Kyle Kingsbury: Finding meaning, depression, and psychedelics

**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.
Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast. If you're listening to this, you probably already know, but the two things I care most about, professionally, are how to live longer and how to live better.
I have a complete fascination and obsession with this topic. I practice it professionally, and I've seen firsthand how access to information is basically all people need to make better decisions and improve the quality of their lives.
Curating and sharing this knowledge is not easy, and even before starting the podcast, that became clear to me. The sheer volume of material published in this space is overwhelming. I'm fortunate to have a great team that helps me continue learning and sharing this information with you. To take one example, our show notes are in a league of their own. In fact, we now have a full-time person that is dedicated to producing those, and the feedback has mirrored this. So all of this raises a natural question. How will we continue to fund the work necessary to support this?
As you probably know, the tried and true way to do this is to sell ads, but after a lot of contemplation, that model just doesn't feel right to me for a few reasons. Now the first and most important of these is trust. I'm not sure how you could trust me if I'm telling you about something when you know I'm being paid by the company that makes it to tell you about it.
Another reason selling ads doesn't feel right to me is because I just know myself. I have a really hard time advocating for something that I'm not absolutely nuts for. So if I don't feel that way about something, I don't know how I can talk about it enthusiastically. So instead of selling ads, I've chosen to do what a handful of others have proved can work over time, and that is to create a subscriber model for my audience.
This keeps my relationship with you both simple and honest. If you value what I'm doing, you can become a member. In exchange, you'll get the benefits above and beyond what's available for free. It's that simple. It's my goal to ensure that no matter what level you choose to support us at, you will get back more than you give.
So for example, members will receive full access to the exclusive show notes, including other things that we plan to build upon. These are useful beyond just the podcast, especially given the technical nature of many of our shows. Members also get exclusive access to listen to and participate in the regular Ask Me Anything episodes. That means asking questions directly into the AMA portal and also getting to hear these podcasts when they come out. Lastly, and this is something I'm really excited about, I want my supporters to get the best deals possible on the products that I love. And as I said, we're not taking ad dollars from anyone, but instead what I'd like to do is work with companies who make the products that I already love and would already talk about for free and have them pass savings on to you.
Again, the podcast will remain free to all, but my hope is that many of you will find enough value in, one, the podcast itself, and two, the additional content exclusive for members. I want to thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. My guest this week is Kyle Kingsbury. Some of you may recognize Kyle. He's a retired UFC fighter. He's been on the Joe Rogan Experience a number of times. He's currently the Director of Human Optimization at Onnit. I first met Kyle in person during a hunting trip in early 2019, though we had both known sort of about each other prior to that and seen each other in interviews and things like that. So we immediately clicked and become very close since that time. Now, in this episode, which truthfully, when you're interviewing people that you know pretty well, you don't really know where you're going to go. And honestly, this episode and this interview went in places I did not expect it to go in and for which I'm incredibly grateful. We could have spent a lot of this time talking about UFC and mixed martial arts and all of those things, and that would have been interesting, but we went to places that Kyle has never talked about publicly, in fact, a couple of things that he hadn't even shared with me privately before. So I was incredibly moved by this experience. So we talk about his upbringing playing football, going to JC, then college. We talk about his experience with performance enhancing drugs, something I don't think he's ever really spoken about before. As a little sidebar, we talk about something called the whizinator, which is about the funniest thing I've ever heard of. Talk about his transition away from football after realizing he wasn't gonna make it to the NFL. And it's during this piece that Kyle really opens up about this period of depression in his life and his thoughts of suicide that have been somewhat recurrent and had started as early as the age of seven. He talks about his close calls with suicide, his eventual transition into MMA and UFC. And we end our talk with a conversation around his experience with ayahuasca towards the end of his UFC career and how that really became the turning point in his own journey towards being sort of more emotionally healthy and frankly what's enabled him to become a father and become the father that he wishes he could have had. Now, before we get into this conversation, I feel it's really important to have a couple of disclaimers. First, in this conversation, Kyle really opens up about his past depression and his thoughts of suicide and how close he was to it on a number of occasions. It's a very heavy conversation and if you're currently experiencing any thoughts of self-harm or suicide, it is imperative that you seek out medical help immediately. Second, Kyle and I have a very open and honest conversation about psychedelics. The substances we speak about are illegal and by no means are we advocating for anyone to use them or experiment with them. There are physical, physiological, psychological and legal risks around the use of these plants. This conversation is purely informational only. Kyle speaks about his personal experiences and how it has shaped his thinking. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with my friend, Kyle Kingsbury.