A bone to pick with an old dog
Top podcaster Andrew Huberman gave tutorials on neuroscience, so why the flurry of media outrage over his two-timing ways?
New York Magazine has just run a prurient exposé of the complicated love life of one Dr Andrew Huberman. If you haven’t heard of Huberman and are wondering why such an esteemed publication would care to investigate his philandering ways and write about them in the kind of detail that would usually prevail at the tabloid end of the media spectrum, let me elaborate.
Dr Huberman, who hosts the most popular health and fitness podcast which is one of the top 10 podcasts globally, is also a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford who likes the sound of his own voice. More importantly, so do millions of people around the world who sit through three hours of technical neuroscience about “how our brain and its connections with the organs of our body control our perceptions, our behaviours and our health”, as well as information about “existing and emerging tools for measuring and changing how our nervous system works”.
Dr Huberman has protocols aplenty for how to live effectively, balance your dopamine levels, and strike exactly the right work, life and nutrition balance — and he shares these openly with his listeners. He’s just wrapped up a sell-out tour in Australia, where the Sydney Opera House was bursting at the seams with people who buy into the protocols. In a world of hucksters, purveyors of snake oil and shysters selling expertise without any credentials (other than a really good hustle and a wonderful way with smoke and mirrors), Huberman makes you feel like you’re listening to the real deal — probably because it takes real academic know-how to become a tenured professor at Stanford and publish regularly in the world’s most reputable scientific journals.
In all his hours of rambling explanations, the one thing Huberman hasn’t done is claim to be an expert in fidelity. In fact, he stays pretty silent on the question of his love life and relationships. The protocols of Huberman are skewed in favour of early rising, sun gazing, nutrition and exercise.
I’m just as fascinated as the next person by what goes on in people’s private lives — the disjunction between the public persona and the private person is ripe for observation and judgment. And, according to the five overlapping lovers of Dr Huberman, he’s a bit of what would be described in common parlance as a dog. To paraphrase Hillary Clinton on the subject of her own hound, Bill, “he’s a hard dog to keep on the porch”.
I confess to having listened to a fair number of Huberman podcasts because I subscribe to the sunk-cost fallacy. Once I’ve listened to an hour and 30 minutes of a podcast about ganglia or the like, I figure I’ve invested so much time in the exercise that I may as well stay on for the whole three hours. However, it’s a fallacy because there’s no guarantee I’ll be any the wiser when it comes to neuroscience two hours later.
What I gleaned from tales of the amorous exploits of the Hube is that all the ladies in his life seem to have embraced the same philosophy — that, seeing that they’d come this far, they may as well carry on with the dog they knew, despite his clear “off-theporchness”. But once they came together in a support group for the victims of the professor’s love protocols, they realised his methodology, while sound (insofar as it worked to get the ladies into the bed chamber), was full of long-term holes in theoretical execution.
Look, he could have been running a study and needed to test his theories about love on multiple subjects for the purposes of crossreferencing, to ensure their scientific validity. And that would have been a perfectly acceptable scientific method — except that he seems to have broken several hearts along the way. The subjects have formed a WhatsApp support group and are now probably deep in therapy. They’re planning a girls’ weekend away to commiserate with one another.
In the schematic manner of #MeToo, we had a flurry of accusations, a global movement, some Tinder swindlers, a few serious cases of truly reprehensible rapey behaviour prosecuted on a Weinstein scale, as well as some actual child sex trafficking. But Huberman is just a dog with a very old bone. He’s a man who’s behaved badly, but is his private love life worth an investigation by a major publication? He’s not selling relationship advice — he’s giving neurochemistry tutorials. If he’s been caught out for anything, it’s for failing to adhere to the Socratic adage that you should “be as you would like to appear”.