After 25 years of being “Superman on the outside but a train wreck on the inside,” John A. Mollenhauer has discovered the missing piece between high achievement and sustainable health.
John is an entrepreneur who started his first gym at 19 and worked with Tony Robbins in his 20s—he learned the hard way that our culture rewards the very behaviors that lead to burnout.
In this episode, John reveals how he developed the Performance Lifestyle framework after checking himself into a hospital from complete exhaustion. His method isn’t about work-life balance—it’s about knowing what to do, why, how, and when at the right intensity for sustainable results in both health and achievement.
This conversation offers a practical pathway to break free from the hidden lifestyle challenges keeping you stuck in the energy-debt cycle.
Table of Contents
In this podcast, John and I discuss:
- Why “managing your energy” is impossible if you haven’t first generated enough energy to manage!
- His opinion on caffeine and how it’s “messing up your gauge” and preventing you from knowing your true energy levels
- How John went from a 250-pound bodybuilder to losing 100 pounds after discovering natural hygiene principles
- The difference between default living, fitness, health advice, biohacking, and an actual Performance Lifestyle
- Why John coaches elite NFL players to “enter slugville” before training camp
- The counter-intuitive truth: “recharging the body feels like tiredness” and why you must embrace it
- How John discovered red light therapy after nothing else fixed his back pain and why it’s now his center’s most requested treatment
- How to escape “performance addiction,” the only addiction you get paid and rewarded for, despite its devastating health effects
- The critical difference between “who you think you are” versus “what you are,” and why it’s the key to sustainable energy
- Why comparison to others creates an energy-draining psychological cycle that’s nearly impossible to escape
- Why most people’s nighttime routines fail: they “Netflix themselves, alcohol themselves, and Ambien themselves” to buffer exhaustion
- How the original definition of “work-life” balance misses the point completely, and what balance really means
- The timeline of lifestyle transformation: 20 minutes to grasp the concept, 12 months to break ground, 3 years to master it
- The final message that could change everything: “You don’t need permission to take care of yourself”
Listen or download on iTunes
Listen outside iTunes
Transcript
Ari Whitten: “JAM,” welcome to the show, such a pleasure to have you.
John Allen Mollenhauer: Ari, I could not be more excited to be here with you. I love this podcast, been living and learning from it since its inception, so it’s exciting. I’m really excited to be talking with you.
Ari: Yes, likewise, and we’ve been talking for a long time. I think I can actually vividly remember our first conversation that we had on the phone. I think we were introduced by a mutual friend, and the first conversation I remember having with you on my driveway of my house in Del Mar, right before my son was born, or maybe right after he was born, so that puts us at like eight and a half years ago.
John: Yes, it’s eight and a half years. Actually, I was fasting. I was on a two-week fast-
Ari: Wow.
John: -in Southern California, and I remember the conversation. I think it was Sean Phillips who introduced us.
Ari: Right. Yes. You’ve been in this game for a long time, talking about energy, talking about performance optimization, and tell us a little bit of background of how you got into this, and I’d love to also hear about the evolution of your thinking and of your work over time, over maybe since its inception and through the maybe last eight and a half years since we first spoke.
John’s story
John: Great, great. Well, look, I’ll set a little stage because my story, to really have my story make any sense, it actually started in my teens. I was a three-sport player: football, wrestling, baseball. I’ve always been a very enterprising guy. In high school, I had a landscaping company with a buddy of mine, things that teenagers do. We were responsible for probably 20, 25 properties a week because we wanted to make money. Nobody was talking about energy back then.
It was all like “from the neck up” psychology. If anything was wrong and you said you were tired or you were falling asleep in the seventh period, no one even thought, other than “Just go get some more sleep,” the subject of energy was a non-starter, right? By the time I was about 17 years old, and I’m getting ready to go to college, I was exhausted all the time. Three sports, taking care of all this work, schoolwork, just the natural arc of growing up. I didn’t think anything much of it.
I just figured, “Okay, I’m working hard.” That was probably true at that time. Then, by the time I was 19, I bought my first gym. I mortgaged my parents’ house. I bought the gym that I trained up in. I was a bodybuilder. I was always living a very fully engaged life. I remember when my friends were getting out of college, and they’re coming back, and they’re roughly 21 years old. They’re like, “Hey, John, man, you’ve been at this for a long time, been enterprising for so long. You’ve started so many businesses, how about you do this with me?”
They’re just getting ready to get started, and I’m having a midlife crisis because I had been, really, working so hard for so long at that point. It had been almost a decade by the time I was 21. I’m in college, I’m running a gym that’s open 19 hours a day. I still have the landscaping business, and I’m experiencing all these symptoms. This was where I turned to personal development because, again, it was all from the neck up. Nobody was talking about recovery. Rejuvenation was not a topic. “Just get more sleep” was really the only answer.
I’m sure you probably remember those times quite well. The idea of stopping was just so foreign to anybody. I literally remember I was working for Tony Robbins at the time, there was like this interim period for about two to three years between 21 and 24, where I was running around the country. I just sold my gym. I put college on hold. I’m running around with Tony Robbins, and I meet up with him out in Del Mar. You know a little bit about Tony’s persona.
Ari: Oh, it’s interesting that Del Mar has now come up twice in this conversation. You’re talking about being there, I think, many, many years before I was. I think I know exactly where his old house used to be there.
John: Yes, the castle. Back in those days, you just kept going. Robbins just wired me up even more because his whole persona was just so large. It was such a huge shoe to step into. When you worked with the Robbins organization, you almost felt you had to be like Tony. That just kept this whole wind-up going. Then the internet hits. I’m making a very long story very short. Then the internet hits, and being the natural entrepreneur that I am, now I’m engaged in internet startups, and slowly but surely, I’m starting to unravel. I’m very reactive.
I would get very angry. I was very short. The gap between what I was projecting myself to be and how I actually felt on the inside were two very different things. Still, at this point, we’re talking ’95, right? ’95 to 2000. The conversation of energy still wasn’t there. Now I had been lifting the lid on it a great deal, but I didn’t really know what to do with it. I just kept on pressing on, the whole “keep on keeping on” thing from one venture to the next to the next.
I remember taking a break in corporate America, and I literally could not believe that they paid me to do what they paid me to do, because you know the life of an entrepreneur. It’s pretty relentless on your time, on your energy. It’s just one thing to the next. You’re almost working all the time, and you take breaks out.
Ari: No question.
John: You take breaks out for everything else. Otherwise, you’re working all the time, especially in our business, where we’re being creative. You’re thinking through the next thing and processing what you just learned. There’s a lot of demand on our time. There’s a lot of demand on our energy. I remember taking a break from corporate America for a three-year period, and I was selling high-tech solutions to Fortune 1000 companies. I woke up in the morning, and I went to work till like six o’clock.
Then I stopped, and I went home and had nothing to worry about. I took a 30-days vacation every year. There was a two to three-year time period in there where I really thought I had my problem licked. Really, all that had happened was that I got a huge break. I stopped the engine. The machine had quieted down. All I had to do was perform one function. I’m not saying it wasn’t hard work. Corporate America is a lot of work. You left the business. I thought I had the problem licked.
I had always been very much into transformation and coaching. That was really when I got the wake-up call. That was, I started an idea. If you go all the way back to the days of Tony Robbins, I remember being in Hawaii in 1988-’89. I’m sitting on a shoreline, and Tony’s doing phobias and getting people to jump into the water. I remember having this thought in my mind. I’m going, “Wow, personal development. It’s like it never ends. There’s no defined principles. There’s no defined practices.”
