404: Talking Points and Scotch with Vinnie Tortorich
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It's the way I heard it with me, Mike Rowe, 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 pill 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, is

Got a PG-13 rating. What's up with that? I don't know. 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? No. 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 VinnyTortorich.com. The Robies. The Robies, you guys called yourselves. And to date, the Robies have lost in 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 a piece, well, there's a million pounds. 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 vinnytorterich.com slash roe. 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 that 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 need it a little bit more than you do. 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 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 VinnieTortorich.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. Every day in this great country, hundreds of Americans realize they've been overpaying for their wireless service. And you know what they do about it? Most of them switch to Pure Talk.

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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? Bayou Lafourche, the longest bayou in the world. Right. I grew up literally, let's call it 20 yards from the bayou. I used to look at an alligator every day when I was a kid.

I wanted to do real things, and everyone said, you're not going to do those things. 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. No.

The movie about the making of the Blackberry. Really? It stars Glenn Howerton 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 nother 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 Sisyphean about your whole journey 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. And 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, you know, 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? I mean, no, he literally did it. That's all he does. That's on camera. Yeah, I can see it should have been rated worse. Yeah, 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 is shockingly correct my hometown is

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's loyalty. I did not check the trunk. 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. There was this fancy Mercedes, and that looked way too fancy for me. And there was this. This is the less fancy of the two cars. 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 them 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 on 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, Fatty Documentary, which is still number 74 now,

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? Fat, a 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 Handel did. Free Solo did. My documentary...

I'm gonna find it before the end of this podcast. Go ahead. I 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 and

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 that kind of thing. Amazing. And then, as I eat the very first thing of the day, I stop by to get some of those healthy egg whites. From Dunkin' Donuts. Well, I mean, I realize that, you know, he doesn't even hesitate. He just looks at me.

With the kind of... A mix of disappointment and transverse shame.

Pulls out this device and starts googling Here get that you just oh you just do that. Okay, just gonna if you need me to find it out. 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 not as green as a pool table in twice a square. Look at this number 76 I said 74 Five-year-old

That's a five-year-old documentary not 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 right that movie made me feel anxious It made me feel angry. It made me feel determined and

But mostly it made 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 MicroWorks 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' Donuts. I can't eat anything. Think about what just came out of your mouth. The healthy choice at Dunkin' Donuts. 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 the 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 School, you may have heard of these kids, Peyton Manning, Eli Manning. Yeah. 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 played football, you ate eggs. You ate beef. You ate chicken. You ate 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 and 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 Ganzer, 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 and I said, look, I'll produce it. I don't have to be. We can find a micro. We can find a 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, then we'll write it up. There's a good 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? They would laugh me out the business. They just laughed right out the building. Just go. You're done. And that's what 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? It's like...

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 could 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's Mike Rowe. Mike Rowe. You started beating Corolla 10 to 1. The oldest podcast in the world. It's like...

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. And these 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's like, who? I said, the Robies. 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 it. He's like, no, I don't think you can Google Roby. Yeah. You know your friend, Mike Rowe? You know him now about 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? Yeah.

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. People who wanted to become pregnant 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. People would call me on these phone calls crying. 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,

And then when you come in, we have a magnification of those people. So now we have Grossberg again from Mike Rowe. As I've always said, by myself, I'm no one.

But you put me with Carolla or me with Mike Rowe, now I'm bigger than Jack LaLanne. 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 cornflakes, I mean, you're literally talking about what's really in the cornflake aside from your urine and it's never good. And these guys are paying for, I mean,

Think about Post, think about Kellogg's, think about the number of shows that are affirmatively sponsored by those guys. 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 and in a completely unscripted way, right? It's freaking amazing

That's amazing that people who want to become pregnant are now pregnant, that they're 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 the 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. 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, wreck everything, improve everything. And we can give Chuck all the credit because I didn't have your number. The first time it 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 Jay Leno 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 it because if I got to the top of that hill with my rock, then what? Right, exactly. But you take, like you said, you take the win. Hey, our listeners lost a million pounds because of you. 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've got to Google it. Oh, I know it, where they got the kids 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.

So we all have two ages, our true age and our biological age. Studies show there's not a damn thing you can do about your true age. But your biological age, the age that's reflected by your physical health, that's a thing you can control. And the best way to keep your biological age younger than your true age is better nutrition, which is why so many people are taking Field of Greens.

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We can't even figure out where to tell kids to go to a bathroom at 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. Right.

