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March 30, 2024 - Conspirituality
25:46
Brief: Yes, Huberman’s Behavior Matters
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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.
And today we can add to that tagline that there's no such thing as a private life for the influencer who wants to influence your private life.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram and Threads at Conspiratuality Pod.
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Alright Derek, so today we have a special lightning brief for listeners called Yes, Huberman's Behavior Matters, where we're going to run down the details of Carey Howley's excellent investigation into the neuroscientist-influencer in New York Magazine, and we're going to put it against the backdrop of what we already know about him.
We're going to sample some of the responses to the article, and we're going to weigh in on why the details of this God-tier podcast bro's private life really are of public concern.
But to start off, Derek, this is a story that's quickly proven itself to be culture war kerosene, because it gets right into the questions of what real morality actually looks like in the world.
It gets into the power differentials between men and women, into what freedom means versus what control means.
It gets into whether this libertarian gospel of self-care and optimization inevitably arcs towards narcissism.
And I think it spotlights the question of whether cancellation is a form of social murder by wokists, or if claiming cancellation is real is now the main form of social promotion in the heterodox sphere.
What are your thoughts?
I think that, first of all, the Huber stans coming out on social media who are confusing The New Yorker with New York Magazine prove that a lot of people don't have media literacy skills.
But there is so much to unpack in this story, and it was a months-long investigation that I did play a small role in.
Kerry reached out to me due to my videos debunking some of Huberman's health claims and wanted to get my take on bro science, especially in the optimization space.
And we talked for an hour about a range of topics in conspirituality around this topic.
That resulted in one paragraph in the story on his affiliation with the green powder supplement AG1, who sponsors Huberman's show and where he serves as a scientific advisor.
But that was included, I believe, to really paint the picture of an opportunist, which in my estimation is what Andrew Huberman is, or at least has become.
Most of the reporting focused on his juggling and gaslighting of six women, five who were interviewed for the article, including one Huberman was trying to have a baby with and who he lived with at the time.
The article also questions what his Stanford lab really is, if it even actually still exists, and that has actually been discussed for some time.
I mean, the man lives in Los Angeles, Where he often lifts weights with RFK Jr.
at Gold's Gym.
Let's go!
A former student of mine emailed me a few weeks ago saying he regularly sees them together there.
But bigger point, a six-hour drive from LA up to Stanford to work in a lab is highly unlikely.
Yeah, and you've done this great job in tracking Huberman's slide towards popular and lucrative pseudoscience for a while now, so why don't you start by walking us through that?
Yeah, so last July, Julian and I recorded an episode called The Andrew Huberman Paradox, and I focused on three pieces.
of questionable science that Huberman puts forward.
First, his claim that sunscreen molecules can be found in the brain 10 years after application, which he's repeated many times, yet has never produced any proof of.
He endorses jaw strengthening exercises, including using this piece of plastic called Jawsercise, which has no evidence of efficacy.
And I've seen Dennis push back on some of his claims there.
And then finally, the biggest one, which is his work with AG1, which I've broken down often.
And I just want to say, I reached out to AG1 on Monday with three questions.
Asking them to provide clinical evidence of the health claims on their website and in their marketing materials.
And they did reply, but it's honestly laughable.
They sent me five studies, which I had already seen on their website.
Three were conducted in a gut simulator, not on actual humans.
One of which had a sample size of three people's stool samples.
Oh my gosh.
Now, one of those studies was a speculative marketing paper trying to coin the term foundational nutrition, which Huberman often repeats but is actually a meaningless term that the company is trying to position as what they're good for.
And then one was a pilot study of 35 people self-reporting their experiences with AG1.
So none of this is close to evidence that would back up their health claims.
Listeners, I just need to say that if you check out Derek's YouTube, you'll see that he's like a one-man wrecking ball on this $1.2 billion supplement grift, which folks pay like $80 a month to swill without having any proof that there's either enough of the active ingredients in the thing or that those ingredients actually perform as claimed.
You know, like Derek, my eyes, not being the science person on the podcast, I just used to glaze over when you went into the money and chemical breakdowns of these supplement stacks, but I kind of really get it now because if you can show a middle to upper income, like educated, urban, politically diverse market that they're all being had, Yeah, it's really important.
the scam. I think that's really good science communications.
And I think it can't help but to push the needle back towards, well, maybe we should
remember that there are experts out there in medicine. And oh, yeah, public health is
actually a thing.
Yeah, it's really important. And also, I'll reiterate that a lot of people who work in
that space also understand that there's a lot of problems with the healthcare system.
They're not chilling for it.
They're actually trying to reform it.
I think that's really important to point out.
