The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 313: We're Breaking Under the Weight of Our Own Weight with Vinnie Tortorich

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

The health and fitness guru breaks down the effects of sugar and grain on the American diet, gives an accounting of the total weight lost by the "Rowebies" that joined Vinnie's crusade after his first appearance on TWIHI (spoiler alert: it's a LOT!), and bids us beware of food pyramids and sleeping nineteenth-century prophets.

And just like that, it's episode number 313 of the way I heard it. This one is called We're Breaking Under the Weight of Our Own Weight. A rather clever turn of phrase by my rather clever guest back for his reprise or redux. I think it means the same thing. Whatever it is. It's Vinny Tortorich. I'm still not convinced he pronounces his name properly. How would you pronounce it?

Torturich. Tortorich. I mean, I... John Tutoro. Exactly. Exactly. And for a long time, I saw his name in print, and that's what I assumed it was. And then he introduced himself when he came on this podcast a year ago,

was Vinny Tortorich. And I'm like, ooh, I hate to tell you this, my friend, but you're saying your name wrong. You got that wrong. And he said, what do you mean, Mike Rao? As it turns out, I was wrong. Vinny's been pronouncing his name properly his whole life. And as it turns out, the things we're wrong about, really is at the guts of this conversation.

You know? Yeah. We get a lot of stuff wrong as a people. Oh, my God. You could fill a book with what we don't know. And that same book would be filled with all sorts of certainty. I know you're tired of hearing me talk about that. But my God, it's just so true in the area of nutrition.

Vinny is somewhat famous. No, he's famous, actually. He's famous. Yeah. He's, uh, he's, uh, he's been. on Oprah for freaking soon. He has been on Oprah and he tells a very funny Oprah story. You know what? I didn't tell my part of the Oprah story in this conversation. No, he didn't. I was so grateful. Yeah, it's probably just as well. Vinnie's on a crusade, my friends, to help more people eat better

and lose more weight and not be so metabolically broken. He's got a PDF out there that is a great place to start called No Sugar, No Grains. His whole movement is called No Sugar, No Grains. He's one of the forefathers, one of the creators of the keto diet. He's written a number of bestselling books, and he's produced three really, really, really terrific documentaries. I saw his latest one last year right before we spoke called Beyond Impossible. And I just watched his first one called Fat, a documentary. And yes, I don't want to gush because no one cares about gushing, but watch it. Watch this movie. It's so important.

And it explains in a way that a child can understand how we have come to believe so many things that are fundamentally untrue about nutrition. And, you know, the theme in this whole conversation is be wary of certainty, be wary of earnestness, but be mindful of the truth and search for. it and keep your mind open and your diet's going to change and some good things can happen as a result. Hard not to like this guy, Chuck. I love Vinny. He's a lot of fun. But I do want to say that in the course of this podcast, in this episode, we do use the word fat a few times. It is the name of the documentary fat, but it is meant in no way to disparage anyone or fat shame anyone. I just want to set that straight from the beginning. Well, isn't that incredibly careful? Vinny's on a mission to help people. It is a little careful. I agree. But I want people to know that Vinny's heart

is in the right place. He wants to get people healthy. It's less about losing weight and it's more about being healthy. He wants people to eat nutritious food and not take a lot of pharmaceuticals. And I am all for that. That's what I want to do. I'm all for it too. But in response, look, I don't want to shame anybody either. And I said some things in our last conversation with Vinny. that invited a certain amount of criticism from some folks. And look, here's where I'm coming from. There's no reason to shame anyone. But what we're seeing happen in the culture today

in so many areas are people embracing lifestyle choices that are fundamentally unhealthy. Unhealthy. Right. It's not enough to say, wait a minute, I don't want to shame you. It's now it's like, wait, you have to be a part of my celebration.

I'm obese, and I'm going to celebrate my decision to be obese, and I don't want to hear any guff about it, right? So that's kind of where it's like, look, I don't want to shame anybody either. But you know what I needed? When I was 40 pounds on the wrong side of good, I needed my father to look at me and say, hey, tubby, what the hell's going on here? You look like a picnic table.

Yeah, he literally said to you. I remember I was there. He literally told me I looked like a picnic table. What he meant to say was, because I was wearing this blue and white plaid shirt. And growing up, we had this picnic table in our backyard that had like a semi-permanent blue and white plaid tablecloth on it. And he told me later, he said, son, what I meant to say was, you look like a tablecloth wearing that shirt, you know, the old tablecloth we had. But no. Yeah.

What came out instead was the truth. You look like a picnic table. So, look, this is not a conversation designed to make anybody feel bad. But I'm going to tell you something that I learned in the conversation that I really am very proud of. After that last conversation on the podcast with Vinny a year ago, thousands of people who listened to this podcast joined his Facebook group. Those people now have their own little like sub team. They're called Robies. I'm not sure how you spell it.

I think R-O-W-E-B-I-E-S, I guess. And according to Vinny, that group collectively has lost literally tens of thousands of pounds by following Vinny's advice and morphing away from carbs and sugars and grains. and toward proteins and vegetables. That makes me feel really great, right? So there's a lot of joking around in this conversation, but underneath it is a deadly serious topic with a guy who's been on the tip of the spear for a long time

and who is really and truly making a difference in moving the needle. I'm glad he came back. I enjoyed this one even more than the last one. How about you, Chuck, if you had to rate it? Oh, the best conversation ever. And that is the sound of an old friend and erstwhile producer desperate to hang on to his job for another week. Chuck, I'll probably let you go next week, but for now, for now, you're safe. It's episode 313.

We're breaking under the weight of our own weight because we are. This is the way I heard it right after this. Shameless plug! Long before she was Peggy Roe, my mom was Peggy Noble, daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble. It was her father, Carl, who inspired me to pitch a show called Dirty Jobs to the Discovery Channel and later start a foundation that honored the kind of work Carl Noble did for a living, trade work, skilled labor. That foundation is called MicroWorks, and today I'm proud to tell you that we've helped

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mash bills, all of which you can peruse at noblespirates.com. In fact, if you spend 100 bucks and use code Carl, C-A-R-L, you'll get one tube of orange bitter-infused sugar cubes for free. That's code Carl with a C to get nine sugar cubes, ingeniously engineered to make nine perfect old-fashions every time. It's my favorite way to support MicroWorks and my favorite whiskey to sip responsibly after a long day of interviewing people on this podcast. Pick up a bottle at noblespirates.com. K-N-O-B-E-L-Spirits.com. Soon may the noble men come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. Yeah, you can't script that kind of thing. Oh, God, no. You can't script Vinny Tortorich for sure. Would you just say you just drove back

from Louisiana? I drove 15 hours to show my dad a kayak that it took me 14 months to build. And did not get to put it in the bayou? Because it rained the entire time I was there. I was there for two days. And I got back in a car with set kayak and drove 15 hours back yesterday. Because they wouldn't let you put the kayak in the overhead compartment, I suppose. So you had no choice.

Well, they frown upon it, Mike. Mike, when I talked to Vinnie before he was telling me about this kayak, he was super proud and everything, he goes, hey, I'm going to text you some pictures. Let me know what you think, right? I never got any. And the first thing he says when he comes on is, he's like, hey, I got two numbers from you. I got this one and I got that one. I go, well, that one's the office and this one's my mobile. He's like, no wonder you didn't answer me.

I thought, what's wrong with this guy? I sent him this beautiful kayak. Look at this thing. It took me 15 months to build this thing. I got a critical kayak update, and there's nobody to share it with. It's beautiful. Why did you build a kayak? What precedes the decision?

You know, like, walk me through that process. I was watching a movie called Class from 1981 or 82 because Rob Lowe was in it. Actually, Jacqueline Bissett was in it, so I wanted to look at her. But you mentioned Rob Lowe first. I just want the record to show. Yeah. You did see the cup, right? Yeah, that is very handsome. I'm watching this movie.

And in the movie, I'm on my spinner. Rob Lowe is driving this red 9-11 Carrera. And I said, man, I always wanted one of those. So I went on the Internet and started looking around. It turns out, I said, I'm going to buy a project car. I'm going to turn it into what I want it to be. and I will finally have a red Porsche. And I did that for about two days.

