The Ayrton Senna Episode (re-release): Celebrating the greatest driver in Formula 1 history and the cautionary tales of driven individuals

**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.
Hi, everyone, welcome to a bonus episode of The Drive. This bonus episode is being released on May 1st, 2019, which is the 25th anniversary of the death of Brazilian Formula 1 legend Ayrton Senna. This interview was originally done in the fall of 2018 Paul Conti and I spoke at length about our mutual admiration for Ayrton, and we actually tied it back into some of the concepts around an interview we had done earlier around depression. So if you're listening to this for the first time, you may even find it helpful to go back and to listen to that.
It's sort of hard for me to believe truthfully that this is 25 years later. I remember the Sunday, May 1st, 1994, like it was yesterday. I remember exactly where I was sitting when the news came across. I was in college at the time. I didn't have a television. I wasn't watching the race, but it's weird. It's one of those moments that I'm sure many people understand when something so profound happens and everything about that moment is seared in your memory, including literally where I was sitting, what the floor looked like, what the shelf looked like in my bookcase, things like that, where my little stereo was sitting. In this episode, we obviously celebrate the life of Senna and talk about perhaps what could have been. In the show notes, we're going to add to what we had done in the past and include some of the really exciting and beautiful recent tributes that have come up, including some really interesting stuff that has come out from his second to last teammate before he died, Gerhard Berger. A number of really interesting articles have come out. So I guess I would say, even if you're not a Formula 1 fan, most people who listened to this the first time around came back to me and said, wow, that was really interesting. I didn't think I could find that interesting. I would encourage you to take a moment to listen to this. Many people to this day consider Senna to be the greatest driver in the history of Formula 1 And his death was really the turning point of a sport. While certainly many drivers had died before Senna, never before had it been so public, never before had it been so visible to so many people. And it almost overnight, well, I would say it overnight changed the culture of the sport. And over a very short period of time actually changed the technology of the sport. And today, the sport that I still love is infinitely safer and considerably different than the one that many of us fell in love with in the 80s and the 90s. So, I hope you'll enjoy this episode today as we look back 25 years after the death of Ayrton Senna. So, Paul, we have a lot of things in common, not the least of which is our birthday. We share the same birthday, which is great because you're one of the few people whose birthdays I remember. I'm like a moron when it comes to birthdays. I have like an encyclopedic memory of many things except for birthdays.
But of course, every time I wake up, usually you're calling me to wish me a happy birthday, which is reminding me that it's my birthday.
I usually wake up to a text from you.
The other thing we have in common is a, I think what can only be described as an obsession with, arguably, though I would say it's not arguably, definitively the greatest driver in the history of driving. I remember it was one of the first things we bonded over when we got to medical school, because at that point it had only been three years since Senna's death.
And for those of us who cherished him, it's a day that all of us remember, Sunday, May 1st, 1994 What is it about Senna that you loved so much?

**Paul Conti** (4:15)
I'll try not to be long-winded, but to answer both facets of that. On the one hand, I'm not sure that I'm aware of anyone, certainly not in a way that I observed and experienced with interest as it unfolded, right? Who has been more single-minded about achievement.