This transcript is AI-generated and [lightly] edited by a human.

Karina Inkster:

You're listening to the No Bullshit Vegan podcast, episode 186. Izzy Jacobus is here to chat about his business journey, including running a vegan men's wear brand, working in a vegan medical clinic, and now owning a gym in New York City.

Hey, welcome to the show. I'm Karina, your go-to no-B.S. vegan fitness and nutrition coach. As we approach the end of 2024, you might be making some plans and setting some goals for 2025. So if strength training and leveling up your nutrition are on that list, make sure you check out our coaching programs at karinainkster.com/coaching. Since 2011, my team and I have helped about a thousand clients in 15 countries to eat delicious plant-based meals that fuel their training, get super strong, and love their bodies. If you are ready to skyrocket your strength, body composition and vegan superpowers of course, we are for you. Go to karinainkster.com/coaching for more info.

Introducing my guest today, Izzy Jacobus. Izzy is a personal trainer with a certification from the National Academy of Sports Medicine, and nutrition coach with certifications from the Nutritarian Education Institute and Precision Nutrition. After holding a position at Brooklyn Nurse Practitioners Clinic, a vegan medical clinic, as their nutrition counselor, he started The Workout Plant to continue helping local clients in Brooklyn, New York and online clients around the world pursue their fitness and health goals. Izzy is also a founder of Vegans of New York, the largest vegan community in NYC and creator of Animals First on the Second, a global animal advocacy organization. Izzy's favorite vegan meal is Mapo Tofu. Here's our discussion.

Hey Izzy, thanks so much for speaking with me today.

Izzy Jacobus:

Yeah, thank you for having me here. I'm excited.

Karina Inkster:

Me too. For the folks listening, we've been connected on Facebook for what seems like forever, but we've never actually had a face-to-face chat, so I'm very stoked.

Izzy Jacobus:

This is true. Definitely a few years. I don't dunno how long though either.

Karina Inkster:

It's been a while, so it's about time. First of all, very important question for you.

Izzy Jacobus:

Yeah!

Karina Inkster:

New cat, new kitten. What's the deal?

Izzy Jacobus:

I do have a new cat. So election day was highs and lows, let's just say. So election day was like, I did a couple clients here. I went and voted, and then we ran to Ridgewood Brooklyn, which is two neighborhoods over to pick up a little polydactyl street cat with the biggest hands and the pointiest nose and yeah, it's amazing. So the night was filled with lots of laughing and maybe a little bit of crying from the Trump debacle that America has recently gone through.

Karina Inkster:

Don't even get me started.

Izzy Jacobus:

Yeah, maybe we shouldn't start. Maybe we shouldn't.

Karina Inkster:

Well, you know what? I saw a really good term. I'm up in Canada, of course, on Threads. Everyone was using the term emotional support Canadian, I'm going to be your emotional support Canadian. I'm like, okay. So that's basically what I am for anyone who needs it FYI.

Izzy Jacobus:

I think, honestly, as sad as this sounds, I've been in various forms of social justice and activism since I was young and very engaged with different important things. But at this point, sadly to say I feel like I'm just going to use my New York white male privilege and stick my head in the sand like an ostrich for the next four years, and stop watching MSNBC, stop engaging on certain social media platforms and just use my New York Times app to curate my engagement with the news as it's just going to be a constant stream of crazy that there's nothing you can really do about. It's all inexplicable weirdness that just flip flops and changes so much. You get outrage fatigue over shit that they're not even going to be talking about an hour later. They used to say the news cycle is like a week long, and now it's like every five minutes, we have four more headlines of crazy.

Karina Inkster:

We have to preserve our own sanity, and I feel like you do a lot in the vegan world. Activism is something that we can talk about for sure, but just being the poster dude of veganism running a gym, I mean, there's a lot of things that we do in our day-to-day life that maybe isn't seen as activism, but actually is and is making a difference and is educating other people. So it's not like we're actually sitting there doing shit all. But I understand specific to the current situation, what you're talking about.

Izzy Jacobus:

Yeah, I mean, there's only so much energy you have. There's only so much, and like I said, it feels like pissing in the wind sometimes, trying to fight the battle of misinformation and overt bigotry that just flies around over this stuff and you don't know what to do about it. And you're wondering, where is my energy used best to affect change or to affect good. And these days it just feels like stay in your lane, do your thing. You cannot control the world. It's going to be a whirlwind of craziness. And so yeah, got to limit some of it.

Karina Inkster:

Yep, a hundred percent. Well, tell me about your amazing gym, the workout plant where you are right now. I can see the background. It's freaking awesome. What's the deal?

Izzy Jacobus:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're in the middle of actually putting up a giant moss wall down the entire, I have 14 foot ceilings here, so literally from the ceiling all the way down around this big neon sign. How cool. So it's a mess in the front right now. I moved down here from working out of my second bedroom for five years building this business after being the nutrition counselor at a vegan medical clinic, which is about 10 blocks away. I moved away from that to that space. And then just here now. So this space is a thousand square feet. In the beginning when I first started, the vast majority of my clients were vegan. Now most of them are not.

So as you said, kind of functions as a form of advocacy. As you start to talk about plant forward or plant focused nutrition, at least for some people, a lot of local vegans and vegetarians find me because they see that and they're already down that path, and some people need a beginning to move down, finding at least plant-based diet information. And then of course, I do advocacy work that happens in your day-to-day life once a month with one of my campaigns. And so sometimes they'll see me engaging in that. 

