: But that’s even,

Lev Itsygin:: I mean, Dr. J’s an athlete, right? Basketball player.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Well, I bought his website from him. Julius Irving is fishing now. He’s retired. He’s done. Yeah. So yeah, my website is Dr. J-D-O-C-T-O-R, the letter j.com. Did you

Lev Itsygin:: Actually buy it from him? Yeah. How much?

Dr. John Jaquish:: I don’t remember. I just told my employees to make it happen.

William Stern:: Yeah, but then you also have a band, right? It’s like a resistance band. And it’s the X3, right? This is the,

Dr. John Jaquish:: Well, it’s a system that comes with a set of bands, but the band, one of the challenges with band training is that, let’s say there’s a couple of companies out there that just sell a bag of exercise bands. And the problem is, if you’re doing a bicep curl, the tension will be high where you’re contracting the muscle the most. But then as you go down, the tension can go to zero, and you don’t want that. You want to load the lengthened position. So you got to have where the muscles long is, you want to still have load on it. That’s significant enough that you can exhaust. So what happens is probably the chest press is easier to demonstrate. I can do however many reps I can do. So I’m holding 550 pounds at the top, but as I lower it at the halfway point, it’s 300, and at the bottom point it’s closer to 200. So I do however many repetitions I can do until the maximum amount of fibers are exhausted at that peak position. And then I shorten the range and I do what’s called lengthened partials. So where the pectoral is stretched, I’m loading just in that range of motion. So going to fatigue first in the strong range of motion is best for strength, going to fatigue. Second in that weaker range of motion is what’s best for growth. So we’re getting the absolute ultimate muscular stimulus.

William Stern:: And what led you, we want to go into the origin story and all that, but what led you to develop this program? I know you had that book that came out. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Well, that’s the thing that fuels everybody who’s mad at me. I wrote the book, weightlifting is a Waste of Time. I was one of the probably 99% of people that went to a gym year after year and basically looked no different. And also noticing other people, most people who are even workout fanatics, the joke about CrossFit is the reason CrossFitters never shut up about CrossFit is you’d never know they work out unless they started talking about it.

William Stern:: Shout out to Rolo. It looks exactly the same, just

Dr. John Jaquish:: Chatting to Dr. Dave Clayton.

William Stern:: Yeah, that’s

Dr. John Jaquish:: True. So many people, they’re all about exercise, yet you look at ’em and you’re like, nobody would know. Now, are they healthier? Sure, certainly better than sitting on your ass and eating Doritos. But where’s your motivation? If you go year after year and you started as kind of a chubby average guy or a skinny, average guy, and then years later, you’re still a skinny average guy or a chubby average guy. And so I was really, while I did get quite a bit stronger over 20 years of weightlifting, nobody would know by looking at me. And I was just sort of generally pissed off about it. And I had already developed a medical device that focuses on bone density. The bone density device emulates high impact. So it’s the benefit of high impact in a very slow and controlled environment. So your own central nervous system is the gauge as to how much loading goes through the particular joint in question, can you give

William Stern:: Us an example of a high impact? Like running is high impact, but we’re talking about lifting ways.

Dr. John Jaquish:: We’re talking about neither. Oh, interesting. This therapy uses robotic arms to get people in the optimized position. So back in the hand, in line with the clavicle, 120 degree angle from the upper to lower arm, and you self-impose force, and you have a computer screen in front of you that shows you how much force you’re creating in the moment, how much force you created in your previous session, previous best and first. So you’re looking at all that data and you’re trying to control, breathe, be comfortable, be well seated in the seat and contract and put the force through the axis of the bone. And it’s that force when you take the axis of the bone, you compress the axis, the bone becomes slightly distorted on the inside. So the bone matrix kind of looks like a honeycomb on the inside. You’ve seen pictures of that. It becomes slightly distorted when it bounces back into its lengthened position, the normal resting position, it’s now stimulated to pull in minerals and rec calcify,

William Stern:: And that’s how it gets

Dr. John Jaquish:: Stronger. That’s how it gets stronger. And you’d find that at Osteostrong. So that’s a franchise that Tony Robbins is one of the driving forces behind getting that out there. We have 300 clinics in 15 different countries, I think 10 million sessions logged. So lots of users, lots of people improving their bone density. After going through the experience of inventing that, I realize, wow, the human body is so capable of producing incredible amounts of force, but we don’t see that in weightlifting. And I thought, okay, strength adaptations were incredible, but not really muscle adaptations. It was a matter of training the body to recruit more tissue. Also, as bone density goes up, you’re able to recruit more tissue because you have less neural inhibition, which is basically your body’s own process of saying, whoa, we’re going to actually recruit less muscle here. Because you might hurt yourself. You can’t.

William Stern:: Well,

Dr. John Jaquish:: Right. You can’t break a finger by squeezing a fist. You have enough strength. Everybody, even weak people have enough strength to break their own finger, but your own body will stop you from contracting and squeezing a fist hard enough to cause a fracture. So that’s what the machine uses is your own mediation, your own comfort. And it’s really kind of beyond comfort, just neural inhibitory. As in, if you’re going to hurt yourself, your body just shuts the muscle off.

William Stern:: And is this something that could pair well with a, are you familiar with the mirror?

Dr. John Jaquish:: Yeah. Yeah. You mean the product? Yeah, by a Peloton. Yeah.

William Stern:: Oh, is it

Dr. John Jaquish:: Peloton? They didn’t know Lululemon.

William Stern:: I think Lululemon bought it. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. That’d be like a cool product to have with the mirror. It’s like you’re using

Dr. John Jaquish:: Yeah, it would never work with that. No, you need most, I put, when I use the Osteostrong devices, I put 4,000 pounds through my hip joint.

William Stern:: Oh, interesting.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Okay. Right. The mirror is like 50 pounds. This is

Lev Itsygin:: A whole different level of

Dr. John Jaquish:: Fitness. I don’t even call it fitness. I mean, it’s a medical device. Is this in

Lev Itsygin:: NFL stadiums? I mean, are these professional athletes

Dr. John Jaquish:: Using this? No, this is designed for elderly women. Really?

William Stern:: Yeah, because there’s a story, right? This goes back to your mom,

Dr. John Jaquish:: Right? Yeah. I developed it to treat my mother’s osteoporosis. So women postmenopausal women, they lose bone density a lot faster. And why

William Stern:: Is that, by the way?

Dr. John Jaquish:: Hormonal changes also, I mean, nutrition,

William Stern:: It affects women disproportionately, right? Versus men, the osteo, osteo

Dr. John Jaquish:: It used to. Now men are catching up because of basically just American nutrition. It’s just garbage food, carbs.

William Stern:: Well, can you also talk about building a personal brand? I think small business owners tails, right? With Yeah, because I think small business owners, they’re starting to realize that if you have, let’s say the X3 product, right? And this is the medical device, right? Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Well, no, Osteostrong is the medical device. Osteostrong

William Stern:: Is the medical

Dr. John Jaquish:: Device. X3 is the fitness device. The

William Stern:: Fitness device, yeah. Let’s say you have an X3 fitness device, right? And we will get to his routine and his fitness and how people want to emulate that. Let me just jump

Dr. John Jaquish:: Right on. Yeah. Alright, cool. The personal brand, have you guys spoken to Hans? Anybody? Okay, so Hans