And then I looked around and I went, you know what? Once I get a Porsche, I'm a Porsche guy. I need to join a country club. I need to get the hat. I need to, on Saturdays, I need to go to some parking lot where other people have cars, like Jay Leno and all these people. I got to become this guy. And I'm not that guy.

And I realized my entire life, I worked and worked and worked to own a Porsche and now I don't want it. And I said, what do I really want? And I really wanted to learn how to build something out of wood my entire life. You know, I'm 60. You go through life and you go, you know, one day, one day I'm going to build something out of wood. And since I'm a kayaker, it just made sense to build a kayak. Well, see, what you did right there, Vinnie, and this is why we love you is like you took us down a road and then you took a colossal leap from maybe I'll build something

out of wood to oh I know the only sensible thing to do is construct a kayak now my dad you'll be interested to know is 90 and he's been taking his first wood shop courses ever in his life he's in a retirement home and every month or so he'll send me a sconce he'll send me a vase or or something. I'm not quite sure what half of it is. But see, he's going through what we like to call the chronology of understanding and expertise, crawl, walk, run. You just jump straight into the kayak, dude.

Straight into a kayak. Into a vehicle. You're making a wooden vehicle that has to keep you above the water. I got lucky because when I moved to central Virginia, I injured my kayak on the way. and I found a guy in Richmond who could fix, you know, a carbon fiber kayak. So when I went to get it fixed, I started talking to this guy before the pandemic about how, you know, I've always wanted to build one of these boats that Nick Schada, you know, Nick Schada is the best

kayak builder in the world. One of his boats was in the museum of modern art. And he goes, oh, Nick and I are good friends. And I thought he was shooting shit. Turns out the guy I was talking to is the second best kayak builder. in the world. He's got all the gear. He's got all the bandsaws and all the rotary this and all the arbitral that, everything. And the part I didn't know was that he was a fan of my podcast. And he goes, man, I'm so happy to meet you. I can't believe you're in my shop. So he said, look, if you ever

want to come in and build a kayak, I have all of the tools. All I have to do is drive 90 miles every weekend for 42 weekends to go build a kayak. Why is it so funny? Dude, I mean, this is so metaphorically perfect for no sugar, no grains, for the quest you've been on, for everything you're doing. You just dive into the deep end of the pool. Also, quick sidebar, but very interesting choice of language in your last observation. You said I injured my kind of.

in what I think would be a classic bit of anthropomorphizing. Do you see the kayak as a sentient being now that you've created it? Or do you just see them in general as things that are larger than the manifestation of the wood with which you created it? I have trouble with coming near the censured being part because here's the deal. I haven't even named her yet. Everyone is, what are you going to name her? Now, I've got to come up with the name. I just toiled over this thing.

Look at my hands. And I've been killing myself to come up with a name. And the other thing people are saying is this thing is so beautiful. I can't believe you're going to put it in water. It's like, well, I'm not going to make a garage queen. You know, I've always said if I owned a Ferrari, I'm going to drive it every day. I'm not going to look at it, right? Right.

My buddy Adam Carolla claims to love cars. He goes, oh, I love cars. I got warehouses full of cars. Yet, whenever I tell him I drive everywhere, he goes, why do you drive? Just get into the plane. It's like, well, if you really love cars, you drive. You drive. You were driving.

I lived on Coldwater Canyon for a lot of years. Jay Leno is a car lover because half the time I would see his ass hanging out of a steamer because it would break halfway up Coldwater Canyon. I could tell you more about Jay Leno's ass than anyone else in the world. would pass him every day. And when you pass, he waves out of the car. He doesn't look up, but he waves. Right, right, right. That's a man who loves cars. He gets in him and he drives him. Yep. Right? He doesn't look at him. I'm not going to look at the kayak. Have you ever done his show, the garage? No, because the closest thing I've ever come to a cool car is I've had a couple of carvettes,

and that's just like an old guy trying to be young again. So it doesn't fit, you know. Well, congratulations on not getting the Porsche. You're so right. I know so many guys and there's nothing inherently wrong with these guys and certainly a Porsche, a remarkable bit of engineering, an automotive genius, but it is true how Way will lead on to Way. And, you know, it's like the gateway, like you start with a car and the next thing, you know, everything has to follow suit from the way you dress, to the house you live in, to the kind of dog you have. It all informs everything. And it's, it's a bad road. Yes, Chuck. Well, the bad thing about buying a Porsche is that your junk shrinks up three inches.

Little known fact. What do you drive? That's scientific. Yeah. I drive a Hyundai because I, no, no, why do I call it a Hyundai? No, it's a Prius. Yeah, because you're deeply ashamed to admit that it's a Prius. So you go with Hyundai as if that's going to get you any kind of salvation.

Did I tell you the shirt that I saw when I was at the drag races, I saw a guy wearing a shirt, and on the back it said, because nobody ever got a hot woman driving a Prius. And I was like, what? I have no idea what the front of his shirt said, but it was whatever it was. I get the point. Vinny, what's your dad's name?

Vincent, the same as mine. But everyone calls him Si, because he's from Louisiana, and nobody goes by their name. So, yeah, he's Cy. I'm Vinny. And my family, if you go to a family, reunion being Italian, if you say Vincent or Tony at the family reunion, you hear the

scratch and everyone turns and looks. 30 heads snap around. Well, listen, take it for what it's worth, but in terms of naming your kayak, I got to think something along the lines of heavy sigh might be interesting. He was quite heavy, so. Again, talking metaphorically, you're a guy. I just watched Fat, a documentary, which I really want to talk about because I'm angry as hell about it now, as I'm sure everybody is who, like, watches that thing start to finish. But it's like, you are a heavy sigh.

And I say that in the nicest way. You've come into your sixth decade. You've been pushing the rock up the hill for a long, long time. So much of what you're doing is sort of quixotic, right? I mean, you're trying to literally change the way people think about food and show. and grain, and you're coming at it from a point of view that says, we've been essentially lied to, remorselessly for decades, brainwashed for decades. Yeah.

And so I think you're on the right side of this thing in a significant way, but doesn't it feel like sighing heavily is some, it's like the only thing left to do in the face of so much resistance in this Sisyphian-Kyakian quest you've embarked upon? You know, sometimes I'll get together with the likes of, you know, Nina Tysheels or whatever, and we'll have a drink. And we sit there and we wonder if we're doing anything. Yeah. Seriously anything. And I think we are.

When I wrote the book, Fitness Confidential, well over 11 years ago, I was writing it 12 years ago, so it's been out for 11 years. That book, along with Gary Talb's book, Why We Get Fat, and maybe Nina Tyshal's book, big fat surprise, we started the keto movement. The term keto didn't exist. As a matter of fact, the reason I went with NSNG or no sugars, no grains is because I didn't want to put the word ketogenic in a book because I knew every doctor was going to go, that's ketoacidosis and you're killing people and this kind of stuff. And I was thinking, I'm just not going to do that. And so we created keto. And now, believe it or not, I'm doing a documentary right now on keto where I'm not so happy with what's been going on.

So you guys are going to have to have me back for a third time in another year because we need to talk about that. Or just get me in the documentary. I'm good at that kind of thing and I have, you know, very limited experience in this. But I have so many questions. Like you can't just jump into keto and go, okay, now I'm a keto guy. It's layers and layers. In fact, the last time you were on here, what you said was when I come back,

because I am coming back, Mike, you said. We have to talk about sort of the bull crappy keto alternatives that have made their way onto the shelves. The knuckleheads like me are probably buying. For the same reason, we bought stuff that said low fat 20 years ago, right? We just don't know. We're just so damn desperate for a playbook, right? And so let's come at it from that direction.

watching fat, watching beyond impossible or beyond me, and I haven't seen fat too yet. But I mean, it's just every time I watch these things, Vinny, it just reminds me of how desperate I am for an easy-to-follow playbook. And if I feel desperate for that, the country's desperate for it. And that seems to be, that's the thing you seem to be trying to cobble together. a playbook that anybody can follow. Yeah, you know, after I wrote the book, and the book became one of Amazon bestseller, stayed at the top of health and fitness for almost a year.

It literally changed my life financially. And I looked around after a year, and I said, oh boy, I wrote an entire book, and I didn't tell anyone what to do. And everyone seems to love the book. So in a fit of rage, I sat down one day and wrote a 26-page PDF. Believe it or not, I write everything. I can't type.

