A talk about depression & suicide among entrepreneurs: Tim Ferriss & Peter Attia
This is probably one of the best podcast episodes I’ve listened to in a while and I highly recommend it to you: Tim Ferriss went into deep details about his experience with depression and close-call with suicide, as part of the first episode of Peter Attia’s podcast.
Dr. Peter Attia is a former ultra-endurance athlete, self-experimenter and one of Tim’s closest friends, so their talk goes into really personal and brutally direct details.
They dive deep into mental health, including why meditation can be so hard, why men are generally bad at handling / talking about depression, the kind of thinking that leads to downward spirals, and so on. Tim also announces his decision to invest more than $1 million (he never invested this much into anything) to fund scientific research that he hopes will help those struggling with anxiety, depression and addiction.
The second half of their talk covers their experience with psychedelics, all kinds of myths related to them and how the public can be manipulated.
One of the interesting stories from this podcast was that of Katherine McCormick and how the birth control pill appeared – it’s basically a story about what a small number of committed people can do to change the course of history.
This is not the first time that Tim publicly shares his thoughts on the subject of mental health. Back in 2015, he wrote about it on his blog, in 2016 in the book Tools of Titans, and last year he had a TED talk about how to define your fears (that has been viewed more than 6 million times).
So go and listen to it. Oh, I should also warn you that their conversation is three-hours long. 😀 But it’s worthy of your time.