Who’s Afraid of Andrew Huberman?

The neuroscientist and podcaster Andrew Huberman is a famous guy in our weird, balkanized, digitized age. The millions of people who have heard of him can probably tell you what his resting heart rate is and what brand of granola he prefers. But most Americans—yes, I asked my mom—still have no idea who he is.

So when I saw that New York magazine had devoted over eight thousand words to a guy known for advising listeners how to optimally sleep, eat, exercise, and mate, I expected that they had the goods. I read the line, “The problem with a man always working on himself is that he may also be working on you,” and prepared myself for an exposé where Huberman gathers his harem together and brands them, NXIVM-style. Or that he drinks the blood of young women after his daily cold plunge. A weird kink. Even a kink. Anything!

But there is nothing. Or just about nothing—that is, assuming you are a human being living in the real world who would be neither surprised nor scandalized to learn that jacked, attractive, smart, successful men tend to date multiple women at the same time and then lie about it.

I’m not saying it’s great that Andrew Huberman, in one single day, managed to fly in one of his girlfriends to California from Texas, only to leave her with his dog to meet another girlfriend at a coffee shop to talk about their relationship, before texting yet another, to thank her “for being so next, next, level gorgeous and sexy.” And then sending yet another message to yet another girlfriend, “Sleep well beautiful.” Not great at all. It’s gross. He’s the kind of guy I would urge my friends to avoid. Though if I’m honest, that sheer feat of scheduling also displays the sort of take-control-of-life optimization he’s famous for.

Midway through the piece—and stop me if you’ve heard this one—the lies pile up too high. Huberman gets in over his head, and all the women—the actress, the wellness freak, the straight-talking New Yorker, the funny one in L.A, the “dreamy” Texan—find out about each other, mostly via Instagram. He had convinced them all that the other women they had heard about were nuts, but now they’ve all left him, choosing the warm glow of female friendship and a group chat where they send each other memes. They give themselves Care Bear names and plan a summer getaway. They hold space, they help each other hold boundaries. Cue the credits.

From the piece: “There’s so much pain,” says Sarah, who dated him on and off for five years. “Feeling we had made mistakes. We hadn’t been enough. We hadn’t been communicating. By making these other women into the other, I hadn’t really given space for their hurt. And let it sink in with me that it was so similar to my own hurt.”

Here’s a rule of thumb: if you’re at the point in a breakup where you’re talking about making and giving space for hurt, or even using hurt as a noun, and New York magazine calls you, place your phone directly in the toilet.

I was in a sorority. I know how these things go. There’s a mania, the high of being right about that guy your friend dated who you never really liked, of catching the sonofabitch in the lie, and backing up your girlfriends—“He tricked you!”—with the wild loyalty of a kamikaze pilot going down. It’s exhilarating. It’s fun. It can also be helpful.

But it’s painful to read through the gymnastics required to both paint the women, described variously as “beautiful,” “assertive,” “successful,” “educated,” “sharp-witted,” and “organized,” as faultless, and the podcaster—who they all consented to dating as adults—as some kind of monster. (Another gobsmacker from the piece: “In private, he could sometimes seem less concerned about patriarchy.” J’accuse!) The fault, it’s implied, isn’t in these women but in the man they all attached themselves to, who, in order to have duped them, must have used some dark triad, Stanford-learned mind control that he is now imparting to his millions of listeners.

You didn’t think that Huberman, a man who studies and constantly discusses apex physiological performance, would have ego and control issues? You’re shocked that a media phenom is flaky and overbooked? Be for real.

We’re meant to believe these women didn’t have the agency to leave their cheating boyfriend who didn’t prioritize them. Meanwhile, last week’s New York mag cover story argued that children have the agency to change their sex. Weird.

Thank God the women of the HuberHarem found each other and came to their senses. I wish them and their group chat well. Their only mistake was going to the press. Well, and thinking Andrew Huberman was monogamous.