Ethan Suplee reveals his 550-pound-to-270-pound transformation, driven by breaking habits—not just diets—while battling body dysmorphia rooted in childhood dieting trauma. Rogan debates determinism vs. free will, citing genetics and environment as key factors in weight loss struggles, like Suplee’s extreme liquid diet symptoms or their shared skepticism of processed foods. They pivot to martial arts, praising Gordon Ryan’s dominance despite health battles, before Suplee shifts focus to weapons training, critiquing California’s inconsistent gun laws while emphasizing safety over regulation. The episode ends with a call for compassion in societal conflicts, contrasting modern cancel culture with historical resilience, and Suplee’s American Glutton podcast as a future touchpoint. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, over the past 20 years, I've gone back and forth with dieting.
I've lost a shitload of weight.
I've gained a shitload of weight back.
How did I do it?
I think that the thing that I've done that has been sustainable is undoing kind of...
Look, a lot of diets come in and say, just do this and you'll lose weight.
But we're not focused at all on how we got to whatever point we were at that we consider non-optimal that we want to change.
And so, undoing the bad habits that I had that I would associate with allowing myself to get up to 550 pounds Is really more important than anything that I could say, this is what I did to lose weight.
2002, I went from 550. I did a liquid diet for two months and lost 80 pounds.
That 80 pounds, I've never dipped back into.
So I was 450. And I went down to close to just under 300, then went back up to 400, then went down to 200, then back up to 350. And for the past five years, I've been around the weight I'm at now.
That's my favorite picture and that's not even down lighting.
I was an idiot and I'm not super thrilled with my hair and my head and I wouldn't shave my head because I thought the hat looked better with a little bit of hair poking out and then it got in the way of down lighting.
So that's not even as good a picture that could Downed lighting.
It's incredibly satisfying, but, you know, look, the reality is that I have mental illness and I don't look at myself and think, like, God, I look great.
I see nothing but negative stuff every day and I try to I try to find something that I'm happy with.
Usually it's my traps.
I can look at my traps because it's lean.
There's not a bunch of loose skin hanging there.
They're not all scarred up from surgeries.
And I look at my trap and I go like, okay, that looks good.
And based on that, I can then start to feel okay about myself.
Looking at those pictures, you know, that's also a long time ago.
And I just don't, I cannot relate to how I lived then.
When I go back to my childhood, I was put on a diet when I was five.
And prior to that, I had no sense of self.
I existed, and clearly I had fun and I played, but I was not aware of my body as a thing, kind of, if it is external to me, as a separate component to me, or just as a thing itself.
It just was.
And at five, I was put on this diet and all these parts of me were pointed out as being super negative.
I have four kids myself, and you watch them, they kind of go in different directions, wide and then tall.
Yeah, there isn't a set thing.
But I spent most of my life feeling...
Wrong like literally that I was wrong or bad or there was some some Just super negative about myself and so I still have to fight through that today like no matter what I've done I 2012 I went and rode every stage of the Tour de France or 2011 maybe Just for just for fun and I could do that on a bicycle and That's not fucking easy.
That's thousands of miles on a bicycle in a very short period of time.
I was much thinner than I am now, and I was miserable.
There's an argument of free will versus determinism.
And I think there's a real good argument for both.
But the argument for determinism is, you are who you are.
I should explain this.
The idea is, determinism is essentially based on the idea that you are You're a product of all of your life experiences.
And the idea that you're responsible for everything you do at every step of the day, that's not entirely plausible.
Because there's childhood trauma, there's life experiences, there's emotions, there's genetics, there's There's what you've had from all these life experiences that you've tried to assimilate, and those are different than my life experiences, and everybody's are different.
And who you are right now.
Like, someone said to me one day, and it was kind of a compliment, I could never do what you do.
It's not like I'm not saying that there's nothing special about me.
I am just who I am because of my life experiences and my genetics and all the things I've done.
And you are who you are for all your life experiences and who you've done.
And to expect someone who has had bad input...
And bad emotional guidance and bad perceptions of their own physical health and their identity.
To accept them to just get their shit together is ridiculous.
It really is.
But they can do it.
Some people can do it.
You obviously did it.
And that's probably the best piece of fuel and inspiration for anyone out there that's looking to get their life together physically, metabolically, healthy.
What's the best piece?
The best is someone who is at rock bottom, who is 500 plus pounds, and worked their way back to, like I said, a guy I would avoid in jiu-jitsu class.
But I think that as my perspective shifts, I do today feel as though I have free will.
I have to battle through everything that makes me me still, but I can do that and I can win.
There was certainly a point where the momentum was such in the other direction That I failed time and time again.
And again, it kind of always came down to I wasn't addressing how I arrived in the state I arrived at.
I was addressing how do I lose weight, thinking that was the only piece of the puzzle that I was missing.
And so once I'd lose weight and I'd wake up and go, well, none of the habits that I had cultivated for decades to get me to this bad place or this place that I deem non-optimal.
Have been addressed.
And by not addressing them, they still exist.
And now here I am repeating this cycle over and over and over again.
Today, I have whatever version of free will I feel that I have, I feel very confident in decision-making because I can kind of work through these ideas.
But there was a long time where it is tough to...
To have the attitude with somebody who's in the middle of it and just go like, just make a decision.
It's a rough position to put them in because you can make that decision a hundred times and fail.
Which is really one of the most fucked up things about the weight loss addiction, which makes it so much more difficult than I think most addictions, is that you have to eat.
I didn't know anyone who was a gambling addict until I started playing pool.
And then I was hanging around this pool hall.
When I was 22, 23 years old, there's a place called White Plains Billiards in White Plains, New York.
Executive Billiards, rather, in White Plains, New York.
And Executive Billiards was a full-on degenerate pool hall.
It was just guys that were gambling, a lot of guys who lived in flop houses.
They always had like $10 for their name, and they would bet that $10 and then try to bum money off of people.
I mean, and it was as a young guy who came from sports, you know, came from martial arts, and I was, you know, I was like goal-oriented and I was trying to be very disciplined in my life.
To see these guys live like this, I was like, wow, this is crazy!
I just enjoyed the game of pools.
I was trying to learn this game, and these guys that were really into it were also degenerate gamblers.
And almost all of them.
I mean, to a man, they were degenerate gamblers.
And to watch these people get jazzed up for gambling and for bets, they would bet on anything, man.
There was a time when, and it's so bizarre that it came out and they modeled it after Soylent Green, which ultimately turned out to be People at the end.
Spoiler alert for anybody who hasn't seen that movie.
Pretty bland, but they have all, and they design it to like, here's my weight and height and activity level, and they give you these drinks and you basically stop eating.
And I, when I heard about that, I was like, fuck, because I'm sober.
And I totally understand this kind of black and white, like, when I'm doing something, I'm doing it 100%, whether that's eating cheeseburgers at 4am or, you know, scoring Coke and drinking a lot.
And If I can just give up food and drink this soylent shit for the rest of my life, maybe I'm solved.
Maybe that's the key to me.
But, you know, I don't think that's even really a realistic thing to do.
When the idea of exercise was insurmountable, just how far can I walk?
And then can I walk a little further the next day?
And then can I beat that?
And I'm saying like...
When I'm used to just walking to my car from my front door, can I walk past my car?
Literally, if that's it, at 550 pounds it might be that small.
