The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 404: Vinnie Tortorich—Talking Points and Scotch
Episode Date: September 10, 2024The celebrity fitness trainer, author, and filmmaker drops by to put Mike and Chuck on his trademarked no sugar, no grains lifestyle. Along the way, he discusses the positive effects of eliminating pr...ocessed foods on fertility, the fallacies of the food pyramid, and the million plus pounds of weight lost by the "Rowebies" following Vinnie's program. If you want to learn more about NSNG and what exactly a Rowebie is, visit VinnieTortorich.com/Rowe
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It's the way I heard it with me, Mike Roe, and what's his name over there looking at me with an odd mix of trepidation.
Because I can see that you're worried about the implicit commitment that's been made as a result of the conversation we just had, Chuck.
That is true. And what are we calling this conversation, Mike?
Well, the title is going to be Talking Points and Scotch with our friend Vinnie Tortorich.
Yes.
Who I do believe we can reasonably say is our friend.
It's his third appearance on the podcast.
Yeah, and this time in person, which was really nice to actually see him in the flesh.
He's a wonderful guy.
And because we talked for longer than normal, I'm not going to make a meal out of it here, as it were.
But he's done such important work with four documentaries, all designed to help you think differently about diet,
help you think differently about the evils of sugar and grain, especially in the quantities that so many people have become.
accustomed to consuming them. His podcast, Fitness Confidential, is changing lives. His book of the same
title is still a bestseller 10, 12 years later. He has become a jagged little bill in the eyes of the
food industry to the point where his latest documentary, which I can't recommend enough,
it's called Dirty Keto, got a PG-13 rating. What's up with that? I don't know. I, you know,
I was trying to think about it because we've both seen it. Is there language in it? No. He doesn't
say the F word, the S word, anything like that?
Now, what he does is make a pretty compelling case that the food pyramid that we grew up with
is exactly upside down.
Yeah.
It should be reversed.
And you're probably up to speed with ketogenic diets and ketosis and the word keto has become
just burned into our lexicon.
But the minds are everywhere.
If you're trying to lose weight, you're in a minefield today.
You're stuck in the middle aisles of the supermarket.
The deck is stacked against us.
So that's the bad news.
The good news is I wanted Vinny back on here because after the first time he appeared,
a support group formed over in his world over at Vinny Tortorich.com.
The Robies.
The Robes, you guys called yourselves.
And to date, the Robes have lost,
excess of a million pounds.
It's amazing.
It's unbelievable.
Yeah.
And then he said, look, if you think about it in terms of like 100,000 people dropping 10 pounds
apiece, well, there's a million pounds.
Yeah.
So, you know, a lot more people than that listen to this podcast, and a lot of people
are struggling with their weight.
And so a lot of people have hopped on to no sugar, no grain, or some version of it.
And I think it's great.
And spoiler alert, we're going to try and take that to another.
level. At the end of this conversation, he will reveal vinytortarich.com slash row.
And by the time you guys go there to register, and I really encourage you to do so, if you want
to explore this whole approach to losing weight and living a healthier lifestyle, you'll
find that Mike Rowe and Chuck Klausmeier were the first two people to register. It's a support
group. It's a place where the group can ask questions to each other. It's a place where Vinny will
appear from time to time to answer those questions, it's a chance to get unlimited access to a
genuine Sherpa in this really confusing world. That's what he is, man. He's a docent in a museum
you simply must visit. And he's a guy who's on your side. You can tell that he really cares. He wants
to change people's lives. He wants to help people change their own lives. You and me in particular.
Well, you mostly. Me. I probably needed a little bit more than you do. But,
Look, we could all use an encouraging word.
The conversation you're about to hear goes in some really unexpected directions.
There's a lot of laughing.
As usual, I'll apologize in advance.
If you're sensitive about weight issues, know that everything you're about to hear is not said in malice at all.
But it's a very frustrating time that we're living in because it's like, I think at some point in this, I say I'm reminded of Sam Malone in Cheers.
who is a recovering alcoholic in a bar.
And anybody who's trying to get sugar and grains down or out of their diet,
we're all Sam Malone because we're surrounded by it.
They're everywhere, man.
And they're in everything.
As we discovered, he pointed out,
you thought you were eating something completely healthy and you weren't.
Look, you're going to learn a lot.
Hopefully you'll be inspired.
Hopefully you'll laugh a bit.
And most of all, hopefully you'll go to vinytortaritch.com slash row.
if you're trying to drop a few pounds or maybe a whole lot more than that.
You're going to meet some nice people there for sure.
Having said all that, well, here he is.
With talking points and scotch, the one and only Vinnie Tortorich 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 thousands of people get the training they need to begin a
career in the skilled trades. In fact, we'd love to help you. You can apply for a work ethic scholarship
right now at microwworks.org. We've set aside $10 million for this year's applicants. Thanks to a number
are very effective fundraisers, including the one with my grandfather's name on the label.
I refer, of course, to Noble Tennessee Whiskey, K-N-O-B-E-L, which is now available in a variety
of delicious 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-Spirates.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.
All right.
What I'd like to do is go back in time about a half hour to begin the podcast.
Because the moment you entered, you started saying interesting things.
And ever since, I mean, we've learned all kinds of new things about Vinnie Tortorich and his,
would you look at the whole thing more as an adventure or a misadventure at this point?
I think it's an adventure.
It's funny, off mic, we were talking about this.
When I got to Hollywood in 91, no one wanted me.
Literally, I had people tell me, you will never work in this business, go home, go back to whichever bayou you came from.
And for the record, which bayou was it?
Bayouche, the longest bayou in the world.
I grew up literally, let's call it 20 yards from the bayou.
I used to look at an alligator every day.
Yeah.
I wanted to do real things and everyone said, you're not going to do those things, where you're just not going to do them.
And it's because we had the gatekeepers.
And the gatekeepers are, I guess, still there.
No one's paying attention to them because it's kind of like the border.
Everyone just went, we're going to go right around this gate and just keep marching.
And that's what happened.
I got a device called a Blackberry.
By the way, did you see the movie?
No.
The movie about the making of the Blackberry.
Really?
It stars Glenn Howardton from Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
And it's excellent.
It's excellent.
And we'll riff on that later because it's just, we're surrounded by so much great content that we don't know about, which is a whole other source of frustration because we're also surrounded by so much bull crap that you're here to talk about.
Yeah.
That's been derailing otherwise well-intended individuals now vis-a-vis nutrition forever.
Which is why I still can't, you know, there's something so Sisyphian about your whole journey.
Yeah.
Through Hollywood.
But I just watched Dirty Keto.
And you've been on here twice before and we've talked about your other three documentaries and your book and all that.
But just to circle back and ask the same thing in a slightly different way.
Is it working?
Are you breaking through?
Do you feel like things are somehow getting better?
Or are you making it worse, Vinny?
Are you making it worse?
I don't think I'm making that much of a dent.
I really don't.
I know I'm supposed to say the opposite thing.
But I must be banking a dent.
I'll tell you why.
The dirty keto was supposed to come out on May 30th of this year.
It's still not out.
Two days ago, Amazon finally got in touch with us.
They kept ghosting, ghosting, ghosting, we kept writing,
hey, the 30th of May, here we are, mid-July, where is it?
Oh, no.
What's it rated?
PG-13.
And you've watched Dirty Keto.
How can it be PG-13?
Exactly.
Because I pissed in someone's cornflakes.
Someone...
That's rude, really.
No, he literally did it.
That's old.
This is what he does.
If that's on camera, yeah, it should have been rated worse.
But you understand, you saw the movie, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
They held it, held it, held it, held it.
Now they're going, we'll release it, but we're going to give it a 13.
based on what?
Right.
Unless you're making someone nervous.
I'll give you another example.
I used to be on Wikipedia.
I had a Wikipedia page.
I don't know how it got there, but it got there.
Everything on my Wikipedia page was correct, shockingly.
Except for one thing they said I worked with one actor that I'd never met.
Other than that, everything was shockingly correct.
My hometown of 5,000 people, it's not hard, but I became one.
of the most famous people in that hometown.
I was on their Wikipedia.
Right.
My wife is a bond girl.
I was on her Wikipedia.
And then one day, all at once,
my Wikipedia was gone.
I was no longer my wife's partner.
And I was taken off of my hometown,
most famous people from this town.
Now, I don't know anyone else in Donaldsonville, Louisiana,
who wrote one book, much less two.
done one documentary, much less four, yet my Wikipedia is gone. And when I had my people,
the guy whose car I drove up in today, my attorney.
That's a fancy car.
I'm driving here going, this car is worth more than me.
It might be. It was an interesting color, too.
The attorney's still in it, by the way.
That is loyalty. I did not check the trunk. Yeah.
It was a fancy car, though, right?
Yes, it was.
I've been driving an F-150 for a week, and I think I've got to go under a building.
And there were two choices there.
It was this fancy Mercedes, and that looked way too fancy for me.
And there was this.
This is the less fancy of the two goals.
Wow, that's saying something.
At any rate, my attorney got in touch with Wikipedia, and they said, yeah, we can't
substantiate one thing about this guy.
He gave him articles because that's what they pull from.
They pull from other things.
And they said, can't do it.
So, folks, the moral of that story is,
never believe what you read in a Wikipedia because they won't even put the truth out.
But when you start messing around with industry and you start putting it in their face,
when you start having documentaries, like the first one, Fat of Documentary, which is still number 74,
the thing is five years old.
Fat, a documentary?
Yeah, I always said the thing.
My co-producer sent me a thing the other day.
He goes, can you believe this?
Fata documentary is four years old, five years old.
Now here's the thing.
When that documentary came out, there was a documentary called Free Solo.
Remember that?
Vividly. Alex Honnold.
We toppled Alex Honnold and we stayed at the top of Apple for three weeks.
We were toppled by the death of Aretha Franklin and the subsequent documentary about her coming out at the same time.
She toppled us.
we toppled her and stayed up there again.
Yet I didn't get the Academy Award for Best Documentary of the Year.
I wasn't even up for it.
Alex Anno did.
Free Solo did.
My documentary, I'm going to find it before the end of this podcast.
Go ahead.
My guy sent it to me.
And he goes, can you believe this?
And this was last week.
Well, look for it now, just as I explained to people, that why we're having this conversation is that each of your documentaries is filled with.
And by the way, I got to give credit where it's due, although I'm not on board with the content necessarily.
