Personal Struggles & Practical Thoughts on Suicide | Tim Ferriss & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | I'm wondering if you'd be willing to share with us a little bit about your mindset, maybe
00:00:09.340 | even your motivation, but certainly your mindset around sharing some of the hard personal tribulations
00:00:16.940 | that you've shared.
00:00:18.820 | In preparation for this discussion today, I went back to some of those posts that you
00:00:23.420 | did and the podcasts that you did around this, and I'd listened to them at the time, and
00:00:30.820 | they deal with quite serious violations of childhood and of self, and they're hard.
00:00:39.380 | They're hard to listen to, and I can only imagine they must be even far, far harder
00:00:45.620 | to experience.
00:00:46.620 | And I was curious what led to your willingness to do that, and yeah, I mean, I have my own
00:00:56.480 | ideas about what might have motivated it, but I'd like to hear it from you.
00:01:00.700 | Sure.
00:01:01.700 | Happy to talk about it, and I think there are two particular examples that come to mind.
00:01:06.620 | So one is my near-suicide in college, and if people search some practical thoughts on
00:01:15.940 | suicide and my name, it'll pop right up.
00:01:18.180 | I mean, if you just search my name and suicide, it'll probably pop right up.
00:01:23.860 | Pretty well indexed at this point, which is very deliberate.
00:01:27.720 | People can look at the URL structure for a little wink and a hat tip.
00:01:33.140 | It'll tell you something about optimizing for Google.
00:01:36.780 | If you look at it, I'll just tell you the URL, it spells out how to commit suicide.
00:01:41.580 | But clearly, I'm not teaching people how to commit suicide, but I wanted that to be a
00:01:46.100 | honeypot for some of that traffic, because it's a lot easier now to find that type of
00:01:51.180 | practical implementation advice, and it's a bit harder to find, I think, compelling
00:01:57.120 | intervention.
00:01:59.340 | So first of all, if you're feeling suicide, obviously call Suicide Hotline, please.
00:02:04.460 | That's sometimes the last thing that people want to hear when they are in a place of suicidal
00:02:09.540 | ideation.
00:02:11.460 | And the reason I ended up writing a long post about this, which was terrifying to write,
00:02:16.900 | because I had never told my parents, I had never told my closest friends.
00:02:23.020 | This was a secret.
00:02:24.020 | It was a dark, dark secret.
00:02:26.980 | And I wrote about it because I went to an event in San Francisco.
00:02:35.140 | I was interviewed on stage by Jason Calacanis, who's a friend and a very good interviewer,
00:02:41.940 | at an event.
00:02:43.100 | And after I got off stage, a bunch of people approached me and I was saying hi and taking
00:02:48.620 | photos and signing things and so on.
00:02:52.540 | And there was one young man there, very well-dressed, which isn't really relevant.
00:02:58.300 | It was striking because in San Francisco, sometimes people are very underdressed and
00:03:02.620 | he had dressed up for it, like he'd taken it seriously and he was in a suit and tie.
00:03:07.580 | He asked me if I could sign a book for his brother.
00:03:11.900 | And I said, sure, no problem.
00:03:15.060 | And I asked him, what would you like me to write to your brother?
00:03:17.340 | And he kind of blanked.
00:03:18.340 | He didn't kind of blank, he totally blanked.
00:03:20.740 | But the look behind his eyes was unusual.
00:03:24.860 | It wasn't just, I don't know what to say blank, there was something else behind it.
00:03:29.840 | And I could tell that he felt under pressure.
00:03:33.180 | And I said, no problem.
00:03:34.460 | Take your time.
00:03:35.460 | I'll tell you what, I'll just chat with a couple of other people and I'll sign the book.
00:03:38.460 | No problem.
00:03:39.460 | I'm not going anywhere.
00:03:41.420 | And chatted with the other folks and then he asked if he could just walk me to the elevator
00:03:46.700 | and then I could sign the book.
00:03:47.700 | I was like, sure.
00:03:49.380 | And he explained to me, as I walked to the elevator, how his brother had been a huge
00:03:57.200 | fan of mine and that I'd really kept his brother afloat for a long time and eventually his
00:04:04.180 | brother killed himself.
00:04:06.180 | And that they'd kept his room exactly how it was and he wanted me to sign the book so
00:04:12.740 | that he could put the book in his brother's room.
00:04:17.100 | And he asked me if I'd ever considered talking about mental health and mental health challenges
00:04:25.060 | publicly because he thought it would really help a lot of people.
00:04:29.380 | And that just, I mean, I'm feeling myself tear up right now.
00:04:34.420 | It was so crushing to hear this story.
00:04:37.460 | And totally unbeknownst to him, I had a lot of history with depressive episodes.