And then we have also conversations about ethics and the ethical implications of exploiting animals and stuff like that. So this is a bigger version of all of that stuff. And the local hipster Williamsburg neighborhood that I'm in is primed for that kind of thing because we have people that are more open to alternative ideas and are more conscious than many other places in the world. So this is the new space. It's still a work in progress, of course, because it's a lot for one guy.

Karina Inkster:

That's amazing. Well, congrats. That's huge. Thanks. That's very exciting. It's kind of cool. A lot of people will ask me like, oh, so how do you deal with clients who are interested in veganism or who might not even be open to it, not realizing that we only work with vegan clients, so people are Googling vegan fitness coach or a vegan personal trainer because they know that's what they want, right?

Izzy Jacobus:

Yeah. Yeah.

Karina Inkster:

And there's a place for that, of course, because a lot of these folks have had negative experiences with other trainers just not getting the nutrition aspect or whatever. But in your case, you're actually exposing folks who might not have been otherwise.

Izzy Jacobus:

Right.

Karina Inkster:

To some of these ideas.

Izzy Jacobus:

And when I first started in nutrition, I had that thought to go in the direction that you went in, which is find a niche, really stay within that group of people. Considering, honestly, I think the neighborhood that I live in might be the most vegan neighborhood on the planet. There are tens of thousands of vegans in this neighborhood. I mean, we have three vegan cheese companies in my neighborhood. We have vegan tattoo, a vegan medical clinic, vegan groceries. It's unbelievable. We'll literally laugh at a restaurant that opens up without significant vegan options because it's just silly. You've just not done your market research. 

But I was going to go down that path and do some of those things. And as I was the nutrition counselor at Brooklyn Nurse Practitioners, I was also running a vegan clothing line with Joshua Catcher called Brave Gentlemen. We had opened up a flagship store, one block from my home, and it's like the only luxury, sustainable, fair labor, fair trade, luxury vegan men's wear line in the world. And so I would say things to him, it doesn't say vegan anywhere on the sign or outside or anything. And he's like, do you think that I should make it look like it's only for vegans? And I would be like, ah. And he'd be like, yeah, yeah, of course. All the vegans know. Of course they'll share it. That's it. The community is very ingrained and they'll eat it up. 

But what about everybody else? So my days were either at the medical clinic or sitting in that store, essentially playing vegan ambassador as people went to world famous Champs Diner where he started our popup, and then coming into this place where I would essentially teach people about sustainability and cruelty-free options all day long. And then, yeah, of course, also talk to every vegan who had a few hundred bucks that needed a really nice pair of shoes or something.

Karina Inkster:

Well, obviously, obviously.

Izzy Jacobus:

So it's twofold. Thing one is it allows me to get lots of different clients of all different kinds, which is great. And the other thing is, yeah, it allows me to influence people, as you said, that wouldn't have necessarily already been in that direction.

Karina Inkster:

Hey, what is a vegan medical clinic? I live in a city that has fewer people in it overall than there are vegans in your neighborhood. Probably. It's very small, and there are very few medical clinics here. The one where I go where my doctor is who's amazing, has one doctor who happens to be vegan. And so she's working with her clients and actually has a copy of one of my books there. But do they brand themselves as a vegan place? Is it kind of like this where people know that it's vegan and they don't use the word, how does it work?

Izzy Jacobus:

So everybody does kind of ask that question, ask and no, it's not quite really branded that way, but everybody who works there is vegan. Every option that we can choose is, so for instance, when we are dealing with sex education, cruelty-free condoms, when we are choosing furniture for our offices, for the lobby and for the various rooms that the nurse practitioners were in or I was in, we were choosing cruelty-free furnishings and all that stuff. And in addition to trying to be as cruelty-free as possible, of course the medical industry makes it nearly impossible to even have an hour's worth of dealing with patients that don't include something that has been tested or something.

Karina Inkster:

Right? Yeah, totally.

Izzy Jacobus:

It was a bunch of vegans started by a vegan nurse who also owns a vegan tattoo shop, and she's also the first person to spend 10 years or something lobbying the main transfer paper for a tattoos company to finally produce transfer paper without lanolin. So she's responsible for that as well, I believe.

Karina Inkster:

Wow.

Izzy Jacobus:

But yeah, in addition to all that type of stuff, our main goal was to try to angle the system to first of all, not just write everybody a script. The idea was to make behavioral change in the forefront rather than, I have diabetes. Well, here's your diabetes medication. No, I have diabetes. Here's your diabetes medication. Also, now that you've paid your copay and you're in the building, go in the back and see Izzy

and find a way that if we can change some of your metrics and get you to a place where we can reduce medication or at some point bring you off of this medication. And this of course went through to heart disease or any kind of metabolic diseases or you mentioned anything where we can come up with a lifestyle or behavioral change that could affect that more than just giving you another script and another script and another script. 

And so the idea was especially for, we were on the border of Bushwick and Bushwick and Bed-Stuy, and some of these areas have very underserved communities and people that desperately need help and are not getting help. And so the idea was, look, you made it into the building. You paid your copay. It doesn't cost you anything more to go get some actual help instead of sick care, actual healthcare. That was what the idea was. But vegan, because we're vegan and because we tried to make everything as cruelty-free as possible, and then these additional thrusts that we were hoping would have a significant effect on the local population.

Karina Inkster:

That's amazing. How cool is that? Hey, side note, how often do you meet other people who are called Izzy? And was it weird? Corresponding with the Izzy on my team? 

Izzy Jacobus:

It also said that it wasn't that weird. I mean, usually they're female, number one.

Karina Inkster:

Yes.