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. Raw dogging a flight. Gina Grad, who does one of my podcasts with me, she brought it up on the show. I said, what's raw dogging? And she goes, well,

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 puke 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 you're not. But you're in a tube with cigars. 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 down. 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 literally ran ads to let you know how sexy their women were by saying, I'm Janet. Fly me. 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 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

You flew on this? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, often. Yeah, because it was super cheap. You could fly from New York to Baltimore for like 20 bucks or something like that. Ridiculous. Yeah, it didn't last. It couldn't. But the thing that strikes me, when you talk about 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. Like that's, but yeah,

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

the fat baby out with the bathwater. 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 SPCA commercial. It was very sad. I'm looking at it, and the comments underneath are, 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 all of these fat celebrities now, I'm trying to think of the woman, she plays the flute, the rapper. Lizzo? Lizzo. Why do I know that? Think about what other thing my brain could have committed to memory. If you didn't know that, what space could fill that? I know that Lizzo plays the flute. Because you know she's a talented woman and she plays a very talented 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, Vinny, 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 OK. 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 McLachlan singing in the arms of a student. 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 I'm going to...

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. Okay, 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. Right.

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, nevermind, 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 produce it. I know how to produce crap now. I made a few documentaries. We can get some of your friends behind it. 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. 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 with the guy. I don't want to digress on that, 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...

to where they might go, oh, let's let this guy produce it. Let's get Mike Rose 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. There is no possibility. And by the way, I don't need money for this. I'm offering me for free to work on this project. Absolutely. Look, they weren't born that way. No. This is self-inflicted. Oh, well...

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, what the mom is eating now. So kids are being born obese. Girls are having breasts at five and six years old because of the hormones and 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 Lustigs? Yeah. Actually, the Catskill Lustigs. There wouldn't be a Lustig in Catskill. That was a really bad joke. Catskillian. 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 gonna stop with the Dunkin Donuts egg bites and I'm gonna stop with the crap in my coffee or whatever they decide to do, but we might be able to help the next generation and

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? 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 load 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 the 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. Right. 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 noticed, Coke used to come in a 7-ounce bottle. Yeah.

Seven ounces. And I would have 12 of those or less a year. People go, how do you know that? It's because we went to Frank DiNino'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 had 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 and just let it spill. It scrolls in front 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 dad 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 has zero calories. So what's wrong with that? Methadone clinic of 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 changed the delivery system. 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 cigar, it's 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 acrylamides 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. How do you know what that tastes like? Whenever people say that it tastes like ass, it's like, 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, the nicotine. But go back to the Splenda. 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 the stevia leaf and right to it.

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. But it's going to have you thinking about sex pretty quickly. At least it does for me. I wouldn't know. Yeah. 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.

Yeah. 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 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?

Whenever I'm in LA and feeling cheap, I'll crash at my producer's place instead of at an overpriced hotel. I used to crash there all the time, but I stopped for a while because Chuck's guest bedroom had a set of blinds from like 1978.

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Three-day blinds, shades and drapes, shutters too, custom-made. I told you once and I told you twice, you buy one, you get one for half the price. You've never seen such a deal in your life as three-day blinds. 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 you. The gas station is not going to help you. All of the fast food places that people think they need to 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 started. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, look, we've all done 360s. Right. And then you walk right back into it. What is a diet? Oh, yeah. A diet to 360. 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 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. 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. 49 to 1. But a war hero, it should be stipulated. I'm not against McGovern because McGovern said something very poignant at the end of his political career. So I'm not against McGovern. 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 food 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. And 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. Like shit. Yes. Yeah. Yep. Well, the McGovern committee kept meeting for 10 years. 10 whole years. And a guy named Ansel Keys, who came up with the K ration, that's where the K comes from, Keys, 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. 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? Wheat. Things that won't spoil. Right. Grains. Yep. Right? Call's coming in. I have no idea.

No, just so people know, Vinny's phone just lit up and then all of a sudden it started recording everything they were saying. I don't even know. Did you press a button? 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, right? I saw what you did. The minute you talk. Yeah, 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, it was literally transcribing everything you were saying. How? 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. Okay. That'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 it. 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? Right.

So now you have Ancel Keys 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 got to cut down on 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.

Hard healthy grains. That word was made up out, not word, but phrase is made up out of whole cloth. So you see what a 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 years they will pay farmers more not to work. They'll say, sit home, don't grow. Right. Called set asides. Yeah. We have too much. Yeah. Kind of like the government cheese program. Too much. Too much.

