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The Peter Attia Drive

#01 - Tim Ferriss: depression, psychedelics, and emotional resilience

The Peter Attia Drive

Peter Attia, MD

Health & Fitness, Medicine, Fitness

4.77.3K Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2018

⏱️ 156 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Excited to kick off the podcast with special guest and close friend Tim Ferriss, lifehacker, podcaster extraordinaire, and author of multiple best-selling books that includes The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, Tools of Titans, and Tribe of Mentors.

In this podcast we cover mental health, depression, and our mutual interest in psychedelics as potential therapeutic agents. Tim talks both experientially and from his own deep dive into the literature of psychedelics and mental health. Tim is shifting his focus from investing in startups to funding experiments that he hopes will establish more reliable knowledge and therapeutic options for those suffering from anxiety, depression, and addiction.

Tim also shared his list of acquired wisdom he returns to most reliably, which might be worth the price of admission alone.

We discuss:

  • Tim’s history of depression and his TED Talk on his close call with suicide [11:15];
  • The type of thinking that triggers Tim’s downward spirals [17:15];
  • Tim’s transformative experience with ayahuasca [48:45];
  • How Tim’s experience and research has led him to focus on furthering the science on psychedelics and mental health [53:00];
  • What some of the meditation modalities, and meditation apps, are out there, why meditation can be so hard to do, but also worthwhile to stick with [1:13:00];
  • Why Tim made a big commitment (more than $1 million) to funding scientific research, and to psilocybin and MDMA research, in particular [1:31:00];
  • From all the habits and tools that Tim has learned, the five things that he returns to most reliably [2:33:00];
  • And more.

Learn more at www.PeterAttiaMD.com

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey everyone, welcome to the Peter Atia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Atia.

0:10.0

The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking,

0:15.7

along with a few other obsessions I've gathered along the way.

0:18.6

I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing

0:21.9

individuals in the world, and this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned

0:26.1

along the way to help you with a higher quality, more fulfilling life.

0:30.2

If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other

0:34.1

topics at peteratiamd.com.

0:36.4

Welcome to episode one of the Peter Atia Drive. I can think of no better person to begin this

0:48.0

podcast with than my very dear friend Tim Ferris. Not only is Tim a really close friend,

0:54.1

but he's also almost single-handedly the reason this podcast is coming into existence.

0:59.8

In other words, if you hate it, you can blame Tim.

1:02.4

Tim has been kind of on my case for about two years to do this, and more than anything

1:07.6

else, he's just really helped me think about how I can sort of put something together that

1:13.4

allows me to create something that is sort of new and that isn't already out there in

1:18.0

terms of content, but also is something that I'll find enjoyable to do and that hopefully

1:22.2

will come across as this podcast gets underway.

1:25.2

I'm guessing most people listening to this know a lot about Tim, but on the off chance

1:28.4

that there are some who don't, I think it's just worth kind of giving a little bit of background

1:32.4

on Tim.

1:33.4

He's been described as a, quote, a cross between Jack Welch and a Buddhist monk by the New

1:37.5

York Times.

...

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