Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman has become one of the most popular science podcasters in the world. His regular two- to four-hour episodes feature a dizzying assault of information on topics like physical and mental fitness, psychedelics, hair loss, brain optimization, and a host of other topics, sometimes with expert guests, while at other times he goes solo. And many of these episodes are super informative and inspirational.
And yet, at times it seems like Huberman is sacrificing quality for quantity. This week, we look at three instances in which Andrew Huberman appears to be speaking outside of his lane, or perhaps overhyping supplements for his own benefit, and we want to know what else is being sacrificed along the way. McGill Office for Science and Society science communicator, Jonathan Jarry, joins the discussion.
Show Notes
Andrew Huberman Has Supplements on the Brain
How Podcaster Andrew Huberman Got America to Care About Science
The Real-Life Diet of Andrew Huberman, Who Switches to Red Party Lights After Dark
The Huberman Effect
NEUROSCIENTIST: This Habit Makes You UGLY | Andrew Huberman
Paul Ingraham critique of Huberman
“Evidence-Based Medicine” vs Science-Based Medicine
Dave Asprey’s Use of PED’s
New York Times review of Tim Ferris’s book 4-Hour Body
Michelle Wong’s query about sunscreen crossing blood-brain barrier
Neuroscientist Asaf Weisman’s opinion on Huberman
Sports Scientist Matt Stranberg opinion on Huberman
“Health Nerd” Gideon Meyer-Katz on misrepresented “cold-plunge” paper
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Julian Walker.
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163. The Huberman Paradox.
Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman has become one of the most popular science podcasters in the world.
His regular two to four hour episodes feature a dizzying assault of information on topics like physical and mental fitness, psychedelics, hair loss, brain optimization, and a host of other topics, sometimes with expert guests while at other times he goes solo.
And many of these episodes are super informative and inspirational.
And yet, at times, it seems like Huberman is sacrificing quality for quantity.
This week, we look at three instances in which Andrew Huberman appears to be speaking outside of his lane, or perhaps over-hyping supplements for his own benefit, and we want to know what else is being sacrificed along the way.
This week, we are diving into Andrew Huberman, who's become one of the most popular podcasters in the world.
He is a neuroscientist and Stanford University School of Medicine professor.
Huberman teaches courses on neurobiology and the nervous system at the school.
He has published numerous research papers on topics like retinal ganglion cells, visual pathways, visual perception, and the visual cortex.
This was all part of his PhD work in the early aughts when he focused on how visual pathways affect our circadian rhythms.
Really interesting lane there for research for sure.
Now later, researchers at the Huberman Lab, and this is the actual lab, not to be confused with the name of his podcast, discovered how retinal degeneration occurs in early stages of glaucoma.
His lab also developed a VR platform to better understand the neural mechanisms of pathological fear and anxiety.
And indeed, anxiety is another area of research that he's published quite extensively on.
Some of that work includes studies on how breathwork affects brain states and how that impacts anxiety and sleep.
So he launched the Huberman Lab podcast in 2021 after appearing on Lex Friedman's podcast, and he also publishes the popular Neural Network newsletter.
So I want to start out this episode by saying I enjoy a fair amount of his work.
He's had great conversations with people I like and respect and have learned from.
This includes Ido Portal, who's a big influence on my movement and fitness career, Robert
Sapolsky, who is awesome, Robin Carhart-Harris and Tim Ferriss.
Huberman has recorded thoughtful podcasts on psilocybin and MDMA.
And unlike a lot of people that we cover on this podcast, he offers extensive footnotes
and often has a sense of humility about what he doesn't know.
He does exist in this certain optimization category that I don't always love.
But overall, I find him engaging, charismatic, and informative.
And when he talks about things like delaying caffeine for two hours after waking and turning on artificial lights in the morning to help with awakening process and sleep hygiene, he correlates each practice with brain function in a non-mystical way, which is very refreshing for someone who likes reading about and understanding science.
So, why cover him?
Therein lies the paradox of some of the figures we see in the broader wellness scene and specifically today, Huberman.
I often say that there are people we can agree with in certain things but then push back on others, and to me he is a perfect example of this.
I don't particularly think he's a dangerous charlatan, but I definitely question both some of the claims he makes in the name of sales and his approach on topics like beauty standards, the sort of flippant way he'll make side comments to support a broader point that he's making.
Okay, so that's all fair and balanced.
I think I'm probably the bad cop today, Derek, even though I know you also, you have plenty of criticisms of him.
I agree with a lot of the things you just said.
My main concern with Huberman's business model is the very blurred ethical boundaries around science and sales.
And I think this gives pseudoscience a patina of respectability.
And I'm pretty clear that it brings him substantial advertising dollars.
He's used his teaching talents and his academic qualifications to rapidly become a kind of biohacker kingpin, advising his mostly male listeners to follow elaborate and arduous optimization routines, which are offered for free and are backed by interesting sciency explanations, although the direct correlation sometimes gets a little lost in translation there.
Some of this may be useful, but almost none of it is actually part of his research domain.
And listeners can of course also enhance their self-improvement project by getting on any number of daily supplement regimes that he endorses for a fee, which will cost them several hundred dollars per month.
And they can only be scientifically assured to deliver very expensive urine.
Well, I'm happy to say that in over three years of doing this podcast, I think it's the first time we've used the word patina and it is an awesome word and I'm glad it's finally made its way in here.
I'll also say that one thing about Huberman and from where I come from, because I know a lot of our listeners are in the broader yoga and holistic healing spaces, which is great.
I also come from a fitness background.
I did teach yoga, but I also taught kettlebell training and I taught studio cycling and I taught Viper and all these different high-intensity formats.
People like Huberman and Ido Portal and Tim Ferriss, I don't always have to agree with everything, but I also take a lot from them.
I spend a lot of time on Instagram on Squat University's feed because they give great training tips there.
So he kind of exists in this world where I'm very interested in some of this that I think a lot of from what I see on our social media feeds that other people might not be as into these spaces as I am.
And so that's why I'm trying to approach it from a more balanced way because in one sense I very well understand gym culture.
I grew up in it.
I know it very well and I really like it despite some of the pseudoscience and the bullshit that comes with it.
But then there's the pseudoscience and the bullshit, so I think it's important to kind of unpack some of that as well.
So the initial inspiration for this points back to my sunscreen episode a few months back.
And Huberman here was just flat out wrong on a topic.
And I've seen him double and triple down on his claims since.
So sometimes, this is the thing, he's truthy without being completely truthful.
And I want to look at why that can be problematic and question why an expert in neuroscientists who is published and respected and is usually willing to ask honest questions about fields he doesn't know, Why he goes into this other side of his work and that just doesn't sit right.
And it seems to be, as you were saying, Julian, he stretches quite a bit.
So there are three domains we'll be looking at today.
Supplements, jaw strength, and to begin, a brief recap of the sunscreen incident, which started with this claim.
I remember hearing years ago, oh, there's stuff in sunscreen that'll go into your brain.
I remember someone talking like, you're crazy.
What are you talking about?
I'm a scientist.
Turns out there are certain sunscreens that have Okay, neurons 10 years after application.
I can find them in neurons like 10 years after people have used a sunscreen topically.
So I've become not paranoid about this.
I don't tend to use sunscreen.
Okay, neurons 10 years after application.
So I came across this clip thanks to Dr. Michelle Wong
who is a chemistry PhD, cosmetic chemist, and science educator.
She runs the popular channels on social media,
Lab Muffin Beauty Science.
And I was personally interested in this topic because my wife is a sunscreen devotee
and has changed my views on this topic.
Notice me getting burned many times early in our relationship.
So I slather it on regularly these days. I did a long
ride this weekend and put it on four times over 80 miles just because
I have now Michelle and my wife in my head all the time.
I reached out to her thanks to friend of the pod, Dr. Danielle Ballardo
who also writes often about sunscreen. And as
we've covered along with the anti-seed oil crowd,
there's a strong anti-sunscreen movement in wellness right now.
And I wanted to better understand the science behind it.
Now, for listeners who haven't heard about the anti-sunscreen movement, let me add that there's a weird religiosity I often hear in their arguments.