But if you go into it with the attitude of setting goals, and you see that you can achieve this goal, and then you can beat it, and you can go a little further, I wouldn't use that to address weight loss, but just to feel that you can accomplish something with your body is a big deal.
And I remember I brought it up to her and I was trying to figure out how to bring it up to her because I could tell she got like super uncomfortable and I was like shit.
Like, I'm trying to be nice here, but I'm addressing the fact that she was gigantic and now she's just big.
And I said, I don't remember what I said, but it's something along the lines of, I think your consistency is incredibly inspirational.
It's amazing to watch someone just decide at some point in time, enough is enough.
I'm gonna do something and that lady was in there every day and I wasn't in there every day I was only going to yoga a couple days a week and I go in there I'm like again you're here again yeah she was such a nice lady too and then the instructor said how much have you lost so far and I think she was at that time she was closing in on a hundred pounds which is amazing yeah but you know you could see the consistency it was changing like a practice like first for the beginning of the year versus the end of the year she's deeper into poses she could hold things longer and this is hot yoga too Which is,
The only time I thought I was going to potentially die was hot yoga.
And the teacher said, we have one rule here.
You cannot leave.
If you can't do anything, you just lay down.
And I laid down and thought, I'm going to lay here and die because I'm too scared to tell this teacher to go fuck herself because I'm not allowed to leave.
And she said, we locked the door.
I'll kick a fucking hole through the door.
I laid there for the rest of the class with my heart rate jacked up and thought like, I can't believe I'm going to allow myself to die in this sauna because this chick has a rule.
I bring a gigantic hydro flask, like a 64-ounce hydro flask, and it's mostly ice and water.
Mostly ice and then water, because it's going to melt during the class.
And I was always trying to find the right level of ice to water, so the end of the class had a little bit of ice, but not much.
There's something about that, too.
There's a study they're doing right now, I believe it's at Harvard, where they're trying to figure out whether or not hot yoga mimics the same sort of effects in terms of heat shock proteins that sauna does.
I think that that is the thing that I like about exercise because sometimes the night before I'm looking forward to it, like I'm going to go to the gym tomorrow, first thing I'm going to feel better.
The morning of, I'm never super amped up to get to the gym and start working out.
And there's always a little bit of struggle there.
It's never something I'm close to losing the struggle on nowadays, but...
Making it through is a big deal for me and the fact that I put and when I string together a Succession of making it through the momentum carries me a long way Any day that I miss it and I lose that fight It's like a massive swing in the opposite direction.
There's something about nature or genetics or whatever our code is, that when you're doing literally nothing, just laying around doing nothing, your body's like, what the fuck is the point?
What are we here for?
And what people don't recognize is like when you're laying around just watching television and then you shut the TV off and you feel like shit, you are artificially stimulated for hours and hours just staring at things happening while you did nothing.
And then when you shut it off, the reality of your actual day sets in like, oh my god, I've done nothing.
But I thought I was doing something.
I thought I was in a fucking Aston Martin being chased because I was James Bond.
And the guys are shooting.
But no, you really weren't doing anything.
You're getting this weird, fake stimulation.
It's so bad for you.
I'm not saying it's bad for you all the time.
It's great when you've accomplished things and you feel good and you want to just enjoy something, give yourself a little reward.
And I'm a firm believer in rewards.
But man, when I waste a day, I feel like such a fucking loser.
I think they're brushing it off a little easier, but it just seems wrong.
Like, your doctor should be the one telling you if you need fucking medication, and you should go to your doctor.
Because psychosomatic disorders are real, you know?
And also this idea that watching something on television in a commercial, and you're like, oh, I have all those problems.
Real simple, real clean.
Talk to your doctor.
Oh, I'm going to go talk to my doctor about this.
Like, what about hypochondriacs, man?
What about crazy people?
Like, you just...
Fucking their head up all day long, which is a real problem with people.
If you say to people, if you plant those seeds in their head, do you have this?
Do you have that?
Is this wrong?
Do you feel bad about this?
You're like, oh, do I? Maybe I do.
We're so malleable, you know, that to influence us with drugs, and then they hit you with, side effects may include, and then they may include, what if they definitely included?
When I hear people say, I'm siding with science, my first instinct is to ask when science developed a set of values or morals.
Because there's no scientific moral code.
That doesn't exist.
If you want to place some value on a scientific outcome, that's a human...
It's an opinion that forces that scientific outcome into a value system.
And so if you sit back and you assume that everybody innately has the exact same set of values, then yeah, we can have these arguments based on science, not science.
But if people don't necessarily have the same value system that you have, why would we want all this?
Like, this is where I get into people who want to protect other people, and it's like, well, you're just assuming that all the things that you want are the things that they should want.
And when I hear what people should want, I go like, that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me.
Right now, It's slightly difficult to talk about weight loss because I've been obese and now I'm not obese and I celebrate not being obese.
I am much better off with the way I have structured my life because of having lost weight.
But I can't tell anybody else to do that.
And I don't even really want to.
If somebody wants to be overweight, if that's a trade-off they're willing to make, that's fine with me.
But I think for the most part, most of the people I've spoken to, they don't want that.
A lot of people seem to have goals that generally line up with mine.
And then in talking to them...
Now there's this diet culture monster in the room where even that is attacked because there's a whole new set of values that are born that must be enforced.
And at some point, there's got to be the recognition that we don't all necessarily have to want the exact same stuff.
I really like talking about diets simply because at the end of the day, it's so much safer than politics because there's no military backing up a diet system.
You talk about politics and it's like, we have a fucking military to force you to do the shit we want you to do versus the other military that's going to force you the other way.
But diets, it's like veganism versus carnivore.
If we're just talking about weight loss, the other thing, some of these things get into like the minutia of health.
If you've got a guy who's got 200 pounds to lose, why are we focusing on the minutia of health?
I don't know that that's the right goal.
If the goal is just weight loss, I don't think these are the same conversations.
For the very first time in my life, I was thinking about the future in a way in terms of what I wanted out of life versus just like what makes me happy right this second.
And I was seeing a girl who I'm now married to.
We have a bunch of kids and I couldn't have a better life.
Like 20 years ago, if I described to you the life I wanted in that moment, I've way surpassed that.
At 500 pounds, I was not thinking I can be a dad, I can be a husband, I could teach little kids how to do stuff.
Like, this was not part of my...
I could take my wife on a hike, I could go to the beach with her and not, you know, sit under a towel in the back because I'm scared of people looking at me.
These were not the thoughts I was having.
So that spark of motivation of, like, what do I want out of life got me just so far because after an extreme diet, when you've crashed your metabolism and you then – and by the way, Your body is fighting against you tooth and nail doing these things because your body thinks you're starving to death.
I forget the name of the hormone, but there's a hormone that makes you hungry.
This is skyrocketing when you're on an extremely caloric deficit diet.
So then you go to like just eating like a normal person and you're watching what other people eat and you're eating this and you're fucking putting on weight again like at a rapid pace and going like this doesn't make sense.
I thought I was cured.
I lost all this weight.
I watched a really fascinating TED talk by a guy named Mike Isretel about five years ago, four or five years ago.
And in it, and I had tried...
I was dead convinced that I was allergic to carbohydrates.
And so I was like, I'll never eat a carbohydrate for the rest of my life.