Izzy Jacobus:

Usually they're women, but it's not that unusual in my area of the world. My name is, my actual birth name is Ian. Izzy is short for Israel, which is my Hebrew name. Even though I'm not religious or anything like that. The first time I was in Temple, a rabbi suggested my mother pick a name. He decided Israel might be a good, and then that turned into a stage name. I was a musician all through being a kid into my twenties and even early thirties, a professional musician. That's what I did for a living. But so anyway, Israel can either be a Jewish name, name, a Jewish name, which there's lots of in New York or can very often be a Latin name as well. And there are lots of Latin Israels as well around here.

Karina Inkster:

Interesting.

Izzy Jacobus:

I had an uncle named Isador who was also an Izzy.

Karina Inkster:

Right. Well, our Izzy on our team is from Elizabeth, which is also pretty common.

Izzy Jacobus:

Oh, I've never heard of an Elizabeth who ended up being a nicknamed Izzy.

Karina Inkster:

No, maybe not. Yeah, it's not Liz. That would just be odd.

Izzy Jacobus:

Yeah, that's a good one.

Karina Inkster:

For our Izzy, anyway.

Izzy Jacobus:

That's a good one. I have a client named Regina, and I was like, I think I want to call you Reggie. I like that, Reggie, because Gina, Reggie's good. I'm not going with Gina. I want to do a Reggie. She's like, people do Reg. I was like, nah, I'm going to go with Reggie. So I wrote Reggie on her little cubby box, and that's what it is.

Karina Inkster:

That's awesome. That's so awesome. Hey, I bought a car yesterday and I have to think of a name for it, A mini, and you have to name it.

Izzy Jacobus:

You have to name a mini.

Karina Inkster:

So any sort of name suggestions. I got to think of a name. It's red and black, which is the only appropriate color scheme in my world. 

Izzy Jacobus:

Red and black meaning?

Karina Inkster:

And it's all electric.

Izzy Jacobus:

I was going to suggest a Mr. Magoo or something, like a little person with big eyes or...

Karina Inkster:

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Izzy Jacobus:

Mostly because,

Karina Inkster:

And it's probably a mister or something or a sir or a Lord or something.

Izzy Jacobus:

Right. I did have a little tiny cat named Mr. Magoo. That was our first cat.

Karina Inkster:

Oh, cute.

Izzy Jacobus:

What makes me think of that?

Karina Inkster:

That's cute.

Izzy Jacobus:

If I think of something else throughout the whole thing, I'll blurt out random names.

Karina Inkster:

Please do, just randomly, every two minutes.

Izzy Jacobus:

Yeah.

Karina Inkster:

Hey, what's the deal? We got to talk about music because you were a pro musician. Playing what? Doing what?

Izzy Jacobus:

And I want to know about accordions. That's such a fucking weird instrument. That's a weird one, dude. What made you choose accordion?

Karina Inkster:

Okay. I don't know what it is, but I play a lot of weird instruments. So Accordion and Du are my two main things, and those are the ones that I teach.

Izzy Jacobus:

Didjarido is pretty weird too.

Karina Inkster:

It's pretty weird. Yeah. You go to Australia, it's not that weird. Anywhere else -

Izzy Jacobus:

Obviously!

Karina Inkster:

It's pretty weird.

Izzy Jacobus:

Is there a place where accordions are not weird? Is that Belgium or something?

Karina Inkster:

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anywhere in that area of the world. Mexico.

Izzy Jacobus: 

Mexico, they do use a lot of accordions in Mariachis.

Karina Inkster:

Argentinian Tangos. Right. That's a lot of what I play. So tango music. But the movie Amali, the French movie.

Izzy Jacobus: 

Yeah.

Karina Inkster:

That soundtrack is why I play accordion. So it started with Yon playing all those pieces.

Izzy Jacobus:

Gotcha.

Karina Inkster:

And then it branched out. By the way, even though I'm half German, I'm morally opposed to polkas. So I do not play polkas at all, ever.

Izzy Jacobus:

I am part German as well. I come from a family of musicians. My father was a rock musician. My mother's brother was a jazz musician who was very popular in the city in the seventies. I grew up playing horn because that was his instrument. 

So trumpet, he played trumpet flu horn, and he was playing with, when he died, Herbie Hancock and Bob James and all these people got together and made an album of all his old songs. So those were the type of people that he played with. A little bit of that progressive, jazzy electronic stuff, and then a little bit of the very sophisticated progressive jazz that, but anyway, so yeah, I played horns and then my dad was a rock, classic rock folky, classic rock, and he can play 40 instruments. 

Karina Inkster:

One of those.

Izzy Jacobus:

He can play guitar.

Karina Inkster:

I envy those.

Izzy Jacobus:

Huge, yeah. You play guitar in ways that just take decades to learn. This is not like I sit on my guitar amp in my basement for a couple of years and then I get good at power chords. And he was at one point studying with this guy, Bob Van Helden, who was the teacher of bluegrass finger picking extraordinaire. And that's what he did for three years because he was bored with all the other styles and was like played flute for 50 years. Amazing. But anyway, I grew up in New Jersey, which was very white and very jersey trashy, and it was all like rock music. If somebody asked you what your favorite band was, you weren't allowed to say Floyd Zeppelin, AC C or Black Sabbath, and it had to be something else. Those were everybody's favorites. If you said one of those, it was like, ah, ah, that's black.

