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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 He commented that the article feels five years out of date, in that it presents itself as a hit piece but fails to deliver the goods.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.
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.
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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