Gluten intolerant that the way that we made bread in America with all the ingredients was just poisonous to the human body I was totally convinced of this and I watched this TED talk by Mike Isretel and In it it's called the the dietary landscape of healthy eating and he just goes over like Just be moderate.
That's it.
Just like try to figure out moderation.
Nothing's poisonous.
Nothing's awful like salt if you have no salt You can die.
If sodium disappears from your diet, you can die.
If you have too much salt, it can kill you.
There's an amount, five grams, I think, at one time, and I believe this study was done on small bodies, can kill you.
It can be fatal.
So is that poisonous or is it necessary?
It's both.
This is food for me.
The way I was interacting with food, The idea that I'm a machine, like, you're a car guy.
You're not going to put diesel fuel in your gas car.
You're not going to do that because it's going to break it.
And I had to start really thinking about food in these terms and going, like, I just have a bad relationship with food, a relationship that is giving me an outcome I don't want.
How do I change that, like, utterly?
The first carbohydrates I ate, after 15 years basically of being convinced that I was allergic to them, I was fucking terrified that it was going to be like cocaine and I was not going to be able to stop myself.
I think at the end of the day, if you're a guy who the idea of giving up carbohydrates, if you need to lose a shitload of weight, and the idea of giving up carbohydrates, if you can't really see that as a long-term thing, Fucking don't.
Dude, when gluten-free bread was invented, because this happened in the midst of me becoming gluten-free, and it was like a few years into it that suddenly it was like, there's a cookie shop, there's a bakery in West Hollywood that does gluten-free pastries.
And then I was just like, oh my God, they're speaking to me.
And I would go there every day and I would eat muffins and cakes and shit and I would go, it's gluten free.
And I would gain weight and I'd be like, what the fuck is the problem?
There was no point that I was ever like, it's gluten for me has nothing to do with it.
Now, if you have celiacs or Hachimoto's or something where gluten can mess with you, yeah, don't eat it.
But...
You know, there's so many trendy diets that come out and it's like you have a group of people that has failed so many times that they're desperate to just tell me the right thing to do.
Because you take Wonder Bread, we used to buy a loaf of Wonder Bread, and we would roll up the Wonder Bread, the little balls, and put it on a hook and toss it out and the carp would get it.
Like, some of them were this big, just floating around.
Like, what the fuck?
And then, you know, you realize like someone released them in.
And there's a, like in Lake Austin out here, there's a grass carp that I was just talking to a guy who's a fisherman who was telling me that it's a real problem on the lake because the grass carp have eaten all the grass.
So now the fish don't have cover.
Like the bass, they want to hide, like so they can jump out and snatch up the other fish, but there's no place to hide.
Someone was just saying this, and it's a really good point, that invasive species, if you just found a way to make it profitable to go after those invasive species, that's the solution that they're trying to come up with with the python in Florida.
Because pythons are overrun in the Everglades.
They're so bad in the Everglades that they've killed most of the mammal species and they've started to eat alligators.
When I was a kid, I lived in Florida for a little bit.
We lived in Gainesville, Florida, and it was right near Lake Alice.
And Lake Alice had alligators, but they were endangered at the time, because I guess people hunted them to the point where they had gotten down to very low numbers, and they were trying to save the alligators.
They're dealing with that with wolves in some places.
They reintroduced wolves into Yellowstone in the 1990s, and they spread through Idaho and all these different areas.
They've gotten to the point now where, I think it was in Idaho, they just decided that they have to kill all the wolves except for a small number of them.
They have to get them down to a few hundred wolves.
Because there's so many fucking wolves, they're decimating the elk populations and they're encroaching into people's ranches and killing steers.
But isn't there a point where they can say, scientifically, we have determined that they are no longer virtually extinct, and scientifically, that means some are on limits to hunt?
I can't think of a single animal I want to go away, but when an animal, like pigs in this state, there's a lot of pigs, and people have a lot of feelings about the way the pigs are hunted, but there's a lot of fucking pigs.
What's weird about pigs is that if you took a regular pig, like a domestic pig, and you let it loose, within, I think, five or six weeks, they start to transform.
That's what's crazy is that they're the same animal.
It's all one genus.
It's called Suscroffa.
And all of them are the same.
Domestic pigs are just wild pigs that have been domesticated.
Like, if you take a domestic pig, they look all pink and white, and you let them go, their snout elongates, their tusks lengthen, and it happens quick.
See, what they think though is that Hogzilla was one of those domestic pigs that broke so it fattened up and then broke through fencing and then went out and started the transformation.
So once pigs fend for themselves, It's so weird.
Like, a switch goes off in their brain and their fur gets thicker and denser.
It's just the sheer amount of them in that photo, and that's just one photo, one random photo from a trail camera that shows how many pigs are just wandering through this field.
They're really hard to get close to in the day because they're very smart, but their eyesight sucks.
So what they do is they set up at night with night vision and just like they look for these weird glowing bodies and they take them out.
Yeah, they're in people's lawns in San Jose fucking them up and they're trying to figure out what to do about it because they're encroaching on the tech community.
The problem with archery in the neighborhood is people suck.
You know, archery is hard to learn.
I don't want some guy who just picked up a fucking bow and he starts launching arrows into other people's yards and, you know, hits someone's window, hits a kid.
Often they have large teeth and are not afraid of people.
It's, yeah, hunting in a neighborhood is, any kind of archery hunting, like, telling someone they should archery hunt is like telling someone they should jiu-jitsu fight.
I think the shitload now is going to be more in a few years.
I think as these things get more and more immersive and then more and more people get involved and also in a lot of places people go to watch them play.
Well, I mean, you see whole stadiums filled up, but there are a ton of people that make money at home Playing video games and people are tuning in to watch.
I don't understand any of this at all, but this is a real thing that our kids are growing up with.
Starcraft is a particularly demanding strategy game that I've never played.
I don't really understand, but it's a top-down game and you're looking down on this world and you're moving these players around and doing all kinds of shit and you're doing many things simultaneously.
You're like playing war with these video game characters.
And you'll see enormous stadiums, like 15,000 people filled with cheering fans and giant screens watching this game play out.
And you've got to imagine that the games these guys are able to develop now, in comparison to the games that will exist 15 years from now, they'll be even more immersive.
They'll either be...
Augmented reality or some form of virtual reality or some more insanely aggressively addictive version of these video games because they're so addictive.
And it was one of those conversations where I was like, ooh, I'm too dumb for this one.
Which happens quite a bit.
But with him, he was explaining how, because of probability theory, because we know that We know virtual reality exists.
We know that technology is ever evolving and that there's always constant innovation and then there's a real thirst for it.
We also know that wherever we are right now, if we can stay alive, whatever our technology is today will pale in comparison to the technology from a thousand years ago.
Then we know that there are literally hundreds of millions of stars in this galaxy.
Hundreds of billions.
Hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe each one of those Has who knows how many fucking stars each one of those has who knows how many planets So that means in some of these they've gone far past us if there is intelligent life out there in the universe Which they suppose there is right Someone has figured out how to make something that's indiscernible from this.
So if this is reality, if what you and I and Jamie and everybody else listening exist in is a real tangible reality that you can touch and feel and you can weigh and measure...
But that one day, we'll get to a place where there'll be an artificial reality that will be as amazing and as tactile as this, and you won't be able to tell the difference.
