The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Anyone have thoughts on the Huberman article run by NY Magazine? He apparently was dating 5+ women simultaneously, letting each of them believe he was only dating them, and therefore it would be safe to have unprotected sex.
My first reaction is: why did he need to lie about this? He lives in the polyamory capital of the world? Surely plenty of women would be down?
On further thought, I wonder if he didn't want to do the poly thing because you'd have to go through the process of electing a #1 girlfriend that you can swap fluids with, and then for girlfriends #2-5 you have to use condoms and that's no fun.
But on even more advanced thought, perhaps this is a signal that poly is actually pretty low status? If an adored sensitive smart hot famous-ish science-y guy can't even be honest about his sexual desires and find suitable partners, again, in the Bay Area (!), that suggests poly has a very, very long road to general acceptance.
I've got a good quantity of thoughts on it, in that I've listened to a ton of Huberman stuff, bought supplements from Momentous, etc. and was sent the article by a ton of friends.
-- DeBoer wrote on it. He commented that the article feels five years out of date, in that it presents itself as a hit piece but fails to deliver the goods. At the height of #metoo it might have hurt Huberman's business, and tbh I'm considering downloading some episodes in case content disappears, but post Tara Reid it mostly gets a yawn except among fans and the bitter-end-feminists
-- This is a case where understanding Sexual Market Value and basic economics makes things a lot clearer. I mostly agree with @2rafa (as usual) on the normal ranking of male relationship states, though it needs a 6 or a 4.5 depending on the man: Never getting laid at all. What we're seeing here is largely Hubes in his 40s going from "Kinda lumpy looking Stanford professor" to "moderate internet celebrity" and that changed his dating options. He went from a guy who could get a normie girl at a 4 or a 3 on @2rafa's scale, to a guy who could get multiple internet hotties to work toward a 2 or a 1. I've never experienced anything like Huberman's level of celebrity, but his behavior largely mirrors at a larger scale my brief fuckboi phase at 18-19, when I realized that girls might actually want to sleep with me. There's a mix of suddenly feeling like a kid in a candy store, and a scarcity poverty mindset of feeling like you need to warehouse as many of these girls as you can because surely they're going to reject you any second now, a sort of sexual imposter syndrome where you can't let go of your old assessment of yourself. I've noticed this with a lot of men over my life, when they suddenly get rich or lose the weight or otherwise experience a glow-up. They fuck around, because they have the option to do so, and because it is novel and fun, and because they feel like the opportunity is fleeting.
-- This all clearly relates back to @Walterodim's post in the main thread about the urge to label fitness as fascist. They keep trying to hint darkly at Huberman's pipeline of "optimizers" and their weird habits. Given, I have a meathead tendency to want to know the bench press of everyone complaining about him, I really do think a lot of hatred towards Hubes and his Optimizers is simple jealousy. Fat out of shape slobs want the guys who wake up at 430am, meditate, lift weights, and take a cold shower to be losers for some other reason. Because to accept that Huberman is just doing things better than you are is a deep psychic injury, his actions must be evil for some unseen reason.
-- It's amazing how weaksauce their accusations of Charlatan-ry against Hubes are. Athletic Greens probably isn't as good as they say it is, but it isn't harmful either. And they didn't even touch Momentous in any detail, probably because they couldn't come up with anything. They couldn't point to any of his content that was really harmful. Either they didn't do any research, or he really is that whistle-clean. I do think that Huberman's podcast suffers from needing to put out content, though less so than most fitness influencers, with a constant stream of things you should be doing. Huberman, at least by his own account, actually does follow too many confusing protocols, claiming for example that he saunas regularly but puts an ice pack in his shorts to keep his balls chilly, which is just colossal levels of weird. Any given episode may be great, but trying to do it all at once will end in nonsense for most people.
-- There's this weird strain of thought among some extremely online femcels that a man who talks with emotional competence is actually a crypto-abuser using therapy-talk to manipulate women. I noticed this a lot on podcasts for the current season of The Bachelor, with Joey being regarded skeptically for trying to listen to girls play their Personal Trauma Cards and gas them up about how strong they are, with some women praising him and others engaging in Backlash because he's surely secretly evil. And for the most part I think what we're seeing with both Joey and Hubes is: they were being a good boyfriend, but they didn't pick you and that's upsetting because they were a good boyfriend. I got the feeling from the little we heard from these women that they would have been perfectly happy with Hubes if he had picked them.
-- Everybody, if you don't want shit like this to happen, don't commit and don't expect commitment until you get married, or at the very least are on a glide path to a definite date of marriage. Don't move in with a boy/girl-friend, for Christ's sake don't do IVF without a ring. If you like it than you should have (made him) put a ring on it. I have very limited sympathy for "cheating" in an LTR that seems to have no plans for marriage. You get what you put up with.
This does definitely sound like the mirror image of the old nice guy meme about men who get mad when they're rejected.