William Stern:: Kim, this is Hans Kim. This is

Dr. John Jaquish:: Hans Kim. No, no. I’m a PR guy, Hans. Sorry. So I met this young guy, I think he was maybe 22. I was at, it was a cocktail party at an Osteostrong location. I was giving a lecture about the device and other bunch of physicians there that I had to talk to them, encourage them to send their patients to the Osteostrong clinics. Hans just happened to be there. It was just, we were in, I think Raleigh, North Carolina. And so he lives there and he was like, Hey, how do you market your stuff? And I’m like, well, I really don’t. Does chief science officer of the company? And then I have some other things going on. I’m about to launch this fitness product. And he says, have you ever thought about a personal brand? And I’m like, what do you mean? What’s a personal brand? And he goes, I really didn’t know. And he says, it’s a new thing. People are going to follow you more than they’re going to follow your company. And I get that. I mean, what drove Apple to being such the juggernaut that it is Steve Jobs people were fascinated with. Every time he’d have a keynote, people who weren’t even interested in, they were kind of silly gadgets at the time. The original, does anybody remember the Newton? You remember that? It was like the original iPad? No, it was thick. It was big. Brett

Lev Itsygin:: Cardone had one. I think that’s where I heard that story. He was his first product on the Newton. Oh, interesting. It’s

Dr. John Jaquish:: Crazy. And what happened was they canned it because people didn’t get it. Then they came out with the iPhone, which was basically just a tiny Newton. And they said, once we get people used to these screens, we’ll come out with the Newton again, call it the iPad, and that’ll be like the new computer standard. So if you wonder what Apple’s trying to do, they’re basically trying to replace the personal computer with a tablet, the billions of dollars they have made through that journey. But it needed to be introduced correctly. A big part of that was the personal brand of Steve Jobs. He was fascinating because he saw the landscape of computing not evolving as it was. He wanted to take in a completely different direction. And guys like that, first of all, they’re called crazy usually. And they’re kind of fascinating to watch. And so I knew what Hans was saying. Hans has become one of my best friends, and we worked together to this day. And he’s led you to build your personal brand. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. He said, you got to have an Instagram and Facebook account for X3, the product and for Jake wish biomedical, but you have to have one for Dr. John Jaquish for you. And I was like, okay. And as we did that, it all sort of fell into place. I think one of the best things for X3, my fitness product really looks at the fact that I’m not so much selling fitness. I’m selling a lifestyle. And there was a big life lesson that I learned earlier that reinforces this. But let me first explain what I mean by that. Selling a lifestyle is in, I’m a busy executive. I’ve got all kinds of scientific work I have to do with Osteostrong. I’m talking to physicians all the time, flying all over the world. I flew, at the time, I was flying 200,000 miles a year. Yeah. I remember trips where I would go from San Francisco to Chicago to London, to Moscow, to Osaka, back to San Francisco, literally around the world. It’s actually a lot cheaper to do that. Buying all one-Way flights around the world instead of trying to make it one trip. But I was so busy and I needed something that would give me a heavy, the equivalent of a heavy weight workout, or better, as it turned out, it was better heavy weight workout. But I needed to be able to just carry it in my regular suitcase because I’m on the move all the time.

William Stern:: And that’s what led to the fitness device.

Dr. John Jaquish:: That’s what led to X3. That was the creation of X3. It was like I needed something that could turn me into at least what looked like maybe not performed completely, just because of my age, an NFL player. I wanted to be as strong as possible, but the limitations were I got to be able to fit in my suitcase.

William Stern:: This is funny. Why Do you guys know who Randy Hetrick is?

Dr. John Jaquish:: My name sounds familiar.

William Stern:: So he is a former Navy Seal, and he started this little company in San Francisco for the same reason.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Oh, TRX? Yeah, exactly. I know, I know Randy. That’s why I sound familiar.

William Stern:: So he would go on these long deployments and be on a boat, and there was nothing he could do to get his physical fitness inline. And so he developed this device, this fitness device called the TRX. And so it’s just interesting how companies are born out of utility, right? Yeah. You needed to travel solving problems.

Dr. John Jaquish:: I needed something that fit a certain description. And also when it came to, I’d rather work out at home. I don’t want to go to gyms. That’s the same way. I hate the stupid rap music that they play. The dumbbell rack has, there’s a study on this, has more microbes, bacteria, and just generally infectious disease than a public toilet seat 50,000 times more than a public toilet seat.

William Stern:: Disgusting. So does the air blade by Dyson, by the way, you ever have the, is that right? Yeah. If you ever have the opportunity to use a paper towel in a bathroom or an air blade or Oh,

Dr. John Jaquish:: Paper towel every

William Stern:: Time. Paper towel every time. Because it just moves around all the bacteria in the air, right?

Dr. John Jaquish:: It sprays it on your face

William Stern:: And spray. Yeah, dude, it’s terrible, dude.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Yeah, they did a study that shows that it actually sprays feces in your mouth. Yeah, it’s

William Stern:: Awful.

Dr. John Jaquish:: People don’t really wash their hands very well.

William Stern:: No. And then they’re going

Dr. John Jaquish:: Under this, and they put this under this sprayer that just throws the material. It is the one that you put your hands in and they used to like this, say the most gigantic hand dryer. They don’t

William Stern:: Say it anymore, take off. They don’t say anymore. Anymore. And that’s the thing with dumbbells, you have guys that are like,

Dr. John Jaquish:: Dumbbells are disgusting. They’re

William Stern:: Wiping their nose, they’re

Dr. John Jaquish:: Breathing heavy and basically spitting all over the dumbbell rack. So the whole culture just sucks. And so it’s changed. I don’t want to be in a gym, but I also we’re looking at home fitness equipment. People who have power racks at their house, they typically lose a garage stall or a room. If you’ve got a whole rack, first of all, you need a concrete floor. You can’t just throw that on the second floor of your house. Then. So I know guys in the Midwest, they park outside because they got their home gym,

William Stern:: The gym in the garage,

Dr. John Jaquish:: And sometimes it’s like 20 below zero and they got to walk. It’s like, why you even deal with that,

William Stern:: Man? So lemme ask you a question. You create this fitness device and

Dr. John Jaquish:: To solve all the problems I just described to solve

William Stern:: All the problems. So then you have this, now you’re building a personal brand. Take us through the sales and marketing. A lot of people, they’re like, oh,

Dr. John Jaquish:: A lot of it’s just lifestyle strong. I’m fit. I have a strong fit wife. We travel all the time. We’re always having a good time, and we’re keeping fit because there’s a lot of people who are all about the kind of bodybuilding lifestyle. Part of the bodybuilding lifestyle is you’re never allowed to have fun. You train. You’re not allowed to have, you can’t go out. And I mean, maybe part of that’s like a financial thing, but it’s like if you look at the lifestyle, my lifestyle is very different than those who are in the bodybuilding industry. And my question is, well, why? You made a whole bunch of decisions so that you’re working out in dirty, awful places with dirty, awful people. This is the woman working on their underwears, the awful people I’m talking about.

William Stern:: Dean loves awful people.

Dr. John Jaquish:: And there’s just also some of the lower end gyms. This is how homeless people shower. Absolutely. They get a $9 a month gym membership. So now you go into Planet Fitness and you’re literally using,

William Stern:: That’s the butt of every fitness

Dr. John Jaquish:: Industry.

William Stern:: Joke, fitness industry joke. You go into Planet Fitness. Yeah, you going to

Dr. John Jaquish:: Planet Fitness, and it’s like you’re dealing with just a sanitation, like horror show. Why deal with any of that? Just have your own X3,

William Stern:: So then you can

Dr. John Jaquish:: Put it in a drawer when you’re done because it’s tiny.

William Stern:: But how do you market that? Take us through the entrepreneur. It’s the lifestyle. Yeah. So take us through that personal,

Dr. John Jaquish:: I work out in my living room on my zebra skin rug, and they can tell it’s a living room. They can tell it’s not a gym. And so they’re kind of looking and like, ah.