So then when I was 11, we moved to a different area of New Jersey and all of my friends were black and hip hop had just really hit, I mean, it was 83, 84. All I wanted to do was be involved in hip hop. Everything that we did was, and this was the beginning of hip hop, was an interesting thing. The culture was really designed so that everybody could participate essentially. You didn't need a particular ability to dance to be able to come up with some little popping move or some little break in move. You could have just a specialty and not be able to do anything else. Anybody could rap. You didn't have to be a great singer, or if you had a lisp for a speech impediment, that was cool. That worked. 

So everything was like, please be part of this culture. I guess when I was 14 or 15, I signed one of these production deals with a company and as a rapper, rapper, singer, e mixture type thing. And then I went through many incarnations of Front Man, or I went through, of course, all of the very embarrassing rapping over rock music with every rock band that wanted a rap cameo in my song, bro. I would jump up on stage and do two songs with my crazy dreadlocks and the whole-

Karina Inkster:

you're painting a picture here, it's very good.

Izzy Jacobus:

And then by the end of it, I was in my studio making rap demos for every local drug dealer who had $2,000 and was like, I could make a rap song, bro. I could make a rap song. And so that's what we did is we made rap songs, crappy rap songs for years and years and years. And then I was kind of doing dance remixes, which felt like non-music, and I kind of started to hate it a little bit. And I was like, man, you could make more money doing something else. Why don't you go do that before you hate music forever?

Karina Inkster:

Good point.

Izzy Jacobus:

And so I stopped these days it's mostly just me with an acoustic guitar, singing old songs and writing goofy animal songs. That's about it now.

Karina Inkster:

I like the sound of that. I like the sound of goofy animal songs.

Izzy Jacobus:

I have actually two songs that I really am proud of. I just never do anything with them. And they are very animal focused, not as on the nose as a lot of the vegan songs go vegan, everybody. Some of those are a little cringy, but they're borderline on that. But I actually like them. I like them enough to sing them over and over again. So I think that is enough to say that they're probably good music.

Karina Inkster:

That's a sign. Totally. That's awesome. So at the end of this music trajectory, is that when you went into the nutrition training realm or was there kind of a middle era?

Izzy Jacobus:

There was a middle era of me trying to find always to find artistic things to do. I went to a performing arts high school. I went to college for a portion of one year for musical theater. But yeah, when I was done with it, I went into interior design and home furnishings and antiquing. I had a junk shop, antique Abba Does a junk shop. I had a brass polisher and a welder. And we did all of these sort of things with taking old antique beds and chopping them up into pieces and turning 'em into king size four posters and canopies and making other pieces of beds into ornate lamps and stuff like that. And that's what I did for a while and then moved into fashion.

And so I was in fashion for a while. I had a little accessory line that was crochet wear with big studs right into the crochet. And then, yeah, I was at FIT, the Fashion Institute of Technology here in New York, which is one of the two big fashion schools in the city, wasn't really trying to get a degree. It was just trying to learn more things and make more cool fun things and expand and play. 

I was looking for more creative things. And at the same time running the white room at Saks Fifth Avenue at the main location in Manhattan, which is their most avant garde over the top men's wear, $8,000 coats and $20,000 bags and little capsule collections of, there's Calvin Klein in there, but it's a very small segment of Calvin Klein Black that you wouldn't even recognize as Calvin Klein. And there's Jill Sander in there, but it's not a Jill Sander that you would ever see in any other store or even in Sacks anywhere else. You would be like, that's what is that made out of every avant garde material and unusual thing. And then I went vegan.

Karina Inkster:

And this is where the vegan men's wear and all that kind of trajectory comes in then.

Izzy Jacobus:

Yeah, I was like, I, I don't think I can do this anymore. So I left there and I even got hired to run. Do you know this Canadian brand M 0 8 5 1?

Karina Inkster:

I do not.

Izzy Jacobus:

So they're like a big French Canadian brand that is international seller of these handmade bags. It started by an architect. So really cool stuff. So I'm running their North American hub, which is down in soho in the city, and it's just leather everywhere. And this dude's smelling the leather. He's like, and I was cringing and this guy's looking at me, you cannot do that to this my customers. And there's a major wholesale customer, probably buys millions. I dunno how much they buy, and I'm making disgusting faces at their product. And that was essentially the realization this has to stop.

Karina Inkster:

And how long ago was that?

Izzy Jacobus:

That was 11 years ago.

Karina Inkster:

Oh, nice. Okay.

Izzy Jacobus:

Yeah, I was like, I think I'm going to leave fashion. There's no way for me to do this. And then Kismet or Karma or one of those weird things I saw Joshua Katcher talking about, I had known what Brave Gentleman was primarily was just luxury men's shoes with a few other things. And I saw him saying, I'm going to open this popup in the back of Haymakers Vegan Grocery, which was the old location of Champ's Diner, had moved to a new location.

And I was like, you should hire me. And he was like, what? I'm not hiring anybody. I'm going to do this myself. While it's been around for a long time, it was mostly an online brand and still small, as small as mom and a pop gets. And I was like, no, dude. I'm the guy that you should work with because I have a lot of retail experience. I know a lot of things about fashion. I have really interesting ideas, and I think that the two of us could really grow this thing to a different place. And so I went and I ran his pop-up for a little while and then he decided let's make a go of it and open a full flagship location on the main strip in our neighborhood that he lived in as well. And that was it.

Karina Inkster:

Amazing.

Izzy Jacobus:

And that was it. So moved into vegan fashion doing all this stuff, and he kept expanding and trying different things and he's now, I don't know what he does now, but he was also the sustainability teacher at Parsons, which is one of the top fashion schools probably in the country at least here. It's the top fashion school in New York City, which is one of the capitals of fashion in the world.

Karina Inkster:

That's amazing.