You see some repeating patterns, but it’s just a never-ending gravy train of learning more, because you can never, never stop developing personally. I thought to myself, “But I can’t keep up with this, okay?” I thought to myself, “There’s got to be a big idea, something, some middle layer that’s just not being talked about.” That’s when I got very lifestyle-focused. Now, I wasn’t calling it a performance lifestyle back then. I just knew I started where everybody else starts: your goals, and then you try to stay fit, and then you dial it back to eating, and then you dial it back to sleep, and you sort of keep peeling that onion back.
It took me literally 25 years to develop a fully integrated lifestyle, to give rise to a new lifestyle, which is called the performance lifestyle. That was an idea that I learned in elite athletics to help athletes sustain their training and win in their sport, because once the support was not there, they would start to tire out, burn out, and wear out. They wouldn’t function and train as well, and they wouldn’t be as on in their sport. It would take me about 25 years to develop that concept.
The third part of this story goes something like this. I’m in. I’m going from business to business to business. I will tell you that in my mid-20s, most of my 30s, and in my early 40s, as an entrepreneur on the inside, this is, by the way, the reason why I have a 7-year-old at 56 and an 18-year-old, because I had kids late, because in my 20s and 30s, I really just didn’t feel that good. Again, Superman on the outside; on the inside, just a train wreck.
There’s a saying in the coaching field that a lot of coaches get into coaching because they’re really trying to resolve their own situation. That was true for me as well. I kept peeling this onion back. I had read a book. Do you remember the book called The Powerful Engagement?
Ari: Yes, absolutely. That was a very influential book for me as well.
John: Huge book, because, well, that book changed the paradigm, right? That was the first time anybody started really talking about energy. I really took that book to heart. There were some things. I come from an engineer father and a home economist as a mother. That’s quite a challenging combination of influences because dad was always trying to look for, “How do we create the perfect system?” Mom was always trying to do more with less or optimize. I grew up with a little bit of that in my blood.
I read that whole book, and I was like, “Wow, this book is groundbreaking. It’s not yet fully in context for people to really apply it in their life.” There was a lot of really good tactics in there, and I could not be more appreciative of them. I’m very close LinkedIn-wise with the authors of that book.
Ari: I saw Tony Schwartz, and who was the other author?
John: Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr.
Ari: Yes, that’s right. The context of that, I think, if I remember correctly, was more for business people, more than anything. It was like how to manage your productivity, your energy/productivity in the context of work and career, more than anything.
John: That’s right. The concept of the book was the corporate athlete. In corporate America, there’s a lot of natural supports built in, right? In the entrepreneurial professional world, you have to build your own supports, right? You’re not stepping into a working system. You have to build all those supports yourself, but it was, it was geared more towards the corporate athlete. It was very tactical, but didn’t really get into a lot of the underlying principles. I’m like, “Okay, man, thanks for the layup, because that’s going to be my work.”
I’m going to say, “How do I manage my energy like a pro, right?” Because I had one fundamental question, which was, “How do I live this hard-charging life that I’ve been called to, but not tire out, burn out, and wear out and sacrifice my health for success?” That was the fundamental question that I’ve been asking my entire career. That’s really addressing the age-old dilemma of “How do you stay healthy and successful at the same time?”
Right? We’ve both seen, there’s a lot of very successful people who just have sacrificed their health every which way to Sunday, and there’s a lot of super obsessively healthy people who can’t rub two nickels together, because they don’t want to burn out, right? They don’t want to tire out, they want to wake up and biohack all day. How do you do both? That’s when I really saw the context of healthy performance really resulted in lifestyle success, right? What were the fundamentals of energy, health, and performance?
How did that translate into a lifestyle where you had a broad enough spectrum of knowledge of the principles, but a broad enough spectrum of skills? That’s, by the way, the context in which I use the term ‘balance,’ right? I don’t use balance for our conversation, our listeners. I don’t use– It’s a useful concept to talk about work-life balance and balance between this and that. Really, it’s this new definition of balance that I came up with over time, which was knowing what to do and why, how to do it, and when at the right level, the right intensity, and the right consistency for you to produce a result, right?
That’s a formula. Behind that, you have to have a really good understanding of lifestyle fundamentals, because nobody does this perfect, and you don’t always have the perfect situation and circumstances, but you have to get your needs met. That’s what I ultimately realized was the answer to my question, right? If I don’t have an hour to work out, working out for one minute is still going to work, okay? What were those fundamentals, and how do I address this issue around energy? By the way, that’s where you really entered the equation. Because I remember in 2016 when you– I think it was 2016, right? When did the Energy Blueprint come out, about 2016?
Ari: That’s right.
John: Right. I interviewed you once at that time because I bought a couple of subscriptions to the Energy Blueprint, and I had done so much work because I had come from the Natural Hygiene Movement, and a lot of the principles, have you heard of natural hygiene?
Ari: I don’t think I know what you’re talking about, no.
John: Well, natural hygiene, it’s a whole lineage of health luminaries. Tony Robbins came out of there. Joel Fuhrman came out of there. T. Colin Campbell came out of there.
Ari: Just before we got on this call, I was spending an hour with Joel Fuhrman, actually.
John: Oh, fantastic. I actually met him at the American Natural Hygiene Society in Georgetown in– It probably would have been, oh, God, 1988, right between 1988 and 1990. I was this big, burly bodybuilder. I was about 250 pounds. I had just placed third in the midst of New Jersey. I’m sitting in my gym, and I get this rag reporter. I don’t know how it made its way into my gym. It was all on health principles. I’m literally reading this, going, “I can’t even believe my own eyes and what I’m reading.”
I was really turned on by it. Within one year, I had sold my gym, and I was at the American Natural Hygiene Society. Within about a year and a half, I lost about 100 pounds. I went to 150 pounds because my body rebuilt, because I was eating all these natural foods. That was like an early foray into biohacking, right? That’s where I met Joel Fuhrman. It’s now called the National Health Association, today. What it was, it was– and this was sort of a precursor to today’s performance lifestyle, there was a book called The Natural Hygiene Handbook, and it really got into health principles.
It was sunlight plus oxygen plus nutrient-rich foods plus sleep plus exercise. It started connecting all these dots. For the first time, I could really see, “Wow, this is the start of a lifestyle.” I was just working out real hard and staying up to all hours of the night and working my tail off and just basically working out. I thought that eating the standard bodybuilder’s diet was the healthiest diet in the world, right? You know that world doesn’t even get into the subject of energy, right?
The original biohackers
Ari: Yes, it doesn’t. On the other hand, I will say that bodybuilders, starting back in the ’60s, ’70s, are essentially the original biohackers, decades before-
John: We are.
Ari: -the term ‘biohacking’ was created, and that was my world growing up, too. I didn’t do it competitively as an adult, but I grew up sort of in the bodybuilding community. I never did steroids, thankfully. I wanted to many times. My older brother dissuaded me every time I was tempted to do it, thankfully. Nevertheless, I was sort of raised in that culture of experimenting with the body. One of the things that I’ve found as I’ve done a podcast for I don’t know how many years now, seven, eight years or something like that.