The sun is natural and therefore it cannot harm us.
Now, to be clear, Huberman doesn't make this argument, though he also says he prefers not to wear sunscreen due to the chemicals involved, as you just heard.
So, before we dive into Huberman more specifically, Michelle joined me for episode 153, which focused on a holistic understanding of sunscreen and many of the arguments we hear from wellness acolytes.
But for today, here's how she responded in that episode to Huberman's blood barrier claim.
The claim is he said people had used sunscreen, stopped using them for 10 years, and then they were finding sunscreen in people's neurons.
So I thought, well, Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist.
This is kind of his field.
So I don't see why I should doubt this.
And then I started thinking more and going, hang on.
Well, I assume it's sunscreen molecules.
And of the sunscreen molecules that would be in someone's brain, he is American.
There's only about, I think, eight common chemical sunscreens that could even get through skin and end up in the brain.
But how would anyone test this?
Because sunscreen molecules aren't just used in sunscreens.
They're also used in lots of other products like, say, hand soap.
So it's used to protect the product from UV.
It stops the color change in hand soap.
So, I mean, everyone goes to public toilets and uses hand soaps.
How could you control for that?
How could you make sure these people hadn't used a hand soap?
And then I started asking biologists.
So I'm a chemist by training.
So biology and any sort of clinical study is kind of a bit of a mystery to me, how any of that operates.
And they're like, this would be very difficult to pass through an ethical review board.
And how could you actually do this on, let's say, cadavers?
It's just not possible.
How could you make sure someone happened to stop using sunscreen 10 years before they died and their body got donated to science?
There would be a lot of logistical difficulty.
So yeah, it's just not a finding that's possible.
Now here's the thing about Michelle and her work.
She spent something like a week reaching out to other scientists before coming to a conclusion regarding Huberman's initial claim.
And she's not only addressing the chemicals on screen, but the entire scientific process of discovery necessary to make such a claim.
And yet, as I mentioned, I recently heard Huberman make the same exact claim again on another podcast.
So here you have him treated as an expert in neuroscience and therefore considered an expert in related domains, this one being cosmetic chemistry and its effects on the brain.
It seems like it should line up, given he knows a lot about what can cross the blood-brain barrier.
But as Michelle just pointed out, it doesn't add up.
And he's repeating what he probably considers a throwaway claim.
And in order to refute it, an actual chemist takes a week to reply and then goes through the complexities of the scientific process, which takes time to unpack.
By that point, Huberman and his listeners have likely moved on, having ingested the sunscreen-crosses-the-blood-brain-barrier myth, and we know all too well what happens when we take something for truth.
I find it a particularly egregious example because, as you're saying, him being a professor of neurology lends an extra dose of authority.
It's a very specific and sensational claim.
It's made without citation.
And it's specifically that molecules in some sunscreens have been found in people's brains 10 years after they stopped using them.
Like if you're going to make a claim that specific, citation should be fairly easy to provide.
Because you're, you know, it's like this is not just like a general throwaway thing.
It would be pretty easy to clear up and yet no response.
And meanwhile, I think the downstream effect is that his listeners will be hesitant to protect themselves from skin cancer because the guy that they look up to has said he doesn't wear sunscreen.
Yeah, and then if you find cases of that, I'm probably going to guess he will not take responsibility for it as many of these influencers do.
They'll just say, I'm just sharing what I know.
And then when things actually go south, they don't actually live up to their claims.
Yeah, the thing he repeats a lot, as you know, is that I'm not a medical doctor.
I'm not prescribing anything.
I'm a professor who is merely professing.
Well, it fits into a pattern that I've noticed with him.
He regularly goes off the cuff on other people's podcasts, stating things that ultimately don't matter to his own work or benefit him in any way.
It's not like he's selling a non-blood barrier crossing sunscreen.
Like Andrew Wakefield did when he was railing against the MMR vaccine was taking out patents on vaccines.
So he's not that.
And I'll return to that idea in the last part of this episode when it comes to jaw strength.
But now I do want to flag what is probably his most problematic aspect and what he probably
does, it seems, monetize, which is supplements.
So here in this world, there's a direct conflict of interest because he positions himself as
a science educator, yet he appears to stretch that term quite a bit to appease his sponsors,
which often include supplements makers.
And I know we've covered this before, but as podcasters ourselves, we have a similar model as Andrew Huberman here on Conspiratuality.
We have a Patreon where people get access to ad-free episodes and bonus content.
We have an ad agency, and we have sponsorships and trade deals.
It's part of how you survive doing this work that the broader podcasting world does, and we are part of that, and I don't begrudge him any of that.
But my own red flag flies wildly when science and supplements are mixed.
In fact, our ad agency recently offered us a potential partnership with a supplements company and I immediately said no because I can't spend my time criticizing supplements but then actually monetize them as if I'm saying that they actually work.
I mean, look, this is the type of criticism we get from time to time.
I think that figuring out how to get paid to do podcasts is not a sin in and of itself.
It's just like, this is my hobby and now it's become my job.
And isn't that, we're so fortunate, but it also takes a lot of work.
It's legitimate work.
And so obviously we are part of that economy and you know, we, yeah, we have people running ads for the last few months.
We are very specific about the types of ads that we want to have excluded.
And we're actually continuously working with them and saying, oh, this one got through and, you know, we're not, we're not happy about endorsing this particular service.
So please, you know, discontinue.
We don't want to take money from someone who is offering that kind of product or service.
The criticism here, though, that we're making of Huberman is much more specific.
My main concern is about ethics, and I see a lot of blurred lines and misleading communication.
So Exhibit A, Huberman has a PhD in neuroscience and he directs the Huberman Lab at Stanford University.
The podcast he hosts is also called Huberman Lab.
But the podcast and the research facility have very little to do with each other.
The actual lab, as far as I can tell, seems to focus on brain injuries, neuroplasticity, vision as it relates to fear, arousal, and anxiety, and the mechanisms of anxiety, fear, and sleep.
All really good stuff.
But is the Huberman Lab podcast a platform for presenting the research from that facility?
No.
It covers an array of other topics, as you've said, including everything from building muscle to weight loss to mental performance, overcoming addiction, fitness, sauna and cold plunges for huge testosterone and HDH spikes, the benefits of ashwagandha, and on and on.
Now, perhaps this is fine.
Like, he can talk about whatever he wants to talk about, but his PhD and his academic research status Does lend an air of trustworthiness to what he frames as a mission to educate the public for free on how to improve their lives.
I was actually disappointed that Time Magazine ran an interview with him that uncritically perpetuates this man of the people PR.
He's just providing a free service because he's such a swell guy.
What he actually does is explain the exciting self-optimization implications of the new science on these topics.
But as Jonathan Jerry will point out when we hear from him in a little bit, Derek, in your great interview with him, new science is almost always thin science.
It's the optimistically suggestive science, which is cool and interesting, but it's the more data is necessary.
And we've only done this in mice and it hasn't been replicated yet science.
So it's speculative.
And Huberman will report on that kind of science and explain it and unpack it for his listeners and then pivot periodically to do endorsements for supplements that likewise have very weak supporting evidence.
Now, to be fair, he does also interview guest experts who are outside of his field, and that can be good, but it can also be misleading.
For example, one of those guests is Sarah Gottfried, who has written for Goop and who credits our friend Dr. Christiane Northrup as her mentor.
He does have a lot of legitimate scientific experts on, as I said, but those also sit alongside people like ex-Navy SEAL and Rogan favorite Jocko Willink, Who, by the way, complained on Fox & Friends about public science communicators not emphasizing diet and exercise as protection against COVID.
He also has on a variety of fitness influencers who, as you said a moment ago, I follow some of these people too.
There's some really good stuff there, but there also can be pseudoscience, especially in the more charismatic ones who figured out how to build a bit of an empire for themselves based on, you know, some method they have.
Now, all of this, of course, is entertaining, right?
We're podcasters, we create stuff that people find interesting and engaging, perhaps inspiring and entertaining.
But it does end up giving the appearance of him legitimizing science-y business models that some of these dodgy experts might have.
So what I see really with Huberman, I'm going to call biohacking 2.0.
