Huberman, Hubermyth
We need to talk about the really jacked elephant in the room of these lengthy health podcasts
via u/SoftFuzzyPeach on www.reddit.com/r/HubermanLab
“Positioning a podcast as being a science communication, science education podcast and then promoting things that are actually not based on science is disingenuous at best and harmful at worst.”
-Dr. Andrea Love
“People say dumbing down is bad; talking over people is bad.”
-Andrew Huberman, Stanford PhD
“Andrew Huberman has been “outed” for having relationships with 5 different women at the same time. He’s a 48 year old man with the energy to date 5 different women. If that’s not a a ringing endorsement of his methods, I don’t know what is.”
-Francis Foster
I used to think that Andrew Huberman was a net good, but not for me. After spilling 3,000 words on his extremely popular podcast, I admitted that, while he shares useful scientific insights, they are packaged in hours of jargony filler that are a joyless chore to listen to. However, after listening to an eye-opening podcast from Unbiased Science and reading a shocking NY Magazine article I now have more substantive doubts about this man and his popular podcast.
So, as I did with Gladwell, it’s time to revisit a widely revered public intellectual and ask harder questions. A good starting point is examining the scientific reasons to be skeptical of Andrew Huberman, as outlined by the team on Unbiased Science.
A PhD doesn’t make you an authority on everything
Huberman, trained in neuroscience, specializes in ophthalmology, meaning he’s a trustworthy source on the eye-brain connection. However, you’ll notice that few of his episodes, much less his viral ones are actually about his area of research. If his podcast stuck to topics he was qualified to hold court on, it would appeal to few people. This conflict between Huberman’s actual expertise and the demands of the podcast industry has only grown over time. As his podcast has become wildly popular and profitable, he’s shifted further and further away from his area of study, giving us more free deep dives than ever about subjects he is questionably qualified to hold court on. This creates a dilemma, particularly for curious and savvy listeners. As Kerry Howley puts it in her New York Magazine exposé:
“How comfortable one feels with the science propagated on Huberman Lab depends entirely on how much leeway one is willing to give a man who expounds for multiple hours a week on subjects well outside his area of expertise. His detractors note that Huberman extrapolates wildly from limited animal studies, posits certainty where there is ambiguity and stumbles when he veers too far from his narrow realm of study, but even they will tend to admit that the podcast is an expansive, free (or, as he puts it, “zero-cost”) compendium of human knowledge.”
Huberman’s guests, intended to extend his credibility, often undermine it
Even Huberman fans will acknowledge that Huberman isn’t an expert on everything, nor does he pretend to be. Huberman’s team researches each episode outside of his wheelhouse and Huberman’s guests are all experts in their realms and share this wealth of knowledge with us. However, for a podcast all about putting science in context, Huberman’s guests often do the opposite, taking things wildly out of context, prioritizing things that are novel, shocking, or easy to act on instead of things that are necessarily true.
For example, in an episode featuring Robert Lustig, an endocrinologist famous for demonizing sugar, Lustig claims that there is no scientific reason to eat fruit. This ignores the reality that no one in real life chugs fructose syrup as the lab rats had done in the study he’s referencing; when we eat fresh fruit we get invaluable fiber and micronutrients long with the villainous fructose. This epitomizes how diving into jargony tangents about biomarkers and enzymes can actually obscure rather than clarify scientific concepts. What is the point of “reviewing the data” in such granular detail if the data being reviewed are both unhelpfully specific, ignore key context, and imply a real-life takeaway that’s actually not backed by scientific or medical consensus? Because of how myopic they are, these digressions can often lead us to the wrong conclusions.