William Stern:: So are you filming this and then posting it to your social media? Yeah. Okay. So people are seeing a device. They’re seeing a guy who’s in his mid forties, who’s in very good shape. And then what they’re seeing this on Instagram, on TikTok, YouTube, shorts,

Dr. John Jaquish:: All the above. All the

William Stern:: Above. And then how are you encouraging them to check out? Do you have some Shopify store? Take us through the engineering of like, I’ve got a product, I’m going to market

Dr. John Jaquish:: It. This is what I’m talking about is just viewers of social media that’s top of funnel. So they see what I got going on in my life, and then they might check out the product. They might go to the website and try and look at some of the science. And the good news is if they’re interested in that, oh, we got lots of science about variable resistance. So variable resistance, much more powerful at stimulating strength equally or more powerful at stimulating muscular size, depending on how it’s applied. And what I started off with talking about the stretch portion

William Stern:: Coming full circle on that.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Yeah, so the product was designed to make up for the shortcoming of a lot of variable resistance programming, which is not enough fatigue happening in that stretch portion. You have to fatigue that stretch portion. And so we built a protocol and made sure that we designed the product so that there’s always tension in that weaker range of motion.

William Stern:: Okay. I want to understand this because a lot of people come up with a product. This is the business side. This is the business side. We’re super interested in that. They come up with a product that’s fine and something that comes to mind and a guy who I want to introduce you to. And if you’re so willing to come back on the podcast, a friend of ours, his name is Dr. Dave Clayton. He’s for all intents and purposes a prison doctor, but he’s a prison doctor who like you, is in his mid forties in very good shape. He’s a triathlete. So he lives the lifestyle that he’s promoting, and he’s trying to start a line of vitamins of nutraceuticals, right? Supplements. Supplements to promote the type of healthy lifestyle that he leads. But I think where he’s stuck and where you are not stuck, and that’s the the Grand Canyon divide between people who have an idea and people who execute on the idea. And so he hasn’t yet been able to execute on the idea. I want to hear about it. You come up with X3 and it’s solving the problem, the resistance problem of what normally people go through when they’re working out. It solves that, but it also solves the portability aspect, which for anyone who’s an entrepreneur, they’re busy and they’re traveling. They’re not going to a city. And then 15 minutes before or an hour before a podcast, they’re going to Planet Fitness in that area to work out and then shower with the homeless people. So they’re looking for that portability. They’re looking for something that solves the physical fitness or that fills that physical fitness void that they need.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Yeah. Well, more than solves it, you’ll get better results with this than you roll with weights.

Dean Lyulkin:: But 30 years ago, this problem for the entrepreneur was solved with an infomercial, right? qvc,

William Stern:: For

Dean Lyulkin:: Example, for today, they A Body by Jake. I remember that. I’m old Beachbody Beach Body. Beach Body

William Stern:: Is another

Dean Lyulkin:: One. But fast forward to today, we’ve got direct to consumer, we’ve got Instagram, we’ve got Google. And so curious, what is your journey? How did you test these theories and how did you actually,

Dr. John Jaquish:: So each style or wording thing, however I want to approach connecting with people is measured. So every post, it’s like we look at the performance and then we look at the comments and try and figure out what did people react positively to? What did people react negatively to? If they reacted negatively, were they trolls or were they maybe asking a good question? If they’re asking a good question, maybe the next post is more like, Hey, we’ve been getting this question. Here’s the answer. And then here’s a couple studies that support how we style the product based on this research. When I wrote the book, weightlifting is a waste of time. There’s 260 peer reviewed references in that book. Nobody’s been able to poke a hole in that book. It’s absolutely solid, because I just backed up absolutely everything I said with other points of data that I didn’t come up with. It’s one of those things where you have to have science, but then a lot of people, they’ll read a scientific reference and it won’t mean much to ’em. But we also have about 40 NFL and NBA players on the website who gave us free endorsements.

William Stern:: So these are brand ambassadors or just testimonials, right?

Dr. John Jaquish:: They’re testimonials, but they’re not testimonials that were paid. These people were paid nothing. That’s important. And Terrell Owens is up there. He’s a I love T. Yeah, he’s great.

William Stern:: Do you remember his TV show?

Dr. John Jaquish:: It was so

William Stern:: Good. Yeah, it was such a good TV show. What’s that number? 81. He was the best huge T fan. Yeah. That’s very

Dr. John Jaquish:: Cool. Yeah, he’s great.

William Stern:: Great dude.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Yeah, he was a really nice person too. I think he was a little harder to deal with a few years ago when you’re the best wide receiver of all time. Yeah. Somebody asks you a stupid question and you’ll tell him it’s a stupid question. And I think he’s in a different place now, and I think he’s just great to work with.

William Stern:: You have this idea, you’ve got this personal brand that Hans led you down this path to promote, which is a departure from everything that we’re basically all the same age. We grew up on QVC direct to consumer. Late night, Chuck Norris and what was that other girl’s name? They’re working out together. She’s Australian, or I can’t remember what it was called, but it was like he would pull on this base. It lay down on a bench press. Yeah. Huh? Bowflex?

Dr. John Jaquish:: Not Bowflex. No. I see. Sliding bench.

William Stern:: It was a sliding bench. Sliding

Dr. John Jaquish:: Bench. You would

William Stern:: Pull these cables.

Dr. John Jaquish:: It was called the Total Gym.

William Stern:: The Total Gym. The Total Gym.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Was it Christie Brinkley? Yes, she was Christie Brinkley. And how the hell do I remember that?

William Stern:: I don’t know. She was smoking. She Smoke.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Haven’t seen a video of Chrissy Brinkley since I was like seven, dude. Yeah, that’s who it was. Chuck

William Stern:: S’s Christmas vacation? No, the normal vacation. Oh, the normal vacation. The original vacation. She was a Ferrari

Dr. John Jaquish:: Was 3 0 8 Ferrari? Yeah.

William Stern:: Yeah. 3 0 8. 3 0 8. Like Magnum Pi, or was that 3 28?

Dr. John Jaquish:: No, that was a 3 0 8.

William Stern:: That was a 3 0 8. Oh man. Great car. But

Dr. John Jaquish:: We can do another podcast that’s not really that great of a car.

William Stern:: Listen, when I was a kid and I was watching, it’s cool

Dr. John Jaquish:: Looking. Oh, it’s

William Stern:: Great. Absolutely. Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish:: The GGO is the great car, and it looked very similar to the 3 0 8. But

William Stern:: Dean’s a Ferrari guy. But I want to understand this. We grew up in an age where you would watch an infomercial. Then it was like, okay, cable TV became something in the nineties, right? First you have to watch late night tv. Actually first the TV shut off at night. It was like, thanks and goodnight. The TV just went black.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Literally.

William Stern:: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Seriously. It was like a screen. It was snow or it was a box with seven colored bars. Almost like a kind of, what do you call that? Paint store? Yes.

William Stern:: What

Dr. John Jaquish:: Year was that?

William Stern:: In the eighties? The TV shut off.

Dr. John Jaquish:: You talking like 81 or 79 or something? Like

William Stern:: The TV shut off. They’re like,

Dr. John Jaquish:: Well, when we got cable,

William Stern:: Okay, so

Dr. John Jaquish:: Yeah, it was when we got cable, then it was like

William Stern:: 24 hour,

Dr. John Jaquish:: And they would just show reruns. There’d be like black and white Mr. Ed episodes,

William Stern:: Right?

Dr. John Jaquish:: And

William Stern:: Remember that Love and USA and all these stuff would have these infomercials late at night. You probably want to talk about,

Dr. John Jaquish:: Remember USA up all night? I knew you were going to go there. They would say all night Night. Stalkings Elvira would.

William Stern:: Yes. Gilbert Godfrey.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Gilbert Godfrey. I actually hung out there. Elvira. She’s so cool.