An inconvenient truth was a great title.
Right.
It was a great title.
It really was.
Maybe one of the best titles of all time.
And had it not been used for the documentary that it's associated with, I would say that fat a documentary could have and should have been called that.
In fact, any of the documentaries you've done, because everything in it, Vinny, you are so freaking
inconvenient. You're an inconvenient person.
I'm a disruptor of a bit.
I mean, first of all, you're like a walking mixed message.
You come in here with two bottles of 15-year-old scotch, and you give them as presents,
which is so sweet.
Nobody ever brings us to that kind of thing.
Amazing.
And then, as I eat, the very first thing of the day, I stopped by to get some of those
healthy egg whites.
From Dunkin' Donuts.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I realize that, you know, he doesn't even hesitate.
He just looks at me with a kind of, on a mix of disappointment and transverse shame and pulls out this device and starts Googling.
Here, get that.
You just.
Oh, you just do that?
Okay.
And just go to, if you didn't even find it, I will.
No, no, please.
I'm keen to scroll through your pictures.
I can't wait to see what's in here.
So your documentary is number.
I'm as green as a pool table and twice a square.
Look at this.
number 76
I lied
I said 74
that's a five year old
movie that's a five year old documentary
not just any movie
people just go away from documentaries
this thing is still burning gas
yeah yeah yeah
but there again is the mix
it's like that movie is depressing
that movie is inspiring
that movie made me feel anxious
it made me feel angry
it made me feel determined
but mostly
it made me feel
me feel, and this is in no way a criticism, but that mix between inspired to do better and helpless.
Right.
That's why I started by saying, is this an adventure or a misadventure?
I started micro-work 16 years ago when we had 2.3 million open jobs.
Now we have 10 million. Clearly, I'm making it worse.
You started pushing your rock up the hill 12 years ago.
And there's more crap right now in our food.
I can't even eat the healthy choice from Dunkin, I can't eat anything.
Think about what just came out of your mouth, the healthy choice at Dunkin,
right.
My whole thing started in 1985 when I got hired to be the strength and conditioning coach for one summer at Newman School in New Orleans.
I was fresh out of Tulane.
I was selling real estate because I didn't know what else to do.
And they knew about me and they had heard about me through.
head strength coach. They said, we're looking for the best strength coach in this country. And he goes,
my assistant, who works for free. And I told him no. So they started throwing money at me.
By the way, Newman's school, you may have heard of these kids, Peyton Manning. Yeah.
Yeah. They, they, a lot of potential. Yeah. They're coming around. Those kids went to that school.
I was the strength coach there. And I graduated high school in 81. And here we are in 85.
And kids already looked different to me.
Just the makeup of kids.
They looked puffier.
They were eating crap.
I never ate in the swamp.
Of course, we had grits.
That kind of thing.
You knew if you play football, you eat eggs.
You ate beef.
You eat chicken.
You eat protein around the clock.
And I'm looking at these kids and they're getting puffy.
And they had a different work ethic scholarship than we did.
Right?
It was way different.
And I looked at that.
said, we're going to have a problem with childhood obesity in this country. And at the time,
I was dating the anchor woman from the 6 o'clock and 10 o'clock news. What state? Her name was
Lynn Gansard, NBC affiliate down in New Orleans. I'm obsessed with local TV. I just love it.
I love local news. It's the most entertaining thing in the world. And I love local news anchors.
I've had some experience. Yeah. You and I have a lot of them. We really do. Parents, teachers.
We've made a lot of the same mistakes.
Love your grandfather.
He was the worker.
He was the one.
I followed him.
I'm looking at these kids.
By 1991, Lynn had convinced me
because we knew the relationship couldn't continue.
She was older than me by eight years.
She wanted to have kids.
I never wanted to have kids.
And she said, you need to be in L.A.
You have this child fitness program that you want to start.
You need to go to L.A.
And I went to Disney when Disney Channel was,
young. I went to Nickelodeon, which is brand new. I would get these meetings in. I said, look, I'll produce it. I don't have to be, we can find the micro. We can find the guy with a voice, good looking guy. We don't need me. But I want to do children's programming around the fact that kids are getting fat and out of shape. And they said, great, Venn, write it up. And it's written up. Look at this. And they were, wait a minute. What do you mean, no grains? What do you mean? Cut back on sugar.
Have you met our sponsors?
me out the business.
It just left right out the building.
Just go. You're done.
And that's where I had to deal with.
I moved here for a reason,
and I couldn't even get that reason off the ground.
So when you say,
is it an adventure or a misadventure?
Maybe an adventure, probably a misadventure.
But eventually, because of the Blackberry,
I got there.
You know, I realized I had this power in my hand
and I can start talking to people,
and that's how the whole thing started.
You know, I thought of you before I watched Dirty Keto, which by the way, it goes without saying, we'll flog it again later, but watch it guys.
What do you call the people that hooked up Robies?
Yeah.
Okay.
Are they still in your world?
There are so many of them, Mike.
First of all, define what it is, so everybody knows.
So the first time I was on this show, people started coming on to my Facebook group and all these different places.
and they started calling themselves Robies.
And I do these phone calls.
People can actually call me and talk to me for a fee.
How did you learn about me?
And it used to always be Corolla.
Right.
And then it said, Mike Roe.
Mike Roe.
You started beating Carolla 10 to 1.
The oldest podcast in the world.
So we started figuring out in a Facebook group that the Robies were losing hundreds of pounds,
then thousands of pounds,
and then tens of thousands.
And then before I came on the second time,
we realized that it was north of a million of the ones we knew about.
We were able to calculate that.
Wait a minute.
North of a million pounds?
Yes.
Come on.
Think about it.
You got 100,000 people losing a few pounds each.
That gets you north of a million pretty quickly, Chuck.
I guess that's true.
100,000 times, I believe 10.
So 100,000 people lose 10 pounds.
That's a million pounds.
I only have 10 fingers, so it's difficult for me to make these calculations.
People started putting their pictures up of 75 pounds, 100 pounds loss.
That's when I got in touch with you a year later.
I said, Chuck, do you guys know about the Robies?
And he was like, who?
I said, the Robes, they're a big group.
And the first thing, you know what Chuck said to me?
How do you spell that?
He went to go Google and say, no, I don't think you could Google Roby.
Yeah, you know, you know your friend, Micro?
You know what, 44 years?
That's the root word.
I had not thought of it in terms of the people listening to this podcast.
have lost over a million pounds as a result of your appearance.
Well, now you have Roby 2.0s because I came on a second time.
Oh, my God.
Roby's the sequel.
Yeah.
And then what about the pregnancies?
Oh, they're off the charts, Mike.
Actually, are you kidding about that because there are pregnancies?
No, you mentioned it to me last time.
Yeah, I didn't know if I did.
People who wanted to become pregnant.
Yeah.
But had been struggling because of their diet.
So circle back quick and.
remind me of the details of that.
So we started noticing this before you.
You know, people would call me on these phone calls crying.
You know, they, grown men crying, women crying, saying we tried in vitro, we tried this,
we tried that.
The doctor said, you know, my husband is producing enough, you know, swimmers and I,
my egg, but we can't get pregnant.
We can't figure it out.
We've tried everything.
And then we stopped eating processed foods.
We followed you and people started getting pregnant.
And the doctors just go, you know, and then when you come in, we have a magnification of those people.
So now we have Gross Spurt again from Mike Rowe.
As I've always said, by myself, I'm no one.
But you put me with Corolla or me with Mike Rowe.
Now I'm bigger than Jack Lillane.
That's just the truth of the matter.
because now I have a bigger platform to talk to more people.
Right.
Right.
And those people talk to people.
Basically, the corporate structure is affirmatively aligned against you.
Right.
It's impacting the way your books sell, the way your documentaries are viewed.
Because when you talk about peeing in somebody's corn flakes, I mean, you're literally
talking about what's really in a cornflake, aside from your urine.
And it's never good.
And these guys are paying for...
I mean, think about posts.
Think about Kellogg's.
Think about the number of shows that are affirmatively sponsored by those guys.
Right.
That's why your truth is inconvenient.
And that's why the podcast space, which I also mentioned to you all fair,
the most intoxicating or at least interesting thing about it to me is that it exists right under that infrastructure,
the mainstream, the traditional communication thing.
But it's big and it's getting bigger.
And the fact that we're probably around where your documentary is,
we're laying the 70 or 80th biggest podcast.
Right.
But the fact that, you know, a couple million pounds have been lost
as a result of us jabbering in a completely unscripted way.
Right.
It's freaking amazing.
That's amazing that people who want to become pregnant are now pregnant,
that their kids born into the world.
Right.
Literally as a result of you sitting down here and making sounds.
And by the way, it sounds like we're getting high and mighty here,
But it's a fact.
And we shouldn't get this high on our own supply, but it's a truth.
I'll take any W we can get.
I love this.
I love the fact that, you know, we had Arthur Leon who invented LifeVac.
We've saved 13 lives.
Right.
We haven't, but the device did because they heard about it on this podcast.
I love that.
There are people on this planet who weren't there before because they now were able to get
pregnant.
And there are people who are still on this planet who, but for having heard this podcast, would
be dead.
Well, sounds have an impact.
Absolutely.
What you say can move everything, change everything, rack everything.
Yeah.
Improve everything.
And we can give Chuck all the credit because I didn't have your number.
The first time I came on, Chuck, you could have just said, ah, fitness trainer.
Yeah.
Or he could have fat fingered a button, not hit record.
We wouldn't have known it until you left.
Oh, speaking of which.
Oh, again.
But whether it's a book or a doc or a podcast, my only point is,
that it's a weird amplification process.
And today, like back to that rating, you know,
it's so interesting that Amazon would put PG-13 on a film
that doesn't have any bad language, no nudity,
nothing violent, nothing gratuitous, nothing, nothing at all.
Just a guy who, it should be said,
was sitting before the camera wearing the same exact shirt he's wearing today.
The same exact shirt, looking straight into the lens,
the way you're looking at me right now.
The other man is looking into a mirror because he wears the same exact shirt every day.
Another similarity we have.
I call this my J. Lino collection.
I probably have a closet full of them.
But in the same way that the ratings system has been used as a cudgel for alternative agendas.
You can't put PG-13 on a news article, but you can label it misinformation or disinformation.
or you can de-platform it or any number of other things.
