I think that the whole COVID situation is terrible. It's obviously a bad virus. I've had it twice ... Do you lock down the economy and force people to stay at home and isolate people and increase opiate deaths and increase the amount of benzodiazepines that are being prescribed and SSRIs, which are extremely dependence-forming that nobody knows about, so we're going to have generations of people who can't get off of meds now? No, I don't think you take away people's civil liberties. As a government. I don't think that's fair—and I don't think the government is smart enough to be making those decisions.

The cover bothered me a lot because it was a cheap manipulation of something that had been working very well for Sports Illustrated. It was also an insistence that, all of a sudden, this non-athletic body type is as beautiful as the standard swimsuit model for Sports Illustrated, and it's not. It's not as athletic, and it's not as healthy, and that's that—and it's also not arbitrary.

Not everyone's a genius. No, not everyone's Picasso. No, not everyone's young and healthy. And no, not everyone is a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, period. And fuck you if you don't like it.

There's this huge misconception in the medical community that a diet high in protein is bad for your kidneys ... This is a complete and utter myth. There's no research... that shows that a high-protein diet, protein from any source, is bad for the human kidneys. And there's definitely no control research showing that protein from meat is in any way bad for kidneys.

There are all kinds of vitamins and minerals, essential fatty acids, that you really can only get from foods that are high in cholesterol and high in saturated fat ... If you're avoiding cholesterol and saturated fat, you're not getting access to this cornucopia of vitamins and minerals and fatty acids that your body absolutely needs for essential, optimal human function.

One thing I can say about abortion that I think would generate no objection is you wouldn't give one to your sister for a present, right? So, whatever it is, it's not desirable, and how not desirable it is at minimum open to question.

I don't think there's any such thing as a casual sexual relationship. I don't believe that. I've never seen any evidence that that's the case ... People rationalize that constantly because they want to believe... that short-term hedonistic gratification is ethically acceptable, and I don't think it is.

Alcohol is a drug that really radically decreases people's medium to long-term orientation ... It decreases anxiety, and it increases, likely, opiate bonding and dopamine-mediated extraversion. And so, it's cocaine, heroin, and a benzodiazepine rolled into one. So, it makes you not care, and for pure hedonism, there's nothing better than not caring.

Make a plan. Look at what you're interested in. Get disciplined about something. Allow for the possibility that you have something important to contribute to the world and that the world would be a lesser place without that contribution.

Kind of what I'm critical of in both of my books is people just taking the cultural definitions of success and doing good... at face value and not really questioning: 'If I do achieve these things, will that actually solve my problem? Will that actually make me any happier? Will it bring any more meaning to my life?'

Often, the difference between somebody being depressed and somebody not is something as simple as getting a job or making a new friend or moving out of your parents basement—it's actually very basic things that have compounding effects.

We kind of invent metrics for ourselves to define what success is going to be, and I think, for a lot of us, our default setting is to define our metric by whatever the people around us are doing or have recently done ... If you're not consciously questioning that, it can get you into trouble.

When I look at someone who's obese on the street, I think, oh, that's too bad ... I don't think, you know, obese pig eats too much, has no self-control. I don't think that; I think bad mismatch between genetic proclivity and appalling diet.

You guys should have children. They're really awesome. They're also a hell of a lot of work, and they make you cry sometimes, but they're so cool. They get so much cooler when they get older, too.

When you live in a society where information is no longer scarce; where there's essentially more stuff for you to consume, and understand, and learn about than is humanly possible; the most obvious question becomes 'What is worth pursuing? What is worth learning about? What is worth trusting and believing in?'

The average person walks so little throughout the day that if they just walked for about 45 minutes to an hour, they would double the amount of steps that they took all day long.

I think people, in lieu of religion, they're taking worldly values—things like politics, cultural issues, social group identities—and behaving religiously around them, adopting kind of religious belief systems around them, and that's extremely concerning to me.

Anyone who's eating over 100 total grams of carbohydrates a day, you're going to have some degree of hyperinsulinemia, some degree of inappropriate, chronic inflammation. It may manifest in your skin, it may manifest in your gut, in your joints, in your hair ... Even your mental health.

I don't think there is such a thing as casual sex. I think that's indistinguishable from masturbation, which I also don't regard as a particularly heroic act.

We've looked at what predicts success in complex functional organizations, and the two biggest predictors are IQ—because IQ is general cognitive ability, and that's just how fast and well you can solve any problem that requires abstraction, and solving it faster is obviously better if it's an important problem because it's more efficient. The other predictor is conscientiousness, not agreeableness.