Readers,

What the hell, let’s do a mailbag.

Send me your questions, prompts, hot takes, and opinions at nicholas.quah@vulture.com, and once I get enough, I’ll get a mailbag issue going. —Nick Quah

I remember the first time I heard about Huberman Lab out in the wild. It was over lunch with a friend here in Idaho who I’d consider particularly discerning in their media consumption, and who I wouldn’t ordinarily associate with interests pertaining to productivity, life hacks, Silicon Valley optimization, or anything else of the sort. Yet Huberman Lab struck a deep chord with this person. As far as I understood it, the appeal lay, in part, with the detailed science-talk of it all, but mostly it seemed tethered to the general vibe of Andrew Huberman as host: gentle and accommodating, which is a sharp contrast with the aggression that defines so many other performances of productivity authority.

That lunch took place around mid-2022, and at the time, I was only ambiently aware of the show, and even as Huberman’s star continued to grow, I continued to not pay much attention to it. After all, the podcast charts are littered with gurus, influencers, experts, and hacks of all stripes. Don’t confuse this sentiment with some holier-than-thou sense of judgment: I’ve accepted what the top end of the podcast ecosystem has mostly become, and in any case, I have my own tastes around authority-performing talking heads. (Can I interest anyone in some sports gambling pods?) Huberman Lab just wasn’t my cup of tea. But since its launch in 2021, the show turned out to be a great many people’s. I now have many friends who are devoted listeners of his interviews on brain processes, dopaminergic restraint, stress, or whatever. Even with the medium’s notoriously opaque metrics, it’s very much safe to assume that it has become one of the biggest podcasts in the world.

But what do we actually know about the guy? In a cover story for the magazine, Kerry Howley sorts through Huberman’s public persona as a podcasting professor for the masses, and considers the yawning gap between Huber-persona and what she discovers is a significantly messy personal life marked by a very real and very distressing pattern of interpersonal entanglements with women, many of whom factor as sources in the piece. Huberman declined to speak with Howley, opting instead to engage and refute certain findings through a spokesperson who appears in the piece in such prominent ways that they become a main character in their own right.

It should go without saying that Howley’s piece isn’t about any one narrow thing about Huberman or his ever-growing celebrity. I invite you to dive through the reportage and discover what you might think or feel within yourself. But one particular thing I’m still thinking about — aside from what Huberman Lab might suggest about the appeal of scientism, but that’s for another day — is how it’s always worth asking questions about the people we form these kinds of one-sided relationships with.

Anyway, I got to chat briefly with Howley about her experience working on the story. Here it is:

Let’s jump right into it. Where did this piece come from?

So, I was assigned this piece back in the summer, and initially I had no familiarity with Huberman. I was a little skeptical that it would be of interest to me, honestly, because he wasn’t someone who penetrated my circle. I originally approached him as a kind of health or Silicon Valley-optimizing influencer, and I didn’t see a path from that to me.

But then I started listening and, very quickly, I found it seductive. There was something really satisfying about the way the information he’s providing connects me to my body, my corporeal form, right? Especially in a time when we’re on screens so often. It was often very deep interviews with interesting scientists, and what I really loved about it is that it didn’t condescend. It was complex. There wasn’t a concern the audience might not follow. It did not feel distilled down the way public health officials often are, like, “We’re going to tell you this much because we’re worried if we tell you more there will be confusion.” I’m personally very sensitive to that. Something that Huberman says a lot is that he assumes infinite intelligence and zero knowledge, and I think that’s a really underappreciated aspect of the show’s popularity. Maybe at some point when he’s describing neural circuits, maybe you won’t follow, and that’s okay.

I also found myself incorporating some of the advice. I wanted to get sunlight on my eyes. I had previously done this piece about Jorie Graham, a poet, in which she talked about how we’ve lost touch with the rhythms of the sun, and here was a science-y way for me to do that in the morning that made sense to me. My partner was also starting to do cold plunges, and that was really helpful to him. So it just became part of my life, and I became interested in other aspects of who this podcaster is given that I was forming this parasocial relationship. So the initial idea for the piece was to write about that. All this isn’t particularly groundbreaking advice, right? Go outside. Get some sunlight. Yet there was something about the delivery that motivated me.

He’s also such a strange figure. There’s something very childish about him. There’s something that seems vulnerable. There’s something that seemed trustworthy to me. Many people who read the piece have said, “I always felt there was something off,” but that was not my experience. So initially, we reached out, and I would have loved to spend some time with him, and we did not get a response. Eventually, some other information came to light and we went in a different direction.

For me, writing involves a comfort level with being lost, right? When you’re writing a profile without interviewing the subject, and you’re exploring a life along many dimensions. So I didn’t know what I was looking for when I found it. I just had a lot of conversations, and slowly those conversations started to overlap. Pretty much almost everybody had something to say about Huberman not showing up: friends, colleagues, women. These patterns started to emerge from all the conversations that I was having, and eventually two other reporters — Amelia Schonbek and Laura Thompson — jumped onto the story as well.