The first generation of biohackers included people like Tim Ferriss, who I also have gotten some benefit from his work, and he's an interesting guy.
Dave Asprey, who I used to feel differently about than I do now.
Aubrey Marcus and Joe Rogan.
And then more recently, the liver king, And of course, there's a bunch of others.
And what I think biohacking 1.0 represents is a kind of charismatic layman who claims to be informed by science in order to help you to get an edge, right?
So you have, I'll go into some of these examples.
You have some like Tim Ferriss, who essentially used himself as an N of one.
Like he's just doing experiments on himself and reporting on the data
for bro science experiments around body composition, blood sugar control, and getting the best results
with the smallest amount of time commitment, which of course is really appealing.
Dave Asprey, as we know, has claimed that only his unique process delivers coffee free
for mold toxins.
And he's also made dodgy optimization assertions about the buttery keto products
he ended up branding and selling.
And the thing about Asprey is he presented his lean, middle-aged physique as proof of concept.
Be like me.
But actually, and he was honest about this to his credit, he was also on a bunch of performance enhancing pharmaceuticals, which included modafinil, thyroid meds, he has hypothyroidism, so those would have been stimulating meds that increased your metabolism, and testosterone replacement therapy.
So there's that.
Then you have Aubrey Marcus and Joe Rogan, who I would say kind of pioneered, perhaps along with Alex Jones, always good company to be with, the podcast as supplement sales platform.
They even launched their own company, as we know, Onnit, complete with product testing that they paid for themselves, as you've covered, Derek, which was then touted as scientific evidence, not replicated, not peer reviewed.
This allowed them to eventually sell their company to Unilever for hundreds of millions of dollars.
So there's a there's a tried and tested pathway here.
It's a great wealth.
And there's a theme here too, because Rogan would talk about how Onnit's branded alpha brain supplement gave him this incredible mental clarity and focus.
But there's a catch.
He was also open, again to his credit, about being on TRT.
Which will often produce, you guessed it, dear listener, better mental clarity and focus.
So just notice here that when we're talking about Rogan, this is the ultimate bro signs millionaire who works out like crazy, does frequent hot and cold therapy.
You know, he stayed with his jujitsu practice for many, many years to become a black belt, which is a hard thing to do.
He consumes expensive and carefully controlled diet and he still needed TRT to get his testosterone levels up where they needed to be just for his health.
And then there's Liver King, who, because he comes later in the story, kind of represents the next level of escalation.
He lied in every single interview about his competitive bodybuilder-level steroid use, while crediting his strongman appearance to an ancestral lifestyle based around his nine freely shared principles you could employ to enhance your masculine power.
And his bloody charade included Instagram videos of him feasting on raw organ meat, And then pitching his more sanitized freeze-dried supplement under his own label.
So look at me, I'm so manly eating these raw organs.
You don't have to do that though, just buy my supplements because you'll get the same benefits and you can be, you know, built like a brick shithouse.
Now, despite their epic success in a market demographic that they basically created for themselves, these biohacking 1.0 guys, as I'm dubbing them, were still missing something.
They didn't have the academic credentials and the research science pedigree.
So enter Andrew Huberman.
He's the latest charismatic, yoked, trusted bro science influencer.
But he has the added bonus of being a PhD Stanford professor who has his own lab.
Even though, by some accounts, he's hardly ever there.
I'm going to link in the show notes to comments by someone named John Volhen, who's a Stanford PhD student and claims that Huberman has abandoned the lab, along with many of his students who were relying on him, and that there's actually just one brilliant postdoc who has guidance from another professor that's doing all of the work that comes out of that lab, which again, is in areas that often have nothing to do with the podcast.
And this person, John Vaughan, says that Huberman can get away with this because he has tenure.
So that's a pretty bold claim.
It's listed in science writer Paul Ingraham's Criticisms of Huberman, and again, I'll link to that.
Yeah, I want to point out that Huberman lives in Los Angeles and his lab is up in Stanford, which is a six-hour drive on a regular day.
So, the idea that you'd be able to do that kind of intense research work on a regular basis is actually impossible.
So, you know, there is some speculation that due to the success of his name and his affiliation that Stanford is kind of like, okay, we'll just keep the lab going with one person.
We won't really focus on that because now you've taken the same name and you've introduced it to tens of millions of people.
and the Association of West Stanford only benefits us.
So whether or not that's true, we don't know, but it's definitely possible
because I think a six hour commute to work every day would be a bit much for people.
They would require a lot of supplements.
So look, yeah, yeah, agreed.
And that sounds like it could be a kind of a win-win, you know, compromise, a wink and a nod that both sides are doing in terms of perpetuating the association.
So the bottom line here, Huberman has a top 10 podcast.
It reaches millions of people.
We know that sponsorship deals are impressions based, so therefore he is likely bringing in massive amounts of cash.
It's not too wild of a speculation to say that.
I would argue that those sponsors are paying him to give the appearance of scientific legitimacy to their products, but we can take just one of them, Athletic Greens, which goes by AG1 these days, and as we'll hear soon, Jonathan Jarry flags this as dodgy at best, and even potentially harmful for some people, because not everyone needs to be supplementing with all of those different vitamins and minerals.
Yeah, thank you for that rundown.
It was a nice framework for understanding the ecosystem that he's coming into with his always-wearing-the-same-outfit Einstein sort of Zuckerberg sort of mentality coming in.
He definitely has his brand down, the look of everything.
That's all fine.
I'm not against any of that, but we are going to get into what I am against.
I would disentangle a little bit, and again, this is maybe just not having listened to enough of him recently, but I do find out of that list, Tim Ferriss has a little more humility than anyone else there.
I loved your N of 1 experiment, but the thing about it is because I used to listen to him a lot when he was doing all of the different exercise routines, cold plunges and everything, is that he took his N of 1 as anecdote and he was always
very honest, being like, hey, I did this for a few weeks and here's what happened.
And he'd be like, yeah, it didn't really work for me.
I expected this and this happened.
And I also appreciate his extreme philanthropic contributions to like psychedelics, for example.
So again, Ferris is definitely in that Austin crowd, but I've always felt that he has a little more respectability.
And I'm sure some listeners have heard some things where he's like, no, listen to this one, and maybe it's true.
But from my experiences, compared to someone like Dave Asprey, who is just grifting all the way down, I can still open up tools of Titan and get something from that masterful work.
Even if I don't always agree that you can do a four-hour work week.
I don't think that's really possible, unless you already have the finances in place to be able to, you know, live such a way.
Yeah, I agree with that.
And he's the only person on that list who didn't go the particular route of monetization that all of the others did.
And he's the only one who wasn't also taking PEDs and saying, this is all because of my amazing natural products.
Yeah, I've listened to This Week in Virology this past week with Dan Wilson, Debunk the Funk, and they made the great point, which has been made before, but you made it with Rogan if he's on TRT and that he's attributing his mental clarity and focus to alpha brain.
He did the same thing with ivermectin, right?
He got COVID.
He got monoclonal antibodies, which are expensive and which not everyone can get access to.
And then he's like, yeah, ivermectin worked.
I threw that in there too.
So it's a repetitive pattern with these people that they throw a cocktail of things and say,
but this was in there, so it had to have worked as well.
I don't want to put Huberman in there.
I don't know his intentions like so many of the other people.
He might believe athletic greens is really beneficial to people.
He might use it himself.
Some of the research on his downline for his show does hold up, like the idea that the Southeast Asian herb, tonkat li, might help increase testosterone levels in men.
Preliminary and importantly, early research found some benefit in some men.
But as you hinted at, those qualifiers are important.
Early research and some men.
Yet, when you go to the Huberman Lab Hormone Support Bundle page that's linked to from the Tancot Ali supplement, here's the marketing copy.
A powerful combination of three natural ingredients designed to support testosterone production, enhance energy and mood, and help the body adapt to stress.
So supplements marketing pages are weird and don't often reflect what's even on the page.
So I've noticed this, so basically we're talking about affiliate links where it's like, hey, try this out, get my code, here it is, and then the actual supplements maker will have a special page that that's how they track.
So when you scroll down that same page for the Huberman Hormone Support Bundle, you find this endorsement from him for Tongkat Ali.