I’ve interviewed 500 people, health experts of all types, and had many hundreds of conversations with health experts outside of this and read so many hundreds of books on health, is there is a fundamental difference, I found, between– and this really doesn’t get enough attention, but there’s a fundamental difference between people who understand human physiology and human health just because of sitting in a classroom and getting classroom lessons on stuff-
John: I know where you’re going.
Ari: -versus people who have a background as an athlete and in fitness, and in bodybuilding-
John: I agree 100%.
Ari: -that actually experimenting with the human body and understanding the maleability of the human body. It’s fundamentally different types of understanding. I don’t want to be mean, but in general, I find that there’s such big holes and blind spots in the thinking of people who only understand human health from a classroom setting or a clinical setting or a setting where you’re diagnosing pathology and doing treatments. If you don’t have the background in actually understanding performance and health and experimenting with the body, it’s like a black hole in your knowledge and understanding of health.
John: No question. No question. Yes, if you think about the text I sent you about three weeks ago, like even in PBM, like photobiomodulation and red light therapy, there’s researchers, and there’s academics, and there’s clinicians. The clinician sees thousands of people coming in and out in a given year, and it’s a different knowledge body than what the researcher is going to have [crosstalk]
Ari: Totally.
John: They all work together, and I think they inform each other, but I completely agree with your whole take on that. Being a bodybuilder, you throw yourself into the annals of physiology, even before you know physiology, right? You’re like, “What does it do to take your diet to that extreme? What does it feel like? What does the body go through, what are the aftereffects?” To touch on your earlier point, it’s a very periodized lifestyle because everything is oriented around your training. I think, to your point, it was a great experience, and you probably had a similar experience. It was a great experience of being all in on something, to be all in on an outcome.
Even though we didn’t quite– we just called it the bodybuilder’s lifestyle, I guess, back then, but you were all in on lifestyle. Everything counted: how much sleep you got, how much you ate, how much you trained, what you did on what day. There was a regimentation about it that was just invaluable experience. I’ve told many people today that part of the reason why I probably gravitated to actually getting in and giving rise to a new lifestyle that was hopefully a lot healthier than bodybuilding was because of that experience.
I don’t know if you recall when there was a time period after competition stopped for me, where I was just looking for “What’s next? What am I going to be all in on?” When you didn’t have competition in bodybuilding, you needed something. Anyway, that was, that was part of my early story as well. You really do, really get an understanding of where the rubber hits the road because you’re literally using your body as a living lab, and you experience a heck of a lot.
Ari: Absolutely. Talk to me about sort of the original conception of a high-performance lifestyle and how that concept has evolved over the last decade or two.
John: Well, one of the reasons why I had a lot of difficulty in stopping, I’m going to tell you what the performance lifestyle for me was, the antithesis of, okay? When I went through this experience, I connected it in to the broader experience of just how our culture really works. Around 2007, I was getting to that peak. If you refer back to the earlier part of our story, I was really starting to experience symptoms that were just not healthy. Even though I knew how to eat and I knew how to exercise and I knew how to do all these other things, I literally could not stop myself, and I couldn’t get the rest.
My eyes were tearing, and I could just feel my body breaking down. Really, I sought out a book. I was just starting to develop the whole idea of performance lifestyle at the time. I did a search on human performance, and I found this book called Performance Addiction. It was written by a Harvard psychologist. His name’s Arthur Ciaramicoli. I literally at the time checked myself into Overlook Hospital in New Jersey because I literally needed to stop. The only way I could get myself to do it was to check myself into a hospital.
Because I was experiencing just anxiety, and my heart was racing, and I just didn’t have enough energy to meet my day. I read this book, and at the end I called him up and I said, “Doctor,” I ended up calling him Dr. C. I said, “Dr. C, your book utterly changed my life, because I used to just call it ‘it.'” By the way, this is an ‘it’ that you have referenced many times since I’ve heard you through the podcast a lot.
Performance addiction
That is like, what would you think performance addiction is?
Ari: You’re asking me, “What would I think?”
John: Yes, I’m asking you, what would you think performance addiction is?
Ari: Well, I think you’re probably going to get at the classic Type A perfectionistic sort of personality traits, I would guess.
John: Yes. All that is somewhat wrapped into it, but the performance addiction, a lot of people will think off the bat that it’s this addicted to performance, this frenetic, “I always have to be on,” like you’re saying, the perfectionistic approach. Oh, everything to the 9s, it almost becomes like a persona. I had gotten my experience of trying to do that, especially in the world of transformation. In the early days, you think you have to be someone that you don’t feel like being in that moment, right?
You feel like you have to be always on, but performance addiction was actually– I’m waiting to see the expression on your face. It’s comparing yourself to other people. It’s not being able to run your own race. It’s somebody else’s racing a little bit faster, is in a little better shape, is having a better go at things, and you compare yourself to them. Because of that story of comparison, you literally cannot stop yourself. You have to keep going. You can’t just be.
You have to always be accomplishing or achieving something to get where you want to go, because you start to achieve goals for the wrong reasons. It’s more about how you look, wanting to be loved, wanting to get success, wanting respect, wanting all these different things. It just drives you incessantly. It is a hellacious way of life.
Ari: Or it ends badly and actually results in burnout and exhaustion. I’ve seen people with that kind of psychology that you’re describing just sort of give up, like opt out in a way, because it becomes unsustainable to continue that, for many people.
John: It becomes extremely unsustainable. I remember going to– I don’t know if you ever heard of Newport, Rhode Island, where they have all the mansions.
Ari: Yes.
John: It had gotten so bad for me at one point. I remember walking into Vanderbilt’s house, going, “God, this guy was worth $250 million, and he built this big house. I don’t have that,” right? [crosstalk] It really got bad. It plays with you because you’re grounded in your psychology. Psychology is your brain’s problem-solving machine. It wants to compare yourself. There’s a natural, healthy level of comparison that goes on, right? You might see something from somebody else and say, “Wow, that’s really nice that they have that. Wow, I’d love to have that in my life.” That’s a healthy level of comparison. It can get really bad.
Ari: Yes, I was just going to say, in an evolutionary context, this kind of social comparison obviously served an important role, and it maybe was reasonable to compare, as a young male, let’s say, maybe it was reasonable to compare yourself to the couple dozen other young males in your tribe. We live in a different era where we still have brains that are programmed that way, but the reality is now we’re comparing ourselves to billions of other people.
The simple fact is, no matter how strong you are, let’s say you’re a bodybuilder, let’s say you’re a powerlifter, let’s say you’re an entrepreneur, let’s say you’re a wealthy person, let’s say you’re Bill Gates or an Elon Musk or whatever, or you own Amazon or Alibaba, or let’s say you have 10 mansions, in different places in the world worth $100 million, no matter how much you play any of any game you want to play in life, no matter how beautiful you are as a young woman, or how big your boobs are, whatever it is that you’re playing, there’s always someone out there that you have access to now via the internet that’s better.
John: That’s doing it better.
[laughter]
Ari: Pretty much, there’s always somebody who’s better than you out there somewhere at something.
John: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
Ari: And probably lots of people.
John: And then adding social media and then and just the natural tribal effect of people and how social comparison can really go awry. I know. I’ve heard you talk about this many times as well. You know, in terms of taking care of yourself, your body, and your life, it’s a killer. It is just a deal-breaker, because you literally cannot stop. Performance addiction, when I first discovered I was like, “Oh my God, that’s it.” Fast forward three years, I had called him up, and I ended up writing the sequel to that book with him and Phil Simms from the Giants, called The Curse of the Capable.