Nick Ballstrom's argument was, because of those facts, it's more likely that it's already existed, and that we're in it right now.
I mean, again, that's a heavy thought to run through, and I think that's exactly what my kid was trying to tell me, and that's fine, but I don't know what I'd do with it.
And then spooky action at a distance where somehow or another a particle in a long, far away place, far, far away place, Has an interaction with a particle that's here.
Yeah, and if something external that had no idea what we were were to perceive us in terms of living organisms, we would be the last because we're a single living organism with hundreds of billions of other organisms inside of us and around us and contributing to us and working together.
So there's actually a company called Defense Soap.
And Defense Soap, shout out to my man Guy Sacco, who created Defense Soap.
He created it for grapplers and he created it for wrestlers and because a lot of these kids were getting sick and then they were using antibacterial soap, like they would get not sick, but they'd get little infections.
And so he came up with this defense soap which is mostly healthy oils like tea tree oil and eucalyptus and all those things they don't kill the bad bacteria but they fight off the bad bacteria and they keep the skin biome healthy.
And so there's a bunch of products that they've developed that are based on this principle that you're dealing with the surface of your skin.
There's so many theories that you can run down to, like autoimmune disease and the rate of autoimmune in countries like America versus really, really third-world countries.
Where it just basically doesn't exist.
Now, I think the life expectancy might be lower, so that's not a good trade-off.
When you have stuff like your immune system and you're clearing it of everything that it's learned to fight over however long we've been here, and suddenly it has nothing to fight, it's going to find things to fight.
I think that that's the same with bacteria and all this stuff, and I know it's even kind of taboo in some circles to recommend eating vegetables.
I know carnivores are not super into vegetables, but Even the mitotoxins in vegetables, you're getting just enough of it that your body learns to fight it.
I think that's the argument, unfortunately, that some epidemiologists have made about our current situation in terms of constantly sterilizing our hands and hand sanitizer and also not even being around people.
That our immune systems are atrophying, which is scary.
My kid right now, my youngest daughter, has a cold, an actual real cold.
I have a hard time rationalizing some of this stuff when it becomes these absolutes of everybody must do this.
And again, I go like, well...
Do we all have exactly the same values?
I don't know that that's true and if that's not true, then this sounds to me like a religious position that we're making.
But I try to understand these things and I was speaking with a guy who studied epidemiology at UCLA and he said they had a large sign that was a constant reminder to them every day and it just said, everybody lies.
What a fucking weird sign.
The idea is, because I was asking, if somebody's had corona, why are they pushing so hard for them to get vaccinated when the amount of reinfection doesn't look to be any worse than breakthrough infection post-vaccination?
Yeah.
What's the point there?
And his point was, well, in epidemiology, you learn that everybody lies.
So your aunt, who never got tested but had a bad cold back in March and is convinced she had corona, might not get the vaccine when she might not have had corona.
And so, therefore, they're going forward with everybody must get the vaccination as this kind of...
But I think it's interesting to think about that.
Like, everybody lies and...
I don't think they mean it necessarily even intentionally.
Dude, when I was keto, I would get bags of macadamia nuts at Trader Joe's and never look at the caloric value of them and eat them.
I could just eat this full of fat and it's so good.
And then I'm not losing weight and I'm eating bacon for breakfast, like a Package of bacon for breakfast, a steak for lunch, snacking on macadamia nuts all day, and not losing weight and fucking pulling my hair out because it didn't seem to be working.
At some point, you can't eat more than your body needs or you're going to hold on to weight.
This is just the way that works.
If keto gets you to a place where...
You're going to be able to not eat enough to lose weight.
That's great.
That's perfectly great.
But if you're eating fucking heavy whipping cream on everything, this might not be the solution.
The only thing that I did ever when I went on a diet to lose weight was that carnivore diet.
But the reason why is because when you're not eating the pasta and the rice and all that stuff, like a salad or anything like that, the steak itself is enough.
If there was a loaf of bread, I would have chowed that too.
And that would have been additional calories that I really didn't need to be satisfied.
But if you're just eating steak, you get to the end of that 16-ounce ribeye, and you're like, I'm done.
I'm done.
I'm good.
I'm not a full, like a glutton, like what I like to be.
I am.
Yeah, but you can get to this place where your body is in sort of a calorie deficit and also not as much calories as I'm accustomed to eating because I do eat a lot of food.
Cold Mountain, 2002. And I had this brutal experience on a plane with a conversation with a guy who I think was very – meant well.
But, you know, honestly, he framed it all in terms of like his relationship with Christ and how my relationship with Christ was clearly lacking because I was a mess.
And that was his value.
He was concerned for me, was basically at the root of it, and expressing that concern.
I think anytime somebody tells me or has, you know, I don't want to talk really about masks or anything like that, but this is also very much like we don't all have to share the same values, but I recognize that when somebody's telling me I need to live a certain way, this is just them imposing their values on me.
This is not...
Anything more than that.
And so I'm a little open and I go, okay, I understand where that's coming from.
You know, I don't want to upset anybody.
He had this conversation with me on a plane.
I landed and I started to think about, like, what am I doing?
Like, I just hadn't been thinking about it.
What am I going to do with my life?
What do I want to do?
Like, I have trouble going to the beach with my girlfriend at the time.
She likes to go on hikes.
I don't fucking go on.
I'm not going on a hike.
I don't even like walking around the block at that point.
And I called her up and it was the most bizarre feeling because I am objectively 550 pounds at this point and I had to talk to her about wanting to change my weight and it felt as though I was telling her a secret.
Like, I felt like I was gonna tell her something she didn't know.
Like, if you couldn't tell, I'm morbidly obese.
Nothing could be more evident.
And in this conversation, she was like, okay, what do you want to do?
And I was like, well, I want to lose weight.
And she said, good, as soon as you get home, I'll have something ready for you.
And when I landed, she picked me up and she had this whole liquid meal plan ready that was full of like fiber pills and vitamins and shakes.
He drank only water and took in vitamins, I think IV vitamins, I forget how they did it, but this guy lost an insane amount of weight and the crazy thing is his skin shrank.
I mean, listen, I don't want to say that's something that's not really talked about enough amongst people who have massive weight loss.
And I find that people who start to lose a lot of weight are suddenly confronted with this fact that they have billowing skin and it's shocking and very upsetting.
And I think that guy's an outlier because I did read about him.
Mostly people are going to have a lot of excess skin.
The thought was that maybe because the fact the guy was ketogenic for the entire 365 days a year and his body was consuming fat, that it also consumed skin as well.
But treating it like a machine is so difficult because it's interconnected with all these feelings and pangs, hunger pangs, and there's so much going on, emotions.
I would boil the pasta, and then I would take the sauce and dump a can of tuna into the sauce, stir it up, pour it on together, and then just thank god I was alone.
When I upped my protein, I started paying attention to how much protein I got every day, and I actually had to increase my protein.
If I would fuck up and miss a meal and wind up with like, I got 100 grams of protein left towards the end of the day, and I'd eat it all at once, which is a fucking shitload of protein to consume at one time, the gas, Everybody in my house would be furious with me.
I mean, like, really fucking awful.
So that, you know, and I have my coach, Jared Feather, again, amazing guy.
He would program me and he would say, you know, like, you eat 25 grams in this meal and 50 grams in this meal and spread it out throughout the day.
