Huberman's Illusions of Control
Huberman's Illusions of Control
the guy with all the protocols sounds messy as hell
I almost missed the news about dopamine mythos preacher Andrew Huberman this week — thanks to the reader who emailed me about it, I love getting email tips!
If you have also been languishing under a moist rock lately, Kerry Howley did a little 8,000-word investigation into the famous neuroscientist and wellness podcaster’s personal life, consulting a bunch of his ex-girlfriends, who apparently have a group chat together where they figured out he was quite the prolific liar:
The women compared time-stamped screenshots of texts and assembled therein an extraordinary record of deception.
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.
I actually think this ends up being a beautiful story about the power of female friendship, but a lot of Huberstans seem to think it’s just a trashy hit piece that dug up drama irrelevant to Huberman’s work as a science educator. I disagree!
“Huberman sells a dream of control down to the cellular level,” Howley writes, and this is always what has interested me about his work — it’s diet culture for men, but it goes beyond just the body and into the brain. Last August I wrote about Huberman’s intricate sunlight protocols for paid subscribers, and because it’s timely now, I’ve unlocked it:
In the piece, I questioned whether Huberman really has the control over his life that he preaches to the rest of us, citing an interview where he claims to ‘outsource his forebrain’ to other people in the planning and organizing of his podcast, and to have a genetic mutation that allows him to function on less sleep.
Listeners of his podcast are led to believe that his success is the result of supreme self-control and higher-order rationality, but Howley’s piece paints a different picture.
His ex, Sarah, describes a man who flew into rages, ‘two to three days of yelling in a row,’ jealous of the fact that she’d had kids with a previous partner. A journalist and friend says Huberman screamed at him on the phone and threatened to sue him for writing a glowing book chapter on his research. His friends describe him as anxious about everything being just right, but also a bit of a flake, cancelling last minute and disappearing a lot.1
The piece frames this in the context of the ‘dark triad’, as if Huberman has a Machiavellian streak and enjoys toying with people, which his journalist friend claims. But this line of thinking assumes he actually does have supreme control, and that he is wielding it sadistically. I prefer to see these anecdotes differently — as evidence that the kind of control Huberman preaches doesn’t actually exist, even for him, and that perhaps he’s not as ordered as his public image would have us believe.
But powerful men like Huberman don’t tend to face serious consequences for ghosting people, running late, and losing control of their emotions. It’s not that such dysfunction doesn’t happen to them — it’s just that, as several neurodivergent scholars have pointed out before, economic and social capital can make up for it. Some can afford to ‘outsource’ their executive functioning, whether through money, social connections, or the care work of girlfriends and wives.
Perhaps I’ve been a bit too soft in my critiques of Huberman — after the immunologist Andrea Love combed through his factually incorrect cold and flu episode, she concluded that he is ‘a menace to society’ for downplaying the importance of flu vaccination and promoting things like saunas and supplements instead.2 The podcast Decoding the Gurus took a closer look at his episode on autism and found some very odd framing in his questions around vaccines that suggest he may have been pandering to the anti-vax segment of his audience.3
Huberman has become a sort of science prophet (something I discussed in a TikTok I made last year) and pieces like Howley’s are important for reminding us that even those who are selling us their ‘evidence-based’ protocols for optimal self-control don’t really have it themselves. Huberman’s Reason Bro persona can make it hard to see the feelings beneath his messaging: the insecurity that makes a person reach for such extensive, detailed health protocols in their everyday life.
The sociologist Robert Crawford (the ‘healthism’ guy) writes about control as a paradox — the more we try to control, the more insecure we feel about potential risks, and on and on in a vicious spiral that turns out to be a bit futile, anyway, because health is much more than a personal problem. Crawford writes:
..working on the self by working on the body’s health cannot deliver the symbolic assurance needed to offset either anxieties about the dangers of a toxic society or the deepening insecurities of contemporary American life.
These ‘deepening insecurities’ are both emotional and economic, and actually essential to the way our economy functions. Financially secure, content people do not overproduce, or take on debt, or take shit from their bosses. “Capitalism is a kind of insecurity-producing machine,” Debt Collective co-founder Astra Taylor writes in her book The Age of Insecurity, noting that every economic problem has an emotional core of ‘bad feelings’ which spare no one, not even the rich:
When we examine society through the lens of insecurity, which affects everyone, as opposed to inequality, which emphasizes two opposing extremes, we can see the degree to which unnecessary suffering is widespread even among those who appear to be ‘winning’ according to the logic of the capitalist game.
This is why self-help gurus like Huberman will continue to find upwardly-mobile audiences willing to buy expensive and mostly useless supplements, and why we shouldn’t be surprised when it turns out that their public image doesn’t match their private life. Of course it doesn’t! The messy truth just doesn’t sell like the illusion of order and control. As Taylor writes:
No matter how much we have, we are ensnared in systems that are structured to trigger insecurity, propelling us to strive for an ideal we will always fall short of. This is why no advertising or marketing department will ever tell us that we’re actually okay, and that it is the world, not us, that needs changing.
I’m a bit light on content lately because I’m getting top surgery next week and just generally freaking out all over the place in preparation!! I’ve been experimenting with separating my paid and free lists bit more instead of sending out previews, so here’s a little digest of paid stuff you missed and might like to sign up to read??
I’m not totally sure how much I want to share with the entire world about surgery just yet, so I paywalled a silly little story last week about the sensory nightmare that is my own chest:
And lately I’ve been dipping my toes into Attention Studies, which is gearing up to be a theme in my work this year:
the only time I’ve ever personally related to Andrew Huberman lol
see also: her piece in Slate this week critiquing Huberman’s shady use of research studies
they also noted that, despite being a popular source of health information during a pandemic, he has never recommended Covid vaccines to his listeners! weird!
It’s always funny to me that people think someone’s values and politics have no bearing on their work. People say this to me all the time—who cares if Barkley is a right-wing libertarian, he’s a *scientist* so it doesn’t affect his work. As though science—especially social science, is value-neutral, as though his politics and values don’t inform the very questions he asks, much less the conclusions he draws from the (often very flawed, sketchy) and the policy proposals that stem from them. #smh
Anyway, this is a great story, though hardly surprising. Snake oil salesmen are a pretty pathetic bunch.
I hope surgery goes well <3 I send virtual hugs