Performance lifestyle for me took a more therapeutic angle, even though it was born in elite athletics, and there’s the whole sports for the soul side of things. For me, it was more of a therapeutic thing, really understanding human performance, how it converted to a lifestyle, because what can human performance ultimately translate to? It’s either going to be an addiction or it’s going to be a lifestyle, right? I wanted to understand what those fundamentals were.
I always refer to a performance lifestyle, which has a bunch of aliases. It’s a lifestyle that fully supports you and what you’re up to in the world. One of my favorites is that it is the antithesis of the performance-addicted life. This is where the–
Ari: In what sense? Clarify that.
John: Wekk, in a performance lifestyle, I’ll fast forward, as if we were going right into like we were deep in performance lifestyle training. This wouldn’t be the first concept I’d talk about, because I’d always talk about energy first, because you really have to have energy to make change. If a person’s overwhelmed, and they’re wound up, and they don’t have a great psychology, it really helps for them to revitalize first before you’re asking for some much bigger changes, right?
Ultimately, one of the changes that I am very involved, and this is probably the only subject bigger than energy itself that I love to talk about and have really spent the most amount of time in, it’s really getting grounded more in what you really are versus who and how you think you are. That’s a huge distinction because, for the first time, you started getting in the right relationship with your brain and your body. When you’re literally living your story, if your life rolled out really fantastic, that’s amazing.
You’re not comparing yourself to other people, and you have a way of being, and you have really good influences. That’s pretty awesome. The culture itself reinforces performance addiction. It’s literally the only addiction that you get paid for and rewarded for, right? It can literally kill you, and it can kill you prematurely, because once you really start overspending your energy, and you start trying to achieve goals for the wrong reasons, and you start tiring, burning, and wearing out, you know.
I won’t be so brazen as to put words in your mouth, but you know that once you start getting tired, even if you know better, your behaviors start to really suffer. Even if you know to eat better, and you know you need to be active, and you know you need to be thinking positive, once you’re tired, your faculties diminish. If you don’t know what that is, if you don’t know what that energy is, and you’re not proactively revitalizing that energy, and you can’t stop yourself, this becomes a huge influence on your psychology, your behaviors, and your overall lifestyle.
That’s why, even though I had probably revealed what I like to call performance lifestyle proper, the 12 fundamentals you really need to know to live your life like a pro, as I like to call it, right? What I mean by pro, I mean being proficient at living. I realized that there were a couple of prerequisite sets of insights that a person really needed to understand to be even able to do that, right? To even eat a genuinely healthy diet and live active and maybe train, just move, let alone training conditioning, right?
To regularly have a positive, optimistic-leaning mindset to be able to deal with overwhelm, and have the direction, intention, and strategy for your life, and be able to fulfill on it. You had to peel that onion back even further. One of those things was, as I would teach it, I would always teach people to learn to proactively recover first and foremost, and then learn the principles and practices of energy renewal. What is energy? What is the experience of actually renewing?
Because, again, you need that kind of energy, especially to make a big shift, like I was pointing to earlier, which is the antithesis of the performance-addicted life, means you really start to get out of who and how you think you are, and you get grounded in what you are. Now, meditation will take you to that place, right? Meditation will take you there, but it’s what you are before your thoughts, before your whole personality, and how you operate in the world.
When you can make that distinction between what and who, you can really break out of a performance-addicted life. Because to really be a healthy, high-achieving person who thrives and flourishes, to really be able to deliver on what we talked about earlier, having a wide enough skill base on living, proficiency in living, so that you can function and perform well, you have to be able to go to 0, go to 30, go to 60, go to 90.
If you can’t, if you just have 1 gear or 2 gears, and you have to stay at 90 and 60 to have a sense of self, it’s going to be a pretty hard road, because you will tire, burn, and wear out. It’s really hard to maintain some semblance of balance, and when I speak of balance in this context, energy balance, if all you’ve got is one gear. That’s going to change with just what? Are you in the right relationship with your brain? Are you using your head? Is your head using you? Are you able to change the story?
Are you able to go to the ground of being and meditate and relax, and then pick up speed again, with some new guidance? Are you just constantly in thinking mode, rumination mode, and like, “What’s next? What’s next?” Because that leads to a very different way of life. Does that make sense?
The key components of performance lifestyle
Ari: It does. Let’s get practical from here. Can you talk about some of the key components of the performance lifestyle, as far as what you’re actually having people implement? What are some of the pillars of this system?
John: Great. Big question and it has a big answer. I’m going to break it down into the five or six chunks that would make up a performance lifestyle curriculum. You’ve got the 12 fundamentals of a performance lifestyle, and interestingly enough, the last 6 have nothing directly to do with your energy, your health, and your physical performance, per se. They’re really more about what you’re up to in the world because a performance lifestyle, everybody starts with default living, and then they get into fitness, and then they’ll get into general health advice.
I think we both know that now there’s this whole new market space, which is far more intelligent because we have access to information, biohacking, or human optimization, where you and I both play, right? Then you move into that sort of bridge because now you’re going deep on recovery for the first time in your life, right? More than just sleep, you’re actually getting into the fundamentals of recovery, or what I would call revitalizing. I want to hit this one key point first.
The central point of your lifestyle, the definition of lifestyle, is it’s really about how you achieve your goals. Nobody wakes up to be healthy on a daily basis. Everybody wants to be healthy, right? They want to have energy. They don’t want to have a disease that’s distracting and holding them back. Everybody wakes up to be successful, right? From the moment you literally pull the covers off yourself in the morning, you’ve already accomplished something, right?
Our natural disposition is to wake up to be up to something in the world, right? We’re creating something, right? Maybe for some, it’s, “I want to be the best mom or dad.” Some people have a profession or a career, and some people are entrepreneurs. Some people get in the military, they’re performance artists. There’s something that you’re up to in the world. I wanted to start there because, “Why do you want to improve your lifestyle?” Because you want to function and perform better.
You want to have the energy, the health, and you want to be able to function well in your life and not be distracted by what I would refer to as hidden lifestyle challenges. Half of the performance lifestyle proper equation is really about engaging and serving others. It’s about knowing your game and how to play it, right? That’s a huge factor. If you don’t, all the sleep in the world is still not going to deal with your anxiety, right? Having enough financial support and a team, right?
If I’m getting great sleep and my mitochondria are getting all the exercise that they need, I’m getting sunlight, but I walk into a business that’s got everything dependent on me, I’m still screwed because I will be spending energy all over the map, right? It’s very, very difficult. A performance lifestyle is not going to save you from doing 10 jobs, right? Or working 90-hour work weeks. It will still take you down. It just won’t take you down as fast.
In other words, human performance is sort of predicated on this idea that you’re not having to be a constant hero, right? Because it’ll still take its toll. I had an opportunity to work one-to-one with Tony Robbins back in November, getting him ready for an Unleash the Power Within. His company called my company because he had a four-day event ahead. One of the things, he’s such a groundbreaking guy, but one of the reasons why he’s so groundbreaking is he broke into this new marketplace of biohacking and human optimization.