And I'd go like, yeah, okay, but...
If I get to the end of the day and I've only eaten one meal, I'll just eat everything then because I kind of like just fucking eating until I'm stuffed.
And you'd go, that's a bad idea for a number of reasons.
I'd go, okay, but does it really matter?
And then the gas actually got me to spread it out.
I know quite a few people that eat one strong meal a day.
Mark Sisson, wasn't he saying that?
Wasn't Mark saying he eats one meal a day often?
He's the guy that wrote that book, The Primal Blueprint.
He had all sorts of arthritis and all sorts of issues with his joints and cut out, for him, this is his thing, he cut out all bread, all pasta, all grains, and just started eating Completely unprocessed food, eats a lot of grass-fed steak, eats a lot of just vegetables, and it all went away.
And then he feels infinitely better and wrote this book about how to cook and how to eat with completely unprocessed food.
But he now, but he's in his 60s, very fit.
He's my canary in a coal mine.
When I see a dude in his 60s, it gets after as much as that guy does.
But, you know, he exercises, but he doesn't kill himself.
But he looks great.
He's got a full six-pack.
As far as an older guy, he looks amazing.
And I'm pretty sure he only eats once a day for the most part.
Occasionally he'll have a light breakfast or something like that, but he's got his body kind of dialed in to where he needs it and what to eat.
Most of my friends, though, that are athletes, particularly fighters, they eat all throughout the day.
A lot of them carry around those little Tupperware containers and they'll eat multiple meals a day.
They come around with sandwiches halfway through the morning and there's still the table over there.
It's psychotic.
And in fairness, like a gripper, an electrician who's picking up heavy things all day, I understand that guy needs to eat throughout the day, but I, who am a fucking dumb actor, who mostly just standing around saying words, it's not physically demanding.
Those habits that people develop at work, I knew a lot of people that would act and they would be on sets and they would gain weight every time they would be on a set because that craft service table they'll set up.
Especially if it's a good craft service one with the bagels and the locks.
Fucking hard to avoid, man.
Especially in the morning when you're tired.
When I'm tired, I have fucking zero willpower.
When I'm tired, like when I come home and I'm hungry, I'm tired, it's like fast food, whatever.
It's been proven, I believe, that your body reacts differently to cravings when you're tired and you make poor choices.
Yeah, this is one of the habits that I've worked on really hard at changing is like I don't do anything hungry and I don't go to the grocery store hungry.
I don't start cooking hungry.
If I start cooking my dinner and I'm starving, My pour of the olive oil is heavier.
You know what I mean?
My portion of the rice, I'm smashing it into that cup to make sure the cup has really two cups in it.
Doing eight hours of cardio a day on a bike, and I didn't have abs, and it was really fucking disappointing.
Now, all that said, I have loose skin, so it's like, you see those big muscle guys in loose shirts, and they don't, they just still, that's still what I got, because I got loose skin hangover, but downlighting.
I did read an article once years ago when I was super cardio focused that said that this overweight power lifter really wanted abs and the way he got them is he did this kettlebell thing where he did a thousand swings a day for ten days.
But, like, doing curls with my legs, doing that, it's very weak.
But it also allows you to do things for your hip flexors.
So you can lift...
Like knee raises while holding on to like a 35-pound dumbbell with this thing at the bottom of your foot.
And some guys work up to 45 pounds, 55 pounds.
And you could really build the muscle tissue in your hamstrings and your hip flexors in a way that you kind of can do by holding something in your arm.
I trained with Eddie Bravo a long time ago, and I have gigantic legs, very, very strong legs, as you know somebody who carried around 550 pounds would have.
And I would go around to other places.
Whenever I'd travel, I'd find somebody and go do a private somewhere.
And I was like, I'm going to throw fucking lockdown on Marcel Garcia and see if my legs are really strong.
And that's one of the reasons why Marcelo always avoids what he calls strongman moves.
Like, Marcelo never uses Kimuras, because he feels like Kimuras are a strongman move, which is really interesting.
But a lot of guys who even, like Gabe Tuttle, who's the head coach at 10th Planet in Austin, he uses Kimoras, and he's a small guy, but he likes Kimoras to set up other things.
So he uses Kimoras because when you have to defend Kimoras, then it sets up back attacks, it sets up arm bars and triangles.
There's different things that happen, so as you clamp onto that Kimura and pull it, the guy has to react, and then you use that, because it's a very predictable action, right?
If you have a hold of a person's arm and you're threatening with a Kimura, there's not a whole lot of things they have to do, or they can do, rather.
So you've got this thing and you're yanking it back like that.
They kind of have to do that.
Right.
So as you anticipate that, then you transition to a triangle or you transition to something else or take the back.
There's a whole series, I think David Avalon has a whole series of Kimura traps and how they call it a Kimura trap.
You're setting up, you're using this attack and you can finish with that attack if you get it, but you're setting up a bunch of other stuff.
It was right after he had that boxing match with KSI. He was vacationing in the same place I was with my family, and all of a sudden I get this tap on my shoulder.
Joey Diaz always says, I never met a bookie with a part-time job.
The thing that could happen, and this is very unlikely to happen, but what could happen is if Logan holds him and hits him and hurts him.
So if there's a moment in an exchange where Logan, who is a very good wrestler, I mean a very good wrestler.
We saw him wrestle Paulo Costa who's a UFC middleweight contender and you watch the scrambles like he was controlling Costa and they scrambled he was keeping up with Costa but you watched him move and you're like man this kid can fucking wrestle and Floyd is not like this one punch obliterating knockout power puncher and then he's also 50 pounds lighter so the The weirdness...
What's the weirdest thing that can happen?
Is Logan could somehow or another tie him up and clip him.
Like, really hard.
Because he's a big guy.
If I was his coach, I'd be like, listen, motherfucker.
You are not outboxing the greatest boxer of all time.
What we're going to do is we're going to cover up.
Some referees say, fight through it, fight through it, and it really depends on whatever rules they develop specifically for this one sort of understanding.
I know there was some specific understandings for the Conor McGregor fight.
When Conor fought Floyd, if he did anything that was MMA-related, like if he tried to take him down or kick him or something like that, I think he would lose all his money or be fined a million dollars.
I mean, that fight made Conor McGregor so fucking rich.
And he did catch Floyd.
That's what's crazy.
When he clipped him with that uppercut in the first round, Floyd was like, oh shit, this guy can strike.
But Conor's used to being a sniper and using all his other tools, like kicks and kicking the legs and Jabbing the body with that front kick that he likes to throw.
For him to just use his hands only He can kind of get things off until Floyd figures out his timing and then once Floyd figured out the timing then Floyd was just not there when those punches land and then Conor's punches became more and more labored and Floyd just dragged him into the later rounds and started fucking him up.
Do you think that's like the worst thing that can happen for a fighter like a fighter like Conor who I remember watching a video on him before he maybe his first UFC fight when they followed him around Ireland he was he did not have much money at all Poor kid, training, hungry.
To go from that to making $100 million in a boxing match, where as long as he doesn't kick the guy, he makes a fortune, is maybe the worst thing.
I mean, for a guy who still seems at times like he wants to fight, for that, for that sport, for mixed martial arts, having so much seems to be working against him.
I think about it, and I only bring it up because...
me because I keep readjusting goals.