And that, in my estimation, is what's happened to you and to me
because this idea of getting people to think differently about trade schools
is not dissimilar.
In fact, it's adjacent to your mission to get people to think differently about nutrition.
Right.
And we're both pushing a rock up a hill.
Absolutely.
And I just find that makes me like you.
Because you're not going to succeed, but we will have victories along the way.
I never look at it as succeeding or getting to, because if I got to the top of that hill with my rock, then what?
Right, exactly.
Right.
But you take, like you said, you take the win.
Hey, our listeners lost a million pounds because of you.
Right.
I'll take that.
What could the world lose?
And I'm sorry to filibuster, but the thing I wanted to tell you that made me think,
of you the other day was an old public service announcement from JFK. And if you haven't seen this,
you got to Google. Oh, I know where they got the kids, you know, doing the whole thing.
Where he's looking straight into the lens. And yeah, they're cutting to B-roll. But he's basically
saying, I think his exact words are, there is nothing more disappointing or disgusting to me
than the sight of a fat child. A fat puffy child is an indictment of our culture, of his or her parents,
and of our school systems. Therefore, and he basically puts phys ed in schools,
with minimum requirements, 18 push-ups, seven-minute miles, all of these things.
600-yard dash. I could tell you the whole test.
Remind people. Like, imagine, imagine getting that back into high schools or elementary schools today.
It's not so much different than trying to get shop back in.
Dumb!
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We can't even figure out where to tell kids to go to a bathroom in school nowadays.
You think you're going to get physical education back.
They're going to say they're shaming the kids.
It's going to be a problem.
It's not going to happen.
That is done.
Yeah, when you watch that ad that the president did,
they show the kids doing all the exercises,
you would swear it was a military school.
That was normal Americans.
Right.
Now, I saw a thing the other day.
I talked about it on my podcast.
These guys were online going,
we're raw dogging flights do you know about raw dogging a flight
raw dogging it does sound sexual it does no but it's not but it's not
sound like raw dogging a flight gina grad who does one of my podcast with me
she brought it up on the show and said what's raw dogging and she goes
where guys are just sitting on the plane not looking at their phone the entire time
and not looking at a screen right and I said okay you mean every flight I took up until
1998.
Right.
If you forgot to buy an Esquire
or a car and driver
in the airport,
you were going to be reading
how to buy
a retractable dog leash
all the way to your destination.
If you ran out of that magazine,
you were reading the back of a poop bag.
I hit a PR.
I went five-hour flight,
raw-dogging it.
When I first started flying,
after we got to altitudes,
they handed out cigars.
They literally handed out cigars.
Now, you can't smoke on a flight.
Now, I'm not saying smoking is good.
Right. I'm sure.
But you're in a tube with cigar.
Now we're raw-dogging it.
The best entertainment on an airliner back in 1998 was still looking at the hot stewardess
walking up and then they took all the weight restrictions off of that.
You can't say stewardess.
You see, you can't even say stewardess.
And I don't know if you're, and I played this for Gina on the podcast.
She thought I was making it up.
I said, there was an airliner that lived.
literally ran ads to let you know how sexy their women were by saying, I'm Janet.
Fly me.
Yeah.
Remember that?
Yeah.
And it was actual stewardesses before we called them flight attendants in the ads.
Yeah.
I mean, that would be a social study now.
Yeah.
But these guys are raw-dogging it.
Yeah, right.
Do you remember people airlines?
Oh, sure.
Right?
They would come down with the cart that had the scanner for your credit
card, you would pay, you would get on the plane and you wouldn't pay until you were in flight.
When was this?
Oh, this was like in the 80s?
Yeah.
It didn't last.
No.
Because like if your card was denied, you know, right out the door.
What do you do?
Bang, you're out, you know.
They were strict.
No.
You flew on this?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah, often.
Yeah.
Because it was super cheap.
You can fly from New York to Baltimore for like 20 bucks or something like that.
Ridiculous.
Yeah, it didn't last.
It didn't last.
It couldn't.
But the thing that strikes me, when you talk about, like,
the bad old days. It's really easy to look at the insane way that we accepted the marketing of
cigarettes and the insane amount of misogyny and sexism and all the stuff that lived in the ads.
And I think we can all agree that, okay, yeah, Virginia Slims, we've come a long way, baby.
But then we get into this idea that in that same exact period of time, we had JFK challenging
schools and parents to do this thing with nutrition. And so now being enlightened and all awakened
and whatnot here in 2024, we have to discern. We have to say, okay, well, that was bad,
but that was good. Right. Right. And so we can't do that because we got dumb. Not sure how maybe
processed foods have made us dumb, but we don't seem to be able to look back 40 years and say,
okay, because these certain things needed to be improved upon, everything needed to be improved upon.
But that's not true.
There were a lot of things we had right 40 years ago.
Absolutely.
A lot of really important things.
But we've bought into this idea that all of it, all of it was prehistoric thinking.
And so everything has evolved to whatever this is we're living in right now.
And I think we threw the fat baby out with the bath water.
Yeah, and it's really not a good thing.
I mean, someone sent me something the other day.
There was a six-year-old girl who was wider than she was tall.
I literally started weeping as if I was watching an SBCA commercial.
It was very sad.
I'm looking at it.
And the comments underneath us, the parents should be.
I get the anger, right?
Because I'm a grown-ass man, and I was weeping watching an Instagram video.
and she's not one of one
she's one of many
and
when we have
you know all of these
fat celebrities now
I'm trying to think of the woman
she plays the flute
the rapper
Lizzo
Lizzo
and they're going
Why do I know that?
Because like think about
what other thing my brain
could have
committed to memory
if you didn't know that
what space could fill that
yeah but instead I know that
Lizzo plays the flute
because you know she's a talented
woman and she plays
very talented woman
woman. But don't make me sit there and say that she's healthy and we should reward this look.
Right. Because she's not healthy. And people would say, well, come on, Vinnie, how do you know she's not?
Look at her. She's not healthy. So don't shove it down my throat and don't shove it down America's
throat that it's okay. You can't normalize it. I'm the first person to say you can never fat shame
because fat shaming will never work.
I've been working with morbidly obese people for 40 years.
They know they're fat.
They know that they're hurting.
They know that they want help.
They just don't know a way out.
They don't have a way out.
But to now look at Lizzo and go, yeah, that's cool.
That ain't good either.
We're going down a bad road, a really bad road,
and we're about to break under the weight of our own weight financially
because insurance companies can't,
keep up now. Does that make sense?
Yeah. Not only does it make sense, that was the title of the podcast.
Your first appearance. You just said that again. I loved it so much. I wrote it down.
We're breaking under the weight of our own weight.
That's how you know I'm not lying, by the way. You must believe it. I mean, you showed up with
talking points and scotch. Talking points and scotch. There's the new title.
I like something else you just said when you were riffing, when you just casually
and parenthetically mentioned the ASPCA ads.
I assume you're talking about Sarah McLaughlin singing in the arms of the street.
And then the most impossibly adorable yet neglected.
Okay.
So there's something in the persuasive power of those ads that is both effective, obviously,
but horribly manipulative.
And it makes us act.
God, help me, I'm going to make this comparison.
But when I look at like St. Jude and the Shriners ads, I know the guy who does those ads.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I just worked with him.
He's a friend of mine.
And it's very powerful.
And it's really relevant to anybody in this space of influence and persuasion.
You know, especially today when everybody is influenced and persuaded, it seems, by different approaches.
But that St. Jude's thing works.
And that ASPCA thing works.
and 50 years ago that Weeping Indian on the side of the road,
that got people to think differently about littering.
Iron eyes Cody.
That's right.
Italian man from Louisiana.
Exactly.
I mean, I don't know.
Who was he?
That was him, man.
He probably lived in your bayou.
He lived, I think he was in Independence, Louisiana, if I'm not mistaken.
I know everything about Iron Eyes.
So that's a topic for a story that I'm working on, actually,
because it's super interesting after the fact,
but it doesn't matter in the moment.
Nobody looked at that ad and went,
I wonder if that guy's really an Indian.
Nobody looks at St. Jude and said,
God, I wonder if that kid actually has arms.
He never would have gotten cast because he was Italian.
I wonder if they photoshopped his legs out.
Yeah, right.
No, nobody's looking at those dogs and those cats and going,
gosh, I wonder if they're stunt.
I wonder if we believe it.
Very, very powerful.
My question is, where is the corollary for obesity?
Do you think we'll get to a point where we could make a deliberate ad, not an Instagram video,
not something that exists on the edges, but something that gets right into the mainstream,
the same people who are PG-13ing your fine documentary when it should be,
never mind, gee, it should not be rated.
It should simply be mandatory viewing.
When are we going to get into the advertising game in a way that truly moves the needle
and gets people to start thinking about,
sugar and grain the way you've been thinking about it for the last 20 years.
It's not going to happen unless you and I do it.
That might be what we have to do.
I'd produce it.
I know how to produce crap now.
I've made a few documentaries.
We can get some of your friends behind you.
Mike, you got micro works out there.
I got access to literally hundreds of dollars.
Yeah, we can actually pull this together and see if we can get, I don't know,
some of the people that we probably both know, maybe my attorney,
because apparently he's got too much money.
to put stuff into this
and get those ads, you know,
get something behind it.
Just like micro work started,
maybe it's me.
Maybe it's someone else.
It might be RFK Jr.
Sure.
You know, because he's already right there, right?
Yeah.
He's known as an anti-vaxxer,
so they put that label on his head,
which is not fair.
No, it's not true either.
Right.
I mean, I've listened to a lot of with the guy.
I don't want to digress on that,
but because it was like when,
I used to go to Disney in Nickelodeon.
They didn't care.
They didn't get out of here, kid.
But at least now I have enough spark to where they might go, oh, let's let this guy produce it.
Let's get Mike Rose voiced it to voice it.
And let's show a bunch of six-year-olds and five-year-olds who are wider than they are tall.
You can't look at that without having a reaction.
Right.
There is no possibility.
And by the way, I don't need money for this.
this, I'm offering me for free to work on this project.
Absolutely.
Look, they weren't born that way.
This is self-inflicted.
Oh, they were born that way.
According to Dr. I'll think of his name in a minute.
Kids are being born obese because of what the parents are with, the mom is eating now.
So kids are being born obese.
Girls are having breast at five and six years old because of the hormones in all
of the fat, Dr. Robert Lustig, I knew it would come to me.
