The Hubris of Huberman

The promise and perils of our cultural obsession with intellectual tourism (Part 2), brought to you by Squarespace

“And when two men mansplain to each other, that’s called a podcast.”

-Unknown, on Tik Tok

“Despite what you may have heard, zero drinks is better than a few (even red wine) and the threshold beyond which health issues start to surface is 2 drinks per week.”

-Andrew Huberman

1. What’s missing from Andrew Huberman’s Lord of the Rings length podcasts

I’ve done a sober September every year since 2019. It’s a yearly reset and chance to take an honest look at how alcohol fits into my life as I get older. During my last sober month I was scrolling on Instagram and happened upon a friend’s story who said that a viral episode of The Huberman Lab podcast had her totally re-thinking her relationship to alcohol. I immediately devoured the episode.

Imagine my smug satisfaction as I learned that I was one step ahead of my beer quaffing friends as Huberman gave me a whopping two hours of peer-reviewed reasons why my decision to be sober was in fact empirically proven to be superior. I learned that not only does alcohol do bad things that I already knew about like disrupt my sleep and give me headaches, it also causes downstream harm to my gut health and anxiety levels. The two biggest epiphanies about booze from Huberman’s brainy buzzkill of an episode were:

• Alcohol’s first and most intense effect is to upset your digestive system. It irritates your stomach and harms your gut flora before you even feel buzzed.

• As a depressant, alcohol causes your stress to spike via cortisol once you sober up as your body desperately tries to get your mood back to equilibrium; as a result drinking basically any amount of booze increases your ambient amount of stress for days and weeks even after you’ve stopped drinking. (bolding my own)

These knowledge bombs validated some learnings and intuitions I'd been building for years about alcohol. I had long felt that the “hangxiety” of the morning after drinking was my least favorite part of being hungover. I sensed that booze was causing a lot of indigestion for me. Since our mood and gut health are so closely linked, I’d also begun to suspect that the two were interrelated.

Feeling scientifically validated like a peer reviewed study by the alcohol episode, I decided to add Huberman to my podcast rotation and see what other aspects of my life he could help me level up on. I quickly consumed episodes about exercise and athletic recovery while deep cleaning my kitchen and guess what? I think I actually hate this podcast.

My personal allergy to The Huberman Lab comes down to two main critiques: His podcasts are often a bunch of jargony ado about nothing and also embody a late capitalist self-optimization culture I’m rapidly growing to loathe.

Just as the first rule of healthcare is “do no harm,” the first rule of podcasting is “be entertaining.” I found many of Huberman’s episodes not just unenjoyable but downright unlistenable. This wasn’t just because of the marathon length, but because he and his various guests got so into the weeds that their discussions didn't feel relevant or digestible for non-scientists. He took me on very indulgent, jargon-heavy joyrides through tangents about specific levels of various hormones and biomarkers. I found myself wondering how anyone is supposed to get something out of content this dense if you don't happen to have your recent blood testing results held up next to your phone like a bingo card. He often fails to actually translate the science into terms that non-scientists can not only understand, but act on. This feels particularly painful for me as a fellow professional communicator and ironic for him given his stated goal of being a science educator.

In my view, Huberman simultaneously tends to explain a topic to death while also starving you of practical applications for the “protocol” he’s so methodically unpacking for you. He loses me very quickly in the minutiae, but the takeaway is ironically something as simple as “go to bed at a consistent time.” What you’re left with is a feeling that he’s smarter and healthier than you, but also that in his somewhat condescending auditory wheelie he’s done basically nothing to pass on any of his knowledge to you in terms you can use in your messy life outside of the hallowed halls of Stanford University. It’s really not hard to find better examples of applicable health & fitness knowledge. Hell even my gym produces a better podcast than Huberman and while their audio might not be as crisp as his black t-shirts, I’ve found their information to be 200% more useful in about 25% of the time with 300% less jargon and supplement recommendations.

2. The limits of life-hacking & the grating tone of gurus

My second, larger critique of Huberman is not of him, specifically, but how he embodies the larger trend of late capitalist self-optimization. Gurus are as old as humanity, but the rise of capitalism and mass media has certainly thrown gasoline on the fire.

By 2023, the life hacking world is far enough up its own ass to count as a colonoscopy even by Huberman’s rigorous standards. I take issue with how self-indulgent content like this perpetuates the misconception that being healthy is complicated, jargony, and expensive and therefore only something that enlightened liberals and type A tech folk can hope to achieve, only after consuming dozens of hours of self-optimization content and buying hundreds of dollars of supplements.

