Charles Piller

speaker

984 appearances 4 recordings 4 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard 17 Apr

Charles Piller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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Passion Struck with John R. Miles · Alzheimer’s Research, Doctored Data, and the Human Cost | Charles Piller – EP 722 · 29 Jan 2026 podcast

The book that I wrote was written and locked down before Trump was even elected.

So the idea that I somehow am responsible for ideas that emanate from that administrative structure in the Trump administration, I think is something that I have to refute and I have done so I can

talk about that further if you're interested.

But the short story is that people of good faith and people who stick to the facts and to the real truth of my arguments, I think I welcome their criticisms.

I welcome their pushback because that's what a real debate is about.

But disingenuous attacks lies about what I do.

And in my opinion, strawman arguments are probably not that useful to the public to illuminate the issues.

My stories emerge in a variety of ways, but one of them is that I get a lot of tips because, unfortunately, there aren't that many reporters who are dedicated to investigations involving scientific issues.

I wish there were more.

There are a bunch of great reporters doing this kind of work, but shortage means that a lot of ideas come my way.

And my book, for example, and many of the articles I've written for science about Alzheimer's disease came out of that process of a tip.

But I think one of the most important things to say about how do I assess ideas and decide whether it's suitable is that my stories often involve a great degree of skepticism about other people's work, about whether they're doing work that's valid and perhaps whether it's been corrupted.

And because of that, it's incumbent on me to also have skepticism about my own ideas.

Journalists, just like scientists and almost everybody, can be subject to expectation bias.

In other words, the idea that

what we're after, the story that we think would feed our determination to get it in such a way that we might overlook details or ideas that could contradict it.

And so what I try to do is to test my thinking, to test my ideas in various ways to ensure that I'm not

going down a road that could prove to be a false idea and that could possibly be harmful and damage thinking that maybe is worthy of paying closer attention to and so i do this as a multi-step process where i test my ideas i test the ideas of others and once i'm sure about both of those things i know i've got a strong story to go forward on

Yeah, thanks, John.

I appreciate that question in part because I do admire Matthew Schrag, who is a key character in my book.

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