Andrew Huberman is one of the biggest names in the world of wellness.
He has the biggest health podcast in the world, which is often in the top 10 for all podcast rankings.
Huberman is a tenured professor in the department of neurobiology at Stanford and has a gigantic platform and a legion of passionate and dedicated fans.
So it’s not surprising that New York Magazine just published a profile of Dr. Huberman because an audience that big means that people are interested in you.
The profile wasn’t really about his show, it was a look into his personal life with an emphasis on how he handles his relationships and runs his lab.
This isn’t a newsletter on personal relationships, the patriarchy, or hypocrisy, so I’m not going to spend any time dissecting the details of the NY Magazine piece.
But I am fascinated by the fact that Huberman’s podcast has the reach that it does because it reinforces something I write about a lot: the influence that a person or an idea has in the zeitgeist is almost never a reflection of how properly they represent the science.
Andrew Huberman may have a reputation as someone who makes complicated scientific ideas accessible to a wide audience, but I don’t think that’s an accurate characterization.
Andrew Huberman is to the modern wellness ecosystem what Dr. Oz was to daytime TV viewers: an insanely gifted communicator who exaggerates the clinical relevance of preliminary data in a way that ultimately misinforms his audience.
Huberman misinforms his audience through extrapolation and biologic plausibility
If you listen to his podcast, you’ll hear about a lot of studies and papers being discussed with a fair amount of depth.
You’ll learn a lot of jargon. Huberman discusses biologic mechanisms in detail. He gets deep into the weeds of the experiments being done and what their results mean for you.
But unfortunately, most of what he talks about is really just nonsense.
Seeing the effect of a supplement on the behavior of a rat tells us literally nothing about what impact it has on the behavior of a human.
An experiment done on human neurons isolated in a lab (an “in vitro” experiment) does not provide any insight into the impact of a supplement on an actual human’s neurologic function.
And so when Huberman talks about how you should change your behavior because of the way that you can influence levels of X hormone or Y neurotransmitter and that will improve your health, it’s certainly possible that he’s right about it, but he will be right by accident rather than because he has rigorous data to support the position.
It’s shocking how similar a smart critique of Huberman sounds like what I wrote about working for Dr. Oz:
We would often look for a mechanistic study showing that so-and-so supplement worked in vitro (or in lab animals) along with evidence that it appeared safe in human studies. We would then extrapolate those findings with the suggestion that it might work in humans as the justification to put something on the show.
This is the same type of extrapolation that I’ve criticized again and again as bad science that misleads and misrepresents.
Nothing was totally made up. It was all based on a kernel of truth, a study showing this mechanism, an epidemiologic association demonstrating that connection.
We were always super careful about the precise nature of the language - “may” instead of “will,” for example - so that nothing we said was totally false. But we would often have the facts right even if the story was wrong.
When you suggest that a plausible biologic mechanism +/- an animal study +/- a short term study in a small group of humans means that there is any certainty to what you’re recommending, you’re misinforming your audience.
The story can be wrong even when the facts are accurate.
Huberman has real influence on many of his listeners
When it comes to behavior change, the messenger matters more than the message.
If you don’t trust the person giving you the information, you aren’t going to be motivated by it.
So it’s worth understanding the connection that Huberman has with his audience - he’s a trusted source of information and they change their behavior and their purchasing patterns because of what he says.
I’ve had plenty of patients ask me about his “sleep stack” and tell me about the supplements that they take because they heard about them on the Huberman podcast.
Lots of people have reported ways that they’ve changed their lives for the better because of stuff they’ve heard from Huberman: they spend more time outside because he discusses the impact of exposure to natural light, they exercise more because of how he evangelizes it, and they’re passionate about improving their health because he’s an inspiration.
It’s clear to me that not all of Huberman’s influence on his audience is bad - it’s a good thing that Andrew Huberman is persuading some of his audience that alcohol is bad for you (and when your audience has a lot of young men, that kind of message is probably a big win for society).
But lots of people spend money on useless supplements because Andrew Huberman recommends them.
People also disrupt their lives and make major changes to their schedules - altering their sleeping patterns, social habits, coffee consumption - because Huberman suggests that it’s good for you.
The information asymmetry in the realm of health is gigantic
Whenever I speak with a doctor in a different specialty, I’m always amazed by how much they know that I’m totally misinformed about.
I went to medical school for 4 years, worked for Dr. Oz for a year, then did a 3 year internal medicine residency, and then spent a 4th year as a chief resident - but I know essentially no useful information about the details of liver disease or cancer or PSA testing.
When my patients ask me about this stuff, I often feel like I’m more likely to misinform them than I am to give them useful information - and I did almost a decade of medical training before I started my cardiology fellowship!
None of us know enough to be informed about everything and most of us don’t have the scientific literacy to read the medical literature ourselves and draw real conclusions that inform action.
I’m not surprised that a talented communicator who uses jargon and dissects medical papers is persuasive to an audience of people who are interested in their health but haven’t been trained to know how to critically appraise scientific literature.
After all, people want to feel good and liver longer. We don’t want to be sick, and we don’t want our friends and family to be sick.
That’s where there’s room for people like Andrew Huberman and Mehmet Oz to persuade large audiences - health and sickness are scary, there’s a lot of confusing information out there, and we have to make decisions about how to live.
Don’t mistake Andrew Huberman for a rigorous scientist who has read all of the papers and is only giving you the best information
Huberman is obviously a brilliant guy, and I’m pretty sure that he knows that the way he represents the science is misleading.
The most generous read of his message is that he’s making an educated guess about what works and exaggerating his level of confidence in its likelihood to be true.
Almost every single recommendation that Huberman makes has a coin flip chance of being wrong.
And if he doesn’t know that most of what he says is just as likely to be wrong as it is to be right, I’m not sure whether that’s worse or better.