Izzy Jacobus:

And then I got this certification from Joel Furman's school. Do you know he has an online school?

Karina Inkster:

Yep.

Izzy Jacobus:

The Nutritarian Education Institute. And it was very comprehensive, much more so than the E Cornell certification that a lot of people have. Yes, I know that one too. Yeah, this one was very in depth, very sciencey, very into the weeds. And I was like, oh, I really like this stuff. And then I know Dina, who has this gristle tattoo shop. It's a funny name for a vegan tattoo shop. It is Grisel.

Karina Inkster:

Grisel.

Izzy Jacobus:

I love it.

Karina Inkster:

Yes.

Izzy Jacobus:

I love it. And I was like, Hey, you're very cool. And she was like, I'm opening this nurse practitioner's client, and I was like, I'm going to come over there and be your nutrition counselor. And she was like, really? And so I sat down with her and the other nurse practitioner and they were like, yeah, he's really, really knowledgeable. All I did was read studies for years and years and you have to geek out on this stuff to get good at it.

You just have to want to. If it's not your thing, then don't just do the thing that's your thing. If it's not your thing, you're not going to be really into getting into the weeds, as I said, like that. And so I'm at Brooklyn NP and I'm seeing clients and what the health comes out.

Karina Inkster:

Oh yeah.

Izzy Jacobus:

I think that was, yeah, what the health comes out. That was six or seven years ago. 

Karina Inkster:

I think so. Seems about right.

Izzy Jacobus:

And so then there was a registry of plant-based doctors, of vegan doctors and we were on that and people were showing up literally, I have cancer, help me cure my cancer. I just had a heart attack. What do I eat to cure my heart attack? And I was like, I am not qualified for this. My little online certification. I didn't even have a precision nutrition certification yet, and I was like, I feel quite unqualified to help a lot of these people and this is not really why I got into this. I just want to help people get a little healthier and lose some weight and learn about plant-based nutrition and a more simple version of that. And so I left and started the workout plan.

Karina Inkster:

Now you do some level of online work as well. And is that the kind of the same clientele? Not necessarily all vegan folks.

Izzy Jacobus:

They're not all vegan, but I would say a much, much greater ratio of vegans in that circumstance.

Karina Inkster:

That makes sense. People are probably seeking out Izzy the vegan coach if they're doing the online thing.

Izzy Jacobus:

Most of it. Some of course is just like I have a client who has a brother who was overweight and wanted to lose some weight in Florida, and so she was just like, this is the guy that I know that I trust the most for evidence-based protocols and advice, and he's really good at creating sustainable things that actually can function in a real regular life, not just I can suffer for 16 weeks during this 16 week challenge. I'm just going to do nothing. I will never go out and have zero cheat meals or treats or whatever you want to call them. And so some of that people might move away and they continue to stay as clients, but yeah, they're more likely vegan and it's definitely not the thing I've been focusing on because I think AI is about to take over. I think AI is about to make that shit obsolete. You better up your game.

Karina Inkster:

I don't know about that, Izzy. I don't know. I think, okay, AI is going to take over creating programs for people. No question. I mean, honestly right now at this point.

Izzy Jacobus:

It's already, yeah.

Karina Inkster:

You could go and get a half decent workout plan, especially as a beginner, like strength training, four day split, whatever the hell.

Izzy Jacobus:

Yeah.

Karina Inkster:

However, here's the thing that I think is the catch, so to speak. Okay. AI is never going to have human relationships. AI is never going to have eyeballs on you to make sure that you did your fricking workouts. Agreed.

Izzy Jacobus:

Right? Agreed.

Karina Inkster:

So, yeah, programming, of course. I mean, people already go to YouTube or they have fitness blender apps or whatever. But I think a lot of the times, especially with online coaching, because you can be a little more well-rounded, right? You can creep on people's nutrition logs. You can see every single workout they do. You can be a little more creative too. Some of our clients do 10 minute workouts, but every day there's no way they would go to a gym for that. They're doing that at home, right?

Izzy Jacobus:

Yeah. Yeah.

Karina Inkster:

So anyways, I feel like the accountability, the relationship, problem solving life shit comes up. You got to brainstorm, lend an ear. AI is never going to take over that.

Izzy Jacobus:

I mean, regardless of whether it's the aspects that you're talking about or what I'm about to talk about, I think the human component is definitely always going to be integral. I want to provide an experience and that's why people love to come here. I teach them all, some kickboxing when they're here, which usually people are just like, I don't want to do that. And then three sessions later, it's all they want to do. I just want to come. Especially these days, they're like, I want to go.

Can you paint a Trump on that for me? I'm going to punch a Trump. But I have clients who come to me two or three times a week and by the end of the week they're like, can we just hit something for the first 20 minutes? We'll lift later, I promise. Of course, there's always going to be the human experience. And then regardless of how smart AI gets, it's only as smart as we are. And right now it can't discern good source from bad source, considering we're talking about it, very unsettled sciences. I mean nutrition sciences, maybe one of the most unsettled sciences there is. You can find a mountain of evidence for almost any argument. And if you don't know how to discern fact fiction and you don't know how to see the difference on a hierarchy of evidence and all this type of stuff, it's kind of hard to figure out what's real and what's not, what's true and what's not. AI's not very good at that, right? Yet, and it's probably going to be a while. Not at this point. It can figure it out. Right now it's as dumb as we are, and we as a collective whole humans are pretty dumb,

Karina Inkster:

Pretty well, humans are pretty dumb. We're not good at discerning. Maybe that's a theme of the conversation. Humans are dumb. Humans are dumb. We're not very good at critical thinking, unfortunately. Why do we have to wait until grad school, which I did, to actually learn to look at a study and look at what it means and dissect the statistics. How big of an effect is this? What's involved in the results? I didn't do that until grad school, not even my undergrad. Did we learn these kind of critical research skills.