I also worry that Huberman, Tim Ferriss, and their intellectual ilk end up (intentionally or otherwise) creating content that’s only applicable to wealthy coastal elites. The people most likely to be able to put their precious protocols into practice have high-paying knowledge work jobs with very flexible schedules, that provide them with the disposable income to drop on supplements, boutique fitness classes, and cryotherapy & sauna sessions. This is frustrating for me not just because it’s inherently classist, but on a larger level because it ignores how most humans live outside of Silicon Valley.

Life hacking gurus don’t seem to acknowledge the fact that what’s keeping many of us from living healthier lives isn’t the fact that we don’t know we should be getting eight hours of sleep or exercising: it’s jobs, families, kids, living situations, and commitments that keep us from following through on this relatively common knowledge. Not everyone has the time, money, or tailwinds to live like they so adamantly insist we can and must.

For example, it’s been well documented that the optimum length for a commute is about 15 minutes, ideally via bike or walking. The logic here is that no commute results in zero boundaries between work and home, which can be a cognitive nightmare that wreaks havoc on your home life, as many of us learned during COVID. So a short commute gives you a built-in buffer and transition time between your home and work life and also ideally a mini burst of exercise to nourish physical & mental health. On the flip side, long commutes, especially those over 90 minutes or happening via car or multiple forms of public transit have been proven to detract from quality of life. They add stress, make it harder to regularly exercise, reduce time spent with family and friends, and cut into our sleep. A study in England found that adding 20 minutes to a commute results in the same drop in quality of life as a 19% paycut. So by 2023, the business science podcastverse has definitely proven what an optimized commute looks like.

Yet what can you actually do with this knowledge? I’d argue this life hacking stat might just be the most frustratingly inapplicable one I’ve come across in a while. Does knowing the scientifically ideal commute actually help most of us have a shorter one? Most people can’t just trot over to their boss and let them know that their favorite podcast recommends relocating the office for a shorter commute. It’s almost as absurd as me popping on down to the BART headquarters and asking them politely to build a few dozen miles of track and running a more trains so this system actually functions as a metro for a modern city. The biggest thing keeping people from the commute of their dreams is of course not their ignorance about the optimum length, but rather largely immovable constraints within their company & its remote work policies or their city and its housing prices, freeways, and public transit system. So then, who truly benefits from knowing the ideal commute length? Those who already have power to dictate their work environment: business owners, some tech entrepreneurs, digital nomads in prestigious industries, all different ways of saying privileged overwhelmingly white people who already have a lot of power and leverage economically.

If this sounds hyperbolic, consider an even more basic example: flossing. It’s been exhaustively proven that we all should floss daily and we’re usually reminded of it every time we go to the dentist. In spite of this abundantly prevalent knowledge, over half of Americans don’t floss every day, hence why our dentists won’t shut up about it. Would Huberman spending 2+ hours laboriously explaining all of the scientific benefits of flossing help persuade people to start? I highly doubt it, since the biggest things keeping stubborn anti-flossers from embracing this habit have never been scientific ignorance, but rather a lack of follow through on what they already know they should do. At this point, if you aren’t regularly flossing, it’s likely because you find it unpleasant, don’t have a routine around it, don’t feel motivated to floss, or don’t have floss consistently in your bathroom.

My point is there’s a consistent and distressingly large gap between the nuggets of life optimization being dished out by the podcast-verse and the actual reasons why we aren’t living according to this knowledge. Getting 8+ hours of high quality REM sleep isn’t possible if you have have young children. Maximizing natural sunlight isn’t helpful if you work the night shift. Yet compromise, tradeoffs, or constraints are seldom acknowledged, much less incorporated in the worldviews of people like Andrew Huberman. Taking this to its hyperbolic and hilarious conclusion, one Reddit user asked ChatGPT to create a daily schedule incorporating as many of Huberman's protocols as possible. The result was a routine that had room for about 1-2 hours of total work. The rest is basically a series of eating, napping, exercise, and meditating. What kind of independently wealthy monk do you imagine has this much free time during the work week, Andy? Does Huberman himself even live this way?

Setting hyperbole aside, there’s the real elephant in the room for Huberman, three letters he doesn’t seem to want to touch with a ten foot pole. The truth is that many of us engage in behavior we know to be unhealthy or unproductive because it’s fun. Joy or pleasure is something that folks like Huberman seem to have little interest in. While he’s taking ice baths after a perfectly calibrated 55 minute resistance training session followed by box breathing and meditation, sometimes the rest of us watch movies, eat ice cream, and (gasp) have some beers with the boys. The implication of Huberman is essentially that living in ways that aren’t scientifically validated to extend your life or improve your biomarkers is scientifically proven to be bad. Therefore engaging in this behavior brands you as a sort of secular sinner, a data-deprived fool who clearly isn’t optimizing your life properly.