I'm sorry to bring it back to diet again.
I'm hyper-concentrating on diet.
But I do know that time after time, if my goal was just, I want to lose 100 pounds, when I lose 100 pounds and I go, well, I did that, the motivation or the hunger to keep it off It could have just been that my goal wasn't to lose 100 pounds and keep it off for 5 years or 10 years or 20 years or whatever or lose 100 pounds for life.
My goals were literally just I'm going to do this diet for 4 months.
And so I think about like a guy...
And I have no idea what Conor's goals are, but a guy like that who goes like, I'm gonna make $100 million.
Once you make $100 million, you gotta set new fucking goals, because he's not fighting the same way that he was, at least in UFC, prior to that.
That fight, it's hard to judge him based on the Dustin Poirier fight because most people tend to look at the end result.
You tend to look at how it went down and how the fight ended.
And if you look at how the fight ended, you go, oh, Conor Soft.
But when I look at it as an analyst, I look at it from the beginning to the end.
And one of the best ways to look at it is my brother Daniel Cormier has a thing on ESPN called Detail about that fight.
And he shows the first fight, and he shows the second fight, and he shows the adjustments that Dustin Poirier made, and then he shows the difference between the way Conor fought the first fight and Conor fought the second fight.
And one of the things is Dustin started kicking the low calf instead of the thigh.
In the first fight he kicked the thigh.
It's way easier to absorb a few hard kicks to the thigh than it is a few hard kicks to the calf.
The calf, it becomes debilitating almost immediately.
One or two good shins slamming into your calf.
There's just not enough meat there.
There's a thing called compartment syndrome that happens where your blood pools up in the leg There's a guy, you want to get grossed out?
There's a guy named Austin Hubbard who fought in the UFC. Google compartment syndrome Austin Hubbard.
He had a fight in the UFC and he got his legs kicked to high heaven and afterwards they swelled up so bad they had to split his leg like a banana.
I think he's fighting welterweight and well he's fought both I believe that's what's going on but his leg was twice the size of his other leg just just from swelling and tissue damage and when you get that compartment syndrome they have to alleviate that look at that one picture go back to where you were look at that picture in the middle with the two legs split up I know but look at that that's an example of compartment syndrome So they have to open you up and figure out a way to drain all that shit.
So see that?
That's in the calf.
And the compartment syndrome in the calf, it happens even more often for whatever reason.
If you want to get really gross, and I don't talk about this much because it seems to put people off, but when I was going to have the skin surgery, I told the doctor that I wanted to tan the skin and make trinkets for my friends.
And he was so offended by this.
He was so gross.
And I was like, it's like the most loving gift I can imagine giving somebody, literally a piece of myself.
And he was like, I'm Jewish.
This offends me on so many levels.
And I was like, I don't even understand what you're saying, but I don't want to do anything to somebody else that's bad and all of that.
I had so much anxiety about sitting still and gaining weight while I was sitting still that I didn't sit still and I fell and tore my side open and had to have a wound vac just like that gentleman for a long time because they can't sew you back up and it fills with fluid and you have to constantly suck the fluid away from the wound.
Oh, I was on heavy-duty antibiotics, Levoquin, the whole time, just to kill bacteria as it came up, in case it was like something I had to take every day, no matter what, in case an infection happened.
He learned from John Donaher, who's probably the greatest mind in combat sports alive today.
Not probably.
I think he is.
You know, and when I found out that John Donaher, Gary Tonin, who is also one of the greatest grapplers alive, is also a John Donaher student, has entered into One FC, which is a mixed martial arts organization in Asia, and he's been incredibly successful.
And then I was like, well, who's his striking coach?
And Gordon's like, John Donaher's his striking coach as well.
And I was like, what?!
And then I realized, like, holy shit!
You're talking about a guy who used to teach philosophy at Columbia and then became obsessed with Jiu Jitsu.
Doesn't have a family, doesn't have a girlfriend.
All he does is train fighters and study tape.
And I get a chance to talk to him this past weekend.
And every time I talk to him, I'm reminded, like, how fucking brilliant the guy is.
He's an extraordinary person.
And Gordon, who is a great athlete, who has incredible dedication and discipline, was trained by the greatest mind in combat sports alive today.
And maybe the greatest ever.
How about that?
John Donahue might be the greatest mind in combat sports ever.
And the two of them together, unstoppable combination.
So you have genetics.
He's a big, strong, tall kid who grew up doing jiu-jitsu, right?
Starts jiu-jitsu when he was a kid.
And then finds John Donaher and trains seven days a week.
And when he's not training, he's studying tape, and he's examining moves and going over things, and he's just fully dedicated.
They don't take any days off, man.
That's one of the things we talked about.
I'm like, no days off?
No, when I'm tired, I just train light.
I'm like, what in the fuck?
He's like, yeah, I might go in and get tapped a few times, but who gives a shit?
If I'm worn out, I just go in and I keep training.
He has not yet, but he has signed for 1FC, exclusive for MMA, and they might put him in grappling matches in 1FC as well.
1FC is a really interesting organization because they have kickboxing, They have Muay Thai, so they have regular kickboxing with gloves, with big gloves, boxing gloves.
They have kickboxing with small gloves.
They have Muay Thai with small gloves.
They have MMA, and apparently they're going to have grappling as well.
So they're going to give away a grappling belt, same way they have 1FC belts for all these other disciplines.
So when he does do MMA, if he does do MMA, he has to do it with 1FC. That's where his contract lies.
Right.
The contract allows him to grapple with 1FC but grapple everywhere else as well.
And the conversation we were having was he's having a hard time getting opponents.
For grappling.
For grappling.
Because no one wants to get manhandled.
They get manhandled.
Why did I say that that way?
Manhandled.
He doesn't just manhandle guys.
He tells you how he's going to tap them.
Like he fought Wagner Rocha and he wrote on a piece of paper He wrote a triangle and he handed it to the guys who are doing commentary and he said, open this envelope up after the match is over.
He fights this guy, triangles him, and he said he was going to manhandle him for a long time because apparently the guy fucked with him when he was 19. He's going to manhandle him for a long time and then triangle him, and that's exactly what he did.
And they had a match a long time ago.
And the difference between, like several years ago, the difference between that match and today is stark.
Like, Gordon is that much better.
He continues to grow at this crazy rate and get better at this crazy rate.
These other guys are recognizing, like, not only is he the best guy alive...
But he's so much better than he was a year ago.
He's so much better than he was a year before that.
He's better than he was six weeks ago.
He just keeps getting better.
And he's only 25. So when you're 25, you just keep getting better.
And he's training seven days a fucking week.
He gets up in the morning, he lifts weights, he does MMA training, and then he does jiu-jitsu, and then he eats, and he goes to sleep, and he does it all over again.
And they moved to Puerto Rico so they could do it because New York City was shutting down the gyms.
Not a bad diet, but he can't eat the amount that he wants.
What's it called?
Gastroparesis.
Paresis?
Gastroparesis.
So this is it, which means partial paralysis of the stomach is a disease which the stomach cannot empty itself of food in a normal way.
If you have this condition, damaged nerves and muscles don't function with their normal strength and coordination, slowing the movement of the contents through your digestive system.
And they think that that happened because of the continual use of oral antibiotics just over and over and over again.
He's on this stuff and it eventually fucked up his stomach.