William Stern:: She was a smoke show. Elvira was a smoke show. She was Silk Stockings. That was the show that I liked. Miami Vice and Silk Stocking, it was called. That’s I was It was all night.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Yeah. USA of All Night. Yeah, man. Close by Elvira. It was episodes of I think, old Twilight Zone, black and white Twilight Zones. And then she would sort of mc the whole, after

William Stern:: There was Munster, I dunno, whatever it was, then you sort got to bring this back to the small business owner. You had these products that would be like infomercials late at night, right? And it was connected to a call center because back then it was no internet, right? So you would call one 800, dah, dah, dah, sometimes

Dr. John Jaquish:: A half hour show amongst old horror programs. There’d be like a half hour where Share is talking about her skincare line. Yeah,

William Stern:: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. So you’ve got X3, you’ve got personal brand. That’s awesome, dude. We’re like from a different generation.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Look at how much the world has changed. We’re not that old.

William Stern:: No, we’re not that old. The world has changed, and it’s because of the internet. The internet has really, Jeff Besos talks about this with Lex Friedman. He’s like, I created Amazon. It’s like Amazon wouldn’t be anything if somebody hadn’t created the internet.

Dean Lyulkin:: It’s the actual infrastructure,

William Stern:: Someone, it’s ecosystem that somebody built, right? Absolutely. And that’s why I’m, he’s talking

Dean Lyulkin:: About space.

Dr. John Jaquish:: I see.

William Stern:: It was a good interview. But what I’m curious about

Dr. John Jaquish:: Darpa,

William Stern:: Well, it’s really the N, but

Dean Lyulkin:: That’s what he

William Stern:: Thinking is

Dean Lyulkin:: He was kind of thanking DARPA

Dr. John Jaquish:: For

Dean Lyulkin:: Their hard work, building the infrastructure. So he’s like, look, now I’m going to do what DARPA did. I’m going to help build this infrastructure in space so that the entrepreneurs of space will thank me.

William Stern:: But again, right in not the seventies, but in the eighties, you have infomercials. Nineties, you have infomercials. Then it’s the internet, the dawn of the internet where people can go online. You have X3, you’ve got a personal brand, but how do you come up with the idea to market it? It’s not just easy, right? You’re making it seem like it’s super simple

Dr. John Jaquish:: When you do it right? It is. But

William Stern:: Okay, well take us through the journey, because you must’ve done it wrong.

Dr. John Jaquish:: I’m about ready to go on a rant here and hit five points that you’re asking me. Awesome. So when you look at that landscape, there’s a lot of different ideas you have to try. What you have to do is figure out how to make each idea fail as quickly as possible, because then you get to learn without spending all your money. The last thing you want to do is say, well, is this going to work? Well, no. In six months, well, when do we run out of cash? Seven months. You don’t want to be in that position. So you want to find out in a day if your idea is going to work or not. So you execute on a strategy and then you put a serious amount of money for one day and see how many are conversions. Are we going to get, alright,

William Stern:: Tell us. Yeah, listen, you’re talking in these obscure generalities that only people with successful companies understand. But if you were to explain this to a seventh grader, you’d say like, okay, I’ve got an X3, it’s a fitness device. I’m going to go on Google and I’m going to put a thousand dollars in one day behind these keywords. Is that what you’re saying? And then if it works, it works.

Dr. John Jaquish:: And whatever keywords don’t work, we stop using those. But then we’ll always try new ones. But

William Stern:: Was that your journey?

Dr. John Jaquish:: Yeah, literally that really? Yeah. When we first launched the product, I was actually planning on targeting sort of the fitness community.

William Stern:: Yeah.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Dave Asprey, good friend of mine was like, oh, that’ll never

William Stern:: Work. I love that guy.

Dr. John Jaquish:: He’s great. He’s great. Yeah. I was just on his podcast. Were you really for the fourth time? Yeah.

William Stern:: In Austin

Dr. John Jaquish:: We did it virtual.

William Stern:: Oh, you did virtual. Okay. We’re going to be in, I dunno if you know Dave Asprey, but we’re going to be going to Shannon Graham, who’s another person I want to introduce you to. He’s starting a company called Astronaut, which is going to take people to space. He’s based in Austin and is close friends with Dave Asprey. But I got to get you connected.

Dr. John Jaquish:: So Dave told me a scientific argument aimed at fitness people. I don’t think you realize how, let me say it in a charitable way, how difficult those people are. You said they’re typically, they don’t have a lot of disposable income and typically not too bright. Yeah, and I mean, that’s great.

William Stern:: It’s the Mark Wahlberg movie. Do you remember that fitness movie that he did? That was a great movie.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Yeah. Pain and Gain. That’s

William Stern:: Right. Yeah. It was such a good

Dr. John Jaquish:: Movie. That was an excellent movie. Excellent. Dwayne Johnson was hilarious from that. I mean, he played a complete craze, which is really outside of what he did. Normally he does sort of family friendly roles and he was like a card core criminal in that movie he sold. Well, yeah, that’s probably my favorite Dwayne Johnson movie. He’s just like a true actor, Tom Hanks level. You watch him and you’re like, I can’t even believe Dwayne

William Stern:: Johnson is that Dwayne Johnson Real? Can’t

Dr. John Jaquish:: Do that. Wow. But just such class Act actor and Mark Wahlburg too. But Mark Wahlberg’s always been lots of different roles. But yeah, it was the audience within one day. It was like, okay, we’re pivoting because these people are never going to understand what I’m talking about. And so we pivoted. I was like, I just sat there and I looked at, I had one employee at the time. I looked at him and I said, well, what am I, because I would buy this. This is awesome. I know I’m not the only busy professional. And so Henry, the guy I’m talking to, who’s still the absolute key guy I have, he’s like, we could just target busy professionals. I’m like, okay, let’s give it a shot. And it was like day two looked like that really just sales like boom. Yeah. And

William Stern:: This is Google, PPC. You’re just typing in keywords, trying it out, looking at what

Dr. John Jaquish:: The cost per click was actually back when Facebook actually had good advertising tools. Now it’s a little more elusive on how to get to that right audience, but Google learns what your audience is and then doesn’t tell you the metrics of that audience because they don’t want you applying in other places. Oh, interesting. But it’s okay. If you’re smart enough, you can figure out that’s where you got to hire the internet advertising analysts. And so that comes later on.

William Stern:: But this is on meta, so you’re targeting busy professionals or something like that. That’s right. And they’re showing the ad for the X3 fitness device, and all of a sudden you’re getting tremendous amount of clicks.

Dr. John Jaquish:: And honestly, the time savings and the fact that you don’t have to go to a gym was the most marketable thing. And it turned out, the reason I called it X3, and I used to say triple the gains, was because there was a study, Anderson 2008 looked at Cornell athletes, two groups of Cornell athletes. One group trained with variable resistance similar to X3. Another group lifted regular weights. They both gained strength, but the amount of strength gained, the difference between the two groups was triple with the variable resistance go X3. That’s why I called it X3. We did a couple surveys of customers. Turns out almost nobody believed that claim. They just loved it. It was convenient. I mean, emotionally as an entrepreneur, it’s like, fuck, really? Yeah, I get

William Stern:: It. Yeah, I totally get it. Yeah, you

Dr. John Jaquish:: Want to be right and not rich, you want.

William Stern:: Yeah,

Dr. John Jaquish:: Exactly. Well, fortunately, I just decided to sit on my hands and not say anything like, okay, I’m not going to straighten everybody out, but I do hammer that idea that this is a superior approach. It’s easier on joints, stimulates more muscle involvement, fatigues more completely. Now you have to use it correctly. You have to do that diminishing range and have those stretch mediated repetitions at the end.

William Stern:: Can I bore you? I want to know more about this marketing thing. I’m just going to ask a million questions.

Dr. John Jaquish:: It’s great. I’m glad you’re

William Stern:: Asking. I

Dr. John Jaquish:: Get almost as many questions about how I pulled it off as about how the actual product works. And so well, this audiences about that. I’m going to tell you the best marketing lesson I ever learned.

William Stern:: It’s a good setup. This is awesome.