00:04:45.140 | And when I say near suicide, I had it on the calendar.
00:04:47.700 | I had a plan.
00:04:48.700 | I was going to kill myself.
00:04:49.700 | I knew exactly how I was going to do it.
00:04:50.700 | I knew where I was going to do it.
00:04:51.820 | I knew all of the variables that I needed to account for to get it done.
00:04:57.340 | And the only reason that didn't happen for people who don't have the context, which most
00:05:02.420 | people want, is I had tried to reserve a book at Firestone Library.
00:05:07.840 | This is at Princeton, which had something to do with suicide.
00:05:11.380 | It was like assisted suicide, like the clinician's guide to euthanasia, something like that.
00:05:17.420 | And it wasn't in.
00:05:20.180 | And I had forgotten to change my address at the registrar's office.
00:05:23.500 | I was taking a year away from school.
00:05:26.860 | And that was to focus on finishing my thesis.
00:05:28.620 | It was to try a few jobs.
00:05:30.500 | But I'd ended up in a very bad place and was feeling very isolated.
00:05:34.620 | And my friends were graduating a year ahead of me.
00:05:36.660 | And I was stuck on this thesis.
00:05:38.020 | And there's a lot of back story that I won't bore people with.
00:05:41.740 | But it got to the point where I decided, not that objectively my life is bad.
00:05:48.860 | I think this is where people who haven't experienced depression get a little confused or that it's
00:05:53.620 | hard for them to identify when they give advice to a depressed person.
00:05:57.400 | Because you might say to a depressed person like, but look, your life is so great.
00:06:00.380 | Like there's this, there's that, there's this.
00:06:02.900 | And for a lot of depressed people to say, yeah, I know.
00:06:05.700 | I look at that and I can't fix my state because I am broken.
00:06:10.220 | And if this is how I'm going to have to live forever with being this broken and dysfunctional
00:06:15.780 | and to have this internal hell that I live day by day, I just want to escape.
00:06:23.220 | It's like someone jumping out of a burning building.
00:06:25.940 | It's like, they don't want to kill themselves, but they're jumping out of a burning building.
00:06:29.920 | And so I had it on the calendar and thank God this is back when they would still send
00:06:36.860 | you a physical reminder in the mail, a little postcard that says your book is in.
00:06:41.500 | And that card went to my parents' house.
00:06:44.940 | And my mom saw it and panicked and called me.
00:06:48.580 | And I lied.
00:06:49.580 | I said it was for a friend who went to Rutgers who was doing a project on A, B, and C. But
00:06:52.300 | it was just enough to kind of snap me out of the trance and realize that killing yourself
00:06:59.100 | is like putting on a suicide vest with explosives and walking to a room of all the people you
00:07:03.860 | care the most about and blowing yourself up.
00:07:07.260 | So that snapped me out of it.
00:07:09.480 | But no one knew this.
00:07:10.780 | This guy certainly didn't know that.
00:07:13.500 | And that is when I went home and thought about it and just decided, okay, there's a chance
00:07:22.500 | if I write this, it's not certain, but there's a chance that this might help someone.
00:07:26.900 | It might prevent someone from doing what I was almost about to do.
00:07:32.380 | And so I spent months getting this post written and put it out.
00:07:37.740 | And I know for a fact it has saved minimum dozens of lives.
00:07:41.980 | And there are other things, including a very extensive list of resources.
00:07:50.240 | And so that gave me, I suppose, not a toe in the water, but sort of jumping feet first
00:07:58.180 | into the deep end and experience of being that vulnerable.
00:08:01.580 | And this was a long time ago.
00:08:02.580 | I mean, this is, I want to say at least eight to 10 years ago when I put that post out.
00:08:08.660 | And then I want to say it was just before COVID lockdown.
00:08:18.340 | I was in Costa Rica visiting a friend, I was with my girlfriend at the time, and she knew
00:08:25.260 | a secret of mine.
00:08:26.880 | And she was one of maybe two or three people who knew that I'd been sexually abused when
00:08:32.300 | I was a kid by a babysitter's son, from two to four, roughly, and routinely, all the time
00:08:40.340 | kind of thing.
00:08:41.740 | And what you're envisioning is what happened.
00:08:46.880 | So it was not good.
00:08:49.420 | And that had been compartmentalized and locked away for my whole life.
00:08:52.540 | I was like, that's in the past.
00:08:56.420 | We're focused on moving forward.
00:09:00.100 | And nothing to be fixed, nothing to fix.
00:09:03.780 | And that was my perspective on things.
00:09:08.980 | It turned out it wasn't quite that simple.
