Tim Ferriss: depression, psychedelics, and emotional resilience

**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 I've gathered 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.
Welcome to episode one of The Peter Attia Drive. I can think of no better person to begin this podcast with than my very dear friend, Tim Ferriss. Not only is Tim a really close friend, but he's also almost single-handedly the reason this podcast is coming into existence. So in other words, if you hate it, you can blame Tim. Tim has been kind of on my case for about two years to do this, and more than anything else, he's just really helped me think about how I can sort of put something together that allows me to create something that is sort of new and that isn't already out there in terms of content, but also is something that I'll find enjoyable to do and that hopefully will come across as this podcast gets underway.
I'm guessing most people listening to this know a lot about Tim, but on the off chance that there are some who don't, I think it's just worth kind of giving a little bit of background on Tim. He's been described as a quote, a cross between Jack Welch and a Buddhist monk by the New York Times. He's one of Fast Company's most innovative business people. He's an early stage tech investor and advisor, and that includes a number of companies that most people have heard of, such as Uber, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, Alibaba, and least 50 others. He's also the author of five number one New York Times bestsellers and Wall Street Journal bestsellers, The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans, also known as Biggest Tools, that's an inside joke in reference to the podcast, and Tribe of Mentors. The Observer and other media outlets have described him as the Oprah of audio due to the influence of his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, which has about 300 million downloads at the time of this recording. It's also been selected as the best of iTunes for three years running.
Now, I want to say something about this episode that will become apparent, obviously, once we get started. One, we talk a lot about things that are topics that Tim and I don't really spend a lot of time discussing publicly and certainly personally. And so it's important to understand here that while Tim and I do talk quite openly about psychedelic experiences we've shared in South America, it shouldn't be taken to mean that that's what we're recommending that anybody go out and do. We're absolutely not doing that. There are physical, there are psychological, and there are legal risks among these things. And it's important to remember that in the United States, at the time of this recording, psychedelics like psilocybin, which we speak about quite a bit, along with mescaline and things that we don't get into much detail around, such as ayahuasca, these are currently schedule one, which means that they are illegal.
And while we believe, obviously, that that designation is completely unwarranted and will likely eventually no longer be the case when the scientific community has a chance to catch up and understand the great potential of these things, really the purpose of this podcast is informational only. And while I do generally provide a disclaimer at the end of my podcast that explains that all of this information is informational, I want to be really clear about this particular issue. We talk a lot about these things. We talk about a few other things as well. And I think even for the listener who doesn't find this topic to be particularly interesting, one thing that we talk about at the very end of the podcast that I'd been meaning to ask Tim for a while and certainly I get asked a lot is, what are the things that you still incorporate in your daily routine? Tim has written so eloquently about this stuff and has codified so many ways to find these minimum effective doses and to optimize everything he's doing that I think people wonder, hey, which are the things that have really stood the test of time? And so I actually found that last part of the podcast to be especially interesting, even for me, though I knew these things and I can see all the things that Tim does day in and day out, but to sort of have him say, look, if I had to pick five, these would be the five. Tim can be found all over the place, but I think the best places to see him are on his blog, which is tim.blog. You can follow him at T Ferriss, that's F-E-R-R-I-S-S on Twitter, and you find him at Tim Ferriss on Facebook and Instagram. I hope you enjoy this first episode half as much as I enjoyed recording it, and there will be lots more of these to follow. So with all of that said, please welcome Tim Ferriss.