Look, right here, I use fountain pens only. It's like I'm two steps away from a quail. And it's, I just sat down and just wrote out notepads and notepads and just wrote this thing. And we called it the NSNG PDF. And I'm telling you this for a reason. I got my wife to type it up and we put it up and we put it up for free. And it was downloaded for free well over 300,000 times. And that thing alone, if you do nothing else, that little playbook, if that's the word you want to use,

has helped gazillions of people lose weight. Now, Chuck asked me to put something together. So it was very hard to quantify what happened after the show. after I did your show a year ago. So I tried to quantify it in some way, shape, or form. So what I did was there's a Facebook group called Vinnie Tortorich's No Sugars, No Grains, Facebook group. And right after this show, it's hard to get into that group. But they saw an influx of somewhere between 3,500 and 5,000 people just in that group.

That group already had like 25 or 30,000 in it. So I went to the admins of that group. and I said, can you give me an average? Because we know some people have lost 100 pounds, 150 pounds since last year. I said, I need an average. So we called 300 people. And out of those 300 people, we came up with, they lost an average of almost 70 pounds. It was 68 pounds.

So I went, okay, I don't want to use 68. I want to really take a lower. So I'm going to go low. I don't want to go high, I want to go low. So instead of 68 pounds in that little group of 300, I did 50 pounds per person. So if you multiply that by the 300, you come up with 15,000 pounds. That's a crazy number, but it gets crazier. So I went, okay, we know that those people lost an average 15,000 pounds, just 300 of them.

So I went to my PDF and I looked to see how many people downloaded the PDF from your group. And we can't see exactly who they are. But we can look at the time period. And from all of the people who downloaded it, we can say, at least 30,000 people in that first several days after the podcast came out were micro people. And they started calling themselves Robies. And we still don't know the correct way to spell Robe. Some put the IE, some put the Y, depends on where you're from. Canada, they use the Y.

We don't understand. But if you take 30,000 people, which is very conservative from the first couple of days, and you do an average of 50, you come up with 1.5 million pounds. And then you look at my newsletter, another 20,000. did the newsletter, and it doesn't mean that they were in the Facebook group or the other group, right? That gives you another million people. So all we know, Mike, is since I did this show last year, you and me together have probably helped more people lose weight than Jack La Lane. But wait, there's more. I do consults with people. Every single one of the people I do

consults with, they'll say, look, I've lost weight, I've lost 50, 70, 100, 150 pounds. They're A1Cs, their blood sugar, people who were diabetic that had A1Cs of 12 and 13, they're below 5.6, they're healed, they're off of drugs, right? To me, that's bigger than the number of people that lost millions of pounds. Now, I've heard this before, but I started hearing this more from Robies than anyone else. Women who could not get pregnant were now getting pregnant. So, Mike, you're probably responsible for more pregnancies in this country in the past year than any other man alive. If I had a nickel.

Got a roll of quarters. Wow. I mean, look, man, Chuck kind of prepped me with this. He said that there's been some really great feedback as a result of your parents. And he ran some of the numbers by me. And I thought he was, you know, just lying to me again, as he's wont to do. But kidding aside, I mean, that's just one appearance on one podcast.

You've been all over the world pushing the boulder up the hill. You know, you've been on Corolla, what, 50 times at this point? Oh, no. It's last year I said it was 100. Turns out it was 93, so I lied. I thought it was 100. See, it's not just me, Mike. Because, yeah.

So now it's over 100. Dennis Prager has me. I've been on Prager, you and that video got, they did a five-minute video. That video got millions. and millions of downloads. Now they're bringing me back. They did a two-hour interview with me. So that's coming up. So when you start looking at that and the fact that a guy like me could be in Norway giving a speech next month or, you know, they brought me to Asia for three weeks to go

talk to doctors, which is odd to me, right? Of course, when you're in India and you're telling the Indian people not to eat meat and are to eat meat and they're going, well, the cow's sacred, You have yourself an issue. Tough sell. Right. Yeah, it's a tough sell. But they bring me to these continents and these countries and I get to talk to people. And I think it's awesome.

Yet we have the biggest problem right here in this country. Well, people are still raving, raving. I tell you about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my face. page and read the comments. They're hysterical. In this commercial, you'll not only see Peggy Roe gently criticizing her oldest son for his longstanding and well-established commitment issues, you'll learn about the latest offer from Pure Talk, which includes unlimited talk, text, and data for just $3499 a month with no contracts and no commitments of any kind. You can see

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and allows me to exploit my own mother. in a national advertising campaign. Do what my mom did. Get yourself unlimited high-speed data for just 3499 a month. At puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Pure talk. I think part of the reason I feel like we're kindred spirits

is that so much of what you do is a kind of debunking, right? I mean, you're looking at myths and misperceptions and stigmas and stereotypes. And what you did in fat, I thought was a really masterful job of explaining how so many people came to embrace so much nonsense, not just as reasonable or credible, but as dogma. The food pyramid is probably the best example. but to go back and look at the well-intended initiatives combined with the unintended consequences, the stuff that McGovern pushed forward. And God, like it's so chilling at the end.

Chuck, did you watch this thing start to finish? Yes, I did. When you look at the amount of money, every subsequent administration has spent on nutrition and wellness, going back to like Johnson and straight up till today, more, more, more, more, more. And when you see the things that coincide with the amount of money we're spending on what looks like, you know, the dispensation of knowledge and truth, when you see what's most correlated with that, diabetes, obesity, all of these problems, I mean, at what point does it just become a full on national emergency? and do people start to say, we need to follow the money? Because we're just being lied to straight up over and over again and again in so many different ways. Yeah, we're not doing that at all from a government standpoint.

Look, if you look at the last election, some of the people were running on the fact that, hey, we're going to pull meatless Mondays. We're going to take meat out of school. And if you look at what they're doing now, they've introduced a new type of graph. that came out of Tufts University. That's even worse than the pyramid was. I mean, this is just out, the last appearance on Corolla was to talk about that. They're putting things like Eminem's and Cheerios ahead of meat and eggs. They're still bastardizing meat and eggs.

And no one can understand why. We know why, but it makes zero sense that we're going down these roads. Yes, yeah, why? I mean, money, big sugar. Well, it's not just big sugar. It's, you know, industry can make a lot of money. Brains are very stable. You know, you can make any kind of chip or any kind of cereal or anything.

It's shelf stable for a long time. So they could just keep pushing this stuff and pushing it and pushing it because it's almost free. The example I like to give was when I was in college, you can get two for 99 cents at Taco Bell. Two tacos 99 cents. Now you can get two tacos and a drink for 69 cents. Okay. The average car cost about four grand when I was in college, and now you need north of 50 grand if you're even thinking about a used car,

it seems like I'm exaggerating that point. But everything has gone up in price except things like Taco Bell and Coca-Cola. And notice candy bars, they're all around the same price. They haven't doubled and tripled and quadrupled over the years. because we subsidize, the government subsidizes this stuff so heavily that it's almost free, right? So these companies can get grains and sugars and everything else for almost free. They pay farmers on certain years not to grow so they can drive up the price, right, supply and demand worldwide. And all of that started.

It all started at the beginning of the Great Depression when we were still, you know, most of this country depended on farming. And it was, remember this? Too big to fail. So the government got into the subsidy business, and then they started realizing we could sell this stuff worldwide. And before you know it, you got yourself an issue. As a matter of fact, we didn't have high fructose corn syrup in this country the way we did. Before, I think we had a sugar shortage in 1972 or 73.

It was right around the time Watergate happened. So we opened up trade with Japan to start bringing in more. of this high fructose corn syrup, and we became addicted to it. You know, Coke went, wait a minute, this is cheaper, it's sweeter. We can change to this and not use sugar. And one thing led to another, and now we have high fructose corn syrup. You know, it's all these trade and trade embargoes and the way we ship stuff around the world that makes it cheap.

