welcome back suckers. finishing this at 5:43 am because i simply must blog...this has been a draft for like two weeks....

updates: i pay $9/month for this blog now. I cancelled my astrology substack subscription to balance things out. I guess the plan is write well enough and enough in general to eventually sucker some people into paying for this. Not you though, I love you.

Things I Have Been Watching:

this is so sick. this woman is a bowling monk.

lmao. this is the dream, to be paid to host a panel discussion like this

please watch Daniel Hentschel

Things I Have Been Reading:

"What does seem certain is that in his adolescence, Andrew became a regular consumer of talk therapy. In therapy, one learns to tell stories about one’s experience. A story one could tell is: I overcame immense odds to be where I am. Another is: The son of a Stanford professor, born at Stanford Hospital, grows up to be a Stanford professor."

Who is Kerry Howley? She is one of America's tip-top writers of the day and accordingly, one of its heroes. I loved every page of her book Bottom’s Up and the Devil Laughs about Reality Winner (another of our nation's heroic figures). This story about Huberman is a dissection of the man and his invention of himself that Howley (assisted by Amelia Schonbeck and Laura Thompson) is uniquely suited to parse through. Who is the Huberman?

Howley is five years younger than Huberman. She was, in 1999, the valedictorian at Academy of Our Lady of Mercy-Lauralton Hall (the oldest all-girls Catholic prep school in Connecticut) located in the tony New Haven suburb of Milford, one of America's best places to live. Other valedictorians named in the Hartford Courant that year went on to U.S. Attorney-ships or become professors. Howley went to Georgetown and on to Iowa for its vaunted MFA - pretty much knocking it out of the park for a smart kid who likes to write. She is thus by no means a stranger to success and optimization and conforming enough with the gatekeepers of power to squeeze into the rooms you want to be in. She is also someone who by virtue of her great work, over time, has ascended to gatekeeper herself (the Iowa MFA grad returned to be an Iowa MFA professor).

Howley's high school Wikipedia page notable alumni section's contents consist of one name: Rosa DeLauro, U.S. Representative for Connecticut. Howley is not mentioned. Howley, as best I can find, has not spoken publicly about her childhood or adolescence.

On the flip side, Huberman attended Gunn High School in Palo Alto (33 Notable Alumni listed on Wikipedia) before switching to Palo Alto High School (too many notable alumni to count). He was not a valedictorian. You don't need to be to make it up out of Palo Alto. As Howley recounts in the article, Huberman has told his origin story many times. He was no golden boy. Child of a messy divorce, he roamed free from the hyper competitive suburbs of Palo Alto into the rougher skateboarding scene in San Francisco and back. He says he was sent to one of those horrible wayward teen camps for a month for skipping school. He has said kids killed themselves while he was there. Gunn's reputation for suicides among its students (acquired after a string in 2009, long after he attended) has been brought up in interviews with him. Huberman says therapy and exercise saved him from this period in his life. Working out, going to therapy, and studying science gave him the power to take control over his life and become the Stanford professor superhero ripped guy you can trust.

Before any millions of listeners podcast, Huberman was a research scientist at Stanford. This is no small feat. His path to Stanford parallels the work Howley must have done to write her way in Georgetown and on to Iowa (and on a similar pace, from Kindergarten to grad school). One difference, Huberman had a Stanford professor pop-pop to show him the way. Howley points at the obvious: however hard the Huberman family's breakup was on Lil Hub, he still came from a tremendously over-resourced place and reached the very same treetops as his father.

And so what is a Huberman to do, then? Despite all the adversity, here we are, we have made it. The lab at Stanford. The place in the Bay. The body in firm shape, the mind sharp. When you have completed optimizing yourself, what is left to optimize? One answer would be: Stay humble, you are always far from finished optimizing yourself, there are always higher goals to push for, pressing research to be done, maybe personal goals like building a family or community of friends that you can optimize yourself further to prepare for.