As it turns out, it's pretty ego-busting to be rejected, especially by someone you really like, and think might be a great match for you. It hurts. A lot. I've been there. And it's very easy to turn immediately to the ego-defense mechanism of denial: "I never liked them in the first place." I'm sorry to say that long in my past, I was there too.
I wish we all could just get along, cooperate, be kind to one another, and derive gains from trade. But I'm disappointed in how sorrow so often leads to bitterness, and bitterness to hatred. I'm reminded of that surprisingly pithy Yoda quote: "fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering."
I'm going to disagree with you that Huberman did nothing wrong. I have a strong distaste for infidelity, especially at this scale. I suppose that comes from just good-faith disagreements we might have over relationship structure. And I don't think this is jealousy. Believe me or not, I'm not all that jealous of someone who chooses not to settle down -- ultimately I prefer monogamy and I see in it a lot of profound benefits that, especially as I've considered it in recent months, far outweigh whatever benefit comes from the alternative. And with the specifics of this case, to hide so much of his life from intimate partners just doesn't sound all that appealing to me -- but hey, I really like deep pillow talk!
Sometimes I worry discussions about dating ignore the diversity of considered preferences that exist out there in the world. I'm a man who, for the balance of my life, has preferred and pursued monogamy as a major life goal. There have certainly been moments where I've doubted that preference (as avid readers may recall), but I've always come back to my strong view that being interpersonally intimate with an exclusive partner is profoundly meaningful, one of the most meaningful things we have on this earth. For me, things like sexual market value and dating strategies are means to the end that is a loving relationship. I think this kind of true relationship becomes more than the sum of its parts, where sex and commitment bring forth not only children but the intimacy, companionship, and mutual fulfillment of a life spent thinking not of "me" but "us."
What strikes me about sex-and-dating discussions nowadays is the total poverty of romance. This is the lifeblood of the poets, the essence of many of our highest values! I don't recognize in them the sort of reckless abandon, or even passionate affection, that has characterized my dating goals since the day I first fell in love in my youth. Perhaps love is just rare. But in all these discussions about body counts and marketplace values and sexual relationship priorities, I see little emphasis on the possibility, however remote, that something profoundly great, sublime even, could ever emerge from an intimate connection with one's lover. It feels like a desacralized, mechanistic, optimized, even inhuman approach to life and love. Where is the lover about which the Bard wrote, who could "see Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt"?
Maybe that's just the internet in general -- happy people don't tend to post about their happiness, but bitter people post ceaselessly about their bitterness. And I see little value placed upon that most agreeable of words, "us," and all the value in the world placed upon the darkest and most tempting: "me me me me me me me." This happens not only in people's honest assessments of their current state, but even in their assesssments of what the ideal would look like. Has anyone ever heard of a dating thread where people talk about how passionate they are about romance and how much they want to spend their lives sacrificing and caring for another person? I presume the people who feel this way get eagerly snached up by the first person to realize it.
But nevertheless I continue to believe strongly in the significance of the Third Thing, the love that unites commitment to sex and alchemizes both into something greater and more enduring, about which cummings could write, "love is the every only god."
I don't really think Huberman did nothing wrong, just nothing worth a magazine article over, and certainly not something I should become aware of on Twitter.
Though to be fair, I put a significant probability on the outcome that, if we had theoretical perfect knowledge of events, Huberman actually didn't do anything wrong by NYMag's own standards of sexual ethics and that the weak accusations against him by ex-girlfriends wouldn't stand up to scrutiny. When you write a hit piece, and the best things you can come up with are pretty soft or vague or rely on personal recollections of interested parties, then I tend to doubt pretty heavily.
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There was also the complaint that he demonized alcohol, like this advice is so absurd that it's prima facie wrong and requires no further discussion. Even still, this is unfair as Huberman says in that same podcast he continues to enjoy drinking.
I think his claim that there's a scientific consensus that the best option is zero alcohol is pretty close to prima facie wrong, but it actually merits a fair bit of a discussion on how a bunch of smart people could wind up with a position that seems pretty silly when looking at the breadth of human history and performance. For me, it raises both safetyism and the overemphasis on low-quality empiricism as issues that color quite a bit of the optimization-minded landscape.
I thought the update (from more than the Huberman camp) is
Is it even p-hacking, when it's so tricky to control for confounders here? IIRC if you just graph mortality vs outcome you get a robust "J shaped relationship", where moderate drinkers are healthier than either heavy drinkers or non-drinkers, but there are so many possible confounding variables (from the obvious "people with other reasons to worry about their health stop drinking" to "people with higher socioeconomic status are more likely to be moderate drinkers" to who knows what else) that any attempt to get a more causal result is going to necessarily end up with a bunch of arguments. It's also not entirely crazy that the effects of moderate alcohol could vary from subpopulation to subpopulation; e.g. if moderate red wine is bad for cancer risk but actually is good for heart disease risk then it might be a net mortality increase for some age/sex/athleticism levels and decrease for others.
Clearly we need an RCT where we find a few thousand moderate drinkers who aren't overly attached to the habit and have the ones who flip "heads" go cold-turkey. That's surely not going to trigger enough anti-experimentation bias to upset people, right?