It's very clear that certain collections of nutrients are useful for promoting testosterone and estrogen production in their proper ratios.
And those things are what I would call the sort of usual suspects, vitamin D, zinc, magnesium, etc.
Now, one of the three supplements in this $80 bundle contains zinc, but the rest of the page is promoting Tonkat Ali.
First of all, I'm sorry, anytime I see et cetera, it's just lazy.
You cannot put that out and expect it to be a scientific endorsement.
I see it all the time.
This morning, someone shared Luke Story's recent climate change denialism Instagram post.
And he's basically like, I don't believe in the official narrative of climate change, but I do think glyphosate and chemtrails are a problem and so on.
So, I mean, how do you take someone supposedly espousing groundbreaking science like Huberman is doing here, yet use etc.
when describing the efficacy of vitamins and minerals seriously?
Huberman also has a sponsorship with an exogenous ketone supplement maker, and here's the lead marketing copy.
For people who achieve ketosis, there's a mental state associated with it that allows the brain to function and think very clearly.
While I don't enter into ketosis frequently, I often ingest ketone IQ because of the further cognitive and physical enhancement that I experience when taking it.
I do this even when consuming non or minimally processed carbohydrates, which I do daily.
All right, so the whole point of taking exogenous ketones would be to enter ketosis, which is a metabolic state in which you're burning fat instead of glucose.
So it's a pretty weird statement to make on the page where you're trying to sell it, but it's par for the course with how Huberman discusses nutrition and supplements in general.
He leaves himself an out.
I'm promoting this product, but I'm also not quite promoting it.
The page goes on to make a number of contested claims about the daily use of ketones, but rather than breaking down every supplement Huberman promotes, I wanted to talk to longtime friend of the pod Jonathan Jerry, who's a science communicator with the McGill Office for Science and Society, whose articles I read weekly, and he's a great resource for sort of debunking a lot of science misinformation.
And in fact, if you look for criticisms of Huberman online, you're likely to first stumble across Jonathan's April article from the McGill office entitled, Andrew Huberman Has Supplements on the Brain.
That's awesome.
I would have taken it for this title episode if I had thought of it, but he got there first.
But I've linked to it in the show notes and it's well worth reading alongside our interview.
Jonathan was also recently quoted in a San Francisco Gate article about Huberman, in which the writer called him a journalist.
So that frames the joke I make that leads into the interview, just so you know, we sort of start off laughing and that's what it's about.
Jonathan was also featured in a recent More balanced Time article, but as you said, Julian, it was a bit overly promotional, but it did have some criticisms, which is great.
And that one is worth linking to as well.
But for now, here's my talk with Jonathan Jarrett.
This episode is brought to you in part by venison meat, which is the healthiest red
meat on the planet, says Andrew Huberman.
AHH!
That's amazing.
And yeah, that really does get to the heart of my criticism and my questions about what Huberman's doing.
So first off, thank you for coming on again, Jonathan.
I'm so happy to hear about your promotion to being a journalist at McGill University.
And a professor in the same week.
You're doing good work.
I mean, you're just getting degrees handed to you all of the time.
I know, it's wonderful.
But that venison comment, I'm going to keep that in because that's such a great place to start this interview.
You sent me shortly before this a page on the Maui Nui Yeah, he says it has the ideal amino acid profile for protein synthesis and repair.
healthiest red meat on the planet.
How you qualify that is beyond me.
Yeah, he says it has the ideal amino acid profile for protein synthesis and repair.
And right there is the crux of the issue.
We are in the body optimization sphere.
And when these claims are being made, you think to yourself,
well, if I'm not eating venison, is my protein synthesis and repair
sort of suboptimal?
And you start thinking about all these tiny little tweaks that you might do to your diet, to how you spend your days, to how you sleep, and you start focusing on little details that odds are have no real bearing on your life.
But they do on your wallet.
Absolutely.
And that's the heart of my criticism here.
Now, I haven't seen a lot of criticism about Huberman, but I do have a red flag when I see someone who's gaining popularity, who's saying good things.
As a neuroscientist, I really enjoyed some of his Interviews with Ido Portal, who's someone I've loved for a long time, who doesn't get a lot of press.
Robert Sapolsky, who was a big influence on me.
He goes on and he talks to these people, but then I see him on other people's podcasts and there are red flags.
But first off, your essay for McGill University was one of the first pieces of criticism I've seen specific to supplements.
What raised those red flags for you?
As part of my job as a science communicator, I'm particularly interested in the hype over dietary supplements because there is a lot of that.
I mean, we see this in the wellness space, but we also see this in the body optimization community.
And, you know, Andrew Huberman came onto my radar because, of course, whenever I'm looking for a new podcast to listen to, I look at what's trending, what's being recommended to me, and the Huberman Lab was always there.
And I was starting to get questions from readers.
Hey, have you looked into him?
You know, I'm not sure what to think of him.
And so I decided to go into that and to watch, you know, hours and hours of his podcast.
And right from the start, he was sponsored by a lot of supplement companies.
He was endorsing a lot of dietary supplements.
You were mentioning some of the good guests he's had.
I was just looking at the latest episode that he released as we're recording this, which was with the chair of ophthalmology at Stanford.
And I scanned through the whole interview and it was, from what I could see, it was a fantastic interview.
This ophthalmologist is very eloquent.
He's a very good educator.
I have some background in ophthalmology and optometry.
I worked for about four years in low vision rehabilitation research.
And a lot of what he was saying was, I mean, it was very true and it was very well explained.
But then, you know, throughout the interview, you stop and he's looking at the camera and he's endorsing these supplements.
And I'm just like, ah!
And that's the problem, which is that you have all this wonderful information that is well digested, very well explained for a non-expert audience.
And you have his standing at Stanford, which gives this imprimatur of authority, and there he is endorsing things that have very thin evidence behind them.
And that's problematic.
He has said that he hates the term biohacking, and I think that's a fair statement.
But he definitely is, as you just referenced, in the body optimization space.
And that very much sounds like a marketing term in a lot of ways.
Now, you mentioned to me, leading up to this interview, Compared to wellness, for example, body optimization is very pro-research.
So if you're with someone like Huberman who is firmly embedded in this space and is pro-research, but you point out that some of that research is very thin.
Yeah, I mean, I wrote a piece about Joe Rogan, who I would also put in the body optimization community.
You know, I wrote that he's trying to beat the lab mice to it.
And I think the same could be said of Andrew Huberman.
Whereas in wellness, you tend to have this appeal to nature, you know, let's go back to how things used to be and embracing nature.
With body optimization, it's very much, okay, what's the latest research?
What is it showing?
And can I adopt this right now to gain an edge?
So, I did look at some of the supplements that he was endorsing, Andrew Huberman, especially he did a whole episode called something like the rational, you know, sort of supplement regime that he recommends.
And to be fair, this is not the first, it's not at the top of his pyramid of recommendations.
I mean, he does give good advice on good dietary habits, on exercising enough, on getting enough quality sleep, but those things don't pay the bills, right?
And so, he does recommend a number of supplements, One of them is myoinositol.
So myoinositol is a type of sugar.
It plays different roles in the body.
And he says that there's good evidence for sleep, for anxiety, and for female fertility.
Now I looked at the evidence.
There's one trial in humans for sleep.
It was done in pregnant women.
And the two groups that were tested got also different amounts of folic acid.
So there's something else, there's not a variable in there that's not being controlled for.
And the results were not impressive.
There was a meta-analysis for its use in anxiety, which found no significant effect.
And there are, I believe, two Cochrane reviews on its impact on female fertility, which conclude very low quality research.
And this is what we often find with dietary supplements.
The studies that are done are done in very few people.
The follow-up is very short.
It concludes, you know, more studies are needed.
Sure, fine.
But then when you see somebody like Andrew Huberman, who has the standing that he has, saying there's good evidence for that, it has profound effect on this or that thing, it just does not match the quality of the evidence that is out there.
And you specifically in your article about myonositol, you write that he frames it as something that is very good for you, correct?
Exactly.
And so, there's a big discrepancy between how thin the evidence is on the ground and how he frames it when he talks about these supplements.