Dr. John Jaquish:: This is absolute solid gold. And I’ve never told this story. I love it. So when I was in undergrad, lived in my fraternity house playing rugby, my father joked, your majoring in fraternity and minoring in rugby. I was actually getting my degree in business, but I definitely took a victory lap. That’s an extra year

William Stern:: For super senior

Dr. John Jaquish:: You, gen Z people who might not know what the term means. Yeah, super senior. They called it that too. Absolutely. Yeah. So yeah, I was in no hurry to graduate and I was having a great time and just to earn a little extra money, I got a job as a greeter at Abercrombie and Fitch. So the greeter basically stands in the breezeway of the shopping mall and with no shirt on and throws a Frisbee into the store and another guy’s in the store throwing the Frisbee back to you. So the environment was like lake party, all the big beautiful photos of gorgeous in-shape, people who are barbecuing lakeside and they’re canoeing. And it was this amazing environment where you almost felt like you were outdoors when you were in this mall that had no windows, right? Because it was just such beautiful, large photography. I mean, I’m talking like 11 feet by eight and a half. Huge. And we remember, yeah,

Speaker 5: We were there. Well,

Dr. John Jaquish:: I know, but for those, I just want to paint the picture. So you wanted people to feel like they were at this lakeside party, which is why the greeter didn’t wear, I mean, I didn’t have to be shirtless, but I was in shape, so I want to be shirtless and just having a great time. And the music was almost so loud, you couldn’t even hear the customer talk

Speaker 5: About the fragrance.

Dr. John Jaquish:: We pumped the cologne through the air conditioning system. Probably poisoned us all. Yeah, absolutely. To a small degree. Do you

Speaker 5: Want an oid? No, I’m

Dr. John Jaquish:: Good. I remember when there was a marketing manager that came to visit us, and he comes into the store and he looks around and it’s like nine o’clock at night because the mall’s closing and this guy’s got sunglasses on. And so I’m like, is he hungover? What’s this guy doing? And so all the employees, it was voluntary attendance, but you want to hear from this marketing guy, I liked that job. I thought it was a really cool store. I thought it was cool that they could pretty much sell the same thing everybody else did for quadruple the price. And people were lining up outside our store, whereas Macy’s had basically the same stuff and nobody was in there. And so I was fascinated at what this guy was going to say. And so I show up at this meeting and the store managers are talking to him about, oh, we have some theft problems and things like that, and I don’t know if we’re using enough cologne in the air conditioning system or whatever, and the guy’s still got a sunglasses on. He’s sitting down. He’s just kind of like I am right now, and just sort of not giving a shit, listening. And he goes, listen, and he puts his hand out like this, and the manager was like, I remember this woman. I forgot her name, but she was super organized and she came with a couple of binders and this guy wanted nothing to do with her paperwork. He didn’t care at all. He goes here, we don’t sell clothes. And he took his sunglasses off and he looked around the room, he says, we sell a lifestyle. He put his shades back on, absolute dead silence. He gets up and walks out and people are like, they had a hundred things they wanted to discuss, and it was just the managers first and then the employees, everyone had questions. We were supposed to be there for two hours. They got left in the first five minutes and just walked out. And so it’s dead silence. And I go, that guy was awesome. And everybody looks at me and they’re like, what the hell are you talking about? He’s terrible. He didn’t help us at all. I’m like, no. He told us exactly what we need to know. We sell a lifestyle here. What do people want? Do they want to pay too much for underwear? No. They want to be a part of an experience. And the interesting thing about the people who shopped at Abercrombie and Fitch, you would talk to them, repeat customers, they love the brand, and they would start talking about their lifestyle and they would always say like, oh yeah, I threw this beach party the other day at Folsom Lake, and it’s just like you bought the clothes and then you went and did what you felt at the store. So we didn’t just sell you clothes. We actually sold you an idea of how to live your life, and these people would actually be happier. The whole experience was creating, I don’t want to say a better life, because you can say that about having Jesus in your life or whatever. So I don’t want to make it sound like too extreme, but they were having a better time. They were having a better experience all as a result. So it’s like, okay, now that I have my own product, now I have X3. I could sit in a room that has just cement walls and a prison cell and just here’s how it works. Here’s the link, and then that’d be it. Now I take that X3 everywhere in the world. I do workouts on every gorgeous beach. I’m actually headed to Bora Bora in a couple of weeks. I’m going to do all kinds of workouts in the sand, and it’s like I see my customers doing the same thing. They have much cooler lives as a result of this product. They’re in super great shape. Their partner is typically in super great shape. The guy is usually the one that makes the strength equipment buying decisions for whatever reason. But the wives are like, wait, I can do that too. Right? They see it’s effective. They can see their husband all of a sudden has a six pack. So I look at the pictures on my social media and my customers are having the same photos. It’s

William Stern:: The UGC, right? It’s the user generated contents help.

Dr. John Jaquish:: When we even talk about user generated content, that’s usually somewhat manufactured, but this is like they’re just actually living the, that I not in so many words, told them that they could live if they were free from the goddamn shitty gym.

William Stern:: You’re helping them curate the lifestyle that they want. That’s right. That’s what Abercrombie does. That’s

Dr. John Jaquish:: What they used to do. Abercrombie is, I

William Stern:: Think they’re back.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Are they? Oh, they’re back. I think they’re a shadow of what they were was

William Stern:: Like, they’re on a tear. Really. They’re on a tear. They are back.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Are they back to only hiring good looking people? Yeah,

William Stern:: Absolutely.

Dr. John Jaquish:: That was a big part of the equation.

William Stern:: Who’s going to use plus size models? No, they don’t. Who’s going to use the X3 if you’re fat, right? If you’re watching.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Oh, so interesting to bring that up. There’s a lot of really morbidly obese people who have had amazing success with X3. We pushed that too. I mean, they’re having a better lifestyle also. It’s not about working out on the beach. It’s about being able to get out of bed for the first time in six months or a year or, yeah. I mean, I did a video on YouTube where there was a woman who, I think she spent three years in bed and she started using X3, just kind of barely getting out of bed and using it. And of course, she had to change her nutrition and the massive problem, and she was healing. She was

William Stern:: Becoming better. There you go, man. Well, that’s the UGC that is going to push this product into a mass market.

Dean Lyulkin:: The best brands in the world understand this lesson that you just taught us so well, from Nike to Jeep.

Dr. John Jaquish:: How about when MP three players were new, Logitech would come out with one and they’d be like, this one has an entire gigabyte more. They were talking in tech terms.

William Stern:: Yeah, I think it was megabytes back then. Yeah,

Dr. John Jaquish:: Yeah, right. Actually, right. It was megabyte, right? The 40 megabyte iPod was like, whoa, what are you going to do with all that space? But Apple comes out with theirs. They don’t say anything about the technology. They say a thousand songs in your pocket, and instantly, every person who didn’t understand the tech terms were like, oh, I would love that. I would love to have a thousand songs in my pocket. So it’s a very similar product. What Logitech was doing, what Apple was doing, it’s all in how you present it, in what they see. Here’s another thing that I’ve always, I heard it maybe one time, and I just remember, and I repeat it all the time. People don’t buy products. They buy better versions of themselves. What is this going to do for me? If you get that 3 0 8 Ferrari, are you going to look cooler? Yeah, it might be a slow car, but it doesn’t really matter because you’re going to be Chevy Chase in that car in vacation. Yeah.

William Stern:: Well, let me ask you a question, because you’ve explained the origin of the X3. You’ve explained the marketing journey. You’ve explained very well the personal brand journey, right? Dovetailing with Hans and his help. If you could do something better today with the X3, because everybody, whatever small business owner that exists out there in the ether, they always think they’re on. You talked about doing the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, and then eventually pivoting to the right one. What’s the one stone in your shoe today? What’s the one thing that bothers you about the business, about the marketing, about the branding, about the distribution, whatever the case may be. What’s one thing where you’re like, if I could just fix this, this brand would

Dr. John Jaquish:: Be That’s an awesome question, and I’m going to give you a bizarre answer. The problem I have is I can’t find a stone in my shoe right now, and that worries me because it’s like, hmm, maybe I’m missing it. Maybe it’s there. And I’m not quite seeing, the business is growing very quickly. I mean, I have detractors, but they’re all clowns. There are people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. People make videos, x-rays a scam, and then they’ll just basically rant on how they love lifting weights and Fuck Dr. J. Yeah. It’s like, okay, how’s that a review? Oh, and there’s review videos where they don’t have the product and they never did. And it’s like, how is this a review? Unfortunately, I mean,

William Stern:: Or it’s like, it’s

Dr. John Jaquish:: Fine.