In an episode about hormones and menopause, Sarah Gottfried similarly oversimplifies the microbiome to promote at-home testing kits. While our gut flora are indeed critical for health and wellness, asserting this and then leaping to recommending everyone get microbiome tests elides multiple middle steps that would constitute actual scientific validity. Gottfried leaves out the fact that these tests are woefully unstandardized as to what they’re measuring and how a home audience ought to interpret them. This recommendation is like referencing a study that found rats deprived of potassium have health issues and then telling everyone to buy potassium supplements. While potassium is a vital nutrient, plenty of people get it naturally from fruits and vegetables, much to the chagrin of Robert Lustig. Correctly stating something’s importance doesn’t mean that the majority of adult humans listening to your podcast must need supplements. According to Dr. Andrea Love, guests like Lustig and Gottfried are guilty of Huberman’s original sin of:
“Taking something that has a nugget of truth and exaggerating, extrapolating, or in some cases diminishing it, and often times ignoring more robust human evidence.”
In trying to distill down the science, Huberman’s guests, like Huberman himself, often end up too granular in their analysis and too general in their takeaways, conflating isolated animal or in vitro studies with sweeping, simplistic recommendations about how to live. What could be education becomes jargony obfuscation and what could be information becomes verbose misdirection.
Huberman gets the flu
We see the flaws in Huberman the podcaster clearly in his recent episode on colds and flu. In it, he manages to ignore the most effective measure to reducing the real suffering and death caused by the flu (vaccines) while spending an inordinate amount of time on supplements that have no evidence backing their efficacy.
He starts by mentioning that he never gets the flu shot because he’s not around a lot of other people since he doesn’t treat patients. I politely call bullshit on someone who appears to teach seven different neurobiology classes at Stanford and definitely goes to the gym saying he isn’t exposed to a lot of people who might have colds and flu. I’ll also concede that these are personal nitpicks and admit that I myself didn’t get the flu shot regularly until COVID made it clear how beneficial individual vaccination is to public health.
However, I don’t have millions of podcast listeners and he does. When given the chance to lean into the science of vaccines, Huberman hedged his language in a way that throws red meat to the libertarian anti-vax crowd while turning the cold shoulder to the doctors, elderly, and immunocompromised people for whom the flu is serious and deadly business. As Dr. Andrea Love puts it:
“He undermined the efficacy of the science based measures, specifically vaccination, which is integral to reducing the morbidity and mortality of flu. He called them “so called flu shots,” first of all so you’re basically alluding to your listeners that they’re not real vaccines.”
It’s frustrating that he frames his individual choice as the scientifically justifiable thing to do when the science suggests the exact opposite. Equally vexing is his decision to spend the rest of the episode discussing supplements that don’t have nearly the efficacy of vaccines.
So why is Huberman so revered despite these issues?
The phrase “Stanford PhD”
Huberman is the beneficiary of the peculiar inverse of anti-intellectualism. If anti-intellectuals dismiss anything that comes from academics for fear of ivory tower liberal bias, Huberman’s boosters will believe anything he says on his podcast because he has “Standford PhD” next to his name. This overlooks the fact that even very smart doctors and health experts are not qualified to speak on every topic and the sadder truth that having a prestigious degree is no guarantee that you’re not also a quack. Let’s not forget that Dr. Oz was a respected cardiovascular surgeon who taught at Columbia. Expertise is a complicated thing. Even prestigious degrees from elite universities aren’t permanent signifiers of universal knowledge. Credibility is not a one and done certification of wisdom, but rather something that must be continually demonstrated and proven.
Jargon jazz
Huberman further entrenches his credibility via a word salad of science buzzwords whenever he speaks. However the irony of his reliance on jargon is that what’s meant to demonstrate his knowledge to the lay audience reveals his limits to anyone with a medical science background. In other words, Huberman is exploiting his audience’s scientific ignorance as much as he claims to be addressing it via these long-winded podcasts. Dr. Andrea Love elaborates that:
“It sounds like they’re doing these really thorough comprehensive summaries of the totality of evidence, but in reality they’re just throwing out unrelated enzymes or chemicals in a given pathway and when you actually look at what they’re citing, they’re referencing a single animal study, a genetically modified mouse model. But for the general public they hear all these fancy words and they’re like ‘wow they really dug into the data.’” Again it’s this marketing, it’s creating this air of legitimacy so that people will buy in to what they’re telling them.”