That's a long way of saying when you go to the cereal aisle, and cereal is, I don't know what it costs, but, you know, a couple of bucks and you can feed your whole family, or a dozen eggs now, six bucks because of the avian flu. What are you going to choose if you're on the budget? I know what I would have to choose, you know, just to get the bellies full in my house. And it's kind of a sad affair because we're creating a different problem. I think part of the reason I was initially resistant to keto was that it just sounded like one more of a gazillion things where very certain sounding people got in front of me to make some very certain sounding claims. And if you're a reasonable person who believes, for instance, in, oh, I don't know, say everything in moderation, right?

That's a trope. It's a bromide. And for most people, I think it serves you pretty well. Well, you know, there's nothing moderate about the hat you're wearing, right? No sugar, no grain. this is not like a just-the-tip situation. You're like, no, no. And so is it poison? Or at what point would you say it's poison, if not quite there? And can you think of any other substance, with the possible exception of, say, fentanyl or maybe no exceptions?

Has anything in your estimation done more harm to more people than an excess of sugar? we would have to go back to Nancy Reagan to start answering this question she did a lot of damage didn't she boy did she that was a tiny woman with a big giant head who did a lot of damage um just say no right it's like okay everyone's on drugs okay just say no it didn't work right it couldn't work so just saying no does not work when we were kids the three of us were the same age you can have dessert, right? You can have, you know, a bit of candy here and there. You can have

breakfast area. You can have waffles or whatever. But we didn't have them every day, right? There was a certain amount of meat and protein and vegetables and everything else that we ate, and we were fine. So when you had a soft drink on occasion, it was what it was. Nobody was fat when we were kids. I'm going to use a cereal ad, a special K, if you can pinch an inch. That ad was around in 1982, 83. They were telling Americans, if you can pinch an inch of skin, you're too fat. Right? That's what we were in the 80s.

I'm not making this stuff up. You can watch commercials tell us where we are in society. So pinch an inch. So now you go, well, Vinnie, you're being a bit ridiculous. No sugars, no grains. I mean, keto. Okay, not for everyone. Mike, you're not overweight.

Chuck, you're not overweight. You guys are not metabolically broken, right? So if you're having a brusky on a Friday night or two or three, you're fine. You're not metabolically broken. You don't have A1Cs of 12. You don't have fatty liver disease. You're not sleeping with a mask on because you have sleep apnea. Right?

You don't have these problems. You don't have what we started calling during the pandemic comorbidities, things that will take you down if anything else happens. So can you get away with the pizza every now and again? Absolutely. Can you have ice cream on occasion? Absolutely. I'm not saying that. But if you're metabolically broken, like the people in the Facebook group, like the 30 or 40 or 50,000, whatever it is that started getting my PDF or whatever, those people, they've already cast their check, right? They're living on borrowed time. They can't do it. Right. And the only way to get them out is to cut out the one thing that's causing the problem.

It's like being an alcoholic. You have to cut out the one thing that's causing the problem. And if you cut it out successfully, you can heal yourself. The problem is, unlike us, they can't go back to it. If they do, now listen, if they have a bit of ice cream or a beer or whatever, they're fine. But if they go back to it in a regular way, then they're going to go right back to being sick again. So it's not a cut and dry thing. Did I answer that in any kind of succinct way that anyone can understand it? Of course, because look, everything in moderation, the danger of that trope is the

danger of all tropes. The minute something wise and relevant to a lot of people becomes dogma for everyone, then we've probably gone down a bad road. So yeah, it's fine. It's fine. It's a to say everything in moderation for somebody who's not a raging alcoholic. To tell somebody who's a raging alcoholic that, yeah, you know, a shot or two probably won't hurt you. Well, hold on a minute. So it all kind of collapses under its own weight. So, yeah, you answered the question.

Chuck, you're dying to say something. If you could just define clearly metabolically broken? There's two types of diabetes. There's type one, or some people call it juvenile diabetes. this is your body, you were born that way, or you developed it, your body was going to develop it, either way at some point. Most people get it as a juvenile. This you cannot fix.

You have type 1 diabetes. You're living on insulin. You have to inject insulin. You have to keep everything even. Type 2 diabetes should not even be called diabetes because it's not the same as type 1. It's something you cause onto yourself, right? So once your A1C's hit 5.6, that's considered diabetes. And if you notice, if you see all the ads on television for OZMPIC and Metformin, they'll say,

hey, if you take this drug, we'll get you down to an A1C of seven. What they're telling you is, we will get you down with this drug to being still perfectly sick. They're not healing you, right? You're still broken. You're still not healed. they're just trying to chemically keep it out a level so that when you go in to see a doctor and they test your blood it looks like you're not as bad so seven is as bad as 12 right that's a problem if you have fatty liver disease it used to be called alcoholic fatty liver disease because only people in the throes of alcoholism

towards the end before they get jaundice and die they would have fatty liver Now we have what's called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. People who can't breathe correctly when they sleep, these are all things that your metabolism is broken. And the only way you can get it back on track, well, not the only way because, Mike, I like you, use the word, certain. I'm never certain about anything. And if anyone can bring me any data, I will change on a dime.

My way is not the only way. There's another way, and that's by fasting. That's by not eating. for long periods of time. And I don't suggest that to anyone unless it's being done medically. These people who are doing OMAD, which is one meal a day,

are intermittent fasting, which means they only eat within a short window. It's diet trickery. I'm not a real fan because you can go down the wrong rabbit hole with that. But fasting, medically fasting, is the other way of doing this. You're not going to do it

by continuing to eat gobs, of carbohydrates. Did that answer it, Chuck? Yeah, thank you. So how many people then, just to keep going with that, are metabolically broken versus, say, morbidly obese? What's the difference? There's not much of a difference.

It's right in the title, morbidly obese, meaning you have an obesity problem. You can die from this. And sadly enough, we saw this. during the pandemic. They were saying whenever you see the reports, well, number one, old people were dying from it, was dying from COVID-19. And they would say, well, yeah, a 35-year-old person.

Whenever you see the picture, most of these people were morbidly obese, right? Very few healthy people died. They were using a term cytokine storm, right, where your body couldn't fight off what you had because nothing else in your body was working correctly. So that's where the problem is. Do you see parallels between the level of certainty that our public officials and politicians embraced with regard to what to do during the pandemic when you compare it to the certainty that the medical community and many of those same officials 20, 30 years ago, had when they started telling us exactly what to eat?

eat and how much and under what circumstances and so forth. I mean, I'm just asking, I don't mean it to be a leading question, but I mean, it's breathtaking how much we got wrong during the lockdowns. What takes my breath away isn't that we were wrong about it. It's the degree to which we were certain about it. And so, you know, that all happened in such an intensely narrow frame of time as compared to the great giant nutrition myths that you're trying to unwind. But riff on the certainty of all of it and the way it gets sold to us each time. You used the term had, and you should have said have, because we haven't changed a whole lot. I was at a dinner party a while back with the head of cardiology for a huge hospital,

and he knew about what I do in the whole thing. And I don't talk politics, religion, or anything at dinner parties. And I certainly don't talk about what I do as a career. And he said, you know, what you're telling people is dangerous. And I said, how so? And he said, well, you're telling people that saturated fat is okay. And I said, yeah, because not only is it okay, but it's healthy for you. And he said, but you're not a doctor.

and I said, what does that have to do with anything? I've studied, I was in college, just as you were. And then I said to him, I said, to him, I said, Doc, you're the head of cardiologist that uppity, uppity, blah, blah, blah, and he goes, yes. I said, you operate? And he goes, yes, I do. And I said, are you a plumber or an electrician? Now, and cardiologist says one of it, you know, a plumber is someone who goes to rotor

roots out, you know, when you have blockage. An electrician is if you have aphylologist. or something, they'll go and kill a nerve or two so that your brain can get the right message. So there are plumbers and electricians when it comes to the heart. And he said, well, I'm a plumber. I said, great. So when you go in to rot a route out an artery or do open heart surgery and do a bypass and a whole thing, what are you removing? And he said, well, we remove plaque. And I said, oh, what else do you remove? He goes, it's plaque.