But what companies like AG1 do is exploit those fears and misunderstandings of that space.
And I'll also add that I've received a lot of pushback from people saying, Andrew Huberman is a scientist.
And yeah, that's true, but he's not a chemist, dentist, or clinical nutritionist, but he speaks freely on those topics.
People also say he always includes links on his shows, to which my reply is, yes, again, true, but have you read the studies?
Because I do.
That's what I do for this podcast.
I go in and read them, at least some of them, and what he says and what he links to doesn't always match up.
But by providing an illusion of research, just like AG1 is doing, in my estimation, he gets away with a lot.
Okay, so that's the science or the pseudoscience side, but three weeks ago, we also noted that Huberman, alongside Joe Rogan and Russell Brand, had recently jumped on the confession of faith bandwagon.
So, here we have three secular-coded, heterodox brofluencers all pivoting towards Jesus as some kind of final boss of the content multiplayer video game.
This meshes in tightly with On Our Beat because when you blend charisma, conspiratorial thinking, and pseudoscience claims, there's a really clear pathway to audience-captured Christianity.
But what was your takeaway from that, Derek?
Yeah, that's really well put, and I do take away what you just said.
And we also knew that the Huberman story was going to be coming when we recorded that episode, and I did drop a little hint in there speculating if Huberman was shoring up the base with his spiritual confession.
And honestly, I don't know his intentions.
But if you know a major article about your far-reaching infidelity and your apparent lying to women is going to be published, and he did know because And given the responses that I've seen to the article on social media, I'm guessing that moment when he was talking to Cameron Haynes about God, I think it did have some impact of that nature.
Well, and also, I mean, we could be generous and imagine that knowing this was coming might force him to his knees, like earnestly clutching a rosary, while having his spokespeople and lawyers preparing for war.
So, turning to Howley's investigation for New York Magazine, we find this piece that is broad in scope, but it's also granular in detail.
And I think we both agree that she nails Huberman's outsized persona and maybe even his soul to the wall with one of the best nut graphs we have ever read.
Yeah, I agree with that.
As a journalist, this is one of those moments where you're just like, oh, you nailed it.
Okay, quote, Huberman sells a dream of control down to the cellular level, but something has gone wrong.
In the midst of immense fame, a chasm has opened up between the podcaster preaching dopaminergic restraint and a man with newfound wealth with access to a world unseen by most professors.
The problem with a man always working on himself is that he may also be working on you.
Dang.
So, yeah.
Howley's discovery of Huberman's control issues begins with that public-facing zone of optimization through this regime and that regime, through the athletic greens, through the constant monetization of his hero's journey story.
And her account of this is exemplary, and we're familiar with it.
What we didn't know is how Huberman has allegedly treated the women in his life.
And Howley's able to show in excruciating detail how the bro doctor was really good at optimizing deception and domination.
And she tracks six of his partners, interviews five, all of them hidden from each other until they started finding each other and talking to each other.
And they all say that they were made to feel special, centered, and trusting enough to have unprotected sex with him.
Yeah, look, like I said, this story has been in process for months, and in that time, I've talked to a number of people in Huberman's orbit, and I understand journalistic guardrails are necessary and really important, but we've even seen in Reddit forums and replies on Twitter, many more claims.
So, let's just see if any future reporting bears out any more problems with this larger story.
Yeah, well, and that's going to depend in part on the backlash that we're seeing now, because what his stans are actually doing is showing other potential interviewees what will happen to them if they speak.
Now, one of the most notable points in the story is that his primary partner, Sarah, now all of the names are pseudonyms because of the anticipated backlash.
Sarah describes him flying into withering rages, likely giving her high-risk HPV, going AWOL for long stretches, and at one point texting with other partners while injecting her with IVF There was a day in Texas when, after Sarah left his hotel, Andrew slept with Mary and texted Eve.
They found days in which he would text nearly identical pictures of himself to two of them at the same time.
They realized that the day before he had moved in with Sarah in Berkeley, he had slept with Mary, and he had also been with her in December 2023, the weekend before Sarah caught him on the couch with a sixth woman.
They realized that on March 21st, 2021, a day of admittedly impressive logistical jiu-jitsu, while Sarah was in Berkeley, Andrew had flown Mary from Texas to LA to stay with him in Topanga.
While Mary was there, visiting from thousands of miles away, he left her with Costello, he drove to a coffee shop where he met Eve.
They had a serious talk about their relationship.
They thought they were in a good place.
He wanted to make it work.
Phone died.
He texted Mary, who was waiting back at the place in Topanga, and later to Eve, thank you for being so next-next-level gorgeous and sexy.
