#405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness

During the peak of his weight loss journey, Penn lost an average of 0.9 pounds per day for 4 months!

I realized in that instant that nobody brags about walking up a grassy slope. They brag about climbing Everest. You know, I have never ever want to do anything easy in my life. Why with my health was I decided that that was the thing that had to be easy and I realized that I not only do I not respect moderation.

If you want to really lose body fat for body recomposition, it's 90%+ diet. You have to prove that to yourself, and a very effective way of doing so is by taking exercise off the table for a short period of time. In which span, you can prove to yourself, quite easily, that you lose pounds in the kitchen, not primarily in the gym.

Of the 7 billion people on the planet, if we round it off, about 7 billion are good. I do not believe in God. I also do not believe in the existence of evil. I believe there's very little bad in the world. There are a lot of mistakes, but not people maliciously trying to do bad things.

If you move sober through the world, you have this huge advantage... You can make rational decisions and you don't have certain parts of your thinking reduced.

If you go to somebody and say, 'I want to talk to you about my problems; I want to be friends with you; I want to pour my heart out,' your chances are pretty good of whoever you talking to being okay. But, if someone comes to you and says, 'I can help you with your problems, your Spidey sense should tingle.

Parents not doing drugs and not drinking is the biggest indicator of offspring not doing drugs and drinking.

It's one way, probably unfairly, that you can decide how close you want to be to somebody — if they can tell you something really early on that surprises you. As we build our theory of other minds, we get these points and then we guess the other points, and if you can't do that, that's someone you want to fall in love with.

I think the biggest challenge we face, even with climate change on the table... is staying kind with profound disagreement, and staying kind when a mechanism has been set up to make money and power out of hate.