Another answer: You are so far ahead of everyone else, turn out to the world around you and the people who are in it, starting with the ones closest to you, and start optimizing them. Start a podcast and spread your gospel and optimize the masses (maybe they will stop being such disgusting slobs). Start dating so you can make children to optimize, and optimize them in ways you never had the chance to be optimized in. I mean, people need this help! They are crying out for it. They eat it up in 3 hour podcasts on the way to, during, and after work. Every smart person seems to be obsessed with squeaking more good outputs from less good inputs, and Huberman knows how they can!

The article details Huberman's attempt to optimize his love life by undertaking relationships with multiple women, all kept secret from each other, for years. It's very clear he knew what he was doing was unbelievably shitty to the women, his partner in particular. But this abuse of others made his own life very optimal. Howley makes it clear that Huberman's obsessive optimizing of his own life spilled out into, and was used to justify, controlling and abusive behavior towards the people around him.

I bow in awe of Howley's writing and reporting for this piece. In her entire article "optimize" is used only twice. She does such an amazing job putting the harm Huberman has done to the women he carried on with in perspective with his work. She details certain Hubermanisms she has incorporated into her life and the comments from life-changed viewers on his videos. She contrasts these with Huberman's turn from producing dubious academic research for his own gain in power and status, to jumping off that status into even more dubious podcasting (chock full of supplement ad reads), along with the truly unpleasant details of his relationships all the while.

The Huberman tale also contrasts with Howley's own story, though she does not lay it out so plain - she is a hard worker who has made her bones off of her good work (without having to sell out and hock supplements), and without any stories of her harming people directly and personally over a period of years coming out. She made choices - to focus on her craft over her personal narrative and brand, and to not harm other people in pursuit of her goals. Huberman made choices too, including how to respond to this report (denial), and now he's made this gross messy bed for himself to lie in.

Unfortunately for us all, as every asshole with a successful podcast/etc can tell you, a loyal audience is hard to lose. So we are stuck with Huberman and Hubermanites for however long he decides to keep milking his audience for money, now with the added bonus of the right-wing anti-women fervor (because there was not enough of that in science) these accusations (and Huberman's denials) will drum up among the sleaze.

"But if children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty, which is a drastic biological upheaval in its own right. Yet we let this happen every day — and not without casualties. I am not speaking of suicide; I am speaking of the many opponents of trans rights who observe with horror that they too might have transitioned given the chance, so intensely did they hate being teenage girls. I do not know if they regret their biology today. I do suspect they regret that they never got to choose it."

I highlight this paragraph because I have seen people who want to brush off this article highlight this point as something that must be obviously wrong, but I agree with Long Chu's argument. Children inform themselves as best they can and forge onward bravely into the biological unknowns of puberty already, why would informing them more and giving them more control be bad? Why should we doom all children who feel deeply compelled to stop their puberty to puberty, is it only because others were doomed before?

"On August 12, 1988, Public Enemy became the first rap group to perform at Rikers Island, a minimum-security jail located in the East River between Queens and the Bronx. Rikers was, and remains, no stranger to hip hop; former prisoners have included Slick Rick, Lil Wayne and Ol’ Dirty Bastard. But this time, a group of young black men were entering and leaving Rikers on their own clock."

A great look into a historic performance. I had a kick as a kid where I listened to Public Enemy and Dead Prez trying to understand hip hop and did not understand anything and just tried to put the pieces together for myself. This was in like 2008 when I was....11/12. I never knew about this performance, it's not on the Public Enemy Wikipedia page. I can't think of any modern comparison to this concert.

Things I Have Been Hearing

thank you flavor flav for encouraging me to make smart choices in life

this one hits i like to pretend they say "playin ur keytar"

Also all the regular podcasts: Nymphowars, Too Far, How to Write a Joke, etc etc

Things I Have Been Thinking

skipping this for now, no thoughts. there were going to be thoughts on mortality, fortune building, and end of life palliative care and how it all ends the same for us, why don't rich people seem to care. i also had planned a blurb about real estate doomers and boat dealers (they should pay more taxes and laugh less loud on their ways to the bank) but i don't have much to say right now. will revisit.

the blog....the blog.....

bowling, tim dillon, dan hentschel, howley on huberman, the right to change sex, public enemy at rikers island, and more!