Sleep well, beautiful, he texted Sarah.
Yeah, that's a sequence that just ramps up and ramps up.
You have no idea where it's ending, and then the payoff is incredible.
And Derek, we talk a lot about purification on this podcast, but I would just like to ask you, how many ice baths do you think it would take to feel purified of the unbearable shame after having days like this?
Or how many gallons of athletic greens would you have to chug to make you forget what a piece of shit you'd been?
Like, I really wonder whether these protocols are kind of about that.
Well, if you watch the latest Liver King Times-J.P.
Sears crossover video, maybe.
But I want to say that I did work for my paragraph with the New York Magazine fact-checking team, and I'm sure they had their work cut out for them having to go through flows like that to make sure it was all squared up.
So great job, Kerry.
Great job to the New York team.
You know, I've done some reporting in the Me Too space.
I have a book coming out in second edition this May about a serial sexual assaulter in the yoga world and how he pulled off decades of crimes.
And I do have to say that this type of investigation is extremely difficult to report out.
It's embarrassing.
It's shameful.
People want to move on.
They know they're up against a powerful person who will predictably deny everything and then his devotees will assassinate your character.
They'll say that you asked for it.
You were making fully empowered choices.
Everybody's adults here.
Corroboration is really hard.
Source contamination is a thing to be really aware of.
And then there's like PR flacks and lawyers who will hound everybody involved.
But what Howley was able to eavesdrop on was more powerful than any optimization regime, which is the whisper network of Huberman's sex partners who started to find each other and then compare notes on his lying lies, even as he fantasized that he was smarter than all of them put together.
Now on my first read through of the article, I predicted that Huberman Stanz would say that even if his shitty private behavior was true, it has no bearing on his public value as a science communicator, meaning the value we've already given some trouble to.
And I also predicted that the backlash would deepen this kind of conspiracy theory arising in response to Me Too reporting, which is that bi-coastal woke media has a bloodlust for successful freethinkers and will stop at nothing to cancel men for being men, and now the libs have sunk so low that they'll try to ruin this man's life over consensual sex partners who feel jilted.
And that's basically what's happened so far.
Also, predictably, there are jokes.
Beginning with this one, there are many versions of it, but the first came from Francis Foster of Trigonometry, who says, Andrew Huberman has been outed for having relationships with five different women at the same time.
He's a 48-years-old man with the energy to date, he says, five different women.
If that's not a ringing endorsement of his methods, I don't know what is.
Well, hardy har.
And also, I hear just a bit of something homoerotic in those joke tweets, Derek, because, you know, partly it's all nudge, nudge, wink, wink, and we'll overlook the fact that we're, you know, misusing the word date.
But there's also this feeling of like, ooh, Andrew, tell me all of your secrets.
And I don't know, Francis, I don't think he's that into you.
Yeah, that's a good point.
One thing that isn't talked about a lot, I think, in these spaces is the parasocial relationship that occurs between men who look up to men like Huberman and their own feelings.
It's complex, but it's also not discussed.
Women generally are more open.
And even I see in different threads right now, responding to this story, a lot of women being like, Here's the story that we've had to live through our entire lives playing out in front of us yet again, and they're sharing their own experiences, whereas men don't do that, so then you have a Francis Foster say things like that as like, yeah, I'm a guy too.
You know, also, weeks before the story dropped, I shared with you guys that the reaction from Huber Stans will be similar to Russell Brand Stans rushing to his defense, and we were right on that.
And even more so, in fact, because Brand has a really known and documented track record of toxic behavior, but this Actually caught, I think, a lot of Hugh Berman's audience off guard.
And reading through so many of these reactions over the last five days, I can firmly say that most people jumping into his defense didn't read the entire article, nor do they focus on the facts presented in the piece.
Well, and they also don't have any understanding that if you're reporting on accounts from five sources, there are dozens of layers of editorial, fact-checking, legal gatekeeping that just prevent you from making shit up.
In other words, to make the obvious comparison, if the supplement industry had to run products through the New York Magazine legal team, there would be no such thing as Athletic Greens.
Or if they had to run it through the FDA.
I mean, that's what people on Twitter do not understand, is that a New York Magazine reporter can't just say shit because they will be opened up to a lot of lawsuits, while you can spout all the shit you want on Twitter and get away with it without actually having to do critical thinking or work behind that.
And I know you're about to break down why all this matters, but let me just say, seeing the predominantly male backlash, not only male, but predominantly, to MeToo, And a predominantly white rage against critical race theory and DEI just shows you how hard it is for society to actually progress.
Now, the stuff that the women in the Huberman story had to deal with is something almost every woman I know has had to deal with in some capacity, like the threads I just mentioned ago.
