I’ve casually listened to Peter Attia’s podcast The Drive for years. I’m not the sort of podcast listener that has a queue that I vigilantly keep on top of, but instead it’s more of a periodic picking and choosing when I’m in the mood. Sometimes when I take a walk I open the podcast app and see if there are episodes that sound like a good listen from the ones I subscribe to: The Drive, 99% Invisible, Decoder with Nilay Patel, This American Life, Freakonomics, NPR’s Fresh Air, CBC’s Ideas, Sam Harris’ Making Sense, among a number of others. If nothing looks good I listen to great music playlists like the algorithmic 𝔇𝔢𝔞𝔡 𝔏𝔢𝔞𝔳𝔢𝔰 𝔇𝔢𝔞𝔡 𝔖𝔬𝔲𝔩𝔰.
Peter Attia is a fantastic science communicator, with a unique approach. In the current blowback to his appearance in the Epstein files, one critic talked about how she enjoyed an episode he hosted with a female researcher she respects, but then complained that he spent much of the episode “mansplaining”. Which is a pretty silly complaint because Peter’s entire method of repeating, recapping, and guiding the conversation forward is something he does with every guest. It’s what makes his podcast good, and he really seems to do a ton of homework preparing for each episode. The information/time ratio is much denser than comparable podcasts for this reason.
Attia isn’t just a Joe Rogan grunting along and saying stupid stuff occasionally.
Regardless, his emails to Epstein were vile. Thankfully I’ve never taken advice from Attia on how to be a good person, husband, father, or so on, and I imagine few others have either. His involvement with Epstein doesn’t indict his science communications. I don’t suddenly think statins are bad because Attia believes in them, and now that he’s unveiled as a bad guy therefore anything he has ever said is bad. That would be bizarre and unproductive, but it’s precisely what is happening across the space. People are literally doing an “Aha! I told you he was wrong about everything because look he wrote some gross emails to that terrible guy Epstein”.
It just demonstrates that people are more interested in going all in on cult of personality things and it becomes some weird personality thing where it’s 100% onboard or 100% against. There can’t be “this guy is a creep and I disagree with him on many things, but this is actually interesting and informative”.
Separate the art and the artist, the science from the science communicator.
I still think Kevin Spacey was fantastic in almost everything he was ever in, and his personal issues are a matter for the courts and the people involved, not the court of public opinion. Spacey was great in Glengarry Glen Ross, for instance, which I still think is a tremendous story and screenplay even if David Mamet became a weird, unhinged Trumper.
I’m a fan of loads of Tom Cruise movies, and simply do not care what cult or whatever he is engaged with, who he dates, what his sexuality is, or anything else not directly and immediately relevant to his acting in a movie. He acts real good like, so good enough for me.
None of these people are my heroes. I don’t idolize any of them. When they fail personally it just doesn’t change any prior response I’ve had to their work because it was never based upon my adoration of these people generally.