Thank God. Robert Lustig,
name just rolls off your tongue.
From the Boston Lustig's?
Yeah, actually, the Catskill Lustig's.
It wouldn't be a Lustig in Caskell. That was a really bad joke.
Katskillian is such a great word.
But yeah, you know, kids are being born fat, which is a problem.
But that could be...
They don't have a chance.
True, but I mean, the minute you're out,
of the body. Okay, these are the cards you got, but it could be corrected in the first year, right?
It could be, but the parents don't know to correct it because they couldn't correct it for themselves.
This generation is done unless people are like, you and me and Chuck who want to make a difference, right?
And they literally sit down and go, I'm going to stop with the Dunkin' Donuts egg bites,
and I'm going to stop with the crap in my coffee or whatever they decide to do.
but we might be able to help the next generation, right?
All right, look, so this is a lot.
First of all, it's too much.
The relativism of walking into a Dunkin' Donuts
and choosing what I chose, which, you know, they tell you,
it's like 80 calories per.
They give you some of the ingredients, not all of them.
And I get that it's a little chunk of poison,
but it's not as poisonous as the Bismarck next to it
or the cruller.
It's not as poisonous as anything else for sale in Dunkin' Donuts.
It's the best thing you got right there.
But that's only in relative terms.
You're not talking about relative terms.
You're saying sugar, I'm not sure if you're saying this,
so I'll just ask you, what's killed more people?
Alcohol or sugar?
At this point, sugar.
Because it's ubiquitous.
Fentanyl or sugar?
Heroin or sugar?
Sugar.
Sugar.
Sugar.
Cocaine or sugar.
Sugar.
And you're going to go, okay, you're a hammer looking for a nail.
But let me offer this.
when Lincoln was president,
the average American
ate less than one pound of sugar
per person per year.
Now, depending on who you ask,
the low number is 250 pounds of sugar
per person per year, and as high as 350 pounds of sugar,
and you'll go, come on, Vinny, you're saying a pound a day?
I'm not the guy who introduced a big gulp.
And if you walk around this country,
the way I do, I drive everywhere,
and I see what's going on.
I was in the deep south,
and I saw a woman waddling down the street
because it wasn't walking.
And she had more than 64 ounces.
It was bigger than that.
It was bigger.
And if you notice the way the cups are shaped,
on the bottom, they're small,
so you could put them in a cup holder in your car,
but then they balloon out.
Whoever drank that.
When you were a kid, if you had a 12-ounce Coke,
you had a 12-ounce Coke, and that was it.
That's 38 grams of sugar.
And you were done.
Did you get a second 12-ounce Coke?
No, you were done.
Right?
When I was a kid, I don't know if you know,
Coke used to come in a seven-ounce bottle.
Seven ounces.
And I would have 12 of those or less a year.
People would go, how do you know that?
It's because we went to Frank DeNino's Barbershop
approximately 12 times.
And after we got a haircut,
my dad would let my brother and I get a Coke.
And I never even finished that Coke.
As soon as it got past being really cold, I was done.
Now, I'm not some kind of hero.
What I'm saying is people are sitting there just lapping sugar in.
As you notice, you have sugar in your egg bites.
People go, how can you get to a pound a day?
With egg bites and with 64-ounce big gulps
and with everything else that you don't know you're doing, right?
Because we can't really keep track.
We think we're keeping track, but we're not.
How many other words for sugar are there?
At this point, probably over 70.
I think in one of my movies, I pegged it at 60-something.
Yeah, it's in dirty keto.
Yeah, they hide it.
That's the one where I sit there.
It's a lot of you.
Yeah, yeah, it's great.
It's great.
You're just sitting there.
It's very funny.
I'm holding still.
So if you ever want me to play dead in the movie, I can do it.
You can do it.
I have a question, though, about the sugar because I eat Splenda, which I know is not sugar,
but it's sweet and it has zero calories.
So what's wrong with that?
Methadone Clinic.
sugar. You're in the methadone clinic. Now when you get off of heroin and you take methadone,
now you need to get off of methadone. Right. Nicotine gum. Yeah. Oh, man. I smoked and then I went to the
nicotine gum. And I smoked it for a little while, about 15 years. And people said, well, why don't
you get off the gum? And I just said, why should I? It's good. I like the nicotine. Just change the
delivery system, but. I'm going to say something that's going to be very unpopular. Oh, I love this.
Nicotine is about as harmful as caffeine.
I knew it.
It's not the nicotine, that's the problem.
I always say, you know, three teens, nicotine, caffeine, and protein.
Nicotine is not the problem.
When you smoke, it's all the other chemicals.
Well, through a regular cigarette, there's all those chemicals that end up on your VLI
and end up in your bloodstream and everything else that will cause cancer.
So let's say you had a natural cigarette or a cigar.
Most cigars are, if you get a nice quality cigars.
just tobacco.
Well, that's bad for you, too, because there's other carcinogens coming in.
Probably when you light it acrylamides, it turns it into chrylamides or whatever.
And that's going to kill you.
But if you're chewing nicotine gum, I'm sure there's a flavor to it or at least sugar.
I like the flavor.
I like the original, which tastes like ass.
That's probably worse for you than the actual nicotine.
Yeah.
I mean, there's no flavor to it, you know what that tastes like.
Whenever people say it, it tastes like ass is like, do you have information?
You made your point.
How does that work?
But yeah, the other stuff in that gum is probably worse for your teeth and everything else than the actual gum.
Nicotine.
But go back to the splendid.
Does our body just look at all sugar as sugar, whether it's real sugar or not?
I get arguments all the time from keto people saying, well, I use stevia.
First off, you can't get real stevia in this country.
The FDA doesn't allow it.
Trust me, I've looked.
So the stevia we get is not squeezed right from.
from the stevia leaf and right to us.
FDA doesn't allow it.
So everything stevia here is mixed with some kind of other sweetener,
erythritol or monk fruit or you name it.
They're all bad.
Now, some people would argue, well, you don't get the glycogen spike
that you would get from sugar and they would be correct.
But as soon as your brain hooks onto that,
you start thinking about sugar.
It's like saying you're a sex addict,
I'm just going to go hang out in the strip joint.
I was going to have you thinking about sex pretty quickly.
At least it does for me.
I wouldn't know.
But isn't that the game?
I mean, Sam Malone, in part, was a great character because he was a recovering alcoholic who worked in a bar.
And so even as a kid, looking at cheers, I saw something so powerful about that.
He dealt with his addiction not by arbitraging it out of his life, but by confronting it every single day.
So the sex addict works in a whorehouse.
That would be difficult, but there's something kind of brave about it.
I think the next category of all this is that we're all addicted to sugar.
We're all addicted to grains.
The food pyramid must be one of the greatest lies ever foisted upon humanity.
And so we've all drunk that Kool-Aid, as it were, and we are all addicted to some
degree to these things. And it just seems like that's how we have to start talking about it.
We are all alcoholics living in a giant distillery. That's what it's like to walk down the
middle aisles of a grocery store or to walk into a Dunkin' Donuts. What can you say today to
equip people with something approaching a fortitude or understanding or awareness or how can we think
about functioning in a world where we are utterly, not just surrounded by the substance that you
want us to avoid, but inundated with invitations to enjoy it.
The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important
role to play for sure, but if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a
national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA, making a real.
difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant
like never before with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands
of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation
of skilled workers than Skills USA. And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of this
movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades. They're launching careers
and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next generation of industry leaders.
In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement explode. Join the
skilled trades movement. Support career and technical education programs through Skills USA. There's no
better way to do it. You can volunteer at a local chapter. 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 skills, USA.org slash mic.
I'm talking skills, U.S. skills, U.S. skills, U.S.
Well, if you want me to be perfectly honest, I'm going to have to lie.
Fine.
We can't.
Each individual person, you have to sit down and say to yourself, this is what I'm going to do.
You have to make a concerted effort because no one else is going to help you.
The grocery store is not going to help you.
The convenience store is not going to help.
The gas station is not going to help you.
All of the fast food places that people think they need to go.
go to is not going to help you.
You have to stop cold turkey.
Again, like I said, you want the honesty.
This is the honesty.
It's not going to be easy.
You have to change habits.
You have to do a 360.
Put you right back where you start.
Go away.
Yeah.
Oh, look, we've all done 360s.
Right.
And then you walk right back in truth.
What is it diet?
Oh, yeah.
A diet's a 360.
Perfect.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny we were talking about RFK Jr.
And you mentioned the pyramid.
I don't know if you know this history, but RFK was the reason we eventually ended up with the pyramid.
Do you know that story?
No.
So, and by the way, I don't talk politics.
This is not politics.
This is just facts.
It's nutrition.
Right.
And Robert F. Kennedy was running, I want to say it was in 1968.
He was going to run for the presidency before he took a bullet.
And he said, hey, there's a lot of poor black people in the South.
What if we could give them free food?
What if we could do that?
I said, yeah, it's a great idea.
Give them stuff.
They'll vote for us.
So I said, all right, we need to put together a committee to figure out how to get these poor black people to vote for us.
So we're going to call it food stamps, but we can't just do that.
We need to put a committee together.
So a guy named McGovern.
George, right.
Remember George?
He actually ran, I think, against Nixon and didn't even win his state or maybe just won his state.
or maybe he just won his state.
No, he just won one state.
He won one state.
It was either his state or I think it was Massachusetts, actually.
It doesn't matter.
At any rate.
But a war hero, it should be.
I'm not against McGovern because
McGovern said something very poignant
at the end of his political career.
So I'm not against Montgomery.
I'm not against any of these people,
but they put together something called
the McGovern Committee
to figure out how to come up with foot stamps.
And they figured that out pretty
quickly because they had to.
Just like they figured out just recently,
we got to get this guy out and put
this woman in as the nominee.
We just did this again, right?
But I digress. But you don't get
political. That's not political. I'm just
saying that's what they did. They traded
one for the other, which is interesting.
At any rate,
they figured out pretty quickly
we're going to give these people free foods
by giving them a monopoly money, basically.
That's what it is.
shit.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yep.
Well, the McGovern committee kept meeting for 10 years, 10 whole years.
And the guy named Ansel Keys, who came up with the K ration, that's where the K comes
from Keyes, the Keys ration.
He was kind of like a Fauci of his day, but in nutrition.
They keep this committee going.
Ansel Keys gets in there and goes, we can make Americans a lot healthier.