Yeah, still with this fucked up stomach thing, because he thinks that if he didn't have the stomach thing, he could, because of his steady weightlifting and everything, he could get up to 240, where he thinks he can dominate people even more.
Yeah, but Hickson went over to Japan and won the Japan Vale Tudo and became a giant star in Japan and then he fought in Coliseum and he fought in Pride and I think Coliseum was his last fight and if I'm gonna be accurate I want to say it was the year 2000. I think that was Hickson's last hurrah.
I think that would be an interesting fight because Cyborg still, now Cyborg and him did have one other match and Cyborg was disqualified for slapping Gordon in the head repeatedly.
If they put enough money, and that's the argument about something like 1FC, is that 1FC might have the financial means to goad maybe some judo champions and some elite grapplers in other disciplines, you know, and make it a big deal.
And, you know, do it in a stadium.
I mean, who knows?
Because if you're doing it at one of those big 1FC shows, once they have audiences, again, I don't think they're having...
I think the UFC is the first combat sports organization in mixed martial arts, at least, to start having full stadiums again.
And so the one that we did a couple of weeks ago in Jacksonville, Florida, was a full stadium, which is pretty fucking nuts.
I like boxing too, but yeah, MMA, it's more dynamic.
There's more involved.
There's more options.
It's more exciting.
And it ends more suddenly, more often.
Like if you watched the UFC fight last weekend or two weekends ago.
Last weekend, this past weekend, this Porhaska.
How do you say it?
Porhaska.
I think that's how you say his name.
Yuri Prohaska.
Did you see that fight?
Bro, that guy is a monster.
He's a real problem.
He's this guy from the Czech Republic.
This big fucking crazy striker who fights wild and he just comes straight at you and puts it on you in this Wild way where he just throws himself at fighters and forces them into these dogfights.
And he got tagged.
He got rocked in the fight at one point in time, but then he knocked Dominic Reyes out with a spinning elbow.
And it was just, I mean, face plant, out cold.
And Dominic Reyes is a guy who went five hard rounds with Jon Jones.
So I was doing a TV show and the character I was playing was based on a real dude who his job is to train tier one guys in edge weapons, blades, knives and stuff like that.
And Tom Kyer is his name.
He's a real guy.
He's fucking awesome.
And I just kind of moved over to the idea...
Obviously, I think that all of this stuff is super beneficial and good to keep up with, but when I think about...
Getting into a fight.
I have four kids.
Two are in college.
They're all girls.
I feel very protective of them.
But I'm not going to bars and putting myself in situations where I'm going to have like a street fight.
And so when I would think about that, I would think, like, what would the circumstances be to require me to have some kind of a physical altercation?
And it always came down to their lives, where my wife's life was in danger.
And then it just led to, like, the idea of weapons, basically.
Yeah, but wasn't it interesting how, I don't know if this is the case with you, people who never talked about guns all of a sudden started inquiring about guns.
And I'm sure if people know that you train with guns, they probably question you about it.
Yeah, I've had that conversation too, and many other friends that I have that have had guns have also had those conversations with other people when they've asked them.
You know, this is another place where people get so divided, and I just think it comes down to, like, preferences and values, and I hear people argue about it, and I'm like, sounds like people are arguing about flavors of ice cream to me, because it's like, I like this, I don't like this, and what I like, you should like, and it's, you know, it's a weird thing to think about.
I like the senator who said the US government has nukes, talking about how people with firearms at home couldn't defend themselves against the US government.
And I just wish I could point out to that guy that neither Vietnam or Afghanistan had nukes.
They didn't have much of anything, and they seemed to do pretty well against the US government.
The argument breaks down because we're now worried about the total loss of life.
When we had the lockdown, it was because of potential medical infrastructure collapse.
That was why we couldn't risk the hospitals being overfilled.
Now, I understand that because...
If the hospitals, if that infrastructure collapses, that's devastating to the country.
78%, and I thought it was 80, you corrected me earlier, 78% of the people who were hospitalized for COVID were obese.
We're not allowed to tell anybody to lose weight, but if they did, we would certainly, and I'm not saying it would be one for one, but we would certainly reduce the need for hospitalization.
Michelle Obama, when Obama was president, Michelle Obama had some get out and move campaign, right?
And that if something similar was employed during the Trump administration, during COVID, we could have gotten people healthier and said, but I don't think they necessarily knew at the time.
I think it took a few months before they recognized that obesity was one of the main comorbidity factors.
But vitamin D is another big one.
which they took away by keeping us inside yeah most people need vitamin D even if you go outside though unfortunately because you're wearing clothes and you don't want to get skin cancer so we've been programmed to think that you have to you can't be exposed you have to put sunscreen on which is fucking gnarly chemicals but vitamin D
in one study at least 84% of the people in the ICU with COVID had insufficient levels of vitamin D and only 4% had sufficient levels, which is really crazy.
Obviously, it doesn't mean it protects you 100%, but it's a strong factor.
And then when you look at the national numbers, I think 79% of the population in total has insufficient levels of vitamin D. It is a real problem because it's a hormone, and it's a hormone that your body best produces when you're out in the sun, but you don't get it any other way unless you supplement.
The New York Times recently had a piece that they put about how people who exercise regularly, it's a strong factor in not having COVID in a severe case and recovering from it quicker.
This is another thing that doesn't get discussed.
All that gets discussed is locking down, vaccinations, all these different things, when it should be a multi-tiered approach to getting people healthier.
But it's hard to tell people to be healthy.
It's like what we were talking about before.
Hearing you talk about the emotional pain involved in being overweight before you decided to take these incredible steps and this amazing result, it makes you think like, man, it's hard to tell someone, especially someone like me, who's never really been fat, it's hard to tell someone that you have to lose weight.
So if the government started doing it, and goddammit, there's so many snowflakes today, If they did start doing it, people would be freaking the fuck out.
There's a real problem with, there's a culture of call-out in this country.
There's a culture of attack vectors.
They're looking for a reason that you're bad or you're wrong or you're guilty or you're responsible for something.
Whether you are or you aren't.
And then if you are saying this publicly, and one of the problems with social media is, even if what you're saying doesn't necessarily make sense, you can get enough fucking people to agree with you, and they'll pile on.
And then the person who is in this debate is an individual, and they get attacked by enormous amounts of people.
And it's a bad proposition.
And for the person that gets attacked, it feels like the walls are closing in on you.
Like, oh my god.
Like, I know people that are like...
Very educated, intelligent people.
And then they espouse something online that goes against the mob, and they get attacked, and it wrecks them.
It wrecks them emotionally.
And I've seen it happen.
I'm like, man, you've got to stay offline.
Just get out of there.
I can't help.
I'm to defend myself.
But you don't have to defend yourself.
I mean, brilliant people who've wrecked vacations because they checked something on Twitter where someone was attacking them, and they spent all their...
Vacation time in the hotel room, crafting a response.
Like, man, don't do it.
Don't do it.
But it's a part of this weird culture that we find ourselves in where people realize that's an ineffective thing.
If you have an opinion that I don't agree with, we will attack that opinion.
And then a bunch of people who agree with your perspective will pile onto it.
And it's a natural inclination people have when you see someone vulnerable to pile on.
It's an animal thing.
You know, you see it with other animals.
When a wolf is cowering from the other wolves, they'll all attack that wolf and fuck it up.
