Peter's takeaways on mastering sleep, dealing with chronic pain, developing breakthrough cancer drugs, transforming healthcare with AI, advancing radiation therapy, and healing trauma | Quarterly Podcast Summary #5

**Peter Attia** (0:10)
Hey everyone, welcome to a sneak peek Ask Me Anything or AMA episode of the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. At the end of this short episode, I'll explain how you can access the AMA episodes in full, along with a ton of other membership benefits we've created. Or you can learn more now by going to peterattiamd.com/subscribe. So without further delay, here's today's sneak peek of the Ask Me Anything episode.
Welcome to another quarterly podcast summary episode of The Drive. In today's quarterly podcast summary, I'll discuss what I learned from some of the recent episodes of The Drive, focusing on what I think were the most important insights, as well as any changes in my behaviors as a result. This shouldn't be seen as a replacement for listening to or watching any of the original episodes, but this may be a great way to reinforce things that you already saw, or at least point you back to an episode you missed. In today's episode, we cover interviews that I did with Jeff English, Ashley Mason, Sanjay Mehta, Sean Mackey and Sue Desmond-Hellmann. We revisit topics around trauma, therapy, mental and emotional health, insomnia, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia and improving sleep, radiology, radiophobia, common misconceptions around it, how radiation is used in not just cancer therapy, but also for treating inflammatory conditions such as arthritis and tendinitis, pain, chronic pain and how to treat them. Finally, discussions around oncology, cancer drug development and how AI is impacting medicine now and possibly in the future. If you're a subscriber and you want to watch the full video of this podcast, you can find it on our show notes page. If you're not a subscriber, you can watch the sneak peek of the video on our YouTube page. Without further delay, I hope you enjoy this special quarterly podcast summary AMA of The Drive.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:10)
Peter, welcome to another quarterly podcast summary Ask Me Anything episode with Peter Attia. How are you doing?

**Peter Attia** (2:19)
Very well.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:20)
You're excited to be here?

**Peter Attia** (2:21)
I am.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:22)
No place you'd rather be?

**Peter Attia** (2:23)
No place I'd rather be. Nothing I'd rather be talking about.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:27)
Even a race car?
Hmm, maybe. Okay. Well, it's good to know you're still being honest. So today, we're going to cover looking back at recent episodes on the podcast. As a reminder for people, these quarterly podcast summaries, they are a way for us to talk about and gather insights from you on what you learned from previous episodes, where your behavior changed, where you're thinking about things differently. But they're not necessarily a replacement for these episodes. What we often find is people kind of use this accompanying listening to the episode or even going back and listening to some sections again based on these insights. And so for today's episode, we're going to look back at previous ones with Jeff English on all things mental, emotional health, trauma, therapy, Ashley Mason, all things related to getting better sleep, insomnia, CBTI as it relates to improving sleep. We have Sanjay Mehta looking at radiology, radiation, different ways to look at how that can be used to cure cancer. And also interestingly, arthritis. We have Sean Mackey, all things related to pain, chronic pain and getting over pain. And then Sue Desmond-Hellmann, which was an interesting episode, kind of looking at her career, but ultimately looking at cancer oncology, drug development, and even an interesting segment on AI and medicine. So a lot to talk about, a lot of different topics, which I think speaks to who we have on the podcast, which is a variety of people, variety of angles. So I think it should be a good one, a lot of different things to chat through, anything you want to say before we get started.

**Peter Attia** (4:04)
No, let's dive in.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:06)
Perfect. First one, Jeff English, all things, trauma, mental health, therapy, et cetera. Do you kind of want to walk through your insights from that episode?

**Peter Attia** (4:18)
This was an episode I was really looking forward to doing as we discuss in the episode. I've obviously known Jeff for many years. I owe him a great debt of gratitude. And this is one of those episodes where between the time we recorded it and the time it came out is probably eight to 10 weeks. During that period of time, I sent the unedited, just straight audio file of it to no fewer than 15 to 20 people. Meaning I couldn't even wait for this episode to come out to be sharing it with people. So I think that probably tells you something. I will be completely comfortable stating that that will be a record that will last for some time. There's no scenario I can think of where I've taken a podcast before it comes out and shared it with so many people. I would say that most of the people I shared it with not only found it to be incredibly valuable, but actually wanted to sort of engage with Jeff on a professional level after that. So it's one of those podcasts where if it resonates with you, it's really important. You're going to share it a lot. Okay. So what was this episode about? I mean, it really was a great episode about understanding trauma. And it's such a loaded word that I think it's understandable why people might have some skepticism around that. I think the word does get used a little bit too much, but Jeff has a great definition for it. And I jotted it down, right? Which is that trauma is a moment of perceived helplessness that activates the limbic system. This can be a wounding event, a major event, or maybe a series of smaller events. And those typically get referred to as big tree and little T traumas. So a big T trauma is something really obvious, being the victim of a violent crime, for example. And little T traumas are like a thousand paper cuts. A parent that was there, but just really wasn't paying attention to their kid. And those can be damaging in different ways. So what Jeff talked about was that in trauma, too often people focus on the what happened part of the equation. But he thinks that it's more important to focus on the how did I adapt part of the equation. And as he talked about it, the sin qua non of trauma is that there's a disconnected version of a person that shows up to life, relying on maladaptive strategies to replace connection with something else. I think that is a remarkably succinct way to explain things. And it's not judgmental. It's just saying that something happened, a series of things, there have been adaptations. Those adaptations have led to disconnection and maladaptive strategies. This could be things that are perceived of as quote unquote bad like alcohol, drugs, gambling. But it could be also things that are perceived of as good, such as work or perfectionism. All of those things replace the sense of connection.