We'll get them on less meat.
and get them to eat more grains.
Now the government loves this idea
because back in World War II,
we had a problem.
We had to keep farming going
while everyone else was over there shooting people.
Right?
We had a problem because we ran on farms.
And farms, now you might have heard this recently,
they were too big to fail.
So they got government subsidies.
So now the government is in the farm business
and they take it worldwide after the war, right?
What are we selling worldwide?
We.
Things that won't spoil.
Right.
Grains.
Yep.
Right?
Call's coming in.
I have no way.
No, just so people know, Vinnie's phone just lit up,
and then all of a sudden it started recording everything we're saying.
I didn't do it, but we were recording the other day, and I looked down,
and my text thing, I'd activated it.
I need a tinfoil hat because you saw what they did.
I saw what you did.
The minute you talk.
That's true.
It started happening as soon as he went down this road.
That's very funny.
I never saw that before just now.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was literally transcribing everything you were saying.
How?
Well, there's a little microphone in there and it's on all the time.
That's out.
I'm going to keep it up in case it happens again.
We can see it.
McGovern.
It's pretty weird.
So that's what we do.
We've got the big farms, highly incentivized.
to grow all kinds of grain, and we start exporting.
And sugar. And sugar, of course.
Right.
Of course.
We start exporting.
Now we have a bigger business that's too big to fail, and we run off of that.
Commodities are run off.
Everything is run off of that, right?
So now you have Ansel Keeves saying, hey, bottom of the pyramid, 11 servings of grains per day.
11.
Yeah.
Can you imagine?
Jeez.
And this is in 1978.
He's saying, we've got to cut down on.
and meat, cut it out if we can, and eat grains.
And it wasn't very long before the American Heart Association started calling it out of the
middle of nowhere, heart-healthy grains.
That word was made up out, not word, but phrase, was made up out of whole cloth.
So you see what the problem is?
Sure.
They're going, wait a minute.
McGovern, that's a great job.
You told them to eat more of this, and we have a lot of it.
As a matter of fact, we have so much, as you know, some of you,
is they will pay farmers more not to work.
They'll say sit home, don't grow.
Called set asides.
Yeah.
We have too much.
Kind of like the government chiefs program.
Too much.
We have abundant.
So they have to create a market.
So they'll tell them sit it out, we'll pay you.
Am I making any of this up?
You work with farmers.
You go to their farmers.
You know what I'm talking about.
I do.
I grow up with farmers.
All my family, that's all we did.
They grew sugar cane.
Everyone in my family hates me now.
Wow.
No sugar, no grain, no family.
Yeah.
No problem.
No S, no G, no F.
I'm just cut right out of my family.
I mean, you know what?
I'll go back to what I said at the beginning of this thing.
It's such a weird mix of you inspire me to want to do better and you make me angry
because now I'm just thinking the fentanyl, the opioid crisis.
This is real.
It's awful.
And hundreds of thousands of people are dying.
some of whom death by misadventure, they didn't know.
In the same way, a lot of people probably don't know
that there's that much sugar and an egg bite.
But this is the thing.
Our outrage, our pearl clutching,
is so completely out of proportion.
Yes, we should be horrified by those overdoses.
Yes, we should be appalled by the drug companies
and the role that they're playing in shining.
lining that up. But how does that even remotely compare to the carnage that you're looking at
that you say is coming as a direct result of not eating one pound of sugar a year, but 250 to 300 to
350 pounds to that poor enormous woman clutching that giant vat of a big gulp in her well-muscled
mitts and throwing down another 80 ounces of mountain dew.
Where's our outrage?
Well, you see, you and me and Chuck, everyone's sitting here.
We grew up in a generation where no one was that.
Special K had a commercial that said, if you can pinch more than an inch.
Right.
You're fat.
That was an ad campaign.
Yeah, I remember that.
I keep going back to ad campaigns.
We're going to get to I'd rather fight than switch at some point.
But if you could pinch more than an inch was in the,
the mid-80s when I was trying to get out here to start saying kids are getting fat, right?
We look at people and go, you're fat. This is not me saying this, but our generation will look
at people and go, you're fat, you're out of shape. Obviously, you're lazy and you don't care.
So why should I listen to anything else? The other side of that is when we saw someone with
chiseled good looks, they didn't have to know anything. We believe that guy. Right.
So it's not just we thought this about this guy.
If you got on an airplane in 1985 and you saw the captain getting on,
and he looked like, I don't know, Robert Redford,
chiseled face the whole deal or Clint Eastwood.
Yeah, we're going to be fine.
I'm good to go.
That guy can fly this plane.
We can run out of gas.
He'll land it smoothly.
I'm good.
But if a heavyset guy got on, it's like, what are we in for?
What's going on here?
Is this the moment?
He's pasty.
He's florid.
He's flushed.
Right.
You know, he just doesn't look well.
You can't blame a passenger.
Right.
Who watches him squeeze himself into the cockpit like a needle being threaded with a sausage.
And then closing the door behind him, you can't blame people for sitting there and wondering if this is how it ends.
Yeah.
That's the world we live in now.
Where we look at that because we look at that.
We're in our 60s, right?
But your cameraman over there, he wouldn't think twice of it because everyone he grew up with is now morbidly obese.
So it's been normalized, right?
Again, we can't shame.
And I don't think we should be, no one wants to be shamed.
I don't want to shame anyone.
I've never done it.
I never will.
But when you normalize something, now you have a problem.
Yeah, but I totally agree, but it doesn't stop with normalization.
It goes into celebration.
We're not only just normalizing something that is so clearly and presently tied to our premature demise.
We're celebrating it.
And the thing we're shaming are the people who don't fall in line.
To your point, it's not about trying to shame someone.
It's about trying to say, no, wait, it is normal to look at someone who has a,
Affirmatively chosen to let themselves swell up like a tick and wonder if perhaps
If perhaps their judgment in other areas might not be
Impacted in a similar way. It's not crazy to assume that but there is an affirmative effort to make sure we don't
We are being discouraged from thinking that way and I object
I agree I object also
Also, we've not gone down a good road.
To the point where we have shows called My 600 Pound Life.
Yeah.
We have shows that, you know, not just normalize it, but applaud it.
You go on the Internet, that's where most kids get stuff.
There's people eating.
There's a YouTube thing where people are just eating.
This is like a category.
It's called muck banging.
They eat themselves to an enormous...
And they die, by the way.
I saw a video not long ago where, you know, these people,
celebrating. They're sitting there and they have pizza sitting on their body and they're eating and drinking
right from the two-liter thing. They're like pulling a slice out of the folds. Pretty much. I'm not kidding. I've seen
these things and you learn that, you know, dead at 32. Yeah, yeah. Dead at 35. All of them are dying.
They're just, what were you doing? At any point did you think, you know, maybe I could just take, so I'm not very
religious, but I always say it's divine intervention. The people,
I have two friends who, you can't say former alcoholics,
they always say, I'm still an alcoholic,
but one's been clean for 38 years,
and the other one's cleaned for 17 years.
And I've asked both of them, how did you get there?
And they said, right in the middle of a drunken stupor,
it was some kind of divine intervention,
and I walked into a meeting.
The other one said, I went to a hospital,
walked into the emergency room,
and said, please check me in.
And he said, what's wrong with him?
I'm drunk and I need help.
The hospital cleaned that guy.
up. They dried him out for two days and it said, we can't hold you because you're now,
you don't have a problem. And he says, but when I'll leave here, I'm going to go drink. Divine
intervention. The nurse who was checking him out wrote an address down and said, there's a meeting at
noontime. And that guy walked into that meeting 17 and 18 years ago. Divine intervention.
The people who, the robies that turn around, most of the people who listen to you will not turn
around. But enough of them turned around and went, you know what? I'm going to start today.
Yeah. I'm going to start right now. And that's the only way you can look at this. I got a question,
though, because the people who are sitting there and eating themselves to death, that's one thing.
But I believe your message is more about the fact that we're eating the wrong things, that it isn't
a lot of people's fault. It's the stuff that we're eating. Processed foods are everywhere.
They're hard to, like even Mike thought he was doing good today. And he gets something that's got sugar
and all these other chemicals in it and stuff like that.
Chuck, you can't call it ignorance
because ignorance would imply that they're ignoring facts.
They're taking the facts that are in front of them.
So I used to go well as ignorance.
30 years ago, if you would have asked me, I said ignorance.
And then I opened my eyes, right when I had my radio show,
I was like, wait a minute.
They think Kellogg's is heart healthy.
Yeah.
Right.
You can't blame for that.
telling me. You cannot blame the American or anyone for that because they've been told by the
American Heart Association, this is what you do. They've been told by the ADA, the American Diabetes
Association, this is what you do. And if you look at where the money comes in from both of those
groups, Coca-Cola, Kellogg's, you name the corporation, you name the food company. That's who funds
that, including Harvard. So when you see any, I tell people, if you see anything coming out of the
T-Chann School of Health.
at Harvard and Walter Willett,
turn and run,
because they're bought and paid for by big food.
These guys have been squinting for a long time.
And I begged him to come on in my movie,
beyond impossible, got turned down.
I asked all the vegan doctors to come on,
turn down across the board.
I even put their rejection letters in the movie.
By the way, that movie is shocking.
That was a shocking movie.
I actually prefer it.
I love Fat, a documentary.
It's probably, I mean, it's my favorite because it's the first.
But I enjoyed watching Beyond Impossible more because you had a, I think, stories need villains.
Yeah.
And when the villains are so big and so systemic, it's hard, I think, you know, for a viewer to just really dial in on it.
But like the impossible burger.
I get that. I can see it. I can pick it up. I ate a couple. I went through a month or two where the local restaurant in my neighborhood had him on the menu. And I was like, oh, I guess. And then I looked into it a bit more. I'm like, you know, you know what? Plus, I don't feel good after this. And going to the bathroom shouldn't take that much paper. Really?
T.M.I. I'm just saying. No, but it's the truth. It's the truth. It's the absolute truth. If your system's not working right, it's trying to get rid of a chemical.
Yeah. Think about that.
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You shouldn't have to wrap your forearm from your elbow.
You should have to get in there like a plum bob, for God's sakes.
It ought to be a square or two.
You go on your way.
By the way, when you do that, do you fold the squares?
Like, do you go in, take a pass, fold it back, and do it again?
Or you just like...
I fold and use twice.