Izzy Jacobus:

I'm teaching it to myself. I'm actually thinking about, do you know that? Who is it Menno or somebody has a school that teaches you just, it's like an online certification that just teaches you how to read studies and assess data.

Karina Inkster:

See, that should be mandatory for everyone in a field like

Izzy Jacobus:

Ours. Yes. I mean, how many coaches that we know that seem knowledgeable until you actually get one level deeper than just the basic surface level shit that they tell everybody and then you're like, homey, that's not, come on. Do you really, really? Come on now. Come on, stop it. Stop it.

Karina Inkster:

Yeah. Well, here's the problem too though, because we all make a living by coaching folks and helping them with fitness and nutrition and lifestyle, et cetera. So there's got to be some level of, I'm using air quotes here, marketing involved in order to get new clients. But if you really think about it, the basic shit that gets people results is boring. Doing your workouts regularly, thinking about your nutrition, food prepping, managing stress, et cetera. It's boring. And if we as coaches showed that on social media day in, day out, no one would give a shit,

Izzy Jacobus:

Right? And that's a lot. I talk to my clients a lot about the idea that fitness and nutrition needs to be simple and repetitive, and if your coach or your trainer or the person that you are consuming fitness content from on social media is standing on a bozo ball and pressing with one arm and curling with the other arm run, that's fucking somebody who's like, I ran out of the good ideas. Now I'm going to go to the bullshit that I didn't use to create my physique that I know is not an efficient use of your time. 

Karina Inkster:

Or it's sensationalized, right? It's exciting. People watch it.

Izzy Jacobus:

Or they think my clients are going to get bored after two weeks if I have them bench press and squat and row again.

Karina Inkster:

Totally.

Izzy Jacobus:

Yeah. Well then figure it out. Have a personality and make them bench and squat and row again, please. I just tell everybody, if your workout routine does not revolve around a squat, a push, a pull in an overhead press and maybe a hinge and a carry, then it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how cool and fun, you're going to get annoyed in a few months when you don't have any results.

Karina Inkster:

Totally. Or you injure yourself even worse. I mean, it goes the other way around too, right?

Izzy Jacobus:

Yeah. That's partially why I do the kickboxing too, and partially why I try to be fun is just to be sure that people are constantly at least learning something interesting, something fun, and then it's like, alright, now we're going to go squat again. Regardless of what we're doing, we're going to go squat again.

Karina Inkster:

I don't know if the analogy really holds up, but it's kind of like in music, doing your rudiments and your scales and your arpeggios and stuff that musicians do all the time and always tell their students to do too if they have them. It's not exciting. You're not learning new music, you're not playing with a new band. You're doing the basic shit, but it's just as important.

Izzy Jacobus:

And it's also why a lot of musicians don't ever get really, really good at their craft is because you sit alone by yourself. And I went through this for years, and it's also why I never really became a great instrumentalist. I'm a good vocalist. I'm a good performer. I can write great songs. I had an entire career off of jumping around on stage and entertaining people. I'm great at that aspect of it. I wasn't even that good of a rapper or a singer, but I'm a great performer. 

But when I would go to learn guitar, learn keys, or learn anything like that, yeah, I'd start fingering exercises and I'm working on it, and I'm doing scales, and next thing you know, I'm playing a James Taylor song or an Eagle song. There's a lot more fun and it's really easy to do, and there's four chords, and I could do it right now, or I could just load up some chords and play some goofy new song that I just heard on the radio, which is surely a lot more fun. But you don't progress like that. It's the same way. That's it.

Karina Inkster:

Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. Hey, what do you think is kind of along the same lines? Oh, wait, wait, okay, wait, what?

Izzy Jacobus:

What are the little creatures in Despicable Me with the little monocle and the little Oh, minions. That's what I think mini minions. Your car. Your car. Oh, it's like a mini minion.

Karina Inkster:

Like a mini. Mini, okay. Here's a slight hitch though, is that it's an SUV mini, so it's not actually really small. What the fuck is that? Because dude, my Deri Dew is seven feet long, which is longer than a fucking Cooper, so it doesn't fit it.

Izzy Jacobus:

It's not a mini, if it's ans UV, it's not a mini.

Karina Inkster:

That's, I know that is.

Izzy Jacobus:

Two opposing forces that cannot be combined.

Karina Inkster:

It's kind of scandalous.

Izzy Jacobus:

Scandal. You can't Voltron, you cannot Voltron like that.

Karina Inkster:

But yeah.

Izzy Jacobus:

I'm sorry. What were you about to ask you? That was not a good name. I didn't even come up with the name.

Karina Inkster:

No, no, no. It's cool. Along the lines of fitness coaches putting out, standing on an overturned bosu ball, curling with one hand and overhead pressing with the other in that world, what else do you see right now in either fitness or nutrition that you're kind of trying to chip away at? I often feel like with this show and with our coaching and with the books and whatever else, I feel like I'm chipping away at this huge mountain of pseudoscience. It's just like mountain of bullshit and I'm this tiny little corner of the internet over here, just like the tiny little pickax. What's your mountain of bullshit that you're picking away at?

Izzy Jacobus:

Alright, so I have a weird relationship with Facebook, and so I used to be a very contentious person on Facebook and I would get into all kinds of fights in the vegan community or in other social justice communities. And so do you know this gigantic Facebook group gym Rats?