William Stern:: I don’t care about, what’s that British car, the group that we love, those British guys that review cars top gear where they purposely the grand tour. Now grand tour. Were they purposely reviewed because they beat the shit out of their cameraman, allegedly? No, I’m pretty sure he did, but

Dr. John Jaquish:: Clarkson did. Clarkson

William Stern:: Did. That’s, that’s why they had to go to Amazon. They got fired by B bbc. But more importantly, they had brought Elon Musk’s model S on, do you remember? This kind of dovetails what you’re talking about, where people wouldn’t even have the X3 or they would review the X3, but it’s broken and then say, look at what they shipped me. And they did that with Elon Musk and his car. They purposely sabotaged the review to screw Elon Musk. I don’t know if you know that.

Dr. John Jaquish:: I didn’t know

William Stern:: That. It’s very interesting. But

Dr. John Jaquish:: That

William Stern:: Happens. It does. And so

Dr. John Jaquish:: You just got to look at that and be like, yeah, they’re full of shit. Yeah,

William Stern:: But you talk about there’s no stone in the shoe. The detractors are kind of not even on the radar. They’re kind of in the peripheral, but you’re sitting in this podcast and we’re talking about this amazing product, but how do we take this brand X3 and

Dr. John Jaquish:: Make it the apple computer of

William Stern:: Exercise, the globally dominant, and I love acronyms. We haven’t heard of it. So how do you take this? We love people to know how do you take it and make this the globally dominant portable fitness device, whatever the acronym is. I

Dr. John Jaquish:: Don’t even think you need to put the caveat portable. It’s just more useful. You can do it on the beach. You can bring it with you when you go on vacation. You can do it in your backyard. Wouldn’t it be better? Do your strength training under the sun. Here’s another thing, I almost never work out inside

William Stern:: Who’s in the soil, dude.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Yeah, A lot of benefits or just I’m like poolside at some place in Vegas. That’s not like a nightclub. Pool it a day club pool. People see that and they’re like, no, no, no, I don’t do those. Those are fun, but not for bringing your workout gear. The Waldorf has a great pool area. There’s no bar there.

William Stern:: This is in Vegas,

Dr. John Jaquish:: And I do workouts with some friends that live in Vegas, and we do ’em, and it’s gorgeous. I’m by the pool, do my workout, jump in the pool, maybe drink water. I’m not a big drinker. No one who’s in shape is,

William Stern:: Hey, no vices.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Well, I didn’t say I don’t drink. I just said I don’t drink much.

William Stern:: Yeah, gotcha.

Dr. John Jaquish:: It’s back to that lifestyle. It’s like people see that and they go, if I go to Vegas, I should have one of those things, and that way I’d actually come home in better shape as opposed to worse.

William Stern:: Yeah. But going back to the distribution of this product, oh

Dr. John Jaquish:: Yeah. I did not answer your question. So this is the thing. I’m running into the problem. Maybe this is the stone of my shoe. I need to encourage people who have never exercised or even thought about exercising because there you

William Stern:: Go.

Dr. John Jaquish:: The actual, the fitness has a couple of different markets. It has the gym market, which pretty much revolves around the $9 a month client

William Stern:: That doesn’t show up

Dr. John Jaquish:: Or that shows up. I mean, there are people who do go and use Planet Fitness other than the homeless people. These are aspiring bodybuilders or people who follow the bodybuilding culture, if you want to call it that. But then there’s also probably the largest market is what I would call fake fitness. As in you get friends with Ryan, the TRX guy?

William Stern:: No.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Okay. No, good.

William Stern:: You’re not going to offend me.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Okay. I mean, people ask me about, is T Rx good? It’s 40 ways to do a shitty pull up. You could just be a man and do a fucking pull up the whole RX thing. They’re actually out of business now. They don’t exist anymore.

William Stern:: That got taken down right by Amazon. Really? So it’s like,

Dr. John Jaquish:: Well, knockoff products, knockoff

William Stern:: Products on Amazon that allowed, right? The proliferation of TRX ripoffs sucks.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Well, when your product is basically truck tie downs with handles, it’s pretty easy to copy that. And they didn’t have a lot of patent protection. I have a shit ton of patent protection. So the knockoffs that have been on Amazon and my product, I shut ’em down.

William Stern:: But going back to, I can even

Dr. John Jaquish:: Shut down. I’ve shut down seven companies in China. In China, people say, oh, you can’t do that. You, you need Chinese attorneys, which I have on retainer, and you need patents that are granted by the Chinese government, which I have.

William Stern:: But you were talking about market segments. I think this is important for small business owners.

Dr. John Jaquish:: The market segments. Fake fitness is a big market, and we want to stay away from those people. So the people who buy a cheapo product, a $35, whatever, so they can say they work out at home, but they don’t. They know it’s junk. And so it’s just like, oh, I work out at home. Yeah, yeah. No, you don’t. So that’s their purpose, and unfortunately, that’s a huge portion of the population. What I want to do is I think those people want to be fit. They don’t want to go to a gym. That’s clear, but instead of that $35 product, how about you actually get a product that’ll do something to you? And so I’m trying to see what I can do to just broaden the spectrum and get more people to want to be fit, because it’s really odd when people talk to me about fitness, they stop me at the grocery store. What do you do? How are you in such great shape? Just the fact that they would even ask the question means they’re interested.

William Stern:: Yeah, those are buying questions.

Dr. John Jaquish:: And then it’s like, but once they hear about the whole thing, it’s like, I’m honest. I tell ’em, I am pretty strict with my nutrition and my workouts. I’m experimenting with some different volume changes, but basically it’s like 10 minutes a day, six days a week, and people will actually hear that and be like, oh, that’s a lot of work. And I’m like, wow,

William Stern:: Really? We have to change their thinking. But I think one of the things that interests me about X3, if this was a pitch deck that was dropped on my desk, or I went to lunch, a country club and sat down with somebody that was pitching this, I would say, okay, well, you’ve got a lot of people who manufacture equipment in the fitness industry, and once you buy a treadmill, you’re not going to buy another treadmill. And that’s the problem that Peloton got into. And they thought they could

Dr. John Jaquish:: Just have an outrageously high subscription,

William Stern:: Well, hold on one second. You’re already anticipating where I’m going. So then they got a rowing machine, or they started with a bike, then they went to a tread, then they went to a rowing machine. Now they’re working with Amazon and they’re offering lease specials, no money down, dah, dah, dah, dah. I think the problem becomes with fitness devices is akin to what the people at Apple go through, which is if you buy an iPad, it’s going to be pretty hard to sell you another iPad. If you buy a Mac, it’s pretty hard to sell you another Mac. And so they try every year to iterate and sort of force you into compliance with buying the updated version. But when you have super expensive equipment, it’s not necessarily the easiest pill to swallow to adapt to this iterative, iterative, iterative device.

Dr. John Jaquish:: You don’t want to spend $2,000 on a desktop computer and then throw it away in two years.

William Stern:: No, you don’t want to. And so with the X3, if you were pitching me as an investor for the X3, I would be receptive if you said, well, so many people come out with fitness devices, but this is something that involves interactive videos and it’s an app on your phone and the device is connected through Bluetooth or whatever technology to the device, and so you’re getting feedback that’s then logged on your device, and then there’s a subscription

Dr. John Jaquish:: Model.