And it makes me wonder, you know, is this a blind spot that he has and why is it?
Is it that he is not very good at understanding the scientific literature on these types of studies?
We like to think sometimes that scientists are Vulcans, and that we're all very logical and rational when we do research.
But, you know, we all secretly want our hypothesis to be true.
And it is this constant fight when you're doing research.
I mean, I'm not doing research now, but I was involved in research before I became a science communicator.
And of course you want your hypothesis to be true.
We're all human and for whatever reason, Andrew Huberman seems to be really drawn to dietary supplements even when the evidence for them is simply not there.
One thing that's pretty fascinating that you would also mention to me is how easy it is to get a false positive in research settings and I think you have a story about your own career when you were researching from your undergrad days, is that correct?
From my grad school days, actually.
So yeah, so that's the thing.
I mean, it is very easy to find a positive study with sort of preliminary results and jump on it and say, now we should all be taking such and such a supplement.
And so, yeah, I just want to talk very briefly about this thing that happened to me.
And this is, it's a very representative example of how easy it is to find false positive results in research.
So, I was studying micro RNAs.
And so, you know, our DNA makes messenger RNA, messenger RNA makes proteins, but of course, our genes, our DNA genes are not always active.
So, they are very tightly regulated.
so that we're not they're not always cranking out proteins and one of the ways in which they're
regulated is through the use of these micro RNAs and some of these micro RNAs end up in the blood
so they're circulating. The lab that I was with when I was in grad school was interested in
knowing like could we find a signature of micro RNAs that we find in the blood of people with a
certain type of cancer that could be used as a diagnostic marker to say oh it looks like you
you have this kind of cancer based on your circulating micro RNAs.
Or as a sort of prognostic marker, so, you know, how severe is your disease and how many more months do you have to live and those types of questions.
Or could it be predictive of, well, you have the signature, so you will respond to this therapy versus that other therapy.
We drummed up this small, I believe we had four blood samples of people with this cancer versus four who didn't have it.
And that was sent out to test all the micro RNAs that were known at the time.
I believe there were 358.
That's a lot of data points.
And so we found a signature.
And so the next step, which is the next logical step, is you then have to confirm that the signature does indeed, you can still see this in a second data set, an independent data set, to make sure that your data is reproducible.
And so we got that underway, and the day that I learned that our signature was not, in fact, reproducible in that new dataset, I was presenting a poster at McGill at sort of an internal research symposium in which I was proudly showing the signature that we had found in our preliminary dataset.
I was in this Really awkward position of having to show the signature and saying, well, you know, more research is needed.
It looks promising, but who knows?
You know, it needs to be confirmed.
Knowing that morning that we had found out that this was actually nothing.
It was just, it's something that you find by chance because you are testing the levels of 358 different molecules, four versus four samples.
And so you're going to have some that are elevated in the people with the cancer and others that are down versus the healthy samples.
And so it's just, it's so easy to find these positive results when you're testing all kinds of variables.
So that's why, you know, reproducibility is so important in research.
I've read hundreds of studies covering them for publications, especially Big Think over the years.
It's very rare that I don't see more research is needed.
At what point are you comfortable extrapolating from a study that says more research is needed and saying, yes, I think this thing is applicable for what I'm saying it's for?
Supplements are beyond that because it is such, you know, researchers in general are very careful about the claims that they make.
And then it's so easy to be like, wow, this is really exciting.
I'm going to share this and I'm going to say it with the confidence that I think that this is the best venison, red meat on the planet.
At what point are you comfortable saying, no, I think this is actually valid?
If we're looking at a single study, you want that study to be as large as is possible and manageable, as rigorous as possible, so to have all kinds of blindings to make sure that people don't know what they are getting.
The people that are doing the administration of the therapy, for example, don't know who is getting the therapy, who is getting the placebo.
That the follow-up is also long enough to make sure that whatever benefits are seen are long-term and not just transient.
But it's also important to see, you know, a different research group either conducting a similar study and getting to the same result or kind of triangulating by doing a different kind of study but also having results that are concordant with what was found in the first study.
And eventually, all of this data becomes part of a systematic review and a meta-analysis where researchers will take all of the data that has been gathered on this question, they will weigh it in terms of just how rigorous it was, and they will give you an answer that is sort of the best answer that we have based on this data.
Now, there's a giant asterisk here, which is that it is easy to churn out really bad meta-analyses because, as the saying goes, And so, if the studies that go inside the meta-analysis were poorly done, which happens a lot with dietary supplements, the answer that you get at the end is completely unreliable, because you have these very, very weak studies that have results that could just be due to chance, and then you're kind of cramming them all together and summarizing what they say, but you know, they're so poor in their nature that you just can't rely on that.
But broadly speaking, that's the kind of I want to drill down on three of the things that Huberman sells that you bring up in your article and we've talked about.
have so far and it looks strong enough for me.
I want to drill down on three of the things that Huberman sells that you bring up in your
article and we've talked about.
But first, thinking large-scale about supplements, there is not a ton of verifiable claims that
lysine and B12 help canker sores.
I bring that up because every day I take those two supplements and I've had lifelong issues with canker sores and since I've gotten on that stack, I have not had one.
So from an anecdotal perspective, I've seen some research, it says it may be helpful, I've taken them, and they are obviously working for me because I used to have very bad problems with this.
I'm sure a lot of people are in similar situations where they come across things and anecdotally they help for whatever reasons.
You get to someone like an Andrew Huberman who is selling supplements that are paying him to speak favorably of them as sponsors.
How do you navigate that space as a listener between being like, wow, I've had success doing these things which aren't verifiably proven but they're working for me compared to, let's bring one into the picture here, Athletic Greens.
So, I would start by correcting you when you say that those supplements are working for you.
these claims.
Just as a listener who likes listening to him talk about neuroscience and they're being
sold this thing, how do you weigh that out?
So I would start by correcting you when you say that those supplements are working for
you.
What I would say is that you taking them is associated with an improvement in your condition.
Fair, yes.
And I'm also very careful to say that when I go see my doctor and he's giving me a new prescription and I say, you know, I've gotten better.
I still don't know if it was this particular prescription.
I mean, we'll see when this happens again.
And if there's enough of a temporal correlation, then I feel comfortable saying that it looks like, you know, this particular drug is working.
So it may sound like I'm being a little bit anally retentive, but it is a very important distinction, right?
Because we're just so conditioned to think, oh, I have this issue.
I took this thing for it.
It got better.
Therefore, it must have caused the improvement.
But you don't actually know that.
I mean, you would have to split the universe.
We're all into the multiverses now, so we have to split the universe into two.
And you would have to see what happens in the alternate reality where you don't take the supplement or the drug.
And that's why we do randomized controlled trials, is to do that without having to go through the multiverse.
I am Spider-Man though!
We're all Spider-Man, Derek.
All of us.
But you bring up Athletic Greens, yes.
I mean, they've been sponsoring everybody, it seems, these days.
It's 75 ingredients.
It's $79 American a month, I believe.
And what they're really tapping into is this anxiety of like,
am I getting everything that I need to be as healthy as I can be
and to prevent diseases, infections?
And so it's sold as health insurance in a sense, right?
It's like, well, I'm taking all of these things that I'm told are good for me.
Therefore, whatever I eat, whatever I drink, I don't have to worry about being deficient in any of these
things.
Now, here's the thing.
Most people don't need a multivitamin.
And Athletic Greens is, in part, like all the vitamins, it's basically a multivitamin and a bunch of other things.
Most of us are not vitamin deficient.
If you have a diagnosed deficiency through a blood test, for example, then your doctor will prescribe a very specific vitamin supplement.
Vitamins are not harmless.
The ones that are liposoluble, so they stain your fat, so these are A, D, E, and K.
they can accumulate. So if you take too high levels, they can actually cause damage.
So that's one point. The other point is that they also have probiotics in them,
athletic greens. And the thing about probiotics is that there's a lot of, you know, what my
colleague Timothy Caulfield has called science-ploitation, which is that you're taking
fields of research that are still in their infancy and you're bringing them to the public
before they're ready for prime time. Obviously the microbiome is very important. It's all of
the microorganisms that live inside of us and on our skin.