00:09:13.020 | And so I had done a lot of work, a lot of therapy, used psychedelic assist therapies
00:09:18.260 | as well, which once again, are not all upside potential.
00:09:23.480 | There are some significant risks.
00:09:27.300 | But I had come a long way.
00:09:28.940 | And my plan had always been to wait until my parents passed, because I didn't want them
00:09:33.180 | to blame themselves for this, and then to write a book.
00:09:38.500 | And there was something, though, at the time when I was having dinner with my girlfriend,
00:09:44.000 | that was dissatisfying about that plan.
00:09:47.100 | There's something about it that bothered me, and I couldn't quite put a finger on it.
00:09:49.740 | And I was talking to her about it.
00:09:51.800 | And she said, that's going to take a long time.
00:09:54.140 | She's like, have you ever thought about how many people are going to pass away, or die,
00:10:02.900 | or suffer between now and when you publish that book?
00:10:07.620 | And I thought about it, and it was at that dinner that I decided to at least record a
00:10:15.180 | podcast covering this terrain.
00:10:18.740 | I was not at all convinced that I wanted to publish it.
00:10:22.260 | I was terrified of publishing it.
00:10:25.260 | Also because it meant opening myself up to a lot of conversations, or maybe just hurtful
00:10:35.140 | commentary online.
00:10:36.140 | Who knows?
00:10:37.140 | There are a lot of idiots out there, and a lot of otherwise fine people who are idiots
00:10:41.060 | on the internet.
00:10:42.060 | So I was very hesitant, ultimately decided I didn't want to do it as a one-man show.
00:10:48.180 | I didn't want to make it a monologue.
00:10:51.300 | So I asked my friend Debbie Millman, who had been on my podcast.
00:10:56.460 | She's an amazing graphic designer and teacher, but she had unexpectedly on my podcast, based
00:11:01.980 | on some of my questions, for the first time publicly told her story about being sexually
00:11:07.420 | abused.
00:11:08.780 | And so I had leaned on her in years after that in private.
00:11:14.580 | And I asked her if she'd be willing to have a conversation with me about our respective
00:11:20.620 | journeys and what it felt like, what it looked like, what helped, what didn't help, what
00:11:26.740 | worked, what didn't, to provide at the very least a glimmer of hope for people who were
00:11:33.260 | keeping some of these dark secrets or contending with them, not knowing what to do with them.
00:11:38.740 | And we had that conversation, and I sat on it, I sat on it, I sat on it, and then I put
00:11:44.420 | it out and decided in advance that I would not look at any social media for at least
00:11:52.260 | several weeks afterwards.
00:11:54.500 | If my team saw anything on social media or got emails, I didn't want to see anything
00:11:57.980 | other than positive feedback, which is not my de facto.
00:12:01.580 | I'm usually eager to solicit constructive feedback, but in this case, I knew that my
00:12:10.180 | own position was too vulnerable.
00:12:13.100 | I didn't want to open up the possibility of destabilizing myself.
00:12:22.740 | And I put it out, and I think it's the most important podcast I've ever put out.
00:12:28.620 | So I kind of felt like my job was done from a podcasting perspective after that.
00:12:35.140 | And it's been incredibly gratifying.
00:12:39.580 | I think it has certainly helped a fair number of people.
00:12:44.100 | And it was also really hard because what I didn't anticipate was I would say of my really
00:12:51.620 | super high performing close male friends, maybe half reached out to me to tell someone
00:13:03.940 | for the first time about their extremely awful graphic firsthand experience of being sexually
00:13:09.620 | abused.
00:13:10.700 | The percentages were mind blowing.
00:13:13.740 | The actual percentages were super, super, super high, which is part of the reason I
00:13:18.700 | mentioned earlier.
00:13:19.940 | I think it's good to spend a little bit of time in those empty spaces to see am I in
00:13:27.140 | a positive energetic sense pursuing something good or am I running away from demons whipping
00:13:32.280 | my back.
00:13:34.140 | And for a lot of those guys, I'm sure it's true for a lot of women too, they find medication
00:13:45.340 | through intense focus and achievement, which is super adaptive in a lot of ways.
00:13:52.140 | But it doesn't always have lifetime reliability.
00:13:57.220 | And that's the story.
00:14:02.400 | It's impossible to hear those stories, your story, without feeling some substantial emotion.
00:14:09.140 | I'm not trying to intellectualize it.
00:14:14.380 | Both of those aspects of your history that you shared are huge.
00:14:18.860 | They really are.
00:14:19.860 | They're obviously huge for you and they're huge in terms of the positive impact in the
00:14:24.300 | world.
00:14:25.300 | And I know this because I have read the comments and I've talked to people who have listened
00:14:33.920 | to those podcasts and read those blogs and have similar or maybe different stories of
00:14:40.820 | trauma.