William Stern:: We just watched that. Alright, so tell me

Dr. John Jaquish:: About it. Yeah, so tell about that Force Bar. Did my staff spin you up on No, nobody spoke. That’s funny. I wasn’t even going to mention

William Stern:: That. Today I’m just Jewish and I have the mind of a champion. Okay,

Dr. John Jaquish:: So X3, the standard X3 has no data capture capability, but the newest one is called the X3 Force bar. It’s about double the price, but it captures all your data. It keeps real time data. So you can see I’m at 200 pounds at the bottom of chest press, the number climbs to 300 in the middle and then five 50 at the top, and it shows that on the phone, and then it captures the aggregate of the entire set. So sampling at multiple times per second. Therefore I can see if somebody does a crappy rep or they’re just doing this sort of thing, just wrap it out.

William Stern:: Yeah,

Dr. John Jaquish:: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean what you want is slow and controlled. You want to be able to control the resistance, the maximum muscular engagement. So you’re rewarded for going slow and controlled because it’s a higher aggregate. And so that force Bar is doing really well and that there is a subscription. There we go for that.

William Stern:: I think one of the reasons why I liked Peloton was because they gamified physical fitness. And it’s another one of the reasons why I like professional sports, even golf, which is a slow moving sport to watch is because they gamify it with a leaderboard. And so just like horse racing or dog racing, football, baseball to a lesser extent, golf with the leaderboard. I think for companies in the physical fitness sector where the foundation of the fitness device, it goes hand in hand with technology. If you gamify it, if you make it fun, if you make it competitive, if you make it, I can get an X3, X3 four, you can get an X3 four, you can get an X3 fours, and then we have, you’re going to work out at 5:00 AM but I am going to work out at eight and you’re going to work out at 6:00 PM but then there’s a leaderboard on the app where I can compete with you in a 30 day challenge. I like that. I like that a lot. It’s the competitive aspect. It’s that you can do it with other,

Dr. John Jaquish:: So we haven’t launched that feature yet, but the idea, you can put together your own groups. So everybody who’s whatever part of your golfing crew on Saturday mornings, they’re all working out throughout the week and everybody’s looking at everybody’s numbers. And if somebody skips their workout, everybody else knows it. So

William Stern:: This is funny. Right. This reminds me of Arnold Accountability. Arnold Schwarzenegger in one of the best movie documentaries, whatever you want to call it, which is Pumping Iron, if you remember that one in front of the camera. I’ve heard of it. Yeah. He’s in front of the camera and he is saying, I don’t know if he’s talking to with the guy who played the incredible Hulk

Dr. John Jaquish:: Lou Far, Lou

William Stern:: Regno, I dunno if he was talking about Lou Faro. He is like, but we’re working out, this is like 1970s or something. He’s like, we’re working out. And then afterwards we go eat a meal where I’m going with this and he’s like, I ordered a hamburger, but I just eat the meat. And then I’m seeing Lou over here eating the bun and we’re like, Lou, what are you doing? You’re eating the bun. Those carbs aren’t going to help you, bro. And I feel like that aspect, the competition, yes, that aspect of competition amongst especially men but also women, very competitive human beings, but men specifically in this segment, we don’t want a device just to work out. We want a device to brag about. We want a device to compete with, we want a leaderboard, we want to shame our friends. There’s a little bit of shain freuder syndrome, if you’re familiar with that term in German, where it’s like you want to see people not do one

Dr. John Jaquish:: Pain.

William Stern:: Yeah, there’s a little bit of that. And I think for people who are building fitness devices or any type of device in the fitness industry, the basis of that device needs to have a large technological component, but it can’t skip the competitive sort of, we’re not hunter-gatherers anymore. We’re a community. And so having a leaderboard with your community in mind, the group you were talking about. Well,

Dr. John Jaquish:: So I was just talking about this on another podcast. Oh fuck no, you guys are cooler. There’s such a, one of the tough things when I launched Osteostrong was there’s nothing that makes you look physically better about having higher bone density. But what we noticed is as people built their bone density, they became very talented at muscle engagement, which is for postmenopausal females, you think they wouldn’t care. But We noticed that people who are slightly kyphotic, almost immediately within weeks, their shoulders would be pulled back. And I don’t mean they were walking around. People think posture is a conscious thing. No, it’s a subconscious thing. Basically based on the 10 seg balancing between the pectorals, the trapezius muscles, just general conditioning of musculature throughout the upper and lower body, like your abs, your quadras muscles, your oblique muscles all play in how you stand. Well, these became much more activated and postural their postural changes. And once Osteostrong started talking about how everybody ends up looking younger because they have improved posture, everybody showed up. You got to have, health isn’t enough. Health isn’t something you see, health isn’t going to make you a more interesting person at the garden party. And I’m just thinking specifically about that population. But you got to have a vanity component, otherwise people aren’t going to stick with it.

William Stern:: And that’s the competitive edge, the vanity component. It’s a callback to what you said earlier about CrossFit. You see somebody who does CrossFit and you’re like, what? You do CrossFit? And you’re like,

Dr. John Jaquish:: I would never know you worked out

William Stern:: And you know what? Those shitty pullups that you’re doing, those ki up or whatever, as you can see, let me count

Dr. John Jaquish:: For you. Zero.

William Stern:: Zero, right?

Dr. John Jaquish:: Zero. Yeah.

William Stern:: Yeah. I think like you said, when people stop you at the grocery store and they see what you look like and they’re like, what do you do? We want to emulate what success is, right? We see a version of ourselves in you. And so with this device, that’s it. The X3 force, I’m going to buy it because I want to get strong, but I also want to look strong. And then I also want to look stronger than you, and then you are going to buy it and

Dr. John Jaquish:: Do it. The next thing I was going to say is when you first start working out, you just want to look better in a T-shirt, but over time you really just want to look better than everybody else. Yes. Yeah. You want to be the guy at the barbecue that everybody’s like, wow, that guy works out. Look at that guy. But that’s what everybody wants to be that guy,

William Stern:: But that’s what innovation is, right? And this is not like an infomercial to pick people up or anything, but that’s what innovation is. And we’ve talked about Apple and how the computer was this big in the fifties and then it got smaller and smaller and smaller. And then you said a

Dr. John Jaquish:: Thousand. You see the size of this room in the sixties for punch cards.

William Stern:: Exactly right. And then you’re like, well now it’s a thousand songs in your pocket. And so it’s iteration, it’s the evolution, but it’s becoming a better version of not only ourselves but our peers and then our peers see it and they want to be a better version of themselves. So it’s like a vanity component, but it creates a better community. And that’s the uplifting part, right? About the X3 fours.

Dean Lyulkin:: Identifying as part of the community is just as important.

William Stern:: Explain what you mean by that.

Dean Lyulkin:: I just mean that people who buy a Jeep want to identify as being outdoorsy, as being adventurous. And so the car represents a whole lot more than just four wheels.

William Stern:: The Ford Raptor, I want to look like a certain way. I never take my truck offroading, but I want to look like that.

Dean Lyulkin:: And so they’re returning to become a Jeep customer multiple times because they want to identify with that community. They

Dr. John Jaquish:: Got their own wave and feel.

Dean Lyulkin:: Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. John Jaquish:: I would show you what it is, but I don’t want to show the people who don’t have Jeeps.

William Stern:: Yeah,

Dean Lyulkin:: Very important.

William Stern:: That’s a great example. It’s the belonging to a community. And so with the X3 or the X3 force, what’s the future of that? And we can end on this note, but what’s the future of the X3 force, the next iteration? Take me through another collaboration project that you might have in mind. I’m just interested, where can we see this device in the next 24 months? What is it going to look like?

Dr. John Jaquish:: You’re going to see it a lot of different places. It’s going to quantify a lot of people’s strength. Professional athletes are using it to quantify strength without risk. The whole combine. Test 2 25. How many times can you lift 2 25? Yeah. Why did they pick 2 25? You know why? No, I don’t.

