Early Saturday morning, people began DM’ing me links to Peter Attia’s appearance in the Epstein Files. If you haven’t been following, from 2015-2019, Attia both feverishly pursued and maintained a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein—and some of the emails are vile. (Also prominently in the Epstein Files: Deepak Chopra.)

People are DM’ing me links because in February 2022, before the New York Magazine story called “Andrew Huberman’s Mechanisms of Control” came out, which discussed Huberman’s non-operational lab and his contemporaneous relationships with a whole bunch of women who all thought they were dating him exclusively, I wrote a Substack called “Ending the Manel.” My newsletter was about the preposterously low female guesting rates on many prominent podcasts. I chose shows where I knew this would be particularly shocking, so I didn’t audit Joe Rogan—I audited Huberman, Attia, Tim Ferriss, and Sam Harris, though there are many others with the same poor female-to-male guest ratios. At that point, Huberman had interviewed eight women total; Attia wasn’t doing much better, with a rate of about 10-11%. (Weirdly, I recently felt called to go back and look to see if anything has improved; it hasn’t.)

That post took off and I wrote some follow-ups, which are all relevant to this unfolding story as well. They are: “The Perception—and Reality—of Scarcity,” “Who Gets to Be an Expert?,” “The Achilles Heel of Women.” The second most relevant is the final piece of the series, which I published in the aftermath of the Huberman piece in New York Magazine. It’s called “One Thing We Need to Learn,” and it’s about the way we rush to defend these guys because of our own anxiety about admiring them. (In the case of Huberman, we saw attempted take downs of the women and the writer, who also happened to be a woman.)

So back to the Attia drama.

In response to his presence in the files, Attia sent an email to his team and patients/clients (which he posted on X on Monday), in which he expresses remorse and humiliation, though it gets about…5% there? The email is full of self-justifications: You can tell that he is lying to himself and that he is working really hard to restore internal consonance with who he professes to be. (For more on this, tune in to my episode with Carol Tavris on cognitive dissonance and self-justification: “The Self-Justification Trap.” It’s a great explainer on the rampant hypocrisy that we see throughout culture.)

Attia claims that he asked Epstein about the 2008 arrest for child prostitution and that Epstein minimized it (and Attia bought it); Attia describes himself as naive, wide-eyed, and new to the table—that Epstein’s wealth and proximity to other powerful people meant to him that Epstein must be a-ok. They were his rubber-stamp. As someone who prides himself on being driven by evidence…I’m sorry, but no. Self-justification, self-justification, self-justification.

Attia claims in his posted email: “In November 2018 I read the Miami Herald investigative article. I was repulsed by what I learned. Nauseated. It marked a clear and irreversible line between what I knew before and what I understood afterward. At that point, I told him directly he needed to accept responsibility for what he did.”

There is no evidence of this in the emails we’ve seen to date, only evidence of concern for Epstein’s legal woes. None for the victims. As Dr. Jennifer Gunter points out, The Miami Herald broke a story on Epstein on November 28, 2018; Attia emailed Epstein on December 4, 2018 to ask: “What is fallout from recent story?” and “Legally any change?” To which Epstein replied: “Zero.”

Internet sleuths have also linked together his emails with a confession he apparently made in his book Outlive, that when his one-month-old son stopped breathing and spent four days in the NICU, he didn’t fly home to be with his child and wife for 10 days, since he had “important meetings” in New York. As the internet sleuths sorted out based on the emails, those meetings were at Epstein’s. Attia does express contrition in his book: “Even today, just thinking about what happened, I feel nauseous about my behavior.” That said, I cannot imagine a female physician with his same platform making a similar confession in her mega bestselling book and not getting destroyed. (I haven’t read the book, though many have as it’s been on the New York Times bestseller list for 129 weeks.) This new context makes it even more monstrous, sure, but it’s wild to me that more people didn’t say: Wait, what? Something is really wrong here for someone who is supposed to be an agent of healing.

I guess what I’d offer is that Attia has been showing us who he is for a long time; that he’s a man who needs help, holds women in very low regard (both professionally and personally), and has no relationship with his own soul. In Jungian terms, he has no connection to his anima. Jung postulated that all men have an inner feminine soul (anima) and women have an inner masculine soul (animus)—we ignore, neglect, abuse, and repress these energies at our own peril. I feel very sad for him. He must feel incredibly alienated from himself. But I feel much sadder for the victims.

There are a lot of men who are disconnected from their souls, which inversely causes them to lash out, minimize, and suppress the feminine elsewhere. Their feminine is in their shadow, or blind spot, and it terrorizes them from their unconscious. They then project this fear/hatred of their own disowned feminine on the feminine in the culture, typically represented by women, as well as LGBTQIA+ folks—they project this on anything or anyone who they perceive to be “weak,” “soft,” “powerless,” and so on. Their inner feelings are reflected by their external behavior. (It’s a whole ‘nother topic but it’s fascinating to me that Trump mostly uses plasticized women to be his guard dogs: Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Karoline Leavitt, Tulsi Gabbard, and so on.)

I had mythologist Michael Meade on Pulling the Thread a week or so ago, and I would strongly urge you to go and listen to what he has to say. It’s called “How to Grow Your Soul.” We spoke at length about the manosphere and the medicine that Meade, specifically, would tender. (For those of you who are unfamiliar, Meade was part of a cultural push with Robert Bly (author of Iron John) to raise the consciousness of men back in the day. As he quipped, people would call it a men’s movement and he would counter that, “there’s already a men’s movement: It’s called Congress. In other words: If you’re on top, you don’t need a movement, you need a breakdown.”)