And, you know, we live in a kind of symbiosis with them. And there's a lot of things that we
can do to help them.
That's fine.
That's great.
And we're starting to learn more about this.
But it is like studying the Amazon rainforest.
It is massive.
And when you take a particular strain of bacteria as a probiotic, for example, it's a little bit like planting a couple of trees in the Amazon.
It probably will not make a big difference.
Again, it's being sold as health insurance, but you probably don't need these things.
There's an argument to be made that those of us who live in more northern climates, we tend to have lower amounts of vitamin D in the winter.
There's a lot of talk about, you know, should we be supplementing?
And it's quite frankly, it's a little unclear, but at least with vitamin D, they're so cheap to buy that it's, you know, it feels like it's worthy sort of investing in a vitamin D supplement during the winter, even if it doesn't do much, it doesn't cost much either.
But at $79 a month for a bunch of things that you're probably getting through your food, I'm very, very skeptical.
It is such an interesting mindset because people always think that extra is better.
It's a marketing technique.
It is.
And again, I bring this back to the concept of insurance of like, well, what if I'm deficient?
What if I'm not getting all of these things?
Might as well just accumulate as many of them as I can because it's going to make a positive difference.
But as I said, like some of these vitamins, the fat soluble ones, I mean, you can take too many of them.
So, let's look at two more.
The inside tracker you bring up, and I'm pinpointing this one because you bring up the distinction with Huberman between body optimization and wellness, but what I found really interesting about this one is that they use very wellness-oriented language in their marketing.
It measures your blood and DNA, but then their tagline is, your personal health analysis and data-driven wellness guy.
So what do you say about this product?
Yeah, I mean, you know, as I said, there is overlap with the wellness sphere for sure.
I mean, this taps into this idea of personalized medicine, tapping into the human, what we have learned about the human genome, right?
And so I see this in nutrigenomics, for example, this idea that typing your DNA will give you personalized advice on what to eat and what not to eat.
The thing about this kind of technology of like getting regular blood tests and DNA tests to get advice on weight control, on bone health, on cognition.
First of all, it comes at a very high price tag.
I believe last time I checked was $249 to $659 American dollars, depending on the package that you choose.
And to your earlier point of, you know, is more always better, more testing is not better.
In fact, there is a great campaign called Choosing Wisely, which aims to inform physicians or rather to remind physicians that they should be choosing the right tests for their patients and not just ordering everything in the hopes of capturing something because As I was mentioning with the whole microRNA story, the more data points you measure, the more likely you are to find something that is outside the normal range.
And then what do you do in a medical setting?
Well, you do more invasive tests.
And these tests can cause anxiety.
They can have actual risks to them, depending on what the test is.
So, this idea of always testing your blood to see if there's something that is wrong with it, it may come from a good place, it may seem like a good way of practicing sort of preventative medicine.
But, you know, I have a podcast with an actual physician called The Body of Evidence, and our second episode was about this idea of the annual medical checkup.
Do you need this?
And that's when I learned that it actually It sounds like a good idea, but if you don't have good reasons for it, it's not a good idea because you run the risk of finding things that just happen to be outside the normal range for one reason or another.
And it causes anxiety and causes further testing.
It's the same thing with cancer screening.
There's a reason why there are age ranges and there are very specific recommendations that are issued.
Because if you screen everybody for every cancer, you're going to find false positives.
And then that leads to a lot of concerns and stress and further, more invasive testing, which is not needed.
I was very surprised when my primary healthcare provider went from one-year to five-year recommendations for the physical.
I agree with you, but that seemed like a pretty big jump.
In terms of testing?
Well, I can't comment on that because I'm not a physician, but what I can say is that yeah, we all think that, give me all the test doctor, give me everything, I want to know what's wrong with me, but if you don't have any symptoms, you know, functional medicine, which is not really medicine, but like functional medicine, which is part of complementary and alternative medicine, this is exactly what it does.
It will test you for everything, and then they will find things that are outside of the normal range, and then they will prescribe a whole bunch of supplements in an attempt to normalize these values.
And of course, if some of these values were outside the normal range
for just random reasons, they're going to go back to normal.
It's going to be evidence that these supplements are working.
So, more is not better when it comes to health.
Didn't SF Gate call you a functional medicine expert too?
Perhaps.
I've lost track of the number of inaccurate or exaggerated things that I've been called, but yeah, it does happen.
Okay, let's close on a big one because this one I've seen for years now, the microbiome.
Huberman goes in on that as well.
From my understanding, it is a very important, I remember reading Gershon's work like 15 years ago about the third nervous system, the enteric nervous system and the importance of gut health.
And I do believe it's a really important aspect of health, but the amount of selling that goes on around it with very little evidence is always a red flag to me.
It is.
It's probiotics, it's prebiotics, and the thing is, again, there's very little evidence, there's very little that we know about it.
It is an active area of research because, as you say, it clearly plays a role in health.
We have, I believe at the last count, we have roughly the same number of bacteria living on us and inside us as a number of cells that our bodies are made of.
Obviously, we know that the microbiome is important, but then how do you manipulate it?
How do you improve it?
How do you prevent it from quote-unquote malfunctioning?
And that is still an area of active research.
I mean, I think, to the best of my knowledge, again, the only intervention on the microbiome that has really been shown to have really good evidence is in the case of C. difficile infections.
And that is what it's called, but it is a poop transfer, basically.
It is.
It is.
You're taking poop from somebody who does not have the infection and you are giving it to the person who is wrestling with the C. diff.
And that really does work.
As nasty as it sounds, it really does work because that poop, of course, contains a lot of good bacteria that can then bring back your microbiome into equilibrium.
That works.
The rest of it, It's very much up in the air.
And as I was mentioning with the analogy earlier, I mean, sometimes it's a little bit like planting a few trees in the Amazon.
I mean, it's not going to make a big difference because there are just so many different species of bacteria in there and it's so complex.
So I do hope that the more that we learn about how this microbiome works and changes over time, that we can devise good interventions, that we can also learn more about its true impact on our health.
But right now, it is a field that is rife with exploitation.
And there's just a lot of marketing because it's just a huge opportunity for people to make a buck selling people on what they would call the latest science.
but it's just, it's based on very little.
It's great to hear your conversation with Jonathan Derrick.
I actually reached out to him afterwards to help clarify what I'm about to say about evidentiary claims because for me this is sort of like a philosophical orientation that I think is important.
In 2008, surgical oncologist David Gorski and neurologist Steven Novella started writing about a problem with evidence-based medicine.
Those are all capitalized, so think of this as a category, evidence-based medicine.
And this led to their influential website called Science-Based Medicine, which is pointedly critical of pseudoscience and quackery.
And here's the thing, their stance is that alternative medicine has in recent times been wrongly accepted by some academics and doctors.
Why?
Because spurious evidence can seem hopeful despite the proposed therapy lacking scientific plausibility.
So here's a case in point, homeopathy.
You can run studies on homeopathy if you want to, but Gorski and Novella will say you're trying to prove that magic works.
Studies that show inconclusive evidence can give the impression that more research must be necessary if we're going to be truly scientific about this, right?
Meanwhile, the central claims of homeopathy are implausible in relation to the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology.
And the same can be said for models like Ayurveda and Chinese medicine, to some extent.
In each of those cases, creating studies and reporting their results amount to what Gorsky and Novella refer to as testing whether magic works.
The studies themselves are often just poorly designed and they test too many variables at once.
And then people who want to can tout any chance positives that arise as scientific evidence.
Now, I'm not saying that Huberman's claims are on the same level as homeopathy, but his style of communicating evidence and encouraging personal experimentation In ways that really, I think, muddy the waters and fail to narrow down correctly the number of variables that are being examined.
I think that style could benefit from more of what Gorski and Novella identify as science-based medicine, again, capitalized as a specific category.
But I have to say that would make for much shorter episodes of Huberman Lab.
Now, in terms of our own beat, this confusion about how evidence works has another effect.
For example, Bobby Kennedy claims that therapeutic drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine showed great promise against COVID, but were then suppressed.
In favor of ineffective and dangerous vaccines.
And the actual science says he's wrong about all of that in every way.