We have abundance. 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 farm. 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. No problem. No S, no G, no F. I'm like Fredo. 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 in 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 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, me, and Chuck, everyone sitting here, we grew up in a generation where no one was fat. Special K had a commercial that said, if you can pinch more than an inch, 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 can pinch more than an inch was in 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. 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 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'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 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. We've not gone down a good road to the point where we have shows called My 600-lb 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 these people are 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. Like pulling a slice out of the folds under their boobs. I'm not kidding. I've seen these things. And you learn that, you know, dead at 32, 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 clean 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 you? I'm drunk and I need help. The hospital cleaned that guy up. They dried him out for two days and they said, we can't hold you because you're now, you don't have a problem. And he says, but when I 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, 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 for them. And that's the only way you can look at this. I got a question though, because I like the people who are sitting there and eating themselves to death. That's one thing. But I believe your message is, is more about the fact that we're eating the wrong things, that, that it isn't a lot of people's fault. It's the stuff that we're eating. The 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. So Chuck, you can't call it ignorant.

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, there's ignorance. 30 years ago, if you would have asked me, I'd say 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 them for that. 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. Chan 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 in my movie to come on in my movie Beyond impossible got turned down. Yeah, 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. I

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 them 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? I don't, plus I don't feel good after this. And, and going to the bathroom shouldn't take that much paper.

TMI. 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. Hooray for Safe Digging Day, August 11th. Before grabbing a shovel, grab a phone and contact 811. Locators flag utility lines for free so you can avoid dangerous accidents. Learn more at sdge.com slash 811. You shouldn't have to wrap your forearms.

from your elbow to your... You should have to get in there like a plumb 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, will you go in, take a pass, fold it back, and do it again? Or are 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? 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 dab at it and throw it away. And when she was done, 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 origami or something. Me too. Because I think we're conservative in nature. I'm for...

You could do four? Yeah. Four folds on a single? Yeah. 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, no. And if it's too ply, he separates those. Come on, man. So he goes in 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 bidets now. I just love it. We have it now. It's the best. Do you love it? It saves so much paper. What?

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. Dap it off. 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. This conversation finally got to a relatable place. People sitting in their cars ready to go into work going, I can't walk in until I hear how this 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 restroom 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 talk. 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 crap. I'm lying in my own stink. And you have to call security. Can you imagine? That is an embarrassing trip to the hospital. And by the way, I haven't heard this 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 the difference between Corolla's show and this show.

Stuff you can tell him off the air, you can talk to me about right now. 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. Blues Traveler, yeah. Yeah, I wouldn't have known...

Maybe Howie Mantel. Somebody famous told me that story, that new John Popper. Okay. It didn't happen to Howie. He never had that. Howie's never been fatted down in 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 in 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 impetus 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'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 Phillip. Yeah. He weighed two and a quarter. Okay. 225. That was the fat kid in my class. Right. Right.

And maybe J.D. Chartino, maybe. They were both good friends of mine. Were. J.D. is, 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'd he manage that? You know, the old, I didn't think the gun was loaded? Yeah. Put one right between his two fingers. Unbelievable. He's like, no, you can't even flip me off. Shut up.

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 and they're five and 600 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. Oh, wow.

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. Hmm.

He brings his kid out of the street. The next day he hears Diamond Dallas Page 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 Carolla 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 Ironman triathlon in 2025. Sure.

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 incidences, I think are really interesting and powerful. I mean, I think I might've 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. And it was Michael Deegan. It was Michael Deegan was producing it. You'll love this, Vinny. Felpro 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...

Are leaking problems, right? Okay. Are you sure it was for a car? Well, that was the gag, right? I'm not going to do it until the end 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. All right. So I do the same thing with my parents where I invite them to come on to

I come from a long line of leakers. And so my mom and dad are there. And they think I'm talking about incontinence. And they confess. My mom says, sometimes 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 looked 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-wise? - I'm 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 in that steakhouse in that 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 pounds.

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. 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. Yeah. 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 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 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. And then he can't protect his own kid. No stomach, he gained all the weight 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 the 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. Right. Because hormones come in and say, hey, we need to flush 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 our size. That's all you need to maintain homeostasis. - Blood sugar. - Blood sugar. So you don't have high blood sugar or low blood sugar. What happens to the rest of it? We don't burn it. Even if you rocked for 10 hours and you kept eating sugar, you're not burning it. So what's gonna happen to it? It converts into a long chain triglyceride, also known as a fat.

And we store it. And we store it in fat cells all over our bodies. And when you're getting too many of these, people 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 Ozempic works. Right? Right.