I do too.
Yeah.
I do too.
And I was dating a girl years ago, and this topic came up.
And she left me because of that.
For that?
Yeah.
Because you fold and use twice?
Right.
She wouldn't even fold it at all.
She would take the toilet paper and hold it in her hand like some giant snow cone
and then just like dab at it and throw it away.
And when she was done, I mean, she would literally go through like a third of a roll of toilet paper.
Like she was so horrified that the eye...
For one sitting.
For one sitting.
Sometimes I'll try to do a third fold like I'm doing an origami or something.
Me too.
Because I think it's we're conservative in nature.
I'm four.
You could do four?
Yeah.
Four folds on a single...
That's talent right there.
Well, I mean, you know, I'm talking about like eight sheets.
Oh, so you have a bigger.
It's got to be thick.
My dad goes in with a single square.
No, no.
And if it's two ply, he separates those.
Come on.
So he goes with like a gossamer wing.
In that case, he might as well go just with his hand.
Does anybody get a bidet?
I have friends who have bidet.
I just love it.
We have a house.
It saves so much paper.
Yeah.
I would imagine it would.
You get the main thing in a wipe or so.
And then you hit it with that thing, boom.
And then do you have a towel that you dry it after?
No, you just use another piece of paper.
Another piece of paper.
How does it save paper then?
Because you can get it done in two wipes if you do.
Okay.
The initial wipe, just to get the lion's share out of the way.
A blast of water just to clean it up and then just another little dab will do you and you're good to go.
Is anybody still listening to this?
I think they're hanging on to the edge of their.
seats. They are now. Yeah, I am for sure. The conversation finally got to a relatable place.
Yeah, people sitting in their cars ready to go into work going, I can't walk in until I
hear out of those ends. I'm going to say something, again, this goes back to sad.
Good. For a moment there, I was having a good time.
We're going to need that scotch. Okay. I do these consults where I've been doing
them for 10 years now. I started doing them because I felt like I wasn't doing my job.
anymore. So you can call me and I'll talk to you. The number of people who have told me that
they started losing weight because they were in a public restaurant where it was attached to the
wall and they sat and broke it off of the wall. And now they're sitting in their own crap and sometimes
gashed because, you know, when porcelain breaks, it's sharp. I would imagine that was that God moment of
talking about you literally had people tell you that they broke a toilet from sitting on it. I'm not brilliant
enough to make that up.
No, he's not, and that's funny.
That's what you call the inciting incident.
How did you know?
Well, I sat down.
I was in the airport, trying to make a flight,
ran in,
just to pinch a quick one,
and tore the toilet off the wall.
The next thing you know, I'm sitting, my ass is tore up
from the porcelain, and I'm in my own
and I'm bleeding.
I'm lying at my own state.
And you can have to call security.
Can you imagine?
That is an embarrassing trip to the hospital.
And by the way,
I haven't heard the story
once or twice.
No.
This is a common occurrence.
And when I told a friend about this,
they're not making toilets strong enough.
It might have been Corolla I told about this off the air.
Maybe Dr. Drew, I can't remember.
See, that's a difference between Corolla show in this show.
Stuff you can tell him off the air.
You can talk to me about it.
We talk right here. We're here.
I want to hear about it.
He said to me that it happened to John Popper,
Blues Traveler.
Yeah.
Yeah, I wouldn't have known.
Maybe Halloween men tell.
Somebody famous told me that story that knew John Popper.
Okay.
It didn't happen to Howie.
He never had that.
No, Howie's never been fatted down his life.
Can you imagine knowing Howie, the germ thing?
Oh, my gosh.
I don't even know how he can go to the bathroom with his whole germ thing, but he sits
on a toilet, rips off the wall, he collapses and a pile of his own stink, starts to bleed.
That would be it for him.
Yeah.
He couldn't.
He would pick up a piece of porcelain and open a vein.
Jesus.
And by the way, you mentioned the security guard who gets called.
Nobody thinks about this from his point of view.
You're just having a day.
This guy has minimum wage.
Yeah, this guy comes in, his minimum wage, goes into the stall and is greeted by that.
Yeah.
Something has to be done, man.
Yeah, look, I didn't mean to turn it into a comedy routine.
That is not funny, but that was the impotence when you talk about that moment when people,
and I can sit here and tell you all the moments I hear.
That's a common one.
The toilet broke, and that's when that was...
That's a common one.
Chuck.
I'm so surprised.
Chuck, when we were in high school, the fat kid in my class, his name was Phil.
Yeah.
He weighed two in a quarter.
Okay.
225.
That was the fat kid in my class.
Right.
And maybe J.D. Shortino, maybe.
They were both good friends of mine.
Were.
J.D.
is, the guy makes the best sausage in the world.
Packs it himself.
And he looks good now.
That's great.
Shot his fingers off.
Idiot.
How did he manage that?
You know, the old, I didn't think the gun was loaded.
Yeah.
Put one right between his two fingers.
Unbelievable.
No, you can't even flip me off.
off.
He just goes, you know.
You know what I'm trying to say.
But Italians use that anyway.
But anyway, these guys are two and a quarter.
The fattest guys in my class.
Chuck, people are calling me in their five and six hundred pounds, do you understand?
There's a kid he's going to love hearing his name right now.
Scott King, 310 pounds down.
And he's running triathlons now.
I love this story.
We need to talk more about Scott King.
Well, let me tell you about the guy.
The guy in Texas sitting on his porch and his young three-year-old daughter starts moving towards the street.
He can't get to her in time.
His daughter is in the middle of the street, and he can't get over to save his kid.
Luckily, it's a quiet street and nothing happens.
He brings his kid out of the street.
The next day he hears Diamond Dallas Pets.
on the Adam Carolla show.
And he goes, I'm going to start doing
DDP yoga.
The very next day, I'm on the Adam Corolla
show, and he goes, I'm going to start eating nothing
but meat and bacon and eggs.
Between DDP yoga
and me, he lost
310 pounds. I've become friends with this guy
now. Wow. He's literally
running triathlons, and he wants to run
a full-length Iron Man
triathlon in 2025.
Divine intervention.
The kid ran into the street. He couldn't protect his
own kid. That's a wake-up call. Couldn't protect his own kid. You must have heard, I mean,
I know you wrote a book on it, but just the chapters and lists of these inciting inciting incidences,
I think are really interesting and powerful. I mean, I think I might have told you this,
and it doesn't compare at all, but I weighed 234 pounds. When? Six and a half years ago,
I was in Chicago
and I was filming a commercial with my mom and dad
For Felpro
For Felpro
Yeah, and it was Michael Deegan
It was Michael Deegan was producing it
You'll love this, Finney.
It's a, Felprow makes gaskets
And they wanted me to do a commercial about leakers, right?
Right.
Leaking, right?
So if you got a car in your driveway
and it's leaking, that would make you a leaker.
So one of the setups is,
Chuck is running a
sort of a recovery group, like
in a basement of a church. Like leakers
anonymous. Like leakers anonymous. And we're all
sitting around just talking about our
leaking problems. Right.
Okay. Are you sure it was for a car?
Well, that was the gag,
right? Okay. I'm like, look, I'm not going to
do a commercial for a filter, but we're
going to learn at the end that we've been talking about
people's cars. But
through the encounter group, you're going to think
we're all dealing with various levels
of incontinence. Right. So I do the
Same thing with my parents, where I invite them to come on to, you know, I come from a long line of leakers.
Right.
And so my mom and dad are there, and they think I'm talking about incontinence, and they confess.
My mom says, you know, sometimes when I, when I sneeze a little, a little bit comes out.
And my father says, sometimes when I think I'm done, I'm not really done.
And then they learn we're talking about cars, and it's all very funny.
And we're filming this thing.
And that's just backdrop.
The story is there's a camera, like right where this one is.
And my mom and dad are over here.
So I'm in the foreground, and I'm wearing this blue and white shirt, a plaid shirt.
And in between takes, my dad looks at me.
And he remembers this picnic table that we used to have under the elm tree in our front yard.
And the tablecloth on it was the exact same design.
And he looks at me.
And he looks in the monitor.
And he says,
Michael, you look just like a picnic table.
I was like, Jesus, Dad?
I mean, that shirt looks like a tablecloth.
That's what I meant to say.
And I look back at the monitor, and he was right the first time.
I looked like a picnic.
I had never been that heavy in my life.
How tall are you?
Six feet tall.
And the last time I'd been on a scale prior to that,
I weighed 198 pounds.
And I knew I was more than that,
but I just didn't get on a scale for five years.
I kept running, I kept working out, but I didn't change my diet.
And so one day my dad said I looked like a picnic table.
And I got on a scale that night and it was 234.
And we had a huge dinner after that.
Remember, we were at a steakhouse at a hotel.
And for the first time in my life, I had a steak, no bread, no pasta, no rice, no nothing.
And for the better part of a year, I stayed on something really close to keto.
and I lost 44 pounds.
Works like a charm.
Now, flash forward.
I'm about 200.
I got down to 188, and then I got 190.
I'm like, 190's fine.
And then 195, blah, blah.
So I started rucking when I got to 200, hard.
Yeah.
And that's changed my life.
Now, I'm sorry, I didn't make this all about me.
No, no, go, go.
But I walk seven miles every morning, usually with 40 or 50 pounds on my back.
That's impressive.
Eh, but my diet's for crap.
I've not completely gone back, but I've backslid a lot, as I demonstrated when you walked in this morning.
And, you know, Chuck, you have too.
You walked with me.
I mean, we were long distance, but we would catch up in the mornings.
We'd listen to podcasts and stuff.
And you lost what?
35, yeah.
But I did it with one of the weight loss programs where they send you the meals and blah, blah, blah.
So you were white knuckling it.
Yeah, pretty much, you know.
But look, it's not about us.
I know there are people listening right now because everybody's doing this.
Everybody's up and down.
Everybody's somewhere trying to combine the next great diet.
Dirty keto is where I want to land this plane because ketosis makes sense to me.
A ketogenic diet made sense to me, but it's been bastardized.
It's been perverted.
And we've been lied to, man.
And so somewhere between personal responsibility and a heightened level of awareness,
please say something that will inspire Chuck and me.
and everybody listening to still cling to whatever hope there is,
but come at this thing with their eyes wide open.
The first thing people need to realize is exercise is a poor way to lose weight.