One of the things you covered near the end of the piece is about the significance of what was found in your reporting. You kinda preempt a rebuttal that may dismiss the gap between the public and the private: “There is an argument to be made that it does not matter how a helpful podcaster conducts himself outside of the studio.” But of course, it does matter. Could you talk a bit more about that?

There’s a lot of ways to answer that one. When you’re writing a profile, you’re essentially just trying to understand a person — to connect with their essence in some way. After spending so much time thinking about this man, and having the context the article provides, the podcast comes to seem like a way that someone with a very particular psychology is asking questions about why people behave the way they do as a way to try to understand himself. This is not the way most of us behave in relationships, you know? I think most of us haven’t self-mythologized quite to this degree.

There is also newsworthiness in someone behaving as an authority on dopaminergic restraint behaving in a way that seems pretty out of control. And then, of course, there is the aspect concerning parasocial relationships. I think those relationships are usually thought about from the side of the audience, right? I think I’m buddies with the people I listen to, but of course, they have no idea who I am. From the other perspective though, if you’re someone who is the object of all these parasocial relationships, you have perpetuated an identity across millions of people, and that’s who they think you are. That presents immense opportunities, and the sense with the women I talked to is that this man is taking advantage of that. He had this immense power to tell this story about who he was, which turned out to be incomplete. He then used that story to convince women to engage in relationships they would not otherwise have engaged in. And I think the women felt a responsibility to others who might come after them.

What else struck you while working on this story?

To me, Huberman’s capacity to self-mythologize seems like it was really honed in therapy. His mythology was also then propagated essentially without question. I mean, there was a profile in Time Magazine that completely accepted his story, and Stanford Magazine seemed like they were just printing everything he was giving them.

There’s so many people who were like, “Okay, this audience overlaps with Joe Rogan, so I know who this kind of person is.” Which turns out to be sort of true, but I think there is a distinction. Huberman presents himself as an apolitical professor with the values that one would expect a professor to have. He would often lavishly praise his trans professor. He did an interview with a doctor who started talking about patriarchy as detrimental to women’s health outcomes, and he seemed incredibly open to that and asked meaningful questions. Here was someone who succeeded in the academy, who was overseeing women who are post-docs, who was collaborating with women. And so when we unearth misogyny in his actual story, that’s more surprising than when we discover that about someone who is fully in what we might call the “Manosphere,” right? A lot of women felt this podcast was different than those other podcasts.

I also think that a big part of the story is the weaponizing of therapeutic language to manipulate women. What made people feel comfortable listening to the podcast was this sense that many of these interviews were about earnestly working on yourself. To find out that this is a person who then deploys that language to lie — that’s noteworthy.

Once again, you can read Howley’s feature here.

➽ You probably don’t need it, but a quick reminder that the fourth season of Serial debuts this week. It’s a two-ep drop, followed by weekly releases through the end of the run.

➽ Also coming out this week: Tonya Mosley’s new narrative project, She Has a Name. 

➽ You Must Remember This is celebrating its tenth anniversary next week with a film series on Kim Novak — pegged to the release of the remastered first episode, previously “lost” — at historic (and newly renovated!) Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. Sick! Details here.

➽ The Amy Poehler partnership must be doing something for the struggling Audacy, because the company has expanded its partnership with Poehler’s Paper Kite Productions.

➽ Of course Jason Concepcion is on the official companion podcast to Netflix’s 3 Body Problem adaptation, which he hosts with Dame Margaret Ebunoluwa Aderin-Pocock DBE, space scientist and Chancellor of the University of Leicester.

➽ Seeing as how I’m chronically behind on everything nowadays, I haven’t started the new season of Vanderpump, but I have been hearing a ton of chatter around Raquel Leviss’ pod, Rachel Goes Rogue.

➽ Might I interest you in Candy Ears, Emily Shaw’s podcast-sized lab of weirdo experiments that recently included an episode where my colleague Charlie Harding popped in to critique generative AI-created music tracks?

➽ Fly like The Wind, sting like a bee.

➽ Got aced out of tickets, but it was fun to see Beautiful/Anonymous, All Fantasy Everything, and Marc Maron light up the local theater marquee here in Boise, Idaho for Treefort Music Festival over the weekend.

➽ Ooooooo.

➽ Boy I wrote a bunch of stuff over the past few weeks. Here’s me on Tobias Menzies’ face acting and muscular sideburns in Manhunt, on the glorious Cosmo Jarvis in Shōgun, and Netflix’s meh docudrama-biopic about Shirley Chisholm.

➽ Top Chef is back with a new season (and new host!). For whatever reason, the show seems to be more frenetic than ever.

➽ Mildly obsessed with the big brouhaha around the downtown sports arena in Salt Lake City.

➽ My March Madness bracket is still holding strong. For now, at least.

➽ Let the Hate Read flow through you…. (but seriously, props to my buddy Delia Cai for reviving the lost art of anonymous shit-talking).

> Caught the Midnight Cowboy doc, Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy, a few weeks ago, and I’m still thinking about it. A good time, even if you’re somehow unfamiliar with the text.

And that’s a wrap for 1.5x Speed! Hope you enjoyed it. We’re back next week, but in the meantime…

Send podcast recommendations, feedback, or just say hello at nicholas.quah@vulture.com.