I said, so you're not moving cholesterol? You're not removing that? And he goes, well, no, it's plaque. And I said, does cholesterol make plaque? And he says, no. Plaque comes from stress and this and that. He started, I said, so can we both agree that cholesterol, which every cell in your body needs is there trying to help remove the plaque,

trying to repair that area? And he goes, well, yeah, so plaque is there. You know, cholesterol is there. And I said, so in other words, every time I pass a house that just burned down, and I see firemen rolling up their hoses, I should assume that firemen causes houses houses to burn, because that's what you just told me. And he goes, well, saturated fat is a problem. And I said, but not all saturated fat even has cholesterol, which we just determined wasn't a problem. You can eat coconut oil.

That's no cholesterol, it's just saturated fat. how does that go in and mess up anything? And he goes, well, because it's saturated fat. And I said, well, that's not an answer. This is a guy who's operating on people who couldn't out-talk a kid with just a regular undergraduate degree in exercise physiology, which is bizarre to me. It's bizarre. Who was, I'm drawing a blank on his name. I just watched it, Charlie's dad, the famous producer, airplane.

That was Jim Abrams. Jim Abrams. Yeah. He's angry, right? His kid was, I guess maybe misdiagnosed would be the best way to put it, but it seemed like childhood epilepsy, horrible seizures and brain surgery and all sorts of things. And, you know, just skipping ahead, spoiler alert. But Charlie's okay. Decades later, and it was the result of a cutogenic diet. And Jim is angry. You know, he's angry at the establishment. because the doctor you just described and hundreds of others, just like him, stand in lockstep. And they had the science. They had every indication to suggest that a change in his diet could be transformative. But it was kept from him, you know, for decades, years.

And you said it earlier. I didn't mean to gloss over it, but look, it's awesome that. a few thousand people who listen to this podcast can lose tens of thousands of pounds. But your movie gets to the next level where you're really talking about lives being saved and wasted and sacrificed at the altar of something that really, it's frightening, dude. It's frightening. And his anger, Jim Abrams' anger, it's righteous. I love stories like this. years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running a food company,

but he was annoyed that so much imported meat was being deceptively marketed and labeled as domestic and decided to fix the problem. The result was a company called Good Ranchers. It's a completely honest, totally transparent meat company that deals directly with American farms and ranches and promises to deliver high-quality American-grown meat for a fair price. Today, that promise. Ben's absolute determination to keep it has not only propelled good ranchers into the top tier of meat delivery companies, it's fueled enormous awareness among meteors like me that we have all been affirmatively deceived by policies that allow imported me to be marketed as domestic. That's the reason I switch to good ranchers. If I'm being honest, though, I doubt that I would have stayed

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Hey-haw! If your audience does nothing else, you know, of course, I love people to go watch my movies and everything, but he put a movie out. It wasn't like airplane or any of the funny movies he did. It's called First Do No Harm. You can watch it for free on YouTube. No advertising.

It's been out for, Merrill Street is in the movie. Merrill Street signed on for this movie. It literally shows the story of someone else that Jim and his wife met along the way. And it's a true story. You know, doctors are supposed to first do no harm. They literally wanted to do a lobotomy on Charlie Abrams. And he was an infant. He was a baby.

And we tell the story in the movie, Jim out of desperation, walks into a medical library and a book falls open to a page. I get the chills every time Jim tells me, he's still, he was weeping in my movie. Right? We opened the movie showing Charlie and showing Jim, and it said that ketogenic diet can change this, right? And he walks in and tells the doctor,

what about this? And the doctor went, ah, we use that as a last resort. That's been around since the 30s. It may work and may not. And Jim is like, but you guys are talking about, you know, turning my kid into one flew over to cuckoo's nest here. What are you doing? I think that's why he gets so angry about all of it.

Again, with the parallels, right? I mean, during the lockdowns, tendency to dismiss any of the treatments other than a vaccine, I was just so interested in that. Nobody, I mean, God, what they did to Rogan, right, with the Ivermectin. Oh, it's crazy. So many, like, we could have been talking about how to get more vitamin D, how to drop 30 pounds during a lockdown. We could have done so many things, so many different treatments were out there that we could have talked about. But it all got pushed aside in favor of these other things.

Again, it was impossible to watch your movie and not like, cross out keto and write in exercise, right? And just have the whole conversation 10, 15 years later. That's what was going on with Jim. Here you have a solution that does nothing to enrich the medical community or any of the ag community. Like nobody's really going to prosper as a result of getting Charlie on a keto diet. And yet it was the thing that saved him.

So that's what I met before about your task being somewhat Sisyphian. Yeah, you know, when I moved to central Virginia, I went to a new doctor and got a physical and did the whole thing because I needed a new doctor. And this woman came highly recommended. And when I left her office, you know, they called me a few days later and they, oh, my God, your blood work was amazing. Your A1Cs were 4.7 and your, your trust. triglycerides. We've never seen anyone with a triglyceride at 40. I'm bragging right now.

But she goes, but your cholesterol was just slightly high and we think we need to put you on a light statin. She didn't know anything about what I do or who I am or anything else. And I said, oh, a statin. And she goes, yeah, look, your ratios were perfect. And I said to her, I said, hmm, did you do a particle test? And she goes, well, no, we just did the regular test? And I said, did you check my APOB? protein against my APOA proteins? And did you do a cross-check on doing a ratio between my triglycerides and my total cholesterol? She goes, no, we don't do any of that. And I said, yet you're recommending a statin? By the way, my total number between the two were under 200. She's recommending a drug. She's recommending a drug to someone who does not need a drug. And I said, so I don't. I don't

need a drug, right? And she goes, no, you should really be on the stat? And it's like, so should I also use a condom when I'm masturbating? Because why take chances? You know, and of course, she goes, I think you need to find a new doctor. And I said, honey, I'm way ahead of you. Yeah. Finally something we agree on. But yeah, it's like, at some point in there, she asked me, you know, when I started talking about APOA and APOB and, you know, just to reference between that. She goes, are you a doctor? And I said, no, I'm not going to just play one on the Internet. But that's what we did.

Most people don't know because I've had every doctor, you know, I've had everyone from William Davis, the Wheatbelly guy, to Perlmutter, Grain Brain, to Robert Lustig. I've had Tim Nokes. I've had every one of my podcasts. I've had all the top doctors, Ovidia, and all these guys on my show, I have this information. You know, we've been doing this show for 10 years.

I've had the top doctors, Say Fried, we've had the top doctors from around the world. The list goes on and on and on. And so I have this information. And I'm wondering why not every doctor have the same information that these top professionals have. It makes zero sense. And you guys saw in my movie where Tasmania came down on Dr. Gary Fetke for healing people. That's a true story, by the way. It's crazy.

It's scary. It's just unbelievable. Well, I think, you know, part of it is we're still in the thrall of experts. How many times have you started a paragraph by forcing yourself to admit not what you are, but what you aren't? I'm not a doctor, but blah, blah, blah. I do it all the time. I'm not an economist, but if you ask me, right, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like you and I spend a lot of time.

acknowledging what we aren't. And we do it because by and large, we are still so desperately in love with our experts that we want to defer to them to the point where if we don't, well, then we're suddenly deniers. You're a statin denier. You're a cholesterol denier, Vinnie. That's what you are, right? And so just cross out whatever the noun is and scratch in climate, scratch in vaccines, scratching whatever it is. But Jesus, so much of this, I think, is our species running in with our desperate hope that we found an unassailable arbiter of the truth and just willing to hang on to it, right? And the more initials you have after your title, well, the more credible you become and the more

unassailable you become. And so here we sit. I think that we're going to have to start to think very differently about expertise in a way for the conversation to ever advance. I think you're right. And look, there have been guys out there who have figured out the cholesterol problem better than anyone else. And they're not doctors.

You know, there were scientists in other areas. Ivor Cummins comes to mind, Dave Feldman, and medical doctors will go, well, they're not medical doctors. No, but they figured it out. They figured out what you guys couldn't figure out, but you're going to discount it because they don't have a medical degree. But these guys are scientists, right? They're researchers, and they did the math, and the math just didn't come out. As a matter of fact, the same studies, Nina Tishel talks about this in her book, the same study that showed that saturated fat was bad.

If you read that study, you'll learn that they cherry-picked that information to make it look the way they wanted to look. We had Ansel Keys in my movie. The guy in Keys came up with a K-Rash. He's the worst, man. Oh, that guy, the legacy he left behind is probably the most damning thing that's happened in this country. And the universities, like Minnesota University, where he was. and some of these big hospitals are just carrying on because they don't want these people to be wrong. Well, they're wrong.

