I can only speak for men, as I am a man, and as we’ve seen by the soaring rates of mental illness and suicide – a lot of men are fucked.
Many of us grow up, for whatever reason, without a father. We then enter an education system, dominated by female teachers.
We enter a culture that deems masculinity as toxic.
We have no roadmap for coping, and many of us feel lost. Completely rudderless.
In addition, if our father left or died, we have a huge amount of abandonment trauma to deal with – that tends to come and bite us right in the arse around our mid twenties.
Traditionally, we turn to drink or drugs. However, Prof. Huberman has given us an alternative path. Deal with your trauma by reprocessing it (ideally with journaling, therapy and yes, psychedelics), maintain a healthy lifestyle so your body works and feels much better, and optimise the mind.
Yes, that’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but for a nerdy meathead like me, it’s perfect. He’s also legitimised many of the practices that I was doing anyway. For example, I’ve been using a cold plunge since 2005-ish*, red light therapy, a SAD lamp, and meditating for many years.
*I remember doing a sport science talk at a football club about ice baths, and everyone was like “WTF are you on about”. These were commonplace in the MMA community at the time though.
Question the Message Not the Messenger
The logical fallicy “Ad Hominem” is by no means completely watertight or fool proof, but in this instance – I think it is important.
Have a healthy amount of cynicism and check the science for yourself – it’s not hard, especially with tools like consensus.app and websites like Google Scholar; and finalise the decision to do, or do not as Huberman, yourself.
If all the allegations are true, well that’s shit, and not nice. But the guy is delivering scientific information, in an entertaining and easy to digest way. Information that has improved many lives.
He’s also criticised for presenting information outside of his area of expertise. In this sense, I personally just see him as a curator of information. His expertise are clear. FFS, who do you want us to look up to? Andrew Tate?
I don’t feel like Hubermans alleged behavior has any impact on the quality of his podcast, or the benefits that it brings to the lives of many people. AG1 is a bit of a rip off though.