Well, Julian, the former crossword puzzle editor in me is really enjoying the verbs and adjectives you're using today.
Spurious coming into the mix as well.
And I see you're playing Connections as well as Wordle nowadays, so that is part of my morning ritual as well.
Must be the reason.
Okay, let's go on.
It's our third and final segment here in Looking at Huberman and this is going to be a little bit different than the last two, but I also think it fits into the broader framework of what we see in a lot of wellness influencers that we cover and honestly, all across domains, not just wellness, but across social media in general.
So we're going to talk about jaw strength and I'm going to get a little geeky here because we are starting from a place of truth.
Our jaws are much weaker than our ancestors.
So Huberman regularly promotes the book Jaws, and it was written by his Stanford colleagues.
But I actually read about jaw strength in Harvard paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman's earlier book, which is 2013's The Story of the Human Body.
It is one of my favorite books about evolutionary biology ever.
Highly recommend it.
Lieberman discusses mismatches in this book, and that's the way that our modern lifestyle and society doesn't reflect our biological and skeletal needs.
So shoes are a big one.
They're completely mismatched for the actual dexterity, strength, and flexibility of our feet, and it keeps a lot of podiatrists in business.
Instead of using our feet as nature designed them, we stuffed them into what biomechanist Katie Bowman calls foot coffins.
I love that reference.
It really happened in the early 70s when Nike started making running shoes, but with those small toe boxes, they created a lot of havoc in people's feet.
So this is something I taught and studied for years as a fitness instructor, and it is a mismatch.
Another one is wisdom teeth.
I mean, how do so many of us have quote-unquote extra teeth if not for a functional problem?
So anthropologist and primatologist Richard Wrangham discussed this in his excellent 2009 book called Catching Fire, which tells the story of what happened when our ancestors started cooking food instead of eating everything raw.
Cooking turns out to make food more nutritionally dense so we can eat less and capture more nutrients in the process.
Cooking also makes food softer, so we don't have to spend four to six hours a day chewing food, which is what our ancestors used to have to do.
But all of this results in weaker jaws.
So Lieberman, having access to countless skulls in Harvard's museum, noticed that hunter-gatherers had near-perfect teeth, whereas pre-industrial farmers' teeth were a mess.
Cavities, abscesses, impacted molars.
He relates our dental problems with osteoporosis.
You don't use them, you lose them.
So here's a section from his book.
Just as your limbs and spine will not grow strong enough if you don't sufficiently stress your bones by walking, running, and doing other activities, your jaws won't grow large enough for your teeth, and your teeth won't fit properly if you don't stress your face sufficiently from chewing food.
So, the mechanical forces of chewing strengthen your jaw and help your teeth fit properly in your jaw.
Lieberman isn't saying to ditch your orthodontist.
Mismatches are trade-offs.
I wouldn't want to spend a quarter of my day chewing food that doesn't taste very good.
He also mentions that there are reasons that some dentists recommend chewing, for example, sugar-free gum, and it's mainly to help strengthen your jaw and therefore strengthen your teeth.
So there's the context, and now we get to Jawsercise.
So Huberman was on a podcast called MindsetRx, and I'm going to play some clips of a longer clip.
I compiled them to make the broader point I wanted to make.
The entire clip is about four and a half minutes long, and I've linked to it in the show notes if you want the full context.
The title of the clip is very bro-y and shitty, but I can't put that on Huberman because he didn't title it.
That's the MindsetRx guys.
They're four of the guys who are on the podcast.
I don't know them regularly.
I only know this clip, so I'm not going to make any other judgments on them.
That said, I don't actually think it's a long walk from what Huberman says to the framing of this clip, and it's titled, Neuroscientist, all capital letters.
This habit makes you UGLY capital letters.
Andrew Huberman, and here is the clip.
Yeah, so this is a wild book called Jaws, A Hidden Epidemic by colleagues of mine at Stanford, and they have these twin studies.
One kid grows up in a culture where they eat a lot of soft food, drinking Capri Sun, eating applesauce, baby food.
The other one is, you know, got stuck in the jungle or whatever it is, and they're chewing on bones and chewing their food.
And one kid, these are identical twins, has a beautiful jaw structure and high cheekbones and the eyes look nice and clear.
The other kid is like, Droopy, the teeth are there and their mouth breathing.
They show this, there's one case of this young girl who just, she got a pet or a pet hamster I think it was, got a allergy to the hamster and literally took this beautiful young girl and she just, her face just starts aging at a rapid rate.
They get rid of the hamster, she goes back to nasal breathing, they do a little encouragement of nasal breathing using the mouth closure thing at night, do a little bit of medical tape, and like her these beautiful almost like Now there's the Jawserciser is really big in Hollywood.
That and peptides are like taking over.
Wait, Jawserciser?
Yeah, these like things where like... Bouncy mouthpiece.
Yeah.
Well, I look at the plastic surgery thing now and it's kind of crazy.
I mean, maybe this just reflects my age and my generation, but...
I see some people with wearing so much dark eye makeup, plus they're getting the cheekbone inserts, they look like skeletons.
Now that's not, you know, everyone's got their taste, especially if they're really lean, you know, and then, but facial structure is something that can be modified.
Chewing your food, chewing hard foods is something we used to do a lot more.
All this slurping down of food and calories we know isn't good from the obesity side, but it's also not good from the jaw structure, teeth structure, face structure, and it's all related.
I find it pretty rich that he's outing slurping your calories when Athletic Greens is one of his earliest and most persistent sponsors.
I'm not sure he'd put that together though.
He's also a scientific advisor to Athletic Greens.
Yeah, so to be completely clear about that, here's a product that allows you to drink vegetables instead of chewing their dense, fibrous, like, original form, which would be totally natural and really good to make you super hot.
And then he's like, slurping your calories is bad for you.
Okay.
The bigger point here gets back to something we've been discussing since the publication of our book around body fascism, in this case, beauty standards put forward by bro podcasters.
Now, to be fair, he qualifies it by repeatedly stating men and women and does state that people have different feelings on beauty, all important, but I don't think he's only talking about chronic oral ventilation, which is a medical condition results in a permanently open mouth, otherwise known as mouth breathing.
And of course, we'll leave aside the pejorative slang reference of a mouth breather as a stupid person because he's not actually referencing that either.
But I don't know of any affiliation between Huberman and Jawsercise, but the company definitely used that clip to promote its product on its Instagram and YouTube channels.
And everything about their marketing copy is meant to promote a sense of insecurity, not of health.
So here's the main page copy.
Redefine your jawline.
Strengthen, tone, and reduce double chin.
Jawsercise was designed to work the full range of motion of your bite, giving you a stronger and leaner look.
With 20 to 50 pounds of resistance, this innovative piece of equipment will chisel and sculpt your jawline for your best look ever.
Yeah, so it's a piece of plastic that you chew on.
So let's be very clear on that.
The Total Contouring Kit, which features four pieces of plastic of different strengths, runs you $80.
It also always seems to be 49% off, meaning it supposedly retails for $155.
for $155.
Now, is $80 49% off of $155?
No, but I'm not expecting these people to master math either
because it's actually 47% off.
Now, the different levels of plastic are kind of like, you know, I have in my car a hand grip, you know,
because grip strength is another mismatch that Lieberman talks about.
And you can get like 10 pounds, 20 pounds, like grip vices that you, you know, use to strengthen your
wrists.
So I get the idea behind it, but I feel like there are better ways of going about this
than spending $80 on plastic.
Fantastic.
Now, Huberman also doesn't have control over Jawsercise's marketing.
Again, I want to be clear.
But this again points back to the problem.
Instead of sticking to what he begins with, which is the functional importance of jaw strength, it quickly becomes about a beauty standard, evidenced by both him talking about being all over Hollywood and discussing the little girl and her hamster.
Now, should she have given the hamster out for adoption if she's allergic?
Certainly.
But that's pretty much all we need to know in this story.
And we're also talking about allergies when he starts with jaw strength, which doesn't make a ton of sense either.
But it just goes back to this little girl's model-esque features that he's citing at that point.
But it's not the story that we hear over and over from these high-level wellness influencers, which is a specific focus on the health aspects.
