Dr. Peter Attia
speaker
5,258 appearances
36 recordings
6 series
first heard Jan 2024
last heard Jun 2025
Dr. Peter Attia’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Are you basically only able to affect that through your interaction with your direct reports and just hope that that's the infusion of culture that then trickles down? Because it's hard to go two levels below your management, and yet the people who probably need this compassion the most are people you're not even going to meet.
Yeah. The word culture, it's very misunderstood. When you think about the culture that you wanted to bring to the Gates Foundation, I'd like to understand what that was and how successful you think you were able to be. And I say that because you were in an organization where you also had very powerful other present people whose culture was also a part of the organization.
Which is kind of odd. The person who's the decision maker is sitting in the presence of the two most senior people in the company, leaving it to him to make the decision.
You were the coach.
So this brings us up to 2020. And were you at the foundation when COVID hit?
Yeah. Interesting. Let's talk a little bit about COVID. So I've talked before about this idea of the difference between science and advocacy, and I still haven't really wrapped my mind fully around it other than kind of a sense of lost opportunity with COVID. What do I mean by that?
Well, on the one level, there was so many pretty incredible things that happened with respect to the speed with which a vaccine could be developed that really made a difference in terms of mortality for a subset of the population. But a lot of that's overshadowed today by the lingering doubts, the lingering suspicions, the mistakes that were frankly made
And my fear is I'm not convinced we're better off today in terms of preparedness for a pandemic than we were in 2019, which seems like an unimaginable statement given what we've been through. Do you think I'm too pessimistic? How do you feel?
Yep. I concur with all of that. And I do wonder what it will take to restore confidence. Look, we could sit here and talk about mistakes. It might be that the medical community and the scientific community need to be more vocal about acknowledging mistakes. And I do think An enormous mistake, though it's understandable to me why it happened, because so much was happening so fast.
But I believe deep down it was an enormous mistake to be the head of science, to be the head of advocacy. I think having Dr. Fauci as being both of those hats was a cataclysmic error. And it's not about him. No human can do that. A scientist has to be an impartial observer of fact,
who is happy to change his or her mind in the presence of new information with no attachment to what has been said in the past. An advocate has to be driving policy and action, and sometimes they have to settle for the best you can do, any port in a storm. When you put those two hats on the same people, I worry that you lose all trust.
I do wish the medical community could have an open and honest discussion about that. I would say that not if, but when. We will have another pandemic. There's zero doubt in my mind.
We will absolutely have another pandemic. I hope it is decades from now, but we will. I hope somebody will remember that lesson and say, we want our chief communicator of the state of the science to be completely uninvolved in telling the public what to do, simply there to report what we know today. Today, we think masks work. You know what?
We just did a study and we realize they don't work worth a lick. Today, we believe vaccines prevent transmission. We just did a follow-up survey. They don't prevent transmission. It's okay. It's okay. I think that's a very forgivable position.
I don't have a solution to that. I mean, the great example, which is a very good example, and I don't know the solution, is in May of 2020, if you suggested that this came out of the Wuhan lab, I mean, you were kicked off social media, you were kicked off YouTube, you were in the doghouse. That was misinformation.
Well, I think almost any observer today would agree that that was actually information. But where do you draw the line? I don't have an insight. This is so far above my pay grade.
Actually, I'm glad you brought that up. I wanted to have a discussion about this. Okay, finish your point, and then I want to make a broader point about oncology.
Yeah, I think that's a great point. I'm glad you brought the ivermectin and cancer thing up. So a couple of my patients, which is a statement, I'm going to acknowledge that my patients are educated and affluent people for the most part. A couple of my patients have sent me clips of various people claiming that ivermectin is curing people with stage four cancer.
Now, because they're sending these to me in text and I'm really, really busy, I'm responding in a rather glib way, which is usually using phrases like, this is effing bullshit. But I usually follow it up a few minutes later with a text that says, happy to discuss. And usually they say, no, Peter, I just needed to know that this was nonsense.
But I also agree that I don't think people should just be taking thing on faith. And I really want to be able to offer. So I think I made a note that actually I wanted to discuss this exact example. And hopefully we'll be able to clip this particular segment so people understand why this is such a idiotic statement.
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