Every time I say that on the podcast or whenever I'm up on the stage,
people will inevitably tell me that's me.
I decided to run a marathon.
I got in shape for 20 weeks.
When I got to the finish line, I was actually heavier than when I started.
or I barely lost any weight at all.
I thought running would make me sinewy and lean and thin.
Do not stop rocking.
Chuck, if you're not rocking now or working out in some capacity, start doing it.
Because exercise is the fountain of youth.
Please do not confuse that with weight loss.
We gain and lose weight based on hormones.
The forementioned Scott King.
He had a stomach cut out before he got to sick.
600 pounds.
Think about that.
He was one of those people.
That's before and after.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
He had had his whole stomach cut out.
And you think, oh, and he lost like 200 pounds doing that.
So he went from like 400 to 200.
And then went all the way back up.
And he thinks he was past 600, but he didn't want to go back and embarrass himself
by going on to a grain scale to figure out his weight.
Because you can't weigh it anywhere.
else you need to go to
I mean it's embarrassing
yeah and then he can't protect his own kid
no stomach he gained all the way back
and he knew it couldn't be exercise because he had tried that
because the whole time he was fighting it back up to 600
until he couldn't move anymore
exercise is a poor way to lose weight
we gain and lose weight hear this
with hormones
hormones control
when we gain and lose weight
I'll give a practical example
you take a woman
who's still in birthing years
before the change
tell that woman a day before she starts her period
today
I want you to really concentrate
really hard and not have a period
tomorrow
that's never going to happen
because hormones come in and say
hey we need to flesh this out
we need to make the bed again and get you ready
for next month
that's what that is
all controlled by hormones
our weight is controlled by hormones.
You stay away from sugars and grains.
You don't raise insulin.
Insulin drives fat.
If you can keep your insulin down, you stop driving fat.
When I say driving fat, I'm going to give a cartoon of what happens.
You eat sugar.
We release the hormone insulin.
Insulin covers that sugar and pushes a little bit of it into our bloodstream.
to maintain homeostasis,
a little bit into your muscles,
and just a little bit into your liver.
And that's it.
We can get by on less than two teaspoons of sugar per day.
Everyone here, people are our size.
That's all you need to maintain homeostasis.
Blood sugar.
Blood sugar.
Yeah.
So you don't have high blood sugar, low blood sugar.
What happens to the rest of it?
We don't burn it.
Even if you rucked for 10 hours
and you kept eating sugar, you're not burning it.
So what's going to happen to it?
It converts into a long-chain triglyceride, also known as a fat, and we store it.
We store it in fat cells all over our bodies.
And when you're getting too many of these, people that get morbidly obese, fatty liver, everything else.
The biggest problem in this country today is non-alcoholic fatty liver disease from too much sugar.
So now you're going to say, well, what's the sugar?
Sugar is not just those 50 things.
Yeah.
Every grain you eat.
Oatmeal.
Seven grain bread.
Brown rice.
I don't care what color your rice is.
It's all sugar.
When it leaves your stomach,
the acid in your stomach breaks it down and goes to your liver.
Your liver is the OG meritocracy.
It operates, it doesn't care what you think or what you thought you did.
right it's a meritocracy you put this in
this is going to happen we're going to push it into
one of the first things I ask people when I get on the phone with them
where are your triglycerides 400
this should be around 40 or 50
definitely below 100 people tell me 400 500
on triglycerides can you imagine
right that's all fat
in the system just making us fat
and making us unhealthy
So you can control that by pushing the hormones back, by not letting that insulin release.
And that's why Ozympic works, right?
And by the way, GLP ones, we're going to look at this the way we're looking,
we're going to look at the electric car, both bad ideas.
Very bad ideas.
GPL1s, did you say?
GLP ones.
That's Ozempic, Wigovi, Jardients, all the things people are taken to lose weight.
we're going to look back on this era and it won't be pretty.
Like Fen Fen.
Yeah, Fin Fin was killing people immediately
because Pondaman, which controlled the hormone,
made you feel full.
And then the pheno part of it, speed, killed you.
That's why they took it off the market.
I'm glad you brought up FinFIN.
Because there's two other hormones that release along with insulin.
One is called ghrelin,
and the other one's called leptin.
Now, you don't have to remember those names, but let me tell you what they do.
Grelin is the hormone that makes you feel like you're hungry, hunger pains.
The old saying when we were kids, what do you need a half an hour after eat a Chinese meal?
Another Chinese meal.
Okay, you're correct, Chuck.
Ding, ding, ding.
Here's the deal.
It takes over three hours for your stomach to completely empty of its content.
So while you still have Mugu Kai pan,
and sweet and sour shrimp in your stomach,
your brain is telling you you're starving again.
Send more.
Yeah.
Well, are you sick of it yet?
Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines
and sucking up all the bandwidth?
You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time?
Do you miss the rotary phone?
Well, get over it.
The genie is out of the bottle.
The poop is out of the goose.
I'm afraid. AI is here to stay. And every business in the country is asking themselves the same
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That's netsuite.com.
Because that switch is in the wrong direction. Mike mentioned earlier in the show, because I pay
attention, the thing about alcohol. If you never drink alcohol and you have one sip,
you're going to feel tipsy. You're an easy drunk. But if you drink,
two shots every day, you need to now drink three to get tipsy.
Same thing happens with Grellon.
You keep eating pizza, you keep eating pasta, you keep eating rice, bread.
Now you've pushed that hormone to where it becomes insensitive to what you're eating, right?
Yeah.
Okay, that's Grellin.
Leptin is even more sinister.
That's where a pondamine worked.
Leptin is the hormone that makes you feel full.
Now, you're watching football on Sunday.
You're having a few beers, that's liquid bread.
You're having chips, and you tell yourself, I'm not going to eat all the chips,
but before you know it, you're opening up the bag and licking out the mylar from the inside aisle
and trying to figure out what else you have in the fridge.
Right?
It's like you've been to our homes.
He's watching us.
Here's a deal.
Does anyone in this room know how many chips are in a family-sized bag of Doritos, the weight of
it. The weight?
A pound?
No. Just north of a pound.
17 ounces.
Okay.
And when you finish that,
you can have another bag if it was available.
I know that because I've been there too.
Yeah.
I'm a sugar addict. That's why I stay away.
I treat sugar like it's alcohol.
And you can have alcohol,
and I'll explain that in a second.
And I'll explain why you can have it.
I hope so. You brought some excellent 15-year-old hooch.
I don't think you're trying to.
to kill us. Here's the deal. If we went down to meat right over here in Santa Monica right at the
beach. Yeah. And they brought you out a 17 ounce steak. Yeah. And when you took the last
bite, they brought out another sizzling 17 ounce steak. Can you eat it? No. No. Okay. That's because
your brain got the message, I'm full. 17 ounces of chips, you're hungry. It's the same amount of
food. Molecular weight is identical. That's weird. So the bottom line then is that we are our own
unreliable narrators. Yeah. We can't trust our feelings. We can't trust our brains. It's correct.
Especially when we're in this state of trying to reset the body. You mentioned earlier,
again, off air, which is tragic because it was a salient point. We did a great show on that. Great
Before I walked in and married.
My bad guy.
Sorry.
I didn't have the mic's run.
Yeah, we need to do that.
In his defense, you did show up a half hour early.
I always do.
Well, there's no extra credit for that crap here.
I don't care.
I just want to be where I need to be.
Make a note next time.
Tell him we start, you know, a half hour later.
I'll be an hour early.
You were saying that because you got your own metabolism
and your own sugar sensitivity and your own body to a place where
you're the product of a whole bunch of new habits,
the slightest amount of sugar, right?
You said you pulled over somewhere to Starbucks,
had one of those egg bites yourself.
Yeah.
Took a couple of bites of it,
and your body immediately let you know.
I ate the whole thing.
And then, because it's just two egg bites.
You're driving.
There's not much.
My wife had two.
I had two.
They give you two in the order.
And about five minutes later, I went,
oh, oh, I can feel what was happening in my brain.
You know, I felt weird.
Yeah, there's crap in there is what you said.
Right.
There's junk in here.
And she goes, how do you know?
It's like, Serena, I'm telling you, it's just junk in here.
And she, these are fun.
It's just eggs and whites.
She looked at it and she goes, oh, my God.
Here it is.
Same thing I did for you with your donut-shaped egg bite.
So what are we to do?
What?
I mean, I, great.
It's hormones.
Super.
A lot of people listening going,
look, I get it.
I want to do better.
I don't want to wait for my dad to call me a picnic table.
I don't want to wait for the toilet to snap off the wall
so I can be scooped up out of my own bloody stench.
What can I, how do I shop?
How do I think?
And obviously, they should listen to your podcast and read your book.
Right.
Obviously.
All right.
I'm going to help all of you out.
First off, I'm going to make sure Chris gets you two copies of,
of my PDF.
So after I wrote the book,
and a book became a big deal,
I realized that I left something out.
So I sat down one afternoon and wrote this 25-page PDF.
I want you to both consume the PDF.
We have to eat it?
Yeah.
Can we put sauce on it?
No, that's the problem.
You can dip it in booze.
Well, now we're talking.
I don't let Catholics do with the host.
So consume the PDF.
Okay.
You both have my number.
Call me whenever you want.
You got questions, text is better.
I'll never pick up the phone.
I'll text it back, yeah or nay.
For your audience, and I'll come on whenever you want.
If you ever want to do touch-ups, we'll do that.
I'll come on, and I'm going to hold you guys accountable
because you're going to have questions, right?
Absolutely.
So we're going to figure the questions, and we're going to help the office.
audience at the same time. But I called my guy Chris on the way here. I should have been holding the
steering wheel, but I was calling Chris. I said, Chris, I want to offer something to the micro people
that they can do. I have an accountability group. We call it the Vinny Tortorich VIP group.
But I told him to come up with a special name and I hope he sent it to me because this is going to
be tragic if you didn't. The VT VIPs. No, no, no, don't look that up. I'm going to give you a special.
Too many Vs.
It's not bad, though.
So for your group, I'm going to open up.
I have a VIP.
It's called a VIP group where I hold people accountable.
I do a live thing twice a month.
I go in.
It's live.
I talk to whoever wants to talk to me.
It's just for that group.
And in between time, they have their own board.
Scott King, the guy we were talking, he's in that group.
All of these people are in the group.
