Huberman Live
We live in a funny time where a person can start a podcast, build an audience, and parlay that audience into a live event. This progression of a platform is no longer reserved for musicians. Podcasters can now hold live events too. When you’re a kid, you listen to a band’s album and, if you’re lucky enough, go see them in concert. As an old man, you listen to a podcast and go see them talk live.
Recently, I saw Andrew Huberman, a Stanford neurobiology professor turned podcaster, give a live talk at The Wiltern. My wife, a regular listener of his podcast, suggested that we go see him talk live. It was a special date night where we listened to nerdy talk about biology and neuroscience. As a connoisseur of brainy podcasts from the likes of Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, and Russ Roberts, I was certainly game for a few hours of stimulating science talk.
The live format allowed Huberman to thread a theme through the concepts and practices he often discusses on his podcast, something he said he couldn’t really do on the podcast. If you’ve ever listened to one of his episodes, you know he takes a subject and goes deep, which makes it hard to thread a theme through a handful of topics at the 30,000-foot level.
Just like a rock concert is more enjoyable when you know the songs and words (that you embarrassingly lip-sync), the best experience may be going into the Huberman event with some foundational knowledge of what he talks about. He doesn’t spend a lot of time rehashing those topics. He assumes you know. You don’t ever really want to hear a song performed exactly the same way as the recording (if you do, you may be missing the point, and you would have loved Milli Vanilli). I suspect you wouldn’t pay a bunch of money to hear a lecture unless you’re familiar with the topics.
The theme for the evening was the push and pull, which he referred to as a seesaw, between various parts of the biological and neurological systems. Your job is to find the hinge that balances out the seesaw so that it doesn’t tip too much one way or the other. We often forget that a good thing can be taken to extremes and that a balanced approach is best. The hinge is the tool that helps balance it out.
If you’re a “lifelong learner,” engage in the act of learning. Attending lectures is one way to do this. We don’t have to be stuck behind a screen or plugged into a podcast. A live talk also has humor and laughter you don’t get from a podcast. He’s actually pretty funny, and that’s sometimes hard to get across when you’re trying to stay on point during a podcast.