And by the way, GLP-1s, 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. What are GPL-1s, did you say? GLP-1s. That's Ozempic, Wegovy, Jardiance. All the things people are taking to lose weight. We're going to look back on this era and it won't be pretty. Like Fen-Phen. Yeah, Fen-Phen was killing people immediately because Pondymin, which controlled the hormone, made you feel full.

And then the phenol part of it, speed, killed you. That's why they took it off the market. I'm glad you brought up fen-phen because there are two other hormones that release along with insulin. One is called ghrelin and the other one is called leptin. Now, you don't have to remember those names, but let me tell you what they do. Ghrelin is the hormone that makes you feel like you're hungry, hunger pangs. Mm-hmm.

The old saying when we were kids, what do you need a half an hour after you 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 Gai Pan and sweet and sour shrimp in your stomach, your brain is telling you you're starving again. Send more. Yeah.

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 ghrelin. 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 ghrelin. Leptin is even more sinister. That's where pandemon 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 out.

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 the 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. Okay.

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 hooge. I don't think you're trying to kill us. Here's the deal. If we went down to meet right over here in Santa Monica, right at the beach, and they brought you out a 17-ounce steak, and when you took the last bite...

They brought out another sizzling 17-ounce thing. 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. That's correct. Especially when we're in this state of trying to reset our

the body you mentioned earlier again off air which is tragic because it was a salient we did a great show on that right right before i walked in my bad guys i didn't have the uh 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 all right make a note next time tell them we start you know a half hour later i'll feel an hour early um

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. 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? I was like, Serena, I'm telling you, there's just junk in here.

And she, these are fun. It's just eggs and whites. She looked up 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? All right. I'm gonna I'm gonna help all of you out first off

I'm going to make sure Chris gets you two copies 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 created, I sat down one afternoon and wrote this 25 page PDF. I want you to both consume the PDF and then you have to eat it. Yeah. I mean, what kind of, can we put sauce on it or how? No, that's the problem. You can dip it in booze.

Well, now we're talking. How do 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 never pick up the phone. I'll text you back year and day 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 out. We're going to help the 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 Vinnie 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 he didn't. The VTVIPs. No, no, no. Don't look that up. I'm going to give you a special name. 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 I charge for it. It's not a whole lot. It's like 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 should be worth $100 million. I don't care about money. I really don't care about money. I know. You know, I've been told, I've had people, oh, you could charge $200 a month for this because you're talking live to these people. You're taking, I don't care. I'm just thinking you could get another shirt. I have more than one of these, Mike, and you could 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.

VinnieTotterich.com/row. VinnieTotterich.com/row, R-O-W-E. So go there and I'm gonna 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 be 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. Twice a month. 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 started doing, 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, Mike. 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 is the question. 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 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. I said, okay. 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. 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. 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 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 bourbon. 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 blood. It's like its own mac. We have fat, carbohydrates, proteins. Booze is almost its own macronutrient if you look at it because it doesn't do anything. It's kind of like the nicotine we were talking about. But when you drink wine, it's full of sugar. 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. 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. Right.

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 I ought to apologize if we hurt 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 in trouble. He's in trouble. They are going to be hurt by this.

Dirty Keto is the most recent. If you're not up to speed on all things Vinny, 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. 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 & Schuster years ago. 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. Quick story. Yeah.

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. 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 on 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 look 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 audio book, I went to the people at Audible. What is it going to cost to do this? And they said, a couple of grand. And they said, but then you're going to need someone to read it like a microtype. I said, well, I'm out of money. I'll read it. And they said, OK, I go into the booth and

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. Does it matter? The publisher is going to want it. I said, I don't have a publisher. I'm the publisher. And he thought about it for a second. He goes, what?

I guess you can do whatever you want. Here's the beauty of it. And this is not for two. This just happened, right? The book comes out. It goes to the top of Amazon. 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 Fey. Tina Fey. 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 Audible Book of the Year read by an author against one Miss 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. Right. 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, 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. Right. His job is to never stop rolling because typically, uh, 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 is,

Same name? Fitness Confidential. And the brand new website where Chuck and I are going to, we'll already be there when you go over to register. Give it to me again, Vinny. VinnyTortorich.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. Don't sit. Are you going to actually put this out? You're not putting this out, are you? 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 for having me. Thanks, Vinny. When you leave a review, only five stars will do. Not just one or just two or just three. We were hoping for more. As in one more.

More than a four. Just a quick review with five stars too. From a you, five stars will do.