The jacked elephant in the room
In addition to being given a lot of slack from his listeners because of where he went to school, we can’t overlook how much Huberman being a muscular white man with a deep voice boosts his credibility. Simply put, he embodies what our society assumes medical expertise and personal health should look and sound like. It’s hard to assess the counterfactual, but I strongly suspect that if Huberman were a woman or a person of color, his/her every post would be nitpicked to death by contrarian white people on the internet. Instead, Huberman is given a huge amount of slack even when he and his guests do not deserve it.
The false dichotomy between Big Pharma and Big Supplement
Like many wealthy white men with podcasts, Huberman's content reflects a noticeable libertarian attitude. This is especially prevalent in his guests, who often trade in a “do your own research, get your own tests” approach that implies that medical science is either hiding things from you or deliberately sickening you. This kind of insider-outsider framing is compelling as it appeals to our tribal instincts and confirms our suspicions about the corporate healthcare system, but is it really the most useful way to look at these issues?
I have my own enormous grudges with the healthcare industry, starting with how inaccessible and expensive it is and how it often neglects holistic maintenance to focus on acute crisis intervention. Pharmaceutical drug companies and insurance behemoths are indeed making record profits while millions of Americans get sick and die from preventable and curable diseases.
However, the irony of Huberman and his guests’ bias against pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines and towards supplements and microbiome tests is essentially trading one type of pill or test for a slightly less expensive pill or test. This is still medicine as defined by what pills you’re taking, not how inherently healthy you are. It also plays right into the hand of the wellness industry, which is far from an underdog or outsider approach to healthcare at this point now that it’s become a multi-trillion dollar industry.
Now Huberman will be the first to say that to keep his scientific knowledge free he has to have sponsors like Athletic Greens and LMNT electrolytes. It’s simply the cost of doing business. However, the risk here is that that uncritical or overly zealous listeners will begin to assume that Huberman’s individualistic life-hacking approach to health care is equivalent or even superior to the advice and services of actual doctors.
The opinionated white man with a podcast about everything problem
Zooming out, I’d describe the problems Unbiased Science identifies as pinhole leaks that won’t sink Huberman but will cause his credibility to become waterlogged over time. They also aren’t unique to him, they’re just as prevalent in any other interview based lifestyle optimization content from Tim Ferriss, Joe Rogan, Jocko Willink, or Jordan Peterson. Perhaps podcasts favor this self-optimization paradigm of health not because it is correct, but because it’s easier to explain and meshes well with the supplement industry funding all these podcasts. It’s the same reason so many of these figures end up selling their own line of supplements eventually. It’s an easy way to monetize your platform and large numbers of followers. Moreover, if we focus on understanding how and when to cold plunge or take zinc, then we get to ignore the unsexy bedrock underneath it such as sleep, diet, and exercise while also avoiding the deeply complicated layers above, which will never be as simple and immediately actionable as audiences demand.
Or, perhaps Huberman is merely a victim of his own success. Having already covered the widely agreed upon building blocks of health like sleep, exercise, and avoiding alcohol like the plague, he has to keep mining for content that people don’t know about, regardless of if it’s widely relevant or even agreed upon in the scientific community. Like the rest of the podcast industrial complex, his popularity and sponsorships mean he’s now stuck on a treadmill that requires him to constantly have novel and eye-catching things to say lest he lose his lucrative and prestigious platform as a thought leader.
The tricky nature of expertise and authority in the modern world
To be fair, you could just as easily levy my critiques against Huberman against me. The last education I completed was a BA in Sociology at Kenyon College, so my doubts about a Stanford PhD are dwarfed by Huberman’s credentials just as my trapezius muscles are by his.