Yet my real beef isn’t just that Huberman comes across as a long-winded joyless buzzkill, nor that his parade of pedantic protocols is about as palatable as a crate of raw celery; it’s that this type of content views humans as sterile lab experiments awaiting optimization instead of the complex, emotional, contradictory beings that we are. I object to Huberman not because I think he’s wrong, but because of my own cognitive dissonance that results from knowing he’s right. Frankly, spending hours cold plunging into the stoic validity of his claims does little to comfort me much less assist my own struggles as a human being trying to live a healthy, joyful, meaningful life that must balance a career, a relationship, friendships with my own physical and mental health.

As a connoisseur and producer of content I want to be crystal clear that I'm all for democratizing science knowledge. I do think that Huberman does this admirably at times, but the flip side of this is: do we really need more podcasts to tell us that sleep and hydration are important and that stress and alcohol are bad? Moreover, does understanding the scientific reasons why sleep and hydration are important and stress and alcohol are bad really help us sleep more and stress less? At what point does more articulate repackaging of things we already know become fruitless navel gazing distracting us from the real work yet to be done? What’s missing for most of us is not knowledge, but the motivation, support, and consistency to live the lives we know we’d like to be living.

3. A better theory of Huberman’s appeal

I unknowingly started writing this essay after my dad sent an email to me and my siblings pitching Huberman’s podcast to us. Unbeknownst to him, my brother and I had already listened to it and had hot takes at the ready. In the family email thread that followed, I responded with a multi-paragraph vitriolic missive whose gist you likely grasp by now. Maybe I just hate being told how to live. My sister, a professor at Penn, responded more concisely by invoking her city’s unofficial motto: Leave Philly Alone. Maybe an allergy to lifestyle advice runs in our family.

Either way, I’m willing to concede that I may have a bit too harsh on Huberman. He clearly brings up a lot of strong feelings for me. Putting my emotions aside, what’s indisputable is that his podcast is one of the most popular ones on Apple Podcasts and judging by the comments on his Youtube videos, he’s brought wisdom and joy to lots of grateful listeners. So, as was the case with Too Hot To Handle, the truth here may be that my own revulsion is just an indication that I’m not the target audience for something that loads of other people can’t get enough of.

However, that explanation didn’t feel satisfying so I decided to interrogate many of my friends about what explains Huberman’s appeal in spite of the aesthetic qualities I can’t stand. They first kindly corrected my misunderstanding that he never talks about joy. He has a whole 140 minute episode all about it, of course, which I found as joyful to consume as a low-sodium Saltine cracker. They then pointed me to some his more useful episodes and shared their honest takes about what people find appealing about this kind of content.

I now believe that the real appeal of Huberman is not the knowledge he shares, but the manner in which he shares it. Many of the takeaways of his episodes after all are things we already know we should be doing. So the draw may actually be the very thing I can’t stand; the hyper-in depth, jargon heavy, dispassionate approach to health & wellness. The medium is the message. The real appeal of listening isn’t learning something new, necessarily, but rather getting lengthy ironclad scientific validation for something you already know or suspect to be important. For people who are looking to make a change (like drink less or sleep more) or justify a habit they already practice (like rigorous resistance training, breath work, or cold exposure), Huberman gives you the confidence and satisfaction that your choices and beliefs don’t just feel good, they’re scientifically proven to be correct. This means investing time, energy, and money in these habits feels more defensible. While I neither learn new things from him nor enjoy his approach, I suspect that the appeal of Huberman isn’t really the science, but how his science makes other people feel about their lives & choices.

As I learned during my sober month, podcasts like The Huberman Lab can sometimes be great, offering the occasional epiphany that nudges me to live according to my values. However, more often than not, this content functions primarily as something to distract me from how many dishes I got dirty while making dinner. What I'm actually missing to self-actualize isn’t secrets from thought-provoking podcasts; it’s will-power, good habits, and emotional regulation. I suppose it's a both-and situation. Huberman’s pantheon of meta-analyses and scientific symposiums is good, but so too is the motivation and follow-through to put it all into action. This brings us to the billion dollar question underlying the astounding popularity of Gladwell, Freakonomics, Huberman, and TED Talks: Are all of these books, podcasts, and talks really improving our lives and world or are they just a form of intellectual masturbation for the 1%? How much of intellectual tourism is making us smarter, healthier, and happier and how much of it is just slick entertainment disguised as a new form of cultural capital? I’ll get into all that and lots more next week when I conclude the series with some hot takes about TED Talks and some musings about the limits of creating and consuming engaging intellectual content.

To be concluded in Part 3…

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Want to hear more about the scientific case against Andrew Huberman? Curious to understand all the hubbub about his dating life? Be sure to check out my follow up article: Huberman, Hubermyth.