#01 - Tim Ferriss: depression, psychedelics, and emotional resilience

Excited to kick off the podcast with special guest and close friend Tim Ferriss, lifehacker, podcaster extraordinaire, and author of multiple best-selling books that includes The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, Tools of Titans, and Tribe of Mentors.

In this podcast we cover mental health, depression, and our mutual interest in psychedelics as potential therapeutic agents. Tim talks both experientially and from his own deep dive into the literature of psychedelics and mental health. Tim is shifting his focus from investing in startups to funding experiments that he hopes will establish more reliable knowledge and therapeutic options for those suffering from anxiety, depression, and addiction.

Tim also shared his list of acquired wisdom he returns to most reliably, which might be worth the price of admission alone.

We discuss:

• Tim’s history of depression and his TED Talk on his close call with suicide [11:15];
• The type of thinking that triggers Tim’s downward spirals [17:15];
• Tim’s transformative experience with ayahuasca [48:45];
• How Tim’s experience and research has led him to focus on furthering the science on psychedelics and mental health [53:00];
• What some of the meditation modalities, and meditation apps, are out there, why meditation can be so hard to do, but also worthwhile to stick with [1:13:00];
• Why Tim made a big commitment (more than $1 million) to funding scientific research, and to psilocybin and MDMA research, in particular [1:31:00];
• From all the habits and tools that Tim has learned, the five things that he returns to most reliably [2:33:00];
• And more.

Learn more at www.PeterAttiaMD.com