You could see how he applies this before every major event where he’s got this huge demand on him. Even Tony has had a huge toll taken on him. He’s had trouble with his vocal cords. He’s a mega achiever. He’s not even a high achiever. He’s off the charts. This stuff takes a toll on your health. You’ve got to make sure that you are really proactively revitalizing the body on a daily basis. Now you start getting into– you’re into what’s driving you and human motivation.
Those are the sort of what you’re up to in the world side of performance lifestyle. Then there are some other key fundamentals, like being able to own your schedule and streamline and simplify your life. These sound simple as they roll off the tongue, but to stay out of overwhelm and to not be chronically busy seven days a week, those are two pretty key skills to have. Do you agree?
Ari: Yes, absolutely.
John: Sometimes, especially in the world of streamlining and simplifying your life, you have to make some pretty big moves to sort of get a manageable life. There’s a quote by Jordan Peterson. Have you ever listened to any of his podcasts?
Ari: Sure.
John: He says, “People don’t come into my office with psychological problems; they come in with unmanageable lives.” They just have so much going on, in my words, they’re barely hanging on, and they just can’t keep up with it all. Now you’re getting into those types of concepts, telling a real, but optimistic-leaning story in your life, activating and strengthening your body, eating a whole-food, nutrient-rich eating style, and probably the most important principle of a performance lifestyle, proper, would be regularly regenerating your life force energy. There’s a part of my story, Ari, where this was back in 2007. Oh, wait, not 2007, seven years ago. What was seven years ago? That was-
Ari: 2017-’18.
John: -2017-’18, that’s when my daughter was born. I remember I had this huge epiphany. This was before I opened up my recovery center. I stopped and I thought to myself, “Wow, if I’m doing all this, and I’m managing my energy as well as I am, why in the hell am I still tired? Why does my back hurt?” Because I have people come into my center all the time, and they’ll be like, “Oh, no, no, my energy’s fine. Ah, my shoulder, the tension, my back is killing me,” right?
Then I’ll say, “Okay, so now tell me how your energy really is,” because they’re scared to say, “I’m just exhausted,” right? That was me back at that time, and I realized, “Look, if I’m going to go into a financial planner and I’m going to manage my energy, I’m asking them to manage my money.” They’re like, “Okay, well, great. What’s your asset base? What’s your portfolio looking like?” You go in and say, “Well, I got a $1,000,” their eyes themselves are going to exit you out of the room because you don’t really have the money to manage.
When it comes to managing your energy, you have to have the energy to manage. You have to, and that’s when I really stopped and I said, “Wow, got it. I know I’ve had the hints at this for some time, but I now need to be proactively revitalizing.” I remember someone put a laser on my back, a Class 4 laser, and I had been prodded, poked, elbowed. I had body workers measuring my hips, saying, “One leg’s longer than the other.” I was dry-needled. You know the whole array. Nothing is solving my back.
Someone put a Class 4 laser on my back, nothing the first time, nothing the second time, nothing the third time, but by the fourth time, it was like, “I was blind and now I see,” right? [laughter] It’s like I could stand up for the first time. It was a real wake-up call. Within a couple of weeks, I learned that there were whole-body beds that did this.
Photobiomodulation
I didn’t know what photobiomodulation was called. The reason why I’m telling this–
Ari: You should have read my book.
John: Oh, I read Red Light Therapy, trust me.
Ari: Was this one year before my book came out?
John: The minute your book came out, I read your book. That was right. Literally, the year your book came out was about one year after that experience. I had just been through an industrial trial, and we had just opened up the first Regenus Center. We were reading your book, and your book was our guide, right? Because that was the deepest knowledge I had seen on red light therapy to date.
Ari: Yes, it’s funny. There’s a lot of centers around the country and around the world that when I speak to the owners of them, they tell me that. In fact, many, I don’t want to take too much credit here, and maybe people will think I’m exaggerating, but I’m in the process of writing the updated Version 2 of that book that’s going to come out later this year. In the process of writing this, I reached out to many of the brands who make LED panels, and had them submit their panels to a third-party lab for testing so I could publish accurate information, accurate data, the real numbers of light intensity for all these devices so that the world has access to this because so many of these companies had been lying before that. Many, many companies in the industry had been lying and putting out bad information. I really wanted–
John: Using solar meters, not spectral radiology.
Ari: Exactly. I wanted to clean up the industry. Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying I reached out to all these companies, and in many of their responses, they’re like, “Ari Whitten, it was your book that I started my whole business, my whole brand selling red light therapy devices because of you, because of your book. I’d be happy to participate.” I don’t know, probably dozens or maybe hundreds of companies now have started because of that book.
John: Oh, I completely believe it. When The Energy Blueprint came out, that was so groundbreaking. There’s probably a handful, maybe three to five people in my life that I really credit with a major pivot in my life. The Energy Blueprint was like that for me.
Ari: Wow, thank you. I appreciate that.
John: No question about it. Matter of fact, I interviewed you early on, and I quickly realized, I’m like, “Wow, I really better step up my game on this energy front because there is a lot I do not know.” The Energy Blueprint was just transformational. It set us on a completely new trajectory and actually was probably in part why I had the confidence to even open up REGENUS CENTER. Because you were– God, it was so chock-full. You were really delving to the research, and nobody had– When in, really, the history of the topic of energy, has anybody ever really delved into the research as comprehensively as you did when the Blueprint first launched? I’d never seen it.
Ari: Yes, that was the point. That was what I saw is that, as you mentioned earlier, one of the only books that even existed in that time of anybody even attempting some more scientific framework of this very nebulous thing called energy was Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr.
John: That’s right. It was The Power of Full Engagement.
Ari: Yes, but that was more about managing your time, your efforts, and creating some bit of understanding of circadian and ultra radian cycles. I don’t even know if they touched on circadian cycles there but managing sleep, managing stress, managing your effort, but very little and almost no real integration of nutritional science or many, many other areas of science.
Yes, they maybe talk a bit about exercise or something, or sleep, but they didn’t really know the science of those things. It was my observation that, in conventional medicine, they didn’t have any even semblance of any scientific explanation for human energy levels and fatigue. In the alternative medicine, natural health community was obsessed with this idea of adrenal fatigue, which I came to realize pretty early on was pseudoscience, was not well supported by the evidence.
Then I was left with this question of this big gap of like, “Okay, well, what is the real science and physiology of human energy levels?” As of right now, no one has even attempted a real scientific framework to understand this. For me, that was an interesting project to take on. It took several years of exploring each layer to that story, to build something out. It’s still evolving. At this point–
John: It still clarifies.
Ari: Yes, now 10 years later. 2005, most of the work I did on that was 2015. My thinking has evolved in many ways. I’ve been building out, for the last year and a half or two years, I’ve been building out a whole new framework, which hopefully will come out later this year.
John: That’s awesome to hear. I can’t wait for the new book. I think the history of it, when it all comes out, and people are looking back, in the decades past, they’re going to see that you were one of the leading players, if not the leading player on really transitioning people’s thinking around energy.
Ari: Thank you. I appreciate the kind words. I don’t know that I’m being credited with those sorts of things, but I appreciate. At least one person is recognizing that.
John: I know a lot of others. I know you’ve received a few awards. That’s a good litmus test for how people think. I’ve always looked at The Energy Blueprint, even brand-wise, it fit great with the performance lifestyle because it was about– I love when you made that transition into human optimization, which is very systems thinking, and you have to think systems thinking. You can’t just hack it, and you can’t just come out from one perspective. You need an evolutionary context. You have to think system.