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I don’t think it’s this. I think it’s that many women realize that there is a subcategory of men who pretty ruthlessly optimize every aspect of their lives to get laid and who don’t really care about any moral or ethical issues, telling the truth or whether people get hurt along the way.
What's the moral/ethical issue with optimizing for getting laid? Other than straight up lying, I can't think of anything, but lying is bad in any context.
I don’t think trying to get laid is necessarily bad, but lying to people and giving them STDs surely is, as is infidelity more generally.,
Okay, but those 3 things are not exactly what one thinks of optimizing for getting laid.
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Nothing, really.
But it makes women feel less Wonderful, less of Strong Independent #BossBabes, the thought that they’re but passive objects, NPCs or lootboxes, for which men can strategize or play the numbers game.
Courtship and romance, from the view of women generally, should be something that just happens like a magical act of God.
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Disclaimer: I don't know anything about this guy except what I've learned looking at the subreddit for a few minutes.
To me he pattern matches to the kind of guy who treats an observational study or one with dogshit controls (or, god forbid, an animal model) as something that should carry any weight (as long as it rejects the null, obviously). In some sense, I don't even blame him, because you can't put out multiple podcasts a week on for years on end about health interventions that are actually proven to work.
As for the supplements, I couldn't easily find a breakdown of micronutrients of CFUs in the product on their website, which makes me think it's bunk. It's probably not going to harm your health (unless it's got heavy metals) but spending $80 a month on a placebo is also a kind of harm. Bonus: the study they place front and center for benefits from the product is a single arm study with no control (see previous para).
As for momentous, it makes even less sense to me. AG1 at least has some special sauce. Momentous is just selling commodity supplements you can get from a million brands, except more expensive? I don't know how these companies stay in business.
Momentous' value add is supposed to be a focus on quality and purity above industry standard.
I'll offer anecdata: I bought the Tongkat Ali from them. I've used supps that claimed to have it before and noticed no difference. Using Momentos' I notice a BIG immediate difference in energy level, strength gains, and muscle/fat ratio when putting on weight. Maybe there's a cheaper source for pure stuff out there but idk where and I don't have time or energy to hunt around.
I do think he puts out quality content, but it's definitely too much content. For a normal human being, I'd encourage them to listen to one episode and follow it, don't try to do all of these things at once. His series with Andy Galpin was magisterial in terms of building a whole fitness program.
I'm glad it works for you, but tongkat ali is exactly the type of poorly studied supplement of dubious benefit that I'm talking about. If you don't miss the $50 a month then it's whatever, but for most people this is probably a waste of money.
As far as purity goes, I did not find any third party test results on their tongkat ali page, so I presume that the standards are probably about the same as other companies (otherwise they'd be trumpeting their results as other companies do).
I'm always torn on weightlifting and sports science studies. There are just so few really quality scientific studies done for weightlifting that even involves people at my pathetic level of skill. I'd love to only do what is scientifically guaranteed to work, but that just doesn't exist. Even the most basic bromides turn out to be based on pretty bad studies. I'm willing to be engage with anecdotal bro-science from people around me who are stronger than me, and guess-and-check to find what works.
Protein powder, water, sleep, healthy eating, lifting heavy weights often but not too often. There is no mystery to it. I was benching 1 rep max 350 as a 160 lb 6' dude in college using just this. Unless you're trying to win a contest you don't need to optimize. Helps to be a bit fat first and lose some weight.
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I think that's a fine approach, what gets my goat is the people who conflate that with science. Let a thousand tongkat alis bloom, but it's laughable to pretend that there's scientific backing or that these studies should be taken seriously. The venn diagram of "works" and "science based" is not a circle.
I'd love to hear an AAQC post from you on the topic. In theory, science should be able to prove anything that works, with sufficient resources and time. So it's the case that if it works, it is science that hasn't been proven yet. Which I think is where the confusion sets in.
I suppose there is some subset of people who are automatically fooled by Dr. BroScience having Dr. in front of his name, but Hubes generally does a pretty good job of going over his material and what is scientifically proven, the state of the studies. Is he perfect? Probably not.
But with everything in the Rogan-Verse, I'm reminded how profoundly stupid the advice a man got in 2004 or so happened to be. Nothing is going to be 100%, but the attempt to gather knowledge is so much more advanced. The average bro is so much more educated, and conceives knowledge as so much more important, today than in 2004. That trend is important.
I'm not sure I have an effortpost in me about this, but I'll give it some thought.
I'd disagree, science is fundamentally a process for discovering true facts. You can discover true facts via other processes, but that's not science.
It's true, but how much more do we know about e.g. tongkat ali today than 20 years ago? Probably 20 years ago no Westerner had even heard of it, but all we have now is a small handful of low quality studies. The attempt to gather knowledge is more advanced but at the same time there is so much more to gather knowledge about, and there are so many things on the fringes that we know practically nothing about.
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Eh... I was a bro in 2004, it was pretty much the same shit.
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