00:14:41.820 | But I think as with your work in the psychedelic space, as with your work in the physical augmentation
00:14:48.500 | space, whatever you want to call it, it's apparent that you're willing to be first man
00:14:54.260 | in on a lot of things and really you're sitting alone there in those moments and these categories
00:15:00.340 | of revealing trauma are, in my mind anyway, so much more substantial in terms of their
00:15:06.260 | impact, positive impact.
00:15:08.660 | And the other aspects for our body and psychedelic work, et cetera, is also tremendously impactful.
00:15:14.540 | So that's saying a lot.
00:15:15.540 | So I just want to say thank you for your bravery.
00:15:19.340 | And-
00:15:20.340 | Thanks, Andrew.
00:15:21.420 | And it's crazy because I think that a lot of people can't imagine telling a story or
00:15:29.180 | to a close friend or something, but to put it out into the world, it's huge.
00:15:34.220 | You don't know how that's going to ripple.
00:15:36.760 | And you've been a real pioneer and example for me, for Lex, for other people in revealing
00:15:43.260 | things not like that, but different.
00:15:46.140 | Peter Atiyah has recently been opening up about some serious challenges that he's had
00:15:50.460 | in his book.
00:15:52.040 | He does that on podcast.
00:15:53.040 | He's been doing it.
00:15:54.040 | So yet another category, arguably the most important category for exploration and sharing
00:16:02.020 | and thoughtful bravery, because you didn't just put it out there in any form.
00:16:06.980 | So one thing I do know by experience is there's nothing weirder than being told thank you
00:16:12.300 | for the painful thing that you did.
00:16:13.980 | So I don't want to push that too far, but I'd be remiss if I didn't, because it really
00:16:17.600 | has its impact and for doing it again here today, because so yeah, that huge thanks for
00:16:23.580 | doing that.
00:16:24.580 | Yeah.
00:16:25.580 | My, my pleasure.
00:16:26.580 | And I'll also say, you know, I got advice from a very, very experienced psychedelic
00:16:33.300 | facilitator at one point who said, take the pain and make it part of your medicine.
00:16:40.980 | And the way I think that applies here is we all experience pain.
00:16:48.860 | We all experience suffering.
00:16:51.380 | Many of us have experienced trauma of one type or another and that can consume you.
00:16:58.180 | I mean, it can consume you, but it's like fire, right?
00:17:01.540 | It can consume you, but you can also harness it and use it for different things.
00:17:06.660 | And I know for, I think it's, I'm not going to hedge, I'll say I know for a fact that
00:17:12.860 | there are people I've spoken to who are suicidal.
00:17:16.580 | And by the way, I'm not inviting everyone who's listening, if you are suicidal to reach
00:17:21.340 | out to me, because it won't work.
00:17:22.820 | I've had to disengage from that because it gets too heavy, right?
00:17:25.660 | Just to engage one-on-one with people who are suicidal, but there are resources in that
00:17:29.460 | post I mentioned, the practical thoughts on suicide.
00:17:34.460 | But let's just talk about closer friends, people you would never suspect in a million
00:17:38.860 | years who are this close to blowing their brains out.
00:17:45.060 | People folks would recognize in some cases.
00:17:49.180 | The fact that I was also there once is why they listen to me.
00:17:53.540 | Because I have, unfortunately, I'm a subject matter expert and I have credibility.
00:17:59.180 | And that actually is very redeeming.
00:18:02.220 | It provides some meaning to the suffering that I experienced.
00:18:05.060 | It's like, okay, here I am, for whatever host of reasons, I am put in this place in time
00:18:11.460 | with this person and they don't trust the input of these other people they're talking
00:18:17.940 | to because those people don't know what it's like.
00:18:21.260 | But I can look at this person in the eye and be like, oh, I know.
00:18:25.700 | And that's just a different thing.
00:18:27.740 | So you can find a way to transmute that pain into something meaningful, into a gift that
00:18:37.780 | hopefully you can share in some way.
00:18:42.260 | Not necessarily with the whole wide world, just one person.
00:18:45.940 | That's a big deal.
00:18:46.940 | One person is a big deal.
00:18:48.600 | There's a lot out there that is intended for mass consumption that gets in front of millions
00:18:52.100 | of people.
00:18:53.100 | It doesn't really impact a single person very much.
00:18:55.420 | So even if you don't have a podcast, you don't have books, if you have the ability to sit
00:18:59.620 | down with one person and really make an impact, that's actually more meaningful than most
00:19:04.060 | of the crap that gets put out there.
00:19:06.400 | So take heart.
00:19:08.660 | [Music]