The Energy Blueprint serves as a rudder. Michael Greger with NutritionFacts.org is very good this way as well. You don’t have to know all the inner workings of a clock to tell time. I will admittedly say that I spend a good amount of time with the help of people like you to understand the inner workings of a clock, but I don’t spend all my time there. I spend most of my time on the fundamentals of how to tell time, right?
At the end of the day, that’s like, “What do you do with this stuff.” One of the things I’ve learned around that was that The Energy Blueprint, it serves as this rudder. When you understand what the science is saying, in addition to principles. Principles usually play themselves out in science. If it’s a true principle, it’ll play out in science. When you understand the science to the degree that you’ve gone into it, it serves as a rudder. It gives you boundaries. It informs you on where the boundaries are and where you stop paying attention, because you realize the science doesn’t support it. It’s outside the realm of principle. It’s completely impractical what a particular source may be talking about.
Anyway, that’s what The Energy Blueprint has been for me. This is our first podcast, but we’ve been on thousands of podcasts together. I’ve listened to so many of your 600-plus videos, and I hear your voice in my head all the time. I know you’ve met with people like Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson’s another figure that gets a lot of airplay in my head.
Ari: There’s two Brian Johnsons now that are–
John: Yes, and now there’s two Brian Johnsons.
Ari: Right, you’re referring to the less famous one, but the one who is a– He’s a personal friend of mine. Maybe also of yours. I don’t know if you know him personally.
John: Yes.
Ari: He was, back in the day, the founder of Philosopher’s Notes, which then became Optimize. Now he’s onto Heroic. Wonderful, brilliant guy. Probably the most, when I think of high performance lifestyle, I think he epitomizes that probably more than anyone.
John: Yes, probably more than anyone. Hopefully, I’m getting close.
[laughter]
Ari: Yes, I don’t even know if I can compete with Brian. He’s a freak of nature.
John: I’m glad you’re saying it that way too, because the hallmark of a performance lifestyle is grace. You actually should be, if you really have your stuff down, you should actually be a fairly calm individual. As we talked about earlier, when you got to go to 90, you get to 90. I know enough about Brian and how he lives his life that you have to have range if you’re going to really be a high-functioning human being.
He does that extremely well, because he’s got this huge, wide swath. He’s got a huge balance of skills. If you think about his whole program, I’ve been involved in his work for probably 12 years. I met him up in Wisconsin with a buddy of mine, John Hines. We went out to dinner. He was just formulating the Entheos Academy at that time. I connected with him when it was brianjohnson.me. Then he moved to Entheos and so forth.
Ari: That was before I even found him. I found him at Philosopher’s Notes.
John: Yes, Philosopher’s Notes. It was just Philosopher’s Notes. I love those, because I can’t read that many books. To read that many books, it’s a full-time job, so you have to get the six pager. I’ve been very involved. I’m a lifetime member of Heroic, and I’m part of it for that very reason, because it’s great to get this wide swath of book reviews and be able to read them.
A lot of the things that he’s talking about wove into, created a whole tapestry in and through performance lifestyle principles. Getting back to that question that you asked earlier, you’ve got 12 fundamentals in a performance lifestyle, but in order to do it, you’ve got to be able to operate from an optimal performance state. That’s what I was pointing to earlier, which is you’ve got to be in right relationship with your brain. The story cannot be driving the show.
Stories do drive the show, but you’ve got to be always already free if you’re going to have the latitude to function and perform well, and just not be in a constant frenzy, if that makes sense. If we peel the onion back even further, there’s a performance living 101 that a person needs to understand. These are things like breathing and hydration and sunlight and circadian rhythms and de-stressing stress itself. Concepts like periodization.
Take a football player. I was just with the captain of the Giants two weeks back. He’s getting ready for training camp. He’s already telling me where he’s currently at. We figured out a plan before the season starts. I connect with some of the people in the NFL. I have a partner who just got out of the NFL last year in my business. I get some nice introductions to NFL players, which is fun because they’re his best friends and that’s his club. We got into that.
He came to my center because he’s trying to accelerate his recovery. One of the pieces of advice that I gave him, and this will dovetail right into revitalize, and I’ll give you a couple little sample of what’s really important to talk about there, that is typically not talked about. It’ll be a little bit anecdotal for you, but not something that can’t be proven in a person’s everyday experience, okay?
One of the pieces of advice that I gave him was, “You’ve got to accelerate recovery,” because he’s still in training because the season’s kicked off. He’s got to bank as much power as possible. Now, for him, he’s very wired because he’s coming off the line. He’s a linebacker. He’s got that physicality where he’s really on top of his game. I really had to coach him around being able to enter—I think the word I used was slugville—for four weeks. That was to literally don’t misinterpret tiredness and think like something is wrong, to literally sit in the tiredness and allow your body to recharge.
If we take a cell phone and we plug it into the wall, and the cell phone could talk, and the cell phone was going from one bar to four bars, if it could talk, if it had like a personality, it would say, “I’m tired.” Because recharging the body feels like tiredness. When do you have more energy? At two o’clock in the morning or two o’clock in the afternoon? When I asked that question, a lot of people will say two o’clock in the afternoon.
I’m saying, “No, you’re more energized at two o’clock in the afternoon.” Assuming you went to bed at a reasonable hour, let’s say you went to bed at 8:00 PM, four hours before midnight, and then woke up at 2:00, and alarm went off, you would be rife with energy because you had already been sleeping for six hours. You’d been banking power. Yet, if you had gotten up to go to the bathroom, it would be like walking like Frankenstein across the hall.
At two o’clock in the afternoon, you’re stimulated, you’re energized. What I needed him to do was to literally bank as much power as possible. Train hard, maintain your daily duties, but cut off everything so you can pay back some of the energy debt so that by the time the season really kicks off, you’ve got a lot of restoration that took place. Are you following me?
Ari: Yes.
John: That’s where revitalizing really comes into play. One of the principles of revitalizing is to get free of the stimulant delusion. You and I have seen this all the way back to the bodybuilding days. You know somebody does not understand this concept when they’ll say something like, “I need to go exercise to relieve stress and get my energy back.” I understand that there’s a good return on the investment from exercising on your energy levels and mitochondrial splitting and to meet the demand, but exercise is a stress and it’s going to take energy.
If you’re exercising a fatigued body, it’s more fatigued after you’re done. The stimulant delusion is that you only experience energy when you’re spending it. You feel tired when you’re recuperating it. You follow?
Ari: Yes.
John: God, how many industries exist on the misinterpretation of that principle by itself? When you’re revitalizing energy, we’ve got to really rethink tiredness itself. We’ve got to rethink yawning. We have to rethink a lot of things because, to actually get your energy back, you can’t stimulate it to get it back.
Energenesis
I’m drinking– this is Energenesis right here.
Ari: There you go. Now we’re talking.
John: Now you like that? You like that right there? Love this stuff.
Ari: Nice. I didn’t know I was going to get a free ad out of this podcast.
John: Free commercial?
Ari: Tell our listeners more, JAM, about the effects of Energenesis.
John: I literally just had to change my order the other day to get two Energenesis for each month because I run out.
Ari: Great. Can you go on for several more minutes about the amazing effects you’ve seen? No, I’m just kidding. Go ahead.
John: It’s a great product. It really is a great product. I feel like I have mitochondrial support, and it’s a strong thing. The flavor is amazing and there’s a certain viscosity about it. I drink it in coconut water, by the way.