It's a natural instinct to see weakness and to attack or to sense vulnerability and attack.
And that is playing itself out in social media.
You see it with people.
So if someone says that diet culture is racist, and so I agree, and then like, you know, and then next thing you know.
There's a conversation to be had, but I think it has to be had maybe through someone who's actually done it.
And I think you have an amazing position.
What you've done is incredible.
It took a long time.
It took an amazing amount of work, and it changed who you are as a human being.
You're more confident.
You have more energy.
You're far healthier.
You look amazing.
And you look at these pictures of who you were and who you are now.
You are a guy who can speak to it in a way that I can't, you know?
For very fortunate reasons, my family ate healthy when I was young.
I have good genetics.
And I worked out from the time I was a kid.
I've never stopped working out.
So I've never really had an issue like that.
But fuck, I could have if I was you.
That's like what we were talking about earlier.
Like when someone said, I can never do what you do.
But you could if you were me.
And that's Sapolsky.
That's determinism.
And it's real, man.
It's hard for people to recognize that.
But I think...
Overall, in general, we need to be way more compassionate with each other, and one way is to recognize that you don't exist the way you are because you just decide this is the way to be, and it's real clear, and I'm gonna fuck people over, and I'm gonna do this, and this is who I am.
Period.
Fuck off.
No, you just become that person over a long period of time.
And I was explaining this to someone recently, and I've said it more than once, but it bears repeating that when I had children, it changed who I am as a person because then I started to think of people as babies.
I never thought of people as babies.
If I met a guy and he was a 40-year-old asshole, I'm like, there's Tom, that 40-year-old asshole.
And I think that's also where communication comes in.
And that recognition that human beings don't exist in a vacuum.
We're all in this together.
And we need each other to check each other, to recognize when our behavior is off, and then to be kind about it.
To let people know, like, hey, you've made a mistake here.
You fucked this up.
And for that person to recognize that this person is reaching out with kindness and then respond in turn with kindness and say, I'm really sorry.
I didn't mean to.
I understand that I did something incorrect.
And we can do that.
It's the opposite of call-out culture, right?
It's like, it's a kindness culture.
It's like a compassion culture.
That's what we really need in response.
And unfortunately, some really intelligent people Who are well-meaning, they think they're doing the right thing, are involved in this sort of cancel culture thing where they're attacking people.
And it's bad for everybody.
It's bad for them, too, because they kind of feel what they're doing while they're doing it.
It gives you a very low opinion of yourself.
Because if you're a person that's piling on on someone, you don't think of yourself as being a hero or some sort of courageous or enlightened person.
It's a product in many ways of social media because it's a shit way to communicate with text online like that.
It's just not healthy.
It's not wise and it's not wise to participate in it.
It's not wise to dwell in it when it happens to you.
It's not wise to go back and forth and I don't think it's wise if we continue this.
I think it's bad for us as a culture and as a civilization.
And again, you've got to forgive the people that are involved in it as well.
I don't think they're bad people.
I just think it's a bad decision.
And I think it's a simple, easy decision, just like it's a simple, easy decision to eat the craft service.
It's right there, but it's not the wise thing to do.
We need more people communicating about all these things that we're talking about.
And we need it to be a big part of the conversation of what it means to be a person in today's society.
Because you can delve into processed foods.
You can get into harmful drugs.
You can get into all sorts of things that can fuck yourself up.
Or...
You can decide, like, you know what, I kind of recognize that this has never served me in the past.
I've seen all these errors I've made up to this point, and I'm going to choose now to move forward with a different ideal and with different ethics and different morals, and I'm going to try to be a better person, and I'm going to try to treat other people the way I would like to be treated.
Not pile on them on social media or attack them for some shit that they might or might have gotten incorrect or whatever, but instead to just recognize, like, this is a terrible way to treat someone you care about.
We should care about everybody.
Like, you would never pile on one of your friends on social media, right?
You know, it doesn't mean you shouldn't be critical of certain things.
And certain things demand critical thinking and they demand criticism because it allows the other person to recognize that they've erred and that other people see things from a different perspective than they do.
But you don't get that from insulting people and being shitty and mean.
And that is more common than not.
That's the majority of these interactions.
It's like people trying to find people who have erred or people who are worthy of attack and then going after them.
Yeah, and I find that people that I could have total disagreement with on any of these things, if I sit down and have a conversation and try to see their point of view, I often do.
And I often have empathy, and suddenly they're a real person.
But if I take my understanding of them based on something I read or off a tweet or something like this or...
How they're discussed amongst other groups of people, then it just becomes like the other and I want nothing to do with them and they're scary and I won't talk to them intentionally.
We evolved in tribes, and we evolved to be fearful of other tribes, and as other tribes are going to do you damage and steal your resources and kill you.
We haven't gotten past that.
And the only way to get past that, I mean, you have to go on a journey, man.
You have to figure out for yourself and each person's personal journey.
It's like, think about your personal journey to lose the amount of weight that you did.
Fuck, imagine trying to tell someone who's 500 pounds, this is what you're gonna have to do.
Yeah, the friendship that comes out of resolving conflict is a beautiful friendship.
If you can let things go, people have to learn how to not hold grudges, man.
Not holding grudges is a beautiful thing.
It's a beautiful virtue, you know, and just to let it go.
Just let it go.
We're all flawed.
We're all people, you know?
We can do this.
It can be done, but it takes work.
I'm not good at it all the time either.
I'm talking a lot of shit right now, but sometimes I'm an angry person as well.
I came here straight from the gym, so I feel great.
I went to the gym this morning too.
That's part of it.
I worked out all my shit.
But if you caught me three days in a row, no gym, who knows?
Maybe I'm like, fuck them and fuck this.
I have an inclination to I have an inclination towards aggression and say fuck you and fuck this and fuck that.
And I try real hard to avoid that inclination and to get better.
And it's not better in like one fell swoop.
It's like I don't learn it from one mistake and now I'm better.
It's like I need to make a gang of mistakes and keep recognizing that I made those mistakes and better.
And I think we need to have that leeway, not just personally for ourselves, because generally, if you're healthy, try to give yourself a little leeway for mistakes.
We need to have that leeway for other people.
And I was thinking about this on the way over here.
I was thinking about felons, like felons that can't vote.
Like, you get arrested when you're 17 for robbing a bank, and then you can never vote for the rest of your life.
I mean, we could just take what our mutual friend Michael Malice has to say about voting and talk about how all votes are an act of violence or they're all illegal and nobody should be voting at all.
I think about this sometimes and I think about like you go back to ancient Rome and there weren't explicit laws against murder.
Eventually, and I mean like 700 years into the Roman Empire, they made laws about killing slaves because they were just like, people are killing too many slaves.
You shouldn't just kill your slaves.
But that took a long time.
Up until then, it wasn't like people were just...
Killing everyone.
There was murder.
It happened.
But it wasn't chaos of people killing right and left.
I think of people in jail for murder and I think we have laws against murder and people still murder.
I don't know that I've never murdered somebody because there's a law.
Well, you know, if you look at Steven Pinker's work when he talks about violence over the course of history...
It's a lot less!
Yeah, a lot less.
When people want to think about the world today as opposed to the world of the past, they want to make this, you know, this judgment that today's filled with monsters and assholes and, you know, society's fucked.