And they hid the results of the cert. You're talking about the Minnesota coronary survey. And it was like 9,000 people. And they didn't like the results. And so they didn't publish it for 16 years. Yeah. And my other favorite is the 27 country studies that Keyes did himself. It's laughable when you hear it now.

but they went to 27 countries, and they did epidemiological studies to prove that meat was bad. And they only found six countries out of the 27 to prove where they were, right? And you had to really squint to make that work. And he felt like, well, we really should have a seventh one in there. So they went back to Crete over in Greece, where they had been before. but they only did a 40-day study and they did it during Lent. And it turns out that most of these people are Catholics. And what do Catholics not eat during Lent?

Meat. So they went, oh, these people are very healthy and we didn't see them eating any meat for that 40-day period. I mean, when you say it, you go, come on, Van, you're making that up. No, this is documented. I mean, you can go find this stuff. It's not that hard. If I can find it, anyone can find it. But how much, I mean, now that you mention that, when I think about the movie,

so much deals with the confusion of causation and effect, essentially, right? It's so easy to confuse those things. Correlation and causation. Correlation and causation. I wanted to ask you about Dave Feldman. You brought up his name in talking about cholesterol in particular, because I'm interested in cholesterol because I'm on a statin. My doctor put me on a statin, and I don't want to be on a statin.

but you know she's a doctor and I'm not so I'm on a statin but this guy Dave Feldman ate a diet of you know high and saturated fat meat 5,000 calories a day and his cholesterol went down is that true yeah and here's how it works so Dave was still working for a company and of course when you have to go and get your health checks or you could get insurance with that company you're you know he would have to lower his cholesterol for a couple of days so here's what most people don't understand about cholesterol. You might have remembered earlier on when I was talking to the doctor. I said that cholesterol is needed for every cell in your body to work correctly.

So we need cholesterol. If we do not take cholesterol, our bodies will make cholesterol, right? Just like a lot of, you know, we have 13 essential vitamins. They're essential because the 13, our bodies won't make. But we make a lot of other things. so we make cholesterol. And so what happens when you take in too much cholesterol, your body downregulates the cholesterol, the serum cholesterol in your body, it lowers it for a short period, right? So Dave figured out, because he's willing to experiment on himself, he did an N1 experiment, that if he just took gobs of cholesterol for a couple of days before he had a blood test, it would lower his serum cholesterol and he would get the results he needed.

So in order to get lower cholesterol, you take in more cholesterol because your body will downregulate it. Now, if you ask any vegan doctor, they'll tell you it's just the opposite, that somehow this cholesterol goes into your arteries and clogs it up like, you know, hot oil down a coal pipe, right? It just doesn't work that way. You know, it's just the opposite. How much of this feels like religion to you? It's just so funny, I read surveys about how the country's becoming less and less religious. From what I see, that's not happening at it at all. We're becoming more religious.

We're just becoming religious about different things. And, you know, when you're asking somebody, I don't know if Chuck should be on this statin. But to Chuck's point, who the hell am I? Look, man, I've read some stuff that suggests these things are being overprescribed, but I don't know. You know, I don't know, and I now wonder who does, but it seems like the people who don't wonder have joined a kind of religion. And to challenge it is to challenge not just the facts or the data. You're challenging their whole identity, man. And people don't give that up.

Two answers. First off, Chuck, when the show is over with, ask me, I'll send you to a doctor who will actually look at your numbers and tell you whether you. you need to be on a statin or not, because a statin has more side effects than what your problem is proposed to be. Some people need to be on statins, by the way, very few people, but they seem to put everyone on a statin. Religion, you might have seen in a movie, the whole thing started with religion and died has been religion for a long time. I don't put down anyone's religion, and I don't mean to put down anyone's religion here. but the Seventh-day Adventist back in the mid-1800s had a woman named Ellen G. White.

And Ellen woke up one morning and said, God came to me in my sleep. Now, if that happens today, and you said that, they would take you somewhere to get checked, right? But in 1865, instead of having LNG white checked for mental acuity, they said, oh, really, what did God have to say? And she said, God said, we shouldn't eat anything with a face. We shouldn't eat a sentient being.

And that started modern day veganism, but it couldn't take hold because we didn't discover vitamins until the 1930s. Vitamines is what we were calling them at first. When we started discovering that, you know, people were getting scurvy and this and that and all this different. And, oh, wait, there are vitamins that we need to take. So we started learning about vitamins. And by the 1950s, there were small cults of vegans who could take an exogenous vitamin and still be healthy enough to do this diet for any period. So it remained religious.

What most people don't know is that the registered dietitians association comes right out of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. So there's religion again. Folks, I don't make this stuff up out of whole cloth. You can go check this out. So religion has been in it the whole way. And since doctors don't learn anything about nutrition or diet through medical school, they just toss it off onto the Registered Dietitians Association who have their hands in everything.

And I do mean everything. So they have their religious cult of don't eat any meat. And we're seeing that in schools now because they're part of institutions. institutions, right, eat less and less meat, and eat more and more of these things, the things that are going to make you unhealthy. But man, on the Internet, I'm just out there every day trying to get people healthy. I don't have a dog in a fight. I'm not fat. My wife is not fat.

I have relatives who are fat, and it really bothers me because some of these people are in 10 and 12 drugs. And that's where my passion comes from that. I have my loved ones who are going down this road. So my dog in the fight is, hey, I'm on the Internet. You can listen to me. You cannot listen to me. I don't really care. But if you want to get healthy, do this.

And everyone else is coming after me with this religious type, you know, fervor going, oh, no, vegan is the way. And oh, no, this is the way and that's the way. It's crazy making. It's really crazy making when you're trying to just, you know, just honestly put a message out there and you get yelled at and shot down. You were talking about, you know, being shut down. My Wikipedia, I was on Wikipedia, and they pulled it down.

And so we called the Wikipedia people and said, well, why did you pull it down? It's like, well, we can't even verify that you actually exist. They looked at my wife. They went to my wife's page. I'm going to break here. My wife is a bond girl. She's an actress. You know, she's been around for a while.

They removed me as being her husband. and put her ex-husband back up there, right? And when my wife called Wikipedia and said, why are you doing this? They said, we can't believe you would be married to that guy. So we found out there are vegans behind this at Wikipedia who's pulling people like me down. And then you find me on something called Rational Wiki,

which is a whole different thing, where they're calling me a climate denier. I don't even know what that means. I don't deny that we have a climate. I don't deny that there's global warming, but I'm not going to let a 16-year-old yell, how dare you at someone like me, because I'm not causing this,

and a cow fart is not causing it either at all. Didn't she paddle over here in a kayak, kind of to bring this thing back to where we started or something? I think she sailed. I think she sailed. But she could have used a kayak. But look, the whole idea. idea behind me denying, I looked into it. I wanted to find out which animal is causing the most

methane in the world. Do you know what it is? Any idea, guys? It's not cows? Is it us? Not even close. No, not even close. Sheep? Now you're off into the weeds. Termites. Termites are putting more methane into the atmosphere than any other animal. Little tiny termite farts. And by the way, the methane that animals put off, us, sheep, cattle, termites, it gets regenerated. It's not the same as the CO2 that we put from, you know, cars and everything else, right? That's what's causing the problem. Cow farts are not causing the problem. And we knew this, and we still know this, right?

They're just saying that because they started losing the battle with everything else. When guys like me came on the internet and said, hey, you can. lose weight by eating more meat and we started proving this, tens and 20s and 30s and, you know, hundreds and millions of people started losing weight. They went, oh boy, we're losing that fight. Let's blame the cows. Let's blame something else on them. So they went with, and by the way, we have governments, we have world health organization. We have everyone saying that cows are a problem. There's zero science behind that. As a matter of fact, the science shows, look, I'll give you a better example.

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You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself. And see, too, how easy it is to get involved. Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic.

That's skillsusa.org slash mic. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S.S.S.S.S. U.S.S.A. Years ago, a myth happened when we first started using cell phones back in the flip phone days. Right. They said that somebody was at some gas station

and they were using a flip phone and somehow the car blew up. So some kind of static electricity, okay, never happened yet if you went to Exxon, Texaco, you went to Shell, you went anywhere. They had a thing going, do not use your cell phone when you're on this device. That was made up science. It never happened. It can't happen. They used to tell us if you use the cell phone on an airplane, that it'll bring the airplane down.