I also recognize that none of us has the time, energy, or resources necessary to fully mine the scientific data and discourse and assemble the kind of nuanced takeaways that would be immune from my style of drive-by Substack critique. Science is complex and constantly evolving and scientists seldom say things in the simple, un-caveated terms so many of us are seeking. This is the very reason that we flock to the Hubermans of the world.
I returned to this topic reluctantly because it’s become clear to me that Huberman’s meteoric rise and glaring shortcomings represent a trend I really care about that’s much bigger than him: our insatiable desire to find authorities to speak simply and compellingly about our complex world, despite the fact that no human being is going to be able to do that to the degree we want without bending the truth or fabricating it. As I covered in my Gladwell trilogy, the popularity of pop science books and podcasts says as much about us as it does about the (sadly almost always) men it elevates. On some level we all crave authority, simplicity, and story more than we claim to crave the truth.
The HuberMAN behind it all
I was ready to leave it here and share my usual “relax, it’s complicated” cute concluding paragraph until my friend Jennifer texted me a New York Magazine article that threw me a real curve ball. In it, Kerry Howley reveals that behind the stoic, articulate, high-achieving persona he performs on his podcast, Andrew Huberman’s personal life is defined by deception, anger, and manipulation of women. Specifically:
Andrew Huberman has lived a double life for years, dating five different women at the same time while leading each of them to believe that they were romantically and sexually exclusive. When confronted with his lies directly, Huberman hid behind therapy language platitudes while doing little to stop cheating on his partners or be more honest.
The women Andrew Huberman dated and lied to have since stayed in touch and formed a support group to piece together his lies and process their experiences.
The image of Huberman as a working scientist is a stretch at best since he lives in Los Angeles and his physical lab at Stanford is barely used by a coterie of unsupervised postdocs.
I nearly didn’t include any of this because of 11th hour wrinkles it introduces into the argument I originally planned to make. However, it felt negligent to leave it out entirely because since its publication in late March, the NY Magazine piece has been a divisive bombshell. Some have dismissed the article as a hit piece, arguing that Huberman’s personal life is irrelevant to his work as a scientist and podcaster. Others seem ready to cancel him yesterday. On Instagram, the responses range from defenders:
“I stand with Huberman. Nymag is disgusting for that article. I don’t care what someone does in their private life. I listen to this podcast for valuable tools to level up my health. Huberman doesn’t give relationship advice and that’s not what people go to him for.”
To scathing attacks:
“Being healthy includes respecting others and others bodies, which this man doesn’t. The amount of people who preach against mind control and psychopathy who are eagerly enabling it in this particular case is completely mind-boggling to me. Where there’s smoke there’s fire. And true health includes integrity. There’s nothing healthy or acceptable about this man’s behavior.”
Regardless of what you think of the allegations, they raise thorny questions about separating content from the creator. Is the personal life of a lifestyle guru relevant context to the polished lifestyle optimization protocols he’s built his brand around? It depends who you ask. As Howley puts it:
“There is an argument to be made that it does not matter how a helpful podcaster conducts himself outside of the studio. A man unable to constrain his urges may still preach dopaminergic control to others.”
My take is that Huberman’s indiscretions don’t merit banishing him, but certainly do paint a picture of a narcissistic, selfish person who seems to lack empathy and self-control. It’s ironic and revealing that a man who made his name lecturing about overcoming the dangers of dopamine-seeking behaviors like lust through discipline and elaborate routines turned out to have created disciplined and elaborate routines around to lying to women so that he could indulge in his own lust. Perhaps part of why he had so much to say about mastering neurological urges via science is because this is what he personally struggled with the most. Write what you know, as they say. While I’m reluctant to draw too many conclusions from the messy love life of a neuroscientist I don’t know personally, the main thing I learned is how Huberman’s driving motivator, control, is a double edged sword. For all his intelligence, he failed to see how trying to control his workouts or productivity was categorically different from trying to control five different adult women. Ultimately, other people are not things to be optimized, a quote I would happily pay to put on a billboard by Highway 101.