Ari: Nice.
John: Water’s just a little too thin and it gets washed down in smoothies, so coconut water’s perfect.
Ari: It is a great product, and there’s a very important reason why that is. It’s because I design all my supplements basically for me, for my own selfish desires of like, how would I create the ultimate supplement in this category, whereas most other supplement businesses design things from the frame of, “How can I create an impressive-looking supplement that has small enough dosages of each ingredient that we can keep our costs to $4-“
John: Hold on, I’ve got to chime in here.
Ari: “-or $7 a bottle and sell it for $50 a bottle so that we have huge profit margins?”
John: It’s profit-essential.
Ari: My costs for the supplements that I make, because they’re incredibly high quality with real dosages of the ingredients, cost 400%, 500%, 800% more than other competitor supplements.
John: Which is why you only sell it direct, because it costs a lot to make it and there’s not a lot of resale in it. Actually, that was the concept. I started to interrupt you there for a second because that’s when you really had me on this product because I always loved your marketing, how it goes through everything, like each individual ingredient. When you said that you couldn’t fit it into the capsules, so it had to be a powder, that’s when I knew you were actually going to be putting in here what you actually need to get a result. It’s got to be palatable. The product is– What is it? It’s like a [unintelligible 01:02:55]
Ari: That was a big challenge, by the way. Lots of headaches that I had in-
John: Oh, I know. I know you went through a couple of iterations on it.
Ari: -the iterations of refining it to get it to be palatable, and lots of customer support complaints in the process [chuckles]. I think we’re good now.
John: It’s a fantastic tasting product. Anyway, I drink it probably twice a day. I know it’s only once a day, but I just like it that much. That part of the conversation dovetails into the thing that is probably the most important thing in human performance, let alone a performance lifestyle or a high-performance lifestyle. What really puts the H in HPL, a High Performance Lifestyle, is that you’re very proactive about revitalizing.
This is not something that you take a nap when you absolutely need it, or you’re just focused on sleep. In a performance lifestyle, the thing that makes a performance lifestyle a performance lifestyle is that you’re proactively sleeping, resting, recovering, relaxing, meditating, and rejuvenating your body regularly and systematically to enable your body to recharge, restore, and rejuvenate.
If you remember earlier, I was saying that lifestyle itself is about what you’re up to in the world. It’s about how you achieve your goals. When you have this broader mindset that, “Wait a second, I wake up to be successful. I don’t want to live one way, run into a bunch of problems, and have to solve it with another way. I want to collapse these two. I want to have one approach where the fundamentals are all built in, where I got The Energy Blueprint giving me a rudder, and I have a performance lifestyle driving me forward.”
Now when you think with that mindset, it’s like– When The Power of Full Engagement came out because they were dealing with a lot of athletes, they were talking about the recovery routines a lot of the time. Remember the tennis player bouncing the ball because they were trying to get recovery? In a performance lifestyle, you’re always preparing for the events of your life.
Now you’re doing these things, you get very good at these fundamentals and these practices and you’re doing things always preparing for your next event. I even prepared for this event. Got two kids, got aging parents, got running a business over there, I got a whole center running over here. You have life, you have your 18-year-old driving you batshit, pardon my expression. I have a 7-year-old daughter who’s developing her whole sense of self.
You’re always assessing your current situation and you’re like, “Okay, how am I going to show up at 4:00 PM Eastern Time with power?” Your whole day is oriented around a series of events that are going to take you to that place. Then what’s next? Then what’s next? Because you have this wide range of skills, you start to not fall for the hidden lifestyle challenges.
Photobiomodulation for recharging your battery
A person who’s not skilled in performance lifestyle would be drinking coffee all day. I’m a little more hardcore on coffee. I just tell people to stop drinking coffee because it’s messing up your gauge. You literally have no idea how much energy you even have when you’re operating the chemicals. You know what you’re managing. What’s called voltage ATP production for just layman years.
You want your nervous system to be in a certain place. You want to have a certain level of power to be able to function and perform for a particular event. You’ve got this whole routine. That’s unique to my circumstances today. There’s not an exact way to do it because circumstances constantly change. That’s why the true art of managing your energy like a pro, which is what a performance lifestyle is all about, when you understand how to revitalize, that guides your experience.
I’m not going to engage in stimulants. Matter of fact, I was extremely low key all day today because I had people come into my center. One guy, my friend Gabe, I hadn’t seen in a while. He came in to visit me and I literally said, “Gabe, not the time, buddy. I love you.” I love the goatee that he just grew. I said, “But we’re going to have to pick up this conversation tomorrow,” because I got something coming up.
The last thing I need to be doing is dissipating my energy because I need to focus it because you and I want to share a message that helps people’s lives. I’m not going to get diverted. I did a photobiomodulation session earlier in the day. My daughter was sick the last couple of days. Last night, we had a full day yesterday. I did a photobiomodulation session.
Normally, I don’t do photobiomodulation late in the day because it can really throw off your sleep cycle. If you have a ton of energy output in a given day, I’ll put on just red infrared. I won’t do red infrared and green. I’ll just do red and infrared or even just red. I’ll go in there for 15, 20 minutes, and it pays back some of my accumulated energy debt, which is the over-expenditure of energy before I’ve had recuperation to offset it.
I like to talk about energy debt versus sleep debt because the sleep debt is one form of recuperation. Energy debt talks about just the net effect of how much recuperation against expenditure that you’ve got. I was able to slow the freight train down. When you get home, you’re already slightly recovered. Now the temptation to want to go eat and—what’s the word?—buffer yourself before you go to bed, that’s why most people’s nighttime routines get so thrown off because they’re going all day. They’ve not stopped.
Then by nighttime, they’re literally so exhausted. They get this short break when work stops, and then they feel completely, utterly fatigued. Now they have to Netflix themselves, maybe alcohol themselves, ambient themselves, just to buffer themselves, because when you’re deep recuperation, it doesn’t feel good. When you have to face your true condition and how tired you really are and then try to go to bed, which is why people will push it to much later at night after they’ve had a chance to buffer themselves.
I had no luxury for that. I don’t typically do that anyway, but I had to be ready to go to bed at 8:00 PM last night. That’s like the perfect night’s sleep for me because now I’ll go from 8:00 to midnight. Maybe I’ll wake up a little bit around one or two o’clock in the morning, three o’clock in the morning, and I go back to sleep, but I’ll get somewhere between 8 and 10 hours of sleep.
Then today, super busy morning, serving clients, I do another photobiomodulation session right around eleven or twelve o’clock. Now there’s no dip anymore. There’s none of this because I probably got three to four more high-energy hours in 15 to 20 minutes because I’m asleep in the presence of red, infrared, and green light. It’s a different experience of life when you have access to photobiomodulation because light is the original biohack. We got nothing. We got no oxygen. We got no green plants. We got no animal life. Nothing happened without light.
Light literally recharges the system, and it can literally change the entire trajectory of your light and week. Revitalizing ultimately is about understanding what energy is, how it’s affected, and what actually is the experience of recharging and restoring actually like? There is a set of principles that do that. You have to rethink tiredness itself. You have to escape the stimulant delusion, and you have to be very proactive about recovery.
I will say this, that’s the real value. I know you’ve just done a whole series of things, and I know your next book coming out is on photobiomodulation, right?