If that were really true, they would have collected every cell phone at the gate. Right. Who's going to take that chance? You treat it like a gun. Right. Exactly. Take it like a gun. Meanwhile, we're taking our shoes off.

Right. So it's this insanity that we just come up with. And then big industries like airlines and gas companies just go, all right, yeah, we'll put this on a pump. This is now reality. And there's no reality there. See, that's what my job is. Yes. I'm so glad you're doing it.

But look, we live in a world where the lawyers have decided for, I don't even know how many companies, that you must write, this bag is not a toy. On the bag. Don't iron the shirt while wearing it. Yeah, don't do that, right? We make ourselves dumber, I think. when we issue these kind of edicts in the form of self-help or instruction, right? When you tell somebody with a straight face that the bag is not a toy, I'm going to make a leap here that's going to make Chuck really uncomfortable,

but I think part of the reason why Black Lives Matter became such a lightning rod for so many people is that the claim wasn't leveled toward people who had expressed any skepticism as to the fact. It was leveled at everyone, right? There's probably a percentage of people out there who need to be told that a bag is not a toy and that you shouldn't iron your shirt while you're wearing it. And there are probably a percentage of people out there who need to be reminded that, you know, a life shouldn't be evaluated based on the color of, the skin. But when we said Black Lives Matter, we said it to everyone, as though no one understood

it. And that eventually wears you down if you already know and if you already believe that Black Lives Matter. If you know that the bag is not a toy, eventually you're going to recoil at being reminded of it. And so I think that part of your challenge is the fact that, you're so much of what passes as advice has become platitudinous in the whole world of nutrition, that people are just worn down, man. We're just so tired of being told that this is good for me or this is bad for me, or these are the recommended allowances.

All of the credibility has been drained out of the system because we've been infantilized and we've been talked to like we're idiots by people who are so certain, Sorry, I promise I'll land on a question. That guy, Keyes, he's the most certain-sounding schmuck in that whole movie. With the possible exception, and I say this is a sublime compliment because you and I do have something else in common. We both lied to Oprah Winfrey.

We both lied to her face, and we both did it with all the certainty that we could muster. I'll tell you my story, but you tell yours first, Because I had no idea you went on her show, and I had no idea you spun such a yarn in front of so many people. But, brother, it was masterful. Did you see that Oprah Winfrey Shale was on? I saw the clips in the movie, but I'm going to go search for it. Now, I think it's like in the top ten Oprah's of all time. Number seven, number seven of all time.

As a matter of fact, it was such a big deal that she brought me back on 20 years later to do a where are they now. So I've been on over twice. Tell people what you did. Well, I was in L.A. for a couple of years, and I went there because I saw childhood obesity as being a problem. This was 1990 when I went to L.A. And, of course, when you go to Disney and Nickelode and you explain to them that you, and they were all into having me on, they were like, well, what do you want to do? I want to get on and tell kids to drink less Coca-Cola and stop eating fruit roll-ups and eating cereal. And they just laughed me out of the building.

because that's their advertisers. And I'm just sitting around L.A., you know, training celebrities at this point. And one day I got a call. I don't know if you, well, you were on QVC. You probably know who this woman is, but she was very close to me. A woman named Rhonda Shear. Do you remember Rhonda Shear? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I know she is. Rhonda calls me one day and she says, hey, listen, they need someone to be on Oprah tomorrow. And I said, well, why me? And she goes, well, you date an older woman, right? And I was, yeah, my girlfriend's a couple, two or three years older than me. And actually, she was four years older than me. And she goes, it's younger guys who are dating older women.

And Rhonda said, that's why you're never going to make it. You won't do anything. And you need to go do this. And I said, you know what? You're right. So I get to LAX. These are in the days where you can like almost still smoke on an airplane. Don't smoke, folks.

But you run through L.A. X, you get on the plane. First class, I get to Chicago. There's a limo waiting for me, and they take me to this beautiful hotel. And the next morning, now, I had never seen an Oprah Winfrey show in my life, ever. And they said, okay, you're going to be there. We'll get you there at 10 o'clock and the whole thing. You guys know all shows work. You have a gazillion shows. And you're in the green room, and they're making you up and all of a sudden they introduced me to this woman and she said her name was Doe. I even say Doe, Adair, female. The buck stops here. Yeah, so I'm doing that. And she's, yeah, my name is Doe. And she goes, so you're going to be my boyfriend. And I say, whoa, whoa, whoa,

what? And she goes, yeah, Rhonda didn't tell you. And it's like, no, Rhonda just told me to get on a plane. And she goes, yeah, we have a group in L.A. and it's older women dating young. I'm 30 or 29 or something. This woman is 50. She looked old to me. Right now, I look back on it. I go, nah, I'd hit that. Yeah.

That's terrible to say. But at any rate. Times change. Yeah. And so I said, look, I can't do that. National television, I'm not a liar. I'm not going to do that. And the whole group came around me and said,

Oh, you got to. You know, Doe's boyfriend just broke up with her and the whole thing. I said, listen, I'll go out there. I'll sit next to you. But that's it. I'm not going to. Well, when Doe introduces me, she introduces me as her boyfriend. And since I had never seen Oprah, I said, you know what?

I'm going to turn this into such a shit show that there's no way they're going to possibly ever air this show. So we're doing a segment and I turned it into the Vinny show. I'm walking. I'm like Chris Rock. I'm prancing around the stage. I'm doing all this stuff. They go to break and we're supposed to leave and they're supposed to bring other characters on. And Oprah goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing?

He's got to stay. And the producers howl up is going. If he stays, everyone has to stay. They brought other people out to sit in front of us on the floor. You can see that if you watch the whole show. But Oprah just kept volleying with me when we came back on. And somehow Cher comes on the show, and I get down and I ask Cher for a date. And we do this whole thing.

I became this instant celebrity on the Oprah show. And I had never seen it. I didn't watch it when it came out. Nothing happened. But the fact of the matter is that I went on Oprah and lied and said, I was with this woman and now I'm asking share for a date and it just became what it was. Well, you dragged the audience into it, right? Like this whole conversation starts about women, older women seizing their power by dating

younger dudes and people should know. I mean, look, you're still a handsome man here in your sixth decade. But back then, like, you're a full on model. You're all over the place. You were, you know, you were all that. And there you are next to this woman 15 years older than you. And you suddenly just start making stuff up about, yeah, I think you even say at one point, why would I drive around in a Volkswagen when I can settle into a Cadillac like this woman here?

Like you literally compared every older woman in the country to a Cadillac, which is so funny since our whole conversation today started with a Porsche wound up on a kayak. But there you are. Once again, riding around a cat. And at that point, Oprah's like, now the audience is engaged. And she's like, now, come on, if Cher walks up to you, she says this to somebody in the audience, Chuck. If Cher walks up to you, you know, and says, I got to have me some of that, you know, you'd be all over that, right? And the kid's like, yeah, I guess I would.

Then Cher is on the phone. Then Vinny's asking her out. So the whole thing goes off the rails so fast. And I'm not just wanting to talk to you about it because I think it's funny. I'm talking about it because they bought it, dude. Everybody watching believed everything you said, just like everybody who ever listened to Keyes believed everything he said, because he was credible as hell.

And the best part about your movie, and the reason I can recommend everybody should watch it, is because it's not just a lecture or a sermon or a bunch of scolding on nutrition. You really take your time, and you make the point that just because the information comes at you in a crisp, well-modulated baritone from a handsome dude on one of the highest-rated shows of all time, that is not enough to justify your belief in it. You're going to have to do some level of homework.

And really, underneath all of it, that's what I think makes you credible. and that's why thousands of people who listen to this silly thing went over to your Facebook page, and that's why they've lost tens of thousands of pounds. Because in the end, you know, you're telling them what you want them to believe, but you're not browbeating. You're just saying the evidence demands a verdict, and I've got the proof. Amen. You know, and that's all we've ever done whenever I took to the Internet.

