Corey McCarthy: Overcoming trauma, dealing with shame, finding meaning, changing the self-narrative, redemption, and the importance of gratitude

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top-performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
In this podcast, I'll be speaking with Corey McCarthy. I haven't known Corey very long. I first met him in April, during a trip that Tim Ferriss and I took with a number of friends to North Kern State Prison, which is a maximum security prison in California, about an hour outside of Bakersfield. We did this as volunteers with Defy Ventures, and if you haven't heard of Defy, or more importantly, Catherine Hoke, you should definitely go back and listen to her interview with Tim Ferriss, which was done probably in January or February of this year, and we'll link to that here. Defy is a program where volunteers like us go into prisons and participate in helping with teaching prisoners certain skills in life. But I gotta tell you, after just that one trip there, I've come to realize that the volunteers get more out of that experience than the prisoners do. It's hard to really explain what we experience there and on the drive home, there was about six of us in an SUV that had a five, six hour drive back, including Corey. It was clear that it was gonna be very difficult to articulate what we went through with people who didn't share that experience with us. But in particular, I was really moved by Corey's story. You see, Corey himself was once an inmate and he was invited on this trip by one of my good friends and he asked, hey, I know this is kind of a small group of your buddies coming with you and Tim, but could we invite Corey? And of course we said, sure. And turned out Corey was just one of the most amazing guys and in many ways the trip was stolen by him and his experiences. And on the way home, I realized that I wanted to have a discussion with Corey that I wanted to be able to share with people. And I think in part, it's so humbling to go through this experience that we went through at Kern. You start to realize that some of the smallest choices can lead you down the wrong path. And so often, there's a lot of pain that's at the root of bad decisions we make. And I didn't know what Corey and I were gonna talk about, to be completely honest. We didn't plan for it at all. I didn't have a script. I didn't have a single question written down. We just talked. And I'm really pleased with how it turned out. And I hope that you'll take this on a leap of faith and listen to this, because I find it impossible that anyone listening to this won't get at least something out of this, understanding how your experiences can define you, understanding what forgiveness means of both yourself and others, understanding how good people can do bad things. As you know, I'm very interested in longevity, but if you've been following me on social media, you've probably noticed I'm becoming more and more interested in mental health, and that's going to be kind of a recurring theme on this podcast, because as I stated before, and I think many people would sort of intuitively agree, what point is there in living longer if your mind is not right, if you're not happy.
So I hope that you'll find this discussion half as enjoyable as I did. Corey is an amazing guy, and I'm really excited to introduce all of you to him. So without further delay, here's my conversation with Corey McCarthy.
Hey man.
Good, how are you?

**Corey McCarthy** (3:57)
Pretty excited, actually.

**Peter Attia** (3:58)
Yeah, welcome to the Big Apple.

**Corey McCarthy** (4:00)
Yeah, I like it here.

**Peter Attia** (4:01)
How often do you get down here?

**Corey McCarthy** (4:03)
Every year for the past five or six years, I've come with my daughter for Christmas time, and I have some friends I might pop in once in a while.

**Peter Attia** (4:12)
Remind me, your daughter's 16?

**Corey McCarthy** (4:13)
17, 17 She graduates from high school next week, exciting.
Wow. Yeah.

**Peter Attia** (4:20)
I have a feeling we'll come back to that in a little bit.