They all help each other in that group.
right and uh i charge for it is not a whole lot it's like i don't know 20 something bucks a month
like 20 bucks i think i can't remember okay you're a terrible businessman by the way i'm the worst
you really are you you should be worth 100 million dollars i really don't care about money i know
you know i've been told i've had people oh you could charge 200 bucks a month for this because
you're talking live to these people when you're taking i don't care i'm just thinking you could
get another shirt like like i have more than one of these mike and you can get another shirt too by the
way. Every picture in here is you with that shirt. All right. So here's what we're calling the group according to Chris. Vinnytaughterex.com slash row. Rowe. Vinnitatorage.com slash row. R-O-W. So go there and I'm going to open it up. I keep it closed. I open it up like twice a year and let people in. And I just closed it. But I said, you know, I'm going to micro, let's let that row.
3.0, the row B 3.0s, let's give the row fans
something that they can do. They can be accountable. They can talk to me
live in that group. That's amazing. That's great.
And the other thing I just started doing, I'm always thinking of things I could do for
free in the group. Because I just got through with chemo, I'm weak.
I got on the floor the first day after chemo. I couldn't do five push-ups.
That was it. So I said, you know, there are people in that group that are weak too.
Also, I said, you know, I'm going to do videos, put them in a group.
And as I get stronger, you guys can get stronger.
I've done one for the push-ups.
I've done a little pulling routine.
I've done leg routine.
I'm going to keep doing them.
You don't pay any extra for that.
It's all in the VIP group.
So we're going to help you guys out here.
We're going to keep the audience going here.
I'm producing your show on the fly now, mate.
I hope you don't mind.
I'll take it.
Let's do it.
Why not?
I have no good reason why not
I mean that's a I mean that is the question
I I asked myself just a couple of weeks ago
there's absolutely no reason I should ever ever
weigh more than 200 pounds honestly there's no
there's no reason that I should ever weigh more than 190 pounds
that's where I should be that's where my body wants to well my body wants to
be probably 220 but where I should be is 190 and I know I can get there
I can get there in a week.
I know exactly how to do it for me.
But it doesn't do me any good unless some new habits come along that allow me to stay there.
And I don't quite yet know what those habits are.
It's not going to be cutting out booze because I enjoy it too much.
And it's not a problem for me.
But right now I'm in this weird place where I know I'm not eating as well as I should,
but I'm making up for it with aggressive rucking.
So do I do that for the rest of my life?
You're white knuckling it.
And look, the things we were talking about in the kitchen
where Chuck said, oh, I'll put cream half and half in my coffee.
Yeah.
And the first thing I said, is it coming out of a thumb pack?
Yep.
And you said, yeah.
And you didn't know.
You see, that's the thing people just don't know.
It's the ignorance of what we don't know because they don't tell us.
And you said, oh, it's sealed.
So it has to be.
No, no.
That's not real cream.
You need stuff.
That's not real half and half?
You need stuff that needs to be refrigerated.
You want to have real cream.
And that's as easy to do.
I saw a fridge in there.
You just put it in the fridge.
Right?
There are little things that will come up
and you can just write to me and say,
A, B, C, and D, or call me.
Right.
I'm always available.
Right?
Okay.
Let's do this.
Okay.
Let's make this happen.
And before you land the plane.
booze
what do you drink
more wine
I don't drink beer anymore
I used to love it
I haven't had a beer in years
I drink wine
and I and I sip bourbon
and some of that
scotch that you brought
I enjoy that
distilled alcohols are better
because it's almost its own
macronutrient by itself
let me be clear
there's nothing healthy about alcohol
I enjoy scotch also and you know uh bourbon yeah but anything distilled and before people ask
i don't care if it's clear or brown it doesn't matter it won't do much as far as raising your
your uh your blood it's its own it's like its own mac you know we have fat carbohydrates proteins
booze is almost its own macronutrient right if you look at it right because it doesn't do anything
it's kind of like the nicotine we were talking about is now.
But when you drink wine, it's full of sugar.
Yeah.
So if you want to drink, drink more of the distilled, the spirits.
And nothing with it, no mixers, right?
Of course.
No, there's no such thing as, of course.
Yeah.
Because, well, of course that thumbnail of half and half is good.
Right. Yeah, it says half and half.
That's the first rule.
There is no, of course.
Everything that seems obvious isn't.
Right.
It's just not.
And look, I thought, and tell me if I say this wrong, but the real big takeaway of dirty keto is, look, there's carbs and sugars, there's fat, and there's protein.
The reason you get rid of the carbs and the sugars is because your body is happy to burn the fat.
It wants to burn the fat.
And the fat will give you all the energy you need.
So you're not cutting fat out of your diet.
It's the other stuff.
Right.
And that's a muscle.
And exercising that muscle will.
lead to a habit.
And before long, maybe, maybe it will take a little longer than you want.
But the addiction starts to wane.
It does.
And as I tell everyone, it feels like it takes forever because gaining weight is so much more fun.
That might be your title.
Yeah.
Gaining weight is fun.
Gaining weight is so much more fun.
Than losing it.
Hey, it's more fun to judge than to think.
It's more fun to make.
fun than to be empathetic. And I guess, you know, I guess I ought to apologize if we heard anybody's
feelings again. Obviously, that's not our intent. But it's so frustrating. It is. It's so frustrating to see
I'm going to see it right now. I'm going to leave here. I'm going to walk out and I'm going to
see that woman you described walking around with a giant big gulp. And, you know, maybe she's
proud, maybe she's happy. Maybe she's in a place where she doesn't feel terrible about herself.
but she's she's in trouble he's in trouble they are going to be hurt right by this uh dirty keto
is the most recent if you're not up to speed on all things vini you really owe it to yourself the
documentary is in no particular order fat a documentary great beyond impossible awesome what's the other
one what's the third one fat a documentary too yeah fatter why didn't you just go with fatter still fat
It was the pandemic.
I wasn't thinking.
And the book, Fitness Confidential, which, by the way, thank you for the audible version.
Did you get to listen to it?
Hey, man.
You know what?
We didn't kiss your ass officially.
You actually did something in this book that I pitched to Simon and Schuster years ago.
Yeah.
So, guys, when he reads the book, it's a book on tape like any other, except that he'll interrupt himself every couple of pages with a tangent.
A digression.
Yeah.
And in fact, I called my version of this, but I digress.
Yeah.
And I just thought it would be a fun way.
Here's the thing I mean to say, so I wrote it down.
But as I read my own stuff, other things are going to occur to me.
Well, obviously, our brains work the same way, except that you actually did it.
Yeah.
Can I tell you what happened with that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
A quick story.
Simon & Schuster and Harper Wave, a piece of Harper Collins, were battling for,
my book when it was just a script.
And they wanted, both people, both companies wanted to give me a two-book deal.
They said, we want you to go back, cut this book in half.
When you read it, you can see why.
It's an autobiography.
And they said, cut it in half, we'll give you a two-book deal.
And I said, no, I want to sell it like this.
And I asked my agent, I said, ask them why they want to do that.
And they said, because they don't know which shelf to put it.
run in a bookstore and I said, do they realize that there's no bookstore and no shelves left?
It's all Amazon.
And she told him that.
And I told my agent, I said, I'm going to self-publish this book.
And they laughed and said, good luck.
I literally went out with my own dollars.
I hired their editors.
I hired everyone to do everything.
I had it nook.
Any kind of format, it cost me $14,000 to do it all.
and I didn't have the money at the time.
I did the whole deal.
And when it came to the audiobook,
I went to the people at Audible.
What is it going to cost to do this?
And they said,
now, a couple of grand.
And they said,
but then you're going to need someone to read it,
like a microtipe.
I said, well, I'm out of money.
I'll read it.
And they said, okay.
I go into the booth,
and I start doing it,
and at some point I break into a story,
and the guy breaks in the Chuck type,
in the other room.
The engineer.
Wait a minute.
You need to go back.
Why?
You have to read it
exactly as it is on the page.
And I said, but it's my book.
Doesn't matter.
The publisher.
The publisher is going to want.
I said, I don't have a publisher.
I'm the publisher.
And he thought about it for a second.
He goes, I guess you can do whatever you want.
Here's the beauty of it.
And this is not for truth.
This just happened.
happened, right? The book comes out. It becomes, it goes to the top of Amazon. I have,
I have screenshots. I was number two on Amazon in between the Queen of England's book and the girl
from Saturday Night Live that used to do the governor from Tina Faye. Thank you. I'm glad that you
pick up on. I'm here. So I'm number two. And then I went to number one. And it stayed there for a long
time. Meanwhile, it got out on the internet, hey, guys, he gives more information in the
audible. Right. I was up for an audible book of the year read by an author against one Ms.
Dolly Parton. So that wouldn't have ever happened if people hadn't started talking on the
internet. Get that, get that too. Well, it wouldn't have happened had you not gone off your own
script. And this is the way, look, the first time we met, I knew we were going to have a great
conversation because we have an idea. I have an idea of what I think I might like to hear you
say. But I'm not married to any of it. Right. You know, I want it to go the way it goes. And
if authenticity is the thing that makes people persuasive, and I believe it is. Yes. And if persuasion
is what the nutrition industry desperately needs while companies are making your docs PG-13 for some reason.
If all of that is happening, and it is, don't lose sight of the fact that when you read your own book, you can pause anytime you want to self-edit.
And don't hide any of that.
I mean, that to me is the, I still don't, I can't believe what a bad businessman you are.
But man, your instincts are so good.
with regard to production.
That guy, Taylor, has been the behind-the-scenes guy in my life for the last 10 years.
His job is to never stop rolling because typically, that's when you hear the truth.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's when you get the truth.
And you'll get the truth in the book.
It's called Fitness Confidential, the podcast, same name.
Fitness Confidential.
And the brand new website where Chuck and I are going to will already be there.
when you go over to register.
Give it to me again, Vinnie?
Vinnytautoreditch.com slash row.
All right.
According to Chris.
So we'll see you over there.
In the meantime, if you're in a stall,
in an airport,
and you're not sure if the toilet can support you,
don't take any chances.
Are you going to actually put this out?
You're not putting this out.
This was live, my friend.
It just happened.
Thanks for the hooch.
Thanks for coming by.
Thanks for the words of wisdom.
You're welcome anytime.
Thanks, Finney.
When you leave a review, only five stars will do,
not just one or just two or just three.
We were hoping.
Four.
Just a quick review with five stars two.
Five stars will do.
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