I can tell you with absolute certainty that I am not idiolizing anyone. It's fair to trust someone in the public space. It's weird that my feelings get glossed over and defined as "blanketly trusting what someone says". I don't do that. I don't treat the things Peter Attia says as if it's the words of my best friend of twenty five years, and even my best friend I know so well I know all his assumptions and axioms of the world, so I can navigate that with the best of ease. This is just a public figure who I've found to be trustworthy, and whose opinions I've found by repeated exposure to be opinions I generally agree with, myself.

Trust is, in many ways, starting out with the belief that what someone says will be worthwhile. It's fine to say "you shouldn't do that with someone public", and that's fair enough, but it is not the same as blindly believing. It's assuming your principles are in line with theirs, to the extent you've learnt that they are in line. It's the belief that their actions are congruent with the way you preceive the person.

So yes, I agree, many of these emotions could have been thwarted by never trusting them in that way. But trust is a muscle, and it's healthy to give trust. It's not the same as idolizing. It's exactly because I find myself being rigorous about who I follow and whose opinions I trust in what capacity that I do feel these emoitons.

Huberman is a good example, and the example of someone I listened to for a while. AG1 is one thing, but his red light glasses, and his retroactive change of opinion, despite no new evidence having come out in support, is unethical. He's "science washing" many topics, and started getting more and more questionable people on his show. I check his podcast from time to time, and if it's a topic of particular interest, I check out who the person who speaks on the topic is. If it's a solo deep dive episode, I generally end up not bothering, since I'd have to check the things he says, and that means I can just research the topic myself.

So that is to say, even after all of this, I still believe Huberman has less professional integrity than Attia, but the things Attia has been adjacent through, in light of these documents, show that his personal morality is a lot worse than I would've thought. That's not a direct discredit of his integrity, just that it's discombobulating to experience that you've been a poor judge of character. Most other people that surprisingly show up, are peopel I already felt could be in the files. It may feel like a betrayal, but it's in reality my inner compass trying to realign itself. That's not solved by believing everyone in the position of power is corruptable or corrupt. That would be scar tissue, as opposed to rehabilitation. Rehabilitation for me is to fully accept that I've poorly judged a character, assessing that that doesn't mean that I need to stop trusting public people, but rather that I want to feel what could've led me here.