Karina Inkster:

Yeah, I think I do. I think I was in it for a while,

Izzy Jacobus:

So it got super popular, probably has half a million members, and it's a absolute shit show. It's not a serious place. This is not a place that you go if you want good science very often, and I've been kicked out, this is a good sign, so I'm no longer in the group, but when I was in the group, I sometimes would use it just as a jokey place to mess around, but also are, the carnivore diet is very popular these days in some of these circles, so there's a lot of these guys experimenting with that fucking nonsense. A lot of it was spending time teaching people about the misnomer of incomplete proteins, which I was talking about a lot in that group, and I was trying to explain to people that they don't understand it. First of all, the woman who coined the term even regrets writing about it in her book.

Karina Inkster:

She retracted that whole concept

Izzy Jacobus:

And she's just like, look, it's not that I'm wrong, it's just that the way I expressed it misled an entire generation and then successive generations of people to think about this in the wrong way. Yes, there are protein sources that have slightly inferior amino acid profiles, but it doesn't matter. 

Izzy Jacobus:

Exactly. It doesn't matter unless you were sitting around eating 2000 calories of broccoli today, which nobody on the history of.

Karina Inkster:

And every other day of the week,

Izzy Jacobus:

Nobody in the history of eating, which is all of time has ever fucking done that.

Your body engages in protein resequencing and has amino acid pools and a cache of those. And beyond all of that, I just keep constantly reposting these links to PubMed to show them metas and systematic reviews, mountains of evidence showing that once higher protein levels are met, there's just no amino acids that you're going to be short on in any reasonable combination of plant-based foods, any of them whatsoever. Nevermind the idea that we're in a bodybuilding group and all of you use protein powder just like I use protein powder, and by the time I'm taking this, that's another buffer to be sure that, and then we get into this conversation about the quality of evidence because they're going to go find Dawn Baker or some other fraud or some other quack that has an idea that's going to lie to them or misrepresent evidence or cherry pick and stretch it out. And I'm constantly telling them, why are you looking for these fringe weirdos? 

I also do not go to fringe air quotes. Again, weirdos in the vegan community. I do not source my evidence from Gregor or from any of these guys, any of the classic guys that you would see in a vegan documentary or any of this stuff. I'm just going to go to Aragon or Menno or the ISSN or anybody and show you these people are not proponents of a plant-based diet. They don't eat vegan, they never will. Then Bio Lane or Bar Medicine or stronger bioscience or any of these groups are not big proponents of this stuff, but they all say the exact same thing. Don't be a goofball and think you need to worry about incomplete proteins or I can't build muscle on this. Those are my biggest things is trying to get a bunch of bros to stop being bro to stop with the bro science.

Karina Inkster:

Hey, this is an overarching theme, let's stop. The Broing, I think needs to happen in fitness in general. I'm in a similar Facebook group, do Rate My Plate. I think you might be in it too, kind of a shit show. But again, I'm in there just to post random shit, poke a little fun at the meat heads or whatever.

Izzy Jacobus:

Right? Same thing.

Karina Inkster:

And I go into this fully knowing that I'm doing it for my own amusement, right? I mean, I realize,

Izzy Jacobus:

Yeah, of course.

Karina Inkster:

There's a point where this kind of stuff negatively affects people's mental health if they're constantly having arguments about veganism and blah, blah,

Izzy Jacobus:

Blah, and you're not going to really move the needle in most of these conversations. Really, really

Karina Inkster:

Not at all. A hundred percent no. So I'm going into it A for my own amusement. I think it's hilarious, and B, for the people who happen to be watching. So it's not the actual person that I'm responding to that I don't think I'm going to change their mind at all but there's a lot of folks who just kind of poke around. They may or may not interact, but they're in there, they're watching,

Izzy Jacobus:

I have a dozen or two Facebook friends from that Gym Rats group that either were vegan or attempted a plant-based diet at some point, or we're thinking about it. And now we're like, bro, it's so cool to see a big 200 pound guy who is knowledgeable and proving that these things work and articulating the points with enough science that it makes sense and not so much that it becomes dull and undigestible speaking of. But yeah, I mean, it's new influence. A few people. You always do a little bit, and that's fun too. But yes, I have to admit most of it is just cathartic. I just want to go poke the bear a little bit and then I poke the bear too. Exactly what it's, it threw me out. I was making fun of them. The fucking steroid heads, the juice heads. It's a literal epidemic right now. Did you see the study that it said more than 30% of the average gym goers in the US are on some sort of PED?

Karina Inkster:

I did not. Is this all gym goers or just do gym goers?

Izzy Jacobus:

All gym goers, every age range. Not just power lifting gyms. Not every crunch. And 24 hour, 30%. Do you know that in the UK, because it's legal more than 40%, or at least on,

Karina Inkster:

I did not know.

Izzy Jacobus:

TRT or test or a little bit var, a little bit of, I don't even know because I've never taken any of these things, but I'm in there. I'm just disgusted by the idea that it's become a thing you got to do, man. You really want results, you got to do it. And of course, it would be a horrible thing to be a vegan and on those same steroids because then it's just like, well, come on. You wouldn't be able to do it without the steroids. And then if I say, well, you wouldn't be able to get to where you got without the steroids, and they're like, how do you know I'm a hard worker? You got to work hard too with that whole thing.

Karina Inkster:

I feel like that's the incomplete protein real quote argument. It's not that they think it's legit, they're just trying to poke anything towards veganism, right?