I’m glad Huberman appears to be human after all because to be honest, his incredible self-discipline always made me feel insecure. There’s a bizarre satisfaction I feel when learning that someone who seemed to good to be true indeed was, followed by a sinking feeling that my flaws and inconsistencies would look pretty terrible under a microscope, especially if a magazine reporter spent weeks digging into them. I feel bad for the women he manipulated, sad that narcissistic white men get away with so much, and am extra reluctant to look to him for advice for how to structure my life given so much of his was built on lies.
My personal protocol for digesting all of this
Even after spending too much time stewing in all of the flaws with Huberman the podcaster and Huberman the person, I don’t think anyone should cancel or even necessarily stop listening to him. We should, however, start by acknowledging that all people are flawed and we put imperfect podcasters on pedestals at our own risk.
There are some for whom Huberman’s personal failings automatically discredit him. I suspect how eager you are to walk away from him depends on how much you enjoyed his content to begin with, how eager you are to see Silicon Valley’s alpha male idols taken down a peg, and if you think an influencer’s personal life matters to the advice they share and the people they influence.
For me, this news reminds me of the importance of trying out “both/and” frameworks. Huberman can both be an overextended, flakey, womanizer disoriented by his meteoric rise and also share useful health tidbits with a grateful audience of millions. Exercise and sunlight can be critical for our physical health and being honest with our partners can be critical for our emotional health. You can learn useful things from someone and they can still behave in a way you find questionable or even reprehensible.
If you’re still open to listening to lengthy scientific mansplanations from someone accused of being dishonest and manipulative to women, then you still need to confront the two seemingly contradictory truths underlying the larger questions he brings up for all of us.
The first is that science and medicine are often more complex and less generalizable than we would like. Those claiming that it isn’t are often trying to sell us something at the expense of the nuanced and messy truth.
The second is that the foundation of health is usually much simpler than the media, fitness, and wellness industry would have us believe. If you knit together the overlapping takeaways from everyone from Michael Pollan to Andrew Huberman, the wisdom of the Blue Zones to the teachings of a good Crossfit coach, it’s comically basic stuff we’ve all heard since childhood: exercise regularly, eat real food, get enough sleep, minimize stress, don’t binge drink, don’t smoke, and spend quality time outside with your friends. That’s it. At this point, literally no one disputes that these things are the keys to health and wellness.
So why do we have to keep re-litigating all this via podcasts and books, re-complicating and distilling it back down over and over again, recycling this common knowledge like Kevin Costner recycling his urine in the curious opening shot of Waterworld?
We crave for health to be simple but refuse to actually let it be.
One cynical interpretation is that consensus is boring and hard to exploit for profit, while controversy is endlessly debatable and lucrative.
It’s just as apparent that our society has a virtually inexhaustible appetite to listen to jacked wealthy white men interview each other endlessly on each other’s podcasts, constantly recirculating the same secrets to being jacked, healthy, and wealthy.
Perhaps the solution is for me is to stop complaining, bulk up, and start a podcast.
Until then, I remain slightly perplexed and frustrated by all this noise, while acknowledging that the intersection of science and the media has always been, will always be, should always be, a noisy affair.
All I can offer is that the most valuable trait any of us can have in the face of all this overwhelming chatter is the ability to sift through and aggregate quality sources, the wisdom to not over-rely on any one guru, and the media and scientific literacy to call bullshit when necessary. The rest is entirely up to you.
As Huberman said in an interview about his critics:
“Do as you will, but know what you’re doing.”
This is sound advice, though I can’t help but wonder if he’s now wishing he’d followed it sooner.
I want to hear your thoughts about The Huberman Lab, separating art from the artist, and scientific expertise.
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