I never thought anyone was going to pay attention. I didn't think anyone would care when I put a book out. I didn't think we were going to get the money to do the movie, right? Everyone kept saying, you need to do the movie based on my podcast. And I said, well, why me? And the only thing I can take from that is I was living in Hollywood. So they said, oh, Hollywood, he should do the movie. Right?

There was no other reason. I don't know how to do it. I went to Adam Carolla and said, hey, how do you do a documentary? And he said, yeah. I don't know. You know, he sounds like a chainsaw. How much money you want to lose? Well, he told me, he goes, because Mike August told me his producer, he goes,

$500,000 if it takes a penny. And Corolla goes, I don't know what you're doing. You probably do it for $3,000, I don't know, you have $350. But don't expect to ever see that money again. And then this kid, Peter Pardini, who was coming off of a huge documentary. He had done Chicago, you know, the Chicago documentary of the group Chicago. He was on my show because he had lost a lot of weight following no sugars, no grains. And he started in on me and he says, you know, you can do this for way less than 300.

And I said, how? He said, I know cameraman. I know sound people. I'll get everybody to work for pennies on a dollar. And we'll do this ourselves. And I said, well, what do you think? it will cost and he said, we could do it for 150 and I said, I'm not putting 150 up because I'm going to lose, according to Corolla, whatever I put up is gone. He said, well, you can crowdcast, you know,

you can crowd fund this. And I was so certain, you want to talk about certainty? I was so certain that I would not get the money that I said, okay, let's do one of these Kickstarter, you know, deals, Indie Go-Go, I don't know. We did it. I was. We did it. I was right. We didn't get $150,000. We got a quarter of a million dollars. Everyone wanted to see this movie done. We got $250,000. I still have to kick in a lot of money at the end to get it finished. And the money I kicked in, I just assumed it was gone. I would never see it again. And then the movie just took off. You know, Ravitas put it on 70 VODs around the world. As I was telling Chuck, you know, I would get on airplanes and I would see my movie on an airplane. It's on

Amazon. It's on everything. And I was shocked. Right. I was shocked that this movie was doing this and breaking records for Gravitibor's Ventures. Yeah. Right. And, you know, when you do that, you make a sequel. I became Stallone. I started making sequels. So what's the sequel called? Is it Fat 2? Still Fat? Yeah, a documentary too. Well, what's the difference? Which do you prefer? Should you watch both? If you only watch one, which one should you watch?

I think the first one, because what I did during the pandemic was, you know, when you make a movie, a lot of stuff ends up on a cutting room floor. And, you know, I was trying to keep the first one to 90 minutes. And I started looking at all this footage going, man, I bet that people want to hear the rest of these interviews. So I cobbled them together. and put them out during the pandemic. And Fat 2 did quite well. It didn't do as well as the original Fat of Documentary

because that one had more fanfare behind it, more money behind it. But it actually made the money back. And it's still doing well. So that movie is still doing well. Of course, the movie that's going to beat them all is eventually it's going to be beyond impossible because that one is nipping at the toes

of the original fat a documentary. Yeah. And I'm talking about, like, if you told me I would be making films back when I'm asking share out for dates, I was like, it's no way, right? But now I'm working on number four. Well, I'll tell you, man, I mean, you're here. Well, you're here for a couple of reasons, but mostly because I have some friends up where I live and there's a restaurant that we all frequent. And about 18 months ago, virtually everybody in the place was ordering an impossible burger. and just raving about it.

And I just knew something wasn't right. And I didn't have any science and have any research, but I've been in lots of slaughterhouses and I've been in lots of meat packing places. And I know that that thing can't possibly look like meat. It must have gone, like so much of what's in that burger must be manmade. It must be colored.

It must be colored. It must be like, that can't be blood that's coming out of that thing. That can't even be juice. It's got to be something completely concocted. And yeah, man, that movie made an impression. I've shared it with all of my friends up here. And I just really wanted to talk to you as a result of that. And now I just like you.

Now you're just a guy who lies to Oprah, who makes a kayak, who might name it after his dad. I certainly would if I were you. But, you know, you're just out there in the... the world, man. And it's really fun to watch you do what you're doing because underneath at all is just this feeling that you're a guy on a journey, you're forest gumping your way through your chosen field, you're still in on the joke, but you're still taking things really seriously because the stakes are awfully high. And that, you know, that makes you worth knowing, man. Well, I appreciate hearing that. And as I tell everyone, they always say to me, why do you care?

much. And, you know, the reason is we're going to break under the weight of our own weight. You know, we're always trying to figure out, oh, is China going to come in here? Is this going to happen? What if the Democrats get in? What if the Republicans get in? What's going to happen? The bottom line is, is we're breaking under the weight of our own weight. I mean, health care can't keep up now. And this is only getting worse. And this is what I care about. I mean, I probably have a few years left on this planet. And my deal. is I'm trying to make it better than when I got here. And I don't know how I'm going to be judged. Obviously, no one will ever know because I'll never be on Wikipedia again. But the bottom line is,

I'm just trying to make a difference. He had a bond girl briefly. Yeah. According to Wikipedia, she's not upstairs making noise right now, which I can hear her doing. Oh, God. Well, if people want to check you out, they can go to Vinny Tortorich.com. The movie is called Fat. It's been out for a while. Fat, a documentary. Forgive me. There's Fat 2 and Beyond Impossible.

Also, very good. And number four is coming. Chuck, can I say this really fast? Yeah. How fast can you say it? The PDF is no longer free. We now charge a whopping $10 for it. And we had to because I have so many people working behind the scenes now that, you know,

I'm not a charity organization. This money was coming directly out of my pocket. So after nine or ten years of giving it away over 320,000 times, we now put a $10 charge on it, which is one stop at Starbucks is what I figure. So if you want to get your health in line, just go to vinytortarise.com, which does not roll off of your tongue.

It really doesn't, man. It's a tough handle. But just go there and get the PDF. I think it might be slash PDF, but just vinytotteris.com will get you there. Just Google it. You'll find it. Yeah.

It's there. Or just change your whole thing to heavy sigh.com. You can take that as well. I mean, if you really commit to the heavy sigh, Vinny, I think there's no telling how far this could go. Buy you or bust? Yeah. Yeah, hey, man, I have a tendency to get a little uncomfortable

at flattery and good news. But I got to tell you, man, it's really gratifying to know that that many people have lost that much weight as a result of listening to our prior conversation. And I know that's just a small piece of it. You've been doing this for a long time. But, you know, that's really great to hear. A lot of nice things have happened as a result of me sitting here in my office,

just shooting the crap with people I like. But that, you know, I lost 35, 40 pounds during the lockdown. And I can tell you, it is transformational. And what you're doing is changing lives. People really ought to watch the movies and find, dare I say, find religion in this particular area. Because it might save your bacon, as it were. And by the way, you know, early on, I was talking about pinching an inch and doing this. I don't body shame anyone.

I'm open for everyone. I don't believe in shaming. Shaming doesn't work. I just want people to know that. Because when a lean guy comes on and says, you need to do this, I think sometimes people take umbrage with that. And I'm not that guy. Everyone in my family has a weight problem. I'm lucky that I've been able to do this and I try to get other people to do it.

So don't get angry. Just jump on board. If you don't like it, you can jump right off and go do something else. I'm fine with that. Good man. Thank you again for making the time. Say hey to the old man and try not to tip the kayak. It's a terrible way to go.

Say hey to the Bond girl. Yeah, please. Yeah, tell her to keep it down up there. You should probably prancing around her high heels. Clopping around. Yeah, because that's what they do. They walk around in high heels all day long. Of course they do.

While ironing your shirt while you're wearing it. The bag is not a toy, damn it. All right, thanks, folks. We'll talk to you next week. Adios. This episode is over now. I hope it was worthwhile. Sorry it went on so long.

But if it made you smile, then share your satisfaction in the way that people do. Take some time to go on a surrog. I hate to ask. I hate to beg. I hate to be a nudge. But in this world, the advertisers really like to judge. You don't need to write a bunch, just a line or two.

All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star. review. Not four. All you got to do is leave a quick five star review. And not three. All you got to do is leave a quick five star review. Definitely not too. All you got to do is leave a quick five star review.

We need five. All you got to do is leave a quick. Even if you hate it. Five star Especially if you hate it. Video. Thank you.