So I could tell someone in Rate My Plate, for example, is you use that shit storm as an example. I'm posting fava bean tofu. Someone says, Ew, that's gross. Or I'm on a carnivore diet, or whatever the hell. I'm like, well, fava bean tofu has more protein per calorie than 99% of animal products. It's like 91% of the calories in fava being tofu, straight up protein.

Izzy Jacobus:

Which is amazing.

Karina Inkster:

Then you get into, oh, but incomplete protein, oh, but blah, blah, blah.

Izzy Jacobus:

But what's the bioavailability of that?

Karina Inkster:

It comes later in the priority of trolling, I think.

Izzy Jacobus:

Yeah. I mean, the one thing that I have to admit that I do regret from that group is I was poking the hunters. And hunters are at the same time the most aggressive people that you can in these groups and the most sensitive fuckers that you can encounter in these groups. And so this girl posts a picture of herself fishing and she's got a fish, and I wrote creepy or something like that just to little poke, poke, poke, and she was like, what you talking about? I have to feed my family. And it's a lady, you don't feed your family fishing out of that stream. I mean, you might eat those fish, but the majority of the food you buy every other hunter is from the grocery store in plastic wrap. But anyway, I was saying, I said, I don't kill for fun. And she's like, I don't kill for fun. I was like, yeah, you do. You're killed. That's what you're doing right now. I'm feeding my family. No, you're not. You do it because you like it. You don't need to eat that. You don't need to do it in that way. And then she tries to go through this, well, I throw most of them back.

Karina Inkster:

Okay....

Izzy Jacobus:

Okay, well, when you rip that fish's jaw in half and then throw it through the air back into the water, how many of those do you think die? Zero. And so I start posting studies and blah, blah, blah. And so this is my biggest regret of being in that group. She was so vindictive and so crazy that she went and found my Google business listing and gave me and created fake accounts and gave me one star reviews and dropped my rating of my business. No, over a five minute squabble in the gym rats group about hunting.

Karina Inkster:

That's happened to me with the podcast. You got to be careful. Same.

Izzy Jacobus:

Exactly.

Karina Inkster:

Yeah. You got to be careful. Got to be careful. It's happened. Multiple fake accounts, all the same person. They're all very similar things about, I don't know, disseminating harmful information, et cetera. It's all the same shit.

Izzy Jacobus:

The funniest part was, at this time, I was still working under the bedroom in second bedroom in my apartment, and she wrote, the bathrooms are disgusting and the staff is rude, and my clients did nothing but laugh at my cats. And rude, rude. That's a rude, because the only staff I have is my cats, is my wellness ambassadors that everybody would meet on the way in and they would just walk in and say, you are rude. And I was like, lady, I have bathroom. I don't even have bathrooms. I have bathroom. That's funny. I don't have any staff. Couldn't even get Google to take it down either. I was like, this person that's unfortunate lives a thousand miles away from me, and I don't have bathrooms. I don't have staff. How do I get this thing taken down? Why is this allowed? Anyway?

Karina Inkster:

Oh, that's super annoying. Yeah. Okay. So that's actually something, even though this podcast thing happened to me with reviews, it's kind of something I forgot about. So this is a good reminder, especially for folks who run their own show. Be a little careful in poking those trolls. I mean, as fun as it is,

Izzy Jacobus:

Yeah, I mean, you never know what some unhinged person might decide they need to do to make themselves feel good that day and take it a step further. I mean, this is when I went and looked at her Google account, I saw this is her thing.

Karina Inkster:

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Izzy Jacobus:

I saw multiple other businesses where it was like, there were bedbugs, there was a broken this, I got food poisoning here. It just every, and it wasn't even necessarily an anti vegan thing, it was anywhere she decided that she needed to lash out. But anyway, yeah, silly stuff.

Karina Inkster:

Well noted on that. Well, hey, let's wrap things up. So where can people find you and your services, workout plant, et cetera?

Izzy Jacobus:

The workout plant.com is my website where you can find stuff that I'm doing and goofy little articles about how to get yourself to drink more water. And I just had a new article coming out about my transition because before I went plant-based, I was actually disabled for about three years and essentially bedridden. I was in bed like 23 hours a day. I was obese. I was more than 250 pounds. And this article is about the steps that I went through to come back from this level of disability and bed health to the place of the Met, and then creating a program for some of the local elderly community and differently able, less abled community and sedentary community to use the same steps and walking and Iyengar yoga and all of these things that I used to regain my health and my mobility. 

So you can find those things on the workout plant.com as well. And my gym is here in Crazy Ass Williamsburg Brooklyn, where all of the silliness happens on Frost Street for the local people. But you can find me on Google or via that. I also do run an animal activist campaign called Animals First on the Second, and you can find that at Animals First on the second.com or fast against slaughter.org. Brilliant. That's about it.

Karina Inkster:

That's awesome, Izzy. Well, it's been great to chat. I'm glad we could do a face to face finally after creeping on each other on Facebook for however many years.

Izzy Jacobus:

Yeah, yeah, it was fun.

Karina Inkster:

Thanks so much.

Izzy Jacobus:

Someday we'll have to jam accordion style.

Karina Inkster:

Yes, accordion did Guitar, jam and horns. Except we have to figure out a way for me to play didge and accordion at the same time, and for you to play guitar and horn at the same time.

Izzy Jacobus:

We'll just use multiple tracks. Yeah, we'll just get funky with it. We got tech.

Karina Inkster:

Brilliant. Nice to chat with you, Izzy. Thanks again for joining me on the show. Connect with Izzy at our show notes, nobullshitvegan.com/186. And don't forget to check out our fitness and nutrition coaching programs karinainkster.com/coaching. Thanks for tuning in.