William Stern:: Why?

Dr. John Jaquish:: Because it’s a fucking weak ass number and anybody can hit it a bunch of times. Yeah. I mean they’re not going to have a 4 0 5 test have torn pecs and triceps. No, I think it’s really funny. I think it’s something like less than 2% of people can bench 2 25,

Dean Lyulkin:: But it would be less than 2%, which

Dr. John Jaquish:: Is part of why I wrote the book. Weightlifting is a waste of time. There’s very few people who can actually lift serious weight, and it is genetics. Variable resistance fixes those problems. I talk about that in my TED Talk. So basically everybody can gain muscle like an NFL player because they, they’re completely bypassing the genetic inefficiencies of their tendon attachments that the NFL players are not limited by.

William Stern:: So what about this device in a health system like a Cigna, a Kaiser,

Dr. John Jaquish:: Okay. Because we can capture the data and it’s portable and it’s very replicable with all kinds of different populations. We should

William Stern:: Be selling this to clinics.

Dr. John Jaquish:: We’re going in that direction. Yeah. Yeah. I’m not trying to just be the best workout device and now the coolest ads, this actually produces data that’s going to change health.

William Stern:: And that’s the thing, you were looking at market segments earlier. You’re like, well, we’ve got all these gym bros. Then we’ve got people that abide devices and not use it, but say that they do at Big Five or one of these stores they sell Yeah,

Dr. John Jaquish:: Fake fitness. That’s fake fitness. That’s

William Stern:: Fake fitness, right?

Dr. John Jaquish:: The little tiny put your feet on. Yeah. People are like, oh, I’m going to get in shape. And it’s like, that’s not going to do anything. Or these

William Stern:: Women, I don’t know if you’ve seen it lately, it’s like they’re in a strip mall and they’re on some sort of device that makes their feet bounce and then they’re tied to A TRX and they’re just bouncing to music. Listen, you talked about market segments. Let me reel it back in. You talked about the fitness bros who have no money. You talked about the fake fitness people that have the devices that don’t use it. Then you’re identifying people like me and you who want a portable device that not only increases longevity and bone density, but also helps us with the vanity component. But I think one of the things that, and I think we just touched upon it, but it’s logging information and that information is vital. And that information then takes their

Dr. John Jaquish:: Think about when I, so sports performance studies are typically limited by budget. Most people don’t care. And I mean certainly pharmaceutical companies don’t care. Federal government doesn’t care. So they’re typically self-funded, which means the university just gives ’em just enough money to scrape by and have a 12 person control group and a 15 person trial group sounds

William Stern:: Like our food pyramid in the 1970s, right?

Dr. John Jaquish:: Well, it’s like there just aren’t budgets there to do pharma level studies. However, I’ve got a connected device that’s pretty inexpensive that is going to the broad population and is collecting all kinds of strength data. I can sort that however I want. At some point I’ll have sample sizes of hundreds of thousands of people and the publishing based on that world changing. It’s not all these other sports performance studies. They suffer typically all the same problem. Very small sample sizes. And you question, well, who was picked

William Stern:: Usually

Dr. John Jaquish:: People who volunteered, who volunteered, people who are interested in strength training, who’s interested in strength training people. It’s already working for

William Stern:: Athletes,

Dr. John Jaquish:: Right? So the fact that most fitness doesn’t work for, I say 99% of the population, it might even be more than that kind of ignored by sports performance studies. The first reference in my book, yeah, 2008.

William Stern:: This like a peer study.

Dr. John Jaquish:: So peer reviewed research where they talk about how 23% of people, no matter what they do with weights, cannot stimulate muscle protein synthesis at all. 23%.

William Stern:: It’s just a waste of their time.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Yeah, absolutely. A waste of their time. That’s

William Stern:: The name of the book.

Dr. John Jaquish:: That’s why it’s the first reference in the book way living is a waste of time. Now there’s another huge portion of the population that no matter what they do, they’ll get a little bit sort of the beginner gains when you first start lifting, you put on maybe 10 pounds of muscle and then nothing for years after that. Interesting. And this is going to solve all those problems.

William Stern:: Well, listen, if you asked me where I think this device could be in the next 24 or 36 months, I would say what you pay attention to determines what you miss. If that makes sense. Yeah. And so many business owners are out there and they’re looking at, alright, I’m going to sell this product to a demographic that matches in my head who would use this device? I’m going to put my coffee shop in this area because I think this, I’m going to make a pizza restaurant in this area because it’s missing a pizza restaurant. I think with physical fitness, the normal, and this is the problem that Peloton and so many of these other companies get themselves into, they dig themselves their own grave. They think they’re only going to sell this device to people that are interested in fitness or people who, like you said, buy a device and then end up using it to hang their clothes on in their study. For me,

Dr. John Jaquish:: You need to get people who are just not

William Stern:: That are just not. And so if I was an investor in X3 four, if you asked me to put in money, this is what I would push you to do. I want that device given out for free in the San Diego Unified School District. I want 20 of these devices in one campus and I want us challenging kids to do it. I want it in clinics and in hospital groups and health groups. I want it everywhere where you wouldn’t think this device should be. That’s where I want it at. And that’s what I would do. And like you said, business is about, it’s about trial and airing and then figuring out not putting the round peg in a square hole or the square peg in a round hole. It’s about quickly trying a number of different things, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. Then doubling down on what does, but again, it come back to my theory about business. It’s what you pay attention to determines what you miss. I think for a device like this, especially for the X3 force, the connected device that’s logging data, it’s like the subscription model. The data’s coming on your phone, the leaderboard, the health groups, the physicians getting behind it, the clinics, the health systems, but then getting it into the schools, because I think it dovetails with the upside down food pyramid. We need to get kids early on. They’re learning to use their iPads at three, but they’re also learning to eat chicken nuggets and french fries.

Dr. John Jaquish:: And they’re not learning how to do a pushup

William Stern:: Ever. No, but I remember when we were kids, all three of us, Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor of California and there was a physical fitness test that you would do in middle school and it was running and sit and reach and all this. And they’re logging all this data and then they’re giving you award. Maybe it was the presidential athletic award or something. So

Dr. John Jaquish:: Arnold was for the first Bush administration as in

William Stern:: The early nineties. HW

Dr. John Jaquish:: Bush.

William Stern:: Right,

Dr. John Jaquish:: Right, right. Yeah. He was sort of the chairman of physical fitness education

William Stern:: Or something. Maybe that’s what it was.

Dr. John Jaquish:: And so

William Stern:: It was like the presidential physical

Dr. John Jaquish:: Fitness award. Presidential physical fitness or something. Yeah. And there was a test. Perfect.

William Stern:: Put the X3 fours in there. Gone.

Dr. John Jaquish:: No more tests. Oh, there’s no more

William Stern:: Test. But I want the X3 inside the Oval Office, and I’m talking about this is the new product that we’re going to use to,

Dr. John Jaquish:: That is where it will go. I mean, there’d be a lot of people, I have to twist their arm to get ’em to do that, but it’s okay.

William Stern:: Let’s do people go to learn about it.

Dr. John Jaquish:: Oh yeah.

William Stern:: Plug, sorry. Plug your website, plug your socials and we can end it there.

Dr. John Jaquish:: My website is dr j.com. D-O-C-T-O-R, the letter j.com. There’s links to all my social I do the most on Instagram.

William Stern:: What’s your handle?

Dr. John Jaquish:: It’s Dr. Jaquish, D-R-J-A-Q-U-I-S-H. But there’s a link on dr j.com because people have trouble with my last name.

William Stern:: Yeah, we’re good. Yeah, that was fun. Thank

Dr. John Jaquish:: You. Great, guys. I

William Stern:: Appreciate it, Dr. J. We’ll see you guys next time. Adios.