Ari: Yes, that’s right.
John: You’re using the bigger terminology probably more so than red light therapy by itself.
Ari: I think the title of the book is going to remain the same just because, by virtue of the popularity of the book, it’s often not wanting to disrupt everything that’s been built around that title. Photobiomodulation, which really came into prominence. It was just starting out around 2017-ish, ’18-ish.
John: Yes, James Carroll and that whole group.
Ari: Now really everything’s changed over from– Obviously, it was low-level laser therapy at first, then low-level light therapy. Now everything is in the term photobiomodulation.
John: Right. For everybody listening, we’re talking about light beds. The light business really started in the laser space.
Ari: Before LEDs existed.
John: Before LEDs existed. Now with LEDs, it’s a whole body light bed. It’s probably the most important piece of biohacking or human optimization gear that I’ve– I have nine modalities down in my center. If I do 800 appointments on average, on a monthly basis, 550 to 600 of them will be just light. Maybe even higher.
Ari: You’re saying that, just so listeners can understand, that that’s a reflection of what your customers are desiring because they notice the best effects from that.
John: Bar none. The second would be probably sauna. Everybody understands heat, they like sweating and they like detoxifying. In terms of the day-to-day, I come in and do something for 15 to 21 minutes, and I get 3 to 5 more high-energy hours. Predictably, every single time I do it, that’s why it’s in the highest demand. What’s three to five more high-energy hours worth on a daily basis.
Ari: Depending on what you do, a lot.
John: A lot. The reason why that experience is so important is because when people are first getting into lifestyle change and improvement and optimization, right, just to put those terms in context, changes is you’re going from a nutrient-poor diet to a nutrient-rich diet. Improvement would be I’m more skilled at being able to do that. Optimization is tweaks that matter, but using a– Like Usain Bolt trying to get from 10 seconds to 9.9 or 9.8 or 9.7. In the grand scheme of things, they’re important to the person who’s really far down the path, but they don’t move the dial that much on the person just getting off the couch.
We have to make fundamental changes first, then we continue to make improvements, and then optimizations become relevant. It’s good to keep an eye on what’s optimal, but it doesn’t mean you can do it right from the start. With energy, I’m sure you agree that’s very relevant. When you can get on a light bed, for example, and you’re not left to your own device, and you have a device that helps accelerate energy production–
For most people, look, they only go to sleep at the end of the day because they’ve been doing that since they were born, and they don’t eat anything, and they don’t drink anything, and they go to sleep, and they wake up, and they’re revitalized to a certain degree. In today’s day and age, what we’re learning to do, because sleep alone in my opinion, is not enough. Especially if you’re going for eight hours, and you’re really only sleeping for six and a half of them, you’re not really banking the battery power that we really need to not tire, burn, and wear ourselves out prematurely.
Where these tools are coming in is that they’re not only accelerating energy production, but they’re– I don’t want to– What’s the word? They’re giving you an assist at a time when you don’t know what you’re managing yet. People are talking about energy. Well, what is this energy? What is this currency in me? Should I be grounded in it? Is it my primary self? You don’t know any of these things.
Most people just wake up, they are their personality, they hit the day. Getting them to stop is hard, like we talked about earlier, for one reason or another. When you can get a person to stop for 15 to 20 minutes to recharge their body proactively, and they literally walk in tired and walk out with power, Ari, it is an amazing transformation to watch on a regular basis.
That’s where I think, what I’m referring to as a biovitality protocol, why I think it’s so important, if you can, to take advantage. You can do everything that we’re talking about here without gear. The sun is a pretty powerful thing. I believe that, at the Earth’s crust, you’re getting somewhere between 100 milliwatts and 136 milliwatts per centimeter squared of light. When you have a device where there’s no– What’s that?
Ari: Roughly, depending on where you are in the world and the conditions, yes, it’s in the range.
John: Depending on where you are in the world. When you don’t have any bees, you can do it proactively, you can connect it with other things, and you can just get in a comfortable environment. It really makes a big difference. These things are popping up around the country. Utilizing technology, when it comes to really getting good at the energy game, is pretty important.
In summary, a performance lifestyle is really about living a lifestyle that supports you and what you’re up to in the world. It’s got to support you, not just what you’re up to in the world. That’s probably going to be a more performance-addicted life. When someone like you or me talks to you, you’ll roll your eyes back and be like, “Yes, I know I should.” When you start shifting into a performance lifestyle mindset, you start to engage in these practices because it’s what enables you to do what you do, with your health and well-being intact.
If you really get into it, look, it doesn’t take a lifetime to learn it out. People can learn this in 20 minutes. They can get a concept that no other population in the history of the world has ever fully grasped. That only takes 20 minutes. It takes about 12 months to really break good ground, and about 3 years to really resolve the hidden lifestyle challenges, to evolve with that lifestyle mindset and skill set, and to be able to get so proficient. This is what I mean by living your life like a pro, that you could be achieving even your most ambitious goals, but still be living in balance with vibrant health and peace of mind.
You’ve got that new definition of balance we were talking about. Fill in the blanks. You’ve got to understand the fundamentals of lifestyle. We’ve got to understand what it means to maintain an optimal performance state. Books like The Power of Full Engagement really broke ground on that. We’ve got to understand 101, what is performance living? What does it mean to have a lifestyle that actually supports you up to the world?
What are those fundamentals that enable you to do the other fundamentals? You follow? Do you understand really how to revitalize the body? Do you understand the principles of energy renewal? Lastly, are you leveraging technology to accelerate that in an extremely busy world? That’s probably how I would chunk down the whole idea.
Ari: Beautiful. JAM, where can people find you if they’re interested in following your work or getting in touch with you, and tell them a little bit more about your centers, and you have physical locations, correct? In New Jersey?
John: Yes.
Ari: Let people know that. Then is there one last thought or last idea that you want people to think about?
John: Yes. You can find me at performancelifestyle.com. That’s where I’ve been giving rise to this new lifestyle that we’re talking about, which is really about connecting the dots on the fundamentals of successful living. Deeply rooted in revitalizing, which is the cornerstone, and being proactive at that. I teach a concept called the BioVitality Protocol, and you can find me at REGENUS CENTER. That’s R-E-G, like regen us, CENTER.
I have one in New Jersey, and we have some other charging stations and things like that, that are opening up to make this more ubiquitous for people to have access to that. You can find me there. If there was one big idea that I would probably leave somebody with, that is you don’t need permission to take care of yourself. You can stop, you can recharge your body, and you can gear up for what’s next.
Run your own race. Don’t do it in comparison with other people, because it’s a performance-addicted society. Our society just wants to keep you going constantly. If you let it, it will. In a twist of words, get out of the performance-addicted life and get into a performance lifestyle, which is a lifestyle that works for you. That would probably be my main message.
Ari: Yes, beautiful. I love it. JAM, absolute pleasure connecting with you. Thank you so much.
John: Yes, Ari, great.
Ari: I look forward to our next conversation.
John: Yes, I look forward to it as well. Talk to you soon.
Show Notes
00:00 -Intro
00: 29 – Guest intro
05:09- John’s story
20:31 – The original biohackers
27:23 – Performance addiction
38:48 – The key components of performance lifestyle
47:25 – Photobiomodulation
1:03:52 – Energenesis
1:09:55 – Photobiomodulation for recharging your battery
Recommended Podcasts