And they seem to default to questions of attractiveness all of the time.
Yeah, which in a way is understandable because, like, That's what people want to listen to, right?
That's what draws in the audience is promises of self-optimization, which includes being more attractive.
So these are all great examples, Derek.
I'm not going to add any more.
I would just say here that after looking over his work and reading his major critics, I have a bit of a summary here about why I have issues with Huberman and also why I think he's especially relevant for us in terms of what we look at on the pod.
So to me, this is all a new-ish version of a familiar grift.
It opportunistically leverages two deeply problematic American dysfunctions, which we do talk about in the book.
First of all is our for-profit medical system that markets drugs directly to consumers via television ads and radio ads and what have you, internet.
And those consumers have no social safety net.
Second, there's a response to this, which is the alt-med wellness and the libertarian spiritual attitude of bro science, which urges taking responsibility for your own health.
And this is usually via expensive bespoke combinations of herbs and supplements, quack treatments, cleanses, saunas, cold plunges that will deliver a better you.
These new science your MD won't tell you, you know, your doctor doesn't want you to know type of regimes are also marketed direct to consumer.
So there's even less regulatory guardrails in that model.
The Joe Rogan and company version of this during the pandemic paid out as the claim that optimized diet and exercise would boost your immune system so that you wouldn't really have to worry about COVID.
You wouldn't have to be afraid, you wouldn't have to follow quarantine measures, you wouldn't have to get vaccinated like all the fatties.
Never mind the danger to infants, the aged or the immunocompromised of you not participating in the big sort of social project of let's keep each other safe and let's make it through this thing together.
Now to be clear, I haven't seen Huberman specifically say any of this.
In fact, I think Huberman carefully avoids these kinds of controversies, but he's still comfortable running in those circles and never really calling out the problems with the science that is talked about in those circles.
So when Rogan had RFK Jr.
on, Huberman actually retweeted the episode link and he said, I'm eager to listen to this and learn more about Robert's stance on a number of issues.
Whenever I run into him in the gym, he's extremely gracious and he asks a lot of questions about science.
And by my observation, he trains hard too.
He's a good guy.
He's just like me and you.
Now, Humor Man also appeared on Jordan Peterson's podcast just a few months, in some cases, one month after the bizarre spiral in which he put out a sequence of videos on how Environmentalism is ruining society.
Africa is not poor because of colonialism.
This is right around the time he signed his lucrative contract with Daily Wire, and I think he went full mask off.
He also called climate scientists the authoritarian masters of the universe and basically told them, you know, to go fuck themselves.
And doctors who provide transaffirming care, he called butchers.
And, you know, the thumbnail for that video is particularly intense and weird.
He hosted Dave Rubin, this is Peterson still, to discuss the societal pitfalls of gay parenting, which again is a sort of a science-y topic.
So I list all of this to say that Huberman was happy to have long-form podcast audience crossover conversations with Peterson.
And not push back an iota on any of those scientific problems with his public positions.
Now the Time article also takes the line that Huberman's podcast has become so popular because the pandemic made people more aware of the need to become healthier.
So here's a quote from that article.
So for me, there's just a lot of blurred ethical lines here.
the virus. He, and this is Huberman, felt officials weren't saying enough about how
to stay well overall. And Huberman was happy to fill the void.
So for me, there's just a lot of blurred ethical lines here.
There's weak science, there's supplement endorsements, there's the misleading implication
of the podcast title with regard to his actual lab, the people with whom he's willing to be
affiliated, who have all Often deeply problematic claims about science, the absence of any criticism of pseudoscience peddlers or anti-vaxxers or conspiracy theorists.
To me, this is all a pretty damning picture, especially when combined with a PR stance that he just wants to be of service to the world by providing free scientific information that will improve everyday people's lives.
Now, as Jonathan Jarry mentions, the supplements he endorses cost a pretty penny.
And they also make misleading claims.
In terms of critics, I was interested to see that even some fitness podcasters like Derek from More Plates More Dates, do you know this guy?
No, no, I don't know.
He's a very interesting dude.
So he's a he's a giant bodybuilder, who's very smart, and who has looked deeply into all of the biochemistry of steroids.
And he breaks a lot of stuff down.
He's become a little bit of a celebrity in that scene.
A lot of different people will reference him.
He did a complete breakdown on one of Huberman's claims about that sort of stuff, about performance enhancing benefits from various things.
Also, UFC former champion and superstar Chael Sonnen has critiqued the weakness of Humor Man's evidence, talking about cold plunges and saunas and the increase in HDH and testosterone.
But I'm going to end here with an excerpt from an article I found by Paul Ingraham, who has written for David Gorski and Peter Novella's science-based medicine website, but he also has his own, which is dedicated to pain science.
This illustrates the problem with many a generalist.
Whenever actual experts on the topics they cover take a closer look, things often go poorly.
So Dr. Jen Gunter, called Huberman's episode on female hormones with Northrop acolyte guest Sarah Godfrey that I mentioned before, atrocious.
Ingraham also cites Michelle Wong's unanswered query about the fear mongering sunscreen claim, as well as these absolute gems.
Here's this is Dr. Asaf Weissman, who's a neuroscientist and he's quoted as saying, He is a BS artist that dumbs down science to the shallowest popular level possible.
His neuroscience knowledge is probably the same as any high school student and his ability to critically appraise studies is embarrassing.
Now that's, obviously this guy has a bone to pick, so for whatever that's worth.
Matt Strandberg is a sports science specialist and he's quoted as saying, Huberman is someone I personally consider a charlatan.
He has some good guests on from time to time and he says some valid things here and there, but it's mostly pseudoscientific infotainment and the cult of scientism masquerading as learning or education.
And then lastly, Dr. Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, who goes by, I think, Science Nerd or Health Nerd, I forget.
This paper on cold immersion recently went viral because it seems to indicate that cold water can improve many facets of human health, except the paper shows precisely the opposite of that.
And he's referring to a paper that Huberman cited for those health benefits.
I've said it before and it bears repeating.
that you can find in the show notes linked.
I've linked each of these in the show notes.
So you can go and look at those if you're interested.
I've said it before and it bears repeating.
So much of what constitutes a healthy lifestyle comes back to the basics of just drinking enough water,
getting enough sleep, getting some sun exposure, walking, getting out there.
If you are interested in modalities that make you stronger and you wanna be just larger
or if weightlifting is a thing for you, there are very simple steps to take.
I personally do the five compound exercises regularly, which are bench press, military press,
deadlift, squatting, and rows because you get the maximum benefit
by working the most amount of muscles per movement for your body and it keeps your entire body strong.
You won't get spot training doing that, but I do some.
Alternate spot training for adduction abduction biceps things like that It's it doesn't take a lot and what I've noticed having worked in the fitness industry for decades I don't work in it anymore, but having worked in it and still being in the gym regularly even here where I live in Portland People do a lot of really stupid and crazy shit in the gym.
That's not necessary I see people co-opting machines and kettlebells and stuff all the time that it's just kind of useless movement Functional movement is just very basic.
But it is appealing because if someone comes on and says, oh, but this thing will 5X or 10X you in a way that all of these other things don't, of course you want that.
And if they promise it in a quicker manner, of course that seems like it's going to be beneficial.
But almost all the time, it's not actually that.
And I think whether consciously or not, but by your great roundup there, Julian, it does seem like there's some intentionality or at least some conscious awareness of it.
Huberman falls into that category and.
I get it.
Wanting to stay healthy and attractive is important to a lot of people.
I don't want to pretend like I'm above all of that.
I have a particular neurosis around working out where if I don't get my hour plus a day in, I don't have as good of a day and it's just something that I've adapted and tried to modify best I can.
But I feel like, especially with that beauty example that I brought up here at the end, Human industry is so far from science education and he enters another domain, and one that I'm sure he'd admit is subjective.
It's just that he crosses over these lines a little too easily.
And from a listener's perspective, it becomes hard to disentangle what is really helpful, as you pointed out, setting some valid things and playing into these tropes around optimization, idealization, and essentially he's exploiting bodily insecurities.
And as long as companies can market to the perceived lack that many people feel, they'll retain customers.