And straight up, Men just do not like being called out for their behavior.
And so what they do is they double down on their animosity, misogyny, and at its extreme, violence—sometimes physical, often emotional—toward women.
And if people don't think that's playing a big role in the defense of Huberman, they're either not paying attention or they do not want to look in a mirror.
100%.
And I think anyone who thinks that the joke is funny, they're really telling on themselves because, you know, if Huberman's optimization schtick, cold plunges, diet and supplements, alcohol, abstinence, had anything to do with this part of his life, it mainly involved using incredible brain power to deceive women while professing care.
And so to commit emotional abuse while podcasting about emotional health is pretty grim.
And I think that's what Foster's smirk conceals, which is that the goals of optimization can be utterly amoral.
Like it reminds me of the phrase, fuck you money.
And I think Huberman is selling a kind of fuck you health.
And I think that the framing just offers permission for execrable behavior.
But I also think there's a more moderate criticism of Howley's reporting, and it goes like this.
People will say, aren't we invading this man's privacy, and even that of his ex-partners?
Are there really any crimes here?
Why should we be interested in this?
And doesn't it draw attention away from the fact that through audience capture and his decreasing dependence on academic affiliation, his content is veering ever closer to flat-out pseudoscience?
Well, here's why it matters.
Beyond the fact that there's no way those women went on what record for fame or money, and beyond the fact that there just is no private life for the influencer who uses his personal story to sell a lifestyle that will impact your private life.
Huberman's grandiosity drives him to opine on relationships, sex, and addiction issues as if he is an expert instead of a hot mess in those areas.
And so this is a form of pseudo-therapy that hides a very negative situation.
And I think we haven't really made this parallel yet, but it's clear from this story that pseudoscience and pseudotherapy are parallel endeavors.
They both use manipulative jargon to convince consumers and women, respectively, that the influencer is well-researched and using best practices to genuinely be of service.
Both are these toxic mimics of care.
And I think for those of you who think his actual behavior has no bearing on his intellectual integrity, I want you to consider this, which is that if you go to the Huberman Lab podcast homepage, there's this bright blue button at the top that says Andrew's Daily Schedule.
And it brings you to this short video.
Since the launch of the Huberman Lab podcast in January 2021, I've covered hundreds of hours of information about science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance.
I've also received a tremendous amount of feedback in the form of questions and comments.
So to respond to that feedback, I've assembled a zero-cost daily blueprint.
The daily blueprint divides your 24-hour day into three different segments.
And give suggestions as to which tools should be inserted into each of those three different segments in order to maximize their effectiveness.
To access the Daily Blueprint at zero cost, please put your email below.
That will give you access to our monthly Neural Network Newsletter, which is also, of course, zero cost and provide summaries of podcast episodes and toolkits describing tools for neuroplasticity, tools for enhancing sleep, tools for enhancing dopamine, and many other critical topics related to mental health, physical health, and performance.
Thank you for considering signing up for our Neural Network newsletter.
And as always, thank you for your interest in science.
So this is Huberman's main sign-up hook.
This is the landing page for his brand, his daily blueprint.
And Derek, you know what's not in those protocols, but which definitely impacts his daily mental and emotional state?
Like, instructions on how to lie to many women within hours, how to juggle phones and text threads, how to convince women that having unprotected sex with you is safe, or how to efficiently study all of the therapeutic jargon you can so that when one of these women starts asking questions, you can reassure them that you're working through your trauma and childhood attachment issues.
I want to say, Matthew, I know you're not a fan of Sam Harris, but his short book, Lying, which is not one of his most famous, he talks about what happens when people continually lie, that they have to keep a mental track record of where every lie goes, and they get confused, and they will often out themselves as We see has happened here.
But the other thing about this is, because they're constantly lying and they have to juggle all those, they begin to lose a sense of what the lie is and what the truth is.
So, I do want to point out that if you are juggling that many people that amount of time, those lines between your own sense of what's false and what's real begin to blur.
Well, Huberman has 202 podcast episodes in his archive, and he lists 104 segments from them in the category of Emotions and Relationship Psychology.
There's hours on sex, attachment, arousal, addictions, and one that I definitely won't listen to called The Biology of Aggression, Mating, and Arousal.
So, omitting his actual daily protocols on interpersonal ethics from his self-marketing, as if the way in which you basically treat other people is not an impact upon your whole being, it's a lie.
It is a blatant lie.
And if he's lying about something as essential And the last thing I'll say, you've alluded to it already, Derek, is that Howley's reporting makes one thing crystal clear that so many women in nominally progressive wellness spaces have known for years.
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