If a man is famous for his podcasts about neurology, ice baths, and dopamine, is it a matter of public concern that he is a cad? When his ex-girlfriends tell tales of his dishonesty and tendency to rage and provide corroborating evidence of the deception, is that an appropriate topic for the cover story of a national magazine?
This is the debate online after New York magazine put on its cover a lengthy article about the promiscuity, deception, and alleged emotional abuse of a podcaster-scientist-influencer named Andrew Huberman.
My own reading of these problems is colored, of course, by my perspective. For starters, I know the writer, Kerry Howley, and while we aren’t terribly aligned culturally or ideologically, I have long admired her writing. Also, I had never heard of Huberman before this article landed. I am not a podcast listener, a wellness hound, or an optimizer. Finally, I am Catholic and a social conservative.
This last point matters because I do not start off with an anthropology that equates humans to all other mammals or a value system that accepts “high-status men seek[ing] greater sexual access.”
It was writer Stephanie Murray who nudged me to consider the mag piece with this observation:
Whether or not you’ve read the article, I encourage you to read it now through this lens.
Why is there no discussion of right and wrong? The word virtue doesn’t appear, and the word vice shows up once, comically, in a key moment. Ethics and morality seem absent, replaced by “optimization,” which may just be a replacement word for the corporate-speak term “best practices.”
The closest thing to virtue throughout this tale is “self-improvement.” Self-improvement is surely part of virtue, and it can easily be confused for the entirety of virtue. But self-improvement in the optimizers’ sense is entirely inward-focused — self-centered in a literal sense of the phrase.
What’s missing from self-improvement is how we treat others. And any story of a man who sets aside his treatment of others is a fatally incomplete story because man is a social animal, and he can only be understood in his relation to others.
Again, let’s go through Howley’s story about Huberman with these distinctions in mind. I think you’ll see what’s missing in Huberman’s life, and also in the lives that his girlfriends try to build. (For what it’s worth, this lack of virtue and intense self-centeredness is so obvious throughout the piece, I assume Howley intended to draw this out.)
Huberman’s expertise involves the human nervous system, and he is a scientist. When he talks about humans, then, his talk is cold and almost inhuman. Mechanism is a key word for him in describing human behavior, and how to improve.
His focus on self-improvement is laudatory, especially if you came of age in the 1990s and you remember a time when relativism dominated. There’s no right or wrong way to live. To each his own.
But relativism is an unstable equilibrium. It’s painfully obvious to anyone who seriously observes human nature that we can’t just follow our appetites, we do need to do unpleasant things in order to be happy, and that some ways of life are better than others.
Huberman is almost preachy, but in a very particular way that matches the spirit of our age: In a secular and materialistic age, where there is little room for talk of virtue or morality, any prescriptions for the good life take the form of scientistic talk of optimization.
Another telling detail in the magazine account is the constant, myopic emphasis on the self. Huberman was “a man always working on himself.”
Huberman’s model of being a good person didn’t involve other people. Check out this account Huberman gives of his loneliness in the pandemic times:
“Loneliness,” his interviewee said, “is a need state.” In 2021, the country was in the later stages of a need state: bored, alone, powerless. Huberman offered not only hours of educative listening but a plan to structure your day. A plan for waking. For eating. For exercising. For sleep. At a time when life had shifted to screens, he brought people back to their corporeal selves. He advised a “physiological sigh” — two short breaths in and a long one out — to reduce stress. He pulled countless people from their laptops and put them in rhythm with the sun.
Huberman never says that you address loneliness by connecting with others. Connection is a weakness in the modern ethos. Instead, you overcome loneliness by working on yourself. By making yourself more powerful, less dependent on others. Breathe better. Turn to the sun. Take full control.
Howley tells how Huberman is against recreational drinking. How he holds a strict eating schedule. These habits surely reflect self-control and sacrifice, but they are also anti-social. Socializing and breaking bread with others doesn’t fit into such a regimen.
Near the climax of the story, Howley finally introduces the idea of a vice in a way that made me laugh. After describing just how awfully Huberman treated women, we get this:
“ ‘Does Huberman have vices?’ asks an anonymous Reddit poster.
‘I remember him saying,’ reads the first comment, ‘that he loves croissants.’”
The words morality, morals, ethics, or virtue never appear.
The article focuses on one of Huberman’s girlfriends, Sarah. Sarah felt particularly jilted because she and Huberman planned to conjoin their lives, but not through marriage and making babies together. They would instead cohabitate and produce children through in-vitro fertilization because “Optimizers sometimes prefer not to conceive naturally; one can exert more control when procreation involves a lab.”
This points to the trickiest part for the reader to wrestle with: The women in this story all share the essential parts of Huberman’s worldview.
Howley writes: “The kind of women who were attracted to him — these were women who paid attention to what went into their bodies, women who made avoiding toxicity a central focus of their lives.”
These women were bright, feminist, successful. They had everything a woman was supposed to have. Sarah learned, to her dismay, that his other women were not airheaded bimbos. “Each of the five was assertive and successful and educated and sharp-witted; there had been a type, and they were diverse expressions of that type.”
What else could a modern woman strive for than assertiveness, career success, or educational attainment?
When Sarah shows, for a moment, an urge toward commitment, toward self-sacrifice, and toward living for others, this is treated as almost a psychosis:
“The relationship struck Sarah’s friends as odd. At one point, Sarah said, ‘I just want to be with my kids and cook for my man.’ ‘I was like, Who says that?’ says a close friend. ‘I mean, I’ve known her for 30 years. She’s a powerful, decisive, strong woman. We grew up in this very feminist community. That’s not a thing either of us would ever say.’”
Who says that?
Well, lots of people just want to be with their children and make their spouse happy. But I guess that folks whose identity is tied up with being “powerful” and “very feminist” elevate autonomy above all else and consider it a denigration of women for them to place motherhood or love at the center of their lives.
It seems that at least some of these women wanted, in essence, marriage and a family, but their value systems wouldn’t allow them to want those patriarchal, old-fashioned, irrational, autonomy-constraining goods of marriage and a family. And so they strove for some optimizers’ simulacrum of family.
A tension runs beneath the surface of this 8,000-word cover story. It’s a tension between the post-Christian, hyper-individualistic, careerist-feminist ethic that its protagonists want to uphold and their righteous desire to hold this man to account for his self-centeredness, his refusal to commit, and his treatment of others and means to his own self-realization.
Obviously, Huberman is a cad. Obviously, he mistreated these women. But it’s easy for me to say that because I am a judgmental Catholic and social conservative who believes in monogamous marriage, in chastity, and in family. What if you think marriage is patriarchy, religion is outdated, and monogamy is old-fashioned?
The tension that this story about Huberman expertly draws to the surface is that we emotionally know that Huberman mistreated these women, but that in the secular, enlightened, post-Christian ethos of the day, the worst charge we could level against him is that he engaged in nonconsensual polyamory.
It turns out that if you don’t believe in God or virtue, it’s hard to condemn bad men.