Does the name Peter Attia mean anything to you?
Peter Attia is an over-achiever. He’s a surgeon, a cancer doc, and he left medicine for a few years to join a Silicon Valley consulting firm. Now he’s focused on helping people live longer.
If that wasn’t enough, he also found enough spare time to run ultra-marathons and swim round trips from Lanai to Maui.
He’s done some stuff, but the thing that impresses me is his BS detector. It’s off the charts good. He belongs in the BS detector hall of fame because he walked away from what looked like the chance of a lifetime. A job with stock options that would have made him tens of millions of dollars.
Peter Attia got a phone call in 2006 about the job of Chief Medical Officer for a small startup company called Theranos. The company was starting to get famous in Silicon Valley because they claimed to have developed a black box that could take a drop of blood and quickly provide a report full of health data. Information like if the person had AIDS or if they were likely to develop Alzheimer’s. Theranos was the first of what was being called “lab-on-a-chip” devices that would make blood testing more accessible and cheaper.
Attia had lunch with Theranos founder and inventor Elizabeth Holmes to talk about the job. He was curious about the technology because there was nothing like it on the market, so he asked all kinds of questions about how the black box worked. The answers didn’t make sense to him, so Attia asked if he could see inside the box, and Holmes told him absolutely not. This was weird because he had to sign an NDA to even get in the building, but the answer was no.
Attia passed on the job because his BS meter was pegging out.
It turns out Attia was right. In 2015 a series of articles accusing Theranos of fraud were published in medical journals and the Wall Street Journal. All the bad publicity turned out to be the beginning of the end. After a few years of investigations and lawsuits, Theranos was closed in 2018.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty on multiple counts of wire fraud.
Peter Attia avoided getting caught up in one of the biggest corporate frauds of all time because he asked smart questions, listened to the answers, and paid attention to his gut when the answers didn’t make sense.
In other words, he used his BS detector.
What is a BS detector? It’s simple, you don’t believe everything you read or hear.
Instead, you do some research. You talk to men who are experts in the field. Maybe even read a book or two or three. And for sure, you don’t invest time, money, or energy in something just because it was on Facebook.
Men with great BS detectors expect to be lied to. This is one of those depressing facts of life you wish weren’t true, but the faster you accept that it is, the better off you’ll be.
When you expect to be lied to, you learn to ask “how do you know that?”. It’s the most powerful question in your arsenal. You want the answer to involve verifiable information, and you need to check out every fact or stat you hear or read.
There is so much information available now that the only reason a man should ever get conned is because he was too